Written By Cary Barnhard

Roger McGuinn is a founding member of The Byrds and a folk rock innovator. His mastery of the twelve string guitar has inspired countless musicians from The Beatles to REM. Heat Beat was lucky enough to speak with Roger as he made his way to the recording studio.

HB: You have a new guitar coming out?

RM: It's already out! It came out in January 2005. Martin Guitar Company has made a new guitar; it's the Roger McGuinn HD7.

HB: And what's special about it?

RM: What makes it special is that it's got seven strings and even though there are other guitars on the market that have seven strings, this is a unique configuration. It's a combination of a six string and a twelve string. It's got the best part of a twelve string, in my humble opinion, the doubled G strings like on the twelve string, because you can get a lot of melody punch out of them. I play melody up and down the neck on the G string, so I went to Martin and said, "If I could get a guitar that had the high string and the low string on the G, but otherwise was a regular six string, it would be more versatile than either a six or a twelve. Then I could do the jingle/jangle Byrds kind of sound and I could also bend and do Blues licks and Bluegrass runs on the bottom and other things you can do on a six string that are difficult to do on a twelve string.

HB: It's very different than anything else.

RM: Yeah. It's kind of a Swiss Army Knife of a guitar.

HB: How did you come to the twelve string guitar?

RM: I got into the twelve string guitar back in the 1950s. I was at The Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago. That's where I learned about Leadbelly and Pete Seeger and Bob Gibson playing the twelve string. Quite a few people influenced me to play the twelve string. I got my first one in 1958, '59.

HB: Your sound on the twelve string is so unique, particularly on electric, can you tell me how you developed that?

RM: The sound that I have on the electric twelve string came about because I played the five string banjo before I'd played the electric twelve string and so I'd developed a number of rolling pick patterns that I applied to the electric twelve string. So if you listen to the rhythm work on say, "Turn, Turn, Turn", you'll hear a rolling arpeggio pattern underneath. That's me playing the electric twelve string. Then I played the lead break on the G string going up and down the neck. We overdubbed the lead break part.

HB: You're playing that with your fingers, in the banjo technique?

RM: I'm actually using, I've got a weird technique, I use a flat pick and two finger picks. That's another story. I developed that because I couldn't really switch between flat picks and finger picks fast enough on stage, so it's just sort of a composite of the two. Just turning the flat pick into a thumb pick, using it between my thumb and index finger and shifting the finger picks down one, so I put one on the middle finger and one on the ring finger.

HB: So it was kind of for expediency, but it became a part of your style?

RM: Yeah, it became my style. I get the same effect as you would either flat picking or finger picking without having to change picks.

HB: It seems like there were whole genres of music based on trying to do what you do on the twelve string……

RM: Yeah, I've heard a lot of people say there are bands that were influenced by what we did.

HB: How do you feel about that?

RM: Well I'll just say that it feels great to have been woven into the fabric of American music.

HB: Do you enjoy hearing that kind of music?

RM: Yeah I like that kind of music. That's probably why I made it! I like that sound and you can find a lot of it on my most recent CD "Limited Edition".

HB: Can you tell me a little about that?

RM: Okay. "Limited Edition" is a thirteen track CD. It has a lot of new songs that I Co-wrote with my wife, Camilla, and it's got some traditional songs, but they're all supped up with an electric twelve string guitar. You can find it on my website www.McGuinn.com and also on www.amazon.com, and we sell them at concert venues as well. But we don't go through the traditional distribution system of brick and mortar stores. We decided that's kind of a waste of time. It's in response to a lot of folks saying they loved the folk stuff I was doing but they wanted to hear some more electric twelve string. We call it "Limited Edition" because it's limited in the way you can buy it; like you can't find it at Wal-Mart.

HB: How did you come to that blending of Folk and Rock?

RM: The blending of Folk and Rock was something that was inspired by The Beatles when I was working for Bobby Darin in New York. I was in the Brill Building in 1963 and I heard The Beatles and it inspired a combination of Folk and Rock and I went down to Greenwich Village and I started playing traditional songs with a Beatle beat and gradually when I went out to the West Coast Gene Clark came along and David Crosby and we formed The Byrds around that sound.

HB: It's very rare to have that many talented people together.

RM: We were very blessed to have so much talent in one band. I don't think we really appreciated it at the time, but looking back you can see that there were really some greatly talented people, like David Crosby for his harmony singing and Gene Clark for his song writing. We had a really good band.

HB: Any good stories from then?

