Harmonies!
This is where knowing your rock history is handy. In the 50's folk and blues and jazz and a whole village of styles collectively raised rock. They poured their hearts and their best years into helping rock grow up into a confident youth with such promise, but also with its own wills and opinions. And then rock went through a teenage rebellious streak, as young genres are wont to do. Fuck you, folk! I wish I'd never been born!, it shrieked as it rode off roaring into the night.
Folk sat alone and honed its quiet presence and wisdom and harmonies. Those harmonies! Embodying cooperation and the human spirit and the vibrating everything that whorls around us all. Rock kept to itself. Rock was about the frontman. Rock was Elvis. Rock was Mick Jagger. Sure, sometimes some pretty rock boys sang together, but seldom, and never with their forefathers' stately grace.
So imagine folk's surprise when here come the Byrds, covering rock and roll songs. By which I mean covering them in huge, molten dollops of harmonies, every song awash in the tidal, endless pull of voices within voices within us all. And now here we are, folk and rock are close again. Too close maybe, leading to incestuous abominations like Fleet Foxes. But I digress.
The actual album? It's good. All I Want to Do and Mr. Tambourine Man in particular are undeniably improvements over the originals (though how hard is that when you're replacing one bad singer with 3 good ones?) and Jackie DeShannon's Don't Doubt Yourself, Babe sounds 30 years ahead of its time with its insistent shuffle and shimmer. And that shimmer, that jangling, chiming guitar. I don't know if they invented it, but this is the first example of it being used this prominently that I've encountered yet.
On some level, though, this isn't an album about sound. Its about feel, swirling up imagined memories of an age I missed by 25 years, making me feel like I was here then, man, but I just can't quite remember, stirring up a mix of televised imagery and whole cloth fabrications. Which is to say, I'll be it was a heck of a thing to listen to in 1965. But I also think you kind of had to be there, and that emptiness takes me down a peg. Fucking 60's. I'm sorry I missed you. I wish we'd met. It'd have been worth being too old to know how to write this stupid blog 4/5
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