The Byrds

This is how the sausage is made:

First I mention the Byrds singing Chimes of Freedom.  Then I pop the song on the stereo.  Then I think to myself (which half the time means subsequently writing it down Here At The Year -- seriously, friends, you literally get fifty percent of my total shit) that if you had to pick the archetypal Byrds song, this could very well be it.  Even if they didn't write it.  Then I find a video.

The live ones are terrible, so this is one of those photo-montage ones with excellent sound.  Two things to watch for:  First, every time I look at Roger McGuinn's 12-string Rickenbacker I experience profound regret at selling mine.  Second, you have to laugh at the virtual unrecognizability of David Crosby in some of these photos.  Hint:  He's wearing the cape.



Okay, here's an okay live version.  You just have to wade through the first 35 seconds of some fatuous ass ...



Favorite lyric:

... the hypnotic splattered mist was slowly lifting.

Bob Dylan at his best.

Two things I wish I still had ...

Really there are three things in the picture, if you discount the lamp in the corner and the top of the guitar case.  The guitar and the painting are gone, although the guy who owns the painting lets me come and look at it once every three or four years.  The photograph behind the guitar is an old black and white of my father sitting at his desk at the Department of Agriculture, circa maybe 1965?

I still have that.

Quick theological aside:  Wikipedia tells me that music critic Paul Williams once described Chimes of Freedom as "Bob Dylan's Sermon on the Mount."