Roger mcguinn home page11/27/2023 "I love taking things apart and trying to put them back together."įortunately for all of us, McGuinn isn't all that different from the man we learn about in The Byrds: 1964-1967, a lavish new coffee-table book that hit shelves on Sept. "I take LEDs and put them in a little box with a switch on it and make them blink, just for fun," he tells. From the road, McGuinn explains that his engineer grandfather got him interested in all things that light up and whir. On top of that, he remains a lifelong enthusiast for all things engineering, aviation, gadgets and science fiction. On his website, he releases free-to-download interpretations of songs from the folk, gospel, sea-shanty, and calypso traditions, among others - under the umbrella of his "Folk Den Project." Therein, the 80-year-old former Byrd clarifies, contextualizes and canonizes his life story, perhaps working it out for himself just as much as he is for his audiences.Īnd as far as the folk canon that galvanized and mobilized him in the first place, he's far from finished with his decades-long analysis. This is wholly apparent in his one-man show currently criss-crossing the East Coast. And that maximum-curious mind is still humming. He wrote immortal odes to celestial voyages and alternate dimensions, and threw down incendiary "out" solos that would make John Coltrane proud. He electrified his beloved folk music to make it jangle and chime. ![]() A new coffee-table book about the early history of the band, The Byrds: 1964-1967, is available now.ĭecades ago, he helped codify the Rickenbacker 360/12 as a rock 'n' roll armament. This week, spoke with Roger McGuinn, a founding member of the Byrds and folk-rock pioneer who, at 80, remains active as a solo act. In February, Sony’s Columbia Legacy series rounded out the Byrds CD catalog with newly remastered versions of three out-of-print albums, as well as a previously unreleased live recording: “The Byrds at the Fillmore-February 1969.” But it’s the online distribution that has McGuinn floating eight miles high: “I’ve never had such artistic freedom,” he says.Living Legends is a series that spotlights icons in music still going strong today. MP3.com is selling three different CD compilations of McGuinn’s downloads. Though McGuinn is convinced that “the Internet will be the future of music distribution,” his music is not about to disappear from plastic- and aluminumware. “Many songs had been field recordings, captured by folklorists John and Alan Lomax,” he observes. For those who see irony in the use of the latest technology to preserve folk traditions, McGuinn points out that much of what he is recording now owes its very existence to a technical breakthrough of the early 20th century: mobile sound recording. MP3 music files are “ten times smaller than WAV, and almost as good,” he says. At first the tunes were available from his site (/jimmy/folkden/songs.html) in the bulkier WAV file format, but it took MP3 and its compact files to make his Net music more accessible. ![]() “I decided to record a traditional song each month in order to preserve them,” he recalls. McGuinn began putting his folk recordings online five years ago on one of the first home pages by a celebrity on the Web: Roger McGuinn’s Folk Den. The publisher denied permission, even though I wrote the entire song.” (One advantage of folk songs: They are in the public domain.) McGuinn explains: “I had a problem last month trying to use ‘Mr. ![]() Since the Byrds’ heyday, he adds, “the music business has grown to unbelievable proportions.” And its hold over pop music still impinges on the new abundance economy of digital downloads. “It’s a good thing that a folk song can be in the top 10 of MP3.com,” he says. “It’s very satisfying to get my music out so quickly and easily,” notes the 57-year-old recording veteran, who satirized having to “sell your soul to the company who are waiting there to sell plasticware” in his 1960s hit, “So You Want to Be a Rock & Roll Star.” The Internet has been receptive to McGuinn. McGuinn offers renditions of old English ballads (like “John Riley”), sea chanteys (like “The Bonny Ship the Diamond”), blues (like “James Alley Blues”) and gospel (like “Mighty Day”)-all with his infectious vocals and trademark jangly sound of the 12-string guitar and banjo. His page on the site /artists/11/roger_mcguinn.html offers free downloads of nearly a dozen of his recent solo recordings in the MP3 music-compression format that is transforming how audio recordings are distributed. The founder, lead singer and lead guitarist of the legendary rock group the Byrds, has become one of the most recognizable names on MP3.com. Some 35 years after becoming one of the first musicians to meld traditional folk music with rock and roll, Roger McGuinn is still pioneering the folk/tech connection-online.
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