ROGER McGUINN
Religion, recreationals and regrets over “chick magnet” Gene Clark, as The Byrds’ group captain submits to the MOJO Interview. Bob Mehr hears his confession.
Among the businessmen and golfloving retirees in this upscale suburban orlando eatery, he cuts a distinctive figure. tall and lean, dressed in a uniform – jacket, jeans and cowboy boots – of all black, Roger mcguinn introduces himself in a voice that’s as airily familiar as the sound of his signature 12-string Rickenbacker guitar. it’s a warm winter afternoon in Central florida and mcguinn is joined by his wife and business partner Camilla. the mcguinns left los angeles and limped into the region some 30 years ago in a state of disarray. his byrds royalties were sequestered in a byzantine maze of contracts, which Camilla was eventually able to navigate, getting Columbia Records to pay up and put them back on their feet. “it wasn’t a lot, but it was enough to keep us from being homeless,” he says. “to the label’s credit, they’ve been very good ever since.” the couple had met in the late ’70s, when mcguinn was in the midst of an uncertain post-byrds solo career and searching, personally and professionally. he would find love (marrying Camilla a few months later) and religion. a spiritual seeker, mcguinn had adopted the subud religion in the ’60s (precipitating his name change from Jim to Roger) and became a born again Christian in 1977, a faith he still maintains. turning 75 this summer, mcguinn has the relaxed air someone who lives as he pleases. following a brief byrds reunion and a major label solo deal with arista in the early ’90s, he’s mostly turned his back on the industry, resisting further byrds projects (somewhat to the chagrin of surviving bandmates david Crosby and Chris hillman). instead, the mcguinns run their own label and touring business. last year, they released a 20th anniversary edition of his Folk Den project – a 100-song exploration that he began in the mid ’90s – and mcguinn continues to play solo shows around the world. meanwhile, thanks in part to his 1966 ditty mr. spaceman, he’s become a popular figure among the fraternity of veteran astronauts who gather at nearby Cape Canaveral, performing at their annual hall of fame ceremonies. “You think rock and rollers party hard… you should hang with apollo mission guys,” he says. mcguinn got his first guitar after hearing elvis Presley, gene Vincent and rockabilly, but swopped it for a banjo during the folk boom. after a few eventful years on that scene – as well as detours backing bobby darin and working in the brill building – mcguinn would return to rock. inspired by the beatles, he helped found the byrds and led them for nearly a decade through numerous musical and personnel changes. for the last 25 years he’s returned to the folk songs that first fired his teenaged imagination. “so which is it – am i rocker or
a folkie?Ó he asks, rhetorically. ÒI still donÕt know. IÕm just Roger McGuinn.Ó
In the late 1940s your parents, Jim and Dorothy, wrote a bestselling book, a satire of Baby And Child Care, Dr Spock’s famed child-rearing manual.
It was called Parents Can’t Win and it was based on their experiences trying to raise me using child psychology and how it backfired all the time. It was considered very topical and sold well. After that, we travelled quite a bit – moved from Chicago to Florida, and then lived in New York for a while, then back to Chicago. As a kid that probably broadened my perspective in life. I didn’t just grow up on one block.
Was your family musical?
My parents sang show tunes around the house. My mother had studied piano. Her mother composed things in the classical vein and performed at the Art Institute of Chicago sometimes. I didn’t pay much attention to music until I heard Heartbreak Hotel. The transistor radio had just come out and I’d ride my bike around Chicago and listen to it. It was the drama of the song – and that really fabulous echo. I asked for a guitar after I heard it and got one. It was a Harmony [acoustic] with a huge action, and I couldn’t play it. Then my father got me a Kay 161 electric guitar, like Jimmy Reed had. That’s when I learned to play the lead from [Gene Vincent’s] Woman Love, which was the flipside of Be-Bop-A-Lula. When I met George Harrison later it turned out he’d learned the same thing at the same time.
But you soon abandoned rock’n’roll in favour of folk music.
I had heard folk music before – Burl Ives and The Weavers – but I wasn’t really that interested until Bob Gibson came around. He played five-string banjo and did these story songs that captivated me. After that I went out and bought his records. I learned how to play the banjo on my Kay electric. Took the guitar strings off and tuned it like a banjo. Learned the Earl Scruggs three-fingered picking style. That’s the underpinning of all the Byrds stuff – the jingle-jangle arpeggios.
You got your professional start working with The Limeliters while you were still in your teens.
I was already playing coffeehouses in Chicago by then. I’d get 10 bucks a night to play a couple sets. I would emulate Gibson and Pete Seeger. At 17, I got hired by The Limeliters to do a session out in Los Angeles and be the opening act for them at the Ash Grove. I thought I’d be with The Limeliters for a long time, but after the recording they said, “See ya later!” But they’d only given me a one-way ticket.
