Out In The 1960s Psychedelic Night- The Byrds-Fifth Dimension - A CD Review

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of The Byrds performing Eight Miles High.

CD Review

Fifth Dimension, The Byrds, Warner Brothers, 1966

Eight miles high and when you touch down
You’ll find that it’s stranger than known
Signs in the street that say where you’re going
Are somewhere just being their own

Nowhere is there warmth to be found
Among those afraid of losing their ground
Rain gray town known for it’s sound
In places small faces unbound

Round the squares huddled in storms
Some laughing some just shapeless forms
Sidewalk scenes and black limousines
Some living some standing alone


Hari, hari, hari, rama, hari, hari came some hidden from view sound from the street, the street of street dreams and scores, or just the street outside Harvard Yard, just off Mount Auburn Street near Tommy’s Lunch, as music, stereo music, blared out from some fourth floor garret signaling the advent of the next day of the “new world.” Music, blaring night and day, and if anybody minded they kept it to themselves. More likely they craned their ears for a closer listen, listening until the notes meshed with their brains, and the slightest trance-like movement began to shake their bodies. Then the guitar sound high and shrill like no Bobby Darin flip or Percy Faith bong from a couple of years before when the music was s-q-u-a-r-e gave forth sounds that became you, man, became you. Dig it.

Just another mid-1960s Cambridge day, a day that had started fresh with a joint passed around by those fourth floor garret “squanders,” (not really, the guy whose name was on the lease was away in Europe for the summer trying to find himself and he had “sublet” the place to his hometown friend, some Cos Corner place in Connecticut, and that friend had multiplied his friends in his midnight crave wanderings around Cambridge Common), four refugees at this hour, jammed every which way on the floored mattresses that passed for sleeping quarters. Four refugees, two boys and two girls, trying to keep their heads attached, literally, against the hard war news, another seventy death casualties this week and no end in sight and one of the boys very, very draft ready.

Trying to keep their heads together, literally, against the crowding day, the do this and do that day, the day of work and more work for no real purpose in a world they did not make, and were scratching their heads to figure out. And not winning on that bet. Topped off, trying to keep their heads together, literally, against some hard drug news, hearing earlier that another comrade had been busted “for possession” down in death hole Texas. Adios amigo, there are not enough prisons for us though

That chant, that hidden from view chant, could only mean, that the Hari Krishnas, just then thick as thieves and growing in the incense, jingle-jangle bell, saffron, or whatever they called their silken sheet garb, in Harvard Square were getting ready to attend to their daily ministrations, meditations, and frankly irritating beggings. Then, like magic, The Byrds’ Eight Miles High started playing on the stereo. And another joint, or maybe just a bogart made the rounds and the four denizens of that new world started to, well, giggle, giggle that pretty soon they too would be eight miles high. And the daily bummers could wait a little longer to be figured out.