Though we still had nothing to show for our hard work, we spent almost every night rehearsing. Not only did we not have a dime, we didn’t even have a name. Finally, it came to us when we were all over at Eddie Tickner’s house for Thanksgiving dinner. Eddie was Dickson’s business partner, as well as the business manager for the folk singer, Odetta. The subject of naming the group came up that afternoon and Jim McGuinn suggested The Birds. He thought that the sounds we were coming up with resembled a jet plane, which he associated with flight. Plus, he thought there was a certain magic to the letter B, since it had served The Beatles and the Beach Boys so well. We all agreed that we couldn’t keep the normal spelling of the word “birds,” since it was a British slang term for young girls. Plus, changing the “i” to a “y” gave it a little more mystery.
Our next step was securing some decent equipment, and Eddie Tickner came to the rescue. He had a business relationship with a lady named Naomi Hershhorn, a member of the famous Hershhorn family whose members were known as major art collectors and philanthropists. Eddie persuaded Naomi to invest $5,000 into the band with a return of 2 percent of all future recording income from The Byrds. That probably turned out to be one of the best investments she ever made in her life.
With that $5,000 in hand, it was time to pick out our equipment. Around that same time, we all went to the Pix Theater on Hollywood Boulevard to watch A Hard Day’s Night. It would prove to be enormously influential on our instrument choices. Jim McGuinn, already a twelve-string guitar player, saw George Harrison playing a Rickenbacker electric twelve string in the film and instantly knew where his destiny lay. That would become McGuinn’s signature guitar. Meanwhile, Crosby fell in love with another guitar George was playing in the movie, a Gretsch “Chet Atkins” electric six string. Mike got some Ludwig drums, just like Ringo’s set. Yes, we were desperately trying to emulate our favorite band, The Beatles. I was the only one who bucked the trend. Since I wasn’t knocked out with Paul’s Hofner bass, I chose a Fender Precision model, which I used briefly before switching to a Guild Starfire.
After spending most of Naomi’s funds on our new instruments and amplifiers, we still had a little money left over. At Dickson and Tickner’s direction, we were taken downtown to a men’s clothing store called Mr. Parker’s Closet that catered to young uptown African-American men. There, we bought matching stylish suits with Edwardian velvet collars while Eddie Tickner pranced around like a proud father whose sons were getting dressed for their Bar Mitzvahs. The next stop was Benson’s Bootery on Melrose Avenue, where we all got cool black boots with Cuban heels that were very similar to those of our English heroes.
Since all five of us were coming out of the folk scene, we really didn’t know anything about performing rock music. Dance steps and stage maneuvers? Forget it! We didn’t have a clue. Dickson decided we needed to make the act more presentable on stage so, early one evening, a strange man showed up to the studio door at World Pacific. He wore a burgundy-colored suit and an ill-fitting toupee. Dickson introduced him to us and explained that this gentleman was from Las Vegas. He was there to show us some simple dance steps to incorporate into the act. It took all of ten minutes before we were snickering and calling him “Mr. Leather Hair” just out of earshot. Crosby finally blurted out what we were all thinking: “This is so lame! There’s no way any of us are going to do this on stage.” Dickson realized it was going nowhere and sent Mr. Leather Hair home in defeat. For the next few nights we would ask him, “Is Mr. Leather Hair coming down tonight?” Even Dickson was laughing by that point.
Finally, we were ready to make our public debut. We planned our first appearance for the next Hoot Night at our old haunt, The Troubadour. It was a hoot all right. Our folk pals got a big laugh seeing us in our matching suits stumbling through our three songs. I wouldn’t call it a successful performance by any stretch of the imagination, but that clumsy first outing did give us some clarity on how to better structure the band. Gene Clark and Jim McGuinn both played guitars, while David Crosby just stood and sang. After the gig, David convinced Gene that they should switch. David would be the rhythm guitar player and Gene would be the non-guitar-playing vocalist. What could have been mildly traumatic for Gene wasn’t at all. In fact, it really worked out for the best. Crosby was the better guitar player, and Gene turned into a striking front man and became a major focus of the group. He was the “Tambourine Man,” playing percussion, singing lead, and playing the part of Prince Valiant with his good looks and great voice. From then on, the gaze of every woman in the audience was locked on his every move.