You also made the passing acquaintance of a young thespian with musical aspirations…
David Crosby. He had been an actor and was hanging around the Ash Grove. I showed him some chords and he taught me to drive. It was a stick shift, an old Chevy convertible from the ’50s. I remember getting up to the top of La Cienega, and having to juggle the clutch and the brake and trying not to hit anybody… with David sitting there. That was a trial by fire. We hung out briefly – I stayed with him at his mother’s house in Santa Barbara for a bit, then I headed to San Francisco.
From there you ended up playing with The Chad Mitchell Trio, before being snatched up by Bobby Darin.
It was a couple years with The Chad Mitchell Trio, though I was more a sideman. We did some interesting things – played the Bell Telephone Hour television show with Segovia. We did a 90-day tour of South America that was pretty intense, and I got into a fight with Chad and he punched me in the mouth… so I’d about had it. Just then Bobby Darin saw us opening for Lenny Bruce in LA. He came backstage and said, “I’m thinking about putting a folk segment in my act and I’d like to hire you.” I told him I already had a job. He asked what they were paying me. I told him and he said, “I’ll double it.” So I went with Bobby. I used to ask Bobby a lot of questions about the business. He said, “If you can make it in rock’n’roll you can do anything else.” It put a seed in my head for later.
Darin stopped performing for a time due to his health – but he set you up as a songwriter in the Brill Building working for his publishing company.
To show up in a cubicle for eight hours every day wasn’t my idea of fun. There’d be a metal folding chair, a piano, and I’d sit with someone like Artie Resnick or Kenny Young trying to write a hit. But from there I got into studio work for Elektra Records, played with the Irish Rovers, Judy Collins, and Paul Simon hired me for the demo of The Sound Of Silence. He wanted a 12-string on it. I was the go-to guy for the acoustic 12-string.
By early 1964, you’d had a Beatles epiphany.
I saw a promo for The Beatles with the screaming girls and went and bought Meet The Beatles. I was doing all those songs at coffeehouses and other folk songs with a similar backbeat. I had the idea that you could take any old song, and put that 4/4 beat to it and it would sound good. I got hired by the Troubadour [in LA] to play with Hoyt Axton and was doing the songs that way. The audience reaction was negative. I got mad at them: “What’s the matter with you people?” [Country singer] Roger Miller was on the bill too. He said, “It sounds good, but you’d do a lot better if you didn’t get so grumpy with the audience.” (Laughs)
In that audience was one Gene Clark… Gene came backstage and said, “I get what
you’re doing – let’s get together and write some songs.” I saw him as a rugged John Wayne character; he didn’t get fragile until later in life. He had a 12-string acoustic too, liked folk music and The Beatles. So we started constructing these Beatley songs. The first one was You Showed Me. As we were writing it, the guitars started doing this figure-eight thing. We weren’t doing it. It was like a divining rod. Something is going on here…
And it was then that David Crosby re-entered your life.
Me and Gene were writing tunes, and Crosby came around. He sang harmony and it sounded good. He said, “I wanna be in your band.” I told him, “We don’t have a band, we’re just writing songs.” He said, “If I can be in your band, I know a guy who’s got a recording studio we can use for free.” I told him: “You’re in the band!” (Laughs) I was a little leery of him, because when we were hanging out in Santa Barbara he was pretty wild. He had the substance abuse problem even back then. I don’t know if I want to work with his guy. But when we sang together, it just clicked. Then we got into the studio and that’s when we decided we needed more musicians and [bassist] Chris Hillman and [drummer] Michael Clarke came in.
Your Rickenbacker sound was something of an accident wasn’t it?
The engineers at Columbia had no experience working with rock’n’roll bands. They were worried we’d blow out all their equipment. So they added a lot of compression to temper it, to keep from pinning the needles. It did dramatically change the sound of the Ric, made it sustain longer. It gave it an airy quality, almost like a wind instrument. Later on, when Rickenbacker made a signature model for me, I had them put a compressor into it, so I always got that sound.
You cut Mr. Tambourine Man – your first serious Dylan cover, but you’d actually known him for a while before that.
Yeah, I’d run into Dylan in the Village at Gerde’s Folk City, when he was just playing hootenannies. Then he got the deal with Columbia. I was happy for him… but I was kind of surprised. The thing about Dylan, though, was the girls in the audience always liked him. That was unusual for folk singers. I mean, Cisco Houston or someone like that was kind of neutral for the girls. He came by the studio and I remember we were playing something of his and when it was over he said, “What was that?” I said, “It’s one of your songs, man.” He didn’t recognise it.
