It was the song that made Simon & Garfunkel musical legends. Yet if it hadn’t been for the foresight of a producer — and the work of a handful of session musicians — we might never have heard of the duo.

Written by a 21-year-old Paul Simon, the original bare-bones acoustic guitar version of “The Sounds of Silence” was one of the earliest songs of his career. The darkness greeted in its opening line was literal.

“I wrote it in the bathroom in my parent’s house because the room was tiled, so there was an echo,” Simon told Uncut. “I used to turn the lights off and leave the water running. It was like white noise.”

Simon knew “The Sounds of Silence” was a step up from anything he’d composed before. “My brother says it was amazing that I wrote it, because everything I’d written before that was way below it in quality.

“I just took it as, ‘That’s a good one, I could close my act with this one.’”

On the strength of the song alone, Simon & Garfunkel secured a recording contract with Columbia Records. The duo recorded their debut album, Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M., in 1964 under the watchful eye of producer Tom Wilson, who had recently produced Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are a-Changin’.

The album featured the song under the slightly altered title “The Sounds of Silence,” but when Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. was released, it went nowhere. The commercial failure led to the duo’s untimely split. Simon headed to London, immersing himself in the city’s burgeoning folk-rock scene, while Garfunkel returned to his college studies.

Back in the U.S., folk-rock was gaining traction. Bob Dylan was leading the way, while the Byrds’ jangly guitar interpretation of Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” gave the genre an additional boost by topping the U.S. charts. As folk-rock swept the nation, “The Sounds of Silence” began receiving marginal airplay on some East Coast college radio stations.

Wilson became aware of the song’s growing popularity. Having recently produced Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home, an album that saw Dylan introduce electric instruments into his music and expand his audience in the process, Wilson believed “The Sounds of Silence” could achieve a similar result if it were augmented with electric instruments and drums.

Without informing Simon & Garfunkel, he decided to overdub the original recording with bass, drums and electric guitars. Among the musicians he called was session guitarist Al Gorgoni, who had already worked with Dylan and would go on to appear on countless recordings by some of the biggest names in popular music.

“I was one of the first-call players, so we got called for almost everything,” Gorgoni tells Guitar Player today. “Tom Wilson was a very successful producer, but not a hands-on producer. What he did was call the right people and turn them loose in the studio. In this case, it was to add a rhythm section to the two guys singing with a guitar accompaniment.”

Wilson also brought in Dylan session drummer Bobby Gregg, bassist Bob Bushnell and second guitarist Vinnie Bell. Having booked the studio for a three-hour block, the four musicians set up their gear and prepared to record.

Gorgoni armed himself with a Gibson L-5 and an Ampeg amp. Bell, meanwhile, had his own preferred setup, which Gorgoni says he regularly arranged as the go-to rig for sessions in the various studios where they worked.

With Wilson at the helm and Roy Halee engineering, tracking began. But the session quickly proved difficult. Because the original recording had no drums and had not been recorded to a click track, its tempo was inconsistent, repeatedly faltering throughout the song.

“It was chaotic,” Gorgoni reveals. “We had to match the recording. They even tried using echo, but that didn’t disguise the uneven tempo.”

The guitarist recalls that Wilson’s hands-off method meant the musicians were left to their own devices.

“There was no arranger or any real guidance for the players from the booth, either. So they kept playing the track until we made up our parts. They made lots of takes. Eventually they chose the one that became the hit.”

Released as a single in September 1965, the revamped version of “The Sounds of Silence” aligned perfectly with the folk-rock sound dominating the airwaves. The new mix connected with a wider audience, and the single slowly began its ascent up the American charts, reaching the top of the Billboard Hot 100 on January 1, 1966. The Beatles’ “We Can Work It Out” knocked it out the following week, but the song returned to number one on January 22.

Simon, still living in London, knew none of this. The first he heard about the new version was when he picked up a copy of the music trade magazine Cashbox. Reportedly, when he heard what Wilson had done to his song, he was enraged.

“I’m not surprised he didn’t like it,” Gorgoni says. “The recording is crude in my view, but it proves the power of a song. Paul is a great songwriter and also an excellent guitar player. And he was part of the new breed of singer-songwriters who were writing more sophisticated lyrics as the pop music scene was evolving.”

Soon afterward, Simon returned from London and reunited with Garfunkel. At the request of their record label, the duo quickly recorded an album titled Sounds of Silence to capitalize on the single’s momentum.

The strategy worked. The album produced two more Top 10 U.S. hits, “Homeward Bound” and “I Am a Rock.” Simon & Garfunkel’s career was back on track.

Over the years, Simon has acknowledged how those three hours Wilson and the musicians labored in the studio transformed not only the song but his life. Had the musicians not managed to build a new arrangement around its uneven tempo, Simon & Garfunkel might never have made their mark on popular music.

“I’m sure he and Art were happy to have such a great career,” Gorgoni says. “And it was launched by that recording.”

Before the British Invasion swept the Beatles across American airwaves, popular music in the United States had a distinct sound. Roger McGuinn, who co-founded the Byrds, accented by his now iconic Rickenbacker 360/12 12-string, was a big part of it.

When the Beatles landed in America on February 7, 1964, McGuinn was working as a session player and songwriter, writing songs for singer Bobby Darin’s T.M. Music company. He says that despite Paul, John, George and Ringo being relative unknowns in the States, he was aware of them.

“I was living in New York, and I was a studio musician, and also working as a songwriter in the Brill Building,” he tells Guitar Player. “And as it turned out, I think there was a CBS TV Channel 2 in New York, and there was a clip of the Beatles, maybe about two minutes long. It had girls screaming, and had the Beatles playing… I don’t know if it was ‘She Loves You,’ or ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand,’ but it was one of those songs.

“I went, ‘Man, these guys are good,’” he admits. “I realized they were using folk music chords for rock and roll. They’d come up as a skiffle band, the Quarrymen, and they’d been playing folk tunes with chords they’d developed into a rock band.”

This realization led McGuinn to change course with varied results. “I started putting folk songs to a Beatles beat and taking it to the Village [in New York City] and playing that for people in the coffee houses.

“They didn’t like it,” he adds with a laugh.

But he knew he was onto something. When George Harrison began playing a Rickenbacker 360/12 in 1964, McGuinn — who had been playing 12-string for years — picked on up as well.

The same year, McGuinn founded the Byrds with David Crosby on guitar and vocals, Gene Clark on vocals, Chris Hillman on bass guitar and Michael Clarke on drums. A 1965 tour followed, orchestrated by their press office Derek Taylor, who had worked for the Beatles in 1964 (and would again from 1968 to 1970). Through Taylor, the Byrds met the Beatles, leading to a friendship between the bands that had a profound impact on both their musical and personal lives.

That impact is evident in George Harrison’s Rubber Soul track “If I Needed Someone.” It also provides the back story to “She Said She Said,” one of John Lennon’s tracks from the Beatles’ 1966 album, Revolver. In August 1966, near the end of their last tour, the Beatles were visiting the Byrds. LSD was a popular drug of choice at the time, and the Byrds and Beatles dropped acid together, along with actor Peter Fonda.

It was Fonda, who, while tripping on acid, said, “I know what it’s like to be dead.”

“Peter had somehow shot himself in the stomach when he was a kid,” McGuinn explains. “He died on the operating table. But they brought him back. So he did know what it was like to be dead.”

Lennon was appalled at the Fonda’s statement. Long after the party ended, still reeling from the episode, Lennon wrote “She Said She Said,” substituting a woman for Fonda, who says, “I know what it’s like to be dead.”

Asked what he made of Lennon’s creation, McGuinn shrugs. “I liked it. I like the song,” he says, “I loved everything the Beatles did, really. There’s nothing that I would put down.”

Despite these connections, the friendship between the two groups is rarely discussed. But the Beatles and Byrds were tight, so tight that when the Beatles gave a press conference at Capitol Records on August 24 of that year, Crosby tagged along.

“Yeah, we were friends,” McGuinn says. “And Crosby kind of followed them around. He’d poke his head out, and whoever was interviewing the Beatles said, “Who’s that guy with the long hair over there?’ And the Beatles would say, “Oh, that’s our mate from the Byrds, David Crosby.’”

Is it true that George Harrison inspired you to start using a Rickenbacker 12-string?

Yeah. We all went to the movies and saw A Hard Day’s Night, and I’d heard that sound on the records, but I didn’t know what instrument it was. But George came out with a Rickenbacker, and it looked like a six [string] from the front.’

But he turned it sideways, and you could see six other tuning pegs, like a classical guitar, sticking out of the back. I went, "Oh, they kind of condensed the 12-string head into something good-looking.” And it sounded great. I had to get one.

What was the first Rickenbacker 12-string you had after seeing George’s?

I traded an acoustic Gibson 12-string that Bobby Darin had given me because he broke the one that I had before that. I put it up against the piano, and the piano was on casters, and it rolled, and the guitar fell down, and the neck broke off. So he brought me a new Gibson 12-string.

I also traded my five-string banjo — a Vega long-neck five-string banjo, like Pete Seeger played — and some cash, and I bought a Rickenbacker 360 12-string in a guitar store in L.A. I played it for about seven hours a day. [laughs]

Was it tough to get used to the 12-string?

Oh, Jim Dixon, who was our manager, said, “You can’t put a capo on an electric guitar, it’s just not done.” So, I had to learn a lot of scales and learn how to play all kinds of stuff up the neck. I had to practice like seven hours a day to do this. That’s how the “Eight Miles High” thing came about, because I’d been doing a lot of scales.

