Arts & Entertainment

Byrds’ Legend Roger McGuinn Lands at Music Hall on May 9

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Roger McGuinn with one of many stringed instruments he has mastered Photo credit: John Chiasson

April 24, 2025

By W.B. King–

Long before he was flying “Eight Miles High” as the frontman for The Byrds, Roger McGuinn called Tarrytown home. “My folks had a rented house there. I went to second and third grade in Tarrytown. My dad was working in Manhattan at an advertising agency, and commuting,” McGuinn told The Hudson Independent. “I loved Tarrytown. I have some delightful childhood memories of playing there, hanging out in the woods and playing in the snow and going over to Hackley and watching track meets and things.”

Years earlier, his parents, James Joseph and Dorothy Laughlin McGuinn, co-wrote the popular childrearing book, Parents Can’t Win. To make the commute less taxing on his father, the family eventually moved to the Fordham area of the Bronx, McGuinn explained, noting parenthetically that he was born in Chicago.

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While McGuinn was living in Tarrytown in the 1950s, the Music Hall, where he would play many times as an adult, wasn’t yet on his radar. But during that time, his baby brother was born, creating a sea change of sorts. “They gave him a plastic accordion, and I picked that up and learned how to play ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’ on it,” he shared. “That was my only experience with music. I listened to the radio, but it was all that crooning, you know, Perry Como and Doris Day and stuff like that.”

Transistor Radio Revelation

When McGuinn returned to his roots to attend the Latin School of Chicago, The Memphis Flash caught his ear one day. “I turned 13 and got a transistor radio. I used to ride my bicycle around Chicago listening to WJJD and I heard Elvis’ ‘Heartbreak Hotel,’ and that just made me want to get a guitar and play music,” he said, adding, “I’m not the only musician that says that.”

Along with The King, other favorites included Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Gene Vincent and the Everly Brothers. The following year, he enrolled in Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music, where he grew adept at playing the five-string banjo and 12-string guitar.

“Mike Bloomfield was there at the same time. This is funny because I’m reading Mike Campbell’s book [Heartbreaker: A Memoir], and he was big time inspired by Bloomfield. Bloomfield came up to me one day and he said, ‘I’m going to get better than you.’ And I said, ‘Okay, man, let’s go.’ And then another time, he came up to me and he said, ‘How did they get that sound of the guitar that goes [screeching]?’ I said, ‘You mean, like this?’ And I showed him how to bend the string.”

While studying at Old Town School of Folk Music, McGuinn became enamored with Pete Seeger and The Weavers who often played in Chicago. One time, Seeger performed solo. “I was a bit skeptical that he’d be able to pull it off, but he did. People singing [along in] that three-part harmony. Just wonderful,” McGuinn shared, adding that this approach still informs his performances to this day. “He had four instruments on stage, which I do. I carry a high string banjo, 12-string Rickenbacker, 12-string Martin, and a seven-string Martin that I kind of came up with the idea for.”

After high school, gigs on the coffeehouse folk circuit led him to joints like Club 47 in Cambridge, Mass., which was a regular stop off for the likes of Bob Dylan, The Lovin’ Spoonful and Joan Baez. The latter celebrated songstress, he said, is an underrated fingerpicker. Soon he was living in New York’s Greenwich Village backing up artists like Judy Collins, Simon & Garfunkel and Bobby Darin.

“It was an amazing story, divinely inspired, really,” McGuinn said in reflection. “I was at all the right places at all the right times.” The celebrated Bob Dylan film, No Direction Home (2024), captured the period in good fashion, he noted adding that Edward Norton was outstanding as Pete Seeger. “The kid who played Dylan was really good, and he finger picked, which Bob doesn’t do,” McGuinn said with a chuckle.

“I used to go to Gerde’s Folk City for the open mics back then and I saw Bob Dylan there in 1961, maybe 62’. I was playing in coffee houses too—pass the hat stuff,” he continued. “John Sebastian, Richie Havens and Peter Tork were there. And comedians like Woody Allen were in the Village playing…the Gas Light with Dave Van Ronk, it was really quite a cool scene.”

Jingle-Jangle

By 1963, Darin was paying McGuinn $35 a week as a songwriter. When the “Mack the Knife” star became ill and retired, McGuinn picked up session work and then had a similar “paradigm” shift as when hearing Elvis for the first time. This transcendental moment forever secured his signature guitar sound.

“The Rickenbacker, that was from the movie A Hard Day’s Night. George Harrison had one. I was listening to the pop music of the day, like The Searchers and The Seekers, and they had the 12-string sound, the octave sound and it was really cool. I copied on what The Beatles were playing,” McGuinn told The Hudson Independent. “I went to the music store and traded in an acoustic Gibson 12-string that Bobby Darin had given me and a long neck five string banjo like Pete Seeger had, and I got this Rickenbacker 360 12-string. I practiced about seven hours a day on it.”

