The Firecracker Principle: Why Roger McGuinn Plays Only Theaters Now
When Roger McGuinn rolled into Foley’s OWA Theater for a Friday-night stop, the founder of the Byrds brought with him a touring philosophy refined over six decades: no festivals, no casinos, no lawns — just theaters, preferably intimate ones, where the sound concentrates and the audience leans in.
“There were times in the past when I’d play anything that would come up, like a club or a casino or a theater or an outdoor festival,” McGuinn has said, “but we’ve narrowed it down to theaters because that’s my favorite.” His reasoning is acoustic as much as practical. Festivals, he notes, are fun for the crowd — “they bring a blanket, the dog, and a picnic basket” — but they are not really about the music. Inside a theater, audiences sit closer together, and the focus tightens. He explains it with a metaphor he has used for years: take a firecracker, unravel it, and dump the gunpowder out, and lighting it produces a fizzle. Keep it wrapped, and it goes bang. An audience packed into a theater, he says, is the wrapped firecracker.
From the Old Town School to the Village
McGuinn — who began playing guitar and banjo in the late 1950s — studied at the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago before going professional in the early 1960s as an accompanist for the Chad Mitchell Trio, the Limeliters, and Judy Collins. He then drifted into New York’s Greenwich Village coffeehouse scene, doing his own material, a folk singer’s career taking shape.
Then the Beatles arrived and rearranged everything. Following their lead, McGuinn added a rock ‘n’ roll backbeat to the folk songs he had been playing and carried the idea west. The result, by 1965, was a band called the Byrds and a run of hits — “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “Turn! Turn! Turn!” — that effectively invented folk-rock. The catalog that followed reads like a chapter of sixties radio: “All I Really Want to Do,” “Eight Miles High,” “So You Want to Be a Rock ‘n’ Roll Star,” “My Back Pages,” “Chestnut Mare.” The group’s signature — lush harmony vocals riding McGuinn’s ringing electric 12-string guitar — became one of the defining sounds of the decade.
A Solo Show Built on Stories
Decades after the Byrds dissolved, McGuinn performs unaccompanied, carrying four instruments and a set that mixes the hits with the stories behind them. Between songs he demonstrates the signature guitar sounds and techniques that made those records famous, and he reaches back to the folk repertoire he learned in Chicago and New York before the move west that helped define the California Sound.
The stripped-down approach extends to the road itself. Rather than a band and an entourage, McGuinn travels from show to show in a Ford Transit conversion van with Camilla, his wife since 1978, who does most of the driving. The schedule runs a couple of shows a week, leaving his voice rested and the couple time to enjoy the drive. The idea came from Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, whom McGuinn met on Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975 and 1976. “He said, ‘You know, Rog, the most fun I ever had was when I threw the guitar in the back of a Land Rover and me and Polly went on the road, and we just had a ball,'” McGuinn recalls. “I thought that sounded really good.”
The travel is part of the show’s texture. “We love to travel,” he says, “and we love to go to the different cities and hang out and go to the grocery stores and see what people do and what they eat and everything. We have a lot of fun.”
An Old Friend on a New Stage
McGuinn has played the Alabama coast before — including the Fairhope Civic Center in 1997 and Mobile’s Saenger Theatre in 2011 — but the OWA Theater inside Foley’s entertainment district was a first stop on his itinerary, fitting his preference for a controlled indoor room. Audiences for his shows fit a familiar profile, as he describes it: people in their sixties and seventies, kids grown and out of college, time on their hands, and no reluctance to come out on a weeknight for songs that defined their youth.
The Byrds’ leader long ago earned the right to scale down. What remains is the essential version: one man, four guitars, a bank of stories, and the unmistakable jangle of a 12-string that changed popular music. In a theater, wrapped tight and lit right, it still goes bang.