LOL David Crosby replaced by horse: NOTORIOUS BYRD BROS. POLL

"Space Odyssey"

LOL.

Anyway really hard to pick one, the sequence "Natural Harmony" to "Get to You" is one one of my favourites on record.

"Wasn't Born to Follow", ultimately.

Voted "Going Back", but the album works best as a whole, played in sequence.

Geir OTM!

This has gotta be the toughest poll I've seen, I love this album so much, and yeah, that includes "Space Odyssey".

Tough...

"Wasn't Born to Follow" gets it (love the feel and the sentiment of the song--also brings up visions of Easy Rider canyons and water).

"Goin' Back" is also splendid, as is "Change Is Now"

"If we had intended to do that, we would have turned the horse around." :)

http://www.snopes.com/music/hidden/horse.asp

And more shame on David Crosby for taking the huff for being replaced with a good looking horse.

(and that rejoinder is classic!)

Since you're including the extra tracks, "Triad", the Byrds' finest moment. Otherwise I'd go with "Goin' Back". I love this album.

I sort of prefer Jefferson Airplane's version of "Triad". One of their best ever.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7S9wA5vV4Q

"Triad" is great and would've fit right into the record. "Bound to Fall" remains one of my favorite rock instrumentals. "Dolphin's Smile" is just so gorgous as is "Gathering of Tribes." Obviously, one of the greatest rock albums ever made.

Wasn't Born To Follow

am I the only one who thinks Artificial Energy is a bit incongrous on the record? It's a favorite album of mine and I love the song, but the rest of the album has a different vibe to me.

yeah it does stand out, those horns are kind of herb alpert-y or something

i'd pick 'draft morning'

Gotta go with Draft Morning, my favorite Byrds tune.

Artificial Energy's got more of a Younger Than Yesterday feel.

And this whole goddamn album is brilliant. I think I am going to go with Old John Robertson.

The horns on "Artificial Energy" are very different, but the rest of the song I feel fits right in. It has the same mood, the same beautiful harmonies, and the same very 1967-68 vocal effects.

I love every track on this album - the original album I mean, not the one with the bonus tracks. No-one has mentioned "Change Is Now" yet, so I'll go for that, though it could been one of half-a-dozen others

I could have picked most of this album, but I went for Goin' Back in the end.

Would you become involved in a three way relationship including David Crosby, and if so, who would be the third person?

i listened to this this AM and it was funny, every song one side one i was like "i'm gonna vote for this" then the next one would come on and i was like "no this is the best"...so anyway i guess i'm gonna go w/"draft morning"

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

sorta falling in love with this album, and i wasn't a big byrds fan previously! although people seem to dig "artificial energy" (except in this poll), it had been a stumbling block for me as i tried to get into this over the past few years. i now tend listen to this album by skipping the first and last tracks. i can't think of another album where that's the case for me. i can appreciate "artificial energy" now to an extent, and see myself enjoying it in the future, but i reaaaaaally hate renaissance faire shit like "space odyssey", even if it does have loads of phasers and effects all over it.

It's space shanty shit, for one thing

Artificial energy I'd a weird opener for sure, in the context of the rest of this album.

I'd = is

It's hard for me to hate on a song based on an Arthur C. Clarke short story, he's one of my favorite writers.
"Get To You" is the sleeper hit, imo.

I don't think I voted in this poll, definitely would have gone with "Change is Now," one of the best side 2 track 1's in history.

T/S: notorious byrd bros Michael Clarke bitchfest vs stoned Crosby/mcguinn 5d promo

"Michael, play drums right!"

Re: artificial energy; I love the story about how the horns weren't "swingin" enough or something so they just threw phase/flange all over them.

I'm way down with Crosby but never really got into "triad". I like airplane's version alright, though.

Triad is epic for the bass sound: ominous doom but also Crosby's wink at his topic.