Now living in Los Angeles and playing at clubs like The Troubadour, McGuinn added Beatle tunes to his solo sets and began playing traditional folk songs on electric guitar. This caught the attention of fellow enthusiast and musician Gene Clark. “My folks sent me a copy of Norman Vincent Peale, The Power of Positive Thinking, when I was getting The Byrds together,” McGuinn shared. I started going around saying, ‘I trust everything’s going to work out all right,’ which is from that book. I remember Bob [Dylan] and I were talking. He said, ‘Don’t you think somebody’s gonna punch you in the mouth for saying that?’

Clark wasn’t throwing any punches. He was a believer and joined the mission. All those hours of playing on the Rickenbacker, along with some studio compression techniques, gave rise to McGuinn’s “jingle-jangle” sound made popular on The Byrd’s 1965 hit, “Mr. Tambourine Man,” penned by Dylan.

Rounding out the initial band lineup was David Crosby (rhythm guitar, vocals), Chris Hillman (bass guitar, vocals), and Michael Clarke (drums). The group’s harmonies were lauded and soon other hits followed, including “Turn, Turn, Turn” and “Eight Miles High.”

On a plane ride back from a tour of England, Clark asked McGuinn how high he thought the plane was flying. He responded, “Probably seven miles.” Clark, a fan of the Beatles’ tune “Eight Days a Week,” thought an extra mile higher had a better ring to it. Also rounding out the song’s uniqueness was disparate musical influences McGuinn had gleaned.

“I had learned a whole bunch of scales, and that’s how we got into the [John] Coltrane ‘Eight Miles High’ thing,” McGuinn said, also noting the influence of Ravi Shankar. Crosby also made his mark.

“I wasn’t a big jazz fan before I knew David, and he would listen to jazz all the time. We’d turn on KBCA, a great jazz station in Los Angeles,” he said. “I wasn’t too much into Dixieland, which was the original jazz, but Coltrane was like modern jazz, I guess it was called bebop at one time. I liked the angular kind of unexpected improvisation.”

In the early days of the band, McGuinn said they all collaborated. “Gene went off and became very prolific as a songwriter. Chris and I wrote some songs, and David and I wrote some songs,” he said. “But I wasn’t really that interested in songwriting, I preferred performing.”

Friends Help Friends

While The Byrds would entertain various lineups over the years, McGuinn was the constant. By 1973, the group disbanded but would rise again throughout the years in different incarnations. McGuinn’s relationship with Dylan was further realized when they collaborated on songs for the movie Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid(1973), which included “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.”

Two years later, he toured with Dylan in his Rolling Thunder Revue, which featured Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell. In 2019, a documentary of the famed tour, Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese, was released. In one scene, the musicians are at a party hosted by Canadian singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot. Seated in a circle with acoustic guitars are Dylan, McGuinn and Mitchell. An eager Mitchell had written a song, “Coyote” about the tour and began playing it. A stone-faced Dylan looked on as McGuinn cheered on Mitchell. By the end of the now famous tune, a fiddle player provided a melody, Lightfoot was transfixed, while Dylan and McGuinn happily strummed along.

“She was trying to impress Bob with her songwriting ability, and he was dead panned,” McGuinn recalled. When asked if Mitchell achieved her goal, he responded with a resounding “Yes!”

Turn, Turn, Turn

Throughout the years, McGuinn, who was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1991, has never slowed down. In respect for the folk music he cherishes, he launched the “Folk Den” website in 1995. The site preserves and promotes folk music, complete with free chords, lyrics and history.

“It’s a labor of love. I started it out of a concern that the traditional side of folk music was being neglected in favor of singer songwriters, which is true,” McGuinn said. Folk music, he added, resides deep in his DNA. “My dad was 100 percent Irish, and my mother was half Irish, so I got some Celtic blood in me. And I just love those melodies. I do a lot of sea shanties too, and they’re basically Celtic tunes.”

When McGuinn returns to his childhood stomping grounds and performs at the Music Hall on May 9, fans can expect to hear hit songs, deep tracks, and maybe even a Pete Seeger impression. He also noted that after a tour with Hillman and Marty Stuart celebrating the 50^th anniversary of the heralded Sweetheart of the Rodeo (1968) album, songs like “You Ain’t Going Nowhere” could be added to the set.

“I really love [all] those songs, especially ‘Turn, Turn, Turn.’ I think that’s my favorite, not just the melody, but the sense of well-being it creates,” McGuinn said of the song Seeger wrote with help from the Book of Ecclesiastes. And at 82, he shows no signs of slowing down. “It’s a lot of fun. Why quit doing something you love, if you can still do it?”

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