Roger McGuinn, best known as founding member, frontman and only consistent member of folk rock and psychedelic rock pioneers The Byrds, brought his “Songs and Stories” tour to Cincinnati on Wednesday for an intimate concert experience.
Playing at the ornate Cincinnati Memorial Hall, which only fills a capacity of 550 people, the concert experience was more akin to seeing a theater performance than your traditional concert.
Opening with The Byrds’ classic arrangement of Bob Dylan’s “My Back Pages,” McGuinn came onstage alone, only with the company of a few guitars, one of which being his signature 12-string Rickenbacker guitar. The Byrds, while only being on the level of other mid-60s rock groups like the Beatles and the Beach Boys for a short period of time, have had a huge impact on rock music since, inspiring musicians like Tom Petty and Peter Buck of R.E.M.
After McGuinn concluded “My Back Pages,” he told the audience that he started with that song because he would be taking us on a journey through his back pages. Starting all the way back in his childhood in Chicago, McGuinn spoke of the music he taught himself guitar to, playing a few measures of “Heartbreak Hotel” by Elvis Presley and “Be-Bop-a-Lula” by Gene Vincent.
McGuinn then went into his experiences learning folk music at the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago, playing “Rock Island Line” by Lead Belly and then The Byrds’ most enduring hit, their jangly, pop-oriented version of Pete Seeger’s “Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There is a Season).”
McGuinn regaled the small crowd with stories of his life traveling around the country in the ‘60s and ‘70s, from meeting David Crosby and Chris Hillman (with whom he formed The Byrds), to his experiences with Peter Fonda and writing the original song “Ballad of Easy Rider” with some help from Dylan for the 1969 countercultural epic Easy Rider, and joining Dylan on the legendary Rolling Thunder Revue tour in 1975 and 1976. The whole performance had the same feeling as a grandfather telling stories to you and playing guitar in a living room.
For the well-known songs he performed like “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” and “Mr. Tambourine Man,” he encouraged the crowd to sing along to the chorus, and the small venue echoed with the voices of the crowd that knew every word.
Along with Byrds’ classics like “I Wasn’t Born To Follow” and “Mr. Spaceman,” McGuinn played and spoke on the importance of traditional folk songs like “The Water is Wide” and “The Preacher and the Bear” (which he performed on his longneck five-string banjo). McGuinn, who self-proclaimed he has “always been into gadgets,” has been consistently uploading and cataloging one folk song every month on his website under the Folk Den project since 1995.
The show, which didn’t allow video or phones during its two sets, allowed for attendees to record the encore, which began with McGuinn playing an acoustic arrangement of the psychedelic 1966 Byrds’ single “Eight Miles High.” McGuinn ended the show with “May the Road Rise to Meet You,” a song he wrote in the early ‘90s along with his wife Camilla based on an old Irish blessing, a beautiful sendoff for a personal night.
