EIGHT MILES HIGH
THE BYRDS (1966)

The Beatles generally get the credit for inventing just about every subgenre of rock going but California's Byrds can lay claim to creating jangle pop, folk rock, country rock and, with 'Eight Miles High,' psychedelia. For all 'Happening Ten Years Time Ago's weirdness it is still more quirky than mind-blowing; 'Eight Miles High' is pretty much the distance skywards the record sends your head.
Taken at face value the song merely recounts a plane journey the band took at the start of their UK tour, but the spindly, raga-tinged opening chords tell an altogether more mystical tale. McGuinn's guitar intro was based upon the work of legendary saxophonist John Coltrane, specifically his 1961 recording of 'India,' and that freeform jazz style is the blueprint for this otherworldly, lysergically spiritual music.
Throughout the psychedelic movement it's US variant would retain the explosive and chaotic soundscapes forged by 'Eight Miles High.' Jefferson Airplane or Quicksilver Messenger Service are unthinkable without it and the burgeoning moral uncertainty of American life found it's aural equivalent in the dark, unpredictable licks that the Byrds pioneered.

HAPPENINGS TEN YEARS TIME AGO

THE YARDBIRDS (1966)

The devil may have all the best tunes but from the early to the mid-sixties the Yardbirds had all the best guitarists. Clapton, Beck and Page all passed through the band on their way to bigger (though not necessarily better) things and this parade of talent combined with a sense of reckless experimentalism to produce a string of innovative singles. None more so than the extraordinary 'Happenings Ten Years Time Ago.' One of the few tracks the group recorded while both Beck and Page were in the line-up it prefigured British psychedelia by several months, effectively ushering in an age of spaced-out lyrics and guitar freakouts. On twin lead guitars the two superstars do pitched battle while Keith Relf's fey vocals float over the top, gabbling none too convincingly about reincarnation. Just to add to the bizarro mix a cockney monologue starts up towards the end of the song, supposedly modelled on the ramblings of a doctor at a VD clinic Beck went to. Unsurprisingly in these pre-Sgt. Pepper times the single didn't even make the top forty, a cast iron example of a song way ahead of its time. Within months every motley group of macho, beer swilling lads would kill for the hippy, trippy sound so brilliantly encapsulated by 'Happenings...'

THE SOUNDS OF SILENCE

SIMON AND GARFUNKEL (1965)

Folk music had always been protest music since before the dustbowl polemics of Woody Guthrie. As the sixties shaped up to blow our minds Bob Dylan had inherited the mantle with excoriating diatribes against war, politics and the class and generational divides.

But Simon and Garfunkel's first big hit was something altogether different. Dylan was a poet no question, but there was a ragged, raw quality to his sentiments that was not shared by the two smart troubadors from New York. The Sound of Silence wasn't just intellectual, it was real and perceptive; a sober slice of social comment for a country, and a world, drenched in paranoia and injustice.

Paul Simon originally wrote the song in 1964 after the assassination of JFK, that pivotal event in twentieth century US history which came close to breaking the spirit of a nation. An acoustic version was included on the duo's patchy debut album 'Wednesday Morning 3am,' which stiffed resulting in Paul and Art going their separate ways. The song resurfaced in Simon's solo shows but it was the intervention of Columbia's Tom Wilson that saved the track from obscurity, overdubbing electric guitar, bass and drums without the band's knowledge or permission and re-releasing it as a single.

Whatever the ethics of the decision Wilson's chutzpah paid off in spectacular style. Simon and Garfunkel reformed and the single climbed the charts to become the first number one of 1966. They may have had bigger hits since but The Sound of Silence is the finest example of Paul Simon's devastatingly artful songwriting and one of the most prescient and haunting records of the sixties.