20180811

MR. TAMBOURINE MAN

The Bob Dylan's song, 'Mr. Tambourine Man', performed by The Byrds, topped the Billboard Hot 100 chart in June 1965 and "changed the face of rock music". It marked the start of the folk-rock revolution. Lead singer Roger McGuinn told 'Let It Rock' in 1975, "To get that sound, that hit sound, that 'Mr. Tambourine Man' sound, we just ran it through the electronics which were available to us at that time, which were mainly compression devices and tape delay, tape-sustain. That's how we got it, by equalizing it properly and aiming at a specific frequency." 

In 'Bob Dylan - Performing Artist: The Early Years', David Crosby recounted, "He (Bob Dylan) came to hear us in the studio when we were building The Byrds (previously known as the Jet Set). After the word got out that we gonna do 'Mr. Tambourine Man' and we were probably gonna be good, he came there and he heard us playing his song electric, and you could see the gears grinding in his head. It was plain as day. It was like watching a slow-motion lightning bolt." 

Bob Dylan remembered, "Bruce (folk guitarist Bruce Langhorne) was playing with me on a bunch of early records (around Greenwich Village). On one session, (producer) Tom Wilson had asked him to play tambourine. And he had this gigantic tambourine. It was, like, really big. It was as big as a wagon wheel. He was playing and this vision of him playing just stuck in my mind." 

As understood, when The Byrds recorded 'Mr. Tambourine Man', the group took some lyrics out and added a 12-string guitar lead. Roger McGuinn elaborated, "I was shooting for a vocal that was very calculated between John Lennon and Bob Dylan. I was trying to cut some middle ground between those two voices … Underneath the lyrics to 'Mr. Tambourine Man,' regardless of what Dylan meant, I was turning it into a prayer. I was singing to God and I was saying that God was the Tambourine Man and I was saying to him, 'Hey God, take me for a trip and I'll follow you.'" 

'History' website noted, "In just a few months, the Byrds had become a household name, with a No. 1 single and a smash-hit album that married the ringing guitars and backbeat of the British Invasion with the harmonies and lyrical depth of folk to create an entirely new sound. Perhaps someone else could have listened to the bright guitar lines of the Beatles' 'Ticket To Ride' and to Bob Dylan's original 'Mr. Tambourine Man' and had the idea of somehow combining the two, but neither of those recordings existed when the Byrds' Roger McGuinn devised his group's new sound. 

"Aiming consciously for a vocal style in between Dylan’s and Lennon’s, McGuinn sang lead, with Gene Clark and David Crosby providing the complex harmony that would, along with McGuinn's jangly electric 12-string Rickenbacker guitar, form the basis of the Byrds' trademark sound. That sound, which would influence countless groups from Big Star to the Bangles in decades to come, had an immediate and profound impact on the Byrds' contemporaries, and even on the artists who’d inspired it in the first place."

Richard Clayton of the 'Financial Times' reported in July 2016, "'Mr. Tambourine Man' is one of the signature songs of the 1960s, the moment when the 'voice of a generation' broke free of the strictures of folky protest to find himself in surrealistic poetry … 'Mr. Tambourine Man's' most important legacy is that it threw open the possibilities of what pop, and specifically pop lyrics, could be. 

"That it was covered almost immediately by The Byrds - in a rockier version as influential as Dylan's acoustic original - only redoubles its impact. 'Mr. Tambourine Man' would eventually open the acoustic side of 'Bringing It All Back Home', the 1965 release that launched Dylan's 'electric' period and triggered an arms race of creativity with The Beatles and The Beach Boys.

"On January 25, 1965 (ten days after Dylan had cut his album version), McGuinn nailed his vocal and played the introduction on his 12-string Rickenbacker guitar. The heady sound kicked off the folk-rock boom. With abridged lyrics, and harmonies from McGuinn, Crosby and Gene Clark, these three minutes translated into a number one on both sides of the pond."

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