Rock and roll legend and founder of '60s luminary band The Byrds, Roger McGuinn, will make a stop in Cincinnati on Oct. 2 at Memorial Hall, touring his one-man show that revisits his historic life and varied career.
CityBeat spoke with McGuinn ahead of the show while out on the road. Our conversation covered his early work in the Brill Building; forming The Byrds; encounters with The Beatles, Bob Dylan and The Beach Boys; the origin of the famous Byrd glasses; an innovative, never-realized Byrds project and more.
McGuinn started his career just of school, backing folk groups with a short stint in The Limeliters before spending a couple of years with The Chad Mitchell Trio. McGuinn was then hired on by music legend Bobby Darin in 1962 as a sideman and songwriter under Darin’s T.M. Music publishing company, which would find him working in the historic Brill Building in New York as a staff songwriter.
He spent that time in the New York folk scene with contemporaries like John Sebastian and Bob Dylan before moving to Los Angeles and forming groundbreaking folk-rock band and Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductees, The Byrds.
McGuinn and the band would make history with a new sound combining folk elements with the rhythm and drive of rock and roll, simultaneously inventing the jangle guitar sound, a combination of McGuinn’s unique style of playing and the sound of his 12-string Rickenbacker guitar that he got after spotting one in The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night. Later, McGuinn further reinvented the tone of popular music with his playing on the band’s forward-thinking psychedelic recordings.
The Byrds helped define an era, growing and constantly evolving over the band’s short but influential run. Between hits like the amped up, melody-infused covers of Bob Dylan songs like “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “All I Really Wanna Do,” along with Pete Seeger standard “Turn! Turn! Turn!” in 1965, they broke out as one of the biggest on the scene in a pivotal time in music history. This was before they morphed into the spaced-out psychedelia of Fifth Dimension in 1966 with “Eight Miles High” or “So You Wanna Be a Rock ‘n’ Roll Star” off of Younger Than Yesterday in 1967 to McGuinn’s innovative raga, sitar-like guitar work on The Notorious Byrd Brothers.
The band further matured and developed into the extremely influential version that recorded 1968’s Sweetheart of the Rodeo, a record regularly regarded as a best of all time and one that helped define a new genre of country-influenced rock and roll.
McGuinn would go on to collaborate with Dylan multiple times over the years, working on songs like “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” and performing on The Rolling Thunder Revue tour, later touring with Dylan and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers in the ‘80s.
McGuinn is also part archivist. He began his longest-running project, Folk Den, in 1995, preserving folk songs for the future by recording a traditional song each month, then posting the song with its lyrics and chords to his website for free download.
He has traveled and toured with his wife Camilla for a number of years, working as a solo act and doing what he loves in the simplest and purest way possible.
McGuinn covers a lot of his history in his one-man show, so some of that has been excluded. Here’s our conversation edited for length and clarity
CB: Did your experience with Bobby Darin affect how you thought about music and what did you learn from him?
RM: Well, he was great, he was kinda old school. He worked with George Burns and George was a sort of old guy of the industry, so Bobby Darin had that kind of old-school ethic of a shoeshine, suit pressed, on time and in tune. He was, really, very professional and I used to follow him around and ask him questions about the music business and what to do and how to make it and everything. He gave me some good advice, he said, ‘You got to test it under pressure, you gotta get up in front of audiences as much as you can because it doesn’t matter how good you are at home, you gotta get under fire.’ It really does make a difference, you know, people freeze up under fire.
CB: I’d love to hear about your Brill Building experience.
RM: Well, you know, I wasn’t that crazy about it because I love the road. I love to travel and I love getting onstage and performing and the Brill Building was like an office gig, it’s like a little cubicle. You go in there all day long and sit there and try to knockout tunes. So, I really kind of played hooky from it. I wrote one song that got to be number 6 in Australia. I’ll talk about that in my show but the rest of the stuff I did there was negligible, really.
