![]() ![]() PKM: You went to a private school where a young music teacher was a major influence on the direction of your life. Roger McGuinn: My main motivation was to learn to play the music, I discovered the girls liked me better after playing for the kids at school. Like a lot of musicians, did you do that to increase your chances of getting girls? Were you popular with the opposite sex before that? via PKM: You got a guitar for your 14 th birthday. Gene Vincent, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, The Everly Brothers. Roger McGuinn: Elvis was the first artist to make me want to play music. How did he rock your world? Who else were you digging then musically? PKM: Like me, your first musical hero was Elvis. There was one exception, I wanted to stay up past my bedtime and they said, “Alright you can stay up but you have to stay up all night long.” I said, “No I’m a little boy and I need my sleep!” They tried his suggestions of reverse psychology on me and they didn’t work, for the most part. Roger McGuinn: Parents Can’t Win was a satire on Dr. Was that true? Where you that much of a terror? Seriously, what were your formative years like growing up in Chicago? They wrote a best-selling book called Parents Can’t Win. PKM: You were born in Chicago to parents involved in journalism and public relations. Roger took time out while on his 77 th birthday cruise aboard the Queen Mary 2 to answer our queries about his fabled past and what’s in store for this still active national music treasure. And we were together the night we entered the Other End in Greenwich Village and got corralled by Bob Dylan into joining his legendary Rolling Thunder Revue tour, recently immortalized in a brilliant documentary by Martin Scorsese. So, it was a delight to reconnect with Roger and get him to reminisce about his early folk days in Chicago, the formation of the Byrds, and his solo career. I met Roger just as he was embarking on a solo career after a disastrous attempt at a Byrds reunion. His band, the Byrds, weren’t content to rest on their laurels and within a few years had defined two more genres of music: space rock, with its psychedelic underpinnings, and raga rock, which drew on elements of traditional Indian music and influenced the Beatles to further explore that terrain. Then, in a stunning shift again, the Byrds produced Sweetheart of the Rodeo, an album that pioneered country rock. Tambourine Man.” It was instantly recognizable because of the unique jingly-jangle sound he produced on his 12-string Rickenbacker guitar. Coming from a traditional folk background, he took elements of that, added a bit of the Beatles sound and, using revolutionary lyrics provided by Bob Dylan, created a whole new genre of music called Folk Rock with “Mr. Roger McGuinn holds a most esteemed place in the pantheon of rock heroes. His fellow member of the Rolling Thunder Revue, Larry “Ratso” Sloman, recently caught up with him to talk about the Byrds, going solo, Rolling Thunder Revue, Bobby Darin, Lenny Bruce, Tom Petty, Pete Seeger, Sweetheart of the Rodeo, and revisit the highlights and lowlights of the past several decades. Roger McGuinn, as a founding member and guiding force of The Byrds, had a huge impact on rock ‘n’ roll of the 1960s, before embarking on a long and distinguished solo career that continues today.
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