byrdsongs, lxx

in which Roger McGuinn lends further proof to Pop Life Unlimited’s Iron Law of Cover Versions, namely that they almost always suck. But this one really sucks. It’s hard for me to get my mind around the fact that this is the same guy who did this, and this, and this, and this.  What a depressing difference a decade makes.  You can tell that corporate rock is at its nadir when disco motifs begin to creep into the arrangements, not because disco is bad, but rather because hearing white rock guys from the 60s try to play disco will make you want to stick a sharp pencil in your eardrum. And when, at the beginning of tonight's clip, you see McGuinn swinging his tush to that disco beat, you may also be overcome with the desire to scratch your own eyes out...The original version of American Girl is not a perfect song. It’s almost ruined by the thumping bass line in the bridge (white disco rearing its ugly head here as well). But the song has elements of perfection. The main riff, played in octaves, is a thing of simple beauty. And then there's those lovely hand claps. The song’s spirit cries out for a joyride down Mulholland with the top down on your Mustang convertible, your best gal riding shotgun. Petty injects the music with a transcendent vibe, call it teen-o-rama (and all that melodrama), and Phil Seymour adds just the right touch with his cheeky little ‘make it last all night.’ So in some ways there’s no place to go but down if you try to cover the thing. And McGuinn covering a guy who many saw as himself a McGuinn copycat tells you everything you need to know about how lost Roger was by 1977.  Thankfully, Thunderbyrd (oy vey) was the last solo album he put out for 13 years, and when he finally returned with Back From Rio, he'd regained his focus and got back to doing the kind of thing he was always meant to do.  The break definitely did him some good, though there’s still the small matter of McGuinn Clark and Hillman…

byrdsongs, lxvix

About three years passed between No Other and Two Sides to Every Story, released in January 1977. I'm getting a little tired of saying this, but it's not a very good record. Like No Other, Two Sides was deleted and virtually impossible to find for the longest time. Every time it popped up on Ebay, the reserve bid was like $150 for a worn-out and scratchy vinyl copy. I'd actually never heard it until a re-released edition came out about two years ago. Hear the Wind is the best song on the record, a yearning ballad that's guaranteed to break your little heart.  It's a rare moment of excellence amidst a sea of mostly unfocussed, half-baked material, likely a reflection of Clark's inner torment and torturously slow descent into the abyss. The footage I pulled for the song looks like it might be from the 80s or even the early 90s, right before Clark's passing.  It's kind of hard to watch because he looks so lost, everything from the goofy ponytail-earning-bolo tie getup, to the hauntingly blank look on his face, to the cheesy Star Search-like set he's been relegated to playing on. Be warned that to watch this footage is to witness a man nearing the end.  But there's also a certain dignity in the way he delivers the song. No matter what life did to him, or what he did to himself, Clark always had that beautiful voice, distinctly understated yet perfect for this type of material...