George influenced you, but if you listen to “If I Needed Someone” from Rubber Soul, it’s obvious that you influenced him, too.

Well, Derek Taylor had been in London, and George gave him, I think, a three-inch reel-to-reel of “If I Needed Someone.” He came over — Derek had been living in L.A., and we were all in Laurel Canyon. He was a few houses down from me, and [Byrds bassist] Chris Hillman.

But Derek came over to my house with this three-inch reel-to-reel tape, and said, “George wants you to play this.” So I played it, and it was “If I Needed Someone.” He said he wants you to know that he got that riff from [Pete Seeger’s] “The Bells of Rhymney” [which the Byrds recorded a famous live version of in 1965].

That same year, in 1965, the Byrds and the Beatles met in August for a psychedelic experience. Can you recount that?

The Beatles had already come over to America and declared that the Byrds were their favorite group. And when they first came over, they would send a limo down to pick us up at our various locations and take us to the house that they were renting up in the Hills, in Beverly Hills.

It was the estate of actress Zsa Zsa Gabor that they had rented for, like, a week, or however long they were there for. And so, we’re coming up in the limo, and there’s all these girls, and they’re up on the fences, and there were policemen, and they took us in. The gate opened up, and we go down to this house, and that’s when we all dropped acid.

What was that like?

Peter Fonda was with us, Ringo [Starr] took acid, and Paul [McCartney] didn’t want to do it. So, George, John, and I did, and Ringo, I think, was playing with some girls in the pool.

Did Paul say why he didn’t want to drop acid, too?

No. I really didn’t have any interaction with Paul at that time. I did when we first met the Beatles in London. It was during that tour that we went over, and they billed us as “America’s answer to the Beatles.” Derek Taylor was with us, and, of course, he had been their press officer, so he introduced us to the Beatles.

I met George and John the first night, and then Paul invited me to the Scotch of St. James, his private club. We had a Scotch and Coke, went outside, and he got into his Aston Martin DB5, and we drove around London. It was really cool.

And later on, we went to a party with the Beatles and the [Rolling] Stones. The Stones told us how their butler would roll up hash joints and put them on the steps for breakfast every morning. [laughs]

Circling back to dropping acid in Beverly Hills, that’s also when you and David Crosby introduced George and John to Ravi Shankar, right?

George, John, David Crosby and I went into this big shower, like a big, maybe nine-foot-square shower, where you could sit on a ledge. And we had one guitar that we kept passing around, and that’s when we showed him some Ravi Shankar stuff — and we all were on acid.

That was especially impactful on George.

George started freaking out. [laughs] He said, “I feel like I’m dying…” And then, Peter Fonda said, “Oh, I know what it’s like to be dead.” And John Lennon said, “Oh, don’t tell me that… you’re creeping me out. This is terrible.”

George was pretty into Indian music by then, so it’s surprising that he hadn’t heard of Ravi Shankar.

Well, Jim Dixon was a producer and engineer at World Pacific Records in Hollywood, and they had Ravi Shankar as one of their artists. So we got a preview of the recordings of Ravi, and we knew about Ravi early on. That’s how we were able to tell George about him, and that he’d been an influence. He had been exposed to Indian music prior to that, but I guess he just didn’t know about Ravi Shankar.

You mentioned earlier that when you went to London, the Byrds were billed as “America’s answer to the Beatles.” But given how you fed off each other, it’s clear that it wasn’t so much about an answer as it was a call-and-response.

Well, what was going on was that America was blindsided by the British Invasion. They were looking for some kind of counter to it. I remember watching American Bandstand, and Dick Clark said, “The best Beatles antidote? It’s probably the Beau Brummels.”

And then, he’s on the phone with somebody, saying, “What? The Byrds? Oh, yeah, okay. It’s the Byrds.”

Although he took influence from George Harrison, as a session player Roger McGuinn had been experimenting with 12-string guitar sounds long before he was captivated by the Beatles and Harrison’s use of the Rickenbacker 360/12.

“I always loved the sound of a 12-string because it sounds like a harpsichord,” he tells Guitar Player. “It's got so many nice overtones in it.”

After catching the Beatles' 1964 movie, A Hard Day’s Night, where Harrison brandished a 12-string Rickenbacker, McGuinn followed suit and picked up his own Rickenbacker, a 370/12. It was with this guitar that McGuinn went on to not only impact the guitar scene via his chiming clean tones but also launch folk-rock as a genre.

The proverbial musical patriarch of the folk-rock era was “Mr. Tambourine Man,” a song penned by Bob Dylan in 1965, which the Byrds covered and scored a hit with. At the time, McGuinn had no expectations, but when he looks back, he admits the track's importance.

“I'm happy with what we did,” he says. “I think it was innovative. I was trying to tune it for the AM radio audience, and it worked! I look back on it as a happy experience, really.”

As the ’60s progressed, McGuinn and the Byrds would influence the Beatles as well as Harrison, by turning him on to the sitar playing of Ravi Shankar. The Byrds eventually ventured into country, psychedelic rock and the merging of the two. His 12-string was never far from his reach, but he did eschew folk rock for a while.

Recently, though, with his Folk Den project, McGuinn has gotten back to his folk roots in its purest form.

“I just love it,” he says. “It’s historical. It's human history, and real people writing about real things that happened.

It’s something that should not get lost,” he adds. “I compare traditional folk music to Victorian architecture: You don't want to tear down a beautiful Victorian building and put up a steel and glass structure instead, right?”

What initially drew you to the 12-string Rickenbacker guitar?

Well, I’d been playing 12-string acoustic before that. I got into it because of Pete Seeger playing one, and Bob Gibson playing one. And I got into Lead Belly and the folk scene, so I was a 12-string player. Actually, I was a studio musician in New York, doing sessions for 12-string acoustic and five-string banjo for a lot of folk acts, including Judy Collins and Paul Simon.

How big of an influence was George Harrison on you as far as the 12-string electric guitar goes?

We all went to see the Beatles movie A Hard Day’s Night, and copied down notes about what the Beatles were playing: that Ringo played Ludwig drums, Paul had that Höfner violin bass…

And then George came out with the Rickenbacker, which looked like a six-string from the front. They’d condensed the tuning pegs into a six-string format from the front, and they had another six sticking out of the back of the headstock. It was like a classical guitar, with a channeled head.

What did you think of that?

I went, “Wow, I love the sound of that.” I’d heard 12-string sounds on the radio before, like the Searchers and the Seekers — although I learned later that they were playing six-string guitars, but with another guitarist playing octaves, or something like that. But that 12-string sound was something that I loved.

It became very popular after the Byrds had a hit with “Mr. Tambourine Man.”

Yeah, after we got the hit, everybody got a Rickenbacker. The Beach Boys had one, Paul Revere & the Raiders had one. It was a new sound in rock and roll, and it came out of England.

You’re also an originator of folk rock. Is it also true that the Beatles were your inspiration for that style?

Yeah! The Beatles had first been a skiffle band called the Quarrymen, and skiffle is a form of folk music. So they were doing chords that were more than one, four and five; they were doing things that were more than subdominant and dominant chords. And they ere doing things in the middle of songs where they got into other minor chords, instead of just playing G, C and D major.

Did you ever talk with them about their influence on folk rock?

No, I never did. But there’s also a theory that the Animals invented folk rock by doing “House of the Rising Sun,” which had been a blues song that Bob Dylan recorded. But I don’t think it's the same, you know?

There’s a story that when the Byrds first heard “Mr. Tambourine Man,” David Crosby said, “The two-four folk beat isn’t going to cut it on radio.” Is that true?

Yeah. I realized when I heard the Beatles that they were onto something — that anything with a four-four beat was going to be a hit. So I rearranged “Mr. Tambourine Man.”

We had a demo that was originally recorded in New York by Bob [Dylan] and Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, but Ramblin’ had too much to drink and was out of tune on the demo. [laughs] It actually wasn’t meant to be a demo; it was intended to be released, but Bob didn’t because Ramblin’ was out of tune.

So we got a copy of that, and that’s where we first learned it. And that version was four and a half minutes long, in two-four time, and out of tune.

That’s when Crosby said, “I don’t like it, man. Two-four time is never going to play on the radio.” And besides that, it was too long; radio wouldn’t play anything over two and a half minutes at that point.

Is it true that the Byrds’ manager, Jim Dickson, invited Bob to hear the Byrds rehearse the song? If so, what was his reaction?

Yeah, it was at World Pacific Studios, where we would rehearse. Jim let us come in there, play on the tape machines, and rehearse, and he invited Bob over.

Bob came over, and he was listening to us to this rock-inspired version of the song. I remember I played the song, and Bob said, “What’s that?” I said, “That’s one of your songs, man…”

He didn’t really recognize it, but he did like it and gave us his approval.

Bob was recording Highway 61 Revisited, the album where he really delved into folk rock, around the same time that the Byrds released “Mr. Tambourine Man.” Do you believe you influenced Bob’s rock leanings?

Well, you know, we all come from rock and roll. I was into Elvis and Gene Vincent and Carl Perkins. And Bob had played piano in rock and roll bands when he was a kid. So Bob was already there. He already had that in his system.

Your Back from Rio record is perhaps one of the greatest star-studded albums of the ’90s. It’s got Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Elvis Costello, David Crosby and Chris Hillman on it. How did that come about, and how do you look back on it now?

