(Untitled)

The live sides were recorded at the Colden Auditorium of Queens College on 28 February 1970 and at the Felt Forum on 1 March. The studio sides were cut at Columbia in Hollywood in May and June. The live second side is led by a 16:03 Eight Miles High, and the studio sides include Chestnut Mare, Truck Stop Girl and Just a Season. The line-up was McGuinn, Clarence White, Skip Battin and Gene Parsons.

The album reached number 40 in the United States and number 11 in Britain. Bud Scoppa in Rock thought it easily their best recorded performance so far. Lester Bangs called it probably the most perplexing album they had made, and Robert Christgau gave it a C+.

A double album by accident

Terry Melcher proposed a double album, one live record and one of new studio material, sold at close to the price of a single. Jim Dickson, whom the band had fired in June 1967, came back to help edit the live tapes and took a co-producer credit. The name came by mistake: Melcher wrote (Untitled) as a placeholder on the record company paperwork and Columbia pressed it that way, parentheses included. Eve Babitz designed the cover, using photographs Nancy Chester took at the Griffith Observatory.

Seven live tracks were taken from the two New York shows and spliced to sound like one performance: So You Want to Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star, Mr. Tambourine Man, Mr. Spaceman and Eight Miles High from Queens College, and Lover of the Bayou, Positively 4th Street and Nashville West from the Felt Forum. It was the first official release of live Byrds recordings and Skip Battin's first appearance on a Byrds record.

Four songs came from the abandoned Gene Tryp musical: Chestnut Mare, All the Things and Just a Season on the studio disc, and Lover of the Bayou on the live one. The musical was finally staged by Colgate University drama students in November 1992 as Just a Season: A Romance of the Old West. Battin's Well Come Back Home runs 7:40, the longest studio recording the Byrds made. He said it grew out of the Vietnam War and the death of a high school friend there, and it ends with him chanting Nam Myoho Renge Kyo. Hungry Planet, written by Battin and Kim Fowley with McGuinn, has McGuinn on Moog.

Release and reissue

The studio sessions ran from 26 May to 11 June 1970. Columbia released the album in the United States on 14 September 1970 as G 30127 and in Britain on 13 November as S 64095, and it spent 21 weeks on the American chart and four on the British. Advance orders alone reached 100,000 copies. The studio disc, at about 38 minutes, is longer than any other Byrds album. Bruce Eder wrote for AllMusic that it is where the later line-up justified itself as more than a continuation of the mid-1960s band, while Robert Christgau, in the Village Voice in 1971, found the songs unarresting. It was reissued on 22 February 2000 as (Untitled)/(Unissued) with a bonus disc.