Roger McGuinn has loved gadget songs ever since he discovered that an electric twelve-string could give a folkish guitar strum a rock & roll jangle. "Car Phone," the tech tune from Back From Rio, his first album in a decade, connects when McGuinn's Rickenbacker runs down the same modal path it did on the Byrds' epochal "Eight Miles High" and then concludes with a hokey conversation via the title toy.
A woman – no doubt precisely the sort of "American Girl" celebrated by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers – is yakking on the phone while driving to the airport to pick up, as she reports, "a guitar player, his name is Jim McGuinn, and he's back from Rio." As the twelve-string
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sprays out more notes, McGuinn, at once boastful and self-deprecating, quotes the Beatles: "He blew his mind out in a car." At the time of "Eight Miles High" – and "A Day in the Life" – the folk-rock-cum-psychedelic Byrds were every bit as influential as the Beatles. And McGuinn, who changed his first name during a brief flirtation with an Indonesian religion, Subud, proved himself to be as much a child of the Sixties as the meditating moptops.
More than two decades later, McGuinn is making the most of his present moment. Back From Rio comes on the heels of Columbia's recent authoritative Byrds box set and also coincides with the group's induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (see page 49). Furthermore, while newly recorded Byrds tracks on the box set suggest a folkie reunion, Back From Rio evokes the commercial pop rock of the group's 1967 album Younger Than Yesterday.
McGuinn's twelve-string shimmers throughout Back From Rio like sunlight on the ocean. The background vocals, when not multitracked by McGuinn himself, are supplied by former Byrds (David Crosby and Chris Hillman) or later admirers who would like to have been Byrds (Tom Petty, Michael Penn, Timothy B. Schmit). Instead of the usual Bob Dylan cover, the modern McGuinn sings a song by Elvis Costello ("You Bowed Down"). And on "King of the Hill," McGuinn and Petty trade lead vocals in a manner that leaves you wondering who is imitating whom.
As a trio of guitars cascades into the first verse of McGuinn's best new song, "Someone to Love," the degree to which Back From Rio is indebted to the Sixties sound of the Byrds is inescapably clear – though Petty, R.E.M. and a flock of other artists that have been influenced by the Byrds have found themselves caught in the same time warp with less justification. That's why Back From Rio, a delight for anybody who never got enough of the Byrds, may also be considered a cautious, conservative comeback. Cynics might suspect that McGuinn's perfectly rendered folk rock wouldn't have been quite so appealing had he been releasing records throughout the Eighties; old fans will be happy to have a latter-day approximation of a Byrds album.
McGuinn, whose lyrics have at times
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