“Eight Miles High” by The Byrds

"Eight Miles High" hit the shops as a Byrds single on March 14, 1966, and turned up again that July on their third album, Fifth Dimension, and nothing on the radio sounded remotely like it. Gene Clark, Jim (later Roger) McGuinn and David Crosby wrote it, and McGuinn's 12-string guitar spirals and stabs in a way that owes as much to Ravi Shankar's sitar and John Coltrane's saxophone as it does to folk rock. Plenty of critics call it the first true psychedelic rock song, and it helped kick open the door for raga rock.

Not everyone was charmed. After the Gavin Report alleged the lyrics carried drug connotations, stations in the U.S. banned it; the band denied it, though Clark and Crosby later admitted drugs were part of the inspiration. It stalled at 14 on the Hot 100, their last U.S. Top 20 hit, and the final release before Clark, their main songwriter, left the band.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.