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Rating: A few years ago, I found on the web the bootleg of the concert that the Byrds held at the Piper. The audio was terrible, but I believed it was a historically extraordinary document. More than a review, I am writing a chronicle, thanks to a time machine (you lose track and you don't know it). Follow me!
Autumn 1968, Rome, Via Tagliamento, Piper club: tonight the Byrds, one of the most famous American bands, are performing. Their most successful songs are also known in Italy: "Turn! Turn! Turn!", the electric version of a Pete Seeger piece, and especially "Mister Tambourine Man", the Dylanian litany that with the arpeggios of Roger McGuinn's twelve-string Rickenbacker has become the manifesto of the emerging folk-rock and in the Italian charts reached even fifth place, alongside Gianni Morandi and Rita Pavone. If in America and England, the beat is already out of fashion, in Italy Equipe 84 and the Camaleonti are thriving. The world seems in turmoil: in March there was a violent clash between students and police in Valle Giulia, right in Rome; in April Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis; in May the Sorbonne was closed due to student protests in Paris; in June Bob Kennedy was killed in Los Angeles; Nixon has just become the new president of the United States, which is at war in Vietnam; in Brazil a coup started, leading in a month to a military dictatorship. At the end of the year, Apollo 8 would fly around the Moon.
In all this shocking world panorama, the Byrds take the stage of the trendiest club of the moment: the Piper in Rome.
Exactly from there, that year, emerged the Italian star of the moment, a certain Patty Pravo, who with the 45 RPM "La Bambola" had reached first place in the charts and who everyone called "the girl from the Piper." In reality, almost no one, among that youth ready to attend the concert, knows that the Byrds have grown and are no longer only the group that reinterpreted Bob Dylan's classics in an electric key. They have released six long plays since 1965 that testify to a stylistic evolution unprecedented in the American scene. From the initial folk-rock revolution, they crossed into the borders of psychedelia with "Younger than Yesterday," from early 1967, one of the most innovative records in history, whose inventions, from raga scales to certain hallucinogenic sound effects, would heavily influence even the legendary Beatles.
David Crosby, one of the group's most creative minds, and perhaps the main architect of that record, was subsequently ousted from the group in conjunction with the release of the new work: "The Notorious Byrd Brothers." On the cover of that record, his place was taken by a horse, and Crosby did not take it well. He would gift the Airplane of "Crown of Creation" one of the songs he had written for Notorious Byrd Brothers and that his former companions had discarded. It was "Triad," which Grace Slick would deliver in an unforgettable performance. In fact, Crosby had started to no longer share time or ideas with the Byrds, especially with their undisputed leader, Roger McGuinn. While the Byrds generally gravitated around Los Angeles, Crosby had started to frequent the Bay Area and groups from San Francisco like the Dead or the Airplane, and to take psychedelic drugs in large quantities. Recently, he was working to produce the debut of a young Canadian girl; her name was Joni Mitchell.
But let's return to the Byrds.
"The Notorious Byrd Brothers" was a creative and interesting record; there was an impressive work on sounds alongside sparkling and sometimes baroque arrangements, with imposing brass sections making their first appearance, the Moog, which McGuinn played on Oriental scales. We are in 1968, and a few months later, "Sweetheart of the Rodeo," a completely different album from the previous ones is released. More precisely, an unprecedented album. No one yet knows the term "country rock," which would prosper in the seventies, but this would be the first product of that strange mixture. The songs are mostly old rural ballads arranged by a rock combo. What seems obvious today was simply music from another planet at the time. The banjo next to the electric guitar. Two years earlier, Dylan, for daring to electrify his acoustic ballads, had nearly been lynched. Indeed, there are also two pieces by the usual Dylan inside, but the real novelty is the new name appearing next to the other Byrds, signing two tracks (the most beautiful on the album): Gram Parsons. He is the architect of the stylistic revolution of "Sweetheart." Yes, he is here tonight, tuning his guitar, on the stage of the Piper in Rome. It becomes apparent the concert is about to start when McGuinn presents the first track, saying it's the single from their latest album, written by Dylan. Its title is "You Ain't Going Nowhere." In the chorus, McGuinn, Parsons, and Hillman's voices try to blend. Probably none of those young Romans know that track yet, but in Italy, as you know, two or three chart hits by the Byrds are known and little more. And surely no one knows that song would later be part of the legendary Basement Tapes and that it was born at Big Pink, where Dylan's group, The Band, rehearsed, and where he had taken refuge following his mysterious motorcycle accident two years before, in 1966. Then McGuinn launches into "Old John Robertson", a song from "Notorious Byrd Brother," and the rhythm picks up magnificently, the bass climbs octaves, and the banjo spins rapidly around the rest.
We are on the Old Continent, far from the vast American lands, in a trendy little club in the center of Rome, towards the end of 1968.
McGuinn introduces the new member of the group who "sings and plays the guitar." It is Gram Parsons, who sings with great anguish the part of the repentant playboy, who discovered he loves his woman only when she left him. The piece is "You Don't Miss Your Water", and when Gram's voice hits the sevenths, it sends shivers down the spine. The attentive audience applauds, and he responds, "thank you" in clumsy Italian. Then he starts one of his own songs, his nostalgic flag: "Hickory Wind." It is poignant, he is a young philosopher of music, a fragile angel but with a clear vision about the verb he must spread for the few years he has left to live.
Applause.
Then McGuinn resumes command, relying on another of Dylan's visionary pieces, "Chimes of Freedom." It is followed by a little country gem from the latest album, the piece is "The Christian Life." McGuinn concludes with "Turn! Turn! Turn!", "My Back Pages", and "Mr. Spaceman" an unrepeatable event for the youngsters standing there on Via Tagliamento that evening in 1968. Shortly thereafter, Parsons would leave the group, before the tour in South Africa, informing McGuinn that he would never play in a place with such racial discrimination (apartheid was still present). A few months later, he would form the Flying Burrito Brothers with Hillman, to continue perfecting his innovative musical formula. Emmylou Harris was still an unknown young girl, but even later, she would never manage to sweeten Gram's melancholy too much. The Byrds would continue to play for a few more years, without producing particularly interesting albums. The history of rock, what rock had already been but most importantly what it would become, had just passed through Via Tagliamento, a stone's throw from the center of Rome, late 1968.
In memory of Gram Parsons (1946-1973)
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