CB: Were you in the office?
RM: Yeah, I was in the building, 1619 Broadway. It was, like, on a high floor, and it had about maybe 8 or 10 little 8’x5’ cubicles, you know, with a piano and a metal folding chair. (laughs) It really was not very a comfortable environment to work in.
CB: I bet not but what a place.
RM: Yeah, well, it’s exciting that it was what it was. A lot of people think Carole King worked there, but no, she worked for Aldon (Aldon Music publishing company) which was 1625 Broadway, down the street.
CB: How about “The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s in His Kiss)” — were you around during that time? I think that was from Bobby Darin’s office, right?
RM: No, I wasn’t there for that. I don’t think I was, but I worked with Artie Resnick and Kenny Young and I think they wrote “Under the Boardwalk.”
CB: Oh, wow, that’s good stuff. I just interviewed John Sebastian a few weeks ago; he grew up in New York and talked about the folk scene in the early ‘60s. How much did you get involved in that world?
RM: Yeah, I lived in the village for a while. I knew John there — he and I were friends. In fact, he’s the guy that turned me onto to the little Byrd glasses (small, square, beatnik-style glasses McGuinn famously wore in The Byrds). He was walking up MacDougal Street one night at about 3 in the morning and I was walking south and he had these antique cobalt blue sunglasses that had been given to him by Felix from Jim Kweskin’s jug band. So, I said, ‘Cool shades!” and he said ‘Yeah, try em’ on and look up at the streetlights. Move your head around, it’s really groovy.’ (laughs) But I did that and I remembered that, so when I got some money in L.A. I got some wireframes and took them to the eye doctor and had prescription lenses put in and they were my glasses, they were just my main glasses. I wore them day and night. It was part of the beatnik thing, you know, Jack Kerouac, people wearing sunglasses at night.
CB: That’s a great story. What kind of places did you play with The Limeliters and Chad Mitchell Trio?
RM: I only worked with The Limeliters for two weeks. I recorded an album with them in L.A., at The Ash Grove (legendary LA folk venue). I talk about this in my show, but, at The Ash Grove, we were invited to play the Hollywood Bowl opening up for Eartha Kitt. But The Chad Mitchell Trio, I was with them for a couple of years and we toured all over the states and mostly colleges — did a lot of college concerts and we played a three-month tour of South America, then I quit right after that. (laughs)
CB: Did you learn anything from those guys?
RM: Not really — it was a good gig though. I enjoyed a lot of it. I was the only musician. They didn’t play anything. So, what happened was they’d been a trio where one of the guys played guitar but he went back to college. They wanted to keep it as a vocal trio because they’d all come from a chorus, a glee club kind of environment at Gonzaga University.
CB: I know you were born in Chicago, then lived in New York during the Brill Building work then moved to L.A. — did those moves between cities and creative lives affect your approach to making music?
RM: Yeah, well, I had a long history of moving around. My folks, my parents wrote a book called Parents Can’t Win in 1948 and it was a bestseller, so we went on a book tour of the eastern United States, went down to Florida and ended up living in St. Augustine for a year and then we moved up to New York and lived in the New York area for a few years. Then they went back to Chicago, which was good because the Old Town School of Folk Music had just opened up in 1957 and I got enrolled in that and I was there until I went on the road with The Limeliters. So, that was fortuitous that we went back to Chicago because there was nothing happening, really, like that, there was no school for folk music in New York, that I knew of.
CB: Sounds like you graduated right in time.
RM: Frank Hamilton was the teacher, he said, ‘I can’t teach you anymore in this environment but you can get private lessons,’ and I said, ‘For how much?’ and he said, ‘$12 bucks an hour’ and I didn’t have the money, so that was my graduation.
CB: How about L.A. and forming The Byrds after seeing The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night and the 12-string guitar?
