Desert Rose Band, True Love (1991)

I remain slightly mystified by the Desert Rose Band: how did Chris Hillman shake off two decades of the doldrums and step into slick Top 40 country-pop so seemingly effortlessly? After years spent mostly coasting through covers, what reignited his songwriting muse (he had a hand in all but one track here)? And why are he and fellow old-timer Herb Petersen paired up with a dude who looks like he should be playing Patrick Swayze’s character in a Road House sequel?

Whatever questions, or reservations about the style, one may hold, it would be hard to deny that Hillman & Co. play this game well. Four albums in, the DRB still brings it; no timeless classics here, but not one dud either, and the whole album flows along swiftly, aided by nicely constructed melodies and crisp, if time-bound production (big drum sounds crossed genre lines during this era, it seems). 

Despite this, and a quite lovely (as always) duet appearance by Alison Krauss, True Love also marked the band's abrupt fall from commercial grace. Perhaps the lackluster title and cringeworthy cover art played a role; for content, Hillman hadn’t been this on since the Byrds.

Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young, Wooden Nickel (1969)

No sense rehashing my grievances with the main characters here—Crosby and Stills remain unbearable egomaniacal prigs, Nash a bobbleheaded proto-himbo, and Young the only real songwriter of the bunch (albeit also something of a hippie meathead, just a really talented one), so that’s off my chest.

Bootlegged at Big Sur, this seems to circulate in pricy but cruddy faceless vinyl. I scored a five-dollar copy at South Philly’s Beautiful World Syndicate, and will say this: within the constraints of the group’s insufferability, it’s a strong document. Audio purists might wince at a version of “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” that sounds like a 90s lo-fi 4-tracker, but to me, it’s a step in the right direction from the pointlessly airless studio perfectionism of the album take. And fortunately, Young takes over the running length—his first-side “Birds” is loose (“close enough for jazz,” as he puts it) and wondrous, and then on side two, he elbows the geezers out of the way for a 19-minute “Down By the River.” Sure, Crazy Horse did it with more muscle, but the thought of a pouty Crosby and Stills sulking because nobody’s paying any attention to them (they add nothing to this song) more than compensates.

David Crosby/Graham Nash, Whistling Down the Wire (1976)

Cultural historians of the future will have a tough time explaining 1970s rock stardom. Did it depend on songwriting skill? Musical virtuosity? Charm? Good looks? Crosby & Nash defy all of the above; they plod along inexplicably, dropping LPs with no legitimate grounds for existence. Like this one: Nash continues to strain for poetry and profundity, consistently achieving neither (he’s clearly been listening to frenemy Neil Young, but just can’t get it right; “And the cannibals are waiting on the edge/to eat the meat that they can smell” is just . . . dumb), while Crosby churns out more vaguely song-like temporal chunks of sound. The best moments come in spite of the nominal figureheads: when Crosby finally shuts the hell up on the wordless “Dancer,” or when “Mutiny” achieves a second-class Steely Dan sound that nearly drowns out Nash’s insipid lyrics. I remain baffled by this entire phenomenon. 

New Riders of the Purple Sage, New Riders (1976)

I’m not much of a betting man, but here’s something I’d lay money on: close your eyes, point your finger to a map of the continental United States, head immediately to the nearest dive bar, and whatever random ragged band is playing there will offer more spirited renditions of “You Never Can Tell” and “Dead Flowers” than these lazy bums, coasting into a new contract with MCA that must have just thrilled the suits. Truly, this is one of the most phoned-in albums I’ve ever heard, major label or self-released. Not for one flickering instant does it spring to life; they don’t write songs (there’s one paltry original, and it ain’t much to speak of), and the otherwise all-covers track listing seems mostly chosen to allow Skip Battin to do nothing but ride bass scales for a whole LP. Nobody else does anything, either; there may be legitimate metaphysical questions as to whether this album even exists. God knows I can’t vouch for it, and the damn thing is playing as I type.