byrdsongs, lxviii

A friend and reader asked me why I’ve been bothering to write about so much mediocre music lately. It’s a fair question, especially since I have other exciting projects in mind for the future. Why not make the future now? I could have ended this series with The Notorious Byrd Brothers, in which case the whole thing would’ve had a happy ending, at least musically speaking.  But I didn’t wanna short change the Clarence White era because I have so much admiration for his guitar playing, even though the Byrds studio material over his tenure with the band as an official member is patchy and mixed.  And then I wanted to reassess all the post-Byrds bands and solo material in hopes of finding gems I‘d never paid attention to before. So far, the only gems I’ve found are ones I already knew about. I hope that I’ve at least been able to introduce them to folks who’ve never heard them before. …Most of the stuff from the mid 70s is quite frankly forgettable. I’m fond of saying that time redeems all bad music.  This may be true of music that’s initially not taken seriously or that’s perceived as a joke, like the Monkees or Herman’s Hermits or the Archies.  But time tends not to redeem stuff that’s just tepid and bland, that just is with no real reason for being other than that it may serve as a vehicle through which a record company can extract more value from its roster of talent. No amount of time, in other words, will redeem the second Manassas album or anything by Souther Hillman Furay. Even still, I’m pressing on in order to be thorough. That's just the anal-retentive way I roll. I think I should see this project through to a conclusion that provides some satisfying closure. It’d be a bummer to end things on a bad note. In spite of all this less-than-stellar music we’ve been exposed to over the past few weeks, it’s still the case that the Byrds – McGuinn, Crosby, Hillman, Clark, and even Clarke – are and will always be heroes to me because of what they were able to do over a few heady years in the mid 60s. I'd like to conclude this series in a way that’s worthy of their most enduring legacy. I imagine that this is how Roger McGuinn felt in the mid 70s. He kept making unremarkable records, each time knowing that the music had to be framed inside an FM radio shell, each time trying to make the corporate rock idiom work for him.  It wasn't a natural fit, perhaps because he’s way too good of a musician to be having to bend his talent to some prefabricated commercial mold. I hear the stuff and I think, what a waste of great talent.  And it’s not his fault.  The changing economics of the music industry forced him into a narrowly circumscribed box, leading to material that sounds stunted and lifeless.  Cardiff Rose, released in 1976, lends further credence to this diagnosis.  What's werid is that the record is produced by Mick Ronson. Rono!  On the one hand, with two of my all-time GUITAR GODZ working on the same project, I'd expect the outcome to be so much better than what we end up with here. But on the other hand, let's face it, Rono and McGuinn is a strange mix, the king of trashy power chords and the deft 12-string player with his endlessly intricate passing chords and arpeggios.  It's a mismatch, and perhaps this is what accounts for the music's lack of personality. The record has some nice touches here and there, but it’s pretty boring stuff, a collection of songs that all more or less sound similar to one another. There’s nothing distasteful on the record, it’s just dull as hell. One thing that’s different this time around is that the song structures are slightly more folky sounding, indicating that McGuinn's attempts at making convincing corporate country rock have been abandoned in favor of corporate folk rock - CFR - with heavy emphasis on the C and the R. A cover of Joni Mitchell's Dreamland is the one song on Cardiff Rose that has anything vaguely approaching a hook, like a water mirage in the midst of the hottest and driest of hot and dry deserts…

