David Crosby was such a talent, but if he got nervous or scared, he would lash out. For whatever reason, he channeled his fear and intimidation into anger. I’m sure we were all a little intimidated simply being on the set of Sullivan’s show, but David just totally lost control. To salvage a potential disaster, Dickson begged the Sullivan brass to reconsider. He pleaded with them, explaining that we’d flown all the way there from Los Angeles, and promising there would be no more problems from The Byrds. Fortunately, tempers cooled, and we were finally allowed to perform on the show that night. This was the platform that made Elvis Presley and The Beatles American superstars, and I was just relieved that we were able to remain on the show that night. Ed Sullivan introduced us, we did perform, and the audience loved it. The sound was not great. Were we sabotaged by the crew in retaliation for one of our members acting like a prima donna during the rehearsal? Who knows?
Whatever happened, it certainly wasn’t a complete disaster. And it definitely raised our profile even further. When we got in a cab the next day, the driver looked in his rearview mirror. “Hey,” he shouted, “weren’t you guys on Sullivan last night?” It was always nice when people recognized us on the street after the broadcast, but—just as we were told—we were never asked back on the show. Regardless, the whirlwind of 1965 had been an unforgettable journey. Little did we know the flight would soon start hitting some more turbulence.
CHAPTER EIGHT
EIGHT MILES HIGH
In January of 1966 Columbia Records decided to record a promotional film for “Set You Free This Time,” which they released as the follow-up single after “Turn! Turn! Turn!” Barry Feinstein, who shot the cover of the Mr. Tambourine Man album, brought his sixteen-millimeter camera up to the beach in Malibu where we would film something like an early music video (many years before the dawn of MTV). Barry got everything set up, and we began walking down the beach and miming the vocals, which would later be synched to the audio of the record.
Before long, Crosby decided that—for whatever reason—he didn’t want to be there. Looking around for an accomplice, he zeroed in on Michael. “Hey man,” he said. “This is stupid. Do you really wanna do this? Let’s get out of here!” He managed to con Mike into agreeing to leave with him. “Mike and I are outta here,” David announced. Dickson, who was a pretty tough guy and never shied away from using his fists if he felt like he had to, stepped in front of David and crossed his arms. “No, you’re not,” he said matter-of-factly. David fired some comment back at him and, almost immediately, the two of them were getting physical. The picture I have in my mind from that day is Gene—who was a big strong Kansas farm boy—pulling David off of Dickson. I yelled, “Barry, keep shooting! This is the video; this is The Byrds!”
Sadly, the confrontation put an end to our would-be music video. Feinstein packed up his camera, and we all trudged back up the sand to return to our cars. Nobody said much more about it. We all just drove back to our homes. We blew it, which certainly didn’t endear us to Columbia. We were all young guys—basically kids—who didn’t know how to handle ourselves, and interpersonal dysfunction would increasingly become a part of life as a Byrd.
In February of 1966, soon after the episode on the beach, The Byrds were on an airplane, preparing to take off from Los Angeles to fly to New York to appear on a television special hosted by deejay Murray the K. Jim McGuinn was the last one of us to arrive, appearing on the plane at the final moment before they shut the door behind him. To this day, none us really understands why, but Gene Clark began to panic as Jim approached his seat. Gene was having a nervous breakdown and he was begging to get off the flight. Jim tried to calm him down and reassure him that everything was fine, but Gene was beside himself. “Look, man,” McGuinn said, “everything is fine. You’ve got nothing to be worried about. You can’t be a Byrd if you can’t fly.” Ultimately, he made his choice. They opened the door of the aircraft, and Gene departed the plane and, effectively, The Byrds.
It was a bizarre moment. We’d never seen any indication that Gene was scared to fly, and there were no warning signs that he might have a nervous breakdown. In fact, it was so unusual that the rest of us were a little spooked. We were all secretly wondering if Gene had become psychic and knew that something horrible was going to happen during the flight. The pilot, a nice older gentleman, came out of the cockpit and talked with the passengers, calming everyone down before we finally departed for New York without incident.
