Descrizione
PREMESSA: LA SUPERIORITA’ DELLA MUSICA SU VINILE E’ ANCOR OGGI SANCITA, NOTORIA ED EVIDENTE. NON TANTO DA UN PUNTO DI VISTA DI RESA, QUALITA’ E PULIZIA DEL SUONO, TANTOMENO DA QUELLO DEL RIMPIANTO RETROSPETTIVO E NOSTALGICO , MA SOPRATTUTTO DA QUELLO PIU’ PALPABILE ED INOPPUGNABILE DELL’ ESSENZA, DELL’ ANIMA E DELLA SUBLIMAZIONE CREATIVA. IL DISCO IN VINILE HA PULSAZIONE ARTISTICA, PASSIONE ARMONICA E SPLENDORE GRAFICO , E’ PIACEVOLE DA OSSERVARE E DA TENERE IN MANO, RISPLENDE, PROFUMA E VIBRA DI VITA, DI EMOZIONE E DI SENSIBILITA’. E’ TUTTO QUELLO CHE NON E’ E NON POTRA’ MAI ESSERE IL CD, CHE AL CONTRARIO E’ SOLO UN OGGETTO MERAMENTE COMMERCIALE, POVERO, ARIDO, CINICO, STERILE ED ORWELLIANO, UNA DEGENERAZIONE INDUSTRIALE SCHIZOFRENICA E NECROFILA, LA DESOLANTE SOLUZIONE FINALE DELL’ AVIDITA’ DEL MERCATO E DELL’ ARROGANZA DEI DISCOGRAFICI .
ROGER McGUINN
back from Rio
Disco LP 33 giri , 1991, arista BMG , 211 348 , germany / europe
OTTIME CONDIZIONI, vinyl ex++/NM , cover ex+
Roger Mc Guinn (Chicago, 13 luglio 1942) è un musicista statunitense. Fu il fondatore del gruppo musicale The Byrds nella prima metà degli anni sessanta, gruppo che comprendeva anche personaggi del calibro di David Crosby e Gene Clark. La sua tipica voce nasale, assieme al particolare sound della sua chitarra Rickenbacker
modificata personalmente, caratterizza i primi album del gruppo,
scioltosi nei primi anni settanta dopo aver contribuito alla crescita
del folk rock americano e aver introdotto il rock psichedelico con
brani di notevole successo, tra i quali si segnalano “Turn, Turn, Turn”
e “Eight Miles High”. Mc Guinn ha proseguito la sua carriera fino ai
giorni nostri, con alterni risultati e successi.
- Interprete: Roger McGuinn
- Etichetta: Arista
- Catalogo: S 211348
- Data di pubblicazione: 1991
- Supporto:vinile 33 giri
- Tipo audio: Stereo
- Dimensioni: 30 cm.
- Facciate: 2
- Glossy cover / copertina lucida , white paper inner sleeve
Back from Rio is the sixth studio album by American singer-songwriter, guitarist and co-founder of The Byrds Roger McGuinn. It was released in January 1991, more than a decade after McGuinn’s previous solo album, Thunderbyrd. The album was issued following the release of the The Byrds box set and musically it leans on the sound of The Byrds thanks to McGuinn’s ringing 12-string electric guitar and vocal contributions from ex-Byrds members David Crosby and Chris Hillman. Also prominent on the album are Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers,
with Petty co-authoring and duetting with McGuinn on the album’s lead
single “King Of The Hill”. In addition, several members of the
Heartbreakers provide musical backing on a number of the album’s tracks.
Other prominent songwriters on the album—besides McGuinn and his wife
Camilla—are Elvis Costello, Jules Shear and Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics.
The album was generally well received by music critics and it peaked at #44 on the Billboard 200 album chart.
Two singles were drawn from the album: “King Of The Hill” and “Someone
To Love”, which peaked at #2 and #12 respectively, on the Billboard Hot Mainstream Rock Tracks chart.
In Europe, Back from Rio was released in February 1991 and featured different cover artwork.
