Courtesy of mcguinn.com

By Paul Freeman [October 2009 Interview]

Roger McGuinn, one of folk-rock’s founding fathers, is a man on a mission. He’s dedicated to keeping folk music alive.

McGuinn, whose concerts feature traditional tunes, as well as Byrds classics, has established the Folk Den project (mcguinn.com). He presents vibrant renditions of classic folk tunes - Mp3s, accompanied by lyrics and chords.

“It dawned on me, about 1995, that I wasn’t hearing enough traditional music anymore,” McGuinn told Pop Culture Classics. “The new breed of folk singers were all singer-songwriters, because there’s more money in it, if you write your own stuff. You get the publishing, the writer’s credit. But it just sort of fell out of favor to do traditional music. I thought, ‘Who’s going to keep this end up?’

“Odetta passed away a while back. Pete Seeger just turned 90. I thought, ‘Wow, the old guard is going to be gone and nobody’s going to be doing these traditional songs.’ I decided to do my part and put them up on the internet, one a month. The idea was to distribute them around the world, get people to download them and learn them and pass them on. People don’t tend to think in terms of how awful it would be to lose something like that.

“The goal was just to keep the songs alive. I love the music and hopefully, my enthusiasm comes out in the recordings.

“Most of them have a story of some kind... and then I pick them for the melody. It’s just a matter of taste, of what you like personally. I happen to like songs that are both melodic and tell a story.“

McGuinn’s first influence was rockabilly - Elvis Presley, Gene Vincent, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, the Everly Brothers.

Then at 15, at his high school, he heard folk singer Bob Gibson perform. “He played five-string banjo and sang some songs that are very much like those on the Folk Den, melodic songs that tell a story. I found that captivating.

“I asked my music teacher what kind of music it was, because I’d never really listened to that before. She pointed me to a school that had, coincidentally, just opened up that year in Chicago, called The Old Town School of Folk Music.”

McGuinn found folk’s communal spirit appealing. “I think that was part of the attraction - the sense that everybody’s in it together. And that’s how it was presented at The Old Town School of Folk Music. Everybody would sing together. There would be individual classes of beginner, intermediate and advanced. And at the end, they’d all get together and play.

“So from age 15 to 17, I went to this folk music school, along with regular high school. By the time I graduated from high school, I had a job with the Limelighters, playing folk music.

“I was beside myself with excitement, when I got the offer. I couldn’t believe it, because it was always my plan to go into music. I was going to do it one way or another. I just didn’t know how. These guys came in, picked me up in Chicago and put me on the road. I’ve been on the road ever since.”

Good fortune followed McGuinn. “There have been a lot of serendipitous events in my life. In fact, some lady was in the audience one night when I was singing and telling stories between songs. And it dawned on her, she said, ‘Roger McGuinn is kind of the Forrest Gump of music - all these right places at the right time.’ And that’s true. I had a lot of very fortunate circumstances.

Bobby Darin came to see me when I was with the Chad Mitchell Trio at the Crescendo Club in L.A., which isn’t there anymore. It was on Sunset Strip. I think it later turned into The Trip. And that’s gone, too.

“Anyway, Bobby was there to see Lenny Bruce. The Chad Mitchell Trio was opening up for Lenny Bruce. He was thinking about putting a folk music segment into his Las Vegas show. So he approached me after the show and said, ‘I like what you’re doing up there. Would you consider working for me?’ And I said, ‘I’ve already got a gig with these guys.’ And he said, ‘What are they paying you?’ I told him and he said, ‘Well, I’ll double that.’ I said okay.

“I was kind of looking to get out of it anyway. I’d been with them for a couple of years. I wanted to expand. I wanted to sing. Bobby let me sing harmony. I had been with three guys who didn’t play instruments. I played, but if I sang, it would have been a quartet.

Courtesy of mcguinn.com

“Bobby, even before he took off his tuxedo and dressed like Bob Dylan, he was putting a folk music segment into his cabaret act, we toured around with.

“It really opened my eyes. I was with Bobby when he discovered Wayne Newton at the Flamingo in Las Vegas. Bobby kind of took me under his wing. He got me to meet Jackie Cooper, who wanted to put me on television. I read the script and it was so corny, I turned it down. It was ‘Petticoat Junction.’ They wanted me to be a banjo player on ‘Petticoat Junction.’ I said, ‘I can’t do that. That’s too square, man.’ They were disappointed, of course.

“Bobby turned me on to Lionel Hampton, who wanted to give me a record deal. But that didn’t work out. But all these things happened when I was with Bobby. He finally took me to New York and got me writing songs in the Brill Building.

“It’s sort of like when you work in an office building, you don’t see everybody else in the other offices. So I didn’t realize that Burt Bacharach and Gerry Goffin and Carole King and Paul Simon were hanging around on different floors. I didn’t find out ‘til later what the big picture was. To me, it was just like a day job. I’d go to work every morning and sit in an 8-by-5 cubicle with several different writers at different times. Kenny Young and Artie Resnick, who later wrote ‘Under The Boardwalk’ were writing partners of mine at the Brill Building. I didn’t really appreciate the whole thing when I was there. I probably would have stayed longer, if I had. But I wouldn’t have founded the Byrds, if I had stayed, because it was right after my Brill Building experience that I went out to L.A.”

McGuinn founded The Byrds with Gene Clark, David Crosby, Chris Hillman and Michael Clarke. “We were all folksingers. And we were all inspired by The Beatles. So it was just kind of a natural blending of the two things. I was consciously trying to do my lead vocal on ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ somewhere between Bob Dylan and John Lennon, trying to get a Dylan-Lennon vocal blend.

“The Beatles came out and they jazzed everybody to put on electric guitars. The Beatles invented folk-rock. They just didn’t know it. But they were doing folk music chord changes in their songs, a lot of our passing chords, because they’d been a skiffle band. Skiffle was kind of a weird hybrid of Dixieland, folk and something else - I don’t know what.”

The Byrds were inspired by The Beatles, but The Beatles acknowledged that they were subsequently influenced by The Byrds.

McGuinn told us, “Having them say that The Byrds were their favorite group was incredible. It was surreal. Just meeting them after having been a big fan and having been on the street forming The Byrds, we were kind of starving musicians for about six or eight months. Going from that position to number one in the world, pretty much, and meeting The Beatles, was just an incredible thrill.

“The Beatles raised the bar and then when The Beatles and Dylan spoke to each other, Dylan was disappointed that they weren’t doing more with their lyrics. And they started doing more with their lyrics after that. And that really raised the bar. ‘Sgt. Pepper’ really kicked it into overdrive.”

Dylan credited The Byrds with helping to popularize his songs. “Dylan had a great knack for doing traditional-sounding songs with new ideas, new lyrics. I just loved his work. He’s the best writer around.”

McGuinn and his exhilarating, jingle-jangle, 12-string electric guitar sound lifted The Byrds into rock’s stratosphere.

“The guitar itself was a result of watching ‘A Hard Day’s Night.’ George Harrison had a Rickenbacker, an electric 12. And then the sound we got in studio, I have to give credit. the engineer. His name was Ray Gerhardt. He was the one who decided to put compression on it. And maybe even Terry Melcher [producer], who had the sense to make it a little more treble, so it would stick out. But I didn’t have a lot to do with it. My end of it was in the studio, on the first album, on ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ and ‘I Knew I’d Want You,’ I got to play the Rickenbacker with Hal Blaine and Leon Russell and Terry Cole and Larry Knetchel. It was the Wrecking Crew and I was real honored, because I’d been a studio musician in New York, but these guys were the ones who played on all the Phil Spector and Beach Boys records. I was just real honored to play with them.”

Hearing McGuinn playing his instrument on the first hit single made his fellow Byrds envious. “Yeah, they hated it. But they got to play on everything after that. But I think it was a wise choice to make the first single a really strong track.”

Like The Beatles, The Byrds experienced the mania, the screaming throngs. “It was fun for a minute. But it got to be scary. We didn’t have good security back then. And they stole my guitar. They stole my jacket when it was really cold out. The scariest thing was trying to get to the limo, that was half a block away. We had to run from the venue and these little girls tackled me. Whoa! It was like football. They wanted to rip an eyeball out for a souvenir. There was a frenzied feeling from them. They did steal the glasses right off my face. It was a little weird.”

