Roger Mcguinn
From Elektra’s go-to “12-string guy” to head Byrd and online curator of classics…
Album By Album with the high-flying Byrd
“I’VE just learned a new word today,” marvels Roger Mcguinn when Uncut catches up with him between dates on his latest tour. “Hodophile. It’s a Greek word about being in love with the road.” This is particularly fitting in Mcguinn’s case. For the past couple of decades he’s been travelling the highways and byways of America and Europe, accompanied by his wife Camilla, regaling audiences with songs and tales from his storied career with The Byrds and beyond. “We’ve kind of refined the road to a very pleasant experience,” he says. “I absolutely love it.”
Mcguinn’s musical journey began in the early ’60s, as sideman for the likes of Bobby Darin and Judy Collins, before his Rickenbacker sound powered The Byrds through folk-rock, psychedelia, raga-pop, cosmic country and more.
Factor in famous soundtracks, solo albums, collaborations, reunions and his online Folk Den series – active since 1995 – and it’s been quite some trip. “I did The Byrds for nine years and I’ve been doing the Folk Den series for over 20, so I suppose that’s my legacy,” he says. “But you really need to look at the whole picture.” ROB HUGHES
JUDY COLLINS JUDY COLLINS 3
ELEKTRA, 1964
Mcguinn had featured on albums by The Limeliters and the Chad Mitchell Trio before landing his first major gig as guitarist/arranger on Collins’ third LP, which includes future Byrds staples “The Bells Of Rhymney” and “Turn! Turn! Turn!”
[Guitarist] Walter Raim was a friend of Bobby Darin and also a studio musician in New York. He got me the gig with Jac Holzman and I kind of became Elektra’s 12-string guy. I did a lot of acoustic work for them and Judy was on the roster, so it was natural that I ended up on this album. I’d gone to a prep school, so I’d gotten into the habit of dressing up. So there I was, in a tie and a jacket, very polite, doing my work. It started out with me just as a sideman, but I’d come up with ideas: “Hey Judy, this song would be great with a cello.” She’d go, “Oh yeah.” So they brought one in and it did sound great. I remember the bass player
[Bill Takas] got angry with me: “A sideman’s job is to be subservient!” I said, “I don’t think so, man. I just have all these ideas.” Finally, by the end of the day, Judy decided she liked what I was doing and wanted to give me a better title than just a 12-string player. Doing arrangements for her felt natural. I had a ball. She was very hip on the singer-songwriter folk side. She knew Dylan and was friends with Bob Gibson. She told me a story about playing the Gate Of Horn in Chicago and Gibson was there as part of the house band. He ended up loaning her a sixshooter pistol to take home at night after the show, just in case of any trouble. It was Chicago, man! They were heavy times.
THE BYRDS MR TAMBOURINE MAN
COLUMBIA, 1965
The debut that established The Byrds as folk-rock sensations. Mcguinn shares vocals with Gene Clark and David Crosby
I didn’t really start to feel natural as a singer until I got into The Byrds. Prior to that, I hadn’t had much opportunity, although I’d sung harmony for Bobby Darin. I was more of an instrumentalist early on and had to teach myself to sing. It’s a craft that you can develop. It’s sort of like playing the violin, in that it doesn’t have frets or keys, and some people have more natural ability than others. I was scared to death going into the studio to record
“Mr Tambourine Man”, because I was playing with the big boys, the Wrecking Crew. I was so nervous that [drummer] Hal Blaine kept saying to me, “Settle down, kid. Why don’t you go out and have a couple of beers?” I was the only
Byrd who played on the single. The others had to convince Columbia Records to let them be on the album. Michael [Clarke] hadn’t even played drums before and, even though he was a great singersongwriter, Gene Clark had a tendency to drag when he played rhythm guitar. So David [Crosby] took the guitar away from him. Chris [Hillman] was an excellent musician and was able to transfer his guitar and mandolin-playing over to the bass beautifully. He was inspired by Paul Mccartney, who was very melodic. It took probably a year and a half for the whole fame thing to kick in after we’d had our first hit. There’s this time lag between the hit and when you get any kind of money or whatever. That’s when it started to became a bit of a problem between all of us. It went to our heads a bit.
THE BYRDS YOUNGER THAN YESTERDAY
COLUMBIA, 1967
Post-gene Clark, the fourth Byrds LP in just over 18 months finds them expanding into psychedelia, jazz, country-rock and space-fried pop Gene had been a really prolific, edgy songwriter. When Fifth Dimension [1966] came out, he made some money and bought himself a sports car, while the rest of us were still walking around without anything to drive. Sometime after, Gene decided to quit The Byrds while he was sitting on an airplane. So there was a lot of competitiveness in the band by the time we did Younger Than Yesterday. It really worked, too. Crosby was bringing in the jazz influences, I was coming from a folk direction and Chris brought in the country element. I remember being
round at Chris’s house, showing him a cool lick I’d learned from Miriam Makeba’s guitar player. We ended up using it for “So You Want To Be A Rock’n’roll Star”, which was written about the one-hit wonders that you’d see in all the teen magazines.
