Roger McGuinn: St George’s Bristol

Tuesday 30th June 2009

This is a Crackerjack review of Roger McGuinn plus support. Do you agree? Rate and review this event.

Crackerjack rating: 8 / 10.

Dressed completely in black with a trilby hat to match, Roger McGuinn strolled on stage singing Bob Dylan’s My Back Pages.

But it was McGuinn’s own back pages that this one-man show was all about.

For, seated on a chair in the centre of the stage, he talked casually and intimately about his life, his music and his career, illustrating it with songs by some of the people who influenced him as well as those works we will always associate with him and the legendary The Byrds.

He took us right back to when the 13-year old Jim McGuinn used to cycle round Chicago with his brand new transistor radio listening to Elvis. How he learned to play guitar from a Gene Vincent record, gained a job backing The Limeliters when he was still at High School and ended up supporting Eartha Kitt at the Hollywood Bowl when he was just 18.

We learned about his early work with Chad Mitchell, how he became Bobby Darin’s accompanist, about working in the The Brill Building songwriting factory and how, with Gene Clark and David Crosby, he formed The Byrds and how jazz star Miles Davis got them their recording contract.

Living up to his own description of himself as “The Forrest Gump of Music”, in that he always seemed to be in the right place at the right time, he related tales about many of the iconic music names he had met or worked with, people like Joan Baez, Odetta, Pete Seeger, and of course Bob Dylan. 

He told us how The Byrds came to record  Mr Tambourine Man and how Dylan wrote the first verse of Ballad Of Easy Rider on a paper napkin and sent Peter Fonda round with it to McGuinn’s for him to turn into the movie theme song.

And of course interspersed amongst the history and the stories were loads of songs picked from his long career, sung to the accompaniment of his unusual custom-built seven-string acoustic guitar and the 12-string Rickenbacker that gave The Byrds their signature and much copied jangly sound.

There was an hilariously silly surfing song that he recorded as The City Surfers, traditional folk and blues, songs by Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie, Bob Gibson and Joan Baez.

And there were, of course, the songs we had come along to hear, the ones that are forever associated with The Byrds like Mr Tambourine Man, All I Really Want to Do, Mr Spaceman, Turn Turn Turn, The Bells of Rhymney and even Eight Miles High.  

He might be approaching his 67th birthday, but the very youthful looking McGuinn has aged as well as his songs. In fact, Dylan could easily have had McGuinn in 2009 in mind when he wrote the chorus in My Back Pages, “Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now.”

A great gig for which he thoroughly deserved the standing ovation.

His supporting act also got a very enthusiastic reception from the audience, but then Edwina Hayes is a grossly under-rated singer with a lot of charm and a stunningly beautiful voice.

She also writes really good songs so it was a bit of shame that her set contained so many cover versions. Nevertheless, she can’t have failed to have made a lot of new fans with this gig.

This is a Crackerjack review of Roger McGuinn plus support. Do you agree? Rate and review this event.