While the band waited for "Mr. Tambourine Man" to be released, they began a residency at Ciro's Le Disc nightclub on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood.[42] The band's regular appearances at Ciro's during March and April 1965 allowed them to hone their ensemble playing, perfect their aloof stage persona, and expand their repertoire.[42][43] In addition, it was during their residency at the nightclub that the band first began to accrue a dedicated following among L.A.'s youth culture and hip Hollywood fraternity, with scenesters like Kim Fowley, Peter Fonda, Jack Nicholson, Arthur Lee, and Sonny & Cher regularly attending the band's performances.[44][45][46] On March 26, 1965, the author of the band's forthcoming debut single, Bob Dylan, made an impromptu visit to the club and joined the Byrds on stage for a rendition of Jimmy Reed's "Baby What You Want Me to Do".[42] The excitement generated by the Byrds at Ciro's quickly made them a must-see fixture on L.A.'s nightclub scene and resulted in hordes of teenagers filling the sidewalks outside the club, desperate to see the band perform.[42] A number of noted music historians and authors, including Richie Unterberger, Ric Menck, and Peter Buckley, have suggested that the crowds of young Bohemians and hipsters that gathered at Ciro's to see the Byrds perform represented the first stirrings of the West Coast hippie counterculture.[7][43][47]
Columbia Records eventually released the "Mr. Tambourine Man" single on April 12, 1965.[32] The full, electric rock band treatment that the Byrds and producer Terry Melcher had given the song effectively created the template for the musical subgenre of folk rock.[48][49] McGuinn's melodic, jangling twelve-string Rickenbacker guitar playing—which was heavily compressed to produce an extremely bright and sustained tone—was immediately influential and has remained so to the present day.[40][50] The single also featured another major characteristic of the band's sound: their clear harmony singing, which usually featured McGuinn and Clark in unison, with Crosby providing the high harmony.[45][51] Additionally, Richie Unterberger has noted that the song's abstract lyrics took rock and pop songwriting to new heights; never before had such intellectual and literary wordplay been combined with rock instrumentation by a popular music group.[52]
Within three months "Mr. Tambourine Man" had become the first folk rock smash hit,[53] reaching number 1 on both the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart and the UK Singles Chart.[54][55] The single's success initiated the folk rock boom of 1965 and 1966, during which a number of Byrds-influenced acts had hits on the American and British charts.[52][56] The term "folk rock" was itself coined by the American music press to describe the band's sound in June 1965, at roughly the same time as "Mr. Tambourine Man" peaked at number 1 in the U.S.[57][58]
The Mr. Tambourine Man album followed on June 21, 1965,[32] peaking at number 6 on the Billboard Top LPs chart and number 7 on the UK Albums Chart.[55][59] The album mixed reworkings of folk songs, including Pete Seeger's musical adaptation of the Idris Davies' poem "The Bells of Rhymney", with a number of other Dylan covers and the band's own compositions, the majority of which were written by Gene Clark.[58][60] In particular, Clark's "I'll Feel a Whole Lot Better" has gone on to become a rock music standard, with many critics considering it one of the band's and Clark's best songs.[61][62][63] Upon release, the Mr. Tambourine Man album, like the single of the same name, was influential in popularizing folk rock[60] and served to establish the band as an internationally successful rock act, representing the first effective American challenge to the dominance of the Beatles and the British Invasion.[1][64]
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A sample of the Byrds' recording of "All I Really Want to Do", illustrating the ascending melody progression in the song's refrain and the Beatlesque melody used in its third verse.
