The original five members of The Byrds reunited in 1973 and released a new album titled simply Byrds. There was a lot of publicity about the reunion, but the album was not especially well received by critics or the band members. As a result, plans for a tour were scrapped and the members basically went their separate ways again.
I wanted to see what a Byrds album might have been had the band given it another shot.
SIDE A
1. Rise and Fall
2. John, John
3. The Lee Shore
4. Heavenly Fire
5. Train Leaves Here This Morning
SIDE B
1. My New Woman
2. No Other
3. Jamaica Say You Will
4. Safe at Home
5. Critical Mass /
6. Homeward through the Haze
In compiling the songs for this album, I wanted to raid the members' 1973-74 albums as little as possible so that in theory those albums could have existed as well. That wasn't always easy as you'll see.
I opened the album with "Rise and Fall," which Chris Hillman recorded for the Souther-Hillman-Furay Band's self-titled debut album, and used that name for this album's title. That's followed by the traditional song "John, John," an outtake from Roger McGuinn's self-titled solo album that came out a few months after Byrds. The first of David Crosby's contributions is "The Lee Shore." This song was originally an outtake from Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young's Deja Vu, but was also considered for that group's uncompleted 1974 album Human Highway, and Crosby and Nash performed it live around this time as well.
The next track on this album is "Heavenly Fire," which like the previous Southern-Hillman-Furay band song was co-written by Hillman and Len Fagen. Side one ends with an outtake from Gene Clark's No Other solo album. "Train Leaves Here This Morning" was co-written with Bernie Leadon who recorded it for the Eagles' debut album.
The second side opens with "My New Woman" from Roger McGuinn's solo album. It's the only track here that features all five Byrds members, and I suppose it was an outtake from the Byrds sessions. The use of a saxophone on this song seems out of place, but I don't know of any other version of the track. This is followed by "No Other," the title song from Clark's solo album. The Jackson Browne-penned "Jamaica Say You Will" is another outtake from Roger McGuinn. Hillman's "Safe at Home" (another Souther-Hillman-Furay track) comes next and adds a burst of rock needed here to pick up the tempo.
The album concludes with two tracks from the Crosby & Nash album Wind on the Water. Here I've featured "Critical Mass" as an intro to "Homeward through the Haze" rather than Graham Nash's "Wind on the Water."
Proving once again that the arrangement of tracks can be critical, my first attempt of this came out terrible. But after some rearranging I think this collection is a stronger one than that of the Byrds album. Some members said that they had held back some of their better tunes for their own solo albums rather than using them for the Byrds reunion. And in a way, this rectifies that.
For a cover, I took a photo I found online by Eric Wagner for an Earth Island Journal article titled "The Rise and Fall of the East Sand Empire," cropped it and added titles.