Roger McGuinn

00:00:15 Speaker 1: Pushkin, I want to let you know that Rick has a new podcast called Tetragrammaton. After about four to five years of recording Broken Record, Rick decided he wanted to talk to more than just musicians, so on his new podcast, he'll be talking to actors, directors, wrestlers, business people, anyone that Rick finds interesting. So make sure to subscribe to Tetragrammaton wherever you listen to podcasts. Roger mcgwin is best known as the driving force behind The Birds, a group that fused folk in popular music in the sixties, but mcgwinn is also a preservationist of traditional folk music. For the past twenty seven years, he's been re recording traditional folk songs and sharing them on a section of his website called the Folk Then. On today's episode, Rick Rubin talks to mcgwinn about the Folk Den and about his decades long career, which started in the early sixties in Greenwich village cafes, where he played alongside the likes of Bob Dylan and Richie Havens. Mcgwinn reminiscences two about the vibrant music scene in la and talks about meeting his Bird's band mate David Crosby for the first time Rip Cross. You'll hear mcgwin plays guitar throughout the interview and also talk about how playing basketball with Bob Dylan helped inspire Dylan's story tour. The Rolling Thunder review. This is broken record liner notes for the digital age. I'm justin Richmond. Here's Rick Rubin and Roger mcgwan. Hello, Hello, Hey, Rick, how are you doing? Cool man? Tell me about the folk den Back in nineteen ninety five, I was listening to a Smithsonian Folkways album of traditional music, and it struck me that the new folk singers were not doing traditional songs anymore. There, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, They're writing their own songs, and they're great songs. But what happens if you know Pete Seeger dies or Odetta dies and they did. I looked at NPR's Top one hundred folk songs and only eight of them were traditional. The rest of them were, you know, James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, Eric Anderson, John Denver, I mean, everybody but the hundreds of years old, like the child ballads, the cowboys songs, the c shanties, the prison songs, all these songs were just neglected. They're just not being done. I thought, man, what's going to happen? So I knew how how to record stuff on a computer. I learned that back in the early nineties when Terry Munscher invited me out to play on a Beach Boys album and it was the first pro Tools session with It was a Mac Quadra with twelve gigabytes of optical RAM and we did a Beach Boys album. It turned out to be the worst Beach Boys album in the world because he was using MIDI for the bass and drums and stuff. But it was an eye opener for me that you could record on a computer. Before that, everybody was like, you know, four track, eight track, sixteen track, thirty two tracks, sixty four track, and digital sixty four track. And then pro Tools came out. This is like a beta copy of pro Tools back in ninety one, and this is great. Man. I got to get this going. So I came home and I got myself some recording software and I started recording songs and putting them up on my website in the section called the Folk Den to preserve the songs, and I put a little story about the song. The lyrics, accords, and a little picture like a coffee table book to kind of tied all together. And I've been doing that since November of nineteen ninety five, and to date that's the twenty seventh anniversary of that unbelievable, so beautiful I came to find FOLKDEN probably I think when the CD Treasures of the FOLKDN came out is when I got turned onto it. And I got turned onto because I was researching folk songs and it was so hard to find them and exactly they were going away, They were being just swept under the rug. Was it clear in the early days, like when you first learned folk songs when you were a kid, was it obvious that this was old music from another time? Tell me about your relationship to folk music when you first got into folk music. Well, I first got into it. I was going to high school in Chicago, and my music teacher invited Bob Gibson to come over and play a forty five minute set on the five string banjo, and he did all this fancy picking and telling stories about the songs, and I just loved it. Before that, I'd been to Elvis and Jean Vincent, Carl Perkins, rockabilly, Johnny Cash, the Everly Brothers. But when Gibson did that, it made me run up to my music teacher and ask it what kind of music is that? And she said this folk music and I said, wow, you know I heard Burlives. He didn't sound like that. So she pointed me over to a new school that had just opened up in nineteen fifty seven in Chicago called the Old Town School of Folk Music. I went over there and Frank Hamilton sat me down and said, play me something you know, and I played a rockabilly song and he went uh huh. And then he said, you know how to play the circle of fifths and he went like I said, no, I didn't know how to do that. He said, well, you know how to play the blues? Said no, I didn't know I do that either said well what about finger picking? I said, okay, I got a lot to learn. So I started going to the Old Town School two days a week and I did that for three years until Frank finally. Frank Hamilton finally said I really can't teach you anything more in this format. You know, you could have some private lessons for twelve dollars an hour. Well, I didn't have the twelve dollars an hour, so that was it. I kind of quit going to the Old Town school. But shortly after that, I went down to the Gate of Horn after a coffeehouse gig, and I had my banjo and guitar and hard shell cases. And I was real proud of him because I looked like a professional musician. And I walked to Limelighters and Theodore Riquel We're sitting around the bar. So I walked into the bar and this gam session was going on, and Alex Hasila from the Limelighter said, what you got there, kid? I said, I got a banjo and a guitar, and he said, great, break out the banjo. We got too many guitars going. So I did, and I played with them till five o'clock in the morning, and that's when that's when they hired me. They hired me to be a backup musician for them, but I said, well, I can't start right now because I'm still going to high school. And so they sent me a letter and my parents had to sign it because I was under eighteen, and they sent me a plane ticket in June and flew me out to la and I recorded with them at the ash Grove record called Tonight in Person, and that was the beginning of my professional musical career. How old were you at that time. I was seventeen when I went out there. I turned eighteen at the ash Grove. Amazing. But you started as a rock fan and then you fell in love with folk? Is that how it happened? Yeah? I got into Elvis when I was fourteen. I had a transistor radio, which was a new thing at the time, and it meant you could listen to what you wanted to listen to on the radio instead of a big wooden box in the living room. And I used to ride my bike around Chicago and listen to w j j D, which was a rock station, and I heard like a less it's my hubbie found a new place to twelve. I'ment, Wow, that's really cool. And I had no idea that he was combining country music and blues and you know, he was doing a synthesis of different styles because he'd grown up with that all around him. Do you think that's what makes all great new forms of music are synthesis of other forms of music that come together