Old music: The Byrds – I See You

Few if any bands, from any era, have inspired lifelong devotion and loyalty among their fans as much as the Byrds. (When I met Roger McGuinn a few years ago, I was reduced to behaving like a stammering, starstruck teenager.) I must have listened to this song hundreds if not thousands of times in the 45 years since it was recorded and I am still discovering new things in there. On the back of their huge success in 1965 with Mr Tambourine Man , a No 1 single in the US and UK, the Byrds mined their blend of folk and rock on two fine LPs, Mr Tambourine Man and Turn! Turn! Turn! But nothing on either record prepared anyone for the thrilling acid-rock sound they unleashed just a few months later with the release of the astonishing John Coltrane-inspired Eight Miles High , followed by their three essential mid-60s albums – Fifth Dimension (1966), Younger Than Yesterday (1967), and The Notorious Byrd Brothers (1968), as impressive and influential a body of work as produced by anyone in that period, the Beatles apart. With the departure of Gene Clark – he didn't like flying – Jim (as he then was) McGuinn and David Crosby emerged as distinctive songwriters and I See You is one of their best. It's a deceptively simple two-chord trick embellished by jagged psychedelic bursts from McGuinn's 12-string Rickenbacker and an intriguing, characteristically sophisticated lyric ("empathise" was not a word that cropped up too often in 60s pop). The effect is haunting, impressionistic ("warm smiling sun through the cave of your hair"), slightly mysterious and, of course – this being the Byrds – very, very cool.