So You Still Want to Be a Rock ‘n’ Roll Star? : Byrds’ leader Roger McGuinn went through troubled times after the group’s creative burst in the ‘60s, but his fortunes have turned

The 12-string Rickenbacker guitar resting on a stand in Capitol Records’ Hollywood recording studio is a Roger McGuinn limited edition model--named after the man in the studio on this recent afternoon, working on his first solo album in more than a decade.

Twenty-six years ago in January, McGuinn picked up another 12-string Rickenbacker--a plain old 360-12 model--in another Hollywood studio and played the classic riff that gave the guitar its name.

Inspired by the Beatles, McGuinn, a Chicago native with a background in folk music, had put together a band called the Byrds in Los Angeles to experiment with a mix of folk and rock.

McGuinn fell in love with the 12-string Rickenbacker after seeing George Harrison play one in “A Hard Day’s Night” and he wanted to see how it would sound on a Bob Dylan song that the group was planning to record.

That session at the old CBS studio at Sunset and Gower not only launched the Byrds as a major new band, but it also established “folk-rock” as a valuable new strain in contemporary pop.

“It was definitely a magical moment,” McGuinn says now, reflecting on the first time he heard the classic guitar riff of the Byrds’ “Mr. Tambourine Man” played back for him.

“We were in Studio A, this huge room which had been Jack Benny’s old radio studio, and (producer) Terry Melcher rolled these huge speakers out on this hardwood floor so we could listen to the record for the first time.

“It just killed me. . . . What a sound. I couldn’t believe that we had actually done that.”

Within six months, “Mr. Tambourine Man” was the No. 1 record in the country--and the Byrds were being heralded as America’s answer to the Beatles.

“It was like we were all part of some elite movement that was going to change the world for the better through our music. . . . Not just us, but the Beatles and the rest. It was like a responsibility.

“There’s been lots of debate about what ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ is all about. Was it a drug song, and so forth. To me, it was kind of a prayer. I had been reading books about positive thinking and the song reflected that. It was like me saying, ‘Hey God, take us wherever you want us to go.’ ”

It’s easy to identify now with the excitement of the early Byrds, whose other original members were Gene Clark, David Crosby, Chris Hillman and Michael Clarke.

“Mr. Tambourine Man,” however, wasn’t an instant hit. In fact, Columbia didn’t release the single for several months after it was recorded--during which a discouraged McGuinn almost moved to San Francisco to join another band with Dino Valenti, who later joined Quicksilver Messenger Service.

But he remained in Los Angeles and remembers the day he first heard “Mr. Tambourine Man” on the radio. “I was living in this little apartment just off Sunset and I didn’t have a car,” McGuinn recalls. “I was walking along Sunset when I heard it from a car radio.”

That was the start of a marvelous period--especially the first 10-month blaze of creative energy that produced the Byrds’ first two albums. Dylan joined them on stage at Ciro’s and Lennon and McCartney stopped by the studio to hear some of their new material.

For their accomplishments, the Byrds were named last week to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and the band’s invigorating, jingle-jangle guitar sound remains alive in the music of such admired groups as Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, R.E.M. and England’s new Stone Roses.

CBS Records has also just released an ambitious, four-hour CD box set of the group’s material--including 17 previously unissued recordings--to mark the band’s 25th anniversary.

But there have been dark times for McGuinn, the singer and songwriter most identified with the Byrds.

For all the acclaim and early success, the quintet had only limited commercial success--just seven Top 40 singles, and none after 1967. McGuinn struggled to keep the band intact as the other original members left the nest.

By the early ‘70s, the quality of the music had waned and McGuinn felt uncomfortable about still using the Byrds name, so he called it quits.

“There was so much tension within the group at various times that it was a relief to have people leave,” he says. “But at some point it just got too far away from what it had been and it felt strange just being on stage with all these new people.”

McGuinn made a series of solo albums, but they didn’t connect with either the old Byrds’ audience or with the new generation of rock fans. Various Byrds reunion efforts also proved short-lived.

McGuinn was discouraged and partially beaten by 1977. After five solo albums, he was without a record contract, had gone through a divorce and was doing a lot of drugs.

Eventually, McGuinn simply withdrew from the music business--so close to bankruptcy that he was almost forced to live in his van because he could barely pay the $400 rent on his house in Morro Bay.

McGuinn returned to music in 1980, but not on the earlier scale. For most of the last decade, he played small clubs or opened for other acts in auditoriums. For some artists of McGuinn’s stature, such a drop in commercial standing would have been humiliating--and made his old Byrds’ hit--”So You Want to Be a Rock and Roll Star”--seem like a cruel reflection of how the record industry had bypassed him:

So you want to be a rock and roll star?

Then listen up to what I say

Just get an electric guitar

And take some time

And learn how to play. . . .

Then it’s time to go downtown

Sell your soul to some company

That is waiting there

To sell plastic ware

Sitting in a Capitol Records lounge during a break from working on his new album, McGuinn nods knowingly when the conversation gets around to the troubled years.

McGuinn, 48, always seemed a bit mysterious on stage behind those oddly-shaped mini-glasses. He didn’t say much between songs and he was given to quick, unexpected smiles while singing--as if reacting to some personal joke that he never quite explained.

In the studio now, however, he seems relaxed and open--an amiable, soft-spoken man who seems to have himself and his career in remarkably good perspective. It’s easy to see why he cites a line from “Turn! Turn! Turn!” when asked a favorite line from a Byrds song: “To everything, there is a season. . . . “

He realizes that it’s easy for people to imagine him as bitter for the way the rock world seemed to turn its back on him for so long. And he acknowledges the awkwardness in recent years when people--from fans to record industry executives--asked him where he has been the last few years, not realizing he has been playing steadily for 10 years.

