![]() ![]() If you took Lennon and Dylan and mixed them together…that was something that hadn’t been done. I saw a definite niche, a place where the two of them blended together. But the Beatles came out and changed the whole game for me. I did feel that the real folk scene was in the Village. I got a job offer to play as an opening act at the Troubadour. Why did you chuck it all to go to Los Angeles? In the early Sixties, you were making a name for yourself on the New York folk circuit. And I’d like my kids to know some of the stuff I did.”īut if McGuinn never really liked Los Angeles, why did he stay for seventeen years? “I guess I liked the weather.” “He had a lot of stories, and he used to tell us to write ’em down, and we never did. “My dad died about four or five years ago,” says McGuinn. This interview - conducted, appropriately, in that city, where he was talking to prospective producers for his upcoming Arista solo album - provides a glimpse at what we might expect in McGuinn’s autobiography, now in progress and entitled So You Want to Be a Rock ‘n’ Roll Star. (He finally put the Byrds to rest in 1973.) But throughout his career, Roger McGuinn - who now lives on the west coast of Florida - has been a keen observer, and often a strong critic, of life and music in Los Angeles. The Byrds themselves were a fractious bunch by 1969, McGuinn was the only original member left, and the hit singles had dried up. The Byrds were also central figures in pop schmooze circles, enjoying friendships with Dylan and the Beatles, helping newcomers like Joni Mitchell and Jackson Browne and partying with Papa John Phillips, Phil Spector and young movie outlaws like Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson. The band’s legendary residency at a Sunset Strip discotheque called Ciro’s started a live-music scene that included historic clubs like the Trip, the Whiskey a Go Go and the Cheetah and gave birth to future legends like Buffalo Springfield, the Doors, Love and Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention. Tambourine Man,” Los Angeles became the main spawning ground for folk rock the Mamas and the Papas, Sonny and Cher, the Grass Roots and the Turtles quickly followed in the Byrds’ wake. These included McGuinn and the Byrds, who were a vital force in L.A.’s metamorphosis from Snoozeville to America’s new capital city of pop. I don’t think the Beach Boys had even started yet.” There was more action in New York during 1962-63, McGuinn was in the Brill Building writing tunes for Bobby Darin, doing session work and playing folk gigs in Greenwich Village.īut by mid-1965, Los Angeles was alive with the crisp sound of electric guitars and the cumulative roar of expensive Porsches driven by the city’s new mod gods. “There wasn’t much going on on the street either. “Pop radio was people like Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme,” says McGuinn, then seventeen and already a veteran of the folk scene in his native Chicago. Ironically, James Joseph McGuinn III (he changed his name to Roger in 1967, during a flirtation with Eastern religion) thought Los Angeles was “a sleepy little town” when he first passed through in 1960 while touring as a backup musician with the Limeliters. That Time Joni Mitchell Brought Gordon Lightfoot's House Down With 'Coyote' Tambourine Man” and “My Back Pages” vividly captured not only the city’s sunny allure but also its restive, and hopeful, adolescent spirit. The distinctive chime of McGuinn’s twelve-string Ricken-backer guitar and the metallic resonance of the group’s choirboy vocals on “Turn! Turn! Turn!,” “So You Want to Be a Rock ‘n’ Roll Star,” “Eight Miles High” and on covers of Bob Dylan’s “Mr. ![]() ![]() was that of the original Byrds - McGuinn, David Crosby, Gene Clark, Chris Hillman and Michael Clarke. And while the twang ‘n’ harmony magic of Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys embodied the SoCal myth of wild surf and sweet beach romance, the real sound of swinging Sixties L.A. It was, however, the very surreal quality of life there - the singular collision of great wealth, high commerce and deviant art in the film, television and music communities, heightened by the rising tide of teenage discontent and the impact of the British Invasion - that made Los Angeles the ideal playground-workshop for the mid-Sixties hip rock elite. “Just the whole attitude here, where people are superficial and so caught up in material things. “I always looked down on L.A., like it wasn’t the real world,” McGuinn says with a chuckle. As the principal singer, lead guitarist and de facto leader of the Byrds, McGuinn was also one of the city’s most distinguished rock & roll citizens - an early champion of Bob Dylan’s songs, a confidant of the Beatles and a major instigator of the folk-, acid- and country-rock movements that transformed pop music during the Sixties. He lived there for the better part of two decades, 1963 through 1980. Roger McGuinn never particularly liked Los Angeles.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |