People talk about the guitars and the lyrics on “Eight Miles High”, but Michael Clarke played brilliantly on that, and what about the singing? David was just a beautiful vocalist, as were Gene and Roger. We stumbled into something without really thinking, which is how you should make music. It’s about cultural shock.ĬHRIS HILLMAN: What I’m most proud of about The Byrds is that within 18 months we went from covering Bob Dylan to making “Eight Miles High”. It’s about touring the UK: the British press, the cars, the girls in the crowds, the weather, the street signs on the side of the buildings which we weren’t used to and couldn’t find. Crosby will always say, ‘Yeah, it’s about drugs, man!’ But it’s not. Some of the band still like to pretend that it is.

They must be talking about some other kind of high!’ Then the Gavin Report came out with a tip sheet for radio and they banned the record because they thought it was a flagrant drug ad. When radio stations heard it they thought, ‘Wait a minute, they can’t be talking about planes because they don’t fly that high. So we changed it to “Eight Miles High”, even though commercial airliners didn’t go to 42,000 ft. He didn’t like the number seven, because the Beatles had “Eight Days A Week” out and he thought that was much cooler. Gene and I were talking about the trip we’d taken when we’d gone to England on tour, and the fact that the altitude was 37,000 ft, which is seven miles high. The airplane thing was my idea, I was always into planes and spaceships. Gene Clark came up with a lot of it, but he didn’t write the whole song. He was trying to incorporate Indian music into jazz, and we were trying to incorporate his attempts to do that into a rock’n’roll song. It’s got a lot of what Coltrane was going for on “India”, which was to capture the elephants in India with his wails, and there’s that tabla beat. I was trying to emulate Coltrane’s saxophone with my Rickenbacker.

Eight miles high the byrd