287. The Byrds, "Mr. Tambourine Man"

 


"These songs all sound exactly the same," my wife said when we were listening to this in the car yesterday and you know what?  She kinda has a point.  When you push a 12-string Rickenbacker up to the highest thing in the mix on every song, yeah, they're all gonna sound the same.  "That's called having a distinctive sound, honey," I replied, and then she pushed me out of the car.  I'm dead now.  

We all know that cover songs are popular, and that in the 60's it was trendy to cover songs that had literally just come out like a week earlier, but this album goes beyond.  Not only are more than half the songs covers, most of those are covers of Dylan songs, including the title track.  But, no question, the Byrds gave that song their own spin, changing the key and the arrangement and adding that 12-string, instantly making a classic sound that influenced thousands of bands, including R.E.M., Tom Petty, and the entire Paisley Underground movement in the early 80's.  It's really a beautiful song, and a beautiful sound.

Speaking of covers, one of the Gene Clark-penned originals on this album, "I'll Feel a Whole Lot Better," maybe the best original song on the album, was later covered by Tom Petty on Full Moon Fever, as we recently saw.  "Here Without You," another Clark original, was later covered by Reigning Sound, which makes perfect sense if you know Reigning Sound.  Covers!  That's our theme today.

So yeah, maybe the songs all do sound kinda the same, but that sound is so great and distinctive it's no wonder this album reached so far so quickly.  

Does this album deserve to be in the Top 500? Totally.

Comments

  1. StoneyOctober 13, 2021 at 11:52 AM

    Gene Clark was their secret weapon in the early days. I wish I had been smart enough to go see him when he was alive.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

103. De La Soul, "Three Feet High And Rising"

Image
  Sorry for the service interruption!  Monday I had, like, work stuff to do and yesterday I was picking my wife up at the airport and they lost her bag and we had to file a claim about that and by the time I got home it was well into my Work Hours and you know, I'm just sorry.  (This was tail end of quite a journey for my wife that found her taking off in Ireland and landing in Newark, New Jersey, and then sitting in a plane for almost three hours and then the flight just getting cancelled and then staying in the Courtyard by Marriott in downtown Newark, NJ [not recommended, she says] and then getting on a flight to SFO at 6:30 am and finally getting back here a solid 14 hours later than expected.) Speaking of the greater New York City metropolitan area, a group of kids from Amityville, Long Island, got together in 1988 and started making songs and released this album, one of the best in hip hop or any other genre, in 1989.  De La have been called the "Beatles of hip...
Read more

3. Joni Mitchell, "Blue"

Image
  Do you want the good news or the meh news first?  The good news is that this album is better than the other Joni Mitchell albums we've seen , or at least better for me.  I hated one of them and barely tolerated the other, so I was not expecting to like this, and after three listens yesterday, it was not as bad as I'd feared it would be.  The meh news?  I still don't love Joni Mitchell and I don't particularly like this album. Obviously, since it's the number 3 out of the Top 500 albums ever made, a lot of people feel differently.  Pitchfork called it "possibly the most gutting break-up album ever made," which may be true, who knows, but if it is it's about breaking up with a whole series of dudes, from Graham Nash to James Taylor to some guy named Carey.  (In Pitchfork's estimation, this is the 86th best album of the 1970s, so not exactly in number 3 overall territory). One thing that bugs me is Joni Mitchell's voice, which I find kind of g...
Read more

1. Marvin Gaye, "What’s Going On"

Image
  500 albums later and we're out of albums.  This album was number 6 on the last iteration of the Rolling Stone list and has now moved up to number 1 (displacing Sgt. Pepper , which was the last album to hold that spot).  I think it's a lovely album with maybe three absolutely incredible songs, a fair amount of average-to-good, and some not great songs.  I'm not a voter and will never be a voter but I just don't think this is the best album of all time. In fact, I would be perfectly fine with this list if they just sawed off the top 3 and left the rest as is: 1. Stevie Wonder, Songs in the Key of Life 2. Beatles, Abbey Road 3. Nirvana, Nevermind 4. Fleetwood Mac, Rumours And so forth.  But let's take this album on its own merits. The first of the three absolute bangers is the title track, "What's Going On," the scene-setter for the rest of the album, a loose concept album that's told from the point of view of a Vietnam vet returning to a country th...
Read more