“It’s a logical assumption to think there has been some sort of dark cloud over me for a long time, because I haven’t been making records and people haven’t heard about me,” he says. “But dwelling on the bad times is not in my character.”

McGuinn pauses and looks across the room, where Camilla, his wife of 12 years, is sitting.

“I might not have been making records for a long time, but Camilla and I have had a wonderful time. We go on the road together. It’s not the Forums, but the audiences love the shows and I love being on stage.

“I know that’s not (the public’s) idea of what makes you happy in this business, but it’s just such a rewarding experience that I never really felt the need to do anything else. . . .

“Don’t get me wrong. I’m thrilled to be making another album. It’s not like I’m trying to pull a George Michael and say I don’t want the pain of success or say that I can’t handle it. But I have learned in the last few years that it’s not something that I need to be happy.”

The Beatles may have been the key influence in McGuinn’s decision to start the Byrds, but it was Elvis Presley who made him want to be a musician.

“Elvis hit me square and center,” he says, retracing the steps that led him to the creative center of rock in the ‘60s. “It made me want to be like him. I got a guitar and slowed down the records and listened to the licks so that I could learn all the parts.”

During rock’s first creative lull around 1960, McGuinn found a new excitement in the vigorous folk music scene of Chicago.

He played banjo, guitar and mandolin in small clubs and went on the road after high school backing the Limeliters and the Chad Mitchell Trio. Known then as Jim McGuinn (he later changed his name to Roger during a brief involvement with Subud, an Eastern religion), he also played guitar for Bobby Darin.

By 1964, McGuinn was eager to go on his own and he was intrigued by the renewed energy in rock. He moved to Los Angeles and experimented with folk-style renditions of some early Beatles tunes.

One of the few people who gave McGuinn any encouragement was a young singer-songwriter named Gene Clark. They began writing songs together in the front room of the Troubadour, where David Crosby--another folkie who was eager to move into rock--heard them one day and began harmonizing with them. Soon, the band was formed.

From the start, the band exhibited much of the Beatles’ eagerness to investigate new musical and cultural horizons. The Byrds made influential singles, but the group’s legacy rests mainly through albums--from the early psychedelic explorations of “Fifth Dimension”--which included the hugely influential “Eight Miles High”--to the pioneering country-rock of “Sweetheart of the Rodeo.”

But the original group members--because of various personal differences or career ambitions--were only together for the first two albums. Clark left before “Fifth Dimension” in 1966 and Crosby and Clarke were gone by the end of “Notorious Byrd Brothers” in 1967. Hillman moved on following 1968’s “Sweetheart of the Rodeo,” forming the Flying Burrito Brothers with Gram Parsons, who had joined the Byrds just before “Sweetheart.”

At first, McGuinn was relieved when he turned in the Byrds name and embarked on a solo career. But it never quite worked.

If “Mr. Tambourine Man” was a rock ‘n’ roll prayer, McGuinn’s personal prayers were answered in the months following what he described as his darkest period in 1977.

He went through a period of Christian reawakening that marked a turning point in what had been a depressing, downhill spiral in his life. He met his wife, Camilla, shortly afterwards at an acting class, and around 1980 did something, with Camilla’s help, that few pop stars have ever done: He turned his back on the music business as he put his life back together.

“Camilla and I were driving back from San Francisco after a vacation and we stopped in Morro Bay and just fell in love with the place,” McGuinn recalls.

“So, we decided to move there. It didn’t seem all that dramatic at the time. It wasn’t like the record business was saying, ‘We need you. Come back.’ We rented this little house overlooking the bay and we just sort of concentrated on enjoying life. It was amazing how easy it was.”

It was nearly a year before McGuinn did another show--at McCabe’s in Santa Monica. He discovered during that show and a few subsequent ones that he enjoyed being on stage again.

So, with Camilla acting as his manager, he booked a few dates around the country and settled on a pattern that has lasted almost 10 years now. The couple live in the Tampa Bay area in Florida and usually travel from show to show by car, with McGuinn doing about 100 shows a year.

All the time, he heard echoes of the Byrds’ music on the radio--in the records of other artists.

“I loved it,” he says. “I was like a proud dad. I was rooting for Petty and R.E.M. and the others. We’d hang out together when they’d come to a town I was in.”

McGuinn’s resurfacing started when he joined Dylan and Petty on a European tour in 1987. His new Arista Records contract grew out of an appearance last year at the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood, where he opened for pop group Crowded House.

Back in the recording studio, McGuinn stands behind the control board, listening to a playback of a song that Elvis Costello has written for the new album. There’s an unmistakable echo of the Byrds in the track. Petty co-wrote and sings with McGuinn on another, and Crosby and Hillman also sing on the album, which will be released in January.

“I just really didn’t have a lot of question in my mind about it,” he says about resuming his recording career. “It was just a matter of continuing with the direction I had always been going. It’s just what I do happens to be back in vogue again.”

Before playing the track again, he turns for a final word, “You know, it is nice--all that’s happening now,” he says. “There was a time when I wondered if anyone was going to remember the Byrds. I thought maybe the Byrds were just going to end up like another one of those bands . . . like Herman’s Hermits or something . . . something that came and went.

“I felt passed over . . . that people weren’t really aware of what we had done. So I am very gratified now that it has come around now to where people do seem to realize there was something of value in what we did.”

* PATCHING IT UP?

They may not play together but five original members of the Byrds will be reunited Jan. 16 when the group is inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Page 75