The Flying Burrito Bros, Burrito Deluxe (1970)

Less heavy-handed than the debut, it also weighs less, sometimes threatening to float away into jangly pop-rock—which is fine with me; frankly, I wish Parsons and Hillman both had taken more interest in that side of their work. GP had been kicking “Lazy Days” around for years before putting it on record here, and it sounds it—if Gilded Palace of Sin strove for the strains of 1938, this one eases into those of 1967. “High Fashion Queen” is sneering but effective, though the FBB—bros indeed—wallow in garden-variety rock misogyny that includes a zippy cover of Dylan's "If You Gotta Go," not one of his more charming moments.

They beat the Byrds to “Farther Along” by a year, though the two versions are largely interchangeable, and Parsons fumbles slightly on the closing “Wild Horses,” failing to bring Jagger’s depth of longing. Still, this brief excursion into a sort of power-pop country charts a direction not otherwise taken for this group--when Hillman dug "Down in the Churchyard" back out several years later on a solo album, it lumbered in at twice the length and half the impact. 

Nashville West (1976)

Before becoming Byrds, Clarence White and Gene Parsons bummed around the bar and studio session circuit for years, recording this live in 1968 but leaving it unreleased for about a decade. Hardly a lost treasure, it mostly shows a strong bar band belting out tight covers. Well-curated overall--their “Green, Green Grass of Home” stands nearly on par with the other Parson’s take, though “Greensleeves” is taking things a mite far, fellas—probably the most interesting interpretive trick is the way they dodge the sexual and gender roles of “Ode to Billy Joe” by turning in an instrumental rendition, with some terrifically bleary fretwork from White, a harbinger of things to come. For that matter, in a genealogy of the Byrds, probably the main point of interest here is the brawn, unfurled early on some crashing, crunchy chords that roll down over “Mental Revenge.” Here’s where the musculature of the late-period Byrds albums was developed, one set of handwashing-in-the-dirty-river workouts at a time.

Love that cover art, too.  

Chris Hillman, Desert Rose (1984)

After the stupefyingly lackluster late-70s solo LPs, Hillman spent the first half of the 80s regrouping with some low-key albums of laid-back country ditties, mostly covers. Desert Rose has the casual feel of a hootenanny among friends, with longtime Hillman associates like Herb Petersen, Bernie Leadon, Al Perkins, et al., all having a good time dishing out solid background music. Nothing memorable here, but it’s all likable enough, and a dry run for the more polished pop-country of Hillman’s Desert Rose Band—which took not only the name, but also a spruced-up “Ashes of Love” rendition, from this. As questionable as the Nashville gloss would be in many cases, the fact is, Desert Rose shows how complacent Hillman had gotten, so the new band would also constitute something of a kick in the ass after his many years in the doldrums, of which this represents the end.

My $5 copy from Amoeba in Los Angeles is autographed; I have a hard time imagining anyone faking a Chris Hillman auto, so I’m going to assume it’s legit.

The International Submarine Band, Safe at Home (1968)

In which Gram Parsons discovers country music and gives it a dry run before offering it up to the Byrds. As a songwriter, he’s got something, though at this point it’s still more promise than materialization. As a singer, he’s holding back, not quite sure how far to take this game. Brevity pays off—at just under a half-hour, it would be pretty tough to overstay its welcome, and it’s not unwelcomed to begin with. It might all peak with “Blue Eyes” at track one, but the “Folsom Prison Blues/That’s All Right” medley is my secret key to the entire Parsons project: instead of wanting to be Johnny Cash or Elvis specifically, he just wanted to iconic, period. Probably could just as well have been Sinatra and the the New Soft Bobby-Sox, so all things considered, lucky how the pieces fell here. I’d hate to think of the Byrds gone Rat Pack.

Gram Parsons, Grievous Angel (1974)

Widely considered sacrosanct, and I can see why, for about half of it. Just under, really; already thin at nine tracks, about half the running time is sheer padding. I like Tom T. Hall more than most people, but Parsons’s take on his “I Can’t Dance” is a preview for a Grounded Burrito Bros album nobody wishes existed. “Las Vegas,” well, speaks for itself. “Love Hurts” is better than the Nazareth version, but mostly because of Emmylou Harris, who admittedly improves everything she sings on.