byrdsongs. lxvii

There’s always gonna be topics one wishes to avoid. When my heroes do embarrassing things, I’d rather not talk about it, rather not dwell on it. It’s like with Willie Mays. Nobody wants to think about him being all gimpy in the 1973 World Series, a shell of his former greatness. And I don’t wanna think about Moe Tucker becoming a member of the Tea Party, or Gene Simmons being an all-around douchebag. Roman Polanski raped a 13-yr-old girl. She might've even been 12. That’s horrible, and it’s none of my business, so I’m just gonna watch Knife in the Water, Rosemary’s Baby, and Chinatown, marveling at them all with my blinkers on. I remember how disappointed I was when I learned that Roger McGuinn is Born Again. But does it make me admire him less? Not unless I think about it. Everybody’s got their flaws, even you out there, dear reader, those things you hope won’t be revealed and pray people won’t hold against you when they are. So try being sympathetic and accepting. Does it sound like I’m vamping? I am. Why else would I waste time spouting hollow platitudes about flaws and acceptance and sympathy?  Because, really, who am I kidding?  I’m the least accepting guy I know when it comes to people’s flaws. I hone in on them so I don’t have to think about my own, which are considerable, believe me. It’s small comfort, though comfort nevertheless, to dwell on the negative, particularly if it’s negativity directed at someone else. That’s a little sick, isn’t it?  The way negativity can be comforting. I have a friend from childhood – we’ve become somewhat estranged from one another over the past 20 years or so – but one of the things I loved about him when we were kids was that he was so negative and bitter, a real dark guy, but in a funny way. He wasn’t a sad sack.  Well, maybe a little bit of a sad sack but not too much. I’d call him mirthfully negative in a way that was very New York, very Jewish, and very much of apiece with the social pressure cooker that was my Manhattan judeo-bourgeois environment. But something happened at some point in his early adult life. I’m not completely sure what it was. I know he had a fairly serious health scare when he was in college and was hospitalized for awhile. There was even talk he might not make it, but he did, thankfully. In the course of this crisis, however, I think he had some kind of moment of clarity, though this ‘clarity’ paradoxically muddled his thinking and his personality beyond recognition. He began to embrace some kind of very loosely defined spirituality. In my mind, when this happens with a person it’s usually a negative reaction to the realization that life is essentially meaningless. But I won’t get too deeply into that right now.  …So he embraces this weird occult stuff, an incomprehensible hodge podge of Aliester Crowley, yoga, Dianetics, and Chinese fortune cookies. And as this awakening (or whatever it was) unfolded, he moved to Frisco and all the things I loved about the guy began to evaporate. He traded in the mirthful negativity for arch optimism and benevolence. I say benevolence but the truth is that it’s a sham, a mask he wears, perhaps even when he’s alone and looking at himself the mirror.  The reality is that he’s become a deeply self-centered, self-important, selfish person, a shell of his former greatness, just like Mays in the ’73 series, no less hobbled, just in a different way. He doesn’t wanna criticize anything. He thinks my negativity is narrow-minded. There’s no point any longer in telling him that it’s better to be critical and discerning than to be accepting of every pile of bullshit that gets thrown in your direction. I keep telling myself that this isn’t really who he is, that he’ll come back around to being the guy I held in such high esteem, once upon a time.  But deep down I know that, while he’s smart enough to know who he really is, he’ll never let that guy come out again. He’s too deeply invested now in this new thing he wants to be. He has been for a long time. He’s too far gone, too old, too lazy, too permanently damaged. And why am I telling you all this?  It should be obvious by now.  I’ll do almost anything not to have to talk about Souther Hillman Furay…

byrdsongs, lxvi

Hippy Midlife Crisis Music (HMCM), a subgenre of Corporate Hippy Music (CHM), and a branch on the same family tree that gave us Corporate Country Rock (ccr), is a style that, more than anything else, puts me in a mood to hear the low hiss of Dave Mustaine’s disdainful nihilism. Nash and Crosby’s Wind on the Water is perhaps the seminal HMCM record. Personally, if I’m jonesing for inoffensive MOR, I’d rather hear the likes of Seals and Crofts, America, Cat Stevens,  Al Stewart, or Gordon Lightfoot, because the thought that Wind on the Water is a record by a former Byrd and a former Hollie upsets me a little bit, makes me wanna look at nasty facial porn.  …Remember that nauseating 80s movie about those boomers who have a reunion after one of their college buddies commits suicide?  Thinking… Thinking… William Hurt… Glenn Close…  A navel gazing apologia for the hippie cum yuppie generation. Lots of Motown music… But no blacks within a ten-mile radius of the script… Jeff Goldblum… God I hate that motherfucker more than the hemorrhoids bulging out my asshole… THE BIG CHILL!  That’s it, The Big Chill. Yes, well, Wind on the Water is The Big Chill before The Big Chill, or The Big Chill before the big chill, as it were, in which the hippies are getting older, if not wiser, experiencing the vicissitudes of life itself after having tried to opt out for so long. But the music doesn’t resonate with me because one of the unfortunate legacies of the 60s is that of adults who never grow up, never mature, yet in spite of this they have children of their own, and they indulge these children beyond saving, because the only constant in their lives has been indulgence, so their children grow up to be monsters, and total pussies, pussies who know nothing of restraint, nothing of limits, and won’t take no for an answer, can’t take no for an answer, don’t even know what NO means. This is what makes a record like Wind on the Water so worthy of mockery. Nash and Crosby would have us believe that the hippies have gained perspective and maturity with age. I wonder if this is the same perspective Crosby had when his head was buried in a salad bowl of blow… The music as music is ok.  It’s unremarkable mid-70s session playerish sounding stuff, kind of like Jackson Browne without the intelligence, the type of thing that’s best heard as barely noticeable aural wallpaper at LAX, where the laughable lyrical content of the music would be obliterated by the white noise of the masses and their beeping gadgetry.  It’s too bad the title Music for Airports is already taken, because that’s essentially what this stuff is…