Gotta rep for "Tribal Gathering" since it has gone tragically unrepped--love those evil psych guitar breaks.

get to you should be over Moog Raga. Recently learned (and discussed elsewhere), Gene Clark co-wrote it and sang back-up vocals on it and Going Back I think, during a brief moment rejoining the Byrds post-Crosby before they finished the record.

if i had voted in this poll, i might've voted for universal mind decoder. that is such a cool jam (basically an instrumental of change is now).

and i can dig artificial energy, but i really don't think it works on this album, much less as the opening track.

oh and lol, i remembered i started a thread with just that sentiment, Classic Albums With Not-So-Classic Opening Tracks

"What are you in the group for?"
"For the money."

Gotta rep for "Tribal Gathering" since it has gone tragically unrepped--love those evil psych guitar breaks.

2-chord riff stolen straight up for "1969" by the Stooges!

Love this album to bits (including Space Odyssey which I think works pretty well as a way to end it). Not sure what I would have chosen as my single favorite track - so much of the album flows together anyway - but I do feel like Natural Harmony and Tribal Gathering deserved at least a couple of votes.

The last Byrds album that sounded like a Byrds album, albeit a bit less substantive than its predecessors, particularly without the bonus cuts.

Notorious' picture of a horse where Crosby would have naturally been expeced to pose was coincidental. But Poco's first album, which like CSNY featured some Buffalo Springfield alumni, had Randy Meisner bolt for the Eagles during recording for their first album, so they replaced his picture on the cover art with a dog.

Was it a nice dog?

Notorious' picture of a horse where Crosby would have naturally been expeced to pose was coincidental.

I hope this isn't true, have always loved the idea that it was deliberate, it's perfect

a beautifully produced record

One of the top 5 records of its decade IMO

Would have voted 'Natural Harmony', but man, what a great album.

yeah, my favorite byrds album

Crosby has the best songwriting of any of the band members on this, despite being kicked out of the group in the middle of recording. The segue from "Tribal Gathering" into "Dolphin's Smile" is a great farewell to his presence in the Byrds.

xp Yeah probably mine too. Out of those classic first six albums, it's one of two that I wouldn't tweak at all (the other would be the debut), but even when I apply personal preferences to the others, Notorious is probably still my favorite. And I agree with Halfway, even though he was kicked out, he made big contributions to this one. He was an essential component to the band - they were very much a collaborative effort, far more than the sum of its parts - and if it wasn't for Gram Parsons, I don't think they would've had it in them to make another great album. (Ballad of Easy Rider is really nice though.)

It's the first of their albums that isn't defaced by a novelty number, failed experiment or blatant throwaway (I guess some listeners would put the opening and closing tracks in those categories). In fact, it's so pared down that it's one of the very few records that suffers from being too short, and none of the bonus tracks are really good enough to fit ("Bound to Fall" if Hillman had recorded vocals for it, and maybe Crosby's single "Lady Friend" but that obviously wouldn't have made the cut).
"Moog Raga" must be the first all-electronic recording by a pop musician, but it's no good.

For some reason, I thought it was a little over 30 minutes. That's still fine for that era - IIRC Bookends, Nashville Skyline and Wild Honey are even shorter (or Bookends would be if you skip "Voices of Old People") - but if I had to pick an outtake, it would "Triad." It's grown dated lyrically, but musically I think it's a great recording. "Lady Friend" makes sense too - they used the B-side and Crosby obviously wanted it in, but I always wished it closed Younger Than Yesterday. It was recorded too late for that to happen, but I think it fits in better with that album. (Plus it would have been a better selection than the inferior alternate take of "Why?" - I actually wished the original B-side version of that made it on to Fifth Dimension, it's a great recording and it originally came out of those sessions too.)

Agree about "Why". "Triad" ended up best sung by Grace Slick, on the Byrds version you can practically feel the non-Crosby band members yawning as they play.
In terms of length, this album is more eclectic than the ones you mention and maybe needed just one more big track to ground it.

I never liked this band as much as I wanted (do I need to hear them in mono?) but this album is really pretty, tracks 2-10 flow gorgeously giving me lovely stoned summer feelings in this painfully sober winter

goffin/king numbers on here might be better than any of their originals or dylan/seeger/etc covers

opening track is kind of blah but it passes quickly and the space odyssey one has some camp appeal. RIP crosby but I can do without his threesome bit myself

never heard the jefferson airplane version but one of the other crosby threads just introduced me to sally kellerman's recording of "Triad" and i was able to appreciate the song for maybe the first time ever. hearing a female vocalist instead of crosby makes it 50x less creepy (sorry croz, rip)

"Triad" really is a time capsule. I like it musically, but even if the Jefferson Airplane never released it, it's probably better that the Byrds kept it as an outtake. It would've dated the album in a bad way, but it has some kind of value because it reflects a part of that era you don't really hear in pop songs.