RM: Well, I guess meeting The Beatles would be one of my favorite stories. When we Were in London in 1965, we were playing at a venue called "Blazes" , it was a Blues club. John and George were in the audience and after the show, we all got together and hung out. Kind of exchanged notes about how things work and Everything. John was interested in my little glasses that I wore. I wore some Rectangular sunglasses, so he liked that and started wearing little round glasses after that. And then The Beatles said that their favorite band was The Byrds. And we started exchanging things across the pond. George wrote a song called "If I Needed Someone" based on a lick I did on my Rickenbacker electric twelve string on the first album, I believe. And so he sent the song back via Derrick Taylor, our press officer at the time, and that's the first song on my new CD, "Limited Edition." And that's the reason it's there; a tribute to George.

HB: So you were very close with them?

RM: Well, we were friends. We saw each other now and again. We didn't see each other a lot, but we maintained a friendship over the years.

HB: You eventually disbanded The Byrds to pursue a solo career?

RM: Yeah. In 1973 I decided it was time to go solo, and I've been real happy about that ever since.

HB: Do you prefer that to being in a band?

RM: I don't really like working in a band. It's a bunch of guys on a bus. I have more fun traveling with my wife. My wife and I travel around the world together and it's kind of like a honeymoon.

HB: And you wrote all these new songs together?

RM: Yeah. We wrote a lot of the songs together. We've been writing since 1978.

HB: How is working with your wife different than other songwriting partnerships, or writing on your own?

RM: It's nice to have somebody to bounce ideas off of or kick things back and forth. We enjoy writing together.

HB: It has to be a different dynamic than writing with someone you're not married to, unless you consider a band a marriage.

RM: Yeah. I think I do consider a band a marriage! (Laughs) It's very much like one. But, it's about the same writing with anybody.

HB: You mentioned Bobby Darin earlier. How did you start working with him?

RM: I was playing in the Chad Mitchell Trio at the Crescendo on the Sunset Strip in LA , and we were opening up for Lenny Bruce. And Bobby Darin came in to see Lenny Bruce and he saw the Chad Mitchell Trio beforehand. My job in The Trio was to be the accompanist. There were three guys who sang and didn't play any instruments and I played guitar and banjo and didn't sing. To make things more interesting for myself, I'd make little faces behind these guys and it cracked the audience up. And Bobby liked that. So he came back stage and said he wanted to hire me; he was thinking of doing a fold segment in his show. I said. "I've already got a job with these guys." And he said, "How much are they paying you?" I told him and he said he would double it. I thought that was cool so I gave the Chad Mitchell Trio two weeks' notice and went with Bobby.

HB: What was it like working with him?

RM: It was great! I loved working with Bobby. He was a wonderful performer, and a very talented guy, very driven. And he taught me a lot about the old show business rules, like show up on time and have your shoes polished and have your suit pressed and be responsible which was far from what I ran into in rock and roll later.

HB: Sounds like a very different work environment.

RM: He was Old School. He'd come up with the Vaudeville people like George Burns. He knew how to play everything. He knew how to sing all kinds of different styles. It was the Old School of show business and it was really interesting to be exposed to that at an early age. I was nineteen or twenty when I worked with him.

HB: And you did some kind of Surf Music single together?

RM: Right! When I was working in his publishing company in New York, my job was to listen to the radio and write songs like the ones out there. The Beach Boys were popular at the time. I was writing with this guy, Frank Gary. We decided to write a Beach Boys kind of song or a Jan and Dean surf song. And we came up with a song called "Beach Ball" , and we played it for Bobby. He liked it so much he booked a studio in the Brill Building and we recorded it that day. And we called called ourselves "The City Surfers". Bobby was the drummer. It was fun. The song got up in the top ten in Australia sung by another guy. I can't remember his name, but he was a hot guy in Australia. Kind of like the Australian Elvis Presley.

HB: Are you doing some recording today?

RM: Yeah. I'm doing mixing and mastering for a new CD box set I'm doing. I've got a thing on the Internet called Folk Den, it's a section of my website McGuinn.com and it's where I preserve traditional songs. They're all like a hundred years old, songs by anonymous authors in the public domain. I got concerned about the health and well being of Traditional music about ten years ago. The new Folk singers were singer/songwriters writing their own stuff. They weren't doing the old songs any more. I started putting the old songs up on the Internet for free downloading starting November 1995. These are my performances of the songs overdubbed. It's going to be the tenth anniversary in November 2005, so to celebrate that we're going to release a four CD boxed set titled, 'The Folk Den Project" and it will be twenty-five songs on each CD, all recorded in full CD quality. It's going to come with a forty page booklet describing what the songs are about.