to create something new. I really do. Yeah, And That's what happened when we combined the Beatles and Bob Dylan, and people went, wow, that's that's different. I mean, they say, okay, well Eric, Eric Burton thought had done The House of New Orleans, which was a blues a folk song, and he did that before mister Timbreeman. But somehow mister Timbreeman was a little different. It was more of a legato kind of thing that a flowing melody, and the lyrics were out of this world. I mean, you know, take me for a trip on your magic swirling ship. All my senses that have been stripped. My hands can't field a grip, my toes too number to a step, wait only for my boot heels to be wandering. I went, wow, this is so cool, and I fell in love with Dylan's writing at that point. Was that the first Bob Dylan song you ever heard? No. I was in the village hanging out in the early sixties when Bob got there. I was hanging out at girtys Folks City, and I saw Bob play there, and he was mostly doing Woody Guthrie stuff at that point. He hadn't one time though, I was over at the White Horse Tavern and Theodore b. Kell came running over. He'd been in I guess the gaslight cafe and he said, I just heard this marvelous song. It was blowing in the wind and he played it, you know, so yeah, I'd heard Dylan's stuff before the Birds. Was it obvious when you decided to do a cover song in the Birds of a Dylan song? Was it obvious that tambreen Man would be the first one? How did it happen that you picked that song? If you knew the others? We didn't really pick at Jim Dixon was our manager and he was a producer engineer at World Pacific Records in La and he had a advanced copy of Dylan's Mister tambreen Man, which was something like a and he thought it was a great song, I guess lyrically the tune, and he was kind of shopping it around different people. I think some of the guys who were blue dress guys back in La heard it first and he played it for us. It was five minute, four and a half minute demo with Bob and ramblin Jack Elliott and Rambling was just kind of out there and singing out of tune. So that's why he didn't release it because Bob never liked to go back and fix stuff. You know, it's like very like to get the impromptu thing whatever happened when you recorded. So we had this demo and they played it for us and Crosby said, I don't like it, man, that folky two four time. It's never going to play on the radio. And he was right because radio wouldn't play anything over like two and a half minutes, and they're playing rock and roll four four beat instead of two four So I rearranged it. I'd been an arranger I worked with I was a studio guy in New York, and I worked with Judy Collins and some other people. So I rearranged it with a year and it changed the whole thing a million percent. I mean, it's it's the it's the signature musical sound of the song, and it created a whole new genre. It's amazing. You talked about so many interesting things, and I want to hear about all of them. So let's talk about the village folk scene when you were there. What was that world like? First? How long we therefore? Who were the other artists around? Tell me everything about it? Okay, Well, after the Limelighter's gig. I got a Sideman gig with the Chad Mitchell trio, and I actually moved to New York and lived on I had an apartment with Mike Settle on Fourteenth Street. This is early sixties. I guess sixty sixty one, sixty two, sixty three round there, and the village was very vibrant with folk music. At the gas like Cafe Dave van Rock was there and other artists and Bob would be around. Was played Girtie Folks City. I used to watch all the acts at Cisco Houston and all the guys that played Folks City, and I'd go to like the other coffeehouses, to Cafe One. But I got a gig at the Cafe Playhouse. It was on McDougall Street and it was one of the pass the hat around kind of place yet and I remember Richie Havens was there at the time, John Sebastian and Peter Tork who was playing banjo at that point, and I remember Sebastian singing, you don't want to follow Richie Havens because there if you pass the hat after Richie, there's no money left. That's all I got. So there was a vibrant folks scene. I remember Freddie Neil there hanging out and all concert folks singers around, and the majority of them were playing traditional folk songs. Yes they were. They're playing acoustic traditional songs. And then the Beatles came out while I was still living in New York, and I heard the Beatles and I went, wow, they were using folk music chords. Changes I thought, wow, the million folk songs have that. It gave me the idea of combining folk music and rock and roll. And I started doing some Beatles songs at the Cafe Playhouse and people are going, what's he doing? Man? It's like, you know, but one clue, I think. I was on Blicker Street and there were a couple of promoters that I'd seen around, and they pointed to me and said, what we need is four of him. I went, oh, I think I'm onto something amazing. And then when did you decide to put the band together or did you decide or did it just happen? It happened. So I was playing these Beatleaf kind of songs at the Cafe Playhouse and people weren't going for it, but the promoter liked it. He put a sign outside that said Beatle impersonation, and the tourist buses were coming around, and I thought, this is embarrassing. I want to get out of New York. So I flew out to la and I got a gig at the Troubadour opening up for Hoyd Axton, and I was doing the same kind of material and nobody liked it there either, except for Gene Clark. Gene Clark came backstage and said, hey, I get what you're doing. I like the Beatles, I like folk music. Let's write some songs and see what happens. So we started writing songs every day in the front room of the Tributor, which was open all day and you could go there for free, and then Crosby came in. Now I had met David Crosby years earlier when I was with the Lime Lighters, and we played the ash Grove. The night before the Lime Lighters engagement. At the ash Grove, there was a play going on called Endgame by Samuel Beckett. There was a one act play with four characters and two of them were in garbage cans and they pop up and save their lines and pop down again. And this is years before Sesame Street got the I stuck around to the end of the play and I met the guy who had been in the garbage can, and it was a young actor named David Crosby, so I met him. He was I think he was eighteen. I was seventeen by there. Maybe I was eighteen, but he was about a year older than me. And after the gig with the Limelighters, I wanted to go up to San Francisco, so David took me up to Santa Barbara, which was his boyhood home, and I stayed there overnight and his mother made its lamb and avocado sandwiches and they were delicious, and then I went up to San Francisco, and that's where I got a call from the Chad Mitchell Trio to fly to New York and work with them. So that's when I was in the village. I was living in New York around that time, this is nineteen sixty maybe the end of nineteen sixteen, sixty one, sixty two, and then I traveled extensively with the Chad Mitchell Trio. Didn't really have a home based. I had this apartment with Mike Suttle, but I didn't really spend any time there. Was John Denver yet in the Chad Mitchell Trio when you were part of it, or he was after No, John Denver was a replacement for Chad Mitchell, who either left the trio to become a solo artist or I know he got busted for a large amount of marijuana over the