When we reached the East Coast, I was recruited to join the front line to sing Gene’s parts alongside David Crosby and Jim McGuinn for Murray the K’s All-Star Special. As it turned out, we would remain a quartet for the rest of that year and into the next, despite my attempts to convince Gene to stick with us. When we returned to LA, I invited him over to my house in Laurel Canyon. I sat him down and told him, “Gene, you need to be in this band!” For whatever reason, though, he just couldn’t handle the pressure. I think Dickson and Tickner were looking for an opportunity to make Gene into a solo artist, and maybe he had visions of solo grandeur—I don’t know. Ultimately, I think he just couldn’t handle Hollywood. He was a gentle soul. Of all the people who should’ve gone back to Kansas, gotten married, and had a normal life, it was Gene. I think the whole scene kind of chewed him up and spit him out. I didn’t always get along with Gene, but—though our friendship was rocky at times—I’ll always admire him as a great songwriter and a genuinely talented man.
Before Gene’s untimely departure, we recorded what I thought was a major breakthrough song, “Eight Miles High,” written by Roger, Gene, and David. During our time on the road with the Caravan of Stars, we listened to John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Ravi Shankar, and all kinds of eclectic sounds in our little Clark Cortez motor home that influenced us when we returned to the studio. Michael’s drum work on the record is brilliant, and I think we all played our best. It was so free form, I seriously doubt if professional session players could have captured the vibe on tape as well as The Byrds did. Having gone from covering Bob Dylan songs to coming up with something like “Eight Miles High” in a little over a year was confirmation that we were turning into a great band. We all knew the song was our obvious next single.
“Eight Miles High” was released in March and started climbing up the charts the following month. It made it just shy of the Top 10 but stalled out following a radio ban that found many stations pulling it from the air. The controversy started when Bill Gavin, who published a broadcast industry tip sheet, warned stations around the country that the lyrics were about drugs. Not true. The idea for the song was hatched on our trip back home from England. The plane was flying at 37,000 feet, which is around seven miles. Roger planned to call the song “Seven Miles High,” but Gene suggested using some poetic license and going with “Eight Miles High,” which was a nod to The Beatles’ “Eight Days a Week.” I guess somebody at Bill Gavin’s Record Report did the math and figured we couldn’t be talking about an airplane because planes don’t fly that high. So, we must have been talking about some other kind of high. The song vanished from the charts only because of misinformation and panic among the gatekeepers of AM radio. It was a setback, but it didn’t stop the song from becoming a classic. Today, many people cite it as the first successful psychedelic rock song, though I always felt it was more of a jazz arrangement.
Undeterred by the controversy of “Eight Miles High” and the departure of Gene Clark, we continued on through 1966 with various television appearances and live shows. In fact, I think the best series of live shows The Byrds ever played happened in 1966. A new club called The Trip opened on the Sunset Strip, right down the street from Ciro’s, and it became our off-and-on home base for a while. At one point, we were booked for a one-week engagement with The Paul Butterfield Blues Band as the opening act. That group, with lead guitarist Mike Bloomfield setting the pace, was nothing short of amazing. To this day, Mike is still one of the greatest guitarists I’ve ever seen. We rose to the occasion and played
our finest. The Butterfield band was so good, there was simply no way we could get up on that stage after them and bring anything less than 100 percent.
Right after our last night at The Trip with Butterfield, Michael Clarke and I boarded a flight for Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. Our friend Alan Pariser, who loved the band and who often hosted us at his home in the Hollywood Hills, told us how incredible Mexico was at that time of year. Mike and I decided on a whim to fly down for a one-week vacation. As a travel destination, the town was still relatively new. We landed at this small airport in the afternoon and began trying to figure out how we’d get a hotel. Over in the corner of the airport was a small bar, and there was a guy sitting on one of the stools. He had very long hair and a beard, and we couldn’t help but notice how he was looking at us—not in a scary way, but more out of genuine curiosity. Finally, he got up, came over, and introduced himself as John Barrymore Jr. He was the son of the famous actor, John Barrymore, and would go on to become the father of actress Drew Barrymore. John was living in Puerto Vallarta and offered to take us into town to get us settled.
