Fact #61298

Roger McGuinn (guitar/vocals, The Byrds] : That was our manager, Jim Dickson's idea. He admired Dylan as a writer, so he'd been working with that and other Dylan songs in bluegrass with Chris Hillman and Vern Gosdin.

He'd heard about Tambourine Man being out there as a demo because it was recorded and they had to shelve it because Ramblin' Jack Elliott was on the track and he was a bit inebriated, sounded a little out of tune, out of time. So Dickson knew the demo was out there but it wouldn't get used on a record because it was out of tune. He had a copy sent out to LA from New York and we learned it.

Initially, David Crosby didn't like it at all. He didn't like the sound of Dylan's voice. And by that point we were all getting into The Beatles, so David was a little down on folk music, and we wanted to do a Beatley kind of thing. We didn't want to do a folky 2/4 kind of sound. So I made up a new arrangement for it, changed it to 4/4, and added the little Bach-like intro on the twelve-string. And that made a difference.

(Producer) Terry Melcher put a Beach Boys kind of track to it. Later, in an interview, he said that it was Don't Worry Baby that he was emulating. And I can kind of hear that, now that I think of it.

Bruce Johnston (Beach Boys) : If you listen to The Byrds version of Tambourine Man there's an influence of The Beach Boys, not in Dylan's writing but in … I went to the first audition for The Byrds when they were getting signed to Columbia and they were assigned to Terry Melcher, so they brought a tape over and sang over it, and when Terry produced Tambourine Man he used studio musicians on the recording, and he pulled the rhythm guitar part – the plunk-punk plunk-plunk from Don't Worry Baby by The Beach Boys. So, because The Beach Boys were so big, a little bit of that influence went through to the first electric Bob Dylan hit.

Roger McGuinn : We cut it down to one verse, and I was shooting for a vocal that was very calculated between John Lennon and Bob Dylan. I was trying to cut some middle ground between those two voices.

Terry Melcher (producer) : They sounded terrible. They had a very thin arrangement. Even if they'd played it well, it wouldn't have worked or lit up the radio. McGuinn asked what I'd do. I told him who I'd bring in to play and he acknowledged that these people were probably better than his bandmates. He had no problem with that at all.

Roger McGuinn : We used to use dual compression - piggy-backing one compressor into another in the studio - and that's how we got that sustain, the ringing sound. If you just play one of those Rickenbackers without compression, the notes fall off pretty rapidly, so you really need compression to get that long sustain. It actually almost makes it like another instrument, like an organ or something; it's another kind of sound. I wanted the compressor built into the guitar itself, so I wouldn't have to carry outboard boxes around. This way, when you're traveling light, you just click the switch and it's there.

Roger McGuinn : Mainly it was Terry Melcher's idea to use the sort of A-team group of musicians who were doing most of the stuff in LA at the time. They were Hal Blaine on drums, Larry Knechtel on bass, Leon Russell on electric piano, Terry Cole played Telecaster. Glen Campbell, was supposed to be on the session, but he couldn't make it.

Hal Blaine (session drummer on Tambourine Man) : When I made records with The Beach Boys, Paul Revere or The Byrds, the drummers were happy to have me play the records, because they knew I had the techniques. They didn't have to go in to the studio and be scared to death of microphones. A lot of them had never been in studios. They were garage bands that got together. They were very happy to allow me to make their records and know they would be great records. Then, they could learn them of course. I would be making $35 for an afternoon with The Byrds, while they were out making $35,000 onstage that night. So, I don't think any of those guys were upset. Most of the people in the business did know that there was a ghost crew in Hollywood and that was our Wrecking Crew that just made everybody's records. There must've been 25 or 30 groups that I recorded with that were most pleased that I was making their records, because they were having hit records.

David Crosby : It would take you a whole page to make up a list of records that those cats made.....starting with Tambourine Man. That was Knechtel playing the bass. And I'm talking about everybody's records. Beach Boys, Raiders, everybody that ever made records in LA, man, those cats made records with them a few times. And like with us, they started out with us, and then we said "no deal" to Columbia. "We won't even finish our first album unless you let us play it." They wanted to make tracks and just use enough of us to put the flavor in so it could easily packaged, easily managed little material - and also wouldn't be dependant on us to put out the record.

David Crosby (vocals/guitar, The Byrds] : We thought we'd made a great record, but we didn't have any idea it was going to do what it did. I was really surprised.

Roger McGuinn : We were not very systematic about the formation of the group. It happened very naturally. Gene (Clark) and I just sort of blended together one night (McGuinn was singing Beatle songs at the Troubadour, an LA club) and decided to form a duet. And the very same night, within ten minutes after we had gotten our thing together with some songs that we both collaborated on -- like (we'd) written a couple of songs in two minutes, right?

David Crosby comes along and says, 'Can I sing harmony?' and we said 'Sure' cause I'd known David from 1960 when I was out on the coast working with the Limelighters. And so there was David singing and we had a trio.

David took us over to Jim Dickson who had a gig at World Pacific Jazz. Dickson started us off when we were all broke, busted out on the street before the days of 'Any spare change?' If you said 'Any spare change?' to somebody back then, you'd get your mouth busted in. We just scuffled. Dickson supported us. One hamburger a day was our diet -- we got emaciated but we worked hard and everything.

We saw Michael (Clarke) on the street man, and he just looked right. David had met him up in Big Sur playing conga drums and he said, 'Hey man, you wanna be a drummer?' and Michael said, 'Sure.' so we all got together and did it.

When we got him off the street he never played traps before in his life. He played conga drums and he was pretty good at it.

He's intelligent and has talent in other areas … he can draw and so on. He's very good at that. But he had to learn how to play the drums and he learned cold with The Byrds. I thought he faked it pretty well.

David was originally going to be the bass player and Gene was going to be the rhythm guitarist. Well, David didn't want to learn to play the bass and Gene's timing wasn't that hot at the time -- he's got it together now, but his timing on the rhythm wasn't together -- he was a little slow on the beat. So as I said, David swiped the guitar away from Gene and we had to get a bass player so we got Chris (Hillman).

That (hiring Chris) was Dickson's idea. Dickson found Chris working at a place called Ledbetter's which is owned by Randy Sparks who started the New Christy Minstrels. Chris was playing mandolin at the time with a group called the Greengrass Group, I think. It was a horrible, watered-down, Disneyland kind of version of bluegrass. Chris was just in it for a steady $100 a week and all the beer you could drink at the club or whatever. So that was it.
(Source : not known)

Bob Dylan : They (The Byrds, The Turtles, Cher etc) made some of my songs top-10 hits. But I wasn’t a pop songwriter. I never even wanted to be that. But it was good that it happened. Their versions of songs were like commercials. I didn’t really mind that. Because fifty years later my songs would be used for commercials. So that was good, too. I was glad it happened
(Source : speech at Musicares Person Of The Year event, Feb 2015)