Mexican border and I think he did some time for it. So the Mitchell Trio became the Mitchell Trio without Chad, and that's when they got John Denver to Phil Lanford. Chad, how did you connect with Bobby Darren? He was in the audience at the Crescendo Club when we were opening up the Shad Mitchell Trio was opening up for Lenny Bruce and Bobby came backstage after the Shad Mitchell set and said, Hey, I liked what you were doing up there. I'm thinking about putting a folk segment in my act and I'd like to hire you. And I said, well, I've already got a job with Shad Mitchell Trio. And he said, yeah, what are they paying you? And I told him and he said I'll double it. I said, okay. I was getting ready to move on. I'd been hanging out with some people from the New Christie Minstrels, and I thought about jumping ship with them, and Bobby said, no, man, if you do that, you just get buried in a group that size. Did he ever talk to you about why he wanted to go from, let's say, a Sinatra esque singer to doing folk music. Well, I think he just appreciated it. I think he liked it. He was quite good at it. We didn't do just like Kingston Trio stuff. We did real prison songs. Makes a long time man feel bad. Yeah, And so he'd come out and do splitsh splash and his rock and roll hit for about fifteen minutes. He'd bring me on and I'd stand next to him and sing a harmony and play some folk songs with a twelve string, and then I was off for the rest of the night, and he'd go out and do his Sinatra stuff and Mac the Knife and all that. And this is fun because I used to on the strip in Vegas. I used to go up the strip and check out the other shows. And I remember I used to like Don Rickles. So I walked on the Don Rickles show one time and he saw me coming in. He said, Hey, this is this kid here he plays for Bobby Darren. He walks around Vegas going I'm a star. I'm a star. I said, Wow, Don Rickles knew who I was. That's amazing. I'm just thinking about the world that Bobby Darren was in, and just based on what you already said, he went from splitch splash, which is how we knew of him, to the more Frank Sinatra style, which it was already a style shift. So I guess for him doing folk music, he was already chameleon stylistically. He was. He was a very talented guy. He could do a lot of stuff. He could tap dannis and he could play the vibes and piano and guitar and do impressions. And it's kind of the old school of talent, where you know, suit press shoes shined in tune on time. It was like a discipline that rock and roll just threw out the window when I got into rock and roll bands. But working for Bobby was a good experience. And I used to follow Bobby around and ask him stuff about how to make it in the business, and he said, well, you got to get up in front of audiences as much as you can, because it doesn't matter how good you are in your room. You got to test it under fire. And that was good advice. And then I mentioned that I wanted to do a movie. He said, well, I'm having a hard enough time getting myself in the movies, but I'll around see what I can do. So about a week later he came up with the script and he said, this is from Jackie Cooper. I said, okay. So I opened it up and it was about a banjo player. Said, oh, I'm a banjo player. I could do that. I turned to another patient. It was about a bench of player in petticoat in junction. I said, oh, man, I don't think I could do this. Man, he said, well, you don't want to turn down Jackie Cooper because you'll never work in Hollywood. And you know what, I never have. It all worked out. It worked out great. We're gonna take a quick break and then come back with more from Rick Rubin and Roger mcgwin. We're back with more from Rick Rubin and Roger mcgwin. So it's interesting that you're in the village either playing folk songs or beatles songs. Everyone there playing cover songs. What was the impetus to start writing songs if you're coming out of a scene that's base stun historic music. When did it become obvious we have to write our own songs. Yeah, the singer songwriter thing, well, well before that, I had a job with Bobby Darren and I worked at the Brill Building as a songwriter, so you know, that was the impetus for me to write songs. And I think what happened was the folks thing kind of just started to fade out. It was like the end of it by sixty four, you know, starting to fade out, and people started writing more. So I don't know what made Joni Mitchell Bay Clouds or you know, I have no idea. Delan was very inventive, and at first he was doing kind of what he got three imitation, and then he developed his own style. I remember I was friends with John and Michelle Phillips and I showed them some stuff I was doing it, you know, the Beatles influence, and they said, ah, that's just bubble gum, that's kids stuff, and I said, well it's got something to it. Cool. Tell me about Jim Dixon. How did you come in contact with him and what was he like? Okay, I first met him back in nineteen sixty three, and he was hanging around the Troubadour and Ash Grove and all that. He was going around kind of scouting talent because he was a producer and he knew David Crosby. He had already recorded David and he was looking around for different ideas. And I remember when Gene Clark and I started writing songs at the Troubadour, David Crossby came in and started singing harmony with us, and he said, I want to be in your band. And I said, well, we don't really have a band here, David, we're just kind of writing some songs. He said, oh, come on, man, if I can be in your band, I know this guy's got the recordings to day we could use for free. I said, you're in. That's how we met Jim Dixon and he took us under his wing. He was still working at World Pacific. He'd recorded Lord Buckley there and he knew some jazz guys and he let us work out on the machines after all the sessions were over, and that's where kind of honed our skill as a singing playing band. In I guess sixty four sixty four by then, so we started working out at the studio and became a parent that we needed more musicians and more instruments. So we went to see the Beatles movie A Hard Day's Night and took notes on Ringo had Ludwig drums, and Harrison had a Gretch guitar. John Lennon had a Rickenbacker, and Paul McCartney and a Hoffner bass, a violin style bass, and then George Harrison came back out with another Rickenbacker. It looked like a six string from the front, but when each other the sideways you could see six other tuning pegs sticking out the back. Anyway, oh man, that's an electric twelve string. I got to get one of those because I was already a twelve string player on acoustic twelve and we traded in. So I traded in a five string band show and a Gibson acoustic twelve that Bobby Darren had given me, and got the Rickenbacker, and that became my main instrument for the rest of the Birds. Was the electric twelve string a new instrument at the time, Yes it was. It was a brand new invention. George had the very second one ever made the first one went to a woman called Susie who played in Las Vegas and some sort of girl band, and George had the second one. Well, when Rickenbacker learned the Beatles, who were playing one of their instruments, FC Hall, John Hall's father, flew to New York, had a meeting with the Beatles and gave George Sherrison. Well, it was actually intended for John Lennon, but John was out and George had the flu and he was hanging around the hotel. So they gave him the twelve string and it became his kind of toy. He played it