But the core of the album is the Parsons originals. Most of them—“Brass Buttons,” “In My Hour of Darkness,” “Return of the Grievous Angel”—have a purity and simplicity that makes them near-staggering, but also suggests they were the end of the road; you can’t get much more elemental than this. “$1000 Wedding,” on the other hand, shows some narrative flair that would never be further developed.

He peaked with GP, and all indications here are of a talent all too eager to squander itself—we hear the squandering in each wasted filler track. Too bad he was so casual about his occasional ability to achieve majesty.

Gram Parsons, GP (1973)

It’s taken me nearly two decades to finally recognize the beauty of this album. I always had reasons, often fumbling music-crit rationalizations (about the unused well of emotion he refused to tap into because of his formalist embrace of artifice, say; or some intellectual rotgut about the inverted catch-22 of the self-applied beautiful-loser trope as a defense mechanism that undermined its force; or etc.). What it came down to, I now think, now that I finally consider this one of the finest post-Byrds records, is simply that I found Parsons distasteful, a smirking trust-fund folkie jerk with an idiotic self-mythologizing death wish.

Well, he was. And he got it. And it has nothing to do with the power of this album. Was it the 40^th spin of “Kiss the Children”? A solitary midnight stroll to the strains of “The New Soft Shoe”? I have no idea, but suddenly, recently, it hit me: this is freaking great. It really is. How I never heard it until now baffles me, but there it is: a conversion narrative GP himself might appreciate, all wasted years and then redemption. And when you play “A Song for You,” I finally concede, there ain’t a smirk to be heard in all that plaintive longing. Tragic, the whole damn thing. 

Skip Battin, Topanga Skyline (2012)

The mind boggles at the thought of hardcore Skip Battin fans—what is there to love, exactly, beyond Kim Fowley songs sung by someone other than Kim Fowley?—but they exist, at least two of them, contributing liner notes from France and Italy to contextualize this unreleased album from 1973, apparently lost during the petroleum crisis and finally recovered nearly four decades later.

As far as ecologically-debilitating uses of world resources go, slapping this on vinyl would have been better than refueling another gas-guzzling American car, but not by too much. Battin does drop some of his unendearing novelty-tune shtick and attempt to deliver a genuine roots-rock LP; it’s credible enough, but still no better than a set of non-Fogerty CCR tunes. Credit where credit is due, though: in “Wintergreen,” Battin and Fowley unexpectedly knock out a real song, full of genuine emotion. It’s certainly their high point to date (and the closing bonus track “China Moon,” taken from later sessions, might also come close, were it not for some questionable racialized lyrics). Otherwise, mostly this just leaves one with questions, such as, does this mean there are also Gene Parsons obsessives out there? John York ones?

The Byrds, Ballad of Easy Rider (1969)

As a rule, albums whose second tracks are written by the new bass player about a dog and feature a mid-song drum solo are to be avoided at all costs. Yet somehow Ballad of Easy Rider proves an (most likely the) exception—and the best late-Byrds LP. McGuinn spends his entire songwriting capital on the lovely opening title track, one of his greatest moments, but the rest of the band steps up admirably, from short-term bassist John York and his aforementioned “Fido,” to co-writers Clarence White and Gene Parsons, whose “Oil in My Lamp” provides another high point. One could read the abundance of covers—there are a lot even by Byrds standards—as a sign of creative exhaustion, but they also reflect curatorial sense and wisdom, with “Tulsa County” and Woody Guthrie’s humane, still sadly relevant “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)” delivered with feeling. It’s a soft, understated record, all the better for not striving to be iconic.

Okay, McGuinn can’t hold back from ending things on another of his stupid spaceship songs, but even that brings a loopy charm.