The Byrds were part of the Caravan of Stars package tours, teamed with bands like The Raiders, Turtles and Herman’ s Hermits.

“That was kind of a whirlwind. We had our own motor home, so we kind of kept to ourselves. That was mostly so we could smoke what we wanted to. We couldn’t do that on the Dick Clark bus,” McGuinn chuckles. “So we didn’t have a lot of contact with those other guys. But it was fun being with them backstage, hanging out and being on a big show like that.”

Despite massive commercial and critical success, The Byrds struggled with internal turmoil. It was always a balancing act to keep the band going. “It was a mixed blessing, because we did have discordant things going on. There was sort of a game of keep-away going on with getting the songs on. Gene Clark got his songs on the first album and then we all saw him driving around in a sports car, it dawned on us that we better start writing some songs. Then we all did. David Crosby wasn’t happy with the number of songs he was getting on. And it really made him mad. It really ticked him off that we kicked out some of his songs, he thought, for no good reason.

“Michael Clarke didn’t get along with David. And Jim Dixon, the manager, didn’t get along with David. I tried to get along with him, but I finally got upset with him, too. Chris Hillman and I just went up to him and asked him to leave. It was good for him. It made him go out and form CSN, which he probably would not have done.”

Gene Clark, whose vocals and songwriting were key elements of the early Byrds work, eventually decided to fly solo. He had been battling his demons for quite some time. “It was kind of a big meltdown,” McGuinn says. “Gene just kind of had a nervous breakdown.”

Many music stars find a niche and stay there. McGuinn didn’t play it safe, instead exploring space rock. With new member Gram Parsons, McGuinn and The Byrds blended country with rock on “Sweetheart of the Rodeo.”

“We didn’t really think of ‘Sweetheart’ or the space rock as a risk. We just did things that we felt like doing,” McGuinn said. “Maybe we thought ‘Sweetheart’ would be more commercial than it was. I think Gram convinced us that country music was the best-selling music in the world and that we should do it. And I loved it myself. To me, it was just an outgrowth of folk music. It was kind of slicked up folk music. So I really got into it. I got the outfit. Cowboy boots. Went over to Nudie’s Rodeo Tailors, where Elvis Presley used to get his suits made, got a black Cadillac El Dorado. Really got into the mood of country.

“I didn’t see it as a risk. Maybe I overestimated our fans, thinking they would dig it right away. Country is a valid art form. One I still like today. But we kind of missed the boat with the rock fans. The rock fans felt we betrayed them, because there was a political tinge to country, which still is there. It’s considered kind of right wing. Our hippie audience went, ‘What’s this? Have they gone over to the other side?’ And the country people felt like we were trying to infiltrate them, like the Communist Party or something.”

Acceptance for the hybrid came, but later. McGuinn said, “Ultimately it dd, with Willie Nelson and Waylon and Kristofferson and those guys. So I think there was another breed of country, the outlaw breed, that came out of our experimentation with it.”

Gram Parsons became a drug casualty at age 26. McGuinn is among the rock ‘n roll survivors. “It’s not by my own doing, though. It’s the grace of God. I didn’t do anything different from the other guys.”

When asked about his musical legacy, McGuinn points not to The Byrds, but to the Folk Den project. Many school systems are now utilizing the site. McGuinn’s “22 Timeless Tracks From The Folk Den Project” is available on CD. His 2011 release “CCD” celebrates sea chanteys and pirate songs.

“The Folk Den is something that I put more years into than I put into The Byrds, something that I care about deeply, something that I hope will endure for a long time.”

Though he celebrates traditional music, McGuinn has always embraced technology. “It seemed like a contradiction on the surface, but if you think back, to what Alan Lomax did, when he went into the Appalachians, he had the latest technology, which was a disc recorder, that recorded on shellac or something like that. So it’s nothing new to take new technology into a rural place.

“In my case, I took a computer up to Pete Seeger’s house and recorded him in his living room. And it was a lot of fun. Pete has always been an inspiration. He was one of my early inspirations to get into folk. I’ve always followed his career and admired him.”