really well, and he did this cool thing that I learned from him. He did this thing on pedioctic strings. He used to play leads up and down the jeef string pair, like had a lot of punch, much more if you if you just want the Yeah, So I learned that trick from him. Did you incorporate that into any songwriting? Yeah, yeah, Well it was be in quite a few songs. The way I played lead on say Turn, Turn Turn, and so on. I got other riffs from other musicians, like the Seekers, from the Searchers, you know. I stole whatever I could, But the Rick Rocker had this really great sound. And then Rie Gerhardt was the studio engineer at Columbia Records in la and he put I think it was two now, I'm not sure the designation of la UA's. It was a tube compressor, and he put the Rickenbacker into one and then out of the back of the one into another. So I had doubled compression on it, and it clamped it down and made it sustain more like a wind instrument because the original the Rickenbacker would fall off rather quickly. It was kind of a thuddy sounding instrument. So that's really what made the twelve strings sounds so distinctive on mister tambreene Man and Turn Turn, Turn eight miles high. So do you think without the compression, was it more like a harpsichord? Would you say? No? It sounded okay, but it didn't sustains as well. It wasn't as good for lead work. It was okay for recording for you know, for strumming and so on, but it wasn't really a good lead instrument at that point. How did you find the other members to make the birds? The Birds? Jane Clark and I started writing songs David Crosby came along and turned us on to Jim Dixon and we got a free studio to work out in, and Dixon recommended we get a drummer and a bass player, and we saw Michael Clark walk in front of the tributory. It looked like two of the Rolling Stones, and we got him mostly on looks. Yeah, this is like nineteen sixty five, nineteen sixty six, sixty four, sixty four. Wow, incredible at sixty four into sixty five. We recorded Mister tambree Man in January of sixty five, and Columbia didn't release it until I think June or May or sometime. They sat on it for a long time. I'd like to tell a story about Columbia was very conservative. They had Steve Lawrence and Idiger May at Doris Stay. They didn't have any rock and roll, and their attitude toward rock and roll was they thought it might be distasteful, you know, like the mob not wanting to sell heroin. But there was a lot of money in it. Was Mister tamben Man the first rock record that came out on Columbia. I think it might have been It might have been certainly was something they were. They weren't really into it yet, you know, they were kind of lagging behind the other labels RCA and Capital. But in some ways, wasn't the world lagging behind, Like was it yet the popular form of music or was it still sort of an underground or well no, no, rock and roll was a craze and people kept hoping it would go away quickly because it was creating juvenile delinquents. That was the story. Yeah, there's the story. And so but RCA had Elvis back in what was fifty six, so it hadn't been around a while. And then we had Chuck Berry, and we had Jean Vincent, Carl Perkins and the Everly Brothers and Johnny Cash. There was quite a bit of rock and roll out there. All of those artists, though, have more of a country flavor in their rock. It's all coming from the South and it's more like an extension of the Sun record sound, which it was rockabilly, Yeah, more rockabilly than rock and roll. And it seemed like, I guess a little Richard might have been more rock and roll, and Chuck Berry was rock and roll. Well. Billy Hally and the Comments are credited with starting the craze, and they were kind of like a holiday in band. You know, they weren't really rocking or rolling. Jean Vince that really rocked, so did Elvis and Carl Perkins. The places you'd be playing in those like ceros in those days, would hold fifty people, one hundred, two hundred people. How many people would you say, I'm not sure of the capacity of seros. It might have been a hundred, might might have been one fifty. It was all these like sort of plush booths with tables. It was almost like a casino. Yeah. I was going to say, like Las Vegas. Yeah, like Vegas. Yeah, there's something like that. It was old hat. It was had been popular in the forties with all the movie stars, and then it lost its appeal. But when the birds got there, we started attracting Jack Nicholson and Peter Fonda and Marlon Brando, and then we had this group of dancers, Vito and his gang, and they were wild. They were just you know, they and they were just a scene by themselves, and so the whole thing really changed Hollywood a little bit. How did you meet Vito Vito Policus? Yes, yeah, how did you meet him? I don't remember. I remember going to a studio and take an acid, that's all I remember. I don't know how we how we got hooked up with him, but but they became our dancing troop, and they even went with us on the road on our first tour and they him on a bus tour to Indiana and you know, Michigan and places where people were freaking out. They've never seen any finds, never seen anything like it. Did they dance on the stage or in the audience? In the audience cool? In front of the stage amazing, But did they face the band or did they face the audience? Like, did it feel like they were part of the show? They were totally No, they weren't facing anybody. They were totally absorbed in what they were doing. Just you know, they're just doing it. So it was like a traveling dance party that happened between you and the audience. Yeah. Yeah, it's some wild to imagine, you know, Yeah, it was wild. The audience, like teenagers, they're pretty pretty square, you know, they're like preppy looking, most of them, and there maybe thirteen fourteen, fifteen year olds and they're just looking on in amazement at this whole spectacle. We did get screams. We got screaming fans at one point. How long did it take for the audience to go from square fans to starting looking like more like people who could have been in bands. Yeah, well, I remember I used to wear those little glasses. I remember looking out in the audience and there would be people with those little glasses on. So it was starting to catch on. Maybe not more than a few months. How's your relationship to music changed from the early days to now. Well, it's a labor of love. I do shows. I still do shows, and I do like a one man show. It's like a play that has a lot of these stories I'm telling you, and I fold in the songs that go with the stories, and I changed it up. It's not always the same we got about We got all these modules. Can put in different modules of stories and songs. And my wife and I had just hit the road together. It's an idea I got from rambling Jack Elliott when I was on the Rolling Thunder review and Rondlin said, yeah, one of the most fun things I ever did was throw the guitar in the back of the land Rover and me and Polly. That was his wife hit the road and we did all these little gigs and it was so much fun. And I've been in a band with you know, had instrument cases and trucks and a lot of logistics and people to deal with, and I thought, man, this would be more fun. So I started doing that, and then gradually it became kind of a scripted one man play. It sounds great. Tell me about Rolling Thunder. What was that experience? Like? Rolling Thunder was great. It started off with Bob used to come over to my house in Malibu and he noticed a basketball