byrdsongs, lxv

Maybe the reason Roger McGuinn kept the Byrds going for about two years  too long is that he had an inkling of how diminished he would become as a solo artist. The one word I keep coming up with in reassessing his 70s solo material is resigned. It just doesn’t sound like he’s that into it. I think post-free-form FM radio had a depressing effect on McGuinn, in the broadest sense of the word depressing. Perhaps depressant is more precise. The music has almost no spark. I don’t blame McGuinn for this, at least not entirely. I’m sure that as the music business became more about business than music, the parameters of what McGuinn could do were increasingly limited. His 70s albums are garden variety corporate rock, nice enough but hardly anything you’d care to hear more than once or twice, hardly memorable. This from the man who’d made some of the most memorable music of all time. What’s interesting is that Brian Wilson and Paul McCartney - both of whom are McGuinn’s peers, not only generationally but also in terms of raw musical talent – made the transition more compellingly. The rock music they made in the 70s had a pop heart and a pop accent. Even songs as cloying as this, and as shamelessly nostalgic as this and this, are catchy and demand repeated hearings. McGuinn’s stuff doesn’t have the same impact, probably because the pop heart’s been ripped out, the pop accent unlearned. The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain. With his cover of Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door, off the forgettable Roger McGuinn & Band, he returns to a reliable source of inspiration and almost pulls it off. Almost. The flanged 12-string jangle you hear at the beginning proves to be something of a false dawn. Once the irritating (focus group tested?) second guitar* kicks in, I just wanna get back in bed and dream a dream in which I'm 16 and it's 1965...**

*Another general pop life music rule: Slide guitar/lap steel (or whatever that thing is polluting tonight’s song) can be filed with harmonica, black choir singers, and wind instruments under things that, with rare exceptions, always make (white) pop/rock songs sound worse than they otherwise would be in their absence.

**In this dream I'm also flat footed, or gay, or some such.

byrdsongs, lxiv

I gotta be honest with you: I’ve been dreading the moment when we would arrive at the Souther Hillman Furay Band.  The best I can say for this utterly transparent attempt to manufacture a CSN-type supergroup is that they are perhaps not quite as horrible as they are almost unanimously made out to be. But the stuff is completely devoid of any shred of inspiration. There’s no joy in the music at all, which is what inevitably happens when the only motivating factor is the receipts. The paradox is that music made only for money almost never makes money, or at least it never makes the serious money it's intended to extract. The Eagles are the exception that proves this rule… If the SHF Band had simply been Furay and Hillman (the Springfield + the Byrds), they might’ve had a fighting chance to do something worthwhile. I place the blame on two people for the grimness of the music: Firstly, there’s JD Souther, a rock mercenary if ever there was one, and whose name should really be DB Souther; 2) David Geffen, who hatched the idea for this product, likely out of his corner office at Asylum headquarters, where many other equally soulless / manipulative / venal / greedy / tedious / completely market-driven ideas were undoubtedly also birthed.  What’s amazing to me is that SHF went on to release a second album, just in case you might’ve been thinking that the first was the absolute bottom of the barrel…

