A Conversation with Roger McGuinn – HuffPost 5.20.11

Mike Ragogna: Roger, are you there?

Roger McGuinn: I’m here, Mike. How are you?

MR: I’m doing well. How are you, sir?

RM: Fine, thank you.

MR: I’m so glad that you could join us here at solar powered KRUU-FM.

RM: That’s cool. We’re solar powered at home too. We have a 6.2 kilowatt system, and it runs everything. Our electric bill is zero, except for administration fees–we sell them more than we use.

MR: How does that work, selling it back?

RM: It’s called metering. You have a meter that goes both ways, so when the inverters get done supplying the house and all the stuff in the house, the stuff left over goes back to the grid, and we get credit for it at the same rate that they charge us.

MR: Wonderful.

RM: Yes, it’s wonderful. It takes a little bit of doing to get the power company to go along with it–they’re not really eager to get it going–but once they do it works fine. I wish more people would realize that it is more cost effective than they think. I talk to a lot of people in the Northeast and the Midwest, and they say, “Oh, we couldn’t do that. We get too much cloud cover and too much snow.” Well, look at Germany, they have really cloudy weather most of the year, and they use solar panels over there to a wonderful extent. So, I think people just don’t realize how well it could be done here. I use it not just for the house, but also for transportation. I’ve got an electric, little motorcycle that I go to the supermarket with every day, and it’s powered by the solar panels, so it’s really got a zero carbon footprint.

MR: Nice. It’s clearly becoming a more feasible energy source, and as power companies come around to giving the credits, it’s totally the way to go, don’t you think?

RM: I think so, as oil gets more expensive and alternatives are available.

MR: Absolutely. Well, we’ve had a great solar power discussion, but I also want to let everybody know that you are going to be performing this Friday night over at Iowa City’s Englert Theatre.

RM: Yes, I am, and I’m really looking forward to it. It’s a beautiful theater.

MR: I think the last performer I saw there was Lucinda Williams, what a nice venue. Have you played there before?

RM: No, I don’t believe I have, but I love the old theaters–it’s my favorite kind of venue to play. We’ve narrowed it down to…we don’t do outdoor festivals, we don’t do clubs. We just do theaters and that’s all we want to do.

MR: What material will you be playing? Will you be running the whole gamut?

RM: Yeah, I do stuff from The Byrds…I think people would be disappointed if I didn’t play “Turn, Turn, Turn,” “Mr. Tambourine Man,” and “Eight Miles High.” Some of the songs have evolved a bit over the years, so they’re not the same as the records. I talk about the stories of how the songs were made, what went into them and what they mean to me. I do some stuff from my solo CDs over the years, and some of the folk tunes I have on The Folk Den, which is my website for preserving traditional music, at www.mcguinn.com.

MR: Can we talk about that for a second or two? When I interviewed you back in Pittsburgh last year, we talked about if briefly, but let’s clue everybody in on what you’re doing with your site.

RM: Well, I started it back in ’95, when the internet was just being turned over to civilians from the military. I realized back then that I wasn’t hearing as much traditional music as I heard before. The new folk singers were singer/songwriters, which was fine, but they weren’t doing the old traditional stuff as much. So, I thought I’d do my bit to save the old songs that I thought could get lost in the shuffle by putting them up on the internet for free downloads. I put them up on my website, and it’s actually called “The Folk Den,” which is named after a little room at The Troubador folk club in Hollywood where The Byrds got together back in the ’60s. The idea is just to keep the songs going. I put the lyrics, the chords, a little story about the song, a picture, and an MP3 file you can download free. There are over one hundred-ninety MP3 files on the site for people to download, share with their friends and families, learn the songs, and keep them going.

MR: Wow, that’s pretty conscious and generous and of you to offer that.

RM: Well, I felt like giving back a little bit. Everybody’s been good to me and I just felt like giving back.

MR: I noticed on one of these projects, Treasures From The Folk Den, you had Pete Seeger, Judy Collins, Joan Baez, and Odetta. So, you’re educating beyond merely the material. You’re also educating people in the context of who is important in the field.

RM: Well, I believe so. A lot of people don’t realize the heroes of folk music over the past fifty years, even though that wonderful PBS thing went out with John Sebastian narrating it. It’s called Folk Rewind on PBS and it’s kind of fun. Pete is 92 now, and he’s still going. It’s wonderful.

MR: Can we get into a little bit of history? I really want everyone to have the full spectrum experience of Roger McGuinn.

RM: Sure.

MR: First of all, let’s start out with some of the basics–the formation of The Byrds in a billion words or less?

RM: Well, I talk about this so much that I put it on my FAQ on my website. So, if anybody is interested, they can look it up there–I wrote the whole thing myself. I talk about it in the show, and it’s kind of a giveaway to the prospective audience members reading this. You can find it at www.mcguinn.com, in The Byrds FAQ.

