[12] Author Ric Menck has commented that in spite of these changes in personnel and the conflict surrounding its creation, The Notorious Byrd Brothers is the band's most cohesive and ethereal-sounding album statement.

[18][19] Though he remained a band member and continued to honor his live concert commitments with the group, Clarke was temporarily replaced in the studio by noted session drummers Jim Gordon and Hal Blaine.

[13] Another factor that contributed to Crosby's dismissal was his controversial song "Triad", a risqué composition about a ménage à trois that was in direct competition with "Goin' Back" for a place on the album.

[22][23] Crosby had also annoyed the other members of the Byrds during their performance at the Monterey Pop Festival when he gave lengthy in-between-song speeches on several controversial subjects, including the JFK assassination and the benefits of giving LSD to "all the statesmen and politicians in the world".

[27] Much to Crosby's chagrin, McGuinn and Hillman reworked his unfinished song "Draft Morning" following his departure and included it in the final running order for the album, giving themselves a co-writing credit.

[30] Clark rejoined the Byrds in October 1967 for three weeks, during which time he and the band performed on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour television program, lip-syncing "Goin' Back" and "Mr.

[12] Following the final concert of the tour, Clark's fear of flying again became a problem when it prevented him from taking a flight to New York with his bandmates and, as a result, he left the band soon after.

[12] This has been corroborated by the Rose Garden's drummer, Bruce Bowdin, who has claimed that Clark's voice can be heard most clearly on the mono mix of "Goin' Back" which was released as a single.

[32] Author and musician Ric Menck has remarked that if Clark is present on either "Space Odyssey" or "Goin' Back", his contributions are not obvious and must have been buried very low in the mix by producer Gary Usher.

[3] The album, as a whole, represented the apex of the McGuinn–Crosby–Hillman songwriting partnership, and took the musical experimentation of the original Byrds to its farthest logical extreme, mixing folk rock, country, psychedelia and jazz, often within a single song.

[4][5][3] The band and producer Gary Usher also used a number of innovative studio-based production techniques on the album, in particular making heavy use of phasing, spatial panning, and rotary speaker effects.

[6][8][35] The band also began experimenting with the Moog modular synthesizer on a number of tracks, making The Notorious Byrd Brothers one of the first rock albums to feature the instrument.

[36] Although McGuinn and Usher played the Moog parts on the song "Space Odyssey" themselves, they ceded the instrument's other appearances on the album to electronic music pioneer and session musician Paul Beaver.

[9][37] This use of pedal steel, along with Clarence White's countrified guitar playing, foreshadowed the country rock direction that the band would explore on their next album, Sweetheart of the Rodeo.

[4][38] The album's opening track, "Artificial Energy", features a prominent horn section and, as such, can be seen as a stylistic relative of "Lady Friend" and "So You Want to Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star", two earlier Byrds' songs that made use of brass.

[2] With its chiming 12-string Rickenbacker guitar and polished harmony singing, band biographer Johnny Rogan has described the song as providing a sharp contrast to the negativity and violence of the opening track.

[38] Thematically, the song recalled the title of the Byrds' previous album, Younger Than Yesterday, and the understated pedal steel guitar playing of Red Rhodes gives the track a subtle country flavor.

[41] The rural ambiance is further heightened by the striking imagery of the lyrics which outline the need for escape and independence: a subject perfectly in keeping with the hippie ethos of the day.

[3] It has been suggested by some commentators that the song exhibits the strong influence of Crosby's writing style, with its laid-back, jazzy feel and dreamy, high tenor vocal part.

[4][44] The McGuinn and Hillman composition "Change Is Now", with its lyrics advising the listener to live life to the full, represents a celebration of the philosophy of carpe diem (popularly translated as "seize the day").

[3] An early instrumental recording of the song, listed under its original working title of "Universal Mind Decoder", was included as a bonus track on the 1997 reissue of The Notorious Byrd Brothers.

[4][13] Lyrically, it follows a newly recruited soldier from the morning of his induction into the military through to his experiences of combat and as such, illustrates the predicament faced by many young American men during the 1960s.

[7] "Old John Robertson", which had already been issued some six months earlier as the B-side of the "Lady Friend" single, was another country-tinged song that looked forward to the band's future country rock experimentation.

[28] According to Hillman, John S. Robertson was something of an eccentric figure around the town, regularly wearing a Stetson hat and sporting a white handlebar moustache, which gave him the appearance of a character out of the old American West.

[1] The album was almost universally well received by the music press upon release, with Jon Landau in the newly launched Rolling Stone magazine noting that "When the Byrds get it together on record they are consistently brilliant.

[16] Pete Johnson, in his review for the Los Angeles Times, summed up the album as "11 good songs spiked with electronic music, strings, brass, natural and supernatural voices, and the familiar thick texture of McGuinn's guitar playing".

[53] Christgau grouped it with contemporary releases by Love (Forever Changes) and The Beach Boys (Wild Honey), remarking: "[i]t's hard to believe that so much good can come out of one place [i.e. Los Angeles].

[5] On his official website, Robert Christgau again commented on the album, declaring that The Notorious Byrd Brothers (along with its follow-up, Sweetheart of the Rodeo) is "[one] of the most convincing arguments for artistic freedom ever to come out of American rock".

[55] Parke Puterbaugh, writing for the Rolling Stone website in 1999, remarked on the presence of "burbling Moog synthesizers and purring steel guitars" on the album, which he ultimately described as "a brilliant window onto an unforgettable place and time".

[3] Band biographer Johnny Rogan has written that the Byrds' greatest accomplishment on the album was in creating a seamless mood piece from a variety of different sources, bound together by innovative studio experimentation.