byrdsongs, lxiii

Lady of the North is autobiographical, allegorical/symbolic, and heartbreaking. The pastoral verses depicting peace, love and contentment are each time answered with others expressing the anguish and dread that, for Clark, always seemed to be just around the corner. I can relate to this.  Some of us have a hard time experiencing unadulterated happiness because we know it's fleeting, and the pain of losing it is worse than not having it at all. I’m only half kidding when I tell friends and loved ones that I don’t do ‘in the moment.’  …There’s a weird disconnect on much of No Other between the raw and abject sadness of its emotional tone and the slickness of the production value. Depression isn’t supposed to sound so polished and corporate. This is what I meant yesterday when I said that No Other is a strange album. The songs are good but the record as a whole is…I don’t know…there’s something a bit off about it. It doesn’t cohere somehow. It’s far more worthy of your attention than anything McGuinn, Hillman or Crosby did in the mid to late 70s, but it’s still flawed in a way I can’t completely articulate. Part of it is that it’s a rock album and Gene Clark is a pop guy. He’s at his best when he’s doing three-minute love songs with great hooks, multipart harmonies and tambourines. He’s in his element when the music is light and deft, even if it’s sad ‘n blue. Keep it simple, keep it compact, don’t ramble. Verse-chorus-bridge-chorus-verse-done. The music on No Other is the opposite of this. A few of the songs are over six bloody minutes long!  That’s not what we’re looking for with Gene Clark.  …I may be overestimating the extent to which it was possible for Clark - coming from where he came from - to have made a pop record in the mid 70s. Even Paul McCartney, Mr. Pop, was making turgid rock records at the time. Band on the Run is a fun album, very catchy, but it’s definitely hard and even heavy.  …The movement from mid 60s pop to mid 70s rock only seems like devolution now, with several decades hindsight. At the time it sounded and felt like progression and growth. I can remember a time, as a little kid, when I definitely preferred the White Album to With the Beatles. So it may not be entirely fair for me to complain that No Other is all rock, no pop. Even still, the sadness I feel when I hear it is not only a reaction to the music’s content but also to its awkwardly navigated form. The record's downbeat strangeness comes from Clark's poignant effort to find his way amidst world that's passed him by...

byrdsongs, lxii

Gene Clark’s No Other is easily the most compelling mid-70s record by a former Byrd. But this doesn’t make hearing it a fun time. It’s a pretty strange and quite frankly disturbing collection of songs, one that, to me, seems to mark the start of a long drift into oblivion for Clark. The album is slick and glossy sounding in the manner of corporate country rock, but it’s too somber to catch fire with a mass audience, and too weird to be marketed effectively. There’s nothing at all poppy about No Other. It was deleted for a long time and I can remember when it was an almost impossible record to find. I stumbled across a pristine copy purely by accident at a yard sale on Fountain Avenue in West Hollywood. I couldn’t believe the Russian guy only wanted a quarter for it… The album opens with Life’s Greatest Fool, a song that puts Clark’s signature happy/sad songwriting approach to work in a country two-step context. Over the otherwise sunny key of G major, he tells us that‘too much loneliness makes you grow old.’ Wow. That’s painful to hear, if also quite true. Elsewhere he sings, ‘we all need a fix, at a time like this, but doesn’t it feel good to stay alive?’ Whether or not this is a reference to the alcoholism he struggled with, it sounds like a desperate plea for help and understanding. This is what makes No Other so difficult for me to hear, even though much of the music is very good. I feel like I’m listening to someone who’s drinking himself to death, which is such a horrible way to go out. It’s amazing to me that he lived for another 17 years and even managed to have bursts of creative productivity in that time. So much of Gene Clark’s music up to No Other is joyful even when it’s so very sad. This is what you sign up for if you’re a pop lifer. It’s not masochism, necessarily, but rather the capacity to transform life’s disappointments through the power of music. No Other doesn’t fall into this category. If you listen to the record carefully, the music will bring you down. This doesn’t mean you should avoid it, but just know that the pop life catharsis – and Gene Clark gave us so many of these – won’t be forthcoming.  It’s like, ‘ok, this is what profound sadness feels like.’  Sometimes I can go there and appreciate No Other’s deep intensity, but a lot of the time it’s just too much pain and sorrow for me to handle…

