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He asked if I wanted to write some songs with him. He was one of the few people who understood it.
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Later on, I ran into Gene Clark at the Troubadour. It would go a lot better if you didn’t get mad at the audience. Roger Miller took me aside one night and said, “I know what you’re trying to do up there. I used to get mad at ’em because I thought it was good. I came out and started blending Beatles stuff with the folk stuff, and the audience hated it. So I got an offer to play the Troubadour as an opening act for Hoyt Axton and Roger Miller. If you took Lennon and Dylan and mixed them together…that was something that hadn’t been done. I saw a definite niche, a place where the two of them blended together. But the Beatles came out and changed the whole game for me. I did feel that the real folk scene was in the Village.
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I got a job offer to play as an opening act at the Troubadour. Why did you chuck it all to go to Los Angeles? In the early Sixties, you were making a name for yourself on the New York folk circuit. 'It Would Have Been Great If We'd Stayed Together': Inside the Upcoming Photo Book on the Byrdsīut if McGuinn never really liked Los Angeles, why did he stay for seventeen years? “I guess I liked the weather.”
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The Byrds were also central figures in pop schmooze circles, enjoying friendships with Dylan and the Beatles, helping newcomers like Joni Mitchell and Jackson Browne and partying with Papa John Phillips, Phil Spector and young movie outlaws like Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson. The band’s legendary residency at a Sunset Strip discotheque called Ciro’s started a live-music scene that included historic clubs like the Trip, the Whiskey a Go Go and the Cheetah and gave birth to future legends like Buffalo Springfield, the Doors, Love and Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention. Tambourine Man,” Los Angeles became the main spawning ground for folk rock the Mamas and the Papas, Sonny and Cher, the Grass Roots and the Turtles quickly followed in the Byrds’ wake. These included McGuinn and the Byrds, who were a vital force in L.A.’s metamorphosis from Snoozeville to America’s new capital city of pop.
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Tambourine Man” and “My Back Pages” vividly captured not only the city’s sunny allure but also its restive, and hopeful, adolescent spirit.īut by mid-1965, Los Angeles was alive with the crisp sound of electric guitars and the cumulative roar of expensive Porsches driven by the city’s new mod gods.
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The distinctive chime of McGuinn’s twelve-string Ricken-backer guitar and the metallic resonance of the group’s choirboy vocals on “Turn! Turn! Turn!,” “So You Want to Be a Rock ‘n’ Roll Star,” “Eight Miles High” and on covers of Bob Dylan’s “Mr. was that of the original Byrds - McGuinn, David Crosby, Gene Clark, Chris Hillman and Michael Clarke. And while the twang ‘n’ harmony magic of Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys embodied the SoCal myth of wild surf and sweet beach romance, the real sound of swinging Sixties L.A. It was, however, the very surreal quality of life there - the singular collision of great wealth, high commerce and deviant art in the film, television and music communities, heightened by the rising tide of teenage discontent and the impact of the British Invasion - that made Los Angeles the ideal playground-workshop for the mid-Sixties hip rock elite. “Just the whole attitude here, where people are superficial and so caught up in material things. “I always looked down on L.A., like it wasn’t the real world,” McGuinn says with a chuckle. As the principal singer, lead guitarist and de facto leader of the Byrds, McGuinn was also one of the city’s most distinguished rock & roll citizens - an early champion of Bob Dylan’s songs, a confidant of the Beatles and a major instigator of the folk-, acid- and country-rock movements that transformed pop music during the Sixties. He lived there for the better part of two decades, 1963 through 1980. Roger McGuinn never particularly liked Los Angeles.
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