Roger McGuinn
Roger McGuinn never particularly liked Los Angeles.
He lived there for the better part of two decades, 1963 through 1980. 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. But he never really liked Los Angeles.
“I always looked down on L.A., like it wasn’t the real world,” McGuinn says with a chuckle. “Just the whole attitude here, where people are superficial and so caught up in material things. I couldn’t deal with that.”
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. 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. was that of the original Byrds — McGuinn, David Crosby, Gene Clark, Chris Hillman and Michael Clarke. 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. Tambourine Man” and “My Back Pages” vividly captured not only the city’s sunny allure but also its restive, and hopeful, adolescent spirit.
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. “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. “There wasn’t much going on on the street either. 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.
But 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. 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. With the Number One success of “Mr. 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. 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. 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 Byrds themselves were a fractious bunch; by 1969, McGuinn was the only original member left, and the hit singles had dried up. (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. 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. “My dad died about four or five years ago,” says McGuinn. “He had a lot of stories, and he used to tell us to write ’em down, and we never did. They went with him. And I’d like my kids to know some of the stuff I did.”
But if McGuinn never really liked Los Angeles, why did he stay for seventeen years? “I guess I liked the weather.”
In the early Sixties, you were making a name for yourself on the New York folk circuit. Why did you chuck it all to go to Los Angeles?
I got a job offer to play as an opening act at the Troubadour. I did feel that the real folk scene was in the Village. But the Beatles came out and changed the whole game for me. I saw a definite niche, a place where the two of them blended together. If you took Lennon and Dylan and mixed them together…that was something that hadn’t been done.
So I got an offer to play the Troubadour as an opening act for Hoyt Axton and Roger Miller. I came out and started blending Beatles stuff with the folk stuff, and the audience hated it. I used to get mad at ’em because I thought it was good. Roger Miller took me aside one night and said, “I know what you’re trying to do up there. It would go a lot better if you didn’t get mad at the audience. Just try to smile and be nice to ’em.”
Later on, I ran into Gene Clark at the Troubadour. He was one of the few people who understood it. He asked if I wanted to write some songs with him. Then David Crosby came in and started singing harmony. I’d already met David back in 1960, when I was with the Limeliters. I knew what kind of guy David was, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to get into that [laughs]. But it worked out okay because his harmony was real good.
Los Angeles was caught up in the clean-cut hedonism of the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean then. Did you feel out of place?
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