I feel great about it. It’s probably my best commercial release.

It came about because I went on the road with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and Bob Dylan in Europe for what was called the Temples in Flames tour.

It was 1987, and we had a day off in Gothenburg, Sweden, and I had a tune. So I showed the tune to Tom, and he and I sat down and wrote “King of the Hill.” And then, Mike Campbell came in, and he had a four-track cassette studio in a briefcase.

So he recorded a demo of it, and we took that demo, and somehow got it to Arista Records, who signed me to a record deal. And then Tom helped me out with the recording, and so did Elvis and the other Byrds. It was a pretty cool project, and I’m still really happy with how it came out.

You’ve returned to folk music in its purest form with your Folk Den project. What led you back there?

I got concerned that it was going to get lost in the shuffle. All the new folk singers were singer/songwriters, and they weren’t doing the old, traditional songs. If you look at NPR's lists of traditional songs, like, only eight of the top 100 are traditional. So traditional music got kind of swept into the dustbin of history.

Do you see the tide turning to where there’s enough quality traditional folk music out there today?

Well, it depends on where you are. If you go to Scotland, there’s plenty of it. But if you go around the United States, you’re not going to find too much of it. It’s all kind of gone, but I’m doing my bit to keep it going by putting things up.

And it’s all for free. It’s a public service sponsored by UNC, North Carolina. I’ve got over 330 folk songs up there for free download on The Folk Den at mcguinn.com.

Few of the guitars that belonged to country-rock pioneer Gram Parsons are around today. Much like the man himself — who died of a morphine-and-tequila overdose in 1973 at the age of 26 — his instruments tended to have disastrously short but eventful lives, creating exquisite, game-changing music before making an untimely exit. Many were lost in a fire at Parsons’ home in L.A.’s Laurel Canyon not long before his death.

But two that survive are very much the alpha and omega of Parsons’ guitar history. There’s his small-body 1963 Martin 00-21 flattop acoustic guitar, currently owned by his former music and romantic partner Emmylou Harris, which dates from Parsons’ earliest days as a young up-and-coming participant in the mid-’60s folk boom. Then there’s the custom acoustic made by luthier David Russell Young in 1973, an instrument that dates from Parsons’ final days and was prominently played on the legendary Gram Parsons and the Fallen Angels tour of that same year. The guitar sold for $125,000 at auction in 2014.

In the decade that separates these guitars, Parsons played a key role in bringing country music out of the honky-tonks and into the forefront of rock music through his landmark work with the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers, and as a solo artist. In the process, he opened up a rich vein of songcraft rooted in the heartbreak tropes of country balladry, yet fused with post-’60s existential angst.

It’s safe to say there would be no Eagles without Gram Parsons. Eagles guitarist Bernie Leadon even played alongside him for a while in the Flying Burrito Brothers. In terms of more contemporary music, Parsons is one of the patriarchs of what we now call alt-country and Americana. His own preferred phrase was “American Cosmic Music.” Call it what you will, the whole twangy crew from Wilco to Neko Case to Jim Lauderdale to Lucius are, in one way or another, the children of Gram Parsons.

Of course, country music was at the party from the earliest days of rock and roll. The music of Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis was a jumped-up shotgun wedding of country and blues, but after the British Invasion, country music fell by the wayside as rock artists started taking their music more seriously in the ’60s.

When rock musicians did perform country songs, they generally relegated it to novelty status, as heard on mid-decade hits like the Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Nashville Cats” and the Beatles cover of Buck Owens’ “Act Naturally,” which exploited the witty side of country lyricism.

But country’s more somber side and growing associations with social and political conservatism (which reached a peak in Merle Haggard’s 1969 single “Okie from Muskogee”) were definitely off-putting to many late-’60s rock music fans, who started to build a dividing line between the two genres.

At Gram Parsons’ urging, the Byrds crossed that line in 1968 with Sweetheart of the Rodeo. Today, the album is hailed as an ambitious landmark work in the country-rock movement, but it was a commercial failure in its time. Chief Byrd Jim (Roger) McGuinn had intended it to be a celebration of 20th century American music thus far, from folk to electronic, but Parsons pushed things in more of a stone-country direction. With his boyish good looks, well-heeled southern charm, and prodigious musical talent, he could be very persuasive.

“Gram was really a strong musical force,” McGuinn said in 1990. “I just let him go and went along with it because it was fun. I was having a good time with it. We went to Nudie’s” — Hollywood tailor Nudie Cohn, known for his flamboyant Western-style suits — “and got some country clothes and cowboy hats. I got a Cadillac and got into the whole country thing. I started listening to country radio and talking with a southern accent. It was like Halloween or something for a long, extended period.”

By contextualizing songwriters like Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie alongside Merle Haggard, the Louvin Brothers, and Stax tunesmith William Bell, Sweetheart of the Rodeo broadened the perspective of the variegated sources that make up rock’s roots. The album also introduced the world to Parsons’ own prodigious songwriting gifts. The winsome bittersweet nostalgia of “Hickory Wind” and the cosmic cowboy philosophy of “One Hundred Years from Now” announced the arrival of a major new voice in popular music.

But Parsons’ time with the Byrds was short. Always restless and erratic in behavior — almost as if he knew how little time he had — Parsons went on to co-found the Flying Burrito Brothers with fellow ex-Byrd Chris Hillman in 1968. His two albums with that group — The Gilded Palace of Sin, in 1969, and Burrito Deluxe the following year — brought Parsons’ songwriting into diamond-sharp focus.

His love of country music’s florid lyrics and ostentatious costumes was matched by his choice of gear. Onstage and in the studio, he favored big, ornate cowboy guitars—Gibson J-200s and Hummingbirds and Epiphone Frontiers. With their mustache bridges and pickguards decorated with flora and fauna, these flashy guitars are very much in the same tradition as Nudie Cohn’s Western suits, which Parsons brought into vogue among rock musicians.

But his take on country tradition was uniquely his own and quintessentially rock and roll. For example, his most well-known Nudie suit, also in the Country Music Hall of Fame collection, features embroidered images of marijuana leaves and naked women.

Given his fondness for a big guitar and a filled fruit jar, not to mention his encyclopedic knowledge of country music, Parsons made an ideal buddy for Keith Richards as the ’60s gave way to the ’70s. It’s an exaggeration to say that Parsons turned the Stones on to country music. Long before Parsons came along, Richards was copping licks from George Jones’ guitarist Charlie Carter when the Stones toured Texas in the mid Sixties.

But Parsons put Jagger and Richards hip to some of the music’s finer points. Gram and his soon-to-be-wife Gretchen Burrell lived for a while at Richards’ house in the South of France, where they were part of the notorious ongoing upstairs party while the Stones were working on Exile on Main St. in the grand villa’s basement.

There is some speculation that Parsons played a songwriting role on country-flavored Stones tracks like “Wild Horses,” “Dead Flowers” and “Sweet Virginia,” but such things are hard to prove. People also wonder if Parsons played guitar on any Exile tracks, though Richards says that he never did.

“But why he didn’t is a good question,” Richards said in 2004. “Gram and I would play a lot upstairs in the living area, and he would play with Mick [Taylor] a lot up there.

“But Gram was a little shy, and we were too busy to say, ‘Hey, Gram, come down here; we need another guitar.’ He would distance himself from us when we were working. He’d come and listen. a bit, but that was it.

“If I have a friend — and Gram was my friend — Mick sometimes gives off a vibe like, ‘You can’t be my friend if you’re his.’ That could have a bit to do with why Gram’s not playing on the record.”

By the autumn of 1972, Parsons was back in L.A., signed to Reprise Records as a solo artist, and at work on his first album under the deal, GP. Around that time, he came through the doors of Westwood Music, just south of UCLA, looking for a new guitar. The store’s owner, Fred Walecki, knew him well, as he’d sold Gram a few guitars and hung with him. At the time, Westwood Music was at the epicenter of L.A.’s burgeoning country, rock, and folk guitar scene.

“Gram was a party kid,” Walecki recalls. “He was in love with the spike [intravenous drugs]. but he wasn’t like some horrible nodding-out drug addict. Gram was like an angel. He was so innocent in a lot of ways.”

Parsons knew what he wanted: a guitar like the one Walecki had recently sold to Merle Haggard’s wife, which was made by luthier David Russell Young and ornamented with the maker’s extraordinary fretboard and headstock inlay work, a floral pattern often called the Tree of Life. This kind of instrument was very much in Parson’s style: flashy and floral, but also elegant and classy. Walecki commissioned Russell to build an instrument for Parsons, which became Parsons’ stage guitar. The guitar figured prominently in the Gram Parsons and the Fallen Angels Tour of 1973.

The nominal goal of this traveling country-rock soap opera-cum-circus was to promote GP. The album was actually a tough sell at the time, although it is now recognized as a classic, rich in poignant southern vignettes and honky-tonk weepers like “She” and “A Song for You,” sweetened by mournful pedal steel, fiddle, and gospel vocal harmonies coming at you like Jesus and his angels beaming down from the nearest cloud.

On the record, Parsons was backed by the crème de la crème of Elvis Presley’s stage band: guitar legend James Burton, keyboardist Glen D. Hardin, and drummer Ron Tutt, as well as country legends Buddy Emmons and Al Perkins on pedal steel and Byron Berline on fiddle.

