Untitled (The Byrds Album) - Background

Background

Following the firing of The Byrds' bass player, John York, in September 1969, Skip Battin was recruited as a replacement at the suggestion of drummer Gene Parsons and guitarist Clarence White. Battin was, at 35, the oldest member of the band and the one with the longest musical history. Battin's professional career in music had begun in 1959, as one half of the pop music duo Skip & Flip. The duo had notched up a string of hits between 1959 and 1961, including "It Was I", "Fancy Nancy", and "Cherry Pie". After the break-up of Skip & Flip, Battin moved to Los Angeles, where he worked as a freelance session musician and formed the band Evergreen Blueshoes. Following the disbandment of that group, Battin returned to session work in the late 1960s and it was during this period that he met Gene Parsons and became reacquainted with Clarence White, whom he had known from a few years earlier. York's dismissal and Battin's recruitment marked the last line-up change to The Byrds for almost three years, until Parsons was fired by McGuinn in July 1972. Thus, the McGuinn, White, Parsons, and Battin line-up of the band was the most stable and longest lived of any configuration of The Byrds.

For most of 1969, The Byrds' leader and guitarist, Roger McGuinn, had been developing a country rock stage production of Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt with former psychologist and Broadway impresario Jacques Levy. The musical was to be titled Gene Tryp, an anagram of the title of Ibsen's play, and would loosely follow the storyline of Peer Gynt with some modifications to transpose the action from Norway to south-west America during the mid-19th century. The musical was intended as a prelude to even loftier plans of McGuinn's to produce a science-fiction film, tentatively titled Ecology 70 and starring former Byrd Gram Parsons (no relation to Gene) and ex-member of The Mamas & the Papas, Michelle Phillips, as a pair of intergalactic flower children. Ultimately, Gene Tryp was abandoned and a handful of the songs that McGuinn and Levy had written for the project would instead see release on (Untitled) and its follow-up, Byrdmaniax.

Of the twenty-six songs that were written for the musical, "Chestnut Mare", "Lover of the Bayou", "All the Things", and "Just a Season" were included on (Untitled), while "Kathleen's Song" and "I Wanna Grow Up to Be a Politician" were held over for The Byrds' next album. "Lover of the Bayou" would later be re-recorded by Roger McGuinn in 1975 and appear on his Roger McGuinn & Band album. Despite not being staged at the time, Gene Tryp was eventually performed in a revised configuration by the drama students of Colgate University between November 18 and November 21, 1992, under the new title of Just a Season: A Romance of the Old West.