When thinking of albums that are somehow great despite the animosity between the musicians making it, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours probably springs to mind first. Before that, in 1968, there was The Notorious Byrd Brothers, the making of which was sorely lacking in brotherly love.
Having formed The Byrds as a quintet, the Californian band began recording their fifth album as a foursome and finished it as a duo, regaining and re-losing original member Gene Clark for three weeks in the middle. Rhythm guitarist David Crosby was fired in October 1967. A range of reasons have been cited for Crosby’s departure – his political rants on stage at the Monterey International Pop Festival, perhaps, or the rest of the band’s refusal to include his seedy plead for a threesome, “Triad”, on the album – but he summed it up himself in the 2018 documentary Echo in the Canyon: “They threw me out of The Byrds because I was an asshole.”
On the album cover, the fourth window along from Chris Hillman, Roger McGuinn and Michael Clarke, that ought to have featured Crosby, ended up being occupied by a horse. Clarke had walked out in August, before returning and then being sacked just after recording was finished.
So it felt fitting that the remastered version of the album came with a 13-minute studio out-take titled “Universal Mind Decoder” that mostly consisted of the band arguing. Go back to the start of the album, though, and what’s on offer is a late-Sixties wonder that marries their familiar guitar jangle to head-spinning psychedelic effects, and here and there, the traditional country sounds that would go on to dominate a refreshed line-up’s next release, Sweetheart of the Rodeo.
The country feel is most obvious on “Wasn’t Born to Follow”, which was composed by the highly successful songwriting duo Gerry Goffin and Carole King. Unlike The Byrds’ debut hit, their 1965 electrification of Bob Dylan’s “Mr Tambourine Man”, this time their version came first. Goffin and King, who during their married life had mixed soul and bubblegum pop by penning hits including “The Loco-Motion”, “Up on the Roof” and “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman”, were on their way to divorcing. Byrds producer Gary Usher knew King and got hold of the unrecorded composition through her.
“Wasn’t Born to Follow” is an epic lyrical journey in song, the drums loping along, guitars ringing appealingly, McGuinn’s lead vocal backed with soft harmonies across six regular verses and no chorus. It’s only two minutes long, but its easy pleasantness is given a vigorous shake by a central instrumental section where the beat begins to pound, phasing sounds whoosh in and out and the guitars of McGuinn and temporary member Clarence White seem to disintegrate before your ears.
Goffin’s words are particularly grand, mixing the natural and the mythical on a trip that features sacred mountains, legendary fountains, a daunting chasm and a female temptress whose solicitations must be resisted. He evokes the magical hippie dream of taking off, allowing any societal rules to slip from a chemically altered mind, and never returning. It was a perfect fit on the soundtrack to a key movie of the counterculture, Easy Rider, accompanying Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper propelling low-slung motorbikes through the kind of forest painted so poetically in the song: “Where the trees have leaves of prisms/And break the light in colors/That no one knows the names of.”
In between the Byrds album and the film, with much less impact than either, King released her own version of the song. After splitting from Goffin and moving to LA, she formed a folk-rock trio called The City. Bassist (and her next husband) Charles Larkey and guitarist Danny Kortchmar would also play on Tapestry, King’s earth shaking 1971 solo album, but record company shufflings meant that Now That Everything’s Been Said, The City’s only release, was deleted quickly and not heard again until a reissue in 1999. Her resonant piano and a slower pace give “Wasn’t Born to Follow” a rich, almost gospel feel, as well as making it nearly twice as long.
King revisited it on a 1980 solo album, Pearls, but its banjo-picking bounciness diminishes some of the song’s power. Better to seek out a rarer, string-laden version by Dusty Springfield, that was recorded around the same late Sixties period as her impeccable Dusty in Memphis collection, but only released as part of Dusty in London, the “lost British recordings”, in 1999.
More recently, Beth Orton kept it simple and acoustic, a bonus track on her 2012 album Sugaring Season. In 2020 Yo La Tengo, the venerable New Jersey indie band with a long history of cover recordings ranging from Blondie to The Beach Boys, stayed faithful to the Byrds version.
The last word should probably go to The Monkees, who didn’t record it until their Good Times! album in 2016, but indirectly played a part in its enduring status. If film producers Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson hadn’t risked their own money on Easy Rider – wealth they earned from co-creating the Monkees’ TV show – the film might never have been made.