John, who had been a working actor in the States and in Europe, was a fascinating guy. I guess he took a liking to us because he went out of his way to show us a great time. We met all his pals and managed to get into some good mischief for the next week. He even arranged for us all to take a supply boat down to Yelapa, a small coastal fishing village. Lying on the deck of that boat, which consisted of one flat area and a wheel house, was almost surreal. Huge manta rays would come to the surface of the water as if they were skimming the waves—all part of their mating dance. After the boat dropped anchor, we ran into Donovan, who was staying at the lone hotel in the little town. The poor guy had been laid up in bed with a bad sunburn; nobody bothered to warn the Scotsman about the Mexican sun.
Eventually we hopped back aboard for the return trip to Puerto Vallarta late in the day. The next morning, Mike and I rented some horses and rode along the beach. While crossing a stream where some local ladies were doing their washing, Mike managed to lose his wallet. Thank God for Barrymore, who knew enough people in town to get us out safely when the week was up. John was a gracious host and, knowing that we had to be home on a certain day to prepare for another tour, he made sure we were on the plane back to LA with Mike’s exit papers.
In October of 1966, The Byrds were booked into The Village Gate, a well-known jazz club in New York City. I think we were the first rock band to get booked there, and it was an honor to be playing the same stage that Dizzy Gillespie, Carmen McRae, Art Blakey, Muddy Waters, and other amazing performers were sharing as part of the club’s summer series. We played for two weeks, which was fantastic. All kinds of interesting guests kept popping in every night, including John Sebastian from The Lovin’ Spoonful and photographer Linda Eastman, who came down on several occasions to take pictures. This was before she fell in love with (and later married) Paul McCartney. Mike and I became quite close with Linda who was a terrific photographer and a wonderful person. The residency at The Village Gate reminded me of our time at Ciros, only now we were actually a really good, solid band.
Back in Los Angeles that fall, David Crosby and I were called to play on some demo recordings for a young jazz singer from South Africa named Letta Mbulu. She was being produced by the South African trumpet player Hugh Masekela, whom we’d gotten to know through Peter Fonda. Hugh was a refugee from the brutal apartheid policies of his home country, which he’d fled a few years prior. He was also an amazing player. There were some incredible jazz musicians on this recording date, leaving me and Crosby as the two white guys who couldn’t read a note. But it didn’t matter; we ran down the tunes and put them on tape. It was wonderful. Letta sang like an angel and, still being a very shy person, I was so uplifted when she complimented my bass playing in front of everyone, saying, “Man, Chris, you are cooking!”
I don’t know what it was about the session, but it was like an epiphany for me. Feeling inspired, I went home to my house in Laurel Canyon that very night and started writing songs of my own, starting with “Time Between.” The previous year I’d bought a Gibson J-45 acoustic guitar at Wallich’s Music City—the last of the great record and music stores—located at Sunset and Vine in downtown Hollywood. That guitar was in my hands constantly after the Masakela demo session, as I wrote four or five songs that same week. I remember that “Have You Seen Her Face” was the final one of that first batch. Something almost unexplainable just opened up inside me after that night in the studio. My awakening as a songwriter came all at once, and it felt so right.
In the summer of 1966, we had released our third album, Fifth Dimension, which included “Eight Miles High,” a great Crosby and McGuinn song called “I See You,” and “5D (Fifth Dimension),” which was always one of my favorites of McGuinn’s songs. “5D” was released as a single, as was “Mr. Spaceman” from that same album. After the problems with the radio stations over “Eight Miles High,” we really didn’t have another potential hit single on the album, so we started preparing for album number four, Younger Than Yesterday. This time around, we decided it was better to follow the lead of groups like The Beatles who weren’t focused solely on hit singles, but on creating great albums that stood as a cohesive creative work. That was where our hearts were anyway, so we threw ourselves into the process with a renewed passion for making music we loved without the pressure of chasing the next radio hit.
