Song of the Day: Flying 'Eight Miles High'
One of the most influential tracks ever, and here in an unreleased Byrds version plus later from Crosby, Clark and McGuinn, Tom Petty, Roxy Music, Husker Du and Robyn Hitchcock.
Greg Mitchell is the author of a dozen books and now writer/director of award-winning films. He was also a longtime editor of the legendary Crawdaddy.
Since we are still in the post-Crosby memories moment, let us return to a Byrds classic and one of the most influential songs in the history of rock, “Eight Miles High.” Released in March 1966, it has been dubbed, at various times, rightly or wrongly, the first “psychedelic single,” the first example of both “raga rock” and “jazz-rock fusion,” and much else. Crosby got a song credit but may have written only one line (on London as “Rain grey town, known for its sound”). Gene Clark had left the group—partly due to fear of flying partly because of Croz’s longtime criticism of him—after writing and recording the basic song.
McGuinn got his own song credit, well-deserved, as he inserted the jazzy intro and solo and overall mood after absorbing some Coltrane and Ravi Shankar. Clark said he wrote the song “in a Pittsburgh hotel room” in the presence of the Stones’ Brian Jones and that it was based on the Byrds’ first flight to the UK where they suffered through a disastrous tour (“Nowhere is there warmth to be found/Among those afraid of losing their ground”), not getting high on weed or acid. It got banned on some radio stations anyway and only rose as high as #14 on the Billboard chart—but that was also partly due to its complexity.
Commercial flights only went to an altitude of six or seven miles but “Eight miles high” had a better ring to it. Clark later admitted that, yes, it was at least partly inspired by drugs.
In any case, a true original, inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, and still a wonder today. Below are a few versions, and the usual daily political cartoons. Enjoy, comment, and please subscribe, it’s still free!
The version we know best, released as a single and on the album Fifth Dimension.
The group had recorded it a bit earlier but Columbia nixed it because it had been done at an outside studio (RCA). Crosby and McGuinn later said they preferred this one:
Croz did it live in 2019.
McGuinn and Clark, 1978
Gene Clark’s late-1980s acoustic version not long before he died.
Ultra Byrds fan Tom Petty, live in 1997.
Robyn Hitchcock tried it less successfully.
For a laugh, a very very ‘80s—enough said—Roxy Music version.
….and more painful chuckles, Husker Du’s punky take. “Didn’t get me,” Croz tweeted a few years ago when McGuinn asked him to give it a listen.
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Greg Mitchell is the author of a dozen books, including the bestseller The Tunnels (on escapes under the Berlin Wall), the current The Beginning or the End (on MGM’s atomic bomb movie twisted by the White House and Pentagon), and The Campaign of the Century (on Upton Sinclair’s left-wing race for governor of California), which was recently picked by the Wall St. Journal as one of five greatest books ever about an election. His 2021 film, Atomic Cover-up, drew extraordinary acclaim, and his current one, The First Attack Ads, aired over hundreds of PBS stations this past fall. For nearly all of the 1970s he was the #2 editor at the legendary Crawdaddy. Later he served as longtime editor of Editor & Publisher magazine. He recently co-produced a film about Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.