Disecting the Importance of Sweetheart of the Rodeo

I wonder greatly if people ever step back to wonder why albums long since past their charting prime suddenly have a hush hush dialogue amongst the music community as being real gems and masterpieces long overlooked. Albums that Rolling Stone magazine shunned so quickly upon release are now brown nosed back into music greatness because they always knew all along that these things were right. The late sixties no doubt coined a lot of albums like this and it’s amazing to see how the landscape was then and why these albums fell so heavily under the radar by their peers but now have become adored by music lovers who are now grandfathers or fathers themselves. Dylan’s late sixties work was met with many questions and outrages from people who looked to him so heavily to be the spokesman against everything that was wrong in the country at the time. Many blamed the motorcycle accident in 66’ for these resulting albums but how can you explain that to acts like the Byrds who released an album like Sweetheart of the Rodeo with some breeze that it went unnoticed and uncared for upon its release in July of 1968, what of them? I don’t believe the band had suffered simultaneous motor cycle accidents but many would be quick to point the finger to the firing of David Crosby from the band as a source. Regardless this doesn’t answer why suddenly these albums are now looked at as classics.

In many ways both Sweetheart of the Rodeo and Dylan's Nashville Skyline signaled a transgression back to simpler messages in music. For the Byrds, the spread-the-message mentality of their hero Robert Zimmerman was now a pasties of it’s former self as Dylan post motorcycle accident even tried to find his footing back into the society of great folk singers that he had unabashedly alienated a few years before and the Byrds were doing exactly the same. The folk rock explosion the Byrds had ushered in some three years earlier with the electrified Mr. Tambourine Man had lost insurmountable steam after the jettison and firings of three original members and a lack of stellar material spanning over three classic albums. So why is it now that an album like Sweetheart of the Rodeo is viewed as a monumental classic after being revered and bashed by critics and fans alike back in the late sixties?

In retrospect it’s a thing of time for the Byrds. Just as people had wondered why Dylan chose to strip back on albums like John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline, McGuinn and company were looking to find their footing again. Original members Roger McGuinn, Chris Hillman, and session drummer Kevin Kelley were looking for the right outfit that didn’t necessarily place them amongst the ranks of the David Crosby’s and Neil Young’s of the world. Enter Gram Parsons and his soulful and painful voice of the country world that ushered in tales of heartache and lost love to the unaware commercial world thanks to the contribution of a 12 string richenbacher from McGuinn when Parsons was brought into the Byrds in the spring of 1968. Strange changes were a foot on both sides of the line for both the direction of the Byrds and the ideals of mixing genres of music so closely mirrored that their followings seemed poised to meet at the battle lines. The first engagement of this union would occur when the Byrds traveled to Nashville to record what would become “Sweetheart of the Rodeo” and to become the first “long haired” act to perform at the world renowned Grand Ole Opry.

The band may have been welcomed with a chorus of boos and charlatan chants but it was the country not the people that would fuel the material on the album. To show an obvious reference to their desire to be like Bob and go back a few twenty years they opened the album with a cover of one of his Basement Tape Demos, “You Ain’t Going Nowhere” which symbolically was the band putting their foot down on the beliefs that they were done and through with the exit of David Crosby during the sessions for the Notorious Byrd Brothers album. Other tracks played as homage’s to their ancestors that they so trustfully rooted their material when they crossed folk with rock music as seen on tracks like “I Am A Pilgrim” and the Guthrie track “Pretty Boy Floyd.” But what this album was really about was not it being a Byrds album but a showcase to the at this time hidden talent of Parsons who had in his arsenal some of real true grit songs of the prairie fastened to mask as music of the California folk rock scene. As pretentious as it sounds it would be hard fast to argue that Parson’s two penned tracks on the album “Hickory Wind” and “One Hundred Years From Now” ushered in the first wave of country rock that would engulf Southern California in the early seventies thanks to acts like The Eagles, Poco, and the later Parsons-Hillman outfit The Flying Burrito Brothers. Even so minus writing contributions the master recordings of Parson’s vocals on “The Christian Life” were an early showing of the talent Parsons had to offer to a new line of singer songwriters waiting in the wings.

The album was garnered with a universal cry of outrage from Rolling Stones editors and the hippie generation who tugged so hard on the coattails the band had dragged with them when they recorded “Eight Miles High” and who had watched them act as a page to the story book of the Monterey Pop Festival one year earlier. The album was a commercial flop and would only be shadowed by the acts last two studio releases as being their worst selling albums. However that was forty years ago, the album is now a beacon of back to basics songwriting long missed after Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley put their stamp on what would be dubbed rock n’ roll in the fifties. The album may not be the best vehicle to showcase what the late sixties were all about but it undoubtedly was a showcase for artists trying something different from the overexposed norms of the psychedelic music movement that had been wrestling the countryside between 1967 and the end of the decade.

Regardless I still cry false pretenses by the nay sayers over at Rolling Stone who met this album with confusion and disgust when it was released and now retreat back on their words greatly. Just another example of the old codgers making up for lost time while they still can. Times like this I miss Ben Fong Torres' contributions to that fabled magazine, anyone willing to answer my confusion?