Skip Battin - Barry Ballard 1976

Kim (Fowley) and I definitely had our own style which didn't mesh as well as we would have liked but at the same time that gave birth to me having a solo album. The next Byrd album that we cut ('Farther Along') was really a reaction to 'Byrdmaniax'. We came over here to England and did one of our own in eight days just to show everybody that was what we wanted to do, to get down to business and do it. Perhaps we over-reacted and maybe we could have made a better album. 'America's Great National Pastime' was the single in the States and it did have some success and it was the most accepted Byrd single in a few years. The idea for the song came from a Coke ad on TV that Kim had seen. He called me on the phone saying he had this great idea for a song and we actually wrote it on the phone in about fifteen or twenty minutes.