THE BYRDS The rise

FEW YEARS AGO, BYRDS bassist Chris Hillman was working on his memoir, Time Between, when he managed to gain access to the band’s photo archive at Columbia Records. “All these old Byrds pictures just jumped out at me,” says Hillman of the trove of several thousand rare images. “Some of them I didn’t remember, some of them I hadn’t ever seen before. But they were so great, it seemed like we really should do a photo book.”

Now, the surviving original members of The Byrds – Hillman, Roger McGuinn and David Crosby – have collaborated on a coffee-table tome, The Byrds: 1964-1967, published by BMG. It collects some 500 images across 400 pages – including pics by noted rock snappers Henry Diltz, Barry Feinstein, Jim Marshall and Linda McCartney, as well as uncredited photos from the collection of former Byrds manager Jim Dickson – along with extensive commentary by the band members.

Rising to folk rock eminence in the mid-’60s, the band weren’t immune to that staple ’60s indignity: the wacky promo shoot. McGuinn recalls the band’s frst ever as a kind of slapstick comedy. “We’re posing, and [drummer] Michael Clarke was up on this scaffolding and he pulled a pin and the whole scaffold went down and hit the photographer on the head,” he laughs. “The next session we did, the photographer came with a hard hat on that said ‘BYRDS’ on it.”

Through the book’s pages we watch The Byrds battle the era’s pop machine. “There’s one picture from Ed Sullivan of David – you can see in his face that he had just completely blown it,” recalls Hillman. “He got into an argument with the producer of the show, and we were fred that day, and never went back. David was always the bad little boy. It’s kind of funny to see that, looking back.”

Funny, perhaps, because Crosby – who offers insightful contributions to the text and signed some limited-edition copies of the book – continues to enjoy fraught relations with his Byrds brethren. In 2018, McGuinn and Hillman went on tour together, billing it as a tribute to the 1968 Sweetheart Of The Rodeo album – which seemed to irk Crosby, who acquired legal rights to The Byrds’ name in 2002. More recently the combative Croz has apparently blocked McGuinn on Twitter, and isn’t actively promoting the new book. “David’s an interesting fellow,” says the ever diplomatic Hillman. “He doesn’t cease to get into mischief.”

Six decades on, it seems little has changed amongst The Byrds. “Yeah, but the three of us are still here, still walking the earth,” says Hillman. “Given that, the book seemed like a good opportunity to look back on what we were and what we did.” ➢