Byrds

The Byrds were formed in Los Angeles in 1965 by a group of musicians whose background was in folk and country music, in response to the success of The Beatles in the United States. After some initial recordings under the name of the Beefeaters, they signed to Columbia Records and achieved a number one single in the US with their version of Bob Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man". They were initially promoted as America's equivalent to the Beatles, but lacked the unity and songwriting ability to inhabit this role. Instead, they became one of pop music's major cult bands, pioneering new styles - folk-rock, psychedelia, country-rock - within the framework of tightly-produced records which rarely exceeded the three-minute limit of the standard pop single. For this reason their influence continued into the 1980s and beyond, the post-punk generations finding their work free of the excesses of many of their West Coast hippy-era successors.

Most of their memorable work was recorded between 1965 and 1970, by which time all of the original members of the band, apart from founder Roger McGuinn, had left. A feature of their career was internal fractiousness and frequent changes of personnel, which led to McGuinn finally breaking up the group in the early 1970s. An attempted revival of the original band in 1973 was unsuccessful, but its individual members formed numerous spin-off groups, some of which were highly successful. The evolution of the Byrds has been extensively documented in several full-length books, as well as by Pete Frame, who not only drew up some of his earliest RocK Family Trees to illustrate the group's history but wrote a series of lengthy articles on them in his magazine Zigzag.

John Ravencroft (Peel) was scheduled to introduce the Byrds at a concert organised by the radio station KMEN in the Swing Auditorium, San Bernardino, in April 1966. What happened then seemed to offend him deeply and he recalled the event frequently in the 1990s and 2000s:

''The Byrds were an absolutely obnoxious bunch of people. I'd obviously not met them before, and I went in to their dressing room to say,Hello, my name's John, I'm the compère; Anything you want me to say, anything you don't want me to say...? And they wouldn't speak to me at all, they were doing their L.A.-cool thing. Out in San Bernadino we were seen as the hicks, I'm pleased to say, because I've always been on the side of the hicks. They wouldn't speak, so I thought, what a bunch of bastards. ''

(from: Interview with Dave Fisher, Filler magazine, Sept. 1996)

Yet he continued to appreciate their music, featuring it regularly on the Perfumed Garden, on his early programmes for the BBC and into the 1970s. In a review of the "Sweetheart of the Rodeo" LP in International Times his mixed feelings about the Byrds - mistrusting them as people while loving their records - are clear:

''Unreserved recommendations for "Sweetheart of the Rodeo" by the Byrds. I don't begin to understand what goes on in their heads but the music that comes out is undeniably a part of many people who hear it - myself included. Eleven musicians are credited on the sleeve - most of them have been part of the group at one time or another. Friends who talked to them say they have a tribal thing going which cannot help but benefit them musically and personally. I was a bit disappointed that Doug Dilard isn't on the record, but many of the things they've done for us in recent months are on it and I hope you will buy. Perhaps part of the Byrds' fall from popular grace has been the difficulty in understanding what they are all about - which isn't really important but it is hard to interest "fans" in a wraith. However we worship dreams so perhaps that is why no-one seems to feel non-committal about the Byrds.''

(Peel in International Times, 23.08.1968)

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