Track listingSide one
Side two
|
Personnel
- Roger McGuinn – lead vocals, background vocals, 12 string electric guitar, 12 string acoustic guitar
- George Hawkins – bass guitar
- John Jorgenson – acoustic guitar, electric guitar, baritone guitar, saxophone, bass guitar, mandolin
- Michael Thompson – electric guitar, acoustic guitar
- Stan Lynch – drums, percussion
- Mike Campbell – electric guitar, slide guitar, baritone guitar
- Benmont Tench – organ, keyboards, Hammond B-3
- David Cole – percussion, piano, acoustic guitar, MPC-60
- Dan Higgins – saxophone
- Tom Petty – lead vocals, background vocals
- Elvis Costello – background vocals
- Michael Penn – background vocals, 12 string acoustic guitar
- David Crosby – vocals, background vocals
- Chris Hillman – vocals, background vocals
- J. Steven Soles – background vocals
- Timothy B. Schmit – background vocals
- Kimmy Robertson – telephone voice
- Stan Ridgeway – telephone voice
Innumerevoli gli
ospiti. In Car phone, la voce al telefono è di
Stan Ridgway; in You bowed
down l’autore della canzone, Elvis Costello, è ai cori; in Suddenly blue,
Without your love e Back from Rio interlude, sono presenti due ex compari di
McGuinn nei
Byrds, Chris Hillman e David Crosby; The trees are all gone vede
ai cori
Tom Petty, come anche King of the hill; The time has come ospita la
voce dell’ex Eagles Timothy B. Schmidt. In quasi tutte le canzoni suonano Stan
Lynch e Benmont Tench, della band di
Tom Petty.-
Tra i ringraziati in modo
speciale: Elvis Costello,
Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne (Electric Light Orchestra e
Traveling Wilburys), Stan Lynch, Mike Campbell,
Benmont Tench (tre Heartbreakers di
Tom Petty), Dave Stewart
(Eurythmics), Chris Hillman e David Crosby (ex
Byrds),
Stan Ridgway (ex
Wall of
Voodoo e poi solista), Timothy B. Schmidt (ex Poco e Eagles),
Willie Nile, Carol King.- I ringraziamenti si concludono con questa frase: ‘(…)
e a tutti i fans che sanno che io non sono andato a Rio’ (l’album si intitola
Ritorno da Rio; in quel 1991 a Rio de Janeiro si svolse la Conferenza Mondiale
sull’Ambiente, che si risolse in un quasi totale fallimento).
After spending the better part of the 1980s as a solo acoustic troubadour, Byrds cofounder Roger McGuinn landed a contract for a solo album with Arista Records at the turn of the 1990s. Featuring Tom Petty, Mike Campbell, and ex-Byrds David Crosby and Chris Hillman,
the resultant album had a strangely modern feel, although it was
primarily driven by McGuinn’s trademark Rickenbacker 12-string.
Songwriting had never been McGuinn’s strong suit, and on this album he
wisely chose some excellent material by Jules Shear and Tom Petty, who provided the album’s unexpected hit, “King of the Hill.”
Dopo una lunga pausa durata per tutti gli anni ottanta,
nel 1990 Roger McGuinn torna in studio con Tom Petty e parte degli
Heartbreakers per registrare il suo album del ritorno, Back From Rio,
che arriva a quasi dieci anni da Thunderbyrd del 1977. Significativo in
questo senso anche il titolo del disco che ironizza sulle voci, nate in seguito
al cambiamento di nome nel 1967, che davano Jim in fuga a Rio per scappare
dallo show business e che un suo ipotetico fratello di nome Roger avesse preso
il suo posto.