RM: Yeah, I talk about that in my show too, but basically, like Bobby Darin told me, I’d been getting in front audiences so I’d do open mics in the Village. I started doing that in New York and I moved out to L.A., and I was doing that. That’s where The Byrds got together, right around that (time).
CB: At The Troubadour, right?
RM: Yeah, at The Troubadour.
CB: This is a random one, but do you recall the theater or who you were with when you saw A Hard Day’s Night?
RM: Yeah, I was with David Crosby and Gene Clark. I don’t think Chris (Hillman) and Michael (Clarke) were with us at that point. It was the Pix Theater on Hollywood Blvd (now the Fonda Theater) that played A Hard Day’s Night.
CB: The Byrds changed directions and expanded in style over a relatively short period of time, from the influential folk-rock sound to psychedelia to Sweetheart of the Rodeo, what do you think drove that, those kinds of changes?
RM: It was restlessness. We didn’t wanna get boxed in to folk rock or psychedelia or even country (laughs), so we just kept moving from genre to genre and we were very interested in different genres. I liked to listen to jazz and classical and I had a good background in music appreciation, so I knew a lot about it. I really enjoyed different genres. I had an idea before Sweetheart of the Rodeo to do a chronological history of music, starting in early music, Gregorian chant, going through the baroque period and then coming over to the United States with the Celtic music coming to the mountains and getting distilled and becoming country music and that influencing rock and roll and jazz, into space music with a Moog synthesizer.
CB: That’s awesome. Did you ever approach that idea again?
RM: No, I never approached it. I couldn’t get anybody interested back then. It was too over the top for everybody.
CB: Maybe a Folk Den thing, once a month?
RM: Oh, you mean like historical stuff? Well, Folk Den is historical — all those songs are traditional, but as far as putting a concept album (out), it would’ve been a double album back in vinyl days, probably about 24 tracks, something like that. It was a fun idea; would’ve been a lot of work, and I’m not sure I could even have pulled it off, but it’s a fun idea.
CB: Is it true that you told John Lennon and George Harrison about Ravi Shankar?
RM: Yeah, we were in L.A. at Gabor’s house, I think it was Ava Gabor’s house — she rented it out when she was out of town and The Beatles rented it for their stay in L.A. They sent out a limo for us and we went up to the house and all these kids tried to get in, you know, hanging over the fences and on the trees and there were policemen. It was a wild scene. So, to get away from the windows, we went to a bathroom that had a big square tub and we all dropped LSD and we’re sitting around with one guitar, kind of, trading it back and forth and David Crosby and I had been exposed to Ravi Shankar because World Pacific Records (American label largely responsible for exposing western culture to Indian music and Ravi Shankar) and Jim Dickson, our manager, was a producer/engineer at World Pacific and he gave us Ravi Shankar (records), you know, we knew about Ravi from him. So, we told George about that. He’d knew about Indian music but he didn’t know specifically about Ravi Shankar.
CB: That’s a great story.
RM: It was fun, it was a fun time. I’ve got a clip of Ringo Starr saying, ‘The Byrds were great, they were our friends. They introduced us to a psychedelic situation and we had a lot of fun.’
CB: You played on the Rolling Thunder Review and The Byrds helped reinvent rock and roll and folk with some of his songs, but could you talk a little about your relationship with Bob Dylan and his work?
RM: Well, I knew Bob from the early ‘60s. I saw him in New York. I didn’t know him when I was at Gerde’s Folk City and he was there. You know, we were all around at the same time. I did talk to him a little bit but I didn’t get to know him until The Byrds recorded “Mr. Tambourine Man” and then he came to Ciro’s (Le Disc, a Hollywood nightclub where The Byrds had a residency in spring of 1965) and sat in with us. We didn’t really know each other really well and then one time, after one of The Byrds records, he invited me to his hotel and gave me the lecture on how to write good songs and everything (laughs). Basically, he had a real hot talent for that and that wasn’t really my strong suit but I listened to him. He said, ‘You know what it’s like to be a millionaire, you don’t even have to carry any money, you just point at something and it’s yours,’ I said, ‘ok.’ (laughs)
CB: Could you talk about the advice Ramblin’ Jack Elliott gave you on touring on your own?
