Happy Byrd-day, Roger McGuinn
By Steven P. Wheeler
Today, we celebrate the 77th birthday of one of rock’s most influential figures. As the founder, lead vocalist and lead guitarist of the seminal Sixties’ band The Byrds, Roger McGuinn helped bring together the polar opposite musical camps of folk and rock, and his place in the annals of music history are cemented in the public consciousness forever.
In 1991, two months after The Byrds—McGuinn, David Crosby, Chris Hillman, Gene Clark and Michael Clarke—were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, I spoke with this soft-spoken rock legend about his illustrious past and his then-current album Back From Rio, which was his first album in nearly ten years.
With his granny shades, his jangling guitar sounds and his vocal prowess, McGuinn led The Byrds through a phenomenal evolution from folk-rock to psychedelia to country-rock with equal success. Although they may be best remembered for their Sixties’ classics “Turn! Turn! Turn!,” “Eight Miles High” and “So You Wanna Be a Rock & Roll Star,” The Byrds also served as mainstream mouthpieces for Bob Dylan by bringing his songs and lyrical attitudes to the mainstream via the bourgeoning world of rock. Their renditions of Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “My Back Pages” created a musical stew that would help change the course of popular music.
When it comes to the magical ingredient that The Byrds possessed, McGuinn said: “I don’t know what it was that made The Byrds so special. I think it was just a sense of wonder and a sense of innocence. We were trying to change musical directions all the time. Basically because I wanted to avoid being labeled as any one thing. We were allowed to get away with a lot commercially. We weren’t forced by the record label to do anything that they thought would be commercial, whereas that kind of liberal attitude doesn’t really prevail in the business today.”
The Folk & Rock Wars
Before The Byrds, the worlds of folk and rock may have well been existing in entirely different universes, according to the Chicago-born musician: “Before the Sixties, there was a tremendous gulf between folk and rock. I think what we did kind of brought them together,” McGuinn explained. “People in the folk circles were really snobs about electric music. So much so that they booed Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival when he went electric, and I remember that kind of thinking being very prevalent. But I never thought that electric instruments were evil or anything.
“It just kind of happened naturally, it’s not really something that anybody put a whole lot of thought into. We were folk singers who were influenced by The Beatles. We loved The Beatles. I think I was truly one of the first people in the folk circles to really pick up on The Beatles and telling everyone that ‘Hey, this is really good stuff.’ But these folkies would be like, ‘No, that’s rock & roll, forget about it.’ But because we were so steeped in the folk tradition, what we did came out differently than what The Beatles were doing.”
The Story of “Eight Miles High”
“I remember the origin of that song very vividly. The inspiration for it was that we had just done a tour of England and we had a tough time over there because the press didn’t like us, because the promoter had billed us as ‘America’s answer to the Beatles’ and that kind of rubbed everybody the wrong way. And we weren’t that good actually, kind of out of tune [laughs].
“So we were feeling pretty bad and wrote a song about the tour. The ‘eight miles high’ was nothing but the airplane ride; the altitude, flying at 40,000 feet. Musically, the inspiration was from John Coltrane and Ravi Shankar. We had been listening to a lot of their records at the time, so when we were recording it in the studio I was actively trying to do a tribute to Coltrane in the instrumental break of that song.
“We ran into [censorship] in 1968 when a radio tip sheet came out and was saying that ‘Eight Miles High’ was a drug song, when it actually it wasn’t. It was about airplane ride. And that really knocked The Byrds out of business for a while. Censorship is a really destructive thing and it smacks of McCarthyism. I just don’t like that kind of mentality.”
The Byrds
During their turbulent eight-year existence from 1965-73, McGuinn was the only constant as band members came and went and each new musical direction continued to confound critics and fans alike. And while the band’s leader is understandably proud of the group’s legacy, there wasn’t much time spent thinking about The Byrds’ impact on rock’s future. “We didn’t have time to think about stuff like that. I’m really pleased that the music of The Byrds has stood up over the years, but we never really thought about the future much back in those days. Looking back on it now, yeah, it’s really easy to assimilate the whole thing of what The Byrds did, and it’s kind of a neat thing.”
Surprisingly, McGuinn told me that, in hindsight, he wishes that he would have closed the nest much sooner than he actually did. “We all had different ideas of what the band was. Sometimes that worked for us and produced a good kind of tension, but eventually it would become too much pressure and would crack us up. That’s basically what happened.