There was a lot of experimentation in the studio. We were inspired by The Beatles, who were using sound effects and backwards guitars and all sorts of things. Gary Usher was such a good producer, very imaginative. He came up with the ideas of slamming the door and banging on the piano and all that stuff. He even worked out how to hook up two eighttrack machines to get 16 tracks. Gary was a gadget guy like me, so we got on great. I wrote “CTA 102” with my friend Bob Hippard, a sci-fi buff. He’d heard that somebody at Cambridge had discovered a pulsing star. Nobody knew about pulsars or quasars at that point, so we thought that this could be somebody sending an alien signal and wrote about it. An astronomer named Eugene Epstein, who worked for JPL [ Jet Propulsion Laboratory], contacted us and put a note in the Astronomical Journal, saying: “Contrary to the opinions of Doctors Hippard and Mcguinn, CTA 102 is not intelligent life from outer space, it’s a pulsar.” Pulsars had just been discovered by the time the record came out. Dr Epstein introduced me to Carl Sagan at Cornell [University], after we’d played a concert there. He came up to me and said: “That really takes a lot of stamina!” Sagan gave me all his books and I gave him all The Byrds albums. I think he was a fan.
VARIOUS ARTISTS EASY RIDER
DUNHILL, 1969
Mcguinn appears solo and with The Byrds on the soundtrack of Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper’s countercultural classic. Pick of the bunch is “Ballad Of Easy Rider”, cowritten – sort of – with Bob Dylan
I was friends with Peter Fonda from the time I worked with Bobby Darin, when he was working on a movie, Tammy And The Doctor [1963], with Bobby’s wife, Sandra Dee. He and I used to fly around together in Lear jets. When Peter came to do Easy Rider, he put The Byrds’ “Wasn’t Born To Follow” on the soundtrack. Then he decided he wanted something written specifically for it, so he went to New York and screened the movie for Bob Dylan. But Bob didn’t really want to have anything to do with it, because he didn’t like the ending. He was upset that the two lead characters got shot and blown up. He didn’t think that was a good message. So instead he just wrote some lyrics on a paper napkin and said, “Here, give this to Mcguinn. He’ll know what to do with it.” Peter flew back and passed me this napkin, all very reverential: “Bob wanted you to have this, man! It’s kind of pastoral. Maybe you can do something to put an edge on it.” And I came up with the lines: “All he wanted was to be free/and that’s the way it turned out to be.” We showed it to Dennis Hopper and he went, “Wow, man. That’s heavy!” I’ve heard the story about the two characters in Easy Rider being based on me and Crosby. I think Peter was doing me a little bit, but there’s a Youtube video of Dennis Hopper talking about it on The Jay Leno Show. Leno says to him: “I heard you were playing David Crosby in Easy Rider?” Hopper goes, “No, man. But Crosby likes to think that!”
THE BYRDS (UNTITLED)
COLUMBIA, 1970
The Byrds’ often overlooked ninth effort, partly salvaged from ‘Gene Tryp’, an aborted musical co-written by Mcguinn and Broadway director Jacques Levy
The Byrds had hit a peak, then there was a valley and (Untitled)
was a bit of a comeback. By then though, it was too late for some people. I think that’s why it tends to get overlooked in The Byrds’ story. Jacques Levy and I had the idea of doing the ‘Gene Tryp’ project, and I’ve also read that I was planning to make a science-fiction film, but I don’t remember that. In the end, we decided to do the album half live and half in the studio. Clarence White was a brilliant guitarist. He was a real sleeper as well, which you’d never know from his demeanour, because he was very shy and humble. But he could play anything and with a great sense of syncopation. He could’ve been a jazz guy if he’d wanted. He never played the same lick twice, it was never predictable. I clearly remember the difference between The Byrds on stage before Clarence and after him and it was a tremendous contrast
“I was scared to death going in to record ‘Mr Tambourine Man’… I was playing with the big boys, the Wrecking Crew”
for the better. He and I used to leave the stage for a cigarette break, to let Gene [Parsons] and Skip [Battin] do the jam on “Eight Miles High” for a while, then we’d come back out and join them. I’d first met Clarence as a studio musician when Chris Hillman brought him around for our third album [1966’s Fifth Dimension]. He didn’t say an awful lot, but he had a dry humour. Clarence, Kris Kristofferson and Bobby Neuwirth used to come up to my house in Malibu almost every day. We’d write songs and drink chi-chis – coconut juice and vodka.