The Byrds would soon become a fairly fractious group. But early on, did it feel like a tight ship? Were you pulling in the same direction?
It was more like a pirate ship – every man for himself (laughs). At least compared to The Beatles, who were all for one and one for all and stood up for each other. After Mr. Tambourine Man the game of getting more of your songs on the record got to be intense. [Byrds producer] Terry Melcher and I were kind of friendly. David Crosby didn’t like Terry, and Terry didn’t like David. So he didn’t get many songs on the record, and that was a big dividing.
Most bands have a natural leader. Is it fair to say you assumed that role in The Byrds?
I wasn’t that great or dynamic a leader. “Come on boys – we’re gonna do this!” It was never like that. The way I got the part was when we recorded with the Wrecking Crew, cutting the band track for Mr. Tambourine Man, I looked at the amounts of money that people were getting and this guy named Roger Webster, the ‘session leader’, got twice as much as I did. So I said, “From now on I’m gonna be the leader.” And that’s how I got to be the leader. I wanted that money, the double pay.
The relative stability of The Byrds ended in 1966, when Gene Clark left the band after suffering a panic attack aboard a flight.
We thought we could soldier on just the four of us. But the truth was the gigs weren’t the same without him, because Gene was a chick magnet. Girls used to go wild and that wasn’t happening without him. I didn’t know this until many years later, until [co-manager] Jim Dickson was ill and I visited him in the hospital – he probably thought he was going to die, though he didn’t. But he told me a story of him and [co-manager] Eddie Tickner taking Gene aside with the idea of going solo, making him into another Elvis or something. So maybe there was more to it than fear of flying.
The following year’s Monterey Pop Festival was a triumphant breakout moment for a number of acts, but not The Byrds.
“Crosby taught me to drive. It was an old Chevy convertible from the ’50s. That was a trial by fire.”
I enjoyed the show, loved seeing Jimi Hendrix and Otis Redding and all that stuff. But as far as The Byrds, it was not happening. It was a little nightmarish actually. It was already falling apart at the seams.
Soon after Michael Clarke quit and then you fired David Crosby.
Chris [Hillman] was the catalyst with Crosby. David was being insufferable going, “You guys aren’t good enough musicians to play with me.” And Chris said, “We gotta get rid of him.” We went up to his house and said, “Sorry David, we just don’t want to work with you.” He said, “Aw man, but we make such great music together.” David thinks I said, “We can do better without you” – I didn’t say that. I said, “We can still make good music without you.” But, in fact, we did miss him. It was a mistake. But he wasn’t happy and Stephen Stills was trying to get him away from us because he saw what a tremendous harmony talent he was.
Sweetheart Of The Rodeo and the arrival of Gram Parsons in 1968 was a reboot for The Byrds, one that led to a long period of country-rock with a series of line-ups.
I had messed around with country music, stuff like Chris’s Girl With No Name, and even Mr. Spaceman was country-oriented, 2/4 time. When Gram came in he was flat-out in love with country music. I liked it, but he loved it. And his love of it was infectious. So I started to listen to country radio and went out and bought a Nudie suit and cowboy boots. Chris and Gram were really united in the country thing, too. I liked it up to the point where Gram wanted to hire a steel guitar player in the band and get rid of me (laughs).
A romantic cult built up around Gram, and Gene Clark to a lesser extent, in part due to their tragic early deaths.
Chris always complains about that: “These dead guys get all the attention!” I thought Gram had a good amount of talent, but he wasn’t diligent about it. He wouldn’t show up to gigs, ’cos he didn’t have to. He was independently wealthy and didn’t need to make money with music. I remember he was hanging out with Rolling Stones and Jagger said, “You got a gig man.” And Gram’s like, “Eh, I’m not gonna bother with that.”
You recorded the title song to the Easy Rider movie. Dylan started it with a few lines he scribbled on a napkin and handed to the film’s co-star Peter Fonda, with instructions to pass it along to you.
He gave the napkin to Fonda who gave it to me – it was like the Holy Grail. Really, Dylan just didn’t want to be involved with the movie. He thought it was gonna be a lousy B-movie, biker flick. He didn’t know it was going to be an iconic film. A couple weeks after it came out he called me at two in the morning – he was mad he’d been credited on the song. “What’s with this credit? I don’t need the money. Take it off!” It was nice of him. After I took Dylan’s credit off, the thing generated like $500,000, but Columbia didn’t pay me that because I was still one-fifth of the old Byrds contract. So they kept $400,000 of it.
“When Elvis died, he was only seven years older than I was. I thought, Man, I better straighten out.”
