Roger McGuinn at SOPAC

The video above was posted in a Politics thread, and it called to mind Roger McGuinn’s autobiographical acoustic performance at SOPAC on Saturday, when he mentioned how much it meant to him for Dylan and the other all-stars to choose his arrangement of My Back Pages for this concert and to grant him the honor of singing the opening verse.

It’s still hard for me to believe it was my honor to sit just a couple of dozen of feet away from a giant like Roger McGuinn, who at 82 remained nimble-fingered on guitar and banjo. (His voice was even reedier with age, but hell if I cared.) 

My favorite anecdote he shared was about his friend Peter Fonda’s asking him for a new song for Fonda’s low-budget motorcycle movie. McGuinn suggests that Fonda ask Dylan instead. Fonda flies to New York and finds Dylan in a bar. Dylan scribbles something on a cocktail napkin, hands it to Fonda and says: “Give this to McGuinn. He’ll know what to do with it.” Fonda flies back go L.A. and shows up at McGuinn’s door with the napkin. On it is written: “The river flows. It flows to the sea. Wherever that river goes, that’s where I want to be.”

McGuinn takes the Ballad of Easy Rider from there.

Great story!

Great clip!

learned a couple of things about McGuinn only in the past few years from reading about the Wrecking Crew. First is that he was originally Jim McGuinn, and Roger was a stage name he adopted. The other is that he was the only member of The Byrds to play an instrument on their first couple of recordings. As a former studio musician in NY, McGuinn was the only one considered by Terry Melcher to have the chops to play on a record. The rest of the studio band was the Wrecking Crew.

But after the first few songs, Melcher relented and the rest of The Byrds played on all the subsequent records.

Did McGuinn also tell the story about Tom Petty going to the studio and reading the riot act to McGuinn's record label exec? Petty was insulted that they had brought what he thought were subpar songs for a legend like McGuinn to record. I think it was for the album that contained the King of the Hill, co-written by Petty and McGuinn.

ml1 said:

Did McGuinn also tell the story about Tom Petty going to the studio and reading the riot act to McGuinn's record label exec?

No. McGuinn did express his fondness for Petty, however, even though he joked after playing So You Want to Be a Rock ’n’ Star that everybody thinks it’s a Heartbreakers song.

He also introduced Lover of the Bayou as a song that Petty’s Mudcrutch covered.