MR: Okay. You still have relationships with the remaining Byrds to this day, right?

RM: Yes, Chris Hillman and I email, and I’ve talked to David Crosby over the years. They are the only ones surviving from the original Byrds.

MR: Can you share any stories of The Byrds’ material?

RM: I think my favorite is “Turn, Turn, Turn.” I just love the way Pete Seeger put that together. He tells a story about it and I can tell it to you because I don’t know that it’s in my show. Pete got a letter from his music publisher that said, “Pete, you’ve got to stop writing these protest songs because I just can’t sell them.” Pete got mad and said, “You’ve got the wrong songwriter because that’s all I do, write protest songs.” He pulled a slip of paper out of his pocket–evidently he’d been going through the Bible, taking notes–and it said, “To everything there is a season. Turn, turn, turn.” He put the “turn, turn, turn” in it, made up a tune for it, and started doing it and it caught on. That’s the origin of that song. I just love the song for what it says, the melody, and it just makes you feel good.

MR: It does. Another huge hit and cultural milestone, “Mr. Tambourine Man,” was almost an introduction to Bob Dylan.

RM: Yeah. Well, a lot of people…in fact I heard Bruce Springsteen say that he hadn’t heard Bob Dylan until he heard The Byrds do “Mr. Tambourine Man.” So, that’s kind of interesting, the way that worked for some people, although Bob was popular as a songwriter and a folk singer at that point. Jim Dixon, who just passed away last month, I believe, found the song “Mr. Tambourine Man,” and he was the person who introduced it to us. We didn’t really know about the song and he made us all audition to see who was going to sing it. First, Gene tried to sing it, then David Crosby tried to sing it, and I did too. We all tried it, and I got the part. That’s how it all worked out.

MR: Thus begins the bromance between The Byrds and Bob Dylan.

RM: Well, we just appreciated his songwriting so much that we wanted to do as much of his material, as we could find. Fortunately, there was a whole lot of it, and it was all good. I think Columbia Records, which is now Sony Music, put together a compilation of The Byrds doing Dylan at some point, and there were enough songs to put a whole album out.

MR: Years later, Roger McGuinn goes on Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue with him.

RM: I did. I was invited to go on Rolling Thunder in ’75, and I had some commitments with my band on the road at the time, which I had to cancel to do it. I really never regretted doing that because it was so much fun with Joan Baez, Bob. And Jacques Levy, my friend, was out there as the director of the show. It was just a great experience.

MR: Joni Mitchell also was out there on that tour.

RM: Yeah, she was out there. I used to sit next to her on the bus–I tell a story about that and sing her song.

MR: Nice. When you look at your body of work, do you acknowledge The Byrds’ contribution to pop music and the California sound or country-rock?

RM: Well, people tell me about that and it’s a very nice thing to know about.

MR: Now, your first Roger McGuinn solo tracks were released on the Easy Ridersoundtrack, right?

RM: Well, let’s see, I guess I was still with The Byrds at that time. In ’68, The Byrds were still together, so yeah, my first solo things were on the Easy Rider soundtrack.

MR: “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” and “Ballad Of Easy Rider.”

RM: Right. Peter Fonda asked me to do those songs. “Ballad Of Easy Rider” was a song that I kind of co-wrote, but it was later given to me as a solo song.

MR: Going through The Byrds’ albums, they were all incredible, but the one that seems to have stuck with the culture strongly was Sweetheart Of The Rodeo. Why do you think that was?

RM: Well, the Sweetheart Of The Rodeo album was a surprise to everybody. It was a surprise to people that were fans of The Byrds because they were used to a certain kind of music–the combination of folk and rock–and they were pretty much rock fans, who weren’t expecting a country album. Then, the people who liked country music listened to it and they didn’t know what to think of it. So, it didn’t do really well back when it came out. After–what’s it been now, it came out in ’68?

MR: I think so, yeah.

RM: Anyway, it’s become one of the best received Byrds albums of all time, making the Rolling Stone top five-hundred or whatever, and that’s kind of cool. At the time, though, people didn’t know what to think of it–it was too much of a left turn for them or a right turn.

MR: It’s also considered the sweetheart of the California country rock movement.

RM: Well, in all fairness, Gram Parsons had a band called The International Submarine Band, where they did some grand stuff, and kind of did the same kind of music that The Byrds did on Sweetheart Of The Rodeo. So, it wasn’t the first time that had been done. We had done country-ish music back as early as the Turn! Turn! Turn! album, which was our second Byrds album. So, country was in The Byrds’ repertoire, but Sweetheart Of The Rodeowas the first time we did an entire album of that kind of music.

MR: Also, it isn’t the first time you influenced or inspired music in the culture. You guys were also the basis for a lot of alternative and Americana that evolved into other genres over the years.

