![]() We had been listening to a lot of their records at the time, so when we were recording it in the studio I was actively trying to do a tribute to Coltrane in the instrumental break of that song. Musically, the inspiration was from John Coltrane and Ravi Shankar. The ‘eight miles high’ was nothing but the airplane ride the altitude, flying at 40,000 feet. “So we were feeling pretty bad and wrote a song about the tour. And we weren’t that good actually, kind of out of tune. The inspiration for it was that we had just done a tour of England and we had a tough time over there because the press didn’t like us, because the promoter had billed us as ‘America’s answer to the Beatles’ and that kind of rubbed everybody the wrong way. “I remember the origin of that song very vividly. I think I was truly one of the first people in the folk circles to really pick up on The Beatles and telling everyone that ‘Hey, this is really good stuff.’ But these folkies would be like, ‘No, that’s rock & roll, forget about it.’ But because we were so steeped in the folk tradition, what we did came out differently than what The Beatles were doing.” The Story of “Eight Miles High” ![]() We were folk singers who were influenced by The Beatles. “It just kind of happened naturally, it’s not really something that anybody put a whole lot of thought into. But I never thought that electric instruments were evil or anything. So much so that they booed Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival when he went electric, and I remember that kind of thinking being very prevalent. “People in the folk circles were really snobs about electric music. I think what we did kind of brought them together,” McGuinn explained. Before The Byrds, the worlds of folk and rock may have well been existing in entirely different universes, according to the Chicago-born musician: “Before the Sixties, there was a tremendous gulf between folk and rock.
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