Each month, McGuinn appends another song to the site, which can be accessed through his home page at. This Wednesday James Joseph "Roger" McGuinn, this conspicuously inconspicuous key figure, also turns eighty.McGuinn, who lives in the Orlando area but owns a condominium on Indian Rocks Beach, is doing his part to help preserve them through the Folk Den, an Internet site where he posts his own home-taped recordings of old chestnuts such as Old Paint, Home on the Range and John the Revelator. McGuinn will probably not go down in rock history for his few fine solo records that never cut through the Byrds roots Īs a songwriter and performer who shares the work with his family, he stands behind Dylan, Neil Young, Paul Simon and Tom Petty.īut his restrained, yet tone-setting hipness and his well-informedness, which always let him know how far he could go, have established a leadership that, in this intellectualistic form, which dispenses with rock-heavyness and not least in clinging to ideas once found, has proven to be fruitful and actually essential to the business. He had rebuffed the musically ambitious Manson and certainly didn't lessen his hatred of the establishment. Like other important West Coast bands, the Byrds were even indirectly involved with the Manson family: the house where Sharon Tate was murdered in August 1969 belonged to Terry Melcher, Doris Day's son and producer of the first two Byrds records. How a redneck can have the same taste in music but hate him and his kind to death.įrom here it's not far to Rolling Stones fan Donald Trump. Rarely has the antagonism between culture and politics been sung so aptly and with black bile as in this song. That's why it required not only clear-sightedness but also courage to make fun of the credulity and the need for harmony among the hippies. Hard-nosedness and cynicism were not very popular in the milieu represented only to a limited extent by the Byrds
#ROGER MCGUINN HOME PAGE FULL#
McGuinn, however, was and remained primus inter pares, letting the players come and go in 1968, when they got involved with The Band and put out three very good country albums, which Byrds saved from becoming a full hillbilly combo and who wrote unusually sarcastic songs during this phase, for example,Īs a clairvoyant swan song to entertainment, "So You Want To Be A Rock 'n' Roll Star" and, most notably, "Drug Store Truck Drivin' Man," the lament of a hippie who just doesn't understand how a redneck has the same taste in music may have, but hates him and his kind to death. The proverbial jingle-jangle, as Dylan used to say it, took on valid form on the first two Byrds records, which alone featured six of his songs.Īlthough they were almost completely under his spell at the beginning, their independence and diversity were already evident back then: in addition to the modern beat for which McGuinn was responsible, there was the unrestrained, desperate beauty of Gene Clark's songs, the more down-to-earth country of Chris Hillman and the same back then dangerously drifting psychedelia by David Crosby. Tambourine Man" was the name of the title track of the debut from June 1965, taken over by Dylan, recorded by McGuinn practically single-handedly, the guitars already electric, while Dylan had still played his version acoustically and only a month later, in Newport, his Fender Stratocaster was electrified in an epoch-making manner should put. Susannah" whistling, on their motorcycles over the hills of Hollywood. It is thanks to him that the sound of this band remained the same as it was from the beginning, despite all the changes in membership: rural, folksy and futuristic, traditional and up to date. The considerable importance that he has for the rock music of the mid to late sixties results less from his musical abilities - whereby his nasal voice is of an almost provocative self-pity and his often twelve-stringed Rickenbacker gave an unmistakably distinctive lute - than from his discreet, but effectively exercised personal dominance. The name, he said, must resonate with the spirit of its bearer. Her boss was lifelong, until the final dissolution in 1973, Jim McGuinn, who came from a Chicago writer household and since the psychedelic year 1967, under the influence of the Far Eastern Subud movement, called Roger. Let's put it this way: "The Byrds do things that most people don't even know existed." This statement, handed down by Bob Dylan, applied to a quintet formed in Los Angeles in 1964, which introduced the rock group as an exemplary way of life in America, not only because of this was considered the counterpart of the Beatles and on top of that invented folk rock, prototypically not only as a West Coast band, but as a band in general.
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