One of the best things The Byrds had going in the early days was the fact that we had access to World Pacific Studios on a nightly basis. That meant we could actually record our rehearsals and listen back right away. We could experiment with arrangements and analyze changes to the band’s sound in real time. Plus, we had Dickson there, giving us feedback and offering advice about what we were hearing on the tapes. Such invaluable tools for rapid growth.
We never knew who might show up at World Pacific when we were working. One night we were out on the studio floor when I looked through the glass and saw Lenny Bruce and an odd assortment of his Hollywood minions hanging out in in the booth with Dickson. We were literally watching the cultural transition from the “beat era” of the 1950s—with all manner of Bohemian literary types, poets, and West Coast jazz artists—to a new paradigm that The Beatles had almost single-handedly created overnight.
Soon after the Troubadour debacle we began slowly booking some shows around Los Angeles. Sally Marr, who was Lenny Bruce’s mother, booked us at LA City College for a noontime concert. Then we played Fairfax High School at a noontime assembly. There were a few other local, low-key shows that helped build a little buzz around town. As our reputation grew, we secured a one-week trial run at a club called Ciro’s Le Disc on the Sunset Strip. The Strip was the centerpiece of Los Angeles nightlife throughout the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, but it was changing drastically by the time we came along. The classic-era clubs were slowly fading away as Las Vegas began to develop. As television took hold as the primary form of entertainment, most of the generation that once frequented the Sunset Strip was increasingly staying home. Even the jazz clubs were hitting hard times. Shelly’s Manhole was still going strong in Hollywood, but most of the other jazz clubs were suffering. The biggest change was the music you’d hear emanating from the nightspots on the Strip. Younger crowds were looking for a new kind of music, and the sounds were changing to reflect the tastes of a new generation.
Ciro’s was one of the more famous nightclubs on the Strip. It was really jumping back in the ’40s and ’50s and was the place to see and be seen. Humphrey Bogart, Errol Flynn, and Spencer Tracy could all be spotted hanging out there. Supposedly, Judy Garland celebrated her eighteenth birthday at Ciro’s in 1940. By the time we came along, it still had that classic nightclub décor with big red leather booths and beautiful waitresses wearing just enough to make you take a second look. Ciro’s was no different, however, from the other old clubs on the Strip that had to adapt to changing times if they hoped to survive. Just down the street was The Whisky a Go Go, a newer establishment that featured commercial rock and roll bands and plenty of dancing for a younger clientele.
That forced Ciro’s owner Frank Sennes Jr. to rethink the entertainment he brought in. He started booking acts like The Ike and Tina Turner Revue and a great local band, The Gauchos, which, at one time, counted actor Edward James Olmos among its members. The club quickly gained attention for the dancers who gathered there—total bohemian beatnik artists—who became nearly as important to the scene as the music. The Byrds and Ciro’s became ground zero for a new era of the Sunset Strip. There was electricity in the air as a California rock scene was forming all around us.
Despite the changes, the Ciro’s name still carried particular weight with the previous generation. In fact, my mom and dad used to go there on dates all the time back in the 1940s. I think the
first time my mother was truly impressed with my music career was when I told her The Byrds were booked at Ciro’s for a week-long engagement. It was an important step for us, but not nearly as important as our first single, which would soon dramatically change the course of the band.
