{"id":4614,"date":"2014-09-16T11:20:02","date_gmt":"2014-09-16T11:20:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/skylight.gr\/administrator_wordpress\/index.php\/2014\/09\/16\/roger-mcguinn-the-byrds-talks-about-the-song-qeight-miles-highq\/"},"modified":"2014-09-16T11:20:02","modified_gmt":"2014-09-16T11:20:02","slug":"roger-mcguinn-the-byrds-talks-about-the-song-qeight-miles-highq","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skylight.gr\/index.php\/2014\/09\/16\/roger-mcguinn-the-byrds-talks-about-the-song-qeight-miles-highq\/","title":{"rendered":"Roger McGuinn (The Byrds) talks about the song “Eight Miles High”"},"content":{"rendered":"


Eight Miles High has been called the first psychedelic record. It\u2019s true we\u2019d been experimenting with LSD, and the title does contain the word \u201chigh\u201d, so if people want to say that, that\u2019s great. But Eight Miles High actually came about as a tribute to John Coltrane. It was our attempt to play jazz. We were on a tour of America, and someone played us the Coltrane albums Africa\/Brass and Impressions. I had just picked up a cassette recorder \u2013 it was such a new thing, you couldn\u2019t buy any tapes to play in it. But I had some blank tapes so recorded the Coltrane albums, along with some Ravi Shankar, and took them on tour. It was the only music we had, for the whole time on the bus. By the end of the tour, Coltrane and Shankar were ingrained. <\/p>\n

There was one Coltrane track called India, where he was trying to emulate sitar music with his saxophone. It had a recurring phrase, dee da da da, which I picked up on my Rickenbacker guitar and played some jazzy stuff around it. I was in love with his saxophone playing: all those funny little notes and fast stuff at the bottom of the range.<\/p>\n

At the same time, Gene Clark [rhythm guitar] had some chords and a vague melody, which went into the more regular structure of Eight Miles High. In later years, Gene started to fantasise that he wrote the whole song. That wasn\u2019t the case: it was a collaborative effort between myself, Gene and David Crosby [vocals, rhythm guitar]. The previous year, 1965, we\u2019d been on a trip to England. It was our first time on a plane, and I had the idea of writing a song about it. Gene asked: \u201cHow high do you think that plane was flying?\u201d I thought about seven miles, but the Beatles had a song called Eight Days a Week, so we changed it to Eight Miles High because we thought that would be cooler.<\/p>\n

When the song came out, some DJs did the sums and realised that, since commercial airliners only flew at six miles, we must have been talking about a different kind of high. And all the stations stopped playing it. We put out a statement refuting those claims, but it was the end of our commercial success. The Byrds were damaged goods.<\/p>\n

Gene left the band the month Eight Miles High was released. He was afraid of flying. We\u2019d get on a plane, and he\u2019d be in a cold sweat, standing up in the aisle, saying: \u201cI can\u2019t stay on this plane, man. I gotta get off.\u201d I remember saying: \u201cYou can\u2019t be a Byrd if you can\u2019t fly.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course Eight Miles High was a drug song. It does refer to the altitude of that flight, but it was a deliberate double entendre. I thought it was Gene\u2019s idea to write a song about our trip to London \u2013 he was a wonderful, talented man. But if Roger says it was his idea, maybe it was.<\/p>\n

We all wrote it together in a Winnebago motorhome, hurriedly swapping lyrics and ideas for the chord progression. The line \u201cAnd when you touch down, you\u2019ll find it stranger than known\u201d is about the disorientation we felt. We were 21, had never been out of the States, and everything was alien. We struggled to understand people \u2013 there must have been 25 different British accents.<\/p>\n

\u201cNowhere is there warmth to be found\u201d refers to our treatment by the British press. A terrible promoter billed us as \u201cAmerica\u2019s answer to the Beatles\u201d. Of course, the press jumped on us for that, but the Beatles knew we\u2019d never say a thing like that because we worshipped them. And they were extremely welcoming, driving us home from gigs, taking us to dinner and parties.<\/p>\n

The reference to black limousines means the Austin Princess, a bulbous British car that record companies used a lot because it was cheaper than a Bentley. And the line about a \u201crain grey town\u201d was mine. \u201cRound the squares huddled in storms\u201d refers to bad weather in London and people clustered in doorways to avoid the rain coming down in sheets.<\/p>\n

We knew Eight Miles High was a special song and wanted to record it properly. We were signed to Columbia, whose studios were union-controlled with regular breaks and everything. We thought they were dicks. Meanwhile, Jefferson Airplane were recording down the street at RCA with Al Schmitt, one of the greatest recording engineers in history. So I said to the band: \u201cWhat if we sneak out and cut it with real guys in a real studio?\u201d So we snuck out and cut a version. When Columbia found out, they threatened to cancel our contract, sue us, everything. Battle raged until eventually our management caved in and we cut another version for Columbia, which became a classic. I still think the first version is better, though.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Source: The Guardian<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eight Miles High has been called the first psychedelic record. It\u2019s true we\u2019d been experimenting…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4614","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skylight.gr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4614","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skylight.gr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skylight.gr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skylight.gr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skylight.gr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4614"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skylight.gr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4614\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skylight.gr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4614"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skylight.gr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4614"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skylight.gr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4614"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}