Byrds – The Preflyte Sessions

Pieced together from work tapes and demos made with Jim Dickson at Sam Cooke’s World Pacific Studios in 1964, this is the most complete portrait yet of the band that would become the Byrds. Musicians and hard-core Byrd watchers have prized long-out-of-print vinyl releases of many of these cuts, heard on the LPs Preflyte and In The Beginning years ago, found as bonus cuts on the first Mr. Tambourine Man reissue, or gathered on the valuable Australian CD Byrd Parts.

This two-disc Sundazed collection bring together all of those shards; several singles released by the proto-Byrds bands Jet Set and Beefeaters; some early, jazzy David Crosby demos; and previously unreleased alternative takes of several known demo songs. All are delivered here in cleaner, more sparkling versions than ever before.

Only four of these numbers would become cuts on that first, famed Byrds LP, all of them Gene Clark or Clark & McGuinn compositions. The search for audible clues to the development of this band’s influential sound — rising harmonies, propulsive electric jangle-rock, growling yet smooth vocal mix — has led to continuing interest in these sessions.

The question for most of us is, how much do we learn about the evolution of that sound from these cuts? The swirling Jim/Roger McGuinn electric 12-string sound, built on traditional folk — toyed with on early Jackie DeShannon and Searchers folk-rock efforts, and in McGuinn’s own imagination — barely gets going here. (And the cuts make clear that the dynamics between guitar and bass and voices, yet to arrive, were a big part of what made the Byrds’ sound happen when it came.)

An early version of “Mr. Tambourine Man” never gets past Mike Clarke’s high school marching band drumming, just starting its trip towards adequacy. And young bluegrass mandolinist Chris Hillman is, after all, just learning to play the bass. As for those soaring three-part harmonies, the versions here rarely get beyond Crosby working off Clark and McGuinn singing in unison, not yet able to break it into a trio.

The rock propulsion starts to show up on numbers such as “You Movin'”, but you wouldn’t yet know these guys would be the American contenders; the British Invasion influence is still embarrassingly pervasive in cuts such as “Don’t Be Long”, with affected Brit accents, Beatle harmonies, and actual “Oh ya’s.”

The Crosby cuts include the mind-boggling original demo of Dino Valenti’s “Get Together”, the Youngbloods hit, done as if it were “Shake It Up Baby”! Well — there was no set folk-rock sound yet. There are, of course, some real highlights — the original of “You Showed Me”, later a hit for the Turtles; the haunting “Tomorrow Is A Long Way Away”; and a series of touching love ballads by the too-overlooked Gene Clark.

In most cases, the most finished and enjoyable versions of the dozen numbers (offered in two to four versions each) were chosen for the original Preflyte — many of them gathered again on the first disc here. Earlier alternates, mainly on disc two, often turn out to be even cruder acoustic versions, and third or fourth choices rarely vary dramatically enough to be revealing.

For all its flaws, The Preflyte Sessions is, no doubt about it, the version of the “World Pacific tapes” collectors have been hoping for. But it’s unlikely to join the “must have” list of the more casual Byrds fan.