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Pete Fornatale: Before the CD, this was something that originated in your mind as part of the new technology, right?

Roger McGuinn: Yes. About eight years ago, I started getting concerned about the traditional side of folk music falling by the wayside, slipping through the cracks. And the reason being that a lot of the new crop of folk singers were singer songwriters writing wonderful material, but they were not kind of led to do the old traditional stuff anymore. And so I thought, what's going to happen in a few years when the old guard isn't around anymore, and I started doing something about it, recording the songs in my home studio, and putting them up on the internet for free download. And I'm still doing that once a month. I've been doing that since November of 1995. So we're coming up on our seventh anniversary in a month. And quite a collection at this point. Yeah, about 84 songs all together. And they're still free at mcguinn.com

Pete Fornatale: But you know, for those who are not on the super highway yet, you decided to do this CD...It seems to me that you really assembled a dream lineup of performers. Tell us about some of them.

Roger McGuinn: Pete Seeger and Joan Baez and Judy Collins and Odetta, Tommy Macomb and Jean Ritchie. And Josh White Jr. and Frank and Mary Hamilton. It was it sort of fell into place. A lot of these people were friends of Tim, who owns Appleseed recordings. And that's a label this is on. He had done a Pete Seeger tribute album a couple of years ago, and I was involved with that. So that's how I knew him.

Pete Fornatale: and this was a do it yourself project, which the technology allows now, right?

Roger McGuinn: well, because I've been making these recordings at home. For the internet. I was using a computer to record and I got kind of handy with it, learning how to do it. In fact, I just did a video for homeschool on tapes on how to use a computer as a recording studio, but so I knew how to do this how to use a multitrack software program to emulate a, a recording machine. Which by the way, I looked up on the internet, a Sony 48 track digital machine goes for $252,000. And you can pick up a laptop for about 1000 bucks. It'll do almost the same thing. So anyway, I guess I was versed in recording with the computer. So I took the computer to Pete's house and I got Joan Baez at a garage at her road manager's house. And we went to Judy Collins home studio. She's got a studio in her apartment in New York here

Pete Fornatale: Jean Ritchie in the town where I live, on Long Island

Pete Fornatale: When did you become a song writer?

Roger McGuinn: probably around 1960 or 61, I was living in New York. I was roommates with Mike Settle who later went on to be part of Kenny Rogers first edition. And I just saw Mike for this PBS folk show that we did in Pittsburgh, last year, or this year. And so Mike, and I started writing songs. He was already a songwriter, and I kind of asked him to help me, you know, like, what do you do? And he said, Well, let's write a song together. So we did we wrote, and I don't know this song. I haven't even tried to play it, but something like [singing] "Hallelujah, Christ was born. Early Christmas morning" something like that. Anyway, it was it was a Christmas song. And we wrote it down and made a little tape of it and took it up to Al Brackman on Columbus Circle. He had a PRL publishing company there. It's called TRL. And Mike was already signed to him. And so we played the song for Al, and he liked it. And so he signed he pulled out a contract. And he said, I like the song. Let's, you know, let's do a deal on it. So we did. And I noticed in the contract that it provided $1 for the songwriter. So I said, Where's my dollar? And he laughed, he said, you open up his wallet and gave me $1 out of cash, you know, under this law, he said, nobody's ever asked for that. That was my beginning as a songwriter. Read the fine print, you know.

Pete Fornatale: you had a lot of familiarity with the Brill Building method of writing songs. it was a good training, but it was very different from the explosion of a singer songwriter.

Roger McGuinn: In a way it was in a way it wasn't. I mean, when you really analyze what the good singer songwriters do, like I'll start with Dylan. Back in the 60s when he started writing. He took a very methodical approach to it. He wouldn't just wait till it hit him. He would sit down with a typewriter. And I think he was inspired by Jack Kerouac who was into the typewriter. And he would sit there all day long every day. I remember he got a suite at the hotel room at the Thunderbird Hotel on Sunset Boulevard. And you can see him up on the balcony with his typewriter all day long every day. It was very methodical. And that's the Brill Building approach. So it's really not that different. the Brill Building was kind of a shotgun approach. He'd write a Frank Sinatra song, or a beach boy song or whatever else was on.

Pete Fornatale: So what new frontier did Dylan open up for someone like you

Roger McGuinn: He kind of took the beat poet mentality and put it into into rock and roll. I mean, well pre rock and roll, you put it into folk music. And then he was when he was living with that girl, who was into protest, protesting, he was a protest writer. And then he kind of drifted out of that and got into writing more subjective love songs and things like that. But he was writing with that beat poet mentality. He was a big fan of Kerouac and hung out with Ginsburg and Peter mulaskey. And, you know, I just read a great book, by the way, by David Amram, about his collaborations with Kerouac and the dominance in the early 60s and late 50s. Called offbeat, fascinating book, it kind of puts you there hanging out with Kerouac, you know, passing around a bottle of Thunderbird wine. And, you know, it was just a great feeling because I always admired Kerouac, and I wanted to hang out with him. And gee, I only missed it by a couple of years.