GP also benefits from angel-voiced contributions of Emmylou Harris. Chris Hillman brought the young up-and-coming singer into the fold. Walecki notes, “Chris’s idea, as I recall, was to get Emmylou Harris to come in, sing on Gram’s album, and then sing on his own album. We had quite the little society.”

Right from the start, Harris and Parsons shared a deep musical empathy, their voices twining in the best country-duo tradition of Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton, George Jones and Tammy Wynette, and Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn. For many years, Harris’s main guitar was a ’60s Gibson J-200 that Gram had given her.

Their musical bond, moreover, was starting to blossom into romance. Harris didn’t want to move in on Gram’s marriage to Gretchen, but she could see that that union was rapidly dissolving. So Emmylou chose to bide her time. If only she’d known how little was left.

Harris exerted a beneficial influence on Parsons. “When I heard the news that Emmylou and Gram had fallen in love, I was happy for them,” Walecki recounts. “Especially the news that she wasn’t tolerating the drugs and alcohol, so he was on the straight and narrow.”

But it was probably too late at that point. Even though Parsons was just in his mid 20s, his health was already seriously compromised by years of abusing booze and dope. “He was shaking the last time I saw him,” Walecki recalls. “Literally. He had pancreatitis, the same thing that killed Lowell George. It was one of those things where he could never get high ever again.”

Harris valiantly worked with Parsons to put together a follow-up to GP. Their plan was to make a duo album, again in the grand country tradition of mixed-gender duets. But Parsons wasn’t in the best of shape, and the songs weren’t coming easily without the familiar aids of drugs and alcohol.

“He was writing for the next album,” Walecki says, “and I don’t think he believed that he could go to that place and write songs without using something as a bridge to get there.”

Even so, Parsons was able to come up with two of his greatest songs, the multivalent trucker/traveling musician’s prayer “In My Hour of Darkness” and the anthemic “Return of the Grievous Angel,” tracks that would soon serve as a eulogy of sorts for the troubled singer. Harris helped him put together the former, and Boston poet Thomas Brown contributed the lyrics for the latter, which celebrated “the truckers and the kickers and the cowboy angels, and a good saloon in every single town.”

With this new material, some leftovers from Parson’s back pages, a few inspired covers, and superb support from Burton, Hardin, Tutt, and a cadre of top country session players, Parsons and Harris cut an album that stands as one of Parsons’ very finest moments. It was to have been titled Sleepless Nights and jointly credited to Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris, but fate had something else in store.

While on a vacation getaway with friends at Joshua Tree National Monument, Parsons took a fatal dose of morphine, mixed with tequila, presumably by accident. He died on September 19, 1973. After his death, Gretchen Parsons had Emmylou Harris’s name and likeness deleted from the album’s front cover. With a few changes in the running order, the disc was retitled Grievous Angel.

The epithet is ideally suited to Parsons, a man frequently described as angelic by those who knew him. But he was an angel who carried a grievous burden, one that rendered short his days on this earth but allowed him to leave behind a rich musical legacy that is still thriving today.

Clarence White's 1954 Fender Telecaster may not quite have the superstar association of, say, Keith Richards' Micawber, but it's nonetheless one of the more storied Teles in rock history.

First owned by White – a member of the Byrds during their late-'60s country era and a much-in demand Nashville session player throughout that time and into the early '70s, until his tragic death in 1973 – the electric guitar is notable not only for its line of ownership, but for its famous “B-Bender” mod.

Invented by White with Gene Parsons – who also played in the Byrds for a time – the B-Bender, in short, is a mechanical device that allows players to bend their B string in such a way as to give their tone a pedal steel-like, distinctly country feel.

Marty Stuart – himself a Nashville legend – purchased the guitar from White's widow, Susie, in 1980, for the whopping price of $1,450. 

“I couldn’t believe it,” Stuart told Guitar Aficionado in a 2014 interview. “I had basically laid my checkbook on the table and said, ‘Susie, name your price.’ She could have asked for far more and I would gladly have paid.”

“I begged her to take more money, and she didn't want any more – she wouldn't have it,” the guitarist elaborated in a 2017 sit-down with Reverb. “[She said] ‘I think Clarence would want you to have this,’ I said, ‘I only met him one time,’ she said ‘You'll take care of it, and honor it.’”

Of its sound, Stuart told Guitar Aficionado, “It’s an indescribable guitar. You could put a hundred Telecasters in a row, and when you plug this guitar in it just has a voice all its own. It is absolutely one of the most magical guitars I [have] ever played.”

The B-Bender Tele can be heard on a number of cuts throughout the Byrds' country-era catalog, and Stuart would later even get the chance to use the guitar onstage with Byrds frontman Roger McGuinn.

“We couldn’t wait to finish singing what we had to sing to get Roger started, because it gave us a chance to do the Byrds,” Stuart told Guitar World in a 2017 interview. 

“To hear that pull-string, Roger’s Rickenbacker, and the sound of Roger’s voice, all together on one stage, and playing the true arrangements, I felt like I was 15 years old, on top of the world with rockets underneath me. It was awesome.”

Most guitarists who have plugged into a whirling, sound-warping, Doppler effect-inducing Fender Vibratone can recall the major impression that playing through a rotary-speaker cabinet made on them. It’s unlikely any compact electronic rendition of the effect will fully satisfy them.

The occasionally crosspollinated worlds of vibrato and chorus have been immensely popular with guitarists in their many forms since they first became available. From the late-’60s Univox Uni-Vibe to the mid-’70s Boss CE-1 Chorus Ensemble and today’s contemporary re-creations of those and other beloved analog pedals, each is an electric guitar classic in its own right.

But the trail begins with the granddaddy of them all: the Fender Vibratone. Produced from 1967 to 1972, it’s a hulking electromechanical sound swirler that produced what is still the most hypnotic and enveloping version of this effect.

Fender licensed the Vibratone from an original rotary-speaker design by inventor Don Leslie, who introduced his rotary-speaker cabinet for use with Hammond organs in the 1940s. The most popular of these units were formidable beasts that contained their own power amplifiers as well as two different types of rotary speakers.

That trenchant swirl you hear from a great Hammond player like Jimmy Smith, Booker T. Jones, the Heartbreakers’ Benmont Tench and the E Street Band’s Danny Fenderici is most often the result of a big Leslie Model 122, 142 or 147.

Aptly called Tone Cabinets, these beasts weighed upward of 150 pounds, were housed in louvered wood cabinets, and included a built-in tube amp, a 15-inch woofer firing downward into a ported rotating drum, and a dual-horn tweeter that spins on a horizontal plane. (One of the horns is a dummy that simply acts as a counterweight to its partner to maintain balance.)

A crossover splits the lower and higher frequencies between the woofer and horn, respectively, and both the drum rotor and horn spin, speed up and slow down at different rates, creating a veritable maelstrom of sound when the drum and horn are spinning at full tilt.

Standing in a room or onstage amid such a storm of sound can be a heady experience. Indeed, play through a Leslie and you’ll discover why many guitarists will never settle for anything less than the sound of a true rotary-speaker cabinet.

While guitarists have lusted after the rotary-speaker effect virtually since its incarnation, and occasionally adapted Leslies for use with the six-string, these cabinets really weren’t well suited to the instrument. Aside from being huge and monstrously heavy, the contribution of the upper tweeter section was often regarded as less than ideal for reproducing the guitar’s frequency range, and the built-in amp was seen as redundant, since most guitarists were already plugged into standard amps that they liked. What’s more, the Leslie cabinet took its power through a cable connected to the organ, making the adaptation of one for guitar a particularly complicated endeavor.

As it happened, the Fender Vibratone was based on the somewhat smaller, black Tolex-covered Leslie Model 16, which required the use of an external amplifier and contained only a single 10-inch speaker firing forward into a rotating 15-inch foam drum, which threw the sound out through ports in the sides and top of the cab. The result was a sound that lived in the guitar’s midrange band and emanated via a more portable and user-friendly unit.

Like the Model 16, the Vibratone included a devoted cable set and interface/crossover, which connects between the speaker output of a traditional guitar amp and the rotary cabinet. This was equipped with a two-button foot switch for changing between the cab’s slow (chorale) and fast (tremolo ) speeds, and switching your amp’s signal between its internal speaker and the Vibratone speaker.

Introduced at the height of the psychedelic-rock movement, the Vibratone was one of several popular effects that helped bring acid-tinged sonics to many prominent recordings.

Jimi Hendrix tapped one for “Little Wing” and “House Burning Down,” and the Byrds, Cream, Pink Floyd, Todd Rundgren and scads of other artists all dove in, too. 

Later, Stevie Ray Vaughan famously broke out a Vibratone for several songs on his album Couldn’t Stand the Weather, the title track included, although it’s relatively low in the mix and he doesn’t appear to have found the speed switch.

If you’re looking to acquire the real thing for use today, be sure it’s in good mechanical condition and has a fully functioning foot switch and interface. And make sure that you’re prepared to haul around a 70-pound, 29 x 21 x 15-inch box in an age where such things are no longer considered compact and portable.

Alternatively, try to forget that addictive, unreproducible, in-the-room sound and make do with a modern Uni-Vibe clone – which, of course, is why the Uni-Vibe was invented in the first place – or Fender’s Pinwheel rotary-speaker pedal, which features three different rotary-speaker emulations, including the Vibratone.

