It Was 50 Years Ago Today: “Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There is a Season)” by The Byrds
December 15, 1965
“Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There is a Season)” by The Byrds
#1 on the Billboard Hot 100, December 4-24, 1965
One of the recurring themes of this column’s journey into 1965 has been the birth and popularity of folk rock. We’ve examined two foundation stones of the genre, Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home and “Like a Rolling Stone”; hangers-on, like Sonny & Cher and Barry McGuire; acts walking the line between folk and folk-rock, like the Seekers and We Five; and even the adoption of folk rock by the biggest band in the world, with the Beatles’ “Help!” It would be a mistake, however, to let the clock run out on 1965 without a look at the genre’s single most influential band, whose success made folk rock a thing worth imitating.
Apart from drummer Michael Clarke, all of the musicians who would become the Byrds had logged time in the sort of chipper, brightly harmonious folk groups in vogue in the early ‘60s; Gene Clark had even shared a stage with Barry McGuire in the New Christy Minstrels. These erstwhile folkies — Clark, Jim (later Roger) McGuinn, Chris Hillman, and David Crosby — forged a new musical direction inspired by the Beatles: not only Lennon-McCartney’s melodies and George Harrison’s 12-string Rickenbacker, but also their commercial success and distinctive image. Early incarnations of the group performed folk songs in a Beatlesy style, Beatles songs in a folky style, and original songs that fused the two.
Despite the band’s later reputation as acolytes of Dylan, the Byrds only really embraced the singer-songwriter after their manager, Jim Dickson, more or less forced him on the group. Yet it was an imaginative reworking of a Dylan composition that gave the group — and the nascent genre of folk-rock — its breakthrough. On Bringing It All Back Home, “Mr. Tambourine Man” is a wordy, abstract ramble through smoke-rings of the mind, set against a barebones, mostly acoustic arrangement. For their cover, The Byrds cut all but the chorus and second verse, shifting the song’s focus to the alluring new world (“the magic swirling ship”) instead of the narrator’s existential weariness. The Byrds’ arrangement, with its rolling guitar arpeggios and intertwining, sweet-voiced harmonies, further situates the song in some sort of peaceful dreamland, while altering the time signature from 2/4 to 4/4 ensures any vestiges of melancholy can be danced away in the warm California sunshine.
The Byrds’ “Mr. Tambourine Man” soared to number-one on the Billboard Hot 100 for a single week in summer 1965, elevating the band to the rare realm of American popstars, like the Beach Boys and the Supremes, who could compete with the British Invasion. After the success of “Mr. Tambourine Man,” the Byrds stuck to the Bob Dylan songbook, releasing “All I Really Want to Do” as their second single and covering “Spanish Harlem Incident” and “Chimes of Freedom” on the Mr. Tambourine Man LP. To allay charges that they leaned too heavily on Dylan for material, they scrapped plans to release “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” as their third single. Instead, they replaced it with a song penned by folk revival patriarch Pete Seeger, whose “The Bells of Rhymney” had also appeared on the band’s debut album.
“Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There is a Season)” became an even bigger hit than “Mr. Tambourine Man,” swept along by the gathering momentum of the folk-rock boom that the Byrds themselves had launched. The record’s flowery 12-string guitar, campfire vocals and gentle optimism (“a time for peace, I swear it’s not too late”) offered an appealing alternative to Barry McGuire’s apocalyptic Vietnam nightmare, even as the line “a time for war and a time for peace” implied the necessity of both states.
“Turn! Turn! Turn!” finds the Byrds fully settled in their element, polishing and embellishing the genre hybrid of “Mr. Tambourine Man” into a seamless, finely-wrought piece of musical craftsmanship. The biblically-derived lyrics share the vague mystical profundity of Dylan’s work, but their comparative straightforwardness avoids competing with the band’s ornate arrangement. The extended length (nearly four minutes) allows more space for the song to unwind, giving it the shape and direction of a complete statement rather than the forced brevity of their debut.
The success of “Turn! Turn! Turn!” not only cemented the popularity of the Byrds, it also gave the band a license to finally break away from cover versions. The Clark-penned follow-up, “Set You Free This Time,” gave the band its first original single, while also showing a more pensive, sensitive side of the group. While its chart placement was a disappointment — peaking at a lowly #79, hindered in part by Columbia Records’ decision two weeks after release to instead promote the B-side, “It Won’t Be Wrong” — the door had opened for an evolution of the band’s sound. The troubled complexities that the band had excised from its version of “Mr. Tambourine Man” returned with a vengeance in 1966’s “Eight Miles High,” in which the Byrds helped invent the pop music’s next big genre: psychedelic rock.
It Was 50 Years Ago Today examines a song, album, movie, or book that was #1 on the charts exactly half a century ago.
