Turn! Turn! Turn! (album) - Music

Music

Turn! Turn! Turn! opens with the Pete Seeger penned title track, which had been issued as a single two months ahead of the release of the album. Based on an arrangement that McGuinn had developed while working on Judy Collins' 1963 album, Judy Collins 3, the idea of reviving the song came to McGuinn during The Byrds' first American tour. The master recording of the song reputedly took 78 takes, spread over five days of recording, to perfect. Rolling Stone editor David Fricke has noted that the song's plea for peace and tolerance was custom-made for the 1960s, a decade colored by assassinations, urban rioting and the horrors of the Vietnam War. Peaking at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100, the single represented the high-water mark of folk rock as a musical trend and reinforced The Byrds' standing as a formidable chart act.

The Byrds also chose to include two Bob Dylan songs on the album, in an attempt to repeat the success that they had enjoyed with their covers of his material on their debut LP. "Lay Down Your Weary Tune" was an unreleased outtake from Dylan's The Times They Are a-Changin' album that had been obtained by the band through Dylan's publisher. Dylan himself was impressed when he heard The Byrds' reading of his song, telling McGuinn "Up until I heard this I thought you were just another imitator...but this has got real feeling to it." The other Dylan song that the band included on Turn! Turn! Turn! was "The Times They Are a-Changin'", which was given a sardonic reading by the band, subverting the seriousness evident in the original and replacing it with irony.

Of the self-penned material on the album, three songs were written by Gene Clark, including "The World Turns All Around Her", which echoed his Beatlesque songs of tortured romance on the band's debut album, and "If You're Gone", a poetic confession of emotional insecurity. To highlight the wistful melancholy of "If You're Gone", McGuinn and Melcher devised a droning, Gregorian harmony part that sounds uncannily like another instrument and foreshadowed the raga rock experimentation that the band would undertake on their next album. The third Clark-penned song on the album was "Set You Free This Time", a densely-worded rumination on a failed relationship that lyrically exhibited the influence of Bob Dylan. The song had been written by Clark during The Byrds' 1965 tour of England, after a night spent drinking with Paul McCartney at the fashionable Scotch of St James club in London.

McGuinn's songwriting contributions to the album included "It Won't Be Wrong", a song that had been co-written with McGuinn's friend Harvey Gerst in 1964. The song had previously been issued in a completely different version under the alternate title of "Don't Be Long" on a 1964 single that the band had released under the pseudonym of The Beefeaters. Another of McGuinn's contributions was an adaptation of the traditional folk song "He Was a Friend of Mine". The Byrds' version featured newly written lyrics by McGuinn dealing with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. The song pre-dated the formation of The Byrds, as McGuinn explained to author Johnny Rogan in 1977: "I wrote that song the night John F. Kennedy was assassinated. I suppose you could say it's one of the earliest Byrds songs." "He Was a Friend of Mine" is notable for being the first Byrds' recording to feature McGuinn playing an acoustic guitar, instead of his usual twelve-string Rickenbacker.

Turn! Turn! Turn! also featured the McGuinn and Crosby song "Wait and See". This represented the first release of a song written by the pair, although they had previously collaborated on "The Airport Song", a track that wouldn't be heard publicly until the release of the Preflyte album in 1969. "Wait and See" also represented the first time that Crosby had received a songwriting credit on a Byrds' album. Both men wanted to move away from the simple boy/girl romance songs that the band had been writing since 1964 but ironically, "Wait and See" was even more in that tradition than the earliest of Gene Clark's songs. Another cover that was included on the album was "Satisfied Mind", a 1955 country and western chart-topper for Porter Wagoner, which had been suggested by The Byrds' bass player, Chris Hillman. The song was the first sign of the band's interest in country music, a genre they would explore further on subsequent albums, culminating with 1968’s Sweetheart of the Rodeo. As with the band's previous album, Turn! Turn! Turn! ended on a quirky, tongue-in-cheek note, with a whimsical send-up of Stephen Foster's 19th century classic, "Oh! Susannah", arranged by McGuinn. Despite being recorded as an intentionally humorous reading of the song, McGuinn later admitted to journalist Vincent Flanders that he was dissatisfied with the track, stating "That was a joke, but it didn't come off, it was poorly told."

Due to the infighting caused by the other band members' resentment of Gene Clark's songwriting dominance within The Byrds, two of the songs that Clark had brought to the recording sessions were excluded from the album. Clark's romantic and densely worded "She Don't Care About Time", which featured guitar work inspired by Bach's "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring", was issued on the B-side of the "Turn! Turn! Turn!" single, while the Dylanesque "The Day Walk (Never Before)" was left to languish in the Columbia tape vaults for more than 20 years. "The Day Walk (Never Before)" was finally issued in 1987 when it was chosen as the title track of The Byrds' archival album, Never Before. In the modern era, both "She Don't Care About Time" and "The Day Walk (Never Before)" have been added to the remastered Turn! Turn! Turn! CD as bonus tracks.