2. The ByrdsYounger Than Yesterday
That theme would lead me to this, a similar kind of record. ‘So You Wanna Be A Rock ‘N’ Roll Star’, ‘C.T.A.-102’, ‘Renaissance Fair’, ‘Mind Gardens’, you know that record’s loaded and what Jim McGuinn was doing with his guitar playing – that’s a great album. I have two versions of that record at home – the stereo and mono. I think the mono one has got the skip right before the guitar solo in ‘Thoughts And Words’ so every time I hear that song anywhere in my life, if I hear it playing at a restaurant or something and it doesn’t skip before the guitar solo it would jar a little bit because I was used to going over and having to touch the needle on that copy. If we were talking to twentysomethings about this they’d be like, "What the fuck are you talking about, a record skip?" – that’s what gives it character, instead of going to the folder that says how many times you’ve played it on your iTunes, I’m like what. I guess that’s what it is now.
I got the album later on, in 1982. I knew The Byrds and I knew the singles from when I was a kid, but you know to go back and study the albums, that was ’82/’83 leading up to the psychedelic phase of Hüsker Dü.
The Byrds song ‘Eight Miles High’ was the warm-up song for the Zen Arcade sessions [it came out as a single before the album’s release and got a lot of press]. We had no idea; there was no design on that. It was like, "Oh yeah, let’s do a cover to warm up". Because we were a first take band we never wanted to do second takes. That was recorded at Total Access in Redondo Beach. It was a recording studio we used to go in to at 11 at night and work until ten in the morning because it was half price and that was a record that was done on used two-inch tape – the Bee Gees NBC special thing taped over. In order to not waste a good version of one of our songs we would just warm up with covers or that jam – the 13-minute thing – ‘Dreams Reoccurring’.
We did an hour-long version of that in Norman, Oklahoma, just one note, that was kind of like a Glenn Branca thing to do. It’s fun. That’s a great trick to see, because people are into it and they’re like, "Ok you can stop now", to "When the fuck are you gonna stop?" to "You’re clearly not gonna stop and I’m not leaving". You go through all these stages of denial and acceptance.
