Bargain Bin Finds #1: The Byrds--Younger Than Yesterday

I've been a Byrds fan since at least high school, and always a big lover of that heavenly 12-string Rickenbacker sound. The first Byrds album I owned was Original Singles 1965-1967 that I bought on cassette at the now defunct, but fondly remembered, Woolworth in Caro, Michigan, for something like $3.99. This was probably in about 1985, when a 17 year old into the Byrds was not exactly the most common occurrence. (But don't let me paint myself as some sort of self-aware iconoclast. I listened to plenty of popular mid-eighties dreck like Thompson Twins, etc. In fact, by and large, my musical taste at this point was so unrefined as to be somewhat embarrassing. That could be fodder for a future post).

By the early nineties, I'd graduated to the Byrds' box set and picked up most of their studio albums along the way, Mr. Tambourine Man (I still have my parents' old vinyl copy in addition to the first Columbia CD pressing--never bothered to pick up the 1996 reissue). I also HAD their second album Turn! Turn! Turn! on cassette (eradicated during my Great Cassette Purge of 2002, resently and quite happily reacquired on CD), Fifth Dimension (I may have got that from Columbia House for about $5.99 in one of their big blowout back catalog sales), 1968's Notorious Byrd Brothers and 1969's Ballad of Easy Rider, and gleefully snatched up Sweetheart of the Rodeo when it was reissued in 1997. Okay, sorry to get all "Rain Man" on you with my boring history of Byrds purchases. What all of this comes down to is that, for whatever reason, I never got around to the Byrds' fourth (and some may argue, best) album Younger than Yesterday, until I found a lone copy of it in the Schuler Books and Music bargain bin.

Younger than Yesterday always intrigued me. It was originally released in January 1967, and opened the first salvo of the great musical year that was '67, but somewhere along the line kind of got lost in the shuffle, while flashier '67 albums (like The Velvet Underground and Nico, the Doors' self-titled debut, Cream's Disraeli Gears, the first two Jimi Hendrix Experience LPs, and of course Sgt. Pepper) get most of the attention.

Younger than Yesterday opens up with "So You Want to Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star," with its bitingly cynical lyrics about the music industry, but it truly is Hugh Masekela, guest trumpeter, that makes the song. The rest of the album covers breezy pop (Chris Hillman's "Have You Seen Her Face"), tentative stabs at country rock (once again, Hillman comes through with gems like "Time Between" and "The Girl With No Name"), druggy paranoid moodiness from David Crosby (the excellent "Everybody's Been Burned") and Tim Buckleyesque jazzy weirdness (Crosby again on "Mind Gardens." Crosby's vocals on this song are so uncharacteristically dissonant that I wonder if he was trying to sabotage the album out of spite--then again, his other songs on the album are great, so that probably blows up that theory). There is also the usual Roger McGuinn obsession with flight and space travel (the goofy "CTA-102" with its alien voices--nine months or so before Hendrix did the same thing on "EXP" from Axis: Bold as Love). I can't forget to mention the wonderful hippy-dippiness of Crosby's "Renaissance Fair," "Hillman's underrated "Thoughts and Words" (Mr. Hillman really blossoms as a songwriter on this album), nor the sublime cover of Dylan's "My Back Pages."

This reissue of Younger than Yesterday doesn't scrimp on the bonus tracks. There is some wonderful stuff like Crosby's dour "It Happens Each Day" (sort of a companion piece to "Everybody's Been Burned") and his more upbeat "Lady Friend" with its gorgeous multi-tracked harmony vocals. We also get take one of "Mind Gardens" with a more tuneful vocal from Crosby.

Younger than Yesterday is as good as I thought it would be, and makes me wonder why I waited so long to finally obtain it. I'd say it's the best six dollars (or so) I've spent in awhile.