Essential Ingredients

• Ported rotating drum
• 10-inch speaker
• Chorale (slow) and tremolo (fast) speeds
• Cable set and interface between amp and cab
• Two-button foot switch

Nels Cline follows two distinct tracks in his guitar playing, alternating the avant-jazz arc he explores solo along with the psychedelic-punk-freakout textures he brings to Wilco.

Here are the five riffs that changed his life, and inspired his own fearless fretting...

1. “Turn! Turn! Turn!” by the Byrds

“I had to listen carefully to see what was going on here,” says Cline. “I learned later in life that I have this great love – as does much of western culture – with the major ninth.

“I think that sound, which has to do with the idiomatic aspects of open strings on a guitar, is what created the term ‘jingle jangle’– not just the timbre of a 12-string, but the sound of ringing, open strings. 

"That sound is irresistible.”

2. “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago” by the Yardbirds

“This is one of the most marvelous and exciting and colorful recorded performances of a song.

“If you think about audio engineering at that time – which was a 4-track deck, I’m sure – I don’t even know how they did it.

“There are so many crazy things going on with the guitar. It’s sort of like satellite Sputnik psychedelia. 

"It still gives me a rush.”

3. “Manic Depression” by the Jimi Hendrix Experience

“This is the song that convinced me I was going to play guitar. 

"When you hear the intro riff, and all the other stuff he does in the solo, he goes completely mad.

“I was sold. There was no way I was not going to do music for life after that. It was like being jolted with electricity – like flying – and it still feels like that every time I hear it.”

4. “Marquee Moon” by Television

“‘Marquee Moon’ is a veritable feast of memorable and influential guitar riffs.

“Tom Verlaine’s long guitar solo ends in one of the most memorable examples of a mixolydian scale in its most rudimentary form, and it sounds like absolute poetry.

“Then, there’s this beautiful, John Cipollina-influenced thing he plays with his finger, but I do it with the bar.

“That’s where I get my penchant for the ‘wiggle’ – which I use all over songs like Wilco’s ‘Impossible Germany.’”

5. “West Germany” by Minutemen

“The Minutemen had an incredibly diverse, poetic vision. I played on a double bill at McCabe’s Guitar Shop with them in the ’80s with Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra.

“I found D. Boon’s note choices and phrasing to be almost spooky. His presence, charisma, power, and commitment was galvanizing.”

***This article was originally published in the October 2021 issue of Guitar Player***

David Crosby is an iconic acoustic captain at the helm of his ever-fantastic ship, always listening for a song on the wind that might lead him to some mystical, musical port of call. More than ever lately, he appears to be a man on a mission, perhaps making up for lost time.

He’s dropped five albums since 2014. Snarky Puppy ringleader and bass ace Michael League produced 2016’s Lighthouse, and they’ve continued a working relationship that Crosby regards as a band.

Otherwise, the guitarist’s primary co-captain is his son James Raymond. Crosby refers to their collaboration as Sky Trails, which is the title of their 2017 album, and James also produced the new album, For Free (BMG).

The colorful folk-rock legend sounds almost too good for having lived a pirate’s life. His voice is unbelievably unweathered. His fingerpicking and signature six- and 12-string sounds are well intact, but as Crosby reveals in this feature, there is trouble on the horizon in the form of treacherous tendonitis.

Before sailing into the sunset, he’s being as creative as possible. What he hasn’t been doing is working with the company of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. It’s well documented that much love has been lost on that front. No more new musical magic is expected from the quartet, but there is a fantastic new 50th anniversary boxed-set edition of Déjà Vu featuring insightful guitar-and-vocal demos and extensive liner notes by Cameron Crowe.

What we can expect at some point, according to Crosby, is a major documentary produced by Nigel Sinclair and Tim Sexton (Sinclair recently produced the stellar Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart).

For Free gets its title from the Joni Mitchell classic that Crosby covers on the new album. He credits her for opening his eyes to alternate tunings, which he still uses to create deep, cosmic textures.

“I Think I” is a crafty composition with exceptional acoustic guitars and vocals that exemplify Crosby’s breezy, existential vibe. Steely Dan fans will dig the funky groove and jazzy changes on his collaboration with Donald Fagan, “Rodriguez for a Night.”

Clever electric guitar comes courtesy of session legend Dean Parks (Willie Nelson, Paul Simon, Steely Dan), who also wrote the music for the soldier song “Shot at Me.” There are some catchy commercial hooks here as well, including “River Rise,” which features backing vocals courtesy of another cat from the Steely Dan camp, Michael McDonald.

Most cuts feature Crosby’s acoustic at the core, and he’s a better guitar player than he often gets credit for, considering how much attention is paid to his voice and character. He’s actually quite humble about his playing and understands why most of the guitar cred from his crew has gone to Stephen Stills and Neil Young.

“Naturally it would go to them, man,” he says. “Those guys are lead players and have different levels of competency.”

Crosby is a true acoustic guitar aficionado, and he can’t help himself from boasting a bit about his awesome collection. He still uses most of it, including his classic Martins from the Woodstock era.

Perhaps his most infamous Martin is his six-to-12-string conversion D-18. Martin has released limited-edition signature versions, first as the D-18DC in 2002, and then as the D-12 David Crosby, featuring a reversed string course in the third slot, in 2009.

Guitar Player fortuitously caught up with Croz on the heels of recent features with other notable 12-string appreciators from his generation, Leo Kottke and Taj Mahal.

How did your six-string roots start you down the 12-string path?

It’s an interesting story. The first guitar I bought was made by a banjo company that produced a 12-string guitar. Bob Gibson [an American folk singer and a key figure in the 1950s/’60s folk revival] played one, and he was one of the folk guys I liked, so I got one too.

But the first good one was a Martin D-18 that I bought at a music store in Chicago when I was living there. When I moved to California, I took it to Jon Lundberg in Berkeley and asked him to convert it to a 12-string because I was entranced with 12-strings. He did, and to this day it’s the best.

Kottke is going to argue with me about this, but I have a handful of the best 12-strings existing in the world. That one is still the king. It’s better than my D-45 12-string from the Martin Custom Shop, which is killer fucking good. Or my Roy Smeck Gibson that the folks at Alembic converted into a 12-string, and that looks exactly as if there had been a Roy Smeck Gibson 12-string.

Or the copy Martin made of my D-18 for the prototype of my signature 12-string. That has an ebony neck, and it is still hanging on my wall. I truly love 12-strings, and the best one I’ve ever had is still that first one.

Why?

Every single one is different, like snowflakes. Maybe it’s the wood combination. Maybe it’s all the love I’ve poured into it over the years. I’ll line them all up and let you play them, and you’ll come to the same conclusion. Although I’ve got to say that the D-45 rings like a bell.

The original modified D-18 has 12 frets to the body, correct?

Yeah, that puts the bridge a little further back, and for some reason that works. I don’t know why. It is what it is.

What inspired you to have the modification done in the first place?

It was the sound of the guitar. It sounded so good as a six-string, and I should have left it like that, but I was enthralled with the 12-string, so I took the chance, and it worked, out of sheer luck.

Why were you so enthralled with the 12-string? Who was turning you on at that time?  

Bob Gibson and Pete Seeger are the two that jump to mind. I just liked 12-strings right away, and I still do. I was playing that D-18 conversion last night.

It’s interesting that you come to the 12-string from a folk perspective and wind up in the Byrds, perhaps the most famous jangling-rock outfit ever, yet you jump to an electric Gretsch six-string and Roger McGuinn does all the jangling on a 12-string Rickenbacker, correct?

Yeah, it’s not me, it’s Roger. He was always a much better guitar player than me. When he got one of the first Rickies, it sounded like a glass avalanche. Unbelievable. He’s such a gifted musician. He basically does one thing, but he does it really well. He’s also brilliant at voicing something into a different form, like turning “Mr. Tambourine Man” from a terrible goddamned demo into that brilliant record.

I started out playing a Gretsch Tennessean in the Byrds, but then switched pretty quickly to a Country Gentlemen, which was a better guitar.

Even more interesting is that you wind up returning to the acoustic for the act that defines folk rock, Crosby, Stills & Nash. In fact, you all start out on acoustic for that, right?

Yeah, Stephen and I are both crazy about acoustic guitars. Graham likes them, but it’s not quite the same. Stephen and I kind of worship them. We love them a lot. We each have multiple stunning guitars, and that’s why we fall in love with them. I have five Martin D-45s.

What were you thinking when Martin re-introduced the D-45 in the late ’60s?

We knew that Martin had the best wood stashed, because they’d been buying it before anybody else, and that they’d uncorked their stash of Brazilian rosewood, which is now gone. And they had a stash of top wood that they thought was their absolute best. They combined them, and that was irresistible to us.

We could get one for about five grand, and as far as we were concerned that was the best guitar anybody was making. I think we were right. I have three of those 1969 D-45s. They’re the ones with all the wear from being played at the concerts. I also have one made of koa, and it’s a mind-boggling guitar with an unbelievable sound.

Can you share the story of “Wooden Ships” from the Crosby, Stills & Nash debut in 1969?

I wrote it on that 12-string [longtime tech John Gonzales says Crosby refers to the guitar as “the Wooden Ships 12-string”]. I’d say that 90 percent of the chord changes are mine. I brought the music to Stephen and Paul Kantner. Stephen added a couple of very significant changes that really helped.

