“We have a bathroom in our house that has all the awards in it,” says Roger McGuinn, who will perform a solo acoustic show Saturday night at The Egg.
At age 71, McGuinn looks at his place in pop music history with a wink and a shrug.
He is the founder of The Byrds, the American rock band that in 1965 broke the British invasion’s stranglehold on the American pop charts. He beat Dylan to the Greenwich Village coffeehouse stages in turning folk electric as early as 1964, a move that so turned off the patrons he moved to L.A. where he found a receptive audience at the Toubadour. “Yeah, I was trying to sell it to a hip audience (in the Village) that already knew pure folk music was the only way to go.”
With The Byrds he turned folk icon Pete Seeger’s “Turn Turn Turn” into a number one hit. “I was trying to get my voice to balance somewhere between John Lennon and Bob Dylan.” And “Eight Miles High” beat The Grateful Dead and their San Francisco brethren up the charts with a psychedelic magic carpet ride that owed more to John Coltrane and Ravi Shankar than it did drugs. “We’d experimented with LSD, magic mushrooms, peyote, mescaline and all that, but we weren’t trying to make a musical version of that,” he says bluntly.
The Byrds lost out to Tom Jones for New Artist of the Year in the 1965 Grammy Awards. McGuinn did later score a win, but it was for the unlikely acknowledgment of his participation in a Steven Foster compilation. The autobiography that he’d spent years writing with Rolling Stone editor and writer Chet Flippo was rejected by Scribner in the late ’90s. “They said it was not what would be expected from a rock and roll star. It was like, forget it. It’s not worth the trouble, and there is the problem. If you tell all the sex, drugs and rock and roll they want to hear, somebody’s going to want to sue you.”
CURRENTLY AVAILABLE FROM GONZO
 | Live At The Basement DVD - £12.99 |
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