Roger McGuinn has been a musical staple for as long as I can claim to have been making my own choices about what I listen to, through the Byrds and various attempts to put together three-letter superstar bands and on through a solo career. His last big studio solo album was in 1991; it was called Back From Rio and saw McGuinn collaborating with a lot of friends, old and new, various Byrds and Heartbreakers amongst them; Car Phone was co-written with Benmont Tench. The song is in part a celebration of McGuinn’s affinity with new technology. It’s also, like most of the album, a nineties take on the ringing 12-string sound he was so associated with.
It’s a pretty good album overall with eco-anthems like The Trees Are All Gone, and a superb co-write, also co-vocalled, with Tom Petty: King of the Hill is a superb song. So why the focus on Car Phone? Well, way back in 2014 the opportunity arose for Americana UK to interview Roger McGuinn, mainly to talk about his upcoming European tour and his current new releases. I think the plan was for about 10-15 minutes, but by pushing the topics a little wider to discuss his signature guitars (including his Martin 7 string acoustic) and his banjo acquisition as well as playing with Richard Thompson and Billy Bragg’s good advice, we managed to have an enjoyable chat for almost three quarters of an hour, and frankly I’d have been happy to ramble on for twice as long. Or more. Lord, I love to ramble.
At one point we landed on his car phone use; there’s a picture of him on the replica Mayflower with several members of the Rolling Thunder Revue, and true to form McGuinn was lugging around a briefcase with a phone in it – as he said “Yeah I know it didn’t make sense – it was a toy. I bought that back in ’73, I think, and it was a briefcase carphone, the early versions of a cellphone before there was such a thing. There was a 25W transceiver. It transmitted 25W and received VHF signals and I used to use it on airplanes and the funny thing is I would ask the flight attendants, stewardesses back then, if they would ask the captain if I could use my telephone on the airplane and they would usually say yes so there I was sitting on an airplane broadcasting 25W And it didn’t interfere with the airplane at all and now cell phones are like half a watt and you can’t use them I think it’s a bit bogus but it was fun back then; you’d see a city coming up on the flight plan and you’d key the telephone and talk to a mobile operator and you’d tell her the number of where you wanted to call and she’d connect you and you’d have 4 or 5 minutes before the jet travelled over the city and was out of range.”
Which naturally brought us onto Car Phone; back then not many people wrote songs about cell phones, how things change. Roger told me that “yes, I did back in the early days of mobile telephones they were analogue and you could receive them on radio scanners, which were readily available so I did that – you’re not supposed to talk about this it’s not illegal to listen, but it’s illegal to talk about what you’ve heard, in the States anyway. So everything I put in that song was something I’d heard over the cellular telephone.”
So, as I started off saying, Roger McGuinn has been a huge part of the music I’ve listened to the most, either through his own contributions or through the people he’s influenced, like Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, The Long Ryders, and R.E.M. And that meant that my chance to bask “in the light of the fifteen fame-filled minutes of the fanzine writer” whilst interviewing him is a great memory, and listening to Car Phone always brings it back; King of the Hill always reminds me of a back-to-back performance of the song with Russian Hillat a gig at The Stables. What a song pairing and what a sublime moment.
By the way, the two voices talking on the car phone at the end of the song are Stan Ridgway and Kimmy Robertson, who declares that she’s off to the airport to pick up a guitarist called Jim McGuinn “who is back, from Rio!“. And if you’re wondering why, well, it’s a callback to a ’60s conspiracy theory that Jim had left the Byrds and gone to Rio and was replaced in the band by his (presumably identical twin) brother Roger. What were they smokin’, eh?
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