RM: Well, I guess so. You could say that.

MR: And, of course, Tom Petty was quite an admirer.

RM: That’s what I heard. (laughs)

MR: Me too. (laughs)

RM: I can’t really talk about this stuff–it’s for somebody else to say–but thank you.

MR: To this day, what is your favorite guitar to play?

RM: My favorite guitar now is my Martin HD-7 because it’s got everything. It’s got the jingle-jangle thing from the twelve string, it’s got the flexibility of the six string, and the bass notes where you can do bass runs and that sort of thing. I love the twelve-string Rickenbacker–I play that a lot–and I have a twelve-string acoustic that I love to play, and a five-string banjo. I love them all, but the HD-7 has the overall sound that I like so much, so I really spend more time playing that than any other guitar. It’s a guitar that came about from a breakage on an airline. Did you ever see that Dave Carroll video, “United Breaks Guitars”?

MR: Yes.

RM: He got eight-million hits on that, and United finally caved in and gave him some money or something. I had a guitar broken on an airline, and I went to the Martin company–it was a twelve-string acoustic–and I contacted Dick Boak, who was the artist relations guy there. We sat down at lunch and kind of designed a hybrid between the twelve-string and the six-string. For me, the best part of a twelve-string is the g-string pair–you’ve got an octave g-string with a regular one, so you can play lead up and down the neck on that and get a twelve-string sound. But then, you can bend it on the top strings like a blues guitar and you can play bluegrass runs on the bottom strings like a bluegrass instrument. So, really, it’s a hybrid between the twelve-string and the six-string. I had one made at Martin and other guitarists came in and liked it so much that they wanted one, and they called it the Roger McGuinn HD-7.

MR: Nice. 7, of course, for the seven strings, right?

RM: Exactly. Most people think the HD stands for “high definition,” but it’s “herringbone dreadnought” Martin designation.

MR: Now, how heavily are you into keeping up with what’s happening with technology, Roger?

RM: Well, I’ve got a MacBook Pro, and a copy of ProTools 8.0–I’m thinking about 9, which has ninety-nine tracks, but I don’t find myself using that many, so I’ll probably just stick with 8.0. It’s always best to stick with the earlier version because sometimes, Apple gets some updates in there that break ProTools. I had that happen once, where I was doing a lecture at a university and went to fire up ProTools, but it wouldn’t work because Apple had sent an update for Safari or something that interfered with it, and I went, “Oh, man!” Anyway, I am pretty tech savvy. I keep up on it and keep up with the latest in computers and technology.

MR: Nice. And I imagine you’re constantly recording.

RM: I record a song a month, for sure, and sometimes, more than that. In fact, we have a new CD that is going to hit Amazon, CD Baby, and our own website mcguinn.com pretty soon called, CCD. It’s twenty-three songs of the sea, all traditional sea shanties with a couple that I’ve written myself. They are the old songs that the sailors used to sing when they pulled the sails up, pulled the anchor up, and the work songs on ships.

MR: Will you have any guests on this?

RM: No, it’s all me (laughs).

MR: (laughs) As well it should be, sir.

RM: I did all the tracks, yeah.

MR: Now, I guess one would call it a “comeback”–I dislike that term–but I was surprised by the huge success of your Back From Rio album in ’91.

RM: Well, that was one of the albums that had more major league flavor to it because it had Arista Records behind it–Clive Davis–and it had the power of the big record company, a big-time studio, and a lot of guests on it like Tom Petty, Elvis Costello, and people like that. So, I guess you could call it that, but you know what? I went out on the road with that, with a band, and I really like going out solo, as kind of a folk singer, better. It was kind of an eye-opener that maybe I didn’t want to pursue that whole lifestyle of being a rock ‘n’ roll star. Maybe I just didn’t want to do that anymore. I wanted to be more like Pete Seeger, my hero, who I’d seen when I was a kid. I remember when he was with The Weavers, and then, when he went solo, I was a little skeptical, wondering how he was going to pull it off solo. I went to one of his concerts, and he blew me away. He was incredible.

MR: He was a major influence on you?

RM: Yes, he was, and still is. I admire him tremendously for his body of work and all the things that he does like the Clearwater project, cleaning up the Hudson. He’s a great guy.

MR: And his recent album with the kids won a Grammy.

RM: Yeah, wonderful.

MR: That’s amazing. Before we leave Back From Rio, when you have hits like “King Of The Hill” and “Someone To Love,” how did you make the decision to go more of a solo, folk route when you were having such wonderful success with another style?

