Bob Dylan was an important figure in the American response during the mid-1960s, but he certainly wasn't the only one that was, that was making a difference in sort of fending off, if you will, the, the British acts who were, who were so dominating the charts during this period. often together with the story that we've heard about Bob Dylan the summer of 65 the Newport Folk Festival Like a Rolling Stone and all that went that, with that. We have to talk about the music of The Byrds, because it's sort of intimate, well in many ways it's intimately related with what was going on with Dylan. The Byrds started by Roger McGuinn, a guitarist, along with David Crosby, Gene Clark, Chris Hillman, and Michael Clarke. That group McGuinn and Crosby emerged out of the Greenwich Village folk scene as, as many of the other musicians did. But at this point in time, there's kind of a, the beginnings of a real migration toward the west coast in the music business. In fact, between the beginning of the 60s and the end of the 60s, you can really see the music business in this country really, in large part, migrate from New York to Los Angeles. There is a lot of natural attractions to Los Angeles. One of them is the television and the movie business were out there. And so, there was a lot of sophisticated people out there who involve the production, there were good recording studios, this kind of thing. and so McGuinn makes his way out to LA, starts doing his folk routine, his, has folk act, doing traditional folk songs, and also playing songs, Beatles songs [LAUGH] in his, in his folk act which I guess was a little bit a little bit strange for the day. but you could already see the beginning of, of McGuinn wanting to go in the direction of what the Beatles did. their first, the, the first collections of, the first version of The Birds was called The Beefeaters. And they used to have a song that they did called Mr Tambourine Man, which was a Dylan song. But it's a Dylan song that Dylan hadn't yet recorded. he'd done a recording of it. And as the story goes, Rambling Jack Elliott had been on the, the, the recording they'd done. Something about the playing on it was out of tune and they decided not to use it. But the guy that was producing The Byrds at the time, Terry Melcher got a hold of this recording. And The Byrds heard it, and so they started working up this version of Dylan's Mr Tambourine Man. Initially doing it with an acoustic twelve string, very much like you know, a kind of folk revival group from the first half of the 1960s. New Christie Mitchells or something like that. but then A Hard Day's Night came out in the summer of 1965. And so the guys from The Birds went to see A Hard Day's Night. First, like everybody else, they were totally enraptured by the Beatles and Beatlemania and all was going, this is fantastic. This is just what we want to do. We want to be just like these guys. But they noticed that in that guitar, in that Movie, George Harrison is playing a Rickenbacker twelve string guitar. Now McGuinn had been playing a twelve string acoustic guitar, but this Rickenbacker electric twelve string had six pegs. If you looked at it straight on, had six pegs just like the normal guitar, but if you turned it sideways, you would see that there were six more pegs for the extra six strings that added up to twelve. And there's George Harrison playing that Roger McGuinn thought that's fantastic, that's what I'm going to do, I'm going to get a guitar just like that. Well, it turned out that Rickenbacker guitars were made right there in Southern California. He was able to go a music store, and, as the story goes, trade in like, I don't know, an acoustic twelve-string and a banjo or something like that for a brand-new Rickenbacker guitar. They decided to do their version of Mr. Tambourine Man with that Rickenbacker electric 12 string guitar. And that jingly jangly sound of folk rock, which has been you know, emblematic ever since in, in, the pop music business. You think about groups like REM, Tom Petty, all that sort of jingle jangle. It all comes from that moment in 1965 when Roger McGuinn picks up to the Hard Days Night guitar, and you know, puts it on a Bob Dylan song. Right. And plays a little introduction that he says is, is influenced by Jesu Joy Of Man's Desiring by J.S Bach. Puts all these things together and creates this hit single Mr. Tambourine Man which goes to number one. Released in April of 1965, so just at the same time as Like a Rolling, Like a Rolling Stone is on the charts. We've also got Mr Tambourine Man two Bob Dylan songs interestingly one song written by Bob Dylan but not performed by him and one song written by Bob Dylan and performed by him. Sort of the two sides of what Dylan's career had been up to that point. an interesting element of that song Mr Tambourine Man, is not only that it combines a Beatles' guitar a Dylan song and this Bach influenced introduction. But also that it uses the same studio band as had worked with Phil Spector in, in his records. And in fact, it was some of the same guys who'd been on a Beach Boys session called, for a song called Don't Worry Baby. And when they were putting together Mr. Tambourine Man, these studio musicians, remembered this and, Terry Melcher said, can you do the beat, can you do the feel from The Beach Boys. So they took the Beach Boys feel from Don't Worry Baby and put it together with that McGuinn already had on the tune and that's what became Mr Tambourine Man. You notice I'm talking about a studio band. The only person actually playing on Mr. Tambourine Man is Roger McGuinn from The Byrds, the rest are all studio musicians. The other Byrds members are singing, but in a couple years, when we talk about the music of The Monkeys, well then, well, when Monkey's music comes along in a couple of years. we'll talk about how people that were so inauthentic that the Monkeys weren't even playing on their own records. But it turns out when it comes to Mr Tambourine Man, an iconic folk rock hit of unquestioned authenticity, it turns out that the, most of the musicians on the recording were studio musicians. Nevertheless, after that the, the Byrds played on their own records and had subsequent hits with All I Really Want