The Byrds, Younger Than Yesterday (1967)

Probably the only album in rock history in which a band recovers from a 3^rd album slump by having the bass player take the lead songwriting role. What’s amazing is that Chris Hillman, for one record and one record only, very nearly fills Gene Clark’s shoes. “Have You Seen Her Face,” “Time Between,” Thought and Words,” they just roll out so seemingly effortlessly, pop-rock manna from four-string heaven. Throw in the slightly lesser (but still wonderful) “The Girl with No Name” and the Hillman/McGuinn co-written opener “So You Wanna Be a Rock ‘N’ Roll Star,” and this is Hillman’s greatest moment, a triumphantly jangly revitalization. Like floating garbage lifted by a rising tide, even David Crosby writes an actual song for once with “Renaissance Fair,” perhaps his finest turn.

This was probably the end of the line for this particular style of music; by the next year, you’d have to up your artistic ambitions or become the Monkees. It’s a delightful departure (I’m just gonna keep pretending Crosby’s “Mind Gardens” never happened).

Gene Clark, Silverado ’75: Live & Unreleased (2008)

In classically Clark-like fashion, I set myself up for a fall here: so excited was I about the idea of No Other tracks rearranged for live performance that I saved this album for a solo drive across upstate New York. Outsized romantic visions of Gene Clark melancholia accompanying the setting sun over Ithaca were just not matched by what often seemed like a honky-tonk one night stand; “Long Black Veil” is a great song, sure, but what is doing as the opening track here, when this guy wrote so many gems?

So I set Silverado ’75 aside for a year, chalking it up as a disappointment. Returning to it now, unburdened of its road-trip duties, it plays better: the thing is a honky-tonk two night stand, after all (sharing a Denver bill with Tom Waits; if only they’d collaborated!), which is about all Clark could hope for after the unjust commercial failure of No Other. The Byrds songs have an added layer of sadness, and the test runs for songs from the next LP fit comfortably alongside the older tracks and some standards--surely credit here goes to his tight touring band of Roger White and Duke Bardwell (trading off between low-rent Clark gigs and huge Elvis ones at the time). And while there are only a bare two songs from the album that theoretically undergirded the tour, both the title track and set closer “Silver Raven” both withstand being stripped down to their core components; shorn of the studio dressing, they’re not necessarily more intimate but they are more revealing of Clark’s songwriting strengths, never lost on record but always jostling for the foreground with the sonic accoutrements.

Ultimately it's mostly a verite documentary of what it was like to be Gene Clark in 1975: constrained to play songs that make folks swing their hips a little rather than the sweeping epics he had just recorded, sounding alternately checked-out and deeply moving, and probably wondering why 1975 seemed so much smaller than 1965. 

The Byrds, Turn! Turn! Turn! (1965)

Second verse, same as the first—to diminishing returns, but only slightly so. We still get revved-up Dylan covers (there’s no “please” in their command to get out of the new road in “The Times They Are A-Changin’”); splendid Gene Clark originals, all moody and brooding and yet possessed of lovely pop melodies; and scattered accoutrements that range from Porter Wagoner country hits to a few McGuinn stabs at pop-rock that aren’t half bad, the Herman’s Hermits to Clark’s Dylan-by-way-of-the-Beatles.

Nothing here is as game-changing as “Mr. Tambourine Man”—what within the Byrds framework could ever be again?—but the album takes on complicated (and problematic) weight as a last dying gasp of the American Camelot myth. The title track’s plea for peace would sound more desperate than prescient soon, and the expunged minstrel past of closing “Oh! Susannah” was a national repressed that was already returning (I won’t even go on a diatribe about Cold War bully John Kennedy, mourned in “He Was a Friend of Mine”; I’ll just sub in a link to Stephen Rabe’s compelling book The Most Dangerous Area in the World: John F. Kennedy Confronts Communist Revolution in Latin America). Anyone who takes this thing as pure simple pop music either votes Republican or hasn't listened very closely.

For all that baggage, and despite inexplicably leaving a few worthy Clark originals on the cutting room floor (“The Day Walk” is quite a loss), the thing hangs together, tenuously and anxiously jangle-rocking on the edge of oblivion. It already was too late, but maybe that was the point.