RM: It’s hard to understand, it’s very personal. The wonderful thing about having your songs on the radio is that people are going to go out to your concerts and buy your merchandise and that sort of thing, and it feels good to get that level of name recognition. But people don’t realize how much work it all is. I’m not twenty anymore, and that’s really what hit me. It was like, “Man, do I really want to do this?” I was doing like ten interviews a day, going to record stores and there was a lot of leg work that was involved. When people write books, they go on these book tours, get up at five o’clock in the morning to catch a plane, and fly to ten different cities. “Do you really want to do that?” The answer was, “no.” I really wanted to do what I’m doing, which was kind of just ambling around the country with my wife. We take an RV and we just take the back roads of America, meet great folks, play beautiful theaters, and everybody is happy. That’s more like it.

MR: Beautiful. Have you heard any rumblings about a Will The Circle Be Unbroken IV? I imagine you’d be on that too, right?

RM: I haven’t heard anything about that.

MR: You did “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere,” with Chris Hillman on the second one.

RM: Yes, we did, and that was a lot of fun. We got a Grammy nomination for it, and we flew out to LA and it was exciting.

MR: One other thing, you were the guitarist on The Beach Boys’ “California Dreamin’,” right?

RM: Yeah, I played guitar. Terry Melcher invited me out to do that, and I’m in the little video too, standing up somewhere out in the street with Michelle and John. That was a lot of fun, seeing those guys again.

MR: When you think back on your early California days, coming up with all those young artists, it has to still be inspirational. It had to be an incredible time.

RM: Yes, it was very enlightening and it made you feel good. There was a lot of vibrant stuff going on, and a lot of songwriters, singers, great pickers, and we all learned from each other. We’d sit down and show each other licks, sit down at The Troubadour, which was open all day long, and you could kind of sit down and exchange musical ideas with other people. Then, there was the freedom that you had in Laurel Canyon, which just felt like–it’s hard to describe–it was kind of like a dream world, really. It was a wonderful time, with other musicians, exchanging ideas, and writing songs.

MR: It must have felt like a loose family.

RM: It did. It felt like a big family, and the atmosphere was very friendly with a lot of sharing going on with everything. It was great.

MR: During that sharing period, as The Byrds were starting to have hits, did that change the dynamic, or did it energize your contemporaries to want that kind of success as well?

RM: Well, we were still sharing, but we were sharing with other people, like John Phillips and people from The Beatles. We knew all these people, and we’d hang out with each other. It was still a friendly environment.

MR: What advice might you have for new artists that are coming up?

RM: Well, the times are different. Back then, there wasn’t as much competition, but there weren’t as many opportunities, so you had to go with a big name record label to get anything going and that’s not true these days. You can get a viral video on YouTube, like that guy Dave Carroll. You can get people to download your MP3s and get viral hits with your music. I think the good thing about the internet is to give something away and to sell something else. Get a business model like that because the old brick and mortar record stores are falling apart, and the big record companies are collapsing under their own weight. But there is a viral thing going on where you can use the internet to promote yourself. Play as many open mics as you can, get yourself out there, give away CDs, and give away thumb drives with your music. Just get people interested.

MR: Nice. You’re a fan of technology, but you’re also a fan of natural ability, I presume, right?

RM: Well, yeah, definitely. That’s something you have to have before anybody is going to want to listen to you.

MR: Okay, but we have things like autotune, which is amazing technology, and you have shows like American Idol, which promotes being a personality over being a musician.

RM: Well, I think autotune–the overuse of it–is a novelty like The Chipmunks. It’s just a gizmo, a gimmick. If used properly, it can save you a lot of time in the studio. If you’ve got one sour note in a perfectly good performance and you want to fix it, I have no problem with that. Using it as a constant, though, for someone who can’t sing but maybe looks good? I find that to be cheating. As for the American Idol thing, we’ve always had amateur shows. Back in the ’50s, they had The Ted Mack Amateur Hour, they had Arthur Godfrey where Shari Lewis got discovered. So, it’s nothing new to have amateur shows, but they used to have a little more diversity. In some ways, it is sort of a cheating thing, where you get to go zero to sixty in one second, as opposed to paying your dues through the system, to learn the ropes and all that. I think it’s valuable to learn the ropes, to know what you’re doing, and to pay your dues. That way, you know what you’re doing and you’re really ready for opportunities when they arise. Some people, though, just happen to have a lot of raw talent, and they can pull it off right way and more power to them, I guess. The bottom line is, do what you love. If you don’t love what you’re doing, don’t do it. Just keep doing what you love, and you’ll be okay.

MR: So, you’ll be doing what you love over at Iowa City’s Englert Theatre on Friday, May 20th?

RM: Absolutely. This is not about money, stardom, or anything like that.

MR: Roger, thank you so much for taking time to talk with me today. Best of luck with your show, and best of luck with The Folk Den, and all your endeavors in the future. This has really been sweet.

RM: I’ve enjoyed talking to you, Mike, and keep up the good work, being solar-powered…that’s really cool.

Transcribed by Ryan Gaffney