hoop over the garage and he said, you have a basketball. I said no, because when I was fifteen, I jammed my finger on a basketball and I couldn't play a guitar for a few weeks. But I bought a basketball the next day and I called up his house and she was out, but I got Sarah and I said, well, tell Bob I got a basketball. She said, oh, he'll be thrilled. So Bob came over the next day and we're shooting baskets in the backyard. He said, I want to do something different and I said, wow, what do you mean? He said, I don't know, something like a circus. Okay. So a couple of weeks later, I was on the road with a band and I had some time off and I went to the village and went to Gerty's Folk City, and I'm run into Larry Sloman, who at the time was a reporter for Rolling Stone magazine, and Larry said, I think Dylan's over at the Other End or the Bitter End what it was called her So I said, let's go see. So we went over there and walked in the back room and there was Shock Levy, my writing partner, and Bob Dylan sitting at a table with a couple of brandies. And I walked and they sit up and the brandies went flying. They said, Roger, we're just talking about you. We're putting this tour together. We'd like you to go on it. So I had a band and I was on tour myself, but I postponed those states and went on Rolling Thunder, and it was all Bob's friends from the village. You know. It's Bobby new Earth and Ramblin, Jack Elliott and Allen Ginsberg and shown byas came along, Joni Mitchell, and we'd pick up people like Willie Nelson in Texas and Gordon Lydfoot in Toronto and Leonard Cohen in Montreal. You know, it was. It was an amazing, amazing tour, about a hundred people on the road in buses and cars, and it was like a parade, and it was like a circus. It was like a circus, and it wasn't exactly like this Corses film portrays. I think it was even more fun than that. I bet it sounds incredible, And the recordings from that era are some of my favorite of his, Like he might sounds great, his singing is great. The song sounds so good. He was really on his game at that point. And some of my favorite songs so the ones he wrote with Shock Leavy for Desire Agreed. Tell me about Sue booed Okay, Well, when I was in the village, I was hanging out with Bob Carey, who had been in a group called the Terriers with Eric Darling and Ellen Arkin. And there was this mine Lionel Shepherd, and we were walking around and Bob and I are sharing a joint and I offered it to Lionel and he stood out. I got something better, I said, what's that? He said, It's called sue Boed. I said, what is it? Something you put in your coffee and drink it? Or he said, come on down, you know, next Thursday and see what it is. So I did, and it was this spiritual exercise. It was kind of like the Holy Spirit, but it wasn't Christian or anything. It was just you know, So I got into it. It was something I did for a while. I had a friend who was who was in Sue Boo grew up in Sue Booed and she followed Ramadan. Yeah, a lot of people were into well, it came out of Indonesia. So the head guy, Bob Pak they called him, he was a Muslim, so it was it was a kind of nonverbal Islam. There was no doctrine or anything. It was just you go in and do these It's almost like a dance. You do a spiritual dance and you know it's supposed to be good for your soul. Yeah, it's great. I didn't realize that there was a physical component. Would you say that this was like TM, like a spiritual fad of the time. I think, so, you know, I got out of it. I didn't stay in it, and later I accepted Jesus so you know, that's all I needed. And how did that happen? It happened in seventy seven when Elvis Presley died and he was seven years older than I was. I was thirty five and he was doing quailuds and uppers and downers, and I had a doctor in LA who would give me anything I wanted. And I was doing that too, plus the illegal drug so I got my hands on. So I thought, man, Elvis just died and he was seven years older, I only got seven years. I better start cleaning up my act. And so I started working on that. And in the process, that's when I ran into this jazz guy named Billy, and he prayed with me about Jesus and I accepted Jesus beautiful. Yeah, so it changed your lifestyle to a healthy lifestyle, and you have this spiritual connection, rightful, inspiring and my wife and I, well, I turned my wife onto it. I met her in an acting class. We were both starting in the same night and we had to do method acting and the assignment was to get her to do something she didn't want to do. And I had talked to her before and found out she'd been a Baptist when she was a kid, but got away from it. So I knew something she didn't want to do. So I started singing me since I had Jesus, he s home World of Fun and she's I said, what do you think of that? She said, it sounds kind of country? I said, yeah, what do you think of the words? She said, Oh, man, you're trying to tell me about Jesus. And she stopped off the stage and all the kids in the class clapped, and it said, wow, what was that? That sounded like, you know, a real play. And then a couple of weeks later she accepted Jesus. And now we've been together for forty four years and we read the Bible every morning. Beautiful, congratulations. Can you play that song for us? Now? Let's see, but feel I should wait? Did he say? I listen the whole World of Fun? But I still love it? And walk in the Christian life? Oh blue heating, God's calm, what is fu others kind, pleasure and things? I to life christ Life. That's beautiful. I never heard that song before. Really, No, it's a Living Brothers song. It's a it's a it's a written song in the twentieth century, not not a gospel song, but it's h The Living Brothers stood it. It's beautiful. I would hearing that makes me want to hear a whole album of you doing acoustic devotional material, just just sharing that I could do that. That's what I want to hear. You wanted to hear something else, the Kane Blues, He said, oh yeah, yeah, yes, So this is my favorite. My favorite of the folkden songs that I'm aware of is this one. That's interesting. That's the story goes. It's an old prison song and I recorded it back when there was a website called MP three dot com. Michael Robertson Entrepreneuri put together this website and he would take MP three's and make little CDs of him and he gave you fifty percent, which is unheard of in the record business. So I signed up for that and I did Kane Blues first. It was called Ain't No McCaine on the Brassos and nobody was clicking on it. I changed the title to Kane Blues and it shot up the charts. He no, ma found it all into laughing, Well, what's the matter? Sharping must be wrong? We are still here rolling short of George Dunn go down all. Don't you rise no more? You rise any more? Ring judgment shop, who look at my whole? Hanna, she's a turning red. Who look at my partner, he's almost dead? Then you should have been yet found that been fault. It was a dead man at every time. Rome Marking on this crazle found it all into molast. I love that song. I love that song. That's a cool song. I've heard from Bob Gibson first time, and he did it a little different. I think I changed the chords on it, but I like the chord pattern. It's unusual, and that it's it's got a lot of passing chords, you know, instead of just a minor to D and then it goes to a D minor. So it's got some interesting passing chords. It there's so much emotion in it, and and I've played this. I've played that song for many artists that I work with, just to