Roger McGuinn, Folk Rock Legend

 

Folk rock founder and original member of the Byrds, Roger McGuinn, will perform a solo show on Saturday, April 9, at 8 p.m. at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass. He took some time last week to speak with me about his impact on folk rock, his website McGuinn’s Folk Den, and how his performance style has come full circle.

 

BL: The Clark is great intimate venue that is perfect for solo performers. Do you prefer smaller, more intimate venues, or large arenas?

RM: No, I don’t like arenas, they’re for sporting events [laughs]. The only reason they have music in arenas is because they can pack a hundred thousand people into them and make a lot of money--it’s all about money, it’s not about music.

Music is best heard in theaters and performing arts centers, and that’s what I concentrate on playing.
 

 

BL: I’m sure you had a lot of experience playing in some of the bigger venues over the years as well, though.

RM: Well, you know what, when the Byrds were popular, there weren’t a lot of really great music venues--there were clubs, and then there were arenas. We ended up playing a lot of really silly places like bowling alleys and high school gyms that were sort of makeshift venues. In fact, they didn’t have some really good dedicated music venues like they do now. And a lot of the theaters in America were either just all movie theaters or closed down, because the age of Vaudeville had long passed...so we were forced to play these strange places.

I did do one tour with the Rolling Stones where we played stadiums, and again, that was about packing a lot of people in.
 

BL: Many consider you a founder of folk rock; what are your thoughts on that, and who do you place among your cohorts?

RM: Well what happened was that the Beatles came out, and they had been a skiffle band prior to being the Beatles called the Quarrymen. Skiffle is a form of folk music, so they played a lot of folk music chord changes in their music and they were used to that, so when they started doing rock and roll, they incorporated these folk music chord changes into their rock and roll. And I being an old folkie, I heard their rock and roll and went, “Hey, that’s folk music with electric guitars!,” and that gave me the idea of doing that.

So I would take old folk songs and soup them up with a beat like that, and that’s what happened with the Byrds with “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “Turn! Turn! Turn!”

We started [folk rock]...we kicked it off, and then Dylan wasn’t far behind. He was already in the studio doing that sort of thing, because he had been in rock and roll before he was a folkie.
 

BL: And the Newport Festival where Dylan famously went electric for the first time wasn’t that long after your release of “Mr. Tambourine Man,” right?

RM: It was six months later. We recorded “Mr. Tambourine Man” in January [1965], and Newport was in June.

And so the other people who got into it were John Sebastian, who was a folkie in the Village, I knew him back in the day in the late sixties; and the Mamas and the Papas, they were folkies too. John Phillips was in a group called the Journeymen prior to that, and Cass Elliott was in the Mugwumps; and there were a whole bunch of folk singers who realized that you could play electric guitars and do a new kind of folk music.
 

BL: Were you aware of what you were doing when you created the “jingle-jangle” guitar sound?

RM: It was an outgrowth of my playing the five-string banjo...and also some interesting electronics we plugged into an electronic compressor in the studio and it gave the Rickenbacker twelve-string a different sound--it gave it more of a sustain than it had normally. So it was a combination of my five-string banjo picking technique, and the twelve-string Rickenbacker itself had a unique sound, and I got that idea from watching the Beatles--I saw George Harrison playing the Rickenbacker in the movie A Hard Day’s Night.
 

BL: Did you have any idea of the impact it would have on the sound of folk music?

RM: No, not really. We were intent upon electrigying folk music, that was the idea. As far as the sound goes, the guitar--that was something that just sort of developed naturally.
 

BL: Are you up on today’s folk music, and do you have any new musicians that you’re listening to?

RM: Well, you know, I’ve been busy making it [laughs], and when you’re making music all the time it’s hard to listen to everybody else.
I’ve been busy mixing and mastering a twenty-three songs of the sea CD right now, and am about to ship that off to the pressing plant and have it for sale.
 

BL: Can you tell me about your website McGuinn’s Folk Den--how it came to be and what it’s all about?

RM: Back in 1995 I noticed an absence of traditional folk music on the scene--all the folk singers had become singer-songwriters, like Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan, who wanted to do that business model. So I thought it would be good to use the internet to publish these folk songs and get them out there for people so they could learn them and share them with their family; and I started putting one up every month, and that’s what I’ve done since November of 1995. I haven’t missed a month, I put 180 traditional songs, and they’re all on MP3 format with the lyrics, the chords, a little story about the song, and an illustration of some type.
 

BL: And there’s a few compilation albums formed from the site as well, correct?

RM: Several albums came out of that. The first was called Treasures from the Folk Den, which was on AppleSeed Recordings, and featured some real folk singers like Pete Seeger, Judy Collins, Joan Baez...so we had quite a few people on that. And then we did a tenth anniversary celebration with a hundred of my favorite songs from the Folk Den called The Folk Den Project, and that’s a four-CD set with twenty-five songs on each CD. And then we did one called Limited Edition--I think that was the first one--which had a few folk songs on it, it was mostly more of a rock studio album. And then we did one called 22 Timeless Tracks, which was kind of condensation of the hundred-song set....
 

BL: Do musicians come to you with their songs, or do you seek them out?

RM: I’ve known many of them since I was kid. I went to the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago and learned quite a few songs...and I’ve always followed folk singers like Pete Seeger and listened to their material and learned their songs, and then the internet is a wealth of stuff...there’s a website a website called The Mudcat Café, and they’ve got thousands of folk songs on there.
 

BL: You’ve explored many different sounds over the years, where would you say your music is now?

RM: I think I’ve gone back to where I started, gone full circle back to the days when I was playing folk songs. But that’s not to say that my show is all folk music, it’s not. I do a mix of some of the Byrds songs, some songs from my solo CD’s, and a few folk songs--I wouldn’t do a whole program of them. And I tell stories between the songs--stories about the songs, or stories about how I came to learn the songs or whatever.

 

An Evening with Roger McGuinn

Clark Art Institute

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Williamstown, Mass.