byrdsongs lxi

Roger McGuinn’s Peace On You is corporate rock pabulum for the most part, but there’s something interesting going on in The Lady. It sounds like he’s playing his Ricky through a flanger, which is undoubtedly an attempt to make the guitar sound more rock-ish, something I would normally have an aversion to, but in this case I don’t mind the vibe, even if it is very slick ‘n corporate sounding.  But I still find it frustrating that McGuinn embraced the FM radio sound so completely, a move that served him neither commercially nor musically (tonight’s song might be a bit of an exception to the latter, but only a bit). By 1975, ten years gone from Mr. Tambourine Man, McGuinn was relegated to playing small venues like My Father’s Place, a club out on Long Oyland, Roslyn to be exact, one of the Foyve Towns. When I was a kid, maybe 12 or 13, I talked my mom into taking me to hear the Good Rats at My Father’s Place. She was a trooper and talked the club into letting me in when normally they wouldn't have, it being a bar and all. My mom held her ears for the whole show. This and the smell of cheeba in the air made me very uncomfortable. Parents, don’t escort your kids to rock shows, or whatever the equivalent is today. Hire a trustworthy teenage babysitter if they need supervision… Anyway, the Good Rats are the type of band that plays My Father’s place. Roger McGuinn should not be playing at such a hole in the wall, and maybe he wouldn’t have had to if he’d taken a different approach in the 70s - less corporate, more revivalist, more Byrdsy, less Eaglesish, more poppy, yada yada. I know I sound like a broken record, but at least the record’s a single, two minutes and change, and it’s ok that it skips because it’s the kind of music you wanna hear over and over again. Even with the flanged guitar, I don’t need to hear tonight’s song more than once or twice every ten years. As it plods along, mid-tempo, past its fourth minute, I’m restless and distracted, craving a strong cup of coffee and music with more life and conviction...

Click here to hear the Lady.

byrdsongs, lx

I give Gram Parsons credit for not falling into trap of making corporate rock. I suppose this is damning him with faint praise or, what amounts to the same thing, defining his virtues in purely negative terms. It’s not that all corporate rock is bad. I mean, the first Boston album is amazing (even if a lot of it sounds like a beer commercial). There’s good corporate rock, and there’s even good CHM, but more often than not the stuff is dull and, by definition, formulaic. Gram Parsons’ music is not particularly corporate sounding, though this doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not dull, which it is a lot of the time.  He didn’t really absorb much from the Rolling Stones (other than drugs) during his encounter with them in France. The Stones were at something of a creative and decadent peak at the time, recording Exile on Main Street, which for all its overstuffed overkill is nothing if not an inspiringly debauched rock ‘n roll jamboree. One would think that being in the Stones’ orbit at the time, however peripherally, would rub off on a guy. But it seems not to have happened with Parsons, at least not musically.  Both his solo records are fairly understated, the sort of fair you can play in the car with mom and dad and have it be a compromise between, say, Annie Get Your Gun and Deep Purple’s In Rock.  Neither side is gonna be thrilled with the music, but neither will be miserable with it either. Family peace begins in the middle of the road…

byrdsongs, lix

When I was a college undergraduate, I walked on the outskirts of a social circle that included a coterie of attractive, smart women who were heavily into Gram Parsons.  The only way, it seemed, to get them pay any attention to me was to make it known that I owned the GP / Grievous Angel two-for-one cassette (Nice Price). But I’ve never really much liked Gram Parsons. I’ve talked about this before, but he’s way too much of a country music purist for my taste.  It’s often said that his so-called Cosmic American Music is a perfect blending of c&w and rock, but to me it just sounds like c&w. If a hippy makes c&w music, the fact that he’s a hippy, in and of itself, doesn’t magically transform the music into rock ‘n roll.  And so it was, or wasn’t, with Gram Parsons. His music’s not bad, it’s just not my taste.  But he was a decent songwriter, I’ll give him that. …I know it’s not good form to speak ill of the dead, but the other thing about Parsons’ vibe that's always put me off is the way it feeds so readily into the college girl mentality. It’s probably envy on my part as much as anything else. I remember how those girls would swoon at the sound of his voice, the dreamily handsome bad boy sensitivo who no doubt pollinated every flower he flew past. He was the opposite of me, both in his day-to-day experience of the world and in the music he cherished most.  There’s nothing there for me to grab hold of. Plus he fucked up the Byrds. After Parsons came into the Byrds and left just as fast, the last threads of the original band – Hillman and McGuinn – were torn apart, and the music was never as good... So let’s review: Parsons was a c&w singer who ruined my favorite band and got laid a lot in the process. Tell me what exactly there is for me to identify with in this package?

