Names before the Byrds include: the Jet Set, the Beefeaters. They misspelled "Byrds" as their nod to the Beatles.
They're distinctive sound came naturally soon after they started performing together. "We had come out of folk music, so we had a sense of time and rhythm," Chris Hillman said in a Songfacts interview. "It was just basically transposing it into an electric format."
When Clark left the band, the media was told it was because he had a fear of flying; a quote by McGuinn saying, "You can't be a Byrd if you can't fly" made the rounds. Clark debunked this in a 1983 interview. "The fear of flying wasn't why I quit the group," he said. "When you're 19, 20 years old and you start on a fantasy, then six months later you're hanging out with The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, it can cause you to become a little disturbed. The reason for the group's breakup was much less the fear of flying than it was we were too young to handle the amount of success that was thrown at us all at once."
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