On December 22, 1965, the Byrds recorded a new, self-penned composition titled “Eight Miles High” at RCA Studios in Hollywood. However, Columbia Records refused to release this version because it had been recorded at another record company‘s facility. As a result, the band were forced to re-record the song at Columbia Studios in Los Angeles on January 24 and 25, 1966, and it was this re-recorded version that would be released as a single and included on the group’s third album.
The song represented a creative leap forward for the band and is often considered the first full-blown psychedelic rock recording by critics, although other contemporaneous acts, such as Donovan and the Yardbirds, were also exploring similar musical territory. It was also pivotal in transmuting folk rock into the new musical forms of psychedelia and raga rock.
During his time with the Byrds, McGuinn developed two innovative, experimental, and very influential styles of electric guitar playing. The first was “jingle-jangle” – generating ringing arpeggios based on banjo finger picking styles he learned while at the Old Town School of Folk – which was influential in the folk rock genre. The second style was a merging of saxophonist John Coltrane‘s free-jazz atonalities, which hinted at the droning of the sitar – a style of playing, first heard on the song “Eight Miles High.”
“Eight Miles High” is often cited as the first psychedelic rock song, as well as a classic of the counterculture era. “Of course Eight Miles High was a drug song. It does refer to the altitude of that flight, but it was a deliberate double entendre.” —David Crosby. McGuinn’s groundbreaking lead guitar playing on “Eight Miles High” saw the guitarist emulating free form jazz saxophone as influenced by John Coltrane, and in particular, Coltrane’s playing on the song “India” from his Impressions album. It also exhibits the influence of the Indian classical music of Ravi Shankar in the droning quality of the song’s vocal melody and in McGuinn’s guitar playing. The song’s subtle use of Indian influences resulted in it being labeled as “raga rock” by the music press.
According to Roger McGuinn: “Eight Miles High has been called the first psychedelic record. It’s true we’d been experimenting with LSD, and the title does contain the word “high”, so if people want to say that, that’s great. But Eight Miles High actually came about as a tribute to John Coltrane. It was our attempt to play jazz.”
“We were on a tour of America, and someone played us the Coltrane albums Africa/Brass and Impressions. It was the only music we had, for the whole time on the bus. By the end of the tour, Coltrane and Shankar were ingrained.”
“There was one Coltrane track called India, where he was trying to emulate sitar music with his saxophone. It had a recurring phrase, dee da da da, which I picked up on my Rickenbacker guitar and played some jazzy stuff around it. I was in love with his saxophone playing: all those funny little notes and fast stuff at the bottom of the range.”
“The previous year, 1965, we’d been on a trip to England. It was our first time on a plane, and I had the idea of writing a song about it. Gene asked: “How high do you think that plane was flying?” I thought about seven miles, but the Beatles had a song called Eight Days a Week, so we changed it to Eight Miles High because we thought that would be cooler. Some DJs did the sums and realized that, since commercial airliners only flew at six miles, we must have been talking about a different kind of high. And all the stations stopped playing it.” From: https://m100group.com/2021/06/09/innovation-with-the-byrds-eight-miles-high-ideo-and-david-kelley-neo-demarcoian-banter/
