Roger McGuinn is at Cadogan Hall, London SW1 ( ) on 25 September, then touring. I still think the first version is better, though. Battle raged until eventually our management caved in and we cut another version for Columbia, which became a classic. When Columbia found out, they threatened to cancel our contract, sue us, everything. So I said to the band: “What if we sneak out and cut it with real guys in a real studio?” So we snuck out and cut a version. Meanwhile, Jefferson Airplane were recording down the street at RCA with Al Schmitt, one of the greatest recording engineers in history. We were signed to Columbia, whose studios were union-controlled with regular breaks and everything. We knew Eight Miles High was a special song and wanted to record it properly. “Round the squares huddled in storms” refers to bad weather in London and people clustered in doorways to avoid the rain coming down in sheets. And the line about a “rain grey town” was mine. The reference to black limousines means the Austin Princess, a bulbous British car that record companies used a lot because it was cheaper than a Bentley. And they were extremely welcoming, driving us home from gigs, taking us to dinner and parties. Of course, the press jumped on us for that, but the Beatles knew we’d never say a thing like that because we worshipped them. A terrible promoter billed us as “America’s answer to the Beatles”. “Nowhere is there warmth to be found” refers to our treatment by the British press. We struggled to understand people – there must have been 25 different British accents. We were 21, had never been out of the States, and everything was alien. The line “And when you touch down, you’ll find it stranger than known” is about the disorientation we felt. We all wrote it together in a Winnebago motorhome, hurriedly swapping lyrics and ideas for the chord progression. But if Roger says it was his idea, maybe it was. I thought it was Gene’s idea to write a song about our trip to London – he was a wonderful, talented man. It does refer to the altitude of that flight, but it was a deliberate double entendre. Of course Eight Miles High was a drug song. I gotta get off.” I remember saying: “You can’t be a Byrd if you can’t fly.”ĭavid Crosby, singer-songwriter/rhythm guitar
We’d get on a plane, and he’d be in a cold sweat, standing up in the aisle, saying: “I can’t stay on this plane, man. Gene left the band the month Eight Miles High was released. We put out a statement refuting those claims, but it was the end of our commercial success. When the song came out, some DJs did the sums and realised that, since commercial airliners only flew at six miles, we must have been talking about a different kind of high. Gene asked: “How high do you think that plane was flying?” I thought about seven miles, but the Beatles had a song called Eight Days a Week, so we changed it to Eight Miles High because we thought that would be cooler. It was our first time on a plane, and I had the idea of writing a song about it. The previous year, 1965, we’d been on a trip to England. That wasn’t the case: it was a collaborative effort between myself, Gene and David Crosby. In later years, Gene started to fantasise that he wrote the whole song. I was in love with his saxophone playing: all those funny little notes and fast stuff at the bottom of the range.Īt the same time, Gene Clark had some chords and a vague melody, which went into the more regular structure of Eight Miles High. It had a recurring phrase, dee da da da, which I picked up on my Rickenbacker guitar and played some jazzy stuff around it. There was one Coltrane track called India, where he was trying to emulate sitar music with his saxophone. By the end of the tour, Coltrane and Shankar were ingrained. It was the only music we had, for the whole time on the bus. But I had some blank tapes so recorded the Coltrane albums, along with some Ravi Shankar, and took them on tour.
I had just picked up a cassette recorder – it was such a new thing, you couldn’t buy any tapes to play in it. We were on a tour of America, and someone played us the Coltrane albums Africa/Brass and Impressions.
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