Back From Rio nasce in quella fortunata scia di brucianti successi di
Tom Petty che aveva generato il suo capolavoro Full Moon Fever, l’album
di come back di Roy Orbison e il debutto con i Travellin’ Wilburys. In supporto
a Roger, oltre a Tom Petty troviamo una nutrita schiera di collaboratori
eccellenti che vanno da Stan Ridgeway, voce in Car Phone, fino agli
Ex-Byrds, Crosby e Hillman e a Elvis Costello che partecipa con la sua You
Bowed Down. La presenza di tanti ospiti illustri tuttavia non oscura il valore
di McGuinn che dimostra di essere ancora l’abilissimo musicista di un tempo
oltre che un ottimo songwriter, come dimostrano la splendida King Of The
Hill, inaspettato hit single scritto in collaborazione con Tom Petty,
l’ottimo rock di Trees Are All Gone e il sipario intimistico
dell’acustica Without Your Love.
Un disco da riscoprire e da ricercare, perché completa un
percorso musicale, quello di McGuinn che lentamente tornerà alle radici
riscoprendo il folk con la celebre serie Folk Den.
With his
credentials as leader of the Byrds and Bob Dylan associate, Roger
McGuinn could have been the sixth Traveling Wilbury. Indeed, Back
From Rio, his first album in 11 years, fits comfortably into the vein
of Tom Petty’s Full Moon Fever and Traveling Wilburys Vol.
1 — pleasant, middle-aged folk-rock that’s meant to re-create the
legend of rock’s ”golden era,” not explore new trails. But too many
of the songs here are banal, the guitar-based production is a bit
monotonous, and McGuinn still doesn’t have very much to say. When he
tries to make a statement, as he does on the strident environmental
rocker ”The Trees Are All Gone,” you wish he’d stick to his
melancholy love songs. Still, when his quivering pinch of a voice and
the chime of his ageless 12-string guitar settle into a sturdy
melody, the album springs to life; for Byrds fans, the airy ”Suddenly
Blue” and McGuinn’s brooding duet with Tom Petty, ”King of the Hill,”
are manna. Back From Rio is the musical equivalent of a Stone Age
creature frozen in a North Pole iceberg, who when thawed acts as if
the last few millennia either never happened or didn’t matter.
Roger McGuinn is back. From Rio (not really). And he brought Tom Petty
with him. I guess that’s the premise behind re-launching his solo career
after so many years. Back From Rio sounds a lot like Tom Petty, or at
least Tom Petty with Don Henley’s brain inside of him. (I don’t know why
I’m always taking out people’s brains and putting them in other
people’s bodies.) The songs are punchy, polished pop with a noticeable
twang, not far removed from the contemporary work of singer/songwriters
like Graham Parker and Lindsey Buckingham. The lyrics generally emanate
from a failed romance (must be the influence of all those
Heartbreakers); the Henley connection occurs in the social correction
and anti-materialism found in songs like “Car Phone” and “The Trees Are
All Gone.” It’s a very professional affair, affording younger artists
(Elvis Costello, Michael Penn) a chance to work with an influential if
infrequent artist. McGuinn, never a prolific songwriter, takes help
where he can get it: EC is stamped all over “You Bowed Down,” Petty on
“King of the Hill.” Combined with McGuinn’s own material (“The Time Has
Come,” “Someone To Love”), Back From Rio is remarkably solid. Of course,
a lot of people were making music like this: studio pop with ringing
guitars and harmonies that could be seen as an alt rock update of The
Byrds’ original vision. That McGuinn can lay claim to this legacy puts
him ahead of the pack, much as it aided Roy Orbison and The Traveling
Wilburys. But the history lesson was lost on most, and despite charting
well Back To Rio went back to the cutout bins. If you missed his
emergence from the shadows the first time, this effort is worth a second
look.
James Roger McGuinn (known professionally as Roger McGuinn, previously as Jim McGuinn, and born James Joseph McGuinn III on July 13, 1942) is an American singer-songwriter and guitarist. He is best known for being the lead singer and lead guitarist on many of The Byrds‘ hit records. He is a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for his work with the Byrds.
Early life
Roger McGuinn was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. His parents, James and Dorothy, were involved in journalism and public relations, and during his childhood, they had written a bestseller titled Parents Can’t Win. He attended The Latin School of Chicago. He became interested in music after hearing Elvis Presley‘s “Heartbreak Hotel,” and asked his parents to buy him a guitar. In the early 1980s,
he paid tribute to the song that encouraged him to pick up the guitar
that he credited “Heartbreak Hotel” to his autobiographical show.