to Do. There's a fun story which has to do with Cher that I'll, that I'll tell you about in just a minute. Turn, Turn, Turn a Pete Seger song which again went to number one in the fall of 65. And Eight Miles High which is a song that mm, McGuinn said is about a cross-country airline flight which would be seven miles high, but eight miles, that, that didn't scan so well as a lyric, so it became eight miles high. But of course, Eight Miles High, everyone thought they were drug lyrics. And so, in fact, the song only got as high as number 14 in the Spring of 1966 and got pushed off the charts because a word went round to radio stations that it was a drug song. It's also very much influenced by the music of John Coltrane, that, there's a guitar lick on the 12 string at the very beginning, which is a quote directly from a John Coltrane track, India. I think it is, so that's the story with the Byrds is, taking this fold thing as [UNKNOWN] was doing, and really sort of turning into that jingly-jangly sound. Speaking of the jingle-jangle that I mentioned before, in the previous video that we would that, that, the guy, the producer Tom Wilson would become an important member, an important part of this discussion. let's talk a little bit about Simon Garfunkel Simon and Garfunkel and how, how all of that how all works out for them. Another important group here coming out of New York City and actually staying in New York City. Well, it turns out that, that Simon and Garfunkel had actually been a kind of [UNKNOWN] brothers kind of group back in the 50s called Tom and Jerry. They had a mild hit with the song called Hey Schoolgirl. they even appeared on the American band stand, right, as a kind of teenage version of of the [UNKNOWN]. But then the, they you know, they finish school and, and did other kinds of things and they came back as part of folk revival as Simon and Garfunkel doing totally acoustic music released an album in 1964 called Wednesday Morning, 3 am. It kind of flopped it has a song on it called the sounds of silence, but it's not the version that you are used to hearing. Anyway, the album flops. Paul Simon goes off to England, to, to sing. I think Art Garfunkel goes to graduate school, whatever. And so they're really not doing Simon and Garfunkel at the time. But when Mr Tambourine Man hits, and when the Dylan tune hits in the summer of 65. Tom Wilson, the producer remembers this, this album, this Wednesday Morning, 3 am, which was on the same label as, as, Dylan, Columbia. And he so, without the knowledge of Paul Simon or Art Garfunkel, he brings studio musicians into the studio. They take The Sounds of Silence and they add to it electric guitar, bass, and drums. Now how do you add something to a song that's already recorded? Well you can tell if you listen to the recording that the first couple of measures to it are the acoustic guitar all by itself. That's how the musicians are able to pick up where the tempo is. And then after a couple of measures, the electric guitar comes in, the bass comes in, the drums come in. And so without their knowledge this song was re-released in this country and actually became a big hit a number one hit in 1965. Imagine being Paul Simon, and getting that phone call. Well, listen, Paul, it's your record company calling. Guess what? You've got a hit in America. What do you mean I've got a hit in America. Well, in, so that's the whole story. And so, what Tom Wilson essentially did was took what was an acoustic folk song, added the electric guitar as base and drums to it, and really, that's the definition of what folk rock is. Well, Simon and Garfunkel went on to record an album The Sounds of Silence and, and that's, that's the one your probably familiar with and that version. other songs like Homeward Bound from 1966, and I Am a Rock really kind of made them one of the most important acts of that of that era. also coming out of LA we've got The Mamas & The Papas. Now they also form in New York, but again, like what we saw with the Byrds, moved to LA. And they're, they're a little bit late comers to this, this folk rock thing. The group led by John Philips, but having two men in the group, two males and two females, so those are the the Papas and the Mamas there, including Cass Mama Cass Elliot. who was, sort of, the, in many ways, sort of the star of the group. Well, although all of the, a lot of the song writing and harmonies, vocal harmonies and arrangements were done by John Phillips, one of the guys in the group. their big hit, first big hit, California Dreamin, went to number four in 1966. And their big number one hit, from '6, from '66, was a track called Monday, Monday. And another thing that began to happen among these, these folk-rock groups is because The Byrds had had so much success, covering Dylan's songs. Other groups either covered Dylan's songs, or try to imitate in their songwriting what a Dylan song sounded like. So there was a fellow by the name of Barry McGuire who had a number one hit in the fall of 1965. So this was kind of just, just in months after the emergence of, of folk rock and Mr Tamborine Man. This track is called Eve of Destruction, and the guy who write the song, P.F Sloan was essentially given the assignment, I think it was by Lou Adler, the record company to basically write a song that sounded like a Dylan song that wasn't a Dylan song so he wrote Eve of Destruction. Barry McGuire had a number one hit with that one. The Turtles, another group from LA covered the Dylan song, It Ain't Me Babe, and had a number eight hit with that in 1965. The hurd, the Turtles made up of dual singers Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan would later be known as Flore, Phlorescent Leech and Eddy or Flo and Eddy when they appeared on Frank Zappa albums and had their own solo career in the 70s. But early on, they were the Turtles. It Ain't Me Babe is a fantastic tune. But Happy Together, their number oe hit from slightly later, 1967, is one of the classic American, pop hits, from the 1960s. So this, this, in many ways, wraps up our discussion of folk rock. But there were other elements of the american response that we can talk about on the 1960s and in the next video we'll turn to the legacy of Phil Spector.
