Something From Nothing

Before he was a rock’n’roll star and one of the founding members of the ground-breaking folk/rock band The Byrds, Roger McGuinn was folk singer Jim McGuinn.

Although he has kept his rock star name, he has never given up his passion for folk music.
When he was a high school student in his native Chicago, McGuinn had a teacher who knew Bob Gibson, one of the leaders of the folk revival of the 1960s.

“So one day he came in to school with his five-string banjo and played a set for us,” McGuinn said in a phone interview from his Florida home. “I was into Gene Vincent and the rockabilly scene. This was before the Kingston Trio became popular. I had heard of the Weavers but I didn’t associate them with folk music because I thought they were just pop.”

He was enchanted by Gibson’s fingerpicking style and his way of tying stories into the songs.
“I asked my teacher about it and she sent me over to the Old Town School (of folk music, where Gibson taught) and I went there and started studying folk music, began playing the banjo and the 12-string guitar,” he said.

It was the 12-string with its distinctive tone that drove many of the Byrd’s later hits, but it was already a staple for folk musicians at the time.

“Bob Gibson played one,” McGuinn said. “Pete Seeger and Leadbelly both played 12-strings. It had a fuller sound and was better as a solo instrument.”

By the time he got out of high school, Jim McGuinn was already well-known as a folk prodigy around Chicago, then went on the road as an accompanist, first with the Limelighters, then as the fourth member of the Chad Mitchell Trio before joining Bobby Darin’s band.

At Darin’s urging, McGuinn moved to New York City and went to work as a songwriter in the famous Tin Pan Alley Brill Building. He also started performing as a regular in the emerging Greenwhich Village folk scene, where he became acquainted with Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and the others.

But another emergence would prove just as important to McGuinn’s career: The Mersey Beat.
“I heard the Beatles and started messing round with putting folk songs to the Beatles beat,” he said. “I heard folk music changes in the Beatles music. They were using a lot of passing chords that weren’t common in rock’n’roll and made their music a lot more interesting than three chords.

“So I started experimenting with this in the village. It didn’t go over very well because the folk musicians there were purists. And one day the club owner put up a sign that said ‘Beatle Impersonator’ to bring in the tourists and that was when I decided to go to L.A.”
In Los Angeles, he found an audience at the Troubador and one night after opening for Hoyt Axton that he met the first of the future Byrds.

“Gene Clark liked what I was doing” by mixing rock and folk music, McGuinn said. “He had just left the New Christy Minstrels and was looking for something to do. But it was a hard sell for a lot of the folk musicians. ‘That’s bubblegum,’ they’d say. We called them the ‘folk nazis’.”

Clark and McGuinn started writing songs together. One day, a guy that McGuinn hung around with sometimes back when he was in the limelighters started singing with them, adding a high harmony part that McGuinn really liked. He wasn’t sure he wanted to be in a band with David Crosby, but Crosby knew a guy named Jim Dickson that had a recording studio they could use for free after hours, so a trio was suddenly born and Dickson became its manager.

They first called themselves the Jet Set, then signed with Elektra records as the Beefeaters. The first single, “Please Let Me Love You,” flopped. Dickson suggesting they form a full band. A mandolin player named Chris Hillman auditioned to play bass. Crosby and McGuinn were hanging out in front of the Troubador one day when they saw a guy on the street one day who looked like one of the Rolling Stones, so they signed him up to play drums. It didn’t matter that he didn’t know how to play; Michael Clarke literally got in on his looks.

At Thanksgiving dinner in 1964, they batted around a new name. Their host suggested “The Birds” since it was kind of like “The Beatles,” but bird was British slang for “girl,” so McGuinn suggested spelling it with a Y.

While looking for material to record that winter, Dickson played them a tape of a song Bob Dylan was working on.

“Dylan was recording the song for an album but Ramblin’ Jack Elliott was singing out of tune on it so they weren’t going to use it,” McGuinn said. “So we got a copy of it and decided to do it for our first single.”

Dylan’s version was also in a folky 2/2 time, so they ramped it up to 4/4 and played it with electric instruments — before Bob Dylan had turned electric himself — and cut it down to one verse and two choruses to make it more radio-friendly. Because the other members of the band were still novices on their instruments, only McGuinn played on that record with an electric 12-string.

“Dylan came to the studio when we were recording it, though, and gave it his seal of approval,” McGuinn said. “We had recorded some of his other songs and played him a tape of ‘All I Really Want to Do’ and he said, ‘What is that song?’ He didn’t even recognize it. He said, ‘You can dance to it.’ He appreciated what we were doing to his songs.”

That summer, “Mr. Tambourine Man” climbed to the No. 1 spot on the Billboard charts and they Byrds were officially rock stars.

In the next two years, they scored hits with “All I Really Want to Do,” “Turn, Turn, Turn,” “Eight Miles High,” “So You Want To Be a Rock’N’Roll Star,” “Mr. Spaceman” and another Dylan tune, “My Back Pages.”

Jim McGuinn became Roger McGuinn in 1967 because a guru in Indonesia said that a new name would “vibrate better with the universe.”

The guru sent Jim the letter “R” and asked him to send back ten names starting with that letter.
Because he was into gadgets and science fiction, McGuinn sent back names like “Rocket” and “Ramjet.” He included the name Roger only because they use it for radio messages to indicate “OKAY.”

Roger was the only “real” name in the bunch and the guru picked it. Jim only changed his middle name from Joseph to Roger but used Roger as a stage name.

He didn’t notice any changes in the vibrations of the universe and wanted to change his name back, but decided it would have been too confusing.

“A study of the ‘60s would help you to understand all this,” he said.

The Byrds eventually fell apart. Clark had to leave because he was afraid of flying.

“You can’t be a Byrd, Gene, if you can’t fly,” Roger told him.

Crosby left from dissatisfaction with the musicianship of McGuinn, Hillman and Clarke. Tired of his carping, McGuinn and Hillman confronted him at the Monterey Pop Festival and offered him a cash settlement to leave.

Other players came and went, most famously Gram Parsons, widely considered to be the founder of the “alt-country” sound, and when a 1973 reunion with Crosby and Hillman flopped, McGuinn retired “The Byrds” name and set out as a solo artist.

In recent years, McGuinn has returned to  his love of folk music.

In 1995 he began uploading folk song recordings and music charts to his website, rogermcguinn.com, and last year released 100 of those recordings in “The Folk Den Project,” a four-CD set of his favorites.

While that is a consuming passion, McGuinn said his live shows are more of “a history of rock’n’roll,” including Byrds tunes and stuff from his solo career.

“I usually do some of the folk den stuff, but not a lot,” he said. “Most people find that too boring.”
But preserving the folk music heritage, he said, is as important as restoring an old building.

“One of the reasons I started the Folk Den was to preserve some of these songs that may have gone away,” he said. “They’re beautiful and if they would be lost it would be a shame.