![]() ![]() He’s always been kind of quiet about that, but I do remember when Bob and Bobby Neuwirth came to World Pacific studios, where we were rehearsing some of his songs. Did he ever share that sentiment with you? Tambourine Man” being played as a rock song until he heard you guys doing it. I’ve heard that Dylan couldn’t really imagine “Mr. It has a few frames, then it goes to full motion and then it goes back to a couple of frames. So if you look at my “Eight Miles High” video-I think you can find it somewhere on YouTube- it’s got a lot of that single frame stuff, but it’s very jazzy. He did one with the music of Ray Charles in 1961. I was a fan of Bruce Connor, who did some avant-garde video stuff with single frame video. I had the movie camera and the idea was that we were going to shoot some video and project it behind ourselves onstage and have kind of a psychedelic light show going on. I took some video footage, some of which was used in the movie Echo in the Canyon. I had a still camera, but what really interested me was my a Bolex RX 16mm movie camera. Is that a medium you actively explored at the time? In a number of the photos that appear in the book, you’re holding a camera. Strangelove, a movie that I loved, so I was trying to reach out to him. I always liked to put a humorous thing at the end of a Byrds record, like “We’ll Meet Again”, which was a tribute to Stanley Kubrick. It was kind of like a magazine, where you have a variety of articles and things about different people and places. We had a potpourri of different styles and different songs. There had been some TV shows that called themselves electronic magazines. Well, that was my idea, although it wasn’t entirely original. You did an early interview in the U.K., where you referred to the music of The Byrds as an electronic magazine, a description that still resonates in 2022. Tambourine Man.” It just kicked it up another notch. I had that idea of taking folk songs and souping them up with a Beatles beat, which is what happened with “Mr. That’s where I ran into Gene Clark and David Crosby. He said, “Put a sign outside that says ‘Beatles Impersonations.’” I thought, “This is embarrassing.” So I bought myself a one-way ticket to LA and got a job at the Troubadour. They didn’t like it, but the guy who ran the coffee house loved it. I took it to the Village and played it for the people in the coffee houses. So that attracted my attention and gave me the idea of doing some kind of folk music with rock-and-roll and combining the two. They had all these passing chords, instead of just going with three chords and an attitude like rock-and-roll normally was. They had been a skiffle group called The Quarrymen, and skiffle is kind of a folkmusic style. They were using folk-music chords in their rockand-roll. He said, “Rock-and-roll, rockand-roll.” This is when I was still into folk music, so he was an inspiration to get into folk and rock. I used to follow him around and ask him questions about the music business and how to make it. I enjoyed working with him and he was kind of a mentor to me. He played piano, guitar and drums and he could tap dance like Sammy Davis Jr. He could do rock-androll and folk music and the Frank Sinatra kind of stuff. I also hung out in the Village, and I worked for Bobby Darin’s publishing company in the Brill Building, where I wrote some songs. I became a studio musician and played with Paul Simon on the “Sound of Silence” demo, for instance. Then, I toured with some bands before I ended up in New York after a couple of years. I was raised in Chicago and went to the Old Town School of Folk Music. What led you out to Los Angeles where you formed The Byrds? You grew up in Chicago, then moved to Manhattan and established yourself in folk circles. As McGuinn reveals, “When we first came out, they labeled us as folk-rock but we said, ‘We don’t want to get stuck in a label.’ So we experimented with country, jazz, electronic music and whatever else. However, the band’s aspirations were always much deeper. Tambourine Man” and continued to connect with their vocal harmonies and McGuinn’s innovative expressions on his 12-string Rickenbacker guitar. The future Rock and Rock Hall of Famers first gained notoriety for their 1965 cover of Bob Dylan’s “Mr. The Byrds: 1964-1967 also incorporates new interviews with surviving members McGuinn, Crosby and Hillman, whose signatures appear in a Super Deluxe Limited Edition. This work presents over 500 images, many of them previously unreleased, that track the development of the band’s original lineup: McGuinn, David Crosby, Chris Hillman, Gene Clark and Michael Clarke. “It felt like we were experiencing an artistic renaissance,” Roger McGuinn says of the period explored in the new art book, The Byrds: 1964-1967. (photo credit: Jim Dickson Archive/Henry Diltz Photography) ![]()
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