Its impact on the radio was, thus, muted compared with airplay that it should have received, based on musical appeal and requests.
It ran into trouble over its title, the strangeness of its sound (which made more conservative programmers suspicious to start with), and the paranoia of some parents and radio station officials, who were convinced that the song was really a paean to drug use, rather than a song about flying that just happened to have been written by one or more composers on drugs. The singing, laced with impeccable high harmonies around an eerily compelling melody, was strangely alluring as well, and the song had all of the earmarks of a Top Ten hit. McGuinn had been listening to the music of John Coltrane, and made his 12-string guitar imitate the sound of a saxophone in a soaring, searing, rippling performance (repeated to some extent elsewhere on the resulting album on the song "I See You"). Opening with Chris Hillman's most prominent appearance on bass to date and a hard rhythm guitar accompaniment, the song was immediately seized by Roger McGuinn's 12-string guitar, sounding as though it had suddenly been transformed into another instrument. Inspired by the band members' first flight to London, it pulled together observations about flying, filtered through a druggy ambience - the members' condition writing the song, if not on the flight - and the surreal experience, on arriving, of becoming international stars in just a matter of months. The defining pop-psychedelic single by the Byrds, "Five Miles High" opened up a rich new territory of musical exploration for the band - but it was also the final single by the five-man line-up of the band, representing the final contribution of co-founder and principal songwriter Gene Clark and for all of its bold new sounds and lyrics, it also became the group's first controversial single and, as a result, never did as well as it should have.
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