CHAPTER SEVEN
MR. TAMBOURINE MAN
Jim Dickson burst through the control room door at World Pacific Studios one night when we were all gathered for rehearsals. He had an acetate under his arm and a huge grin on his face as he announced, “I’ve got a song!” As Dickson put the disc on the turntable, he explained that he was friends with Bob Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman. He’d told Grossman about his new project, The Byrds, and asked if Bob had anything the band could record. Once he dropped the needle on the disc, we heard a rough recording of Dylan and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott running through “Mr. Tambourine Man.” It went on for a few minutes with four very full verses and a repeated chorus after each one. When the tape ended, Dickson switched off the machine. “I love it,” he exclaimed as he slapped the console. The rest of us just sort of looked at each another and shrugged. How was that supposed to be a Byrds song? Bob’s demo was in 2/4 time, which is more of a country/bluegrass feel. I understood what he was going for because of my background in that world, but the song desperately needed some kind of arrangement if it was ever going to become anything approaching a rock record.
Noticing that we were less than enthused, Dickson shook his head and spun his chair around to fully face us. “You guys need to go for substance and depth,” he said. “Make records you can be proud of—records that can hold up for all time. Are we making an artistic statement or just going for a quick buck?” It was a fair question. Being the shy nonsinging bass player, I didn’t really have that much input. McGuinn went to work on “Mr. Tambourine Man” and rearranged it into a 4/4 groove. We were still a few years away from FM rock radio, and we knew there was no way the AM stations were going to play a single that was more than two-and-a-half to three minutes long. Figuring that there was really only enough time to include one of the verses, it was decided that the one that would work best was the one Dylan had written as the second verse, “Take me for a trip upon your magic swirling ship…”
Dean Webb from The Dillards stopped by one night and helped work out the vocal blend. It was decided that Jim and Gene would double the lead vocal on the chorus, with David singing the third harmony above them. The blending of Jim and Gene’s voices was perfect and, with Crosby’s harmony, they captured that angelic sound that I’d heard when they were first becoming familiar with each other’s voices. Jim and Gene continued together on the verse with David coming back in again for the next chorus. It created a fantastic vocal blend and, most importantly, the recording came in at less than three minutes. We had made a decent demo of “Mr. Tambourine Man”—not slick enough for a radio release, but a good roadmap of what could be. When Dylan heard our version, he was impressed and told McGuinn, “Man, this is great; you can dance to it!”
We had the song, but now we needed the vehicle to get it heard—which meant a record company willing to take a chance on us. Since Dickson had already been active in the music scene for several years at that point, he had become good friends with important agents, managers, and artists. He started playing our demo for his various contacts in the industry, including Benny Shapiro, who owned a jazz nightclub on the Sunset Strip called The Renaissance. Jim and Benny were sitting in the living room listening when Benny’s preteen daughter, who’d heard it from her upstairs bedroom, bolted down the steps to find out who the band was. She loved it. Benny might not have gotten it, but an enthusiastic response from a young girl was the ultimate stamp of approval when it came to the value of a rock band in the mid-1960s. Benny was close friends with Miles Davis, who recorded for Columbia Records. He talked to Miles about our demo and how his daughter reacted. Miles, having never heard a single note of our music, was kind enough to put in a call to Columbia president Goddard Lieberson, asking him to consider signing The Byrds to his label.
Whatever Miles Davis said obviously worked. Columbia offered us a singles deal, meaning we could record a couple of radio-friendly releases and, if there was any success, there would be an option to record an album. The paperwork was put in place, and Columbia assigned us to a staff producer named Terry Melcher, who was Doris Day’s son. Terry had already had some minor success with some Beach Boys-flavored material, and he liked our stuff. It was decided that he would produce a new version of “Mr. Tambourine Man,” along with a Gene Clark song called “I Knew I’d Want You” that would comprise the two sides of our first single.