We were on my boat in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I was docked at a friend’s house and they both came down to visit. We wrote it right there, sitting in the main cabin. Paul gave me some key lyrics that started it going really well. You can guess which verse Stephen wrote: “Horror grips us...” [laughs]

That’s in standard tuning, but you were into alternates, as evidenced by the haunting sound on “Guinnevere.” How did you arrive at that unique tuning?

A kid from the Midwest showed me that tuning that, from low to high, goes E B D G A D, and I got “Guinnevere” and “Déjà Vu” out of it. I’ll tell you what got me started: My brother turned me on to jazz early on and I liked some keyboard players, including Bill Evans and McCoy Tyner. They’d play chords that were like huge freaking tone clusters. Thick stuff. My hand wasn’t good enough to play them in standard tuning.

Some guitar players can approach playing the same stuff as a piano player, using closed positions in standard tuning, but the guitarist can only produce six notes, so the piano player has got you by at least four. I couldn’t do it, but in alternate tunings, different inversions of the chords came up. I started to get to those strange, mystical places I wanted to go.

The chords on “Déjà Vu” can be found simply by barring the top three strings at the 3rd and 5th frets. It’s a matter of which order you pick the notes. I fingerpick with my thumb and first three fingers. The rhythm on “Guinnevere” goes 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2, which is actually very normal.

The main guitar is one of the 1969 D-45s. There are a couple of guitars along with it on the intro, and one of them is probably the 12-string. There are a couple of guitars on “Déjà Vu,” but I’m not sure which ones. We didn’t record it until the Déjà Vu album [released in 1970], but I had the music early on when I was leaving the Byrds and started hanging out with Stephen Stills.

The 50th anniversary edition of Déjà Vu includes the demos for “Almost Cut My Hair” and “Laughing,” which isn’t on that record but becomes a signature guitar track on your solo debut [If I Could Only Remember My Name, 1971]. Can you offer some guitar insights?

I’ll guess that I’m playing one of the ’69 D-45s on “Almost Cut My Hair.” That song is in standard tuning, although it might be dropped a whole step for the demo. “Laughing” is in an alternate tuning that, from low to high, goes D G D D A D, and again the demo might be dropped a whole step from the full studio version.

The vibe that tuning summons is similar to the slow section on “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.” Did you get that from Stills, or did he get it from you?

More he got it from me. The people who taught me the most were Joni [Mitchell] and Michael Hedges. Stephen got into tunings pretty much right away, but he was a blues player, so he could take them to a different place than I could. Joni and Michael worked tunings to the most sophisticated level. They’re both geniuses at it.

And once I found out what kind of music I could write – “Guinnevere” being a good example – I loved it. So, of course, I kept exploring tunings. Over and over again, my best stuff is in alternate tunings.

“Music Is Love” [from If I Could Only Remember My Name] is another example, although I can’t remember that exact tuning right now [low to high, D A D G B D, and the original recording is dropped a half step]. That’s another good example of the original 12-string’s sound.

“I Think I” from the new album has a classic Crosby sound, perhaps in some kind of C tuning.

It’s in an alternate tuning that’s been very good for creating several songs, although I can’t say exactly what it is right now. There are two acoustic parts on there. Steve Postell played the beautiful acoustic lead at the end, and I played the fingerpicking part on one of the 1969 D-45s.

“Other Side of Midnight” is a lovely cosmic tune with a killer chord progression. What’s the guitar story?

You’re going to be pissed, because there isn’t one. Every single sound on that recording is synthesized. My son James played all the guitar sounds on a computer. He’s that good at it. You shouldn’t be able to do that, but he can. I’m not sure if we should allow him in the country. [laughs]

Who’s playing the high chimey intro on “Shot at Me”?

One of the best guitar players in the world, Dean Parks, wrote the music and played on that song. The lyrics are about guys coming back from the sandboxes in Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan. It wrecks them and really screws them up.

Do you still take your vintage Martins on the road?

I’ve been taking two of the three ’69s, even though it’s crazy to do so because they’re worth, like, a hundred grand each. But I’ve been taking them on the road anyway because they’re that good. I also have a Gibson J-200 made out of Brazilian rosewood from their custom shop that I have taken on the road.

And I have some guitars made by Roy McAlister up near Seattle. He showed up at my door one day saying he’d made me a guitar. It was a triple-0 body style, and I prefer dreadnoughts, but he mentioned that he was the guy at Santa Cruz Guitars who had made the copy of my 12-string, which is another one I have. So I invited him in, and it was one of the best guitars I’d ever touched. It’s still the one closest to the bed. I’ve given five of his guitars away to other players, and I have five others that he made, including a mind-boggling 12-string. I take four of his guitars on the road.

Including the 12-string?

No, when I play 12-string in the live show it’s an electric made by Alembic.

How do you electrify your acoustics?

We have gone through the stages of the cross when it comes to pickups. I don’t use any pedals. The signal goes straight to the house, and I have two monitors: one for my voice and one for my acoustic guitars. I use a Magnatone amp for the electrics. [John Gonzales reports that the acoustics all have D’Addario EXP16 strings and Fishman Matrix Infinity undersaddle piezo pickup systems that feed into Radial J48 direct boxes. The electric Alembic 12-string was custom built around 1970, and the Magnatone amp is a Twilighter.]

How are your hands?

I’ve got tendonitis in both. I can play, but I’m down to about 80 percent of what I used to be able to do, and it’s steadily deteriorating. The middle finger on my right hand doesn’t bend well. I had an operation done, but that actually made it worse.

I’m not trying to whine and snivel here. I’ve just got to cope with this reality. I’d guess I’ve got about another year to play guitar, if I’m lucky. It’s not a solvable problem. That’s just how it is. I’ve been playing for 70 years. I’ve had a good run, man.

Can you do any more tours?

I don’t think I can tour anymore. Well, maybe limited, but I do think I can make a couple more records. I’d like to do another Lighthouse record with Michael League and that lineup, but he lives in Spain now, so we’ll see.

James and I have already started the next record. They don’t pay us for them anymore, but we didn’t start doing them for money in the first place. We started doing them because we loved doing them, and we still love doing them. Albums are still our art form. They are what we have based our life on, and we still love making music. They are what we are going to leave behind.

Grab your copy of For Free here.

Legendary singer-songwriter and guitarist David Crosby has died at the age of 81.

A pioneer of the 1960s folk rock movement, Crosby co-founded the Byrds along with Roger McGuinn and Gene Clark in 1964. The following year, the Byrds released their era-defining debut album, Mr. Tambourine Man, scoring the band a top ten hit on the Billboard charts.

Further success followed, however, by late ’67 Crosby had parted ways with the Byrds due to musical differences.

The following year, he formed the supergroup Crosby, Stills & Nash along with Buffalo Springfield’s Stephen Stills and the Hollies’ Graham Nash.

Released in 1969, the trio’s debut album, Crosby, Stills & Nash, peaked at the number 6 position on the Billboard charts.

Adding ex-Buffalo Springfield member Neil Young, the group performed at the Woodstock festival before releasing the Billboard number one Déjà Vu album in 1970 as Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.

In 1971, Crosby launched his debut solo album, If I Could Only Remember My Name. His last, For Free, arrived in 2021.

Speaking of his recorded work in a 2021 interview, Crosby told Guitar Player: “Albums are still our art form. They are what we have based our life on, and we still love making music. They are what we are going to leave behind.”

Shortly before he passed away, Crosby joked on Twitter that heaven was “overrated… cloudy.”

Soon after, tributes began to pour in from across the music world.

“I know people tend to focus on how volatile our relationship has been at times,” wrote Nash, “but what has always mattered to David and me more than anything was the pure joy of the music we created together, the sound we discovered with one another, and the deep friendship we shared over all these many long years.”

"He was without question a giant of a musician," said Stills, "and his harmonic sensibilities were nothing short of genius. The glue that held us together as our vocals soared, like Icarus, towards the sun.

"I am deeply saddened at his passing and shall miss him beyond measure.”

"David was an unbelievable talent - such a great singer and songwriter" tweeted the Beach Boys co-founder Brian Wilson. "And a wonderful person."

Nils Lofgren paid tribute with a touching rendition of Tim Hardin's "Black Sheep Boy."

"Dear Croz, Rest in Peace and Song, old friend," he wrote.

After its raucous birth in the 1950s and early demise following Buddy Holly’s death, Chuck Berry’s imprisonment, Elvis Presley’s Army enlistment and Little Richard’s spiritual rebirth, rock ‘n’ roll shriveled up.

The epicene years from 1960 to 1964 had been a formative but difficult period in which garage rock bands claimed back a piece of the teen pop charts before the British Invasion groups led the way to a rock ‘n’ roll victory.

Those spirited rebels were anything but monolithic. Many brought together influences of early rock, folk, blues, soul, trad jazz and more.

It’s hardly surprising that the old formulas for songwriting and music production were inadequate to the aims of these young and ambitious performers.

Something had to change, and in 1965, it did, largely due to the work of guitarists.

Fuzz effects, once novelty devices on songs like the Venture’s “The 2000 Pound Bee,” were used in earnest by players like Jeff Beck and Keith Richards for their otherworldly tones, along with already established effects like tremolo and reverb.

It was Beck, too, who introduced the sonorities of Indian music to rock ‘n’ roll with his guitar, soon to be followed by George Harrison and Brian Jones, who did likewise by learning the rudiments of the sitar.

What followed was a radical reconfiguring of teen “beat” music.

