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At the end of 1971, only one member remained of the quintet of Byrds who had initiated the folk-rock boom six years earlier when they scored #1 hits by grafting their lush harmonies and jangly guitar sound onto traditional and modern folk songs such as Mr. Tambourine Man and Turn! Turn! Turn! Although the other four original Byrds had long since departed the group, founder Roger (originally Jim) McGuinn had weathered a series of personnel changes over the years and kept the Byrds going as a recording and touring act. The Byrds' last gasp as a studio group came with the November 1971 release of their final album, Farther Along. Many critics panned the LP as a hurriedly-recorded collection of disappointingly tepid songs, and some of them later suggested that the weakness of the Farther Along material was attributable to the members of this final incarnation of the Byrds sensing that the end of the line was near and withholding their best material for release on future solo efforts. Roger McGuinn, in particular, was said to be distracted by promise of a reunion of the original five Byrds, leading to his being unfocused and detached during the production of Farther Along. These criticisms prompted Byrds biographer Johnny Rogan to note a decade later that Roger McGuinn had been so uninterested in the Byrds' final album that a mere roadie (i.e., a person engaged to transport and set up equipment and perform errands for musicians on tour) had been allowed to write and sing one of the songs appearing on it: It's easy to see how a listener might have formed this impression of the song in question, BB Class Road.: It didn't much sound like a Byrds track; it listed the Byrds' roadie, Stuart Dinkie Dawson, as a co-writer; and the lyrics were a first-person account of life on the road, complete with a spoken introduction dedicating the song to all the road managers that are worth a dang anywhere in the word: In fact, although roadie Stuart Dawson had a hand in the writing and recording of BB Class Road, the song was actually sung by the Byrds' drummer, Gene Parsons. The reason it didn't sound much like the Byrds was because Parsons' voice was unfamiliar to many listeners (he'd only sung lead on a couple of Byrds tracks prior to the release of Farther Along), and he departed from his normal vocal delivery on BB Class Road to assume an alternate persona as a roadie. As the liner notes to the 2000 CD re-issue of the Farther Along album describe the song: Although Farther Along proved to be the final record produced by what was known as the CBS Byrds (i.e., the group then under contract to Columbia Records), the original five members reunited briefly the following year to record an eponymously titled album for another label.
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