![]() David Crosby, 45, has been serving a five-year jail term for drug possession.Many people believe this song is about drugs, but the band claimed it was inspired by a flight where singer Gene Clark asked guitarist Roger McGuinn how high they were in the sky. Michael Clarke, 43, who has toured with Clark’s tribute band, is currently “taking a breather,” painting pictures and houses in the Southeast. He’s also incurred the ire of some of the other Byrds by taking a successful Byrds tribute show on the road. Gene Clark, 44, is working on a record with Carla Olson of the Textones. Chris Hillman, 43, has scored a record contract for his country combo, Desert Rose. The original Byrds are still in flight - separately. Then, after Sweetheart of the Rodeo, Hillman split, leaving McGuinn to oversee an ever-changing nest of Byrds until 1973, when the original members recorded a disappointing reunion LP, The Byrds. That year the remaining Byrds recorded the Fifth Dimension LP, which included the psychedelic classic “Eight Miles High,” but Crosby and Clarke departed the next year. Clark, who suffered a nervous breakdown and, ironically enough, developed a fear of flying, left the band in 1966. Tambourine Man” hit Number One, they were touted as the American Beatles, but the “too much, too soon” syndrome quickly took its toll. Once the Byrds’ cover of Bob Dylan’s “Mr. “Then I heard the guy sing, and I was totally floored.” Crosby eventually teamed up with the duo, and Hillman and Clarke came on board shortly afterward. “Who is this arrogant punk?” Clark asked McGuinn. ![]() Then, on a hootenanny night at the Troubadour, they caught the performance of another young singer named David Crosby. Sometime later in L.A., Clark knew he’d found a potential soul mate when he spied McGuinn sitting in the Troubadour club, strumming his twelve-string and singing the Beatles’ “You Can’t Do That.” They soon became a duo. After coming across “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You” on a Norfolk, Virginia, jukebox, he played them “a hundred times” - and quit the New Christy Minstrels the next day. For Clark, the Beatles had a more immediate impact. “They knocked me for a loop,” says McGuinn, who at the time was working for Bobby Darin’s publisher in the Brill Building in New York (“My job was to listen to the radio and write songs like the ones I heard”). We didn’t come out of a garage in the Valley playing rock & roll.”Īctually, the Byrds came together through their love for the Beatles. David Crosby came from ensemble folk singing. Roger was a folk singer who had accompanied the Limeliters. “Five guys with different musical backgrounds and tastes. “If you want a quick analysis of the Byrds, I’ll give you one,” says Hillman. and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers (who recently covered the Byrds’ “So You Want to Be a Rock ‘n’ Roll Star”), as well as dozens of lesser-known bands. That sound still rings in the music of R.E.M. Even more important, the Byrds’ sound - the rich vocal harmonies and the resonant chime of McGuinn’s twelve-string Rickenbacker - defined folk-rock. ![]() The band’s five original members - guitarists Roger McGuinn and David Crosby, singer Gene Clark, bassist Chris Hillman and drummer Michael Clarke - went on to form such seminal groups as Crosby, Stills and Nash and the Flying Burrito Brothers. Tambourine Man,” soared to the top of the charts in 1965, the Byrds continue to exert a formidable influence on American music. More than twenty years after their first single, “Mr.
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