Consumer Guide Album

The Byrds: Younger Than Yesterday [Columbia, 1967]
The Byrds' Greatest Hits, a profit-taking retrospective from later in the year, sounds like a triumph of produced and programmed rock and roll, while The Notorious Byrd Brothers and Sweetheart of the Rodeo, which followed it in '68, are two of the most convincing arguments for artistic freedom ever to come out of American rock. But this April '67 failure suffers from two related '67 maladies: pretentiousness and self-expression. David Crosby's "Mind Garden" is a completely unlistenable acid meander, while four (three too many) innocuous folk-rock cum countryrock tunes by Chris Hillman are a familiar-sounding example of how an uninteresting self does its number. Never before did concept-master Roger (né Jim) McGuinn efface himself so disastrously on a Byrds album--and never after, either. B−