The Byrds - Bound to Fall (1968) (MASH-UP)

Having tackled the "Stranger in a Stranger Land" Byrds mash-up in my last post, I figured why not try another one. There's one other Byrds song I know of that is just an instrumental badly in need of vocals, and that's "Bound to Fall," a bonus track off the 1968 "Notorious Byrd Brothers" album.

The song was written by Mike Brewer of Mastin and Brewer, a little known duo that sometimes opened up shows for the Byrds in 1966 but only released one single that didn't contain this song. (Brewer would later go on to bigger success in the duo Brewer and Shipley, and that group would finally record the song on a 1974 album.) However, the song is associated with Byrds bassist Chris Hillman, who has played it off and on during his long career, Aside from the instrumental Byrds version, which came out in 1997 and obviously wasn't originally meant to be released in that form, a Hillman version of the song wouldn't get released until 1972, when it was done for the "Manassas" album led by Stephen Stills. Hillman was a member of the Manassas band, and he sang the song on the album with his voice intertwined with Stills' voice.

It would be very difficult for me to combine the Byrds version with the Manassas version, because Manassas does it in a different arrangement. I couldn't find any versions of the song sung only by Hillman. However, I found a bootleg of Hillman singing the song in a duet with Kim O'Kelley at My Father's Place in Roslyn, New York, on March 1, 1978. It was possible to isolate the vocals because the song was performed acoustically and in front of a very small crowd, so the vocals were clear.

I think the mash-up worked out well, although I should warn that I'm new to this sort of thing and I'm sure there are others who can do it better. One problem is that Hillman and O'Kelley were performing the song without any sort of rhythm section, so sometimes they got a little bit ahead of the beat or behind it, when compared to the Byrds' version. I tried my best to fix that, but I can only do so much with my limited audio editing skills. It was also tough to sync up the pitch and tempo.

Maybe someone with more skills will see this effort and make a better version. As with my last mash-up, I've included the two versions I combined, so one has the raw materials to make one's own combination.

As it is, I'd much rather hear this version with Hillman's vocals than the instrumental version. I hope you feel the same.

https://www.upload.ee/files/15239501/TByrd_BndtoFallSongEdit.zip.html