talk about the amount of emotion that can be held in a song, even when you don't necessarily know what all the words are about. And it's what's also interesting about it is it's so repetitive, you know, it's it's a very simple structure that just keeps repeating. Yeah, there's no chorus or anything, but it doesn't it doesn't get old, you know, it doesn't get old. That loop can go on for a long time and it does feel like this, the emotion, and it just keeps getting deeper and deeper with the story. It's beautiful, beautiful song. Okay, Well, Old Hannah is a sun or sunrise? I didn't know that. Uh huh, Old Hannah is the sun sunrising? What did the other? Yeah, decode as much as you can for me, it'd be greatful. Okay. Well, a no more cane on the braser. It was a sugar cane, like a work farm for a prison, and they cut all they came down and turned it into molasses. Something. Brazos is the river, Brazos River, Yeah, down in Texas. Uh, what's the matter? Something must be wrong? Who we're still rolling? That's being still in prison? Shorty George done gone. He got out, Shorty George got out somehow. What's something wrong? We're still here and he's gone. Yeah, look at my old Hannah. She's a turning red Who the sunrise or sunrise or it could be sunset. Yeah, look at my partner he's almost dead. They's just worked at people to death. There go down, old Hannah. Don't you rise no more? Okay, that's the sunset, and if you rise anymore you can ring judgment. Sure you're gonna We're gonna get in trouble tomorrow, you know, because we get in trouble every day. Yeah, yeah, every day's trouble. Should have been here in my nineteen o four. It's a dead man on every turn row. So people are, you know, getting work to death. There was one should have been here in nineteen ten that working women just like the men. So it's a Promrison song about harsh labor, intensive, you know, work you to death kind of stuff. Wow, I had no idea it even was prison related. You know, again without knowing the context is nothing in the lyric if you don't know what it means. It was clearly a sad song, and it was it was clearly a work song, but I didn't understand that it was a prison song. Yeah, and that's the kind of thing that gets lost with the singer songwriter genre. People aren't doing those old songs anymore. Yeah, I'm so thankful that you're that you're doing the folk then and that these songs live on and if people want to hear them they go to the website. Is that the best mcgwyn dot com. The Folk Done section. Great, We have to pause for another quick break, but we'll be back with the rest of Rick's conversation with Roger mcgwin in just a sec. We're back with Rick Rubin and Roger mcgwin. How has recording changed over the course of your life? So it started you said it was tape in the beginning, but really more specifically technologically, from the early days of recording until now, what are all the changes that you've seen. The first recording I did was on a Ampex three track three track, and that was we recorded beach Ball on that. Bobby Durning played drums and Frank Carey played piano and I played guitar, and we all sang and clapped her hands and we got a record deal on Capitol called herself the City Surfers, and that was a three track who couldn't really overdub very well. And then when I got in the Birds, they had a four track at Columbia Studios in LA and they had an eight track who was over against the wall and somebody had written with a sharpie or you know, like felt ten big bastard on this eight track, and they didn't want to hook it up because it was too new, too much trouble. They finally did, They finally got the eight track going. But so I went from three track to four track, to eight track, to sixteen track, to thirty two tracks, sixty four track and digital. And then I told you about the digital audio workstations and got into I couldn't afford pro Tools when I first ran into it. It was like ten thousand dollars for rudimentary set up. So I got something called Digital Orchestrator Plus. It was like a ninety dollars program and it did the same thing. It recorded forty four point when wave forms, you know, sixteen bit. It sounded pretty good. I recorded the Treasures from the Folk down on that system. And then gradually I got pro Tools, and I've had pro Tools for years and years now, and you know, I find it very easy to work with and fun. I love being able to pop things in and move them around like a word processor. And I imagined that the advantage of being able to record at home versus in a in a big studio with all this equipment is good. It's a good change in terms of being able to make whatever you want whenever you want. Absolutely. I mean I tell kids, I say, you don't need to go to a recording studio and spend thousands of dollars. You can just get a Mac and pro tools and do it at home. All you need is a good microphone and maybe some editing skills. Yeah, he said, you went into the earliest version, the three man version of The Birds. I don't know what you were called at that time, into the jet set called the jet set, the jet set. Do you remember what you recorded in that first session when you decided we need more players? I think it was some stuff that Gene Clark and I had written, like the Only Girl that I Adore or whatever you showed me, which the Turtles later picked up was one of the songs that she and I wrote, and it was rejected for the Birds. We didn't get to do it, but the Turtles got a hit with it. Cool. Do you remember it at all you showed me? Yeah? Can you play me a little of it? Yeah? Well, first the original version was down down here. You see, you showed me how to do exactly what you do love it, so it's incredible. It's true. I'm in love with you. And when I tried, I could see and I decide, it's not a truth. You tart it to me too, exactly what you do, and now you love me too. It's true who you do. And I always loved that relative minor thing to the g minor like I could see and it's not a true. Are the court changes rooted in classical music? It feels like it is, well it was if it was. It was subliminally in classic because Gene Clark and I wrote it. We were standing in Jim Dixon's driveway and we both had a crush on the same girl, and we wrote it about this girl that we both had a crush on. And I remember something interesting. There's something like spiritual because as I was playing it my guitar, it was almost it's like a divining rod. It was moving around in like you know, figure eights, like an infinity sign. It was it was kind of unusual for that to happen. Amazing, Yeah, yeah, like a like a dowsing rod or divining rod. Yeah yeah, something like that, like a you know, divining water. Amazing. I've got a BMI Award for one million plays. It's probably had more than that by now, but it's been covered by Salt and Pepper and Wow, Let's see you two Kanye West. Wow, it's such a beautiful song. I love that song. Thank you. Have you had any other mystical experiences? Oh? Yeah, I mean yeah, tell me. Well, you know, I sometimes I see stuff through the walls, you know, like little dots of light and things like that. You could call it hallucinating whatever. But and also I've always I've always had this thing, this tactle thing where you know, I could feel something in the air, something that isn't there. I used to do that. I remember in the Columbia studio. I'd been waving my hand around while I was singing, and when I sang mister Tambreeman. Well. Jim Dixon had made us read an Actor of Preparist by Stanislavsky. Jim had a