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

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