Younger Than Yesterday is the fourth studio album by the American rock band the Byrds, released on February 6, 1967, by Columbia Records. It saw the band continuing to integrate elements of psychedelia and jazz into their music, a process they had begun on their previous album, "Fifth Dimension". In addition, the album captured the band and record producer Gary Usher experimenting with new musical textures, including brass instruments, reverse tape effects and an electronic oscillator.
The album also marked the emergence of the band's bass player Chris Hillman as a talented songwriter and vocalist. Prior to "Younger Than Yesterday", Hillman had only received one shared writing credit with the Byrds, but this album saw him credited as the sole composer of four songs and a co-writer of "So You Want to Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star". Byrds expert Tim Connors has remarked that two of Hillman's compositions on "Younger Than Yesterday" exhibited country and western influences and thus can be seen as early indicators of the country rock experimentation that would feature—to a greater or lesser degree—on all of the Byrds' subsequent albums.
Upon release, the album peaked at number 24 on the "Billboard" Top LPs chart and reached number 37 on the UK Albums Chart. It was preceded by the "So You Want to Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star" single in January 1967, which reached the Top 30 of the "Billboard" Hot 100. Two additional singles taken from the album, "My Back Pages" and "Have You Seen Her Face", were also moderately successful on the "Billboard" singles chart. However, none of the singles taken from the album charted in the United Kingdom. Music critics Richie Unterberger and David Fricke have both remarked that although it was largely overlooked by the public at the time of its release, the album's critical standing has improved over the years and today "Younger Than Yesterday" is considered one of the Byrds' best albums. The title of "Younger Than Yesterday" is derived from the lyrics of "My Back Pages", a song written by Bob Dylan, which was covered on the album.
Background.
The Byrds had initially come to international prominence in mid-1965, when their folk rock interpretation of Bob Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man" reached number 1 on both the U.S. "Billboard" Hot 100 chart and the UK Singles Chart. Further commercial successes followed, with the band releasing two hit albums and reaching number 1 for a second time in the U.S., with a cover version of Pete Seeger's "Turn! Turn! Turn! (to Everything There is a Season)". Throughout the latter half of 1965, the band enjoyed tremendous popularity among teenage pop fans and their music received widespread airplay on Top 40 radio. In early 1966, the Byrds' principal songwriter, Gene Clark, departed the band, leaving Jim McGuinn, David Crosby, Chris Hillman, and Michael Clarke to complete the band's third album, "Fifth Dimension", without him. Upon release, "Fifth Dimension" received a mixed critical reception and was less commercially successful than the band's earlier albums. As a result, the Byrds' popularity began to wane and by late 1966, they had been all but forgotten by mainstream pop audiences.
Shortly after the release of "Fifth Dimension", the Byrds found themselves without a record producer, when Allen Stanton, who had worked with them on that album, left Columbia Records to work for A&amp;M. The band chose to replace Stanton with Gary Usher, a former songwriting partner of Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, who had recently co-produced Clark's debut solo album, "Gene Clark with the Gosdin Brothers". In addition to producing the recording sessions for "Younger Than Yesterday", Usher would produce the band's next two albums. The Byrds' biographer Johnny Rogan states that Usher's wealth of production experience and love of innovative studio experimentation would prove invaluable as the group entered their most creatively adventurous phase. Author David N. Howard has also remarked that despite the hodgepodge of styles and genres present on "Younger Than Yesterday", Usher's studio expertise gives the album an impressively uniform consistency.
Following an intensive period of rehearsal at their Sunset Boulevard headquarters, the Byrds completed the entire "Younger Than Yesterday" album at Columbia Studios, Hollywood, during a work-intensive, eleven-day period, starting on November 28 and finishing on December 8, 1966. The original working title for the LP was "Sanctuary", but ultimately this was dropped in favor of a title inspired by the chorus lyrics of the album's Bob Dylan cover, "My Back Pages":
"Ah, but I was so much older then,"
"I'm younger than that now."
Although Clark had left the Byrds prior to completion of the "Fifth Dimension" album, he did participate in the recording of the songs "Eight Miles High" and "Captain Soul" from that record. As a result, "Younger Than Yesterday" was the first album to be entirely recorded by the Byrds without Clark's participation. As on "Fifth Dimension", guitarists McGuinn and Crosby continued to hone their songwriting skills in an attempt to fill the void left by Clark's departure.
However, the most surprising development within the Byrds at this time was the emergence of bass player Chris Hillman as both a lead vocalist and the band's third songwriter. Prior to the recording of "Younger Than Yesterday", Hillman had never sung lead vocals on a Byrds' recording and his only writing contribution with the band had been a shared credit for the instrumental track "Captain Soul". On this album, however, he is credited as the sole songwriter of "Have You Seen Her Face", "Time Between", "Thoughts and Words", and "The Girl with No Name", with all four tracks featuring him as the lead vocalist. Hillman is also credited as the co-writer of "So You Want to Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star", which he sings with McGuinn and Crosby.
Music.