little experience in the Hollywood area. He was married to Diane Varcy for a short time and he helped her with her career until she decided she didn't want to live in Hollywood and do that. So he made us read an Actor Preparist, which is about method acting. So when I got the lyrics to mister tamboreine Man, I wanted to do a parallel meaning. And I was singing, Hey, mister tambrein man, play a song for me. I'm not sleepy and there is no place I'm going to. I wasn't singing to an abstract tamboree man. I was singing to God beautiful. So that was a mystical experience to it. I think the reason that song was as popular as it was because it had some real heartfelt truth in it. Absolutely, and there's something about the like Lyrically, there's nothing obviously devotional in in tambourine man, but when you're connected in a devotional way, there's an energy that can come through that you can just feel it. I never I never knew that. It's a beautiful story. I love hearing that story. Yeah. Do you feel things in space in general or just in certain places? Well, it's not all the time. I wouldn't say it's dependent on the place so much as the time. And they you know, mental spiritual attitude I have whatever. I remember they asked Tom Petty about how he writes songs. They said, well, you know, they come down from I don't want to know. He said, you might go away. Tom was a great friend and a wonderful inspiration to me. I know I inspired him somewhat, but you know, he was just an incredible performer and songwriter and a really sweet guy. He was just the sweetest guy. He was the best. You inspired him a lot, and he talked about you all the time. This is the first time we're a meeting, but he talked about you all at the time. Oh well, we had a good friendship. He was such a great He was a great songwriter. He was such a great musician and had such a beautiful voice. But he knew everything about making records, like in the studio. He was a total craftsman. He could do anything, and it was just fun to be around him. I learned so much being around him. Yeah. Wow, well we miss him absolutely. Have you heard other versions of songs you've written that made you hear them in a new way? Yeah? Well, eight Miles I got covered by Whosker Doo Hotsker Do. Yeah, yeah, Whosker Do and they did sort of a real headbanger version of it, like loud and raucous. That was good, And so he wanted to be a rock and roll star. Got covered a lot, yeah by Pattis and Tom Petty. When you hear other people do your songs, does it feel like that's my song? Or does it feel like, oh, oh, I like what they're doing with this thing? Like what's the experience like hearing someone else sing a song you've written? It's a nice feeling, you know, even even if you don't appreciate the whole way they did it, it's a nice feeling to know that they did do it. Yeah, they picked you, They picked your song, they picked your work. Yeah, yeah, and they could have picked anything and they picked yours. So tell me about Terry Melcher. Okay. When we got signed to Columbia Records, Jim Dixon assumed that he would be a producer because he was a record producer, and Columbia had a strict policy. They were a union house and they only used their staff producers. So they assigned us a twenty three year old son of one of their biggest artists, do or stay. Terry had he already produced a lot of stuff at twenty three. Well, he knew what he was doing. He was friends with Brian Wilson, and he knew he knew Brian had used the Wrecking Crew on some Beach Boys stuff, and he also knew that Michael Clark couldn't play the drums and we were a fledgeling band just kind of learning how to play together. So he got the Wrecking Crew to come and do the band track of Mister Tambreen Man and the Flip Side. I knew it Want You, and I was allowed to play on it because I'd been a studio musician in New York and I also had the Rickenbacker and the the Licks, so I got to play on it, and then the band went nuts. It said no, we want to be like the Beatles, we want to play on our own stuff, and okay, so they got to. Ever after that, we just only did two tracks with the Wrecking Crew, but with the Wrecking Crew we knocked out two songs in a three hour session, and when we got the whole band playing, it took a seventy seven takes to get turn Turn turned. What was it like playing with the Wrecking Crew? It was really fun. You know that they were so polished and professional. You know, they didn't do us trick beat I analyzed some of this stuff and they're like a school of fish. You know, they go around together. You know, they maybe go up tempo, down tempo and sideways and you know, but they were always together. They were tight. And I was a little nervous. Hal Blaine said, you got to go out and have a couple of beers, kid, you know, but I didn't. So but I got We got the session done and it came out good. So were they older than you guys at that time? Oh yeah, they're about maybe like seven years older, like Elvis's age. It was help Blaine, Leon Russell on electric piano, Cherry Cole on a six string guitar, and Cherry was playing schinks like and that was something they got from Don't Worry Baby, because they played on Don't Worry Baby for the Beach Boys and the Chinks and that, and then Bill Pittman played on it. Bill Pittman was guitar, Cherry Cole guitar, and Laurie Nicktol, who usually did keyboards, played bass. Wow, he's great, Yeah he was. He was great. It was a fun experience, a little nerve wracking, but fun for sure. But I think that some people know the story of the Wrecking Group, but they're one of the greatest bands of all time, really absolutely, and I you know, I didn't know they were the band that played on full Spector's Wall of sound stuffs. And I still loved to do Ron Ron and my Boyfriend's Back or whatever, all those all those songs that Oh. And then then when Hal passed away, the story came out. See I always thought this was a beatle beat. Like let's say, uh okay. So the story goes that Hal dropped a stick. He was in one of those sessions, and so he couldn't he couldn't play boom boom boom boom. He could go boom boom boom boom boom boom. As a musician, when you make a mistake, you want to continue it so it sounds like you did it on purpose. And that's what he did. So he invented that boom boom boom beat because he dropped a stick. That's unbelieved bowl. Yeah, that's the sound of all the Phil Spector records that it is. That's the sound. And then the Beatles picked it up. Yeah, and I called I used to call it a beatle beat because I didn't realize that Hall had come up with it for Phil spector. That's amazing, and came up with it by mistake. This is a great thing to talk about. How much do mistakes play into the process of writing something? Well, that one sure did. Yeah, I don't know, but I love the Sunday and the same dude, Run run, d run Run run un. Oh yeah. At the broad Building. Kenny Young and I used to analyze Phil Spectra records, you know, and we look at that. He us the scribble little stuff on vinyl. It's like audio matrix. He wrote with a little stylus, the wall of sound. Wow. Why did Gen Clark leave the band? Well, there's two stories about that. The first one goes, we were ready to fly from LA to New York to do a TV special with Murray the k And back in those days, you could kind of get on a plane whenever you wanted. They didn't have the screening and all the stuff they got now. So I used to show up late, you know, I get there just before they closed the door. And so I got on the plane and