Most of the lyric of ‘Eight Miles High’ was by Gene Clark, begun following a November 1965 conversation with the Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones who the Byrds were touring the US with at the time, which helps to negate fellow Byrds member David Crosby’s continued claims that the song was about drugs since he had limited input. The music press didn’t like them – their performances were somewhat lacklustre and they spent ages tuning up onstage – and they came a little too highly recommended, the Beatles having declared them ‘their favourite band’. Most of the lyrical content of ‘Eight Miles High’ relates to their first trip to England in August 1965, a tour which was fairly disastrous to say the least. The Byrds were of course also much inspired by the Beatles music and their 3-part harmonies (leader Roger McGuinn played a 12-string Rickenbacker guitar like George Harrison – it’s a Rickenbacker strummed chord that opens ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ from 1964) though they weren’t particularly enamoured with England. With ‘Eight Miles High’ the Byrds had certainly evolved dramatically since their recording debut just a year earlier when they allegedly invented folk-rock with their Number 1 cover of Bob Dylan’s ‘Mr Tambourine Man’, a recording that partly inspired Dylan to go electric to the disgust of many of his fans in the process. In my personal impression this was a landmark recording in the evolution of popular music and should have been a number one record but wasn’t for reasons we’ll be coming back to. Writers Gene Clark, David Crosby & Jim (later Roger) McGuinnĪs a teenage pop fan and avid record buyer in the mid-1960s, this was the first piece of ‘psychedelia’ that I can recall hearing, in the spring of 1966, (at least by a mainstream pop group) and several months before the Beatles Revolver album which contained, as its closing track, John Lennon’s decidedly ‘far-out’ ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’.
Recorded at Columbia Studios, Hollywood, 24th & 25th January 1966 “Crosby will always say, ‘Yeah, it’s about drugs, man!’ But it’s not.”
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