"Younger Than Yesterday" found the Byrds expanding their musical style in several different directions. Music critic John Harris has described the album as the Byrds' "West Coastified version of the "Revolver" aesthetic", with reference to the Beatles' 1966 album. Chris Hillman contributed two country rock-flavored songs with "Time Between" and "The Girl with No Name", the latter of which was inspired by a young lady with the unusual moniker of Girl Freiberg. "Time Between", on the other hand, was a Paul McCartney-influenced pop song and the result of Hillman's first ever attempt at writing a song on his own. Both songs featured the country-style guitar playing of session musician Clarence White, who would go on to become a full member of the Byrds' latter-day line-up from 1968 through to 1973. Byrds expert Tim Connors has suggested that the pop-country sound of "Time Between" and "The Girl with No Name"—like "Mr. Spaceman" from the band's previous album—anticipated the experimentation with country music that would color the Byrds' subsequent albums.
In addition to these two country-tinged songs, Hillman also contributed the LSD-influenced "Thoughts and Words", a metaphysical meditation on human relationships that featured the sitar-like sound of backwards guitar effects. A fourth Hillman-penned song on the album, the British Invasion-influenced "Have You Seen Her Face", was considered commercial enough to be issued as a single in the U.S. some months after the release of the album. Tim Connors had remarked on his Byrdwatcher website that these four melodic, romantically themed Hillman songs brought to the album elements that had largely been missing from the band's recordings since Clark's departure.
Hillman also had a hand in writing the album's opening track, "So You Want to Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star". With its satirical and sarcastic lyrics, the song was an acerbic, but good-natured swipe at the success of manufactured pop bands like the Monkees. However, Connors has stated that "So You Want to Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star" also suggests certain ironies due to pre-fabricated aspects of the Byrds' own origin, including drummer Michael Clarke having been initially recruited for his good looks, rather than for his musical ability. As a result of this, music journalist David Fricke has said that some fans have mistaken "So You Want to Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star" for an autobiographical song. Hillman's driving bassline and McGuinn's chiming twelve-string Rickenbacker guitar riff form the core of the song, with the production being rounded off by the sound of screaming teenage fans, which had been recorded at a Byrds' concert in Bournemouth during the band's 1965 English tour. South African jazz musician Hugh Masekela contributed the trumpet solo featured in the song, which represented the first use of brass on a Byrds' recording. Masekela and the Byrds would later perform "So You Want to Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star" together at the Monterey Pop Festival on June 17, 1967.
McGuinn and Crosby's songs, written both separately and together, represented an expansion of the jazz influences and psychedelia that had been featured heavily on the band's previous album. The song "C.T.A.-102", named after the CTA-102 quasar and written by McGuinn and his science-fiction-minded friend Bob Hippard, was a whimsical, but ultimately serious song that speculated on the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life. McGuinn explained the inspiration for the song in a 1973 interview with "ZigZag" magazine: "At the time we wrote it I thought it might be possible to make contact with quasars, but later I found out that they were stars which are imploding at a tremendous velocity. They're condensing and spinning at the same time, and the nucleus is sending out tremendous amounts of radiation, some of which is audible as an electronic impulse on a computerized radio telescope. It comes out in a rhythmic pattern... and originally, the radio astronomers who received these impulses thought they were from a life-form in space." Although the band's earlier song "Mr. Spaceman" had been thematically similar, "C.T.A.-102" was a slightly more serious attempt at tackling the subject matter, highlighted by the extensive use of studio sound effects, simulated alien voices, and the sound of an electronic oscillator.
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Crosby's songwriting skills had also developed rapidly, with Fricke citing "Renaissance Fair" (co-written with McGuinn) as an example of his increasingly wistful lyricism and writing style. The song was inspired by a visit to the Renaissance Pleasure Faire of Southern California and Connors has described its dream-like medieval ambiance as being a thematic precursor to Crosby's later song "Guinnevere". Fricke has also praised the instrumental interplay between the "church bell peal" of Crosby and McGuinn's guitars, and Hillman's melodic, loping bass, while describing the song as "a radiant evocation of a medieval festival, and by extension the sensual idealism of the hippie dream". Writing for the AllMusic website, critic Bruce Eder attempted to sum up the song's contemporary relevance by suggesting that it was "a topical song every bit as tied to real events as Buffalo Springfield's 'For What It's Worth'". In addition, Eder also described "Renaissance Fair" as "a perfect synthesis of the group's original electric-folk sound evolved into a new, more contemporary form of music and songwriting, almost hippie-folk music".
Another of Crosby's songwriting contributions to the album was the moody, jazz-influenced "Everybody's Been Burned", a somber meditation on the need to find a balance between disillusionment and resolute perseverance in a relationship. Although the song was regarded by many critics as a leap forward in terms of musical sophistication upon its release, it was actually written in 1962, two years before the formation of the Byrds. Originally written as a nightclub torch song, Crosby had recorded demos of "Everybody's Been Burned" as early as 1963. An acoustic recording of the song by Crosby, dating from this pre-Byrds period, was eventually released on the archival album "Preflyte Plus" in 2012. Author Johnny Rogan has stated that the Byrds' recording of the song features one of Crosby's best vocal performances and one of McGuinn's most moving guitar solos, while critic Thomas Ward described it as "one of the most haunting songs in the Byrds' catalogue, and one of David Crosby's finest compositions". "Cash Box" called it "a slow-moving, blues-drenched soft-rocker."
Crosby's ambitions for artistic control within the band were expanding along with his compositional skill, and the resulting turmoil would ultimately lead to his dismissal from the group during recording sessions for the Byrds' next album, "The Notorious Byrd Brothers". One source of discontent for Crosby during the recording of "Younger Than Yesterday" was related to the Bob Dylan cover "My Back Pages". The song had