everybody's on the plane and Jane Clark is standing up in the aisle in a cold sweat. He's gone, Man, I can't do this, man, you know, and we thought, wow, this maybe psychic, maybe you know something. Anyway, he got off the plane and I remember saying, well, if you you can't fly, you can't be a bird. That's really funny. So you said there are two versions of the story. That's one, okay, Well that was the one he had a nervous breakdown on the plane and left. Yeah, and it was and you think it was he's just afraid of flying. He was afraid of flying and it just got worked by that time. The pressure. Yeah, well you he was doing some heavy LSD and stuff, and you know, I don't think he was on ASCID at that point, but something had damaged his nervous system. He was is not a well man. He was, but Jim Dixon in his later years developed some kind of illness where he had to go to the hospital and we didn't know if he was going to make it. So I went to the hospital with my guitar to share him up and played some songs for him, and that's when he gave me what I think might have been a deathbed confession, although he didn't die then, but he said, well, you know, Jean left the band, but Eddie Tickner and I that was his co manager. We're thinking about spinning him off to be a new Elvis Presley. So he was going to go solo. Yeah, and he did. Wow, Wow, And he did and he didn't. He didn't become Elvis Presley. But yeah, yeah, interesting, he did some good stuff. He did some really like no other is really a fine album. When did Ticket to Ride come out in relation to Bird's time? It came out after the Birds, so guitar wise, it must be inspired by because it's so much of the Bird's sound. Yeah, I think so. I know we did influence George because he sent Derek Taylor back from London with a tape of If I Needed Someone, and he got the riff from My Bells of Rumney and he asked Derek to tell me that and I was wow, Man, the Beatles inspired us, and we've inspired the Beatles back. Isn't really a cool thing. It's the best. It's the best to make something you love and to also to be recognized by someone that do you respect their work. It's it's there's no better feeling. I know. It's great. And we became friends, The Beatles and the Birds became friends and we hung out together. You know took acid with him. This is a weird thing I was thinking about right before we started talking. I looked at your discography and started thinking that we tend to think of musicians lives through their discography, and I was feeling like it doesn't make sense, and I feel like it's not fair. I don't think the discography does is a true reflection of doesn't do justice. Yeah, I don't think so. I never I never thought about it before, but for some reason it hit me today that the discography it's just another detail. Well, it's just so the gig. It's just what we do for a living, and then there's a life that goes on beyond that. But it's an exciting gig. I've enjoyed it. I've been very blessed that I could make money as a musician my whole life and never really had to do a day job except the brill building, which is not bad and it's a good story. That was good experience, And then being a studio musician was good experience. Do you write songs all the time? No, not anymore. There's no market for me doing that at this point. I don't really feel inspired to do that. I'm happy just doing the folks and keeping the traditional stuff alive. And it keeps my chops up and keeps my recording chops up and my playing chops up in vocal, and so it's really fulfilling. I'm working on a project. It's a slow, slow going labor of love kind of thing. But Jack Leady and I collaborated on a musical back in nineteen sixty eight called Trip ryp Jean. Trip was an anagram of peer Ghant, and he got the idea for the story from Ibsen's Pierre Ghant, but he wanted to move it to the Western United States and nineteen sixty eight when The Birds Sweetheart of the Rodeo came out, so he thought I'd be a good guy to co write the music with him, and we wrote about twenty six songs and the thing never got mounted on Broadway. It did finally get played when Shock became the theatrical instructor at Colgate College in Hamilton, New York, and the kids there did a version of it. But I'm rerecording some of the songs, and some of the songs were on the Birds records, like Chestnut Mayer, And I'm a little conflicted because I've rerecorded Chestnutmeyer, but you're never going to get it to sound like the Clarence White version that came out on the untitled album. I was thinking, man, do I want to license this stuff from Sony or what do I want to you know? Anyway, I've rerecorded it sounds pretty good. I got Marty Stewart to play the Clarence White part son Chestnut Mayor, and they're they're spot on. He got that part right. So I was going to do a narration between the songs, kind of like Peter and the Wolf and some of the songs I've never been recorded before, like um, the song robbing of the Stage, Robbing of the State. You got to be proficient at the ribbing of the stage with the cold smith and wasn't a Remington engage. So it's up here. Gat went around, he had to the board. It's like this supernatural force that kept him going from job to job. And so that's what happens in the Gene Trip thing. He goes he's a preacher, he's a riverboat gambler, and he becomes a stagecoach robber at one point and a politician. And that's what the song I want to grow up to be a politician came from that sounds great. I can't wait to hear the whole thing. I have one thought when you when you talk about doing covers of songs you've already been involved with, think about it like you're doing a cover of a song that you had no part in and you want to reinterpret it in your own voice, making believe that the other one was not you, Like, what what would be the new? Do you know what I'm saying, instead of trying to Really, it's a mental adjustment. It's a mental adjustment of just thing get intimidated by. Don't get intimidated by the original. No, let go with the original completely and make the most interesting version to you today forgetting what the old one was. Just look at the chords and the and the melody and rethink, rethink the approach. A. Yeah, it's great because you can. Also there's a chance you'll make one that's better than the original. You're never gonna make one better than the original trying to do the original. But now you know it happens sometimes where a cover song transcends the original because you find a new way in and it's really interesting. Okay, thank you my pleasure. Well, thank you so much for talking to me today. This is great. I had fun. I had fun. It was great, thanks again to the great Roger mcgwinn. You can hear a playlist of our favorite Roger mcgwinn and Bird songs at broken Record podcast dot com. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube dot com slash Broken Record Podcast, where you can find all of our new episodes. You can follow us on Twitter at broken Record. Broken Record is produced with helpful Lea Rose, Jason Gambrell, Then Taliday, and Eric Samda. Our editor is Sophie Cragy. Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show and others from Pushkin, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content an uninterrupted ad free listening for four ninety nine a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple podcast subscriptions, and if you like the show, please remember to share, rate, and review us on your podcast app. I theme musics by Kenny Beats. I'm justin Mishin