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Author John Einarson has noted that during this period of their career, the Byrds enjoyed tremendous popularity among teenage pop fans, with their music receiving widespread airplay on Top 40 radio and their faces adorning countless teen magazines.[69] Much was made at the time of the Byrds' unconventional dress sense, with their casual attire strikingly at odds with the prevailing trend for uniformity among contemporary beat groups.[70] With all five members sporting Beatlesque moptop haircuts, Crosby dressed in a striking green suede cape, and McGuinn wearing a pair of distinctive rectangular "granny glasses", the band exuded California cool, while also looking suitably non-conformist.[70][71][72] In particular, McGuinn's distinctive rectangular spectacles would go on to become popular among members of the burgeoning hippie counterculture in the United States.[73]
Although McGuinn was widely regarded as the Byrds' bandleader by this point, the band actually had multiple frontmen, with McGuinn, Clark, Crosby and later Hillman all taking turns to sing lead vocals in roughly equal measures across the group's repertoire. Despite the dizzying array of personnel changes that the group underwent in later years, this lack of a dedicated lead singer would remain a stylistic trait of the Byrds' music throughout the majority of the band's existence. A further distinctive aspect of the Byrds' image was their unsmiling air of detachment, both on stage and in front of the camera.[70][72] This natural aloofness was compounded by the large amounts of marijuana that the band consumed and often resulted in moody and erratic live performances.[70][74] Indeed, the contemporary music press was extremely critical of the Byrds' abilities as a live act during the mid-1960s, with the reaction from the British media during the band's August 1965 tour of England being particularly scathing.[69][75]
This 1965 English tour was largely orchestrated by the group's publicist Derek Taylor, in an attempt to capitalize on the number 1 chart success of the "Mr. Tambourine Man" single.[69] Unfortunately, the tour was overhyped from the start, with the band being touted as "America's answer to the Beatles", a label that proved impossible for the Byrds to live up to.[69] During concert performances, a combination of poor sound, group illness, ragged musicianship, and the band's notoriously lackluster stage presence, all combined to alienate audiences and served to provoke a merciless castigating of the band in the British press.[69]
However, the tour did enable the band to meet and socialize with a number of top English groups, including the Rolling Stones and the Beatles.[69] In particular, the band's relationship with the Beatles would prove important for both acts, with the two groups again meeting in Los Angeles some weeks later, upon the Byrds' return to America.[69] During this period of fraternization, the Beatles were vocal in their support of the Byrds, publicly acknowledging them as creative competitors and naming them as their favorite American group.[76][77] A number of authors, including Ian MacDonald, Richie Unterberger, and Bud Scoppa, have noted the Byrds influence on the Beatles' late 1965 album Rubber Soul,[78] most notably on the songs "Nowhere Man"[79] and "If I Needed Someone", the latter of which utilizes a guitar riff similar to that in the Byrds' cover of "The Bells of Rhymney".[80]
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An excerpt from the Byrds' recording of "Turn! Turn! Turn! (to Everything There Is a Season)", which provided the band with their second U.S. number 1 single and served to cement folk rock as a chart trend.
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The Byrds' second album, Turn! Turn! Turn!, was released in December 1965[85] and while it received a mostly positive reception, critical consensus deemed it to be inferior to the band's debut.[86] Nonetheless, it was a commercial success, peaking at number 17 on the U.S. charts and number 11 in the UK.[86] Author Scott Schinder has noted that, along with Mr. Tambourine Man, the Turn! Turn! Turn! album served to establish the Byrds as one of rock music's most important creative forces, on a par with the Beatles, the Beach Boys and the Rolling Stones.[87] Like their debut, the album comprised a mixture of group originals, folk songs, and Bob Dylan covers, all characterized by the group's clear harmonies and McGuinn's distinctive guitar sound.[88] However, the album featured more of the band's own compositions than its predecessor, with Gene Clark in particular coming to the fore as a songwriter.[89] His songs from this period, including "She Don't Care About Time", "The World Turns All Around Her", and "Set You Free This Time", are widely regarded by critics as among the best of the folk rock genre.[90][91] The latter song was even chosen for release as a single in January 1966, but its densely worded lyrics, melancholy melody, and ballad-like tempo contributed to it stalling at number 63 on the Billboard chart and failing to reach the UK chart altogether.[92][93]
While the Byrds outwardly seemed to be riding the crest of a wave during the latter-half of 1965, the recording sessions for their second album had not been without tension. One source of conflict was the power struggle that had begun to develop between producer Terry Melcher and the band's manager Jim Dickson, with the latter harboring aspirations to produce the band himself, causing him to be overly critical of Melcher's work.[94] Within a month of Turn! Turn! Turn! being released, Dickson and the Byrds approached Columbia Records and requested that Melcher be replaced, despite the fact that he had successfully steered the band through the recording of two number 1 singles and two hit albums.[94] Any hopes that Dickson had of being allowed to produce the band himself, however, were dashed when Columbia assigned their West Coast head of A&R, Allen Stanton, to the band.[87][94]