Should clarify, this is when you think of the '60s as an eruption of social experimentation. That means doing a lot more and going a lot further than people generally did before, but as with much experimentation, it can be misguided - it's uncharted territory so there's a lot of directions both good and bad you can go into. Even with the questionable stuff, I kind of like having this music out there just to reflect the entire scope of that era. The '60s remains pretty unique and fascinating for that reason, at least from an anthropological perspective.

it's still one of the most interesting (and maddening) decades in world history - in spite of the boomer nostalgia industry's attempts to codify the most boring and superficial aspects of it

Crosby's "Triad" is corny, the Airplane's is creepy but in an ominous, haunted way.

it's such a bad song

When I learned about "Triad" two decades ago, imagine my disappointment on realizing it wasn't two guys and a girl! I thought, what a crock of shit the '60s were. Some liberation!

Yup. Maybe related, I've known a lot of Deadheads who were either very liberal and very libertarian, and when you sort of reverse engineer that, I want to say it's an edifying look at the counterculture. It's not a case of certain factions "selling out" later in life, it's more a reflection of how certain aspects of the counterculture were processed differently, in many cases for very selfish or self-serving reasons, and sexual liberation was absolutely exploited.

that should be "very liberal OR very libertarian"

Richard Brody's Godard biography mentions French radicals in the 70s signing petitions against the age of sexual consent, the argument being that it was another limitation against the young by The Man.

yeah all your french theory faves are implicated in that shit and I know it was in the air more generally (semi-toleration of nambla within gay lib is a shameful episode) but also wtf is the deal with france and consent

this is way off topic, I've been wanting to start a thread about the intersection of politics and music in 60s/70s counterculture for a while because it seems like it was such a big deal (lennon rejecting/endorsing mao! jagger repudiating private property!) that gets reduced to an embarrassing footnote by most rock writers these days (even though the whole idea of rock as revolutionary doesn't make much sense without it) but it's such an unwieldy multifaceted topic it's hard to know where to begin

Lots of the guys of that era (all eras really but this was an advantageous one for them) strike me as not liberal or libertarian but just apolitically libertine

Have some surface level amoral charisma and go wild under the guise of rebellion. Most direct descendants being your Dov Charney types. Off topic obv.

It would be a great topic to cover but also very difficult one because on an individual level, I get the impression the politics of the time can be very confused. I don't mean that to be entirely critical - again, you have a lot of very young people who were very green about the world jumping into the deep end of unfamiliar intellectual territory. That's a very bold thing to do and very impressive to see on a mass scale, but it also takes a lot of risk into misguided decisions and ideas.

Something that I've read in a lot of accounts of the era was, "our elders told us certain things were forbidden or harmful that weren't, so we thought that nothing they warned us about was true".

Have some surface level amoral charisma and go wild under the guise of rebellion.

cunning con man to his core, manson grokked this instantly

It was a golden age for repulsive predatory creeps tbh.

It's frustrating as someone who loves music to accept how few of these '60s icons gave even a shit about queer politics. It didn't even cross their minds.

[re: "Working Class Hero"] It’s really just revolutionary. I think its concept is revolutionary, and I hope it’s for workers and not for tarts and f*gs. I hope it’s what “Give Peace A Chance” was about, but I don’t know.

one of the first results for this on google is some homophobic lefty blog citing it quote approvingly in 2016. because millionaire rockstars are more authentically proletarian than queers and whores. right on lennon great legacy

that kind of macho radchic socialism feels pretty far removed from the proto-californian ideology libertarian shit mentioned above but it all came from the same soup

Never knew how to take "Artificial Energy"'s lyric about killing a queen.

I assumed it was just another 60s cliche placeholder lyric (a la hey joe) like the ticket to ride reference