Mr. Tambourine Man (album) - Music

Music

Mr. Tambourine Man opens with the Dylan-penned title track, which had been a huge international hit for the group and had initiated the folk rock boom of the mid-1960s. Due to producer Terry Melcher's lack of confidence in The Byrds' musicianship at the time, most of the band had been replaced by session musicians for the "Mr. Tambourine Man" single and its B-side "I Knew I'd Want You", with only McGuinn being allowed to play on these tracks. The most distinctive features of The Byrds' rendition of "Mr. Tambourine Man" were the vocal harmonies of Clark, McGuinn and Crosby, as well as McGuinn's jangling twelve-string Rickenbacker guitar playing (which complemented the phrase "jingle jangle morning" found in the song's lyric). This combination of 12-string guitar and complex harmony work became the band's signature sound during their early period. Another notable element of the band's rendition of "Mr. Tambourine Man" was the melodic bass playing of session musician Larry Knechtel, standing in for The Byrds' bassist, Chris Hillman.

Another Dylan cover, "All I Really Want to Do", was the first song to be recorded for the album following the "Mr. Tambourine Man" and "I Knew I'd Want You" session and it would go on to become the band's second single release. Producer Terry Melcher felt confident that the band's debut single would be, at the very least, a regional hit and so he brought The Byrds back into the studio on March 8, 1965 to record a follow-up. This March 8 recording session yielded the version of "All I Really Want to Do" that appears on the album but the song was later re-recorded on April 14 and it was this later take that graced the A-side of The Byrds' second single.

Although the band's musicianship had improved since the recording of their debut single, it was assumed by both Columbia Records and the band's manager that the entire album would be recorded with session men providing the musical backing. However, the band had other ideas and insisted that they be allowed to perform the album's instrumental accompaniment themselves. Melcher felt satisfied that the group had polished their sound enough to be able to produce professional sounding backing tracks and thus, The Byrds were allowed to play on all of the remaining songs on the album without any help from outside musicians. However, a persistent myth about the album is that all of the playing on it was done by session musicians. This misconception is likely due to confusion between the "Mr. Tambourine Man" single and the album of the same name. Chris Hillman has noted that the contrast between the smoother, more polished sound of the two tracks featuring session musicians and the rawer sound of the rest of the album is quite noticeable.

For the most part, the Mr. Tambourine Man album consisted of two types of songs: band originals, primarily penned by Clark, the group's central songwriter during its first eighteen months of existence, and covers of modern folk songs, composed primarily by Bob Dylan. The Clark-penned songs included "Here Without You", a song detailing a bittersweet trip through the city in which every landmark and physical object reminds the singer of an absent lover, and "I Knew I'd Want You", a Beatlesque recountal of the first flushes of romance. Although "I Knew I'd Want You" had been recorded as the intended B-side of the band's debut single, it's interesting to note that had the band failed to secure permission to release "Mr. Tambourine Man" from Dylan and his manager Albert Grossman, "I Knew I'd Want You" would've been issued as the group's first A-side.

A third song from the pen of Gene Clark featured on the album was "I'll Feel a Whole Lot Better", an upbeat number with pounding tambourine, jangling Rickenbacker and criss-crossing vocals from Clark on the lead and McGuinn and Crosby on backing vocals. The song bore a passing resemblance to The Searchers' 1963 hit "Needles and Pins" and has, since its release, become a rock music standard, inspiring a number of cover versions over the years. Two of the album's songs were co-written by Clark and McGuinn: "You Won't Have to Cry", which featured a lyric concerned with a woman who has been wronged in love, and "It's No Use", which anticipated the harder-edged, psychedelic sound that the band would begin to explore towards the end of 1965 and throughout 1966.

The abundance of Dylan material on the album, with three songs taken from the Another Side of Bob Dylan album alone, led to accusations of the band being too reliant on his work. However, the Dylan covers, including "Chimes of Freedom", "All I Really Want to Do", and "Spanish Harlem Incident", in addition to the title track, remain among The Byrds' best-known and most enduring recordings. Another enduring cover included on the album was an expansive arrangement of Idris Davies and Pete Seeger's "The Bells of Rhymney", stressing the band's folk music roots. "The Bells of Rhymney" was a relative newcomer to the band's stage repertoire, having been worked up in March 1965, during The Byrds' residency at Ciro's nightclub on the Sunset Strip. The song, which told the sorrowful tale of a coal mining disaster in Wales, had originally been adapted by Pete Seeger from a lyric by the Welsh poet Idris Davies. During recording, the band paid special attention to their diction and pronunciation of the song's lyrics but in spite of this attention to detail, the band actually mispronounced the word "Rhymney" in their recording of the song. Although the song had a somewhat somber theme it became one of the band's most popular numbers during their residency at Ciro's. "The Bells of Rhymney" was also influential on The Beatles, particularly George Harrison, who co-opted McGuinn's guitar riff and incorporated it into his own composition, "If I Needed Someone", from the Rubber Soul album.

The band also covered two non-folk songs on the album: "Don't Doubt Yourself, Babe" by Jackie DeShannon, an early supporter of the band, and Vera Lynn's World War II era standard, "We'll Meet Again". The latter was given a very sardonic reading, influenced by the song's appearance in the final scene of Stanley Kubrick's movie Dr. Strangelove. This treatment of "We'll Meet Again", sequenced at the end of the album, began a tradition of closing The Byrds' albums with a tongue-in-cheek or unusual track, a policy that would be repeated on several subsequent LPs.