In a way, you’re a big part of the film, because Peter Fonda was sort of playing you. That’s what Peter told me. He told me that he was doing me and Dennis Hopper was doing [Crosby]. When I first saw the film I didn’t get that, because Peter was kind of a quiet, cool character anyway. I once told Peter, “I wish I’d been in the movie.” He said, “Well, you were.”
During that era, everyone was exploring drugs and alternative spirituality – but you’d got into Subud and dropped acid in the early ’60s. I wasn’t very spiritual. I’d gone through Catholic schools and kinda threw it all away – threw the baby out with the bathwater. But I started going to these Subud meetings in New York and gradually felt something happening. It was an interesting way to get spiritual. It was non-verbal, there wasn’t any doctrine. It was going into a room and speaking in tongues and whirling like a dervish. It was automatic stuff and there was music in it, natural harmonies. My drug experience came when I had some time off from working with Bobby Darin in ’62. I’d just gotten married and rented a house in San Francisco in the Mission District. It was kind of a commune and we got some Sandoz labs acid in sugar cubes wrapped in aluminum foil. It was the real stuff. It was amazing. I smoked pot, but wasn’t into downers. I was always into pills, amphetamines. And eventually cocaine. There was a time when I wanted to make enough money to get all the cocaine I wanted. That was an ambition for a while. But I finally quit it.
You worked with Terry Melcher, before and after his involvement with Charles Manson. Was he dramatically altered by the experience?
Oh yeah, he was beside himself, he was terrified. I took him on the road at the time to kinda cool him out. He was totally devastated by that. I think he thought it was his fault – that he had promised Manson something and somehow caused everything. He came back to produce those later Byrds records, including [1971’s] Byrdmaniax. Then we did Farther Along which was a kneejerk reaction to Terry’s over-production of the previous album with all the strings and things. We decided to produce ourselves in London and that was not a good idea. We didn’t have a gatekeeper. At that point, that version of the band had run its course.
Which led you into a reunion of the original Byrds in ’73.
David Crosby came out to my house with [manager] Elliot Roberts and said, “You know, some of this stuff you guys have been doing is OK, but some of it isn’t” – and I had to agree with him. He said, “Let’s get the original guys together and we’ll make an album.” It sounded like a good idea. I put the other version of The Byrds away and did the reunion. It turned out it was not what people hoped it would be. Partly, it was David’s revenge for being fired – he was the producer and he put the Rickenbacker way in the back. It wasn’t really like The Byrds.
Other than getting back together briefly for legal reasons in 1989 and for your Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 1991, you don’t seem to have been much tempted to do anything else as The Byrds.
Honestly, I just didn’t want to. Gene Clark and Michael Clarke had been in a bogus Byrds for a while – they even had Rick Danko and other people in it. I thought, “I don’t want to do that kind of thing.” I don’t even want to be a rock’n’roller any more. When I play now, I still do the songs – that’s the important thing. The songs hold up.
Do you still talk to the others?
I’m internet buddies with Crosby, we talk on Twitter. Chris doesn’t do Twitter, but he did send me a video for my birthday on Facebook. He did Dave Brubeck’s Take Five. This is a guy who didn’t like jazz, but he learned Take Five on mandolin and sent it to me as a kind of present. The three of us are still friendly.
In the late ’70s you cleaned up and also found religion, becoming a born again Christian. What prompted those changes?
When Elvis died, that was the catalyst. I was doing speed and the same kind of drugs he was. He was only seven years older than I was, and I thought, “Man, I better straighten out.” At the time, I was experiencing a physical depression. I was feeling this heaviness that was so overwhelming. I ran into this jazz guy, this piano player, and he said, “That sounds like spiritual oppression to me. Do you believe in the power of prayer?” He took my hands and he prayed: “Lord Jesus come into this man’s life in your own time.” That was it – and nothing happened. Couple weeks later I started to get this really heavy thing again. I thought, “How can I keep from feeling this?” I didn’t hear an audible voice, but I thought, “Well, you could accept Jesus.” And I did, and bam, that negative feeling just went away.
Since your last major label album – 1991’s star-studded Back From Rio – you’ve operated as a family business. Are you happier doing it this way?
Absolutely. Ramblin’ Jack Elliott once told me, “Rog, the best fun I ever had was when I packed the Land Rover and me and [wife] Polly hit the road and played these little gigs.” I thought, “Man, that would be a great life.” So that’s what we’ve been doing. We keep refining the show, refining what we do.
You seem to be in good health and great voice still – safe to say you’ll continue to refine it rather than retire?
Well, my mother lived to be 102 years old. Segovia was performing into his nineties, so was Ravi Shankar and Pete Seeger. So it’s conceivable. (Holds his hands up) As long as these still work, it’s conceivable.