In the hallowed halls of recording studios like London’s Abbey Road and Trident, this took place with serious application of orchestras, Mellotrons, electric pianos, harpsichords, organs and early Moog synthesizers.

In the dingy basements and dirty garages of teen bands in the U.S., it was evidenced instead by a deconstruction of norms: screamed vocals and fuzzed-out guitars plied against primitive, pummeling beats.

In either form, this was psychedelic rock.

The shocking new sounds fired off synapses in ways familiar to those who had taken LSD.

The drug had become popular in California’s youth culture, primarily in San Francisco, where the Grateful Dead were at the epicenter of Ken Kesey’s acid-fueled happenings, as well as in Los Angeles, where Byrds guitarists Roger McGuinn and David Crosby dropped LSD with the Beatles in the summer of 1965.

Within months, both of those bands would dramatically change their musical direction as acid opened their minds to new approaches to sound.

By late 1966, in London, a newly arrived guitarist christened Jimi Hendrix was conjuring up his own singular brand of psychedelic guitar rock.

He needed nothing more than a Stratocaster and Marshall stack to do so, but with assistance from early effects guru Roger Mayer, Hendrix blew down the walls and signaled the birth of a potent brew of blues-based psychedelia that redefined the electric guitar.

Rock ‘n’ roll was never the same.

The Byrds were among the first bands to have success in the folk-rock genre in 1965, with their jangling electric version of Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man,” featuring Jim (Roger) McGuinn’s languid vocals and ringing 12-string fretwork on a Rickenbacker 360/12.

The group continued in this vein over the next year and two albums, during which time they also released their hit folk-rock cover of Pete Seeger’s “Turn! Turn! Turn!”

But with 1966’s “Eight Miles High,” they made what is considered the breakthrough psychedelic recording, with McGuinn channeling the cascading modal melodies of saxophonist John Coltrane and funneling them through the ragas of sitarist Ravi Shankar.

While touring the U.S. in 1965, McGuinn had acquired an early portable cassette deck and recorded Coltrane’s Africa/Brass and Impressions albums, along with some music by Shankar, who was then becoming popular in the West.

As McGuinn told The Guardian, the Byrds’ nascent attempt at psychedelia “actually came about as a tribute to John Coltrane.

“It was our attempt to play jazz... I was in love with his saxophone playing,” he said. “All those funny little notes and fast stuff at the bottom of the range.”

McGuinn’s guitar for much of this classic era was his Rickenbacker 360/12, which he purchased after seeing George Harrison play one in A Hard Day’s Night.

He added a Vox Treble Booster to his setup in 1966 at the suggestion of Jefferson Airplane’s Paul Kantner, who also played a Rickenbacker 12-string.

“I took the Rick apart and installed it in the guitar,” McGuinn said.

Compression, a key element to his sonorous guitar sound, was added liberally in the studio, although McGuinn never found an outboard compressor that he liked well enough to use in performance.

“Not until Rickenbacker designed my signature guitar with the built-in compressor did I find one that worked for me,” he said of his late-1980s 370/12 RM model.

A visual history of the group’s remarkable trip comes together in The Byrds: 1964–1967, a 400-page art book curated by McGuinn and former members David Crosby and Chris Hillman.

Visit byrdsbook.com for more information

With his folk guitar jangling and surreal lyrics, Bob Dylan more than perhaps anyone laid the groundwork for psychedelic rock’s more fanciful abstractions.

His raw-boned tunes were transformed into baroque-pop balladry by psychedelic-rock trailblazers like the Byrds (“Mr. Tambourine Man,” “Chimes of Freedom” and “All I Really Want to Do”), the 13th Floor Elevators (“It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”) and Manfred Mann (“The Mighty Quinn”).

But many other groups found in Dylan’s songs inspiration for their own peculiar musical explorations.

While his early tunes like “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and “Mr. Tambourine Man” are charged with mysticism, Dylan’s lyrics had largely lost their fanciful edge and turned dark, more surreal and menacing by the writing of 1965’s Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited.

Songs like “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” “Maggie’s Farm,” “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” and “Highway 61 Revisited” describe danger zones and deals to be avoided, pointing the way to psychedelia’s darker side.

This menacing style can be heard in everything from the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” to Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit.”

Dylan could still be playful: A tune like “Desolation Row” presages the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s, with its mix of historical and literary characters, fanciful themes and flirtations with fatality.

Speaking of which, it was Dylan who turned the Fab Four on to pot, which inspired the earliest psychedelic stirrings of John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s music and the group’s nascent studio trickery.

And lest anyone forget, it was Dylan whose look, sound and music inspired a young Black guitarist to let his processed hair go natural and begin singing in his own imperfect style in the clubs of Greenwich Village.

As Jimi Hendrix, he became the biggest guitarist in late-’60s rock and scored his highest-charting U.S. hit with a transformative reworking of Dylan’s own psychedelic nightmare, “All Along the Watchtower.”

Browse the Bob Dylan catalog here.

As Gene Parsons recalled, it was at a 1967 session that inspiration struck for creation of the B-Bender, a mechanical device that pulls an electric guitar’s B string a step sharp to facilitate the weeping sound of a pedal steel.

Parsons and guitarist Clarence White would both join the Byrds’ ever-changing lineup the following year as drummer and guitarist, respectively. But on this day they were performing on sessions for a never-released album by country artists Vern and Rex Gosdin when White needed an extra hand to bend a string – likely the B or high E – behind the nut as he played a harmonic.

“And then he wanted to do it at the second position and the third position,” recalled Parsons, a multi-instrumentalist who played guitar, banjo, pedal steel and drums. “‘He said, ‘Gee, I wish I could do that, but I’d need a third hand!’”

Parsons volunteered his, and the take was soon completed. Afterward, Parsons, a former machinist, set his mind on devising a mechanism that could pull a string sharp on demand and return it to pitch.

His first attempt using a pedal prompted White to complain, “If I wanted to play pedal steel, I’d play pedal steel!” On White’s advice, Parsons devised a pull-string mechanism comprising a system of levers, fulcrums and springs that could smoothly raise the pitch of the B string by up to a full step and return it to pitch simply by pushing the neck down and releasing it.

The key was the upper-bout strap button, which toggled and served as the system activator.

Parsons’ original design used parts from a pedal steel that he’d attached to the back of White’s 1954 Fender Telecaster and covered with a wooden frame and Masonite board, doubling the body’s depth. Later designs were sleeker and fit inside routings on the back of the body.

Parsons went on to retrofit them to order and licensed the design to Dave Evans, who made mods of his own.

Among the guitarists to adopt the B-Bender are Albert Lee (used on countless tunes), Jimmy Page (“All of My Love” and “Ten Years Gone”), Bernie Leadon (the Eagles’ “Peaceful Easy Feeeling”) and Marty Stuart, who owns White’s original modified ’54 Tele, which he calls Clarence.

Variations on the design have endured, including models like the Hipshot B-Bender that require no modification, and even double- and triple-benders for G, B and high-E strings.

90 years ago, Rickenbacker launched the world’s first commercially available electric guitar following the introduction of the game-changing ‘horseshoe’ pickup in 1931. And though much has changed over the years in terms of technology and musical styles, the basic principle of the electric guitar remains the same to this day.

It was a watershed moment for the music industry and pop culture as a whole. Over the decades, Rickenbacker continued to evolve their designs, producing a huge range of instruments including acoustic guitars, jazz guitars, semi-hollowbodies, solidbodies, bass guitars, laps steels, pedal steels, amplifiers and more.

Now, for the first time ever, Rickenbacker’s conclusive history has been captured in fine photographic detail, from the earliest days of the 1930s up to the turn of the millennium.

Created by the Kelly brothers – author Martin Kelly and photographer Paul Kelly – Rickenbacker Guitars: Out of the Frying Pan Into the Fireglo provides readers with a full and detailed account of Rickenbacker guitar evolution that is finally rendered accessible by an easy-to-follow chronological layout.

Much like their previous book, The Golden Age of Fender: 1946-1970 (Cassell Illustrated), The Kelly brothers’ quest to nail the ultimate history of Rickenbacker took them on a journey around the world photographing collections of rare instruments and conducting countless hours of interview.

The result is indeed “definitive,” according to Rickenbacker Chairman and CEO John Hall. A family-run business for many years, his father – F.C. Hall – acquired the firm from Adolph Rickenbacher in 1953 at the dawn of rock ‘n’ roll.

Celebrating the launch of Rickenbacker Guitars: Out of the Frying Pan Into the Fireglo, a special exhibition is being held at Shapero Rare Books in London. Earlier this month, Guitar Player caught up with Hall at a Q&A event held at the prestigious Mayfair bookshop.

“It was a big undertaking for Martin and Paul Kelly,” Hall told us. “Naturally, I was careful about who I would permit access to. The project was initially arranged via Alan Rogan. (The late Alan Rogan was a respected guitar collector/expert who famously worked as Pete Townshend’s guitar tech.)

"He was the one who came to me and said, ‘John, I know these guys. Do you want to do a book? I think they’d be good.’ So I felt comfortable that Martin and Paul were the right people to do the job.

“There’s some amazing information in the book. It fleshed out a lot of details, including some of the stories I knew.”

One such story included in the new Rickenbacker book concerns a young John Lennon who, in 1960, stumbled across what would later be revealed as the first Capri model ever made. Needless to say, the young Beatle’s purchase was a turning point in guitar history.

