Episode one hundred and twenty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Mr. Tambourine Man" by the Byrds, and the start of LA folk-rock. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.

Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "I Got You Babe" by Sonny and Cher.

Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/



Erratum

The version of this originally uploaded got the date of the Dylan tour filmed for Don't Look Back wrong. I edited out the half-sentence in question when this was pointed out to me very shortly after uploading.

Resources

As usual, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode (with the exception of the early Gene Clark demo snippet, which I've not been able to find a longer version of).

For information on Dylan and the song, I've mostly used these books:

Bob Dylan: All The Songs by Phillipe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon is a song-by-song look at every song Dylan ever wrote, as is Revolution in the Air, by Clinton Heylin.

Heylin also wrote the most comprehensive and accurate biography of Dylan, Behind the Shades.

I’ve also used Robert Shelton’s No Direction Home, which is less accurate, but which is written by someone who knew Dylan.

While for the Byrds, I relied mostly on Timeless Flight Revisited by Johnny Rogan, with some information from Chris Hillman's autobiography.

This three-CD set is a reasonable way of getting most of the Byrds' important recordings, while this contains the pre-Byrds recordings the group members did with Jim Dickson.

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Transcript

Today we're going to take a look at one of the pivotal recordings in folk-rock music, a track which, though it was not by any means the first folk-rock record, came to define the subgenre in the minds of the listening public, and which by bringing together the disparate threads of influence from Bob Dylan, the Searchers, the Beatles, and the Beach Boys, manages to be arguably the record that defines early 1965. We're going to look at "Mr. Tambourine Man" by the Byrds:

[Excerpt: The Byrds, "Mr. Tambourine Man"]

Folk-rock as a genre was something that was bound to happen sooner rather than later. We've already seen how many of the British R&B bands that were becoming popular in the US were influenced by folk music, with records like "House of the Rising Sun" taking traditional folk songs and repurposing them for a rock idiom. And as soon as British bands started to have a big influence on American music, that would have to inspire a reassessment by American musicians of their own folk music.

Because of course, while the British bands were inspired by rock and roll, they were all also coming from a skiffle tradition which saw Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Big Bill Broonzy, and the rest as being the people to emulate, and that would show up in their music. Most of the British bands came from the bluesier end of the folk tradition -- with the exception of the Liverpool bands, who pretty much all liked their Black music on the poppy side and their roots music to be more in a country vein -- but they were still all playing music which showed the clear influence of country and folk as well as blues.

And that influence was particularly obvious to those American musicians who were suddenly interested in becoming rock and roll stars, but who had previously been folkies. Musicians like Gene Clark.

Gene Clark was born in Missouri, and had formed a rock and roll group in his teens called Joe Meyers and the Sharks. According to many biographies, the Sharks put out a record of Clark's song "Blue Ribbons", but as far as I've been able to tell,