999,934: The Byrds — You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere

By the late 60s, Bob Dylan found blowing minds with pop music to be so easy that he stopped doing it. Why bother going through the hassle of recording and touring and answering questions, if he could just hole up and churn out tunes, letting other people sing them while he stayed paid? That was the idea, anyway, when he had a “motorcycle accident” and disappeared with The Band to upstate New York.

I’m assuming they just did lots of drugs and tossed songs into the ether, which surfaced, initially as demo tapes and later as The Basement Tapes when, one presumes, royalties from “The Weight” weren’t pumping enough cocaine directly into Robbie Robertson’s pleasure centers anymore.

Meanwhile, out in LA, The Byrds were reformulating, post-Crosby, with Gram Parsons dragging Roger McGuinn et al over the country line of the folk-rock continuum. The Byrds had caught fire, years earlier, by jangling up some Dylan tunes that weren’t burning the charts up on their own, but they were ebbing well out of the limelight. When this demo got into McGuinn’s hand, it had to seem like his ticket back in.

Instead of the jangly-ennui of those early Dylan covers, we ended up with this honky-tonking dancer of a take on what’s essentially a sad rambler. It would have been easy enough to take this tune and imbue it with whiskey-scented sadness of Waylon or Johnny, but instead, The Notorious Byrd Brothers pepped it up and sang it with a smile.

Missing the entire point of the song (being completely, utterly, helplessly stuck where you are, unable to find direction, and, instead, just waiting for the world to beat a path to your door) seems to have disaster written all over it in deep red Sharpie marker. Amazingly, no. Instead, their misread gives it the peppy optimism of a real lunatic, wild-eyed and sure.

Dylan read it with a moan, laughing at his existential breakdown. The Byrds read it with gusto. Ghoulishly upbeat, but perhaps appropriate for a bunch of famous guys stuck in a town where it’s always sunny, and all the women are beautiful.

You Ain't Goin' Nowhere - The ...