The Byrds, (Untitled) (1970)

Untitled and also seemingly rather unsung, but a remarkably strong album with an adventurous format: double-LP, first one live, second new studio tracks. They bring the muscle for the live stuff, with a set spirited enough to reclaim even the doofy “Mr. Spaceman” from its 5^th Dimension doldrums. “Lover of the Bayou,” one of McGuinn’s last strong originals, opens things—live rather than studio was the right call—and an entire sidelong “Eight Miles High” avoids feeling like one of those awful San Francisco jam bands stretching out aimlessly in some poor ballroom; these guys hammer ferociously.

The studio material contains more solid McGuinn/Levy compositions (“Just a Season” especially), and balances nicely against the live record. The Skip Battin/Kim Fowley songwriting machine that would irreparably mar the next two Byrds albums begins to seep in here, but is held slightly in abeyance by the fact that McGuinn takes the mic, and these actually sound like rock songs and not irritating novelty tunes—though the concluding “Well Come Back Home” drones on twice as long as it should.

That we're pretty far from "Mr. Tambourine Man" is signified by the brief two-minute rendition it gets, squeezed late on side 1--the Byrds could never escape their folk-rock origins, but they race through it to better move on to where they're now at. It's a better place than one would be primed to imagine.

Firefall, Undertow (1980)

The 1979-80 season must have been a tough one for Larry Burnett, since he came up with a mere two ditties for this round; subtract one anomalously jaunty Jock Bartley jam buried safely deep on side 2, and this is effectively a Rick Roberts auteurist LP. His vision, of a sort of primordial silky ooze that runs from one song to the next as if discrete units of songwriting were a thing of the past (or possibly future) is nothing if not cohesive; this is probably my vote for Firefall’s best, though it manages to win the dubious honor without a single standout track. “Business is Business,” a Burnett track declares; indeed: the business here is that of polishing off every idiosyncratic edge from lyrical content to studio musicianship (the single proper noun on the entire album is a lone reference to California, and an impersonal one at that). As such, Michael Clarke’s rote 4/4 timekeeping—his recorded swan song before his revived faux-Byrds touring act and sadly early death—can almost be read as masterful; no distracting jazz flourishes here, that’s for sure. Let Steely Dan hire Jeff Porcaro for one verse, an older club veteran for the next; Clarke in some ways embodies the core of the Firefall project, all bland and anonymous and easy to listen to, hard to focus on.

That being said, more gripping and harrowing than any percussive work he offered in life was the graphic, grueling letter Clarke offered in death, detailing his alcoholism and warning children not to follow in his footsteps. Undertow has my favorite Firefall cover art, really some of my favorite 70s-malaise imagery altogether, all dark and brooding and ominous and as fuzzy about identity as Friedkin's Cruising (what any of this had to do with their music, I can't tell). But Clarke's visual decline is even more powerful, a sad and stark trajectory from pop heartbreaker to emaciated leftover. RIP to a guy who chanced into a pretty great run of it, and locked into a tragic one at the same time.

Roger McGuinn (1973)

McGuinn still can’t write, but having Bob Dylan play harmonica on an opening track that sounds like a Dylan cover almost works. Other minor pleasures are to be found: a catchy melody on “M’Linda,” a random children’s chorus popping up on “Stone,” a few traditionals given nice 70s-rock arrangements. But the original five Byrds reunite (again) for “My New Woman” only to be drowned out by a gratuitous sax, and while “Lost My Drivin’ Wheel” fares better, it makes one miss Clarence White and Gram Parsons, who brought more fire to a version inexplicably left off Farther Along. “Hannoi Hannah” is about a mean joke played on a prostitute (typically classy lyrics by Jacques Levy), and the Moog experiment “Time Cube” is a mean joke played on the listener. So things aren’t great here—and on subsequent McGuinn solo efforts, they’d only rarely get better.

Parsons Green, Birds of a Feather (1988)

If you’re going to go the adult contemporary route, you might as well have the courage of your convictions. Closing an album with a four-minute a cappella “Quiet Joys of Brotherhood” (by Richard Farina/Sandy Denny), well, that counts. To get there, we listen through everything from Jimmie Rodgers to Donovan, all flattened into the same politely pleasant folk/country/bluegrass hybrid sway. Gene Parsons allows himself one homespun instrumental as on the solo LPs of old, and Meridian Green keeps herself restrained and kinda dull (her rare almost-guttural moments fall well short of what, say, Alannah Myles was doing at the time; feral, they are not). They seem pretty happy together—if you don’t pick that up from the cover, she’s “cooing like a dove/I’m so in love with you” on track 2 to remind you. Upon the release of this album, Lux Interior and Poison Ivy probably threw up on one another in protest.

