You're Only Lonely, J.D. Souther (1979)

I'm not sure why J.D. Souther has eluded the limelight as much as he has over the past decades, but something reminded me of the gem You're Only Lonely today, so I thought I'd give him his due.

But in a way, he is in the limelight again, although until just this moment I didn't know how. Last week I woke up from a stuporous sleep in front of the TV to Joe Walsh's grizzled aspect and then the realization that I was looking at a live performance of the Eagles, who it seems have once again reunited.

And what the Eagles were singing was an early Souther composition, How Long, apparently the debut single from their first studio album in 28 years. Huh! And Souther recently released his own album, If the World Was You. I've been living under a rock, apparently.

Anyway, back in the 70s J.D. Souther was a talented singer-songwriter and sought-after session man in the burgeoning, oh-so-melodic Southern California scene that kind of defined that period in American music in my mind - Jackson Browne, the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt et al.

Souther and his buddy Glenn Frey had their own obscure acoustic band, Longbranch Pennywhistle, which released an equally obscure album in 1969. Frey went on, with Don Henley, to form part of Ronstadt's touring band, while Souther became a third of the country-rock supergroup Souther Hillman Furay Band, with Poco's Richie Furay and Chris Hillman of the Byrds, a marriage reportedly not made in heaven. Souther continued as a solo act and songwriter for others, especially the newly-formed Eagles. My favorite: New Kid in Town. Another is Ronstadt's cover of his White Rhythm and Blues, which was my introduction to that song.

Conventional wisdom has it that You're Only Lonely was an homage to Roy Orbison, who, like many, Souther admired, but on his website he describes the actual genesis thusly:

I actually didn't write "You're Only Lonely" with Roy in mind, but for a very beautiful singer and songwriter who, it seemed to me, worried herself into knots with language inappropriate to her real issue. She was, like many artists, simply insecure about being alone. The song was written to reassure this wonderful woman that she was not, probably had never been, and would not likely be alone unless she wanted it. ... when Waddy Wachtel and I were arranging songs for the 1979 album ... and he was trying to find a song of mine faster than a dirge and asked, as only he can something like: "What the hell, Jake, don't you have anything like, you know, a single?" I said, "Well, there's this little rockabilly thing but it has no bridge and no third verse. I played it for him. He looked at me like I was mental and I said, "But there's no third verse!" He said, "So sing the first verse again!" So I did.

Sometimes it's just that simple.

Eight Miles High, The Byrds (1966)

The most evocative psychedelic record of the 60s, to me, is generally believed to be one of the first, Eight Miles High, written and performed by the Byrds. A cornucopia of complexity, it had many distinctive features, not the least of which were the spectral voices in alternating unison and harmony against the mesmerizing riffs of Roger McGuinn's then-unconventional 12-string guitar and Chris Hillman's throbbing bassline.

This is another one of those songs where just hearing the first notes triggers an immediate magic carpet ride back to my turbulent adolescence. The almost menacing intro, followed by "eight miles high, and when you touch down, you'll find that it's stranger than known" signaled a radical departure from the group's previous hits, such as Turn, Turn, Turn and Mr. Tambourine Man, which were Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan covers, respectively.

McGuinn, David Crosby, Gene Clark, Michael Clarke and Hillman distinguished themselves with music that seemed a hybrid of British Invasion and contemporary folk. In fact, their first tour of the UK positioned them as America's answer to the Beatles. Unlike the Beatles, however, they all had cut their teeth in the California folk scene and, knowing next to nothing about amplified instruments, might have seemed an unlikely pioneer of this new genre. In the liner notes to the Byrds box set There Is A Season, Tom Petty writes, "Without a single member with a rock background, they came from folk trios, bluegrass, Christy Minstrels and beatnik coffee houses. It was almost like a lab experiment, mixing the elements and seeing what came out."

What came out in Eight Miles High was an acknowledged homage to John Coltrane and the emerging influence of Ravi Shankar. The Byrds' first foray into psychedelia was surrounded by controversy from the outset, with baffled radio stations banning the record in the belief that the title was referring to drugs - which it probably was to some degree. (As with so many of these songs, the real story of what the song was "about" takes different forms depending on the source. There's an entire discussion about the song's genesis that can be read online in Eight Miles High: Folk-Rock's Flight from Haight-Ashbury to Woodstock by Richie Unterberger.)

It's interesting to me now how unsettling I found the shifts in the output of many groups circa 1966. It might seem strange, but I still remember being filled with foreboding, at age 14, as I witnessed the metamorphosis of the Beach Boys, the Beatles, and the Byrds, just to name three, from their comparatively clean cut origins to new realms that were fraught with allure, yes, but still on some level, danger.