All The Byrds members showed up for our first big recording session in January of 1965, knowing full well that Jim would be the only one playing on the session. Terry and Columbia felt that, since they were making a first impression in introducing a new group to the public, professional studio musicians should be brought into Columbia’s studio in Hollywood to lay down the backing tracks. The label figured they had one shot to make The Byrds work, and they didn’t want to risk any problems with tracking a great record. McGuinn, Crosby, and Clark each did their vocal parts, but Jim McGuinn was the only one of us who played anything. He had worked out a brilliant intro on his twelve-string electric guitar that that was almost Bach-like in its beautiful simplicity. The rest of the players were the top guys in the business: Hal Blaine on drums, Leon Russell on piano, Jerry Cole on guitar, and Larry Knechtel, who came up with that long slide on his bass for the song’s intro. These were the same guys who would come to be known as The Wrecking Crew, and who played on thousands of recordings over the next thirty years. I don’t know how the other guys felt, but it didn’t bother me that I didn’t get to play on that recording. For me, just getting to watch a master like Larry Knechtel made it all work—a great experience.
The spring of 1965 was a whirlwind for The Byrds. Columbia released “Mr. Tambourine Man” in April. It debuted on the Billboard pop chart in May and was sitting at number one by the end of June. Even before the single was released, the word was out that we were signed to a major label. We were creating great buzz over at Ciro’s. The Byrds were a huge success, not only with the younger crowd who were starting to transform the Sunset Strip for a new era, but with other musicians, an assortment of aging beatnik artists and writers, and even several well-known actors. I was out in front of the club, smoking a cigarette, one night when I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned around to see actor Lloyd Bridges standing next to me. “I love your music,” he told me. “You guys have a great career ahead of you.” Many years later, I told that story to his son, Jeff, who laughed and said, “Lucky my dad didn’t grab that cigarette out of your mouth and stomp on it. He hated smoking.”
It was during that era that we began experimenting with our onstage appearance. In fact, we had to figure it out quick after our matching velvet-collar suits disappeared in a perfect rock and roll moment. After the humiliation of our first Troubadour performance, we weren’t so sure about those matching suits anyway. It was after our first or second night at Ciro’s that we left them hanging in the dressing room. Little Richard and his band were booked there for a weekend show. As soon as we found out that one of my early idols was going to be playing, Mike Clarke and I made it down for opening night. Hearing Richard was unforgettable, but we were also blown away by his amazing lead guitar player who was over to the side of the stage. His name was Jimi Hendrix, and he possessed a magnetic presence that was irresistible. We ran into him again at the Monterey Pop Festival just as his solo career was exploding, and he remembered meeting us at Ciro’s. As for our suits? Richard’s band stole them. It was for the best. We all had a great laugh when providence intervened, saving us from convincing Dickson that the suits, along with the dance lessons, were not the direction The Byrds should be going.
I look back on that whole period now as a magical time. Bob Dylan came into Ciro’s one night and played harmonica with us. Knowing how much he l
oved our rendition of “Mr. Tambourine Man” made it an incredible experience. I’m sure we may have been an inspiration for Bob to plug in with a band. In fact, I recall seeing Sonny and Cher sitting in one of the booths at Ciro’s one night and grabbing everything they could from our performance—including our take on Dylan’s “All I Really Want to Do,” which was our follow-up single after “Mr. Tambourine Man.” By the time Columbia released our version, however, Imperial Records had already put out a version by Cher. Both records hit the national charts on the same week, but she already had the head start on us and climbed higher up the rankings than we did in the US. It was the opposite in the UK, where ours became a Top 5 hit.
In addition to our shows at Ciro’s, we started playing other cities around California, including a short tour on a bill with The Rolling Stones. Once we started getting known, The Byrds were occasionally hired to play at celebrity parties. We played a Fourth of July celebration in Malibu for Jane Fonda when she was still with French film director Roger Vadim. Guests included Steve McQueen, Lauren Bacall, Warren Beatty, Mia Farrow, and Sidney Poitier. It was all of twenty minutes into our set when I felt a tug on my pantleg. It was Henry Fonda who politely asked me if we wouldn’t mind turning down the volume a bit. Fabulous! Here was the great Henry Fonda talking to the shy guy in The Byrds. We didn’t turn down the volume. We also played a party for Lance Reventlow, heir to the Woolworth fortune and designer of the Scarab race car. The morning after the concert, he took us out on his racing catamaran, with Bob Dylan along for the ride.
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