Trivia / The Byrds

• Approval of God: While the band was rehearsing "Mr. Tambourine Man", band manager Jim Dickson decided to invite Bob Dylan to a rehearsal session at World Pacific Studios to help boost the band's confidence. After hearing the song, Dylan was enthusiastic, saying "Wow, you can dance to that!", and gave them his approval to record the song. And as David Crosby has enjoyed recounting in interviews, Dylan then "went right out and got an electric band."
  • Dylan also approved the band's cover of his then-unreleased song "Lay Down Your Weary Tune", telling Roger McGuinn "Up until I heard this I thought you were just another imitator...but this has got real feeling to it."
• Banned in China: A lot of radio stations refused to play "Eight Miles High" because they thought the title was a drug reference.
• Breakup Breakout: David Crosby went on to form Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.
  • And, at least posthumously, Gram Parsons, the father of country-rock.
  • Chris Hillman enjoyed substantial commercial success in the country genre as the frontman of the Desert Rose Band in The '80s. In fact, he's a credited writer on more chart hits than any of the other members of the band—even with CSNY, Croz mainly contributed album deep cuts while Stills, Nash and Young wrote the singles.
• The Cast Showoff: Chris Hillman's main musical experience prior to joining the Byrds was as a bluegrass mandolinist. He showcases his skills on the instrument on "Draft Morning" from The Notorious Byrd Brothers and "Pretty Boy Floyd" from Sweetheart of the Rodeo.
• Career Resurrection: The Ballad of Easy Rider and (Untitled) after it had been lost thanks to the New Sound Albums and unstable lineups, only for it to be lost again with Byrdmaniax.
• Corpsing: David Crosby can clearly be heard trying to keep himself from laughing as he sings the line "I don't know how it's supposed to be" in the second verse of "What's Happening?" from the album Fifth Dimension.
• Creative Differences: Hoo boy...from the very beginning band members clashed frequently, leading to their Revolving Door Band status. One writer has described them as "Lord of the Flies with guitars." Unlike, for example, The Beatles, who'd been schoolmates and bonded after years of playing clubs together, The Byrds barely even knew each other personally when they got together,^explanation Jim McGuinn started adding Beatles songs to his solo sets at the Troubadour in 1964, Gene Clark introduced himself after one show and they briefly formed a duo, then David Crosby asked if he could join, then their manager Jim Dickson added in Michael Clarke and Chris Hillman. were never particularly good friends, and often were in direct competition with one another, to the detriment of the group overall. In an interview Chris Hillman pointed out that when they formed, the only things the original quintet had in common were that they liked the Beatles and pot.
• Creator Backlash: Although many fans consider The Notorious Byrd Brothers to be the band's high watermark, David Crosby always claimed that it was a significant step down from Younger Than Yesterday. Whether his opinion had to do with the actual quality of the music on the album, or the fact that he was unceremoniously fired from the band midway through its recording, is somewhat up for debate.
• Dueling Works: The deluxe four-CD Byrds box set released in October 1990 had four newly-recorded songs by McGuinn, Crosby and Hillman. One of them was the Julie Gold-penned "From a Distance". As it turned out, Bette Midler and Cliff Richard also released versions of the song within a couple weeks of The Byrds, with Midler's becoming a huge hit.
• Executive Meddling: The single version of "Lay Lady Lay" included an overdubbed female choir that the band didn't know about until the single had already been released. The band hated this version and when the song was included on their box set and the remaster of Dr. Byrds & Mr Hyde, the version without the choir was used. Whilst the original version has appeared on compilations, if the band had their way, it wouldn't have. The incident led to the band switching producers from Bob Johnston to Terry Melcher.
  • The situation eventually repeated itself on Byrdmaniax, where producers Terry Melcher and Chris Hinshaw overdubbed keyboards, horns, strings and backing vocals over songs the band had finished recording while they were out on tour. The band were outraged when they heard the final version of the album, and have repeatedly criticised Melcher and Hinshaw's meddling.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • Most Byrds fans enjoy at least one of the various Byrds spinoff projects (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, The Flying Burrito Brothers, Dillard and Clark, Manassas, Firefall, the Desert Rose Band, the various solo careers of McGuinn, Clark, Crosby and Hillman, etc).