ROGER MCGUINN ROGER MCGUINN
COLUMBIA, 1973
Mcguinn reunites with writing partner Levy for his first solo outing, issued in the wake of an ill-fated reunion of the original Byrds lineup The opportunity came up after The Byrds’ reunion album. Crosby and Elliot Roberts had come to my house and David said, “I think a lot of what you’re doing with those guys as The Byrds is good, but a lot of it isn’t.” And I had to agree with him, because I was letting everybody have their songs on there and it was too democratic. So he had this idea to get The Byrds back together for one album for Asylum and maybe do a tour and see how it went. I agreed to do it, but that didn’t go so well. I’d already put away the Clarence White Byrds, so I no longer had that to fall back on. So I put a band together and went out on the road solo, then I went into the studio to make my first record. I tried to do anything I wanted on there – a sea shanty, a blues, whatever – I wasn’t thinking about trying to have hits. I’d worked with Jacques Levy since ’68 and he and I had developed a good writing method. He was the lyricist and I came up with the melodies. I don’t regard myself as a writer of wonderful songs, so having Jacques there was really a benefit to me. Making a solo record was something I did to have fun. I produced it myself and was just doing music I liked. I was hoping that other people would feel the same way and appreciate it too, but it didn’t turn out that way. It wasn’t a great seller. For my next one [1974’s Peace On You], the record company insisted I had a producer.
MCGUINN, CLARK & HILLMAN MCGUINN, CLARK & HILLMAN
CAPITOL, 1979
A trio of reconstituted Byrds may have been a great idea on paper, but it didn’t quite pan out as planned The three of us getting back together again started very organically. The Troubadour in Los Angeles was having an anniversary, so I got up and did a song or two. Gene was in the audience and I invited him to sing “Eight Miles High” with me. Afterwards my manager said, “You guys sound really good together. Why don’t you go out on the road?” I though it was a good idea and called my booking agent, so Gene and I went on an acoustic tour, just the two of us, for a month or two, then Chris Hillman got wind of it. We ended up with this record deal for Capitol. The Albert brothers
[Ron and Howard] had produced Chris before, so they were kind of pushing him to be the front guy on the album. And they told me that they didn’t want to make it sound like The Byrds, so I couldn’t play my Rickenbacker or sing very much. As a result, it wasn’t that fulfilling for me. Ironically though, the only hit we had was “Don’t You Write Her Off”, which was a song I’d written with Bob Hippard. We managed to get some good radio play with that and did pretty well. We toured New Zealand and Australia and played shows around the US. It was a pretty successful operation for the first album, then Gene got too heavily into substance abuse and stopped showing up for gigs. That’s when it fell apart. I put away Mcguinn, Clark & Hillman and decided to go out solo again.
ROGER MCGUINN BACK FROM RIO
ARISTA, 1991
Having more or less sat out the ‘80s, Mcguinn returned in style with this sixth solo album, partly thanks to a hook-up with Tom Petty
The ’60s had been so intense and then I didn’t really fit into the punk rock thing of the ’70s. So I kind of took the ’80s off. I didn’t stop touring, I just stopped recording. I only got back into it because I was hanging out with Tom Petty. I’d first met him in the late ’70s, when my manager played me “American Girl”, which I loved. We’d lost touch for maybe 10 years, then Camilla and I went to see him play in St Petersburg, Florida. I ended up joining Tom on stage and the following day he invited me to go on tour in Europe with him and Bob Dylan. We had a day off in Gothenburg and I had a tune that I wanted to show him. He thought it was a good one, so we wrote a song based on the autobiography of John Phillips, Papa John, called “King Of The Hill”. When we got back to the States we made a demo of it, which, incidentally, recently came out on his An American Treasure collection of stuff put together after he passed away. Arista Records liked it and signed me on the basis of that, which turned out to be the ticket to making Back From Rio. Tom joined me on the album, along with most of the Heartbreakers, plus Elvis Costello and Michael Penn and others. It was a really good project for me. I was also writing a few songs with Camilla on there. She and I had started working together back when we first met. We recently wrote a new one, “Sweet Memories”.
ROGER MCGUINN TREASURES FROM THE FOLK DEN
APPLESEED, 2001
Alarmed by the prospect of a disappearing genre, Mcguinn started his online Folk Den series – curating and re-recording old classics – in 1995. This handsome comp is packed with esteemed guests I was listening to a Smithsonian Folkways album of traditional songs and it dawned on me that, in America at least, the singersongwriter had taken over from the traditional folk singer. I was worried that the music of people like Pete Seeger, Odetta and Tommy Mackem could easily get lost in the coming years. The catalyst for starting my own online label was after George Harrison passed away and his record company wanted to do a tribute album. I hired a studio in Nashville on my own dime and got John Jorgenson and Stan Lynch to back me on “If I Needed Someone”, which George had written based on The Byrds’ version of “The Bells Of Rhymney”. The record company guy said, “Give us the master and we’ll send you a cheque.” I said, “No, give us a cheque and we’ll send you the master.” This cat-and-mouse thing went back and forth for a few weeks until we finally realised that he was never going to give us the money. That’s when I started my own label. Being a gadget guy, I knew how to put songs up on the internet as free downloads, so I uploaded one in November ’95 and I haven’t really missed a month since. It’s a labour of love. It also keeps my studio chops up, allowing me to add banjos, guitars and Rickenbacker. It’s a case of adding a little flavour of my own. When it came to putting together Treasures From The Folk Den, that album had all the original guys on it, great folk singers like Tommy Makem, Josh White Jr, Judy Collins, Joan Baez, Jean Ritchie and Odetta. It was such a thrill.
“I kind of took the ’80s off. I didn’t stop touring, I just stopped recording”