How did The Byrds start?
I started going up and hanging out with Roger and Gene, we would sing together at The Troubadour. Gene was from a family of 11 from somewhere like Mississippi, he had no clue what the rules were, so he would just do it in a way that somebody else hadn’t thought of. And Roger was so smart, he’d listen to it and go, “Well, we could just do this and this to it,” and boom, it’s a record! I almost hate giving Roger as much credit as I do, but you can’t deny it – he was the moving force behind that band, and he did create the arrangements for the songs.

What part did your first manager Jim Dickson play in the band’s development?
We went to Jim Dickson because he was the guy I knew who knew more about show business than I did. He said, “Yeah, you got a band, we’ll get you a bass player and a drummer, and it’ll happen, and you’re gonna make it, this is how we’re gonna do it.” And he knew how: he created a scene around us, he’d have us play some big movie star’s party, he did a lot of good things. Then he got hold of a horrifically bad demo, of somebody whose name I can’t remember now, singing “Mr Tambourine Man” very badly! We listened to it, and Roger, who has a gift for being able to translate from one mode into another, he heard that song and knew how to make it into a record. I sang good harmonies on it – that’s what I do – but Roger did it. Roger was at least 50 per cent of The Byrds.

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So Roger effectively invented raga-rock?
Oh, Christ! You know what? The music business always wants to label things, because once they’ve labelled you, they don’t have to think about you. They tried to say we were so many things – we were folk-rock, then jazz-rock when we did “Eight Miles High”, then raga-rock when we did something else. About that time, we got the giggles about it, really badly: you wouldn’t believe some of the other ones we thought of! But it’s nonsense.

In The Byrds, it must have been like riding a tiger: you’re young guys, your first record is an enormous global smash, you’re showered with fame and fortune and acclaim. What are you going to do with that?
Well, we did what we should have: we made good records – Turn! Turn! Turn! was fantastic, Younger Than Yesterday was a good album – especially once Chris [Hillman] started writing too. See, that’s one of the strengths of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young: we all write completely differently, it gives us this enormously wide palette of colours to paint with. The same thing happened with The Byrds: I started writing, Chris started writing, and the whole thing widened out.

Then you got booted out of The Byrds. What were The Byrds working on at that point?
The one where they put a horse’s ass on the cover in place of me! I don’t know what they meant! Moi? We had pretty much gotten on each other’s nerves by that time. The funniest part of the whole thing was that on the way out, their parting line was, “We’ll do better without you!” Gotta be careful what you say, because that stuff always comes back to bite you…

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Legend has it that “Triad” broke up the band…
Not true! I think it had mostly to do with my ego, and my wanting a bigger share of the pie, because I thought I was starting to write pretty good stuff. And also Roger, like the rest of us, is as crazy as a fruit bat – we all were – and it’s not an easy thing to balance a bunch of egos that have just been given a million bucks and have no idea what they’re doing and are taking drugs and stuff. Drugs have probably been the single most destructive force in music. I think we’ve lost more people that way than any other. I tried writing a list of drug casualties on a legal pad, and when I got to the end of the second page I stopped, it just became too fucking grim. How good would Janis be singing right now? How good could Jimi play by now? How hard could John Belushi make you laugh?