McGuinn-Hillman (1980)

I have no idea who opened for Loverboy or Eddie Money in 1980, but I do know, with absolute certainty, that they sounded exactly like this album: crisp ringing trebly guitar chords hanging in the air, faux-anthemic synth climbs to anticlimactic pseudo-crescendos, plenty of open space for live handclaps, and not a song in sight. Drowning out the sad, lazy all-filler tracks is the giant sucking sound of the now-absent Gene Clark, responsible for many of the best moments in the previous McGuinn-Hillman affairs. In his place are a nonsensically sequenced consecutive double whammy of Graham Parker tunes on side 1, a procession of farmed-out hack-written songs neither better nor worse than the former Byrds’s inert originals, and the grinding death throes of the promises of the 1960s. I guess this is what America deserved for electing Reagan.

Capitol seemed to know this one was slated for oblivion; as far as I can tell, between the front and back covers, the target audience for this LP was inattentive bikers impulse-buying based on the logo, sunburn victims, and barefoot survivalists surfacing from their fallout shelters to buy batteries.

Crosby/Nash, Live (1977)

Graham Nash’s “Simple Man” followed by David Crosby’s “Foolish Man” at the start of side 2 here summarizes the intertwined careers of these buffoons better than any belabored snark possibly could. There are probably less essential albums out there—Rednex’s 1994 Sex & Violins comes to mind, though even Whale’s 1995 We Care just barely avoids the classification, “Hobo Humpin’ Slobo Babe” and all—but few less interesting ones. This just plods along, not even bothering to grab for the duo’s grade-A material, whatever that might be. If four minutes of Nash’s “Mama Lion” seems interminable, that’s only because you haven’t yet reached the epic closer, nearly ten excruciating minutes of Crosby’s orgy-of-idiocy “Déjà Vu.” 

Gene Clark, No Other (1974)

Visionary maximalist psychedelic country-rock albums are hardly in abundance, with good ones more rare yet. So it wouldn’t seem like Gene Clark was tapping a goldmine here—nor did the immediate results vindicate him, with the album flopping and meeting critical disinterest.

Gene Clark was right, and everyone else was wrong. More than just the great lost Byrds-member album (and let’s face it, it doesn’t take much to rank high in this particular canon), this is one of the great lost 70s albums, period. Thomas Jefferson Kaye’s production is bombastic but genuinely exploratory, slithering funk bass and constant keyboard hum and even Chris Hillman stopping by with his mandolin all contributing to rather than distracting from Clark’s grasp for transcendence. On the lyric sheet some of it reads as mystical babbling, but the delivery sells it—when he asks, “Have you seen the old world dying,” you don’t doubt that he has, and when "Some Misunderstanding" briefly totters toward formlessness, that voice, all yearning and longing and reminding that "we all need a fix," pierces the fog and pulls it together. Even if that old world for Clark might have been his sobriety—while “Life’s Greatest Fool” and “The True One” might have fit in on his earlier solo albums (high praise indeed), closer “Lady of the North,” co-written with Doug Dillard and the only shared songwriting on the record, shows how far things have moved from the Dillard & Clark albums. This is what they might have sounded like with a symphony and a mountain of blow—accoutrements that might crush a lesser talent, and which couldn’t possibly be sustained even by Clark, but which coalesce here into eight long songs (with no conceivable radio single in sight--oh, how David Geffen must have fumed) that form one unbroken, nearly perfect, suite. No Byrd ever put out, or even played on, a better album than this.