RM: Yeah, that’s true. That was on the Rolling Thunder Revue. Prior to that, I’d been in The Byrds, then I went solo, and I had a band with me and we had all these logistics. We had trucks and equipment, and I used to fly everybody first class and it was like a machine that was going and it was a hassle. So, Ramblin’ said, ‘You know Roger, the most fun I ever had was when me and Paulie threw the guitar in the back of the Land Rover and barnstormed around the country playing these little places and had so much fun,’ and I said, ‘That sounds great.’ We’d been on the road, earlier with The Byrds, and Eric Anderson was a solo (act) and he’d come out and do a set and he was making $500 a night doing that. That was more money than I was grossing with The Byrds and all the overhead — it sounded like a good deal.
CB: Could you talk about the Folk Den stuff? That’s a really interesting project.
RM: I knew Ralph Rinzler (musician and founder of Smithsonian Folklife) who was at the Smithsonian as a curator for folk music. He’d been in, I think, The Greenbriar Boys or maybe part of the New Lost City Ramblers, and John Cohen (founding member of New Lost City Ramblers, photographer and music preservationist) was there too. So, in 1995 I was listening to an album of traditional music from Smithsonian Folkways and it dawned on me that all the new folk singers were writing their own stuff. They weren’t doing the cowboy songs, the blues, the sea shanties, the work songs, the prison songs, the gospel songs — they weren’t doing any of those. They were writing really nice songs you know, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, great stuff. If you look at NPR’s list of 100 Folk Songs, you find that only 8 of them are traditional. This is ‘95. I thought, ‘Man, what’s gonna happen when Odetta and Pete Seeger are gone? This stuff’s gonna disappear.’ There is a website for Smithsonian, if you want to, you can dig in it and get it but I thought I’d do something about it.
So, I’d been invited to be on a Beach Boys album by Terry Melcher in California. So I flew out there and I’m sitting in this living room thinking any minute we’re gonna get in the car and go down the hill to the studio, but no, we walked into another room and he had an engineer in there with a Macintosh Quadra and a beta copy of Pro Tools. It was the brand new Pro Tools and he had 12 gigabytes of optical ram and that was it. We recorded a Beach Boys album on that. It was the first album recorded on Pro Tools. So, I was on that, I knew then that you could record on a computer and I thought, ‘This is great.’ So I got some software and got an audio workstation going, and I knew how to record on a computer.
And then Mike Nesmith (The Monkees) had put some stuff on the internet for free download and I thought, ‘Oh, that’s a great idea.’ So I started doing that too, with one of the early universities. University of North Carolina Chapel Hill invited me to come over there because they had Real Audio, which was a new thing, at the time. I’d been putting up very low-quality WAV files and they were just not very good sounding. So, I went to Real Audio, it was around ‘96, I think. So, I’ve been putting a song up, an MP3 every month since November of 1995. They’re all MP3s now. They’re free to download and I put a story about the song and the chords and the lyrics and a little picture. It’s like a coffee table book of folk songs.
CB: That’s a great idea, preserving musical heritage.
RM: The way I feel about folk songs is the way I feel about architecture. You know, the old Victorian houses are beautiful and they tear them down and put up steel and glass buildings instead. (laughs)
CB: Do you have any memories of Cincinnati over the years?
RM: My memory of exactly where I’ve played is a little faded because it’s always the same, you know, it’s like you get there and there’s a stage and there’s a microphone and there’s lights. It’s almost like those bands that say, ‘Hello Nashville’ and they’re not in Nashville. (laughs) It’s like Spinal Tap.
Roger McGuinn plays Memorial Hall on Oct. 2 at 8 p.m. More info: memorialhallotr.com.