This truly remarkable tale that bounces back and forth across the pond is told in authoritative detail along with many others in Rickenbacker Guitars: Out of the Frying Pan Into the Fireglo.

Other influential electric guitar players and a bassists featured in the Kelly brothers’ new book include Pete Townshend, Roger McGuinn, Brian Jones, Tom Petty, John Fogerty, Dee Dee Ramone, Paul Weller, Peter Buck, Johnny Marr, Susanna Hoffs, Chris Squire, Lemmy, Geddy Lee and others.

You can order a copy of Rickenbacker Guitars: Out of the Frying Pan Into the Fireglo directly from Phantom Books here.

Rickenbacker’s explosion in popularity in the 1960s came courtesy of an unlikely and convoluted combination of circumstances: a British band selling a U.S.-made guitar back to the American audience, all thanks to an admittedly oddball model originally purchased in Germany. 

But while anything the Beatles laid their hands on made for an easy ride in the marketing department, the Rickenbacker 325 and its brethren proved to have a lot going for them in their own right. 

You’d be forgiven for thinking that Rickenbacker was born in the late ’50s or early ’60s, given the way its guitars hit the scene with John Lennon and George Harrison of the Beatles, the Byrds’ Roger McGuinn and the Who’s Pete Townshend, among others. 

In fact, this manufacturer’s origins extend back to the very dawn of the electric guitar. Rickenbacker evolved from a team of inventors and manufacturers who originally worked together at National in the 1920s, trying to make guitars louder using resonator cones, before amplification became the obvious way forward.

They included George Beauchamp and Paul Barth, who in 1931 developed what is widely considered the first successful magnetic pickup for guitar. With help from Harry Watson and Adolph Rickenbacker, they put this “horseshoe pickup” – so called for its U-shaped magnets – on a rudimentary maple solidbody guitar.

Dubbed the “frying pan” for its shape, this was the first of a line of solid Spanish and Hawaiian guitars made from both wood and Bakelite that would carry the Rickenbacker (and sometimes Rickenbacher) brand name that fronted Beauchamp, Barth and Rickenbacker’s Electro String Company. Ownership went to distributor F.C. Hall in 1954, by which time Rickenbacker was on its way to becoming the jangly propellant of the British Invasion.

The big horseshoe pickup still appeared on some of the revamped company’s early models, notably the Combo, but over the next few years, some more-conventional single-coil guitars went into production, and the line was lurching toward what we consider its classic status.

By the end of the 1950s, Rickenbacker offered a model range that included hollowbodies, short- and full-scale solids, and semi-hollowbodies with one, two and even three pickups.

It was around this time that a young John Lennon was walking the streets of Hamburg, Germany, in search of his dream guitar. For Lennon, Harrison or any young British rock and roller of 1960, the term quality guitar was synonymous with American guitar.

Lennon found his hanging in a Hamburg guitar shop in the form of a natural-finish 1958 Rickenbacker 325, which was part of the company’s Capri series (named for the Hall family cat). The 325, like the other models in the series, was designed by German luthier Roger Rossmeisl.

Harrison, who was along for the ride when Lennon bought the guitar, told BBC Radio, “It was a great-looking guitar, and I think in England you had to order them and wait for six months. Not just for Rickenbackers, for anything – Fenders, Gibsons… And I think it [came about] purely because John needed a decent guitar and that one happened to be in the shop and he liked the look of it.” 

This 325 would become the sound of Beatles rhythm guitar from 1960 to around ’65, as heard on “All My Loving,” “I Saw Her Standing There” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”

By the time it was thrust into the public eye during the band’s 1964 debut appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, Lennon’s 325 had transmuted to a gloss-black finish in 1962, courtesy of an English coachmaker. (A decade later it would be repaired and stripped to natural by New York repairman Ron DeMarino.)

But fans comparing Lennon’s early Rickenbacker with even slightly later 325s will notice several other things that stand out about it. For instance, later examples sported an f-hole on the upper bout that revealed the body’s semi-hollow nature, though this ’58 – an early guitar built in the model’s first year of existence – had a solid top that gave it the impression of being a solidbody.

A year or two after Lennon’s 325 was made, Rickenbacker switched to the characteristic white-plastic pickguard with a raised forward section, rather than the flat white (and later gold) pickguard. In addition, Lennon modified his 325 by swapping its original Kauffman Vibrola for a Bigsby, and changing out the original oven-style knobs for Hofners.

Mods, rare features and refinishes aside, the Rickenbacker 325 was something of an oddball to attain legendary guitar status. Its scale length was a mere 20¾ inches, putting it in the student-sized range. As such, it’s likely the shortest-scale electric to attain star-guitar fame.

Given the limited appeal of these short-scale models, the 325 Capri wasn’t setting sales records in the late ’50s and likely would have been headed for deletion. After Lennon embraced it, however, it became one of the most desirable of all the now-vintage Rickenbacker guitars.

Tone-wise, the 325’s scale length contributes to a loose, wiry sound, but the key proponent of that Rickenbacker jangle and kerrang is found in its three toaster-top pickups. Although these look somewhat like mini humbuckers, they are actually single-coil units made with a central row of six individual Alnico magnet pole pieces with a coil wound around them.

Their sound is appropriately bright and chimey, and has played a big part in Rickenbacker guitars’ enduring popularity. In the wake of the British Invasion, the brand found favor with ’70s and ’80s stars like Tom Petty and Mike Campbell of the Heartbreakers, Paul Weller, Peter Buck, Dave Gregory, Johnny Marr and many others.

Despite the collectability of vintage 325s and Lennon’s enduring legacy, relatively few major stars have turned to this short-scale model, although Susanna Hoffs made her mark with one in the Bangles, and a generation earlier John Fogerty used his Fireglo 325 on many Creedence Clearwater Revival recordings and live dates. In the eyes of most players, it remains a classic model from the British Invasion.

Check out Guitar Center's current line-up of Rickenbacker guitars here.

Act One

As a founding member of the Byrds, Roger McGuinn launched the mid-’60s folk-rock movement and subsequent heartland rock style that brought acts like Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers to prominence in the 1970s. 

He was born Jim McGuinn on July 13, 1942, in Chicago, and by his mid-teens had become a fan of emerging rockabilly artists, including Johnny Cash, Gene Vincent and Elvis Presley, whose “Heartbreak Hotel” inspired him to take up guitar. 

When the Old Town School of Folk Music opened in Chicago in 1957, McGuinn signed up to study five-string banjo. 

“My music teacher was friends with [American folk singer] Bob Gibson,” he told the Chicago Tribune in 1999. “She invited Bob over to play for one of our assemblies, and when I saw this guy carrying a banjo, I thought, 'Ugh.' But he blew me away. I had to find out more about this folk music stuff, and my teacher told me to check out the Old Town School.” Unable to afford a banjo, McGuinn strung his electric guitar with banjo strings.

Act Two

McGuinn spent the late ’50s and early ’60s performing in coffeehouses on the folk circuit with acts like Judy Collins and the Limeliters, and doing session work on recordings by Collins and Simon & Garfunkel. 

When pop singer Bobby Darin jumped on the folk bandwagon in 1963, he took on McGuinn as guitarist and backup singer, and eventually hired him to write songs for his publishing company in New York City’s Brill Building.

Act Three

In 1964, McGuinn relocated to Los Angeles and began performing at the Troubadour. His technique of giving traditional folk songs a rock and roll treatment caught the ears of fellow folkie Gene Clark, and they formed the Jet Set with fellow guitarist David Crosby, bassist Chris Hillman and drummer Michael Clarke. 

After hearing an acetate of Bob Dylan’s then-unreleased “Mr. Tambourine Man” that summer, the group, following McGuinn’s lead, recast the tune with a rock-band arrangement. Invited to hear the band perform his song in the studio, Dylan raved, “Wow, man! You can dance to that!” 

The Jet Set had changed their name to the Byrds by the time the song was released on April 12, 1965, launching the folk-rock movement. McGuinn changed his own name from Jim to Roger in 1967 after joining the Subud spiritual association, when he was told a name beginning with R would better “vibrate with the universe.”

Act Four

As a folk-rock founder, McGuinn defined its guitar sound and technique, both in his choice of the Rickenbacker 360/12 12-string electric and use of banjo-picking techniques. 

“I liked George Harrison’s Rickenbacker 12,” he explained, “but I couldn’t find one that looked like his, with the pointy cutaways, so I bought the blonde 360 model.”

Despite his love for the guitar, McGuinn was unhappy with its lack of sustain until recording engineer Ray Gerhardt applied tube compression (most likely from a Teletronix LA-2) to it at the “Mr. Tambourine Man” recording session. 

“That’s how I got my ‘jingle-jangle,’” McGuinn said. “I found I could hold a note for three or four seconds.” 

Using a flatpick, with metal fingerpicks on his ring and middle fingers, McGuinn made use of the banjo-style picking he’d learned at Old Town School. “I discovered I could instantly switch from fast single-note runs to banjo rolls and get the best of both worlds.”

Act Five

McGuinn went solo after the Byrds broke up in 1973. He worked with Dylan on the soundtrack to Sam Peckinpah’s film Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, which featured the song “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” and took part in Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue in the mid ’70s. 

He’s worked with former Byrds Hillman and Clark, and in 2018 he and Hillman toured for the 50th anniversary of the group’s’ influential Sweetheart of the Rodeo album. McGuinn continues to run the Folk Den, a website he founded in 1995 to preserve folk music, and to perform and record.