Palo Alto Daily News: Keeping Folk Music Alive

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The Daily News

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Saturday, Oct. 10, 2009

Keeping folk music alive Roger McGuinn is on a quest

MUSIC PREVIEW

WHAT: An Evening with Roger McGuinn WHERE: Montalvo Carriage House Theatre, 15400 Montalvo Road, Saratoga WHEN: 7:30 p.m. Thursday TICKETS: $27-$35; 408-961-5858 or montalvoarts.org

BY PAUL FREEMAN For The Daily News

everybody to put on electric guitars. The Beatles invented folk-rock. They just didn’t know it. But they were doing folk-music chord changes in their songs, a lot of our passing chords, because they’d been a skiffle band.” The Byrds were inspired by The Beatles, but The Beatles acknowledged that they were subsequently influenced by The Byrds. Dylan credited The Byrds with helping to popularize his songs. “Dylan had a great knack for doing traditional-sounding songs with new ideas, new lyrics. I just loved his work. He’s the best writer around.” McGuinn and his exhilarating, jingle-jangle, 12-string electric guitar sound lifted The Byrds into rock’s stratosphere. But he didn’t play it safe, instead exploring space rock. With new member Gram Parsons, McGuinn and The Byrds blended country with rock on “Sweetheart of the Rodeo.” “The rock fans felt we betrayed them, because there was a political tinge to country, which still is there,” McGuinn explained. “It’s considered right wing. Our hippie audience went, ‘What’s this? Have they gone over to the other side?’ And the country people felt like we were trying to infiltrate them, like the Communist Party or something. Ultimately another breed of country, the outlaw breed, came out of our experimentation.” When asked about his musical legacy, McGuinn points not to The Byrds, but to the Folk Den project. Many school systems are now utilizing the site. McGuinn’s “22 Timeless Tracks From The Folk Den Project” is on CD. Photo by Bill Kollar Though he celebrates traditional music, Roger McGuinn is to perform at the Montalvo Carriage House Theatre on Thursday. McGuinn has always embraced technology. A contest through www.kompoz.com enables longer, if I had. But I wouldn’t have founded Darin took McGuinn to New York and set anyone to collaborate with McGuinn on a new The Byrds, if I had stayed, because it was right him up at the famed pop songwriter mecca, the Folk Den recording. after my Brill Building experience that I went Brill Building. “The Folk Den is something that I put more out to L.A.” McGuinn recalled, “When you work in an years into than I put into The Byrds, something McGuinn founded The Byrds with Gene office building, you don’t see everybody else that I care about deeply, something that I hope in the other offices. So I didn’t realize that Burt Clark, David Crosby, Chris Hillman and Miwill endure for a long time.” chael Clarke. Bacharach and Gerry Goffin and Carole King A quintessential troubadour, McGuinn, 67, “We were all folk singers and we were all and Paul Simon were hanging around on differplans to continue performing for a long time. inspired by The Beatles. So it was just a natural “Segovia was 93 when he died and he was still ent floors. I didn’t find out until later what the blending of the two things. I was consciously big picture was. To me, it was just like a day good enough to be booked at Carnegie Hall at trying to do my lead vocal on ‘Mr. Tambourine job. I’d go to work every morning and sit in an that advanced age. I’d like to shoot for that.” Man’ somewhere between Bob Dylan and John 8-by-5 cubicle with different writers. Lennon. “I didn’t really appreciate the whole thing E-mail Paul Freeman at “The Beatles came out and they jazzed when I was there. I probably would have stayed [email protected].

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Roger McGuinn, one of folk-rock’s founding fathers, is a man on a mission. He’s dedicated to keeping folk music alive. McGuinn, who plays Montalvo’s Carriage House Theatre on Thursday, has established the Folk Den project on his Web site, at www.mcguinn.com. He presents vibrant renditions of classic folk tunes on MP3 audio files, accompanied by lyrics and chords. “It dawned on me, about 1995, that I wasn’t hearing enough traditional music anymore,” McGuinn told The Daily News. “The new breed of folk singers were all singer-songwriters, because there’s more money in it, if you write your own stuff. “Odetta passed away a while back. Pete Seeger just turned 90. I thought, ‘The old guard is going to be gone and nobody’s going to be doing these traditional songs.’ I decided to do my part and put them up on the Internet, one a month. The idea was to distribute them around the world, get people to download them and learn them and pass them on. People don’t tend to think in terms of how awful it would be to lose something like that.” Rockabilly was McGuinn’s first influence. Then at 15, he heard folk singer Bob Gibson perform. “He played five-string banjo and sang some songs that are very much like those on the Folk Den, melodic songs that tell a story. I found that captivating.” His music teacher pointed McGuinn toward Chicago’s newly opened Old Town School of Folk Music, which he attended for two years. By the time he graduated from high school, McGuinn had a job with the Limelighters, playing folk music. “These guys came in, picked me up in Chicago and put me on the road. I’ve been on the road ever since.” McGuinn was performing with the Chad Mitchell Trio when they opened for Lenny Bruce. Bobby Darin attended the show and asked McGuinn to help him put together a folk segment for his act. “There have been a lot of serendipitous events in my life,” McGuinn said. “In fact, some lady was in the audience one night when I was singing and telling stories between songs. She said, ‘Roger McGuinn is kind of the Forrest Gump of music — all these right places at the right time.’ And that’s true. I had a lot of very fortunate circumstances.”

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