![]() Along with Roger McGuinn and David Crosby, Gene Clark had been there at the very beginning - before the beginning really - and his voice and songwriting had been a seminal component of the group's image and success for its first year. If its commercial potential wasn't fully realized, the song's circumstances also reflected a major change in the group line-up. Its impact on the radio was, thus, muted compared with airplay that it should have received, based on musical appeal and requests. It ran into trouble over its title, the strangeness of its sound (which made more conservative programmers suspicious to start with), and the paranoia of some parents and radio station officials, who were convinced that the song was really a paean to drug use, rather than a song about flying that just happened to have been written by one or more composers on drugs. The singing, laced with impeccable high harmonies around an eerily compelling melody, was strangely alluring as well, and the song had all of the earmarks of a Top Ten hit. McGuinn had been listening to the music of John Coltrane, and made his 12-string guitar imitate the sound of a saxophone in a soaring, searing, rippling performance (repeated to some extent elsewhere on the resulting album on the song "I See You"). Opening with Chris Hillman's most prominent appearance on bass to date and a hard rhythm guitar accompaniment, the song was immediately seized by Roger McGuinn's 12-string guitar, sounding as though it had suddenly been transformed into another instrument. Inspired by the band members' first flight to London, it pulled together observations about flying, filtered through a druggy ambience - the members' condition writing the song, if not on the flight - and the surreal experience, on arriving, of becoming international stars in just a matter of months. Overall, "Eight Miles High" is a song that encapsulates the countercultural ideals of the 1960s, celebrating the freedom of expression and the unbridled creativity that can be unleashed through psychedelic experiences.The defining pop-psychedelic single by the Byrds, "Five Miles High" opened up a rich new territory of musical exploration for the band - but it was also the final single by the five-man line-up of the band, representing the final contribution of co-founder and principal songwriter Gene Clark and for all of its bold new sounds and lyrics, it also became the group's first controversial single and, as a result, never did as well as it should have. The line "Nowhere is there warmth to be found / Among those afraid of losing their ground" could be interpreted as a commentary on the societal norms and expectations that stifle individual expression and creativity. The speaker seems to be overwhelmed by the sensory input of their surroundings, unable to comprehend the meaning behind the signs and symbols that surround them.Īs the song continues, the lyrics become more abstract and impressionistic, with lines like "Rain gray town, known for its sound / In places, small faces unbound" evoking a sense of detachment and freedom from earthly concerns. They are describing a sensation of being lifted above reality and transported to a place that is beyond their normal perception.įurthermore, the lines "Signs in the street, that say where you're going / Are somewhere just being their own" describe a sense of disorientation and confusion that often accompanies altered states of consciousness. The opening lines, "Eight miles high, and when you touch down / You'll find that it's stranger than known" suggest that the speaker is either on a plane or already experiencing some kind of altered state of consciousness. ![]() The song seems to be about a hallucinogenic journey that transports the listener far beyond the physical world, into an ethereal and dreamlike state. ![]() The song was released at a time when The Byrds were experimenting with drugs like LSD, and the lyrics seem to reflect that kind of experience. ![]() "Eight Miles High" is widely known as one of the quintessential psychedelic rock songs of the 1960s.
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