to its farthest logical extreme, mixing folk rock, country, psychedelia and jazz, often within a single song. 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. 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. McGuinn had first discovered the Moog during the Monterey Pop Festival, where the instrument's inventor, Robert Moog, had set up a booth to demonstrate his new creation to the musicians who were performing at the festival. Being something of an electronics buff, McGuinn was eager to experiment with the synthesizer in the recording studio, although reportedly, Hillman failed to share his enthusiasm for the instrument. 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. The album also featured the pedal steel guitar playing of session musician Red Rhodes, which represented the first use of the instrument on a Byrds' recording. 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. The songs 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. The song deals with the dark side of amphetamine use and it was Chris Hillman who initially suggested that the band should "write a song about speed". The title was suggested by drummer Michael Clarke, and his input in the creation of the song was sufficient to afford him a rare writing credit. Although the song's lyrics initially seem to be extolling the virtues of amphetamines, the tale turns darker in the final verse when it becomes apparent that the drug taker has been imprisoned for murdering a homosexual man, as evidenced by the song's final couplet: "I'm coming down off amphetamine/And I'm in jail 'cause I killed a queen." Although the press had accused the Byrds of writing songs about drugs in