The Byrds – Mr. Tambourine Man

The record that invented folk rock was played almost entirely by session musicians — only one actual Byrd is on it, playing the guitar you can’t get out of your head.

The sound that opens “Mr. Tambourine Man” — that bright, cascading, twelve-string jangle — is the sound of a genre being born. It is also, as it happens, the only part of the record actually played by the Byrds. When the Los Angeles band cut their debut single in January 1965, their producer decided the group wasn’t ready to play on it, and hired the best session musicians in the city instead. The one exception was Roger McGuinn, whose Rickenbacker twelve-string became the hook, the signature, and the whole reason the record still sounds like nothing before it.

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The Byrds had come together in Los Angeles in 1964 — Roger McGuinn, Gene Clark, and David Crosby, later joined by bassist Chris Hillman and drummer Michael Clarke — a band of folk musicians electrified by the Beatles. Their manager handed them an acetate of an unreleased Bob Dylan song, and at first almost none of them wanted it; McGuinn, who had known Dylan in Greenwich Village, felt competitive with him, and Crosby initially argued against recording it at all. What changed their minds was hearing what happened when Dylan’s dense, dreamlike poetry was married to a rock rhythm section and those chiming harmonies. They cut the four-verse song down to a single verse and chorus to fit radio, changed the feel to a steady 4/4, and made something that was neither folk nor pop but a new third thing.

Who actually played on it

Producer Terry Melcher — the son of Doris Day, and later the man who declined to sign Charles Manson to a record deal — didn’t believe the young band had gelled tightly enough to nail their own debut. So for the single, and its Gene Clark–written B-side “I Knew I’d Want You,” he brought in the loose collective of Los Angeles session aces later known as the Wrecking Crew: Hal Blaine on drums, Larry Knechtel on bass, Leon Russell on electric piano, and Jerry Cole on rhythm guitar. McGuinn played his twelve-string; McGuinn, Crosby, and Clark supplied the vocals. The rest of the Byrds sat it out. It was standard practice at the time — the Beach Boys and, later, the Monkees did the same — but it means the record that made the Byrds famous was, instrumentally, mostly other people. To their credit, the band pushed to play on the rest of their debut album, and did.

The song that started a genre

Released on April 12, 1965, just weeks after Dylan’s own version appeared on Bringing It All Back Home, the Byrds’ single climbed to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 that June and topped the UK chart weeks later. It remains the only song Bob Dylan ever wrote to reach No. 1 on the American singles chart — Dylan, for all his influence, never took one of his own recordings to the top there. The electric, harmony-rich treatment the Byrds gave the song became the blueprint for folk rock, a template that within months had bands on both sides of the Atlantic chasing that jingle-jangle sound. The Byrds went on to restless reinvention — psychedelia, country rock, and beyond — and their ranks would later scatter into acts like Crosby, Stills & Nash and the Flying Burrito Brothers. But it began here, with a Dylan song the band almost passed on, a guitar figure one man played, and the accidental invention of a genre.