“I kind of wish I had broken the band up earlier,” he said candidly, “but at the time it was like being the owner of a corner store. It’s a business and you do whatever you can to keep it going. It was kind of lonely when all the guys that I had started the band with were gone and I had to bring in new people. The only saving grace was Clarence White, because I really enjoyed working with him. He was just a wonderful friend and an excellent guitar player.
“I just kind of think that if I had come out with some of the later things as a solo effort—because it was all basically my stuff—it would have been a better start on a solo career.”
The Post-Byrds Era
Between 1973-77, McGuinn released five solo albums that did not do well, so he grabbed two of his former Byrd-mates—Chris Hillman and Gene Clark—and formed McGuinn, Clark & Hillman.
The Troubadour Years
Following the demise of McGuinn, Clark & Hillman in 1981, McGuinn decided to stop making records and adopt the lifestyle of a traveling minstrel. “That was when I decided to take it easy and do the folk thing for a while,” he said. “Just go around like a troubadour with a guitar and play clubs and theaters by myself. The idea came from Ramblin’ Jack Elliot who told me that he had so much fun barnstorming the country in a Land Rover. It sounded so romantic, like a Hemingway trip, so I decided to do that and I absolutely loved it.
“It gave me a tremendous sense of freedom. I was making plenty of money. I had everything I wanted. We had a really good standard of living and I wasn’t beholding to any corporations and didn’t have to do anything that I didn’t want to do.”
Back From Rio
By the dawn of the Nineties, McGuinn decided the time was right to enter the recording studio for his first album in nearly a decade, Back From Rio. “I was having so much fun traveling around and playing solo gigs, I didn’t pursue another record deal. I didn’t put a demo together or anything. But by the end of the Eighties, the musical climate was getting warmer for the kind of music I do, it just kind of fell together. It wasn’t anything I was actively pursuing.”
And in a case of what goes around comes around, Byrds’ devotee Tom Petty joined creative forces with his former mentor on the album’s first single “King of the Hill,” which the two wrote and sang together. “I wrote that song with Petty in Europe when we were on tour together. It was during the Dylan/Petty Tour, and I was opening for them. We had a day off in Sweden and I had this tune and I went up to his room and we came up with the words after jamming with it. It came together really quick.”
When I mention to McGuinn that after playing his new album for a friend, their response was: “Good album, but that guy is trying too hard to sound like Tom Petty,” he laughed at the irony. “That’s funny. That does make me laugh. It’s just amazing, isn’t it [laughs]. But I get it. I remember when I first got into John Coltrane, I didn’t know for years that Dexter Gordon had come first and that Coltrane had been inspired by Dexter Gordon.”
Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue
An interesting sidenote that cropped up during my talk with McGuinn had to do with his being a part of Bob Dylan’s infamous Rolling Thunder Revue Tour in 1975-76. This is especially of interest today in light of the new Martin Scorsese documentary about that tour that was just released.
McGuinn, who was part of both legs of the carnival-like tour, recalls it all with a wry smile and boyish enthusiasm: “It was even wilder and crazier than Larry Sloman wrote in his book [On the Road with Bob Dylan: Rolling with Thunder]. I mean, he walked around around with a tape recorder but he only got bits and pieces of what was really going on. Boy, it was great. It was seriously the best thing I’ve ever done in my life.
“It was wild. Imagine sitting on a bus with Joni Mitchell on one side and Joan Baez on the other,” he continued. “We were all playing guitars together and talking about things. It was truly amazing. It was just such a flawless tour. It was closer to vaudeville than anything I’d ever seen.”
The Sixties in Retrospect
Decades after the Sixties, one has to wonder if that whole era has been blown out of proportion by a media longing for that magic again. McGuinn, who was a focal point of that musical wonderland, won’t have any of that: “It’s not a myth,” he maintained. “We really did have a strong feeling that we could help make the world a better place through our music. We could educate people and really get together a grass roots movement of people who wanted to try and stop wars or stop big business from polluting and all of those kinds of things.”
Of course, he does admit in hindsight: “It was certainly a very naïve approach to life and some good social changes did come out of all of that, but it was not with the earth-shaking global impact that we had hoped for.”
No matter their intent or ultimate disappointment, Roger McGuinn was a major force in the evolution of rock music. Yet someone who remains modest about his artistic impact, always preferring to let his 12-string Rickenbacker do all his talking for him. We are lucky to still have him as he continues to perform to this very day.
Happy 77th, Roger. You remain a true original whose shadow over the rock world is a large one indeed.
2 Replies to “Happy Byrd-day, Roger McGuinn”
A great article Steve, thank you. It was both nostalgic and informative. Takes me back to my younger days!!
Thanks Pauline 🥂