  • With Buffalo Springfield and The Hollies, the two other pre-CSNY groups.
    • Actually, the three groups have additional Commonality Connections outside of CSNY. Chris Hillman helped get Buffalo Springfield off the ground in 1966 by recommending them to the promoter at the Whisky a Go Go, and would later co-found Manassas with Stephen Stills, and the Souther-Hillman-Furay band with Richie Furay. The connection with the Hollies is more tenuous, but also more amusing—both the Byrds and the Hollies were fronted by guys called Harold Clark(e) who went by their middle names, Eugene and Allan.
  • With The Beach Boys, due to both being Los Angeles-based bands who enjoyed great popularity at around the same time, and because the Byrds were produced by two close associates of Brian Wilson and company (Terry Melcher and Gary Usher). There does, however, exist a very mild Fandom Rivalry between the two groups, mainly over who has a better claim to being the American equivalent of The Beatles.
• He Also Did: Gene Parsons and Clarence White invented the Stringbender (also called a B-Bender or a Pull-String), a device that uses a lever to manipulate a guitar's B-string to give it a steel guitar-like effect. Parsons custom-built the first few thousand units (with the likes of Jimmy Page and Ronnie Wood as customers), before outsourcing its production.
• Money, Dear Boy:
  • From the intra-band argument included as a Hidden Track on the CD of The Notorious Byrd Brothers
    Michael Clarke: I don't even like the song.
    Chris Hillman: What are you in the group for?
    Michael Clarke: For the money.
  • Also the reason they reunited for the Byrds album in 1973.
• Self-Remake: On his 2017 solo album Biding My Time, Chris Hillman recorded a new version of "Old John Robertson" (titled, appropriately enough, "New Old John Robertson") in an acoustic bluegrass style. The redone version adds a new bridge in place of the string interlude that features on the original Byrds recording.
• Short-Lived, Big Impact: The classic lineup of the band was only together for a little over two years (and that's counting the months they spent together before the "Mr. Tambourine Man" single was released).
  • The four-man McGuinn/Crosby/Hillman/Clarke lineup lasted another eighteen months before Crosby's firing.
  • Despite looming large over their entire legacy, Gram Parsons was only in The Byrds for six months. He joined in February of 1968 to replace David Crosby and quit that July when he refused to tour with the band in Apartheid South Africa. In that short time, he recorded just one album with the band: Sweetheart of the Rodeo, the Trope Codifier of country rock.
  • In fact, the longest-lasting form of the Byrds was actually the latter-day lineup of McGuinn, Clarence White, Skip Battin and Gene Parsons.
• Throw It In!:
  • On "Spanish Harlem Incident" (Mr. Tambourine Man) Chris Hillman badly flubs a bass note behind the line "I've been wondering all about you." Hillman later joked that this was ironclad proof that he, and not a studio musician, was playing on the track.
  • On "Hickory Wind" (Sweetheart of The Rodeo) someone coughs right after Gram Parsons sings "in South Carolina".
• Troubled Production: The making of The Notorious Byrd Brothers was, well...notoriously difficult. The recording sessions, which took place from July to December 1967, saw Michael Clarke routinely getting replaced with session drummers, David Crosby being fired after around half the album was complete, and Gene Clark re-joining and then leaving again in the space of a few weeks (general consensus among fans is that he can be heard vocally on "Goin' Back" and maybe "Space Odyssey" as well). By the time the album hit stores in early 1968, Michael Clarke had left for good, reducing Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman to a duo. Despite all of this drama, Notorious is fairly widely considered to be the band's best album, and their most cohesive artistic statement.
• What Could Have Been:
  • After Van Dyke Parks guested on organ on the track "Fifth Dimension", David Crosby reportedly asked him to join the band (presumably as a replacement for Gene Clark), but Parks declined and famously went on to collaborate with Brian Wilson on the aborted SMiLE project.
  • The Byrds were asked to play Woodstock, but they were tired of the festival circuit and believed it wouldn't be any different from any of the other festivals they turned down that summer.
• Write Who You Know: "Old John Robertson" on The Notorious Byrd Brothers is about prolific early Hollywood director John S. Robertson (director of dozens of films including The Single Standard and Little Orphan Annie) and his wife Josephine Lovett, who were neighbors of Chris Hillman when he was growing up in rural San Diego County.

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