MCGUINN: It's a Bob Dylan song called "My Back Pages" because within the concert, I take people through my back pages, and here's the song. That's a wonderful, wonderful thing.ĬONAN: And I understand, though, you start every concert with another of your old tunes, a Bob Dylan tune. I'm really honored that you play "Politician" all the time. And Roger, we play your tune "Politician" every week. He's on tour and serves as curator of the Folk Den Project. Roger McGuinn joins us here in Studio 4A. That's at npr.org, and click on TALK OF THE NATION. ![]() Email us, You can also join the conversation on our website. Later in the program, science fiction writer Vernor Vinge on some of the implications of a world seen through Google glasses.īut first, we want to hear from folkies in the audience today: How do you overcome the fustiness factor and keep your music relevant? Give us a call, 80. Folk singer Roger McGuinn joins us this hour. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1991, and all these years later, he's back where he started - or maybe never left. They get credit as pioneers of folk rock and for plugging the music of folkies like Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger onto the early top 40 charts. The following decades took him through the star machine as one of the founders and leaders of The Byrds, one of the most popular and influential bands of the '60s and '70s. Fifty years ago, Roger McGuinn started out as a folk singer. "There are almost 200 MP3s there for free download, along with the lyrics, the chords, a little story about the song and a picture of some kind. I started the Folk Den out of a need to preserve the traditional side of folk music. "So I thought, 'What's going to happen when Odetta dies?' Well, as you know, she just passed away. All the new folksingers were singer-songwriters, writing wonderful material, but they were writing new folk songs. And almost 17 years ago now, I was listening to a Smithsonian Folkways record, and I said, you know, I'm not hearing these traditional songs even in the folk clubs or on the radio, or anywhere. But I was a folksinger at heart because we always loved folk music. "I've always considered myself a folksinger, even though we strapped on Rickenbacker guitars and played pretty loud. One time we did a song, a country song called "You Ain't Going Nowhere," and I reversed the order I said, 'Pack up your money and pick up your tent.' And about six months later he recorded it, and it came out 'pick up your money and pack up your tent, McGuinn.'" I've gotten his words wrong before, and he got mad at me. "I'm looking at the official lyrics typed in from the official Bob Dylan songbook, and instead of 'romantic flanks of Musketeers,' it was 'romantic facts of Musketeers.' And I'd learned the song off the record, so I got some of the words wrong. "I did for Bob Dylan's 30th anniversary on Columbia Records at Madison Square Garden, and they had Teleprompters at the foot of the stage. ![]() You know, it was really solid, solid music." I mean, you could really not get anything between the beats. You know, they wore black leather jackets with the collar up and very cool. " Leon Russell, Hal Blaine, Jerry Cole, Larry Knechtel and Bill Pitman were in the studio at the time. And I was honored, because I'd had about five years of studio experience in New York, so they let me play with them. But the first single was with The Wrecking Crew. "Of course, David Crosby and all the other Byrds went nuts and campaigned, and we got to play on all our records after that. ![]() Tambourine Man" and the flip side, "I Knew I Want You." And Terry Melcher, who was Doris Day's son and our producer, decided to use The Wrecking Crew for the single "Mr. "The Wrecking Crew was sort of a secret in Hollywood, where Phil Spector used them for all his recordings and The Beach Boys for quite a few of theirs and the Mamas and Papas. ![]() On The Session Musicians Who Called Themselves The Wrecking Crew But when he did folk songs, he really got into them. He did that Sinatra thing that he did and the "Splish, Splash," the teenybopper music. and he was such a talented guy that he could really devote himself to it wholeheartedly when he did it. He seems incongruous, but he had a love of folk music.
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