Roger McGuinn crafted the quintessential sound of folk rock in 1965 with a Rickenbacker 12-string in hand. The Byrds’ take on Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” became a rallying cry for guitarists caught between the fading days of folk and the British Invasion.
Not long after its release on April 12, 1965 — in the same month Dylan released Bringing It All Back Home, his first album to incorporate electric guitar — folk-rock became a force that would bring success to acts like Simon and Garfunkel and Buffalo Springfield.
But no artist defined it quite like McGuinn, with his chiming lines played on a Rickenbacker 360/12 and, later, his signature Rickenbacker 370/12RM. More than a decade later, his sound and style would be kept alive in the hands of new players like R.E.M.’s Peter Buck, the Bangles’ Susanna Hoffs and Vicki Peterson, as well as Tom Petty gunslinger Mike Campbell and Petty himself, whose laconic drawl recalled McGuinn’s vocal style.
“The first time I heard Tom was at my manager's house in L.A.,” McGuinn told us. “He had the first Tom Petty album, or a rough of it, and said, ‘Sit down, I have something I want to play for you.’ After hearing it, I said, ‘When did I do that one?’ I was half kidding, because I knew it wasn't me.
“I thought the record was great, so we called Tom's manager and had him come over.”
McGuinn subsequently covered Petty’s “American Girl” on his 1977 album, Thunderbyrd. “After that, we became friends and toured together. He opened up for my act, and then we sang a duet at the Bottom Line and a couple of other places.”
McGuinn weighed in on other guitarists he’s known in his travels from Chicago to New York City to Los Angeles, in a career that’s spanned 60 years and counting.
Mike Bloomfield
“I went to the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago when Mike Bloomfield was there. I'd been in the school for about a year before he got there. I was one of the first people to enroll and had progressed up to the advanced class. One day Mike poked me and said, ‘I’m gonna get better than you.’
“Then he emulated a bend, saying, ‘You know that sound, that mmmuimmmmm? How do you get that?’
“So I showed him how to do that — I taught Mike Bloomfield how to bend a string.”
Bob Dylan
“He didn't play electric until after we had. ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ came out in the spring of ’65. I met him in the Village in New York. I saw him play hootenannies at Gerde’s Folk City a few times. I said hi to him once. That was about it.
“I think he liked [the Byrds’ version of ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’] He said, ‘That‘s cool.’ He came over to the World Pacific studio in L.A., where we were rehearsing. After we played ‘All I Really Want to Do,’ he asked, ‘What was that?’ We changed it so radically that he didn’t recognize it!”
George Harrison
“The management people tried to dress us up like the early Beatles, with suits with velvet collars, but they got ripped off after about two weeks. We were glad to see them go.
“When we met the Beatles, they asked us, ‘How’d you guys get to wear jeans? We had to wear stupid suits.’ We told them about the suits, and they said, ‘Boy, we wish somebody had ripped our suits off.’
“Jim Dickson [the Byrds’ first manager and producer] was working at World Pacific, which was Ravi Shankar’s label. [David] Crosby hung around there all the time, and he'd heard Ravi in the studio. He turned us on to it, and we were all playing it on the 12-string.
I played a lead break from Gene Vincent's ‘Woman Love’ or something like that, and he said, ‘That's exactly what I learned first!’”
— Roger McGuinn
“Once we became friends with the Beatles, they would send a limo to bring us to their house in the L.A. hills. One day we all took acid. We were sitting around on the bathroom floor playing guitars, and Crosby started doing all this Indian stuff on his 12-string. George was really interested in it. He‘d never heard it before. Then [the Beatles] went back and really got quite into it. Went wild with the stuff.
“We just jammed at the house. I remember going through early influences with him, and somehow we got on the subject of the very first thing we learned on the guitar. So I played a lead break from Gene Vincent’s ‘Woman Love’ or something like that, and he said, ‘That’s exactly what I learned first!’
“Neither of us learned chords right away; we learned how to pick out lead stuff and got into chords later. It was because we didn’t have any chord books.”
Gram Parsons
“I guess I was kind of tired by then [when Gram Parsons and Clarence White joined the Byrds]. [laughs] Gram was a strong musical force. I just let him go and went along with it because it was fun. I was having a good time with the country thing.
“We went to Nudie’s, the rodeo tailor, and got some country clothes and cowboy hats, and I got a Cadillac. I started listening to country radio and talking with a southern accent [laughs]. It was like Halloween for a long, extended period.
‘Sweetheart of the Rodeo’ was a one-time adventure. I didn’t intend to permanently get into country music.”
— Roger McGuinn
“Sweetheart of the Rodeo was a one-time adventure. I didn’t intend to permanently get into country music. After the album was finished, Chris [Hillman] and Gram wanted to do another country record, and I said, ‘No, no! Wait a minute. That’s enough.’
“They were so upset about it that they started the Flying Burrito Brothers. I really liked the Flying Burrito Brothers, but it wasn’t the direction I wanted to go in. I wanted to play rock and roll.”