Roger McGuinn: I was very saddened by it. You know, it was horrible to, to deal with that.

Pete Fornatale: When did you first cross paths?

Roger McGuinn: In 1965, we played a gig at the blazes club in London. And Derek Taylor, who had been the press officer for the Beatles was working for the Byrds at the time. And he arranged for a room upstairs from the blazes and and John and George were there. And we met the Beatles, you know, for the first time and then later that night or the next night, I met Paul over at the at his club, the Scotch on St. James club, and he bought me a scotch and Coke, which is his favorite drink at the time and took me for a ride in his Aston Martin db5.T hat was really kick well to meet the Beatles, British rock royalty. Only six months prior to that we'd been on the street looking up at the Beatles like everybody else and here we were hanging with him.

Pete Fornatale: you have always been generous in acknowledging George as as your inspiration for the electric 12 string.

Roger McGuinn: Absolutely. I was a, an acoustic 12 string player from the 50s. I had never heard of electric 12 until the Beatles were given one by the Rickenbacker company. And George used it in the movie A Hard Day's Night. And Crosby and Chris Hillman Gene Clark and Michael Clark and I all went to see A Hard Day's Night to kind of do a little reconnaissance run and see what the Beatles were playing and how to how to be more like them because they were our heroes. And we said, oh, wow, look at that guitar. And at first it looked like a six string guitar because it had the three pegs, six pegs, sticking, you know, in the back so you couldn't tell it was at 12 but then George turned sideways and I could tell it was at 12 and I went I gotta get one of those. And fortunately they had one in LA at the time and I was able to trade in my acoustic 12 for it.

Pete Fornatale: and the rest as they say is history. George repaid the compliment in a way by doing a very birds sounding like song.

Roger McGuinn: Well Derek Taylor came over to to my house with a preview copy of Rubber Soul and he said George wants you to listen to if I needed someone and he wants you to know that he got it from the lick of bells of Rhymney which of course goes like...

Pete Fornatale: I certainly appreciate your doing a version of it for us today on on mixed bag. Still thinking about that night. I've always seen the link between - Well, we talked about this before too because He once went on tour with them - Dylan to Roger to Petty. You know, there are times in Petty's music where he sounds amazingly like Bob. Yes. And times when he sounds amazingly like you.

Roger McGuinn: Well, he has his own style, and he can sound like whatever he wants to. I take it as a tremendous honor that he would want to sound like me anytime. And you know, the story I tell about how I first heard him was I was at my manager's house looking at some material for outside material to fill out my Thunderbird album. And my manager was playing me different tracks from different sources, you know, some tapes and records. I don't know what else it was before. There were CDs so there wasn't CD. Anyway, he played Tom's American Girl and just kidding to my manager, I said, When did I record that? I thought maybe it was something I'd you know, like an hour or something. I'd record it somewhere. But no, I didn't really think that. But you know, he said, It's not you. And I said, I know. I know. I know who's that. And he said, It's Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and I said, Well, I want to meet him. So the next day, we got to meet him and became friends went on tour together. We wrote king of the hill together. We did that tour. We wrote that song on the tour in 87, I believe. It was called the temples in flames tour.

Pete Fornatale: That's funny. You know, I was trying to think of questions I had never asked you before. Here's one. What's your favorite movie?

Roger McGuinn: I would have to say it's either War of the Worlds or Forbidden Planet. Might be might be War of the Worlds. The George Pal 1953 film, no remakes. I don't like any of the remakes that they've done. It was starring Gene Barry. And I don't know the lady's name. Anyway, it was it was quite a beautiful, beautifully done movie. special effects were incredible. Considering they didn't have the equipment they have now. Like, you know, Industrial Light and Magic magic and all that sort of computers. I didn't have that. So they made these alien spaceships look so real. They scared me to death. 10 years old.