Around the same time, he was also influenced by country artists and/or
groups such as Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Gene Vincent and The Everly Brothers.
In 1957, he enrolled as a student at Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music, where he mastered the five-string banjo and continued to hone his guitar skills. After graduation, McGuinn performed solo at various coffeehouses on the folk music circuit where he was discovered and hired as a sideman by folk groups like the Limeliters, the Chad Mitchell Trio, and Judy Collins. He also played guitar and sang backup harmonies for Bobby Darin. Soon after, he moved to the West Coast, winding up in Los Angeles, where he eventually met the future members of The Byrds.
In 1962, after he left the Chad Mitchell Trio, Bobby Darin
hired him to be a backup guitarist and harmony singer. (At that
approximate time, Darin wanted to add some folk roots to his
repertoire, seeing it as a burgeoning musical field.) Unfortunately,
about a year and a half after McGuinn began to play guitar and sing
with Darin, Darin became ill and retired from singing. Subsequently,
Darin opened T.M. Music in New York City‘s Brill Building, hiring McGuinn as a song writer for $35 a week. In 1963, just one year before he co-founded the Byrds, he was a studio musician in New York City, recording with Judy Collins and the Paul Simon-Art Garfunkel duo. At the same time, he was hearing of The Beatles, and wondering how Beatlemania might affect folk music. When Doug Weston gave McGuinn a job in Los Angeles, at the Troubadour,
McGuinn had seasoned his act with Beatles’ songs, and he consequently
turned his attention to another folkie who was also a Beatle fan, Gene Clark, who joined forces with McGuinn in The Byrds, in July of 1964.
The Byrds
During his time with the Byrds, McGuinn developed two innovative and
highly influential styles of electric guitar playing:
“jingle-jangle”–generating ringing arpeggios based on banjo finger picking styles he learned while at the Old Town School–and, secondly, a merging of saxophonist John Coltrane‘s free-jazz atonalities which hinted at the droning of the sitar, a style of playing first heard on the Byrds’ 1966 single “Eight Miles High.”
While tracking the Byrds’ first single, “Mr. Tambourine Man,” at Columbia studios, McGuinn discovered a key ingredient of his signature sound. “The ‘Rick’ (Rickenbacker guitar) by itself is kind of thuddy,” he notes. “It doesn’t ring. But if you add a compressor, you get that long sustain. To be honest, I found this by accident. The engineer,
Ray Gerhardt, would run compressors on everything to protect his
precious equipment from loud rock and roll. He compressed the heck out
of my 12-string, and it sounded so great we decided to use two tube compressors [likely Teletronix LA-2As] in series, and then go directly into the board.
That’s how I got my ‘jingle-jangle’ tone. It’s really squashed down,
but it jumps out from the radio. With compression, I found I could hold
a note for three or four seconds, and sound more like a wind instrument. Later, this led me to emulate John Coltrane’s saxophone on ‘Eight Miles High.’ Without compression, I couldn’t have sustained the riff’s first note.”
“I practiced eight hours a day on that ‘Rick,'” he continues, “I really worked it. In those days, acoustic 12s
had wide necks and thick strings that were spaced pretty far apart, so
they were hard to play. But the Rick’s slim neck and low action let me
explore jazz and blues scales up and down the fretboard, and incorporate more hammer-ons and pull-offs into my solos. I also translated some of my banjo picking techniques to the 12-string. By combining a flat pick with metal finger picks
on my middle and ring fingers, I discovered I could instantly switch
from fast single-note runs to banjo rolls and get the best of both
worlds.”
Another sound that McGuinn developed is made by playing a seven string guitar, featuring a doubled G-string (with the second string tuned an octave higher). The C. F. Martin guitar company has even released a special edition called the HD7 Roger McGuinn Signature Edition,
that claims to capture McGuinn’s signature “jingle-jangle” tone which
he created with 12 string guitars, while maintaining the ease of
playing a 6-string.
