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Roger mcguinn uk tour 20148/30/2023 ![]() The origin of The Byrds anecdotes come at the end, featuring big hits like Eight Miles High, with a Segovia-esque intro and, of course, Mr Tambourine Man. There’s a quick trip to his Brill Building beginnings with Beach Ball. But there are a number of curios for the faithful, like a Leadbelly spiritual and the intriguing song Joni Mitchell gave him, Dreamland. Despite the presence of a Rickenbacker and a 13 string guitar, it lacks the oomph that a band can give these great songs. The 90 minute show is cosy, full of anecdotes McGuinn’s told a thousand times. ‘It’s a bit like a gig in an old people’s home,’ a friend tells me, somewhat cruelly, in the interval. McGuinn does a good Dylan impression and seems sanguine about how his career has been overshadowed by Dylan’s and, later, by Tom Petty, whose American Girl and co-write King of the Hill feature in the second half. Discussion of Dylan threatens to dominate the evening: You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere and the co-write Ballad of Easy Rider get early outings. Gram Parsons is left out of the last story but Miles Davis gets a glowing mention. He describes how he invented folk-rock, psychedelic rock and then country rock. No longer chronological, it begins with Dylan’s My Back Pages. The show has changed since I saw it last. McGuinn is now a bespectacled 72 and his wavy hair is half concealed by a big black hat, which he only raises once, at the end of the evening. For the best part of twenty years, McGuinn has been touring a solo show where he talks through his career and plays us the highlights. The Byrds’ strongest albums, 5D and The Notorious Byrd Brothers, were commercial flops, and his solo career yielded no hits. Much of McGuinn’s best work was ahead of its time. For that alone, McGuinn can never be forgotten, but he also has one of the most distinctive voices of any sixties giant: sweet, plaintive, endlessly naive, with a trademark warble. If he hadn’t, Dylan is unlikely to have come up with Like A Rolling Stone. I chose several Byrds songs to usher people in to his funeral, a year later.įormer Byrds’ frontman Roger McGuinn invented folk-rock, speeding up Dylan’s Mr Tambourine Man and adding a back-beat to take it to number one. This was one of the last gigs I went to with my oldest friend and most frequent gig companion Mike Russell, who was an even bigger Byrds fan than I am. Don’t think I’d rush to see him again, though, even if I were to get the chance. His contribution to folk-rock, space-rock, country-rock and beyond can never be equalled. Still, like Donovan in the previous review, Roger’s more than earned the right to earn a crust in whatever way he wants. Nine years on, now aged eighty, McGuinn is still touring the same show, in stark contrast to Bob Dylan, 81, whose shows have changed enormously in the fourteen times I’ve seen him since 1978. Saw him again in Sheffield, then Newark, doing versions of the show reviewed below. I first saw Roger McGuinn playing with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and Bob Dylan back in 1987, when I’d already been a huge fan for half my life. ![]() Creative Commons 2009 photo by Hans Werksman.Īnother Post review that I haven’t got round to putting up here before, maybe because the gig was… underwhelming.
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