“We had been working with folk bands and they had that look,” McGuinn said. In their formative days, when they were still known as the Jet Set, the initial players wore crisp white shirts that made them look as clean-cut as choir boys. In fact, the Beatle suits were the second look adopted by the Byrds.
“When Roger McGuinn told John Lennon about it,” recalled Hillman, “Lennon said, ‘I wish they’d have stolen our suits!’” According to Hillman, the culprits were members of Little Richard’s band. Small wonder they were relieved when their suits were stolen at a club they were playing in one night. “We didn’t like the conformity,” Hillman said. But the look didn’t last long and the members never favored it. In that vein, they adopted a uniform look, outfitting the members with tab collar shirts and tight black suits trimmed in velvet. In fact, when the Byrds chose their initial wardrobe, their template was the early Fab Four. “The Byrds were the band that brought the Anglo cool that had been introduced by the Beatles and the Stones to America.”
#THE BYRDS PAST MEMBERS TV#
“In those days, before we were constantly bombarded by visual images through social media, it took the presence of a band like the Byrds in the teenybopper magazines and on American TV to present a new gateway for dressing,” said Holly George-Warren, who co-wrote the book Rock in Fashion with designer John Varvatos. That angle was hardly lost on the teen magazines in the mid-60s which featured them in “groovy” photo spreads underscored by drooling captions. “He said, ‘they had great hair and clothes,’ and we did!”ĭavid Crosby matched an ushanka-style hat with a Russian shirt in a photoshoot. “Tom Petty once said, ‘the Byrds were a good-looking band,’” Hillman recalled with a laugh. But the pictures tell a different story, one fired by a sartorial flair and whimsy, as well as by the power of male beauty. Through extensive interviews with the three surviving original members – McGuinn, Chris Hillman and David Crosby – the book features many entertaining details about the development of those sounds, as well as the band’s testy interpersonal relationships along the way.
History rightfully records the Byrds as the band that, by dizzying turns, pioneered folk-rock by electrifying Dylan songs like Mr Tambourine Man and Pete Seeger’s Turn! Turn! Turn!, helped create psychedelic and raga rock with songs like Eight Miles High and So You Wanna Be a Rock’n’Roll Star, and set a trend in country rock with the pivotal Sweetheart of the Rodeo album. Visual style has always been very important to that,” he said.Ī gorgeous new photo-driven book, titled The Byrds 1964-67, aims to make the case that, during that era, the Byrds had nearly as much resonance in the realm of style as they did in sound. While that may be obvious in the world of contemporary pop, such elements were far more rarely acknowledged in the rock’n’roll world of the 60s, when the mantra was “it’s all about the music, man.”Īs McGuinn made clear, however, “when you’re in a band, you want to create a mystique. The mere fact that one of music’s most consequential and respected bands would prize features like those so highly proves conclusively the power looks, style and fashion hold in popular music. Specifically, Clarke boasted the dense bangs of Brian Jones and the lush lips of Mick Jagger, not to mention the slim physique of all the classic rockers of the day.
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