Album Reviews

Apparently, the inclusion of the nostalgic Goffin/King song “Goin’ Back,” and the rejection of Crosby’s icky threesome song “Triad,” (which found its way onto The Jefferson Airplane’s superb Crown of Creation) caused him to split. The story goes that the horse on the cover represents Crosby, but if it's really a parting shot, why show the head instead of the tail?

So the lineup here is McGuinn, Hillman and Clarke, with Gene Clark long gone. Despite the decimated lineup, the trio (with Jim Gordon drumming in the studio) produced one of the great albums in The Byrds’ catalog, thanks in part to Brian Wilson cohort Gary Usher, who helped create a “Pepperland”-like sonic landscape to compliment the often dreamy,experimental music.

Beginning with the distant, phasey horns on the meth-rush tune “Artificial Energy,” the album charts an ethereal, sound-effects laden course through collapsing, and expanding spatial fields, while returning to familiar sounds on more traditional fare like the Top 40-ish “Goin’ Back,” and the pedal steel sprinkled countrified “Wasn’t Born to Follow.” Yet even those tunes are showered with ear-catching studio shimmer.

The jazz that so heavily influenced earlier Byrds albums is here too in the cadence of the Jefferson Airplane influenced “Tribal Gathering” and the rhythmic rolling waves of “Get To You,” which, juxtaposed with pedal steel creates a dazzling hybrid that hasn’t lost any of its allure almost 40 years later.

You’d think the complex arrangements would benefit from a stereo spread, yet hearing this reissue of the ultra-rare mono mix demonstrates the opposite. Even if you’ve lived with this album (in stereo) for the past 38 years as I have, you will hear new, previously buried elements along with some startling mix revisions that merely change where the accents fall, but even those profoundly affect the feel of familiar songs.

Perhaps because of the “limitations” of mono and perhaps because of thoughts of airplay, the mono mixes are models of spatial and instrumental clarity. Textures muddied in stereo, waft through the single channel mixdown with ultra-clarity, revealing the deft hand of the producer in bringing elements to the front of the stage and then slowly pushing them back.

Consider the chilly, surreal “Draft Morning,” so resonant today: you’ll hear guitar and mandolin parts with new clarity and discover added power and importance in the textures of Hillman’s bass line in driving forward the song’s alienated feel.

This album captures the rolling, surreal, earthquake-prone emotional terrain of 1968 as well as any album I can think of from that time, and hearing for the first time on this mono mix the illuminated dark crevices hidden in the indistinct stereo mix, floods the mind with non-musical memories of that time.

One caution: because the mix was intended for a single mono speaker (and perhaps because it was designed to be “radio friendly”), when you play it on a pair of speakers, you are doubling the high frequency energy (you are doubling everything of course but you'll probably first hear the HF energy). If you don’t turn the volume down somewhat from normal levels, you’ll find the mix somewhat hard and bright. This is true for any mono record played on a "stereo" of course, not just Sundazed's.

Of all the recent Sundazed Byrds mono reissues, this is by far, the most essential, and the one to start with. Once absorbed I bet Byrdmaniax will have to have them all.