McGuinn enjoys being on the road. “The reward from touring is multifaceted. There’s a wonderful feeling on stage when you connect with an audience. But it’s also the traveling. We love to travel. My wife [Camilla] and I go together. We recently took an ocean liner over to Europe and back. We traveled around in trains there, like we were living in the 1920s or ‘30s. It was such a kick. It’s really great fun. It’s what people pay to do for a vacation. So that’s an added bonus, part of the job.

“It’s all in how you do it. We’ve winnowed out the elements that are grueling. We don’t fly commercially anymore. We’ll take private planes once in a while, if there is one. But commercial air travel with musical instruments is a nightmare these days. And it was a nightmare even before 9-11. We quit doing it before that. So we just drive everywhere and it’s real laid back and relaxed. One of my favorite things to do is drive across country. “And some years, we get to do it a couple of times a year. So it’s really great seeing the scenery change. We’re down in Florida, with its sort of jungle-like atmosphere, and then you get over to New Orleans and maybe, if you’re going up I-40, you see the wheat fields and the corn fields. And the finally you get to the buttes, these rising pink things. coming out of the ground. It’s an incredible experience to drive across country.

“We moved to Florida back in 1984, when most of my concert work was on the East Coast. That’s not the case anymore. But I was mainly playing an East Coast circuit. So living in California made it difficult. So we thought we’d like to live closer to work, but we don’t want to live in the cold weather. So that ruled out New York or anywhere around there.

“We had lived in Malibu, on the ocean, so we moved to the West Coast of Florida. It was a good alternative to Southern California. Then we finally moved over to Orlando, because it’s got a little more going on. The West Coast of Florida is real sleepy and you have to drive a long way to get to a good restaurant. Where we live, it’s kind of like New York, where you can walk to 35 good restaurants within a mile. So it’s really great over here.

“I turn on the iPhone and look at the “Around Me” thing and all these great restaurants pop up. It’s amazing.

“I’m really into gear. I love it. I just got Pro Tools 8, which has music notations built into it for the first time. I went online and downloaded some Byrds MIDI files and put them into this thing. It’s really interesting to see the multitrack music notation for, say, ‘Turn, Turn, Turn’ and ‘Eight Miles High.’ ‘Eight Miles High’ had about six tracks of instruments and 10 tracks of drums. And whoever did it did a pretty good job on my lead break on ‘Eight Miles High.’ They did it on keyboard, naturally. But they got the notes pretty close to what I did on the record. I was impressed by that.”

McGuinn likes being a solo artist. And a listen to his “Live From Spain” album proves that even on his own, he can make Byrds classics sound richly, stirringly satisfying. A gifted songwriter, as well as vocalist and guitarist, McGuinn penned (or co-penned) such Byrds numbers “EIght Miles High,” “So You Want To Be A Rock ‘n’ Roll Star,” “5D (Fifth Dimension), “Mr Spaceman,” “Chestnut Mare” and “It Won’t Be Wrong.” He and Gene Clark wrote “You Showed Me,” which became a smash for The Turtles. McGuinn has also written many beautiful, adventurous tunes for his solo albums.

“I don’t want to use The Byrds’ name anymore. I prefer it to just be myself and tour around as a troubadour. Doing a tour on buses with a band with a lot of equipment is grueling. I don’t want to do it anymore. That’s why I do what I do now.”

The quintessential troubadour, McGuinn plans to continue performing for a long time. “Segovia was 93 when he died and he was still good enough to be booked at Carnegie Hall at that advanced age. I’d like to shoot for that.”

McGuinn has always been a fascinating musical storyteller. How about an autobiography? “I wrote one back about 15 years ago. It was for E.P. Dutton and they didn’t like it. So it sat on the shelf. Now there’s another publisher interested, so we’ll see what happens. It’s not something I’m burning to do. It’s like, if you tell the story, you get sued. So you have to be real careful about what you say. In the meantime, I think the songs and the recordings kind of speak for themselves.”

They certainly do... eloquently. For the latest Roger McGuinn news and info, go to mcguinn.com.