Shortly after writing those first new songs following the Hugh Masekela session, I came up with the opening riff and first verse of “So You Want to be a Rock ‘n’ Roll Star,” which was very much inspired by Hugh and his band. I called Jim McGuinn, who lived up the canyon from me, and asked him to come over and listen to my rough ideas. He loved the concept and completely understood where I wanted to go with the tune. Jim came up with the bridge, which was based on a Miriam Makeba song he had heard her perform. Hugh and Miriam were actually married to each other in the mid-1960s, so it seemed that everything was somehow connected. That just added to the magic of the song. It was the first thing we cut for the new album and, ready to continue stretching our musical boundaries, we incorporated Latin and jazz influences, anchoring them with my bass and Roger’s twelve-string. Hugh even came to the studio and added a trumpet part. The song was a serious nod to the music we were soaking up around us, but the lyrics were our lighthearted take on the music business. Some people interpreted it as a jab at The Monkees. In reality, we had immense respect for all of them as singers and musicians. We weren’t skewering the members of the Monkees, but we were taking a shot at the cynical nature of the entertainment business that will try to manufacture a group like The Monkees as a marketing strategy. For us, it was all about the music, and we were commenting on the pitfalls of the industry rather than on any of our fellow musicians.
Everything about recording “So You Want to be a Rock ‘n’ Roll Star” just fell into place. During McGuinn’s twelve-string electric guitar solo, we even added a recording of screaming girls. On our first English tour (the “not so good” tour), Derek Taylor had borrowed Jim’s new Phillips cassette player and, at one of our shows, taped the girls in the audience carrying on with their cheering and screaming. We somehow figured out a way to transfer the taped screams from the cassette onto the multi-track machine—very cool and very effective. Though it wasn’t necessarily what we were shooting for, the song became a fairly successful hit and revived the band after we’d been shortchanged on “Eight Miles High.” To this day, “Rock ‘n’ Roll Star” and “Eight Miles High” are two of my favorite Byrds records, and I think they’ve both really held up over the decades.
Not only was I participating more with my songwriting and singing, but David and Jim both came up with some great tunes for Younger Than Yesterday. The record was produced by Gary Usher, a staff producer at Columbia who had some success as a songwriter when he co-wrote The Beach Boys’ “In My Room” with Brian Wilson. Gary was a good guy and a lot of fun to work wit
h. He brought a focus to the sessions that reignited our original excitement, and he encouraged us to incorporate some outside musicians to add a bit of fresh flavor to our sound. In addition to Hugh’s trumpet on “So You Want to Be a Rock ‘n’ Roll Star,” I had Hugh’s keyboard player Cecil Bernard play piano on “Have You Seen Her Face.” We also brought in the fantastic Bakersfield-style lead electric guitar work of Clarence White on my songs “Time Between” and “The Girl with No Name.”
Clarence was a great musician whose band, The Kentucky Colonels, was one of the best bluegrass groups in Southern California when I was playing with The Scottsville Squirrel Barkers and The Golden State Boys. He had started the group with his brother Roland, whose brief hiatus from the group necessitated Scott Hambly covering for him. And, of course, Scott was the one who taught me the important basics I needed to know to become a good mandolin player. Clarence and I met when we were both sixteen years old, and we used to run into each other all the time in our early bluegrass days. We lost touch for a while until Gene Clark invited me and Michael Clarke to serve as the rhythm section on his first solo album. During that process, I reconnected with my old bandmates Vern and Rex Gosdin, who sang backing vocals with Gene, as well as with Clarence, who played lead guitar on several songs. By that time, he’d switched to electric, and I knew I wanted to have him on the sessions. Country-rock isn’t a term I’ve always embraced, but I’ve come to accept it over the years as groups like The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and The Eagles furthered the concept and continued to make it a pure California country sound. To me, good music is good music. If I had a hand in blending the various genres I love in a way that led to country-rock, roots rock, Americana, or whatever you want to call it, then I’m glad I could contribute in a way that made an impact.
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