Alaska Employment Law

If you are of a certain age, or if you ever listen to oldies stations (or both), you know the work of The Byrds, who blasted into popular culture in 1965 with their ringing cover version of Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man,” notably featuring Jim (now Roger - it’s the same guy) McGuinn on the 12-string Rickenbacker guitar (which he acquired because he liked Leadbelly).  The Byrds also included Gene Clark, David Crosby (of CSN&Y fame), Michael Clarke, and Chris Hillman (of Flying Burrito Brothers and Souther-Hillman-Furay fame).  For a little while Gram Parsons was also a card-carrying Byrd.  Clark and Clarke are both dead now, ruined by substance abuse, mostly the demon alcohol.  How David Crosby has survived this long after a life of freebasing, a new liver, and significant prison time is a puzzle, but perhaps we could ask Keith Richards and Brian Wilson.  Some people are just hard to kill, evidently.

Jim McGuinn, on the other hand, has not only survived, but thrived, in his odd way.  Originally a follower of the Subud religion (an Indonesian sect - his Subud beliefs caused him to change his name from Jim to Roger when his son was born, but I can’t really say why), McGuinn was the only member of The Byrds to feature in all of its varied iterations.  He later became a born-again Christian, but those beliefs seem to have flagged eventually as well.  For one reason or another, though, he managed to avoid wretched excess and in his later years has been doing excellent small solo shows.  There’s a great one that came out in 2004, Live in Spain, which you can find on iTunes.  Another terrific solo album is Back From Rio (a name intended as a joke to those who might remember that fans used to think that (a) Roger McGuinn was Jim’s brother and (b) Jim had gone to Rio - I’m not making this up), which features Tom Petty.  Which is only right, since Tom Petty owes his career success to The Byrds.

Jim/Roger McGuinn started out as a folkie and, though he played for Bobby Darin and hung out with The Beatles (George Harrison based “If I Needed Someone” on The Byrds’ “Bells of Rhymney” - the Byrds tried really hard to pronounce all the Welsh names in that song correctly, except, as turned out, for RHYMNEY, a word they mispronounced for years), he remains in many ways devoted to folk song.  In 1995 he started recording folk songs and posting them on the internet at the rate of one a month.  The collection, which is now quite large, can be found on McGuinn’s Folk Den, which has music, lyrics, and occasionally a little essay about each song.  (Lawyers, please don’t call me, the songs are all out of copyright and McGuinn’s performances are licensed to users of the web site.)  You can find the Folk Den here:

http://www.ibiblio.org/jimmy/folkden-wp/

It’s really quite a remarkable effort to preserve American folk song.  The sampling rate on the posted songs is small, I think 32kps, but they sound fine for casual listening.  For afficionados, McGuinn sells 100 of these songs on a CD box set for $39.95 including shipping, with CD-quality sound.

[There is a lot more to say about The Byrds.  For example, their first producer at Columbia was Terry Melcher, the son of Doris Day.  Melcher had briefly known Charles Manson through their common friend Dennis Wilson of The Beach Boys.  Melcher had recently resided in the house where Sharon Tate - a/k/a Mrs. Roman Polanski - was murdered by the Manson Family, and some think that Manson had targeted Melcher, who had declined to produce Manson’s songs.  Melcher sure thought so - he was not without a bodyguard for a year after the Tate-LaBianca murders.  Circulating on the internet are session tapes of Melcher’s interesting recording sessions with The Byrds, notably their first two superb albums.  Melcher died not so long ago of melanoma.  Alright, enough already; perhaps more another time.]