Too bad about the cover art, though. As much as I endorse the destabilization of gender roles, the strikingly attractive Clark looks terrible in bad makeup and (I think?) drag on the back:

The Souther-Hillman-Furay Band, Trouble in Paradise (1975)

Writing bland MOR rock must be more exhausting than it seems, because all these guys can squeeze their muses for is an average of three songs apiece, which really bleed together into one unbroken procession of musical, lyrical, and performance banality. Apparently Richie Furay was born again in the interim since the first SHF LP, so imagining the recording or the backstage of a show is vastly more entertaining than listening to the damn thing. Hillman nearly comes to life on “Follow Me Through,” buried deep on side two, but the arguable keeper is (as on round one) Souther’s “Mexico,” whose half-assed, shrugged-off tale of infidelity is an apotheosis of this scene’s darkness-free easy-sleazin’—not to mention a perfect embodiment of what Steely Dan was mocking in “Deacon Blues.”

The Byrds, Farther Along (1971)

Timing and production, they matter: I could see this ramshackle album recorded on a four-track in 1996 getting some underground traction, and I could see it slathered in Byrdsmaniax overdubs, coming out in 2007 on Sub Pop as a Fleet Foxes opening act. Recorded near-live in 1971, right after the aforementioned flop, it too wilted on the vine. If not a lost masterpiece, it still deserved better, as Gene Parsons and Clarence White really showed themselves the center of the group, Roger McGuinn overcame his lifelong songwriting stupor to kick things off with the self-penned chugging 50s-style riffage of “Tiffany Queen” (one of the most overlooked Byrds gems, with even modestly clever lyrics from Our Man of the Norman Vincent Peale Reading Club), and the wretched Skit Battin/Kim Fowley songwriting duo pushed their obnoxiousness into relative remission here. We even get a moving dead-dog tribute.

Probably this was all they had in them and it’s just as well the road ended here (it’s the final LP in the organically continuous life of the Byrds, with the 1973 original-lineup return a reunion rather than a next-album). But the thing deserved better than the critical and commercial neglect it received—even the bonus tracks on the CD reissue kinda kill it.  

The Byrds, Byrdmaniax (1971)

The near-universal consensus is that producer Terry Melcher killed this album by drowning it in sickly sweet strings and horns. Which gives him both too much and too little credit; okay, he lays it on thick, no question, but this was bound for mediocrity no matter who tweaked the knobs. Nothing could polish these tunes into gold, nor does Melcher entirely stifle what is there; McGuinn’s gentle but simple “Kathleen’s Song” was going to be endearing but forgettable whether or not swirling symphonic fills were crammed into its open spaces.

That and the Gene Parsons co-write “Pale Blue” are the fearless leader’s most—only—valuable contributions (the less said about his faltering stab at political commentary, “I Wanna Grow Up To Be a Politician,” the better; on his go-to co-composer Jacques Levy, let even less be said). Team Battin/Fowley can’t compete with even that, turning in more of the lazy pap that marked Battin’s Byrdsian contributions. Clarence White moves behind the mic for a few songs, credibly enough, though surely even the young Jackson Browne had better offerings for him to cover than “Jamaica Say You Will.”

At least they were smart enough to leave off the once-requisite Dylan cover that traded in and simplified the complicated sneer/sorrow combo of “Just Like a Woman” for a more straightforwardly sentimental version that thus missed the point.  Otherwise, all the markings of a slapdash contract filler are here, including the goofy, unappealing cover and title. Ladies and gentlemen, this is what uninspired journeyman rock music feels like.

The Flying Burrito Bros, Flying Again (1975)

In their second or third (depending on how one defines it) configuration, stripped of the most crucial initial members, the FBB are basically a bunch of journeyman session dudes with no particular propensity for songwriting or distinct musical identity. The attenuated Byrds connection is down to Gene Parsons, probably the most credible writer of the bunch (his “Desert Childhood” comes closer to memorable than the rest of the album), even if, as Country Rock Blog notes, his status as one “G. Parsons” might have been his real ticket into the band. Nothing sticks out but nothing grates, right up until the terribly misguided decision to end things with a “Hot Burrito #3,” which reeks of such pathetic desperation, bottom feeding, and outright gravedigging that it can’t help but leave a sour taste as the final impression.