Song of the Day 4/14: The Byrds, “Eight Miles High”

In popular consciousness, “Eight Miles High” is a drug song. Radio stations certainly thought so when it was released in 1966 – many refused to play it, so it only reached No. 14 on the Hot 100. But it’s considered by many critics and historians to be the first psychedelic rock song.

The musical inspirations were the John Coltrane and Ravi Shankar tapes David Crosby played on the tour bus, but Gene Clark’s lyrics are mostly about the band’s flight to London for their 1965 tour of the UK, where they opened for the Rolling Stones (and were panned by the rabid British music press). Planes don’t fly quite that high, but eight scanned better than six or seven, and when talk of drugs and bans started their management strongly denied it – it’s about a trip to London! Years later Clark said that as an impressionistic poem, it was about a lot of things, and Crosby pointed out, “We were stoned when we wrote it.”

The obtuse lyrics, jazzy chords and buzzy, droning guitars helped kick off the psychedelic rock craze that swept the music word for a couple of years, even after the Byrds switched to a country-rock sound. Here they are lip-synching the single on American Bandstand.

The version released by Columbia wasn’t the band’s first crack at recording the song. A month earlier they had recorded it at RCA’s studio, but Columbia refused to release it because the band hadn’t used their facility. Both Crosby and Roger McGuinn said they preferred the RCA version, which was finally released in 1987.

Robyn Hitchcock covered it in the ’90s, and with his clear reading of the lyrics it’s pretty obvious the trip to London is the main subject, whatever side trips were taken along the way.