There's no intro, just a chiming chord and straight into the vocal: "I come and stand at every door, but no one hears my silent tread. I knock and yet remain unseen, for I am dead, for I am dead." It's the recognisable Byrds sound, that Rickenbacker whine, but the tempo is slow, deliberate, with Michael Clarke's drums – so alive and mobile elsewhere – dragging behind the beat, like a funeral march.
On vinyl, I Come and Stand at Every Door is placed at the end of the first side of the Byrds' third album, Fifth Dimension: following three fast, super intense, proto-psychedelic tunes (Mr Spaceman, I See You, What's Happening?!?!), it could almost be a drag – and then Roger McGuinn's patient, paper-thin voice sucks you right in.
Musically, it's one long, lilting drone, taken from a traditional folk melody called Great Selchie of Shule Skerry (recorded by Judy Collins on her second album). The lyrics are adapted from a poem by the celebrated Turkist poet Nazim Hikmet – spoken from the viewpoint of a seven-year-old child incinerated at Hiroshima: "I'm seven now as I was then/When children die they do not grow."
I Come and Stand at Every Door was recorded in May 1966. During the previous year, pop had begun to go deeper and darker. Bob Dylan's ascent to mass popularity kick-started the protest boom of late 1965: among the plaints both consequential and trivial were anti-nuclear rants like Barry McGuire's Eve of Destruction and Tim Rose's Come Away Melinda.
The Byrds were more thoughtful. Thanks to their manager, Jim Dickson, and their own experiences, they had direct access to the hardcore beat/folk tradition. They had all grown up with the work of the blacklisted Pete Seeger, whose adaptations informed the Byrds' versions of The Bells of Rhymney and Turn Turn Turn, and whose translation of Hikmet's poem they used on this song.
The third verse takes you into the heart of the holocaust: "My hair was scorched by swirling flame/My eyes grew dim, my eyes grew blind/Death came and turned my bones to dust/And that was scattered by the wind." There is no solo, no break, just the relentless, measured, quiet voice: "I ask for nothing for myself/For I am dead, for I am dead."
No pop song had gone so far, nor pitched it so right. The documentary feel makes it of a piece with Peter Watkins's contemporaneous BBC film, The War Game (shot in 1965, scheduled for transmission in August 1966), which simply aimed to show the effect of a one megaton nuclear bomb hitting the town of Rochester. Banned by the BBC as "too horrifying", it was not shown until 1985.
Nuclear weapons haunted 60s pop culture. Throughout the 50s, there had been H-Bomb tests – weapons with the power of multiple Hiroshimas – and the world had nearly come to an all-out nuclear war during the Bay of Pigs face-off in October 1961. Throughout the late 50 and early 60s CND was a mass youth movement in the UK.
This ever-present threat – the Big Fear of the age – fostered a kind of mass existentialism. As Jeff Nuttall wrote in his brilliant survey of the 60s underground, Bomb Culture: "The people who had not yet reached puberty at the time of the bomb were incapable of conceiving of life with a future." The only certain thing in this world was what Nuttall called "the crackling certainty of Now".
People look back at the extraordinary explosion of music in the 60s with their own prejudices. They forget that it was rooted in a consciousness that felt the world could vaporise in an instant. In the same way, the onset of commercial youth culture – heralded by the creation of "the teenager" in late 1944/early 1945 – coincided with the end of the second world war and the terrible events in Japan.
I Come and Stand at Every Door reinforces this fundamental connection. But there is a resolution, some light at the end of the horror. As the song moves to its climax, a harmony voice comes in: "All that I ask is that for peace/You fight today, you fight today/So that the children of this world/May live and grow and laugh and play." The sense of catharsis is palpable.
The Byrds put this masterpiece of tension and release into the US top 30 when its parent album Fifth Dimension entered the charts in September 1966. With nuclear weapons back in the news, this haunting, almost forgotten, song still strikes a chord.