Roger McGuinn mixes Byrds hits with the folk tradition

About 2 o'clock Saturday afternoon, Roger McGuinn will sit down for a late lunch in the Elgin area, or perhaps somewhere between there and Chicago, and start drawing on "thousands of songs to choose from" to come up with the set list for his performance that evening at the Hemmens Cultural Center.

It will rely heavily on hits from his days with the Byrds, of course, but "the other things are more flexible," he says with considerable understatement, on the phone from his Florida home. "It keeps it fresh."

McGuinn will be drawing on the full range of folk music, including the Child ballads, sea chanteys, cowboy songs and murder ballads that made up much of Harry Smith's epic "Anthology of American Folk Music" collection when it was first released in the early '50s.

"I've gone back to folk music," McGuinn says. "I've really come full circle."

The Chicago native certainly has, literally, as he returns to the area this weekend, and metaphorically, as he has returned to his musical roots at the Old Town School of Folk Music, where he first learned to play guitar and banjo.

It was sometimes lost in his days of rock stardom with the Byrds, but McGinn was steeped in the folk tradition, something he reminded fans by taking a large part in last year's gala 50th anniversary concert for the Old Town at the Auditorium Theater in Chicago.

Truth is, McGuinn was never that great a songwriter. Many of the Byrds' hits were borrowed from Bob Dylan, and their originals tended to be collaborations. With his feathery tenor voice, he wasn't even that great a singer. The self-lacerating confessional of the singer-songwriter was never his style, and after the Byrds disbanded in 1973, his solo career was off and on.

Yet that's not to sell McGuinn short as a visionary and an artist. When he took folk music and lassoed it to the rock 'n' roll of the Beatles, picking up a Rickenbacker 12-string guitar he'd seen George Harrison use in the movie "Help!," it changed popular music. With their clean, crisp harmonies and jangly chiming guitars, the Byrds' hits still sound fresh - "Mr. Tambourine Man," "Eight Miles High," "Turn! Turn! Turn!" - which makes them distinctive and enduring classics today.

McGuinn had a reputation as a technophile and a demanding perfectionist in the studio, and as David Crosby and Gene Clark left the group he nevertheless produced an album-length masterpiece in "The Notorious Byrd Brothers." Yet, beginning with the follow-up, "Sweetheart of the Rodeo," which found the Byrds and Gram Parsons inventing country rock, McGuinn aimed for a simpler, more direct sound, a trend he has followed to this day.

In the mid-90s, however, he again found a new way to mix technology with tradition with his "Folk Den" project on the World Wide Web.

"The Internet had just opened up to regular people," he recalls, and so he began to post the lyrics and guitar chords to timeless folk songs on the Web. "It was a little ahead of its time. The idea was to keep the tradition going. I sensed an absence of traditional material," McGuinn says. "The inspiration was the sheets we used to get at the Old Town School of Folk Music, (so) it never cost me anything but time."

Yet, as bandwidth increased to bring actual music to the Web, McGuinn began recording the songs as well, with the end result being the massive four-disc "Folk Den" album.

"It's done very well," he says. "I think we made a profit on it the first month. I have to say, our self-released stuff has made us more income than any of the other record deals I've ever had."

Last year, he released the distillation "22 Timeless Tracks From the Folk Den Project" - sort of the way he'll pick about 22 timeless tunes for Saturday's show - and that too sold well.

Fans will notice too that time has added something to McGuinn's singing. A slight rasp has crept into his feathery tone, making him a more expressive vocalist. (See his fine solo rendition of "Turn! Turn! Turn!" on YouTube.)

"I think I'm singing better," McGuinn says. "I think it's practice. It's years and years of singing them, it has given me a better sense of intonation, and different colors come out."

Unlike their musical heirs, the Eagles, who trot through on their latest lucrative tour next week at the Sears Centre, McGuinn has thus far resisted a full-scale Byrds reunion. "As Paul McCartney once said, it's like reheating a souffle," McGuinn says. "It would just be a money grab, and everybody knows that, but they still want to see it anyway."

Instead, McGuinn will be singing the old hits and folk songs he loves solo at the Hemmens Saturday night. "It's terribly fulfilling," he says. "It's wonderfully fulfilling. I've never been happier."

<p class="factboxheadblack">Roger McGuinn</p> <p class="News"><b>When: </b>8 p.m. Saturday, March 21</p> <p class="News"><b>Where:</b> Hemmens Cultural Center, 45 Symphony Way, Elgin</p> <p class="News"><b>Info:</b> (847) 931-5900 or <a href="http://www.hemmens.org" target="new">hemmens.org</a></p> <p class="News"><b>Tickets:</b> $10-$45</p>