Pete Fornatale: Isn't that funny? I mean, your your influences early in life, keep getting reflected over and over again. Maybe your whole thing about technology and gadgets and flight certainly could have come to

Roger McGuinn: I was already into that. At that point. My grandfather was an engineer in Chicago, worked on some of the bridges over the Chicago River. And he was obviously into this technology. When he instilled that love in me, he would take me to Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry every Sunday. And I would push buttons and things would were one of my favorite. One of my favorite displays, probably in the 40s, was the bell telephones mobile telephones exhibit and what they had was a sort of a 25 by 25 Square layout almost like you'd have for an electric train set. Only instead of having trains. They had little blinking lights that went around to indicate roads. And they had a little car out in the one of the roads. And then they had a little house and things would light up as as they were talking. There was this audio presentation. And it went something like this. The phone would ring and the nurse would answer Dr. Philips office and and the frantic mother would say it's a little Susie's just swallowed some poison. What do I do? And the nurse says, Well, Dr. Phillips is not in right now. But perhaps I can get him on his mobile telephone, you know, mobile telephones. So then you see the little lights going out and no no, you see radio waves coming off the tower and they go you know flash flash flash flash. And then Dr. Phillips gets it. He's Dr. Phillips here. And it's so little Susie swallowed poison. Well, I'm going right over there right now. And he goes over and saves Little Susie. Well, that got me to want a mobile telephone. So actually I did, by 1970 I had one in a briefcase, I remember.

Pete Fornatale: It's like the guy who carries whatever the code is for the President.

Roger McGuinn: It was the greatest gadget. They only probably sold them to the CIA and me, the only civilian that had one. one time I put a CIA sticker on it that I'd gotten from Time magazine, and I cut it out and taped it on the front of it. And I was going through airport security. And the airport security was very suspicious of me because I had long hair, but they open up this. They open up the telephone, and they said, This is your company. And then they looked at it and they closed it real fast. And they gave it to me and said gone through going through.

Roger McGuinn: Well, I ran into him in Chicago at a concert that was kind of aborted for some reason. It was at the Navy Pier. And he doesn't remember this, of course, because I was just one of maybe 50 adoring teenage boy fans who had my banjo with me. And, but because he's the kind of guy he is, when the concert was canceled, he couldn't just let it go at that. He actually got his banjo out and stood on the loading dock of the Navy Pier and did an impromptu concert for all of us kids who had come to see him. And I asked him some questions. I said, you know, what do you attribute your popularity to? And he said, Well, I think it's because I get people to sing along. And they hear themselves singing and they like me. And you know, that's true today. I found that when I get the audience singing along, the applause for that song is twice as much as it is for any other song on the concert.

Pete Fornatale: There are so many stories like that. Neil Diamond saw him at a summer camp. Yeah, I mean, one would not think of Pete Seeger. And another generation, Suzanne Vega, as a child was called up on stage at Carnegie Hall to sing in a group with Pete.

Roger McGuinn: So he's really been Johnny Appleseed. He was with me for sure. Got me into the 12 string guitar and the five string banjo. I mean, he turned me on to Leadbelly and he got his 12 string guitar influenced from Leadbelly. Interesting story about the 12 string. I heard that Leadbelly actually was shopping around in Texas, he was working in Texas, and he found a pawn shop where there was a 12 string hanging in there. And they think it was probably coming from the mariachi singers in Mexico, because they used on this kind of a rhythm instrument that they do a lot of like fast. strumming kind of stuff on them. But Leadbelly picked it up in a play bass notes. He turned it into a bass, you know, like bass run kind of blues guitar. And that's how the 12 string became popular. And Pete, of course, carried the torch after Leadbelly

Pete Fornatale: You were developing stuff long before many of your peers. Have you talked to Al Gore about this?

Roger McGuinn: No, that's another story entirely, never met the man. well, I'm toying with some new ideas about what to record next. And I'm thinking along the lines of doing something very much like my first solo album, which was very eclectic. It had a little bit of country rock, a little bit of jazz influenced stuff, some folk, and I wasn't really shooting for a specific genre or, or a specific audience and I obviously wasn't trying to get a hit. You know, I'm just kind of doing what I love. Maybe the James alley blues, maybe some other tunes so that I love some things from the folk side and some things a little more rock.

Pete Fornatale: And how about something recent that you've written? Southbound Blues?

Roger McGuinn: Thank you for the clue. Okay, let me set this up a little bit. This is a song I wrote pretty much all by myself. I think Camilla, Camilla came up with the best part of it. Actually, I have to give her credit. Here's the best part of it. Drive home high, drive home low in the rain in the snow, drive them high and drive them low in the rain and in the snow. It's what truck drivers do. And I get the audience singing along on that part when I do it live and they sound wonderful.

Pete Fornatale: Roger McGuinn live on mixed bag from the Museum of television and radio in New York City special She'll thanks today to Camilla McGuinn, Ken Beck, Chip Christarella and Janice Kohlar. This is Pete Fornatale. Roger I know we just did one but I can hardly wait for the next update. Thanks a lot...Thank you. Boy, that was I'm serious. I don't think we ever got that much live music. I mean, just because we can stretch out here and it is a good feeling. Chip. Did you meet Roger? Okay, this guy has. They have made this lovely facility available to us