63. The Byrds - Fifth Dimension (July 1966)

1. 5D (Fifth Dimension)

2. Wild Mountain Thyme*

3. Mr. Spaceman

4. I See You

5. What's Happening ?!?!

6. I Come and Stand at Every Door*

7. Eight Miles High*

8. Hey Joe (Where You Gonna Go)

10. Captain Soul

11. John Riley

12. 2-4-2 Fox Trot (The Lear Jet Song)

B+

Well this is a weird album. The Byrds had moved on from weed to LSD, and at the same time lost their principle songwriter. The result is a darker, weirder album than Mr. Tambourine Man, less consistent but at the same time featuring some truly exceptional songs. 

Things kick off with "5D (Fifth Dimension)". Musically it has a Dylanesque melody and swirling, hypnotic guitars. According to Wikipedia, Jim McGuinn wrote this song about the theory of relativity and the idea that there are more dimensions to space-time than can be perceived by the human mind. According to anyone who's ever heard the song, though, it's pretty clearly describing a trip on hallucinogens. It's an OK song, but whenever someone goes on about peace and love and a benevolent universe I get very annoyed and just think about that line in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon where Li Mu Bai talks about meditation bringing him to a place of great sadness that his sifu never told him about. 

The next song, "Wild Mountain Thyme", is just beautiful, and one of the most gorgeous songs I've ever heard. It's just a simple folk song about wandering the hills and "gathering thyme" (I think this may be a euphemism), but it's just lovely, and features the Byrds' signature folk rock sound fleshed out with some beautiful, vaguely Eastern strings. It's easily my favourite song on the album, and fast becoming one of my favourite songs, period.

Then you have "Mr. Spaceman". This is a country rock song about being contacted by aliens. It's a fun song but fucking weird. 

Then there are a couple of nice enough throwaways. They have pleasant melodies but aren't really very deep or engaging. The song that really stuck with me is "I Come and Stand at Every Door". It's a setting of a translation of a Turkish poem (I do research!) about a child who died in Hiroshima, and now wanders the Earth entreating people to fight for peace. It's haunting and hypnotic and strange and genuinely moving. 

After that is "Eight Miles High", a good song but also possibly the most overrated piece of music I've ever heard. I mean, it's cool and droning and hypnotic psych rock, and it features a kick-ass guitar riff, but I don't really get why people adore it so much. It's still a great song, though. And also, apparently, not written about drugs - it's about flying to London and being weirded out by the experience, and the musical oddity is because the Byrds were listening to a lot of Ravi Shankar and John Coltrane. But then again, the Byrds were constantly high, so who knows?

After "Eight Miles High", the album kind of falls apart. I never liked "Hey Joe" to begin with, but the version here is particularly shitastic. "Captain Soul" is an utterly forgettable instrumental of the sort that should only be found at the end of a second disc of studio outtake bonus tracks. And "2-4-2 Fox Trot (The Lear Jet Song)" may be innovative in its overdubbing of jet engine sounds and pre-flight take-off cabin noises, but is ultimately just someone saying "Gonna ride a Lear jet baby" over and over again, and genuinely annoying. The saving grace of side two of this album is a lovely setting of the traditional ballad "John Riley", about a sailor who returns to his true love. It's pretty great, and shows that even though the Byrds were transitioning into a new sound, folk rock is really where their strengths lay.

So anyway, is this an album worth listening to? The criterion for the List is that it must be one of the 1001 albums you hear before you die. And honestly, you could skip this. The songs I've asterisked are all brilliant, and I guess this album is important for context as a major work of psychedelia that influenced a lot of people, but as pure music it's very patchy. There are only a couple of genuinely bad songs, but there are only a couple of really good ones, too. I'm glad I listened to it, though. Being introduced to the Byrds has been one of the real pleasures of doing this project, and while I don't know where they're going after this, I'm excited to find out. This is an uneven album, but it takes risks, and it's always exciting to see a band trying something new, especially when the rewards are as great as the best songs on this album.