The Byrds - The Boarding House, San Francisco, CA, 12-8-1977

Here's a concert I'm particularly psyched to present, as part of commemorating the recent death of David Crosby (as I write this in January 2023). As far as I can tell, Crosby reunited on stage with other key members of the Byrds for only three concerts in the late 1970s. One of them, at the Roxy in Los Angeles, apparently hasn't been bootlegged at all. But very luckily, the other two have been bootlegged with excellent soundboard quality. I plan on posting both of them. Here's the first one that took place chronologically.

By 1977, the solo career of former Byrds member Roger McGuinn was losing steam. He resorted to going on an acoustic tour as a duo with former Byrds member Gene Clark. In early 1978, another former Byrds member, Chris Hillman, would join them and they would release a couple of albums as "McGuinn, Clark, and Hillman." At the time this concert took place, Hillman wasn't in the picture yet. 

But former Byrds member David Crosby was living in the San Francisco Bay Area at the time, so when the McGuinn and Clark tour came to town, McGuinn called Crosby and asked them to join them on stage. Crosby was a big star at that point, with the Crosby, Stills and Nash album "CSN" released earlier in the year and selling millions. So it's surprising that not only did Crosby join his former Byrds band mates on stage, he played most of both the early and late shows with them. All five original members of the Byrds had reunited for a studio album in 1973, simply called "Byrds." But Crosby, Clark, and McGuinn hadn't played on stage together since 1966 (when Clark quit the band).

Both the early and late shows were recorded with soundboard quality. However, there are pluses and minuses of both shows, and some different songs were played. So what I've done is combined the best parts of both shows, creating one ideal show that contains all of the songs from both. If you want to know which song is from which show, that info is in the comments field of the mp3 tags.

Generally speaking, I tried to use the late show song versions. The format of the show was that each band member played two or three of their songs in a solo acoustic format, then all three played together for the rest of the show. For the songs played together, Clark and McGuinn had been doing this tour together for some time, so they knew the songs well. But Crosby hadn't sung with the others on stage in a decade, and many of the songs they did were from AFTER the time he'd been fired from the Byrds in 1967! So he was flying by the seat of his pants much of the time, trying to come up with harmony vocals on the spot. I figure he did a better job of that in the late show, because he at least got a whack at the songs in the early show.

For the solo spots in the first portion of the show, I carefully combined songs from the early and late shows. For instance, Clark's "Release Me Girl" and "Train Leaves Here This Morning" are from the early show, and "Silver Raven" is from the late show. I didn't include his performance of "Denver or Wherever" because it was the one song in the whole bootleg where the sound was really messed up. (That's probably because it was the first song of the late show and some technical problems had to get worked out.) It seems that Crosby only did a solo spot for the late show. That's why he only has two solo songs, while Clark has three and McGuinn has four, since Clark and McGuinn played some different songs in each of their solo spots. 

For the main part of the show, with all three playing together, they generally did the same songs in roughly the same order. There were a few exceptions. For instance, "Wild Mountain Thyme" was only done in the early show, and "Little Mama" was only done in the late show. As I mentioned above, I generally used the late show versions. But a few of those were marred by a kind of crackling noise. So in those cases I used the early versions instead. Also, the first part of "Mr. Tambourine Man" had really bad sound quality on the vocals. But since that was just the chorus, I patched in the chorus from later in the song.

There's a lot of banter between songs. One can tell all three of them were having a great time. I used as much banter as possible, taking bits from the early show and adding them in to the late show banter. Hopefully, the end result sounds like one seamless whole.

I consider this a "must have" for any Byrds fan. It was a special and even historic evening. The three of them did songs they never did together before, like "Chestnut Mare," "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere," "Wild Mountain Thyme," and "Knockin' on Heaven's Door," as well as rare songs from their early Byrds days like "She Don't Care about Time" and "Chimes of Freedom" that they didn't even do in other reunion shows.

This album is an an hour and 33 minutes long. I plan on posting their 1978 Boarding House reunion show soon.

01 talk (Gene Clark)
02 Release Me Girl (Gene Clark)
03 Train Leaves Here This Morning (Gene Clark)
04 Silver Raven (Gene Clark)
05 talk (Gene Clark)
06 The Lee Shore (David Crosby)
07 talk (David Crosby)
08 Drive My Car (David Crosby)
09 talk (David Crosby)
10 Dreamland (Roger McGuinn)
11 talk (Roger McGuinn)
12 The Ballad of Easy Rider (Roger McGuinn)
13 Wasn't Born to Follow (Roger McGuinn)
14 talk (Roger McGuinn)
15 Jolly Roger (Roger McGuinn)
16 talk (Roger McGuinn)
17 Mr. Tambourine Man (Byrds)
18 Chestnut Mare (Byrds)
19 Crazy Ladies (Byrds)
20 talk (Byrds)
21 Turn, Turn, Turn [To Everything There Is a Season] (Byrds)
22 talk (Byrds)
23 I'll Feel a Whole Lot Better (Byrds)
24 She Don't Care about Time (Byrds)
25 talk (Byrds)
26 You Ain't Goin' Nowhere (Byrds)
27 talk (Byrds)
28 Wild Mountain Thyme (Byrds)
29 talk (Byrds)
30 Chimes of Freedom (Byrds)
31 talk (Byrds)
32 He Was a Friend of Mine (Byrds)
33 talk (Byrds)
34 My Back Pages (Byrds)
35 talk (Byrds)
36 Little Mama (Byrds)
37 Knockin' on Heaven's Door (Byrds)
38 talk (Byrds)
39 So You Want to Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star (Byrds)
40 talk (Byrds)
41 Eight Miles High (Byrds)

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The cover photo comes from one of the late 1970s reunion shows with Crosby, but which one? This shows Clark (left), Crosby (center), and McGuinn (right). It actually had Hillman in it too, but I cropped him out. I have another photo with all four of them on stage at the Boarding House. So that must be from a later reunion concert they did in that venue in 1978, since Hillman wasn't there on this night. Thus, by process of elimination, I'm pretty sure this photo comes from the other reunion show with all four of them, at the Roxy in Los Angeles. 

For the band name at the top, I used the same unusual lettering as what was on the cover of their 1973 reunion album.