The Byrds recorded several albums after Mr. Tambourine Man in 1965. The single Turn! Turn! Turn!
was the Byrds second Number One hit, topping the charts in late 1965.
In 1969, McGuinn’s solo version of Ballad Of Easy Rider appeared on the
film of the same name, while a full band version was the title track
for the album released later that year. 1970’s “Untitled” album
featured a 16-minute version of the Byrds 1966 hit “Eight Miles High”,
with all four members taking extended solos representative of their
‘jam-band’ style of playing during that period.
After several personnel changes, the group disbanded in 1973, with
Chris Hillman playing bass with the band for their final show in
February of that year. Notable band members included David Crosby, Gene
Clark, Chris Hillman, Michael Clarke,Clarence White, Skip Battin and
Gram Parsons, all of whom went on to form successful groups. In 1968, he helped create the groundbreaking Byrds album Sweetheart of the Rodeo, to which many attribute the rise in popularity of country rock.
Post-Byrds
After the break-up of the Byrds, McGuinn released several solo albums throughout the 1970’s. He toured with Bob Dylan during his 1975 and 1976 “Rolling Thunder Revue“In late 1975, he played guitar on the track titled “Ride The Water” on Bo Diddley‘s The 20th Anniversary of Rock ‘n’ Roll all-star album.
In 1978, McGuinn joined fellow ex-Byrds Gene Clark and Chris Hillman to form “McGuinn, Clark and Hillman,” and the band released its debut album with Capitol Records
in 1979. The media loved the band and they performed on many TV rock
shows, including repeated performances on The Midnight Special, where
they played both new material and Byrds hits. “Don’t You Write Her Off”
reached #33 in April 1979. While some feel that the slick production
and disco rhythms didn’t flatter the group, and the album had mixed
reviews both critically and commercially, it sold enough to generate a
follow up. McGuinn, Clark and Hillman’s second release was to have been
a full group effort entitled “City,” but a combination of Clark’s
unreliability and his dissatisfaction with their musical direction
(mostly regarding Ron and Howard Albert’s production) resulted in the
billing change on their next LP “City” to “Roger McGuinn and Chris
Hillman, featuring Gene Clark.” By 1981 Clark had left and the group
briefly continued as “McGuinn/Hillman.”
In 1987 Roger McGuinn was opening act for Dylan and Tom Petty. In 1991 he released his comeback solo album Back from Rio to successful acclaim.
Roger McGuinn has used the World Wide Web to continue the folk tradition since November 1995 by recording a different folk song each month on his Folk Den site. The songs are made available from his web site and a selection (with guest vocalists) was released on CD as Treasures from the Folk Den. In November of 2005, McGuinn released a four-CD box set containing one hundred of his favorite songs from the Folk Den.
On July 11, 2000, McGuinn testified before in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on downloading music from the Internet
that artists do not always receive the royalties that (non-Internet
based) record companies state in contracts, and that to date, The Byrds
had not received any royalties for their biggest hits, “Mr. Tambourine
Man” and “Turn, Turn, Turn”—they only received advances, which were
split five ways and amounted to just “a few thousand dollars” per band
member. He also stated that he was receiving 50 percent royalties from MP3.com.
McGuinn currently tours as a solo artist.
Religious faith and name changes
In 1965, McGuinn joined the Subud spiritual association and practiced the latihan,
an exercise in which he opened himself up to receiving spiritual
guidance through the quieting of his mind. McGuinn changed his name in 1967 after Subud‘s founder Bapak told him it would better “vibrate with the universe.” Bapak
sent Jim the letter “R” and asked him to send back ten names starting
with that letter. Owing to a fascination with airplanes, gadgets and science fiction, he sent names like “Rocket,” “Retro,” “Ramjet,” and “Roger,” the latter a term used in signalling protocol over two-way radios, military and civil aviation. Roger was the only “real” name in the bunch and Bapak
picked it. While using the name Roger professionally from that time on,
McGuinn only officially changed his middle name from Joseph to Roger.
In 1977 McGuinn became a born-again Christian.