byrdsongs, lviii

Gene Parsons’ Kindling is a nice 'n quiet country/ folk/ bluegrass record.  It’s not my thing, really, but I appreciate its pleasantly relaxed vibe, and I understand where Parsons is coming from. I think he was always more of a country and bluegrass guy than a rocker.  He just happened to be a very good rock ‘n roll drummer, but his real musical passions lay elsewhere. And secondly, there’s some ‘let’s get back to the country and back to what’s really important’ sentiment expressed intermittently throughout the album, which leads me to believe (without knowing for sure) that Parsons wanted to make mellow, down-home music in the aftermath of having toured continuously with the Byrds for close to five years. Fair enough. You’ve gotta give the guy credit for not making a corporate rock record. 

But the best thing about Kindling might be the sleeve. The front shows Parsons, presumably at his cabin someplace, standing with an axe in front of a huge pile of chopped wood. And on the back we see the cozy kitchen inside the cabin, replete with wood burning stove, natch. You can practically smell the firewood burning and the biscuits baking. It all oozes with rustic authenticity, the simple pleasures of country living. I wish I were the kind of person who could buy into this stuff. I guess I can appreciate it in a detached way. It’s neat that people are into rural lifestyles where they subsist off the land and chop their own firewood and live in cabins and what have you. But the idea that country living is somehow more real than life in the city, and that it’s superior because it’s less superficial and less wedded to material things, that’s the part I can’t accept. It’s silly, and it’s conservative. Plus, I grew up in a penthouse apartment in Manhattan and I tend to get frightened when I’m in the woods…  

byrdsongs, lvii

As much as it hurts me to say anything critical about Roger McGuinn, I think he lost the plot in the 70s and never really found it again. But this is totally understandable when you stop and consider how profoundly he affected rock ‘n roll. He had the misfortune of having his biggest impact relatively early in life, in his 20s, and so the rest of his work thereafter doesn’t measure up to the five or six years during which he was a brilliant innovator. His first solo album, released in 1973, is ok, nothing spectacular. Several of the songs were collaboratively written with Jacques Levy. The problem as I’ve diagnosed it here before is that corporate rock is beneath Roger McGuinn. He was trying to make his talents fit into the CHM* mold when really, in a more just world, he would have been rejecting the mold and doing what he does best, adding his signature jangle and distinct vocal warble to tight, three-minute folk-pop songs.  Then again, perhaps continuing to do so in the 70s would have seemed retrograde and as if he were resting on his laurels. But maybe he could have innovated further if he hadn’t been locked into in the FM radio straitjacket. The unfortunate irony here is that I don’t think any of his solo material received much radio airplay anyway. It seems like he became increasingly obscure as the Byrds faded from recent memory. Even now, you don’t hear much talk of McGuinn’s solo material outside a small circle of obsessive fans.  …The personnel on Roger McGuinn reads like a page out of the 1973 edition of Who’s Who in the LA Rock Scene, and the players tellingly include several of the most egregious purveyors of CHM: Leland Sklar (bass); Daivd Crosby (vocals, guitar); Graham Nash (vocals, guitar); Chris Ethridge (bass); Jim Gordon (drums); Chris Hillman (bass); Bruce Johnston (piano, backing vocals); Hal Blaine (percussion); Michael Clarke (drums); Bob Dylan (harmonica); and so on. In other words, the same old gang, with a growing emphasis on the old part, not necessarily in terms of literal age but certainly in the somewhat dispiriting way in which the music these guys were all involved in by this time stuck to a formula that was so settled in its ways…

*Corporate Hippy Music, the basic characteristics of which were more fully elaborated in yesterday's post.