Roger McGuinn

Published Apr 20, 2023, 9:00 AM

Roger McGuinn is best known as the driving force behind The Byrds. But McGuinn is also a preservationist of traditional folk music. For the past 27 years he’s been re-recording traditional folk songs and sharing them on  a section of his website called The Folk Den.

On today’s episode Rick Rubin talks to Roger McGuinn about his decades-long career, which started in the early ‘60s at Greenwich Village cafes where he played with the likes of Bob Dylan and Richie Havens. McGuinn reminisces about the vibrant music scene in LA, and he also talks about meeting his Byrd’s bandmate David Crosby.

We’ll also hear Roger McGuinn play his guitar throughout the interview, and talk about how playing basketball with Bob Dylan helped inspire Dylan’s storied tour, the Rolling Thunder Revue.

You can hear a playlist of some of our favorite Roger McGuinn and The Byrds songs HERE.

Pushkin, I want to let you know that Rick has a new podcast called Tetragrammaton. After about four to five years of recording Broken Record, Rick decided he wanted to talk to more than just musicians, so on his new podcast, he'll be talking to actors, directors, wrestlers, business people, anyone that Rick finds interesting. So make sure to subscribe to Tetragrammatin wherever you listen to podcasts. Roger mcgwin is best known as the driving force behind The Birds, a group that fused folk in popular music in the sixties, but mcgwinn is also a preservationist of traditional folk music. For the past twenty seven years, he's been re recording traditional folk songs and sharing them on a section of his website called The Folk Den. On today's episode, Rick Rubin talks to mcgwin about the Folk Den and about his decades long career, which started in the early sixties in Greenwich Village cafes, where he played alongside the likes of Bob Dylan and Richie Havens. Mcgwinn reminisces two about the vibrant music scene in la and talks about meeting his Bird's bandmate David Crosby for the first time Rip Cross. You'll hear mcgwinn plays guitar throughout the interview and also talk about how playing basketball with Bob Dylan helped inspired Dylan's story tour The Rolling Thunder Review. This is broken record liner notes for the digital age.

I'm justin Mitchman.

Here's Rick Rubin and Roger mcgwin.

Hello, Hello, Hey, Rick, how you doing cool Man? Tell me about the folk den Back.

In nineteen ninety five, I was listening to a Smithsonian Folkways album of traditional music, and it struck me that the new folk singers were not doing traditional songs anymore. There, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, they're writing their own songs, and they're great songs. But what happens if you know Pete Siegert eyes or Odetta Dyes and they did. I looked at NPR's Top one hundred folk songs, and only eight of them were traditional. The rest of them were, you know, James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, Eric Anderson, John Denver, I mean, everybody but the hundreds of years old, like the child ballads, the cowboys songs, the sea shanties, the prison songs, all these songs were just neglected. They're just not being done. I thought, man, what's going to happen? So I knew how to record stuff on a computer. I learned that back in the early nineties when Terry Munscher invited me out to play on a Beach Boys album and it was the first pro Tools session with It was a Mac Quadra with twelve gigabytes of optical RAM and we did a Beach Boys album. It turned out to be the worst Beach Boys album in the world because he was using MIDI for the bass and drums and stuff. But it was an eye opener for me that you could record on a computer. Before that, everybody was like, you know, four track, eight track, sixteen track, thirty two tracks, sixty four tracks, and digital sixty four track. And then pro Tools came out. This is like a beta copy of pro Tools back in ninety one, and I, this is great, man. I got to get this going. So I came home and I got myself some recording software and I started recording songs and putting them up on my website in a section called the Folk Den to preserve the songs, and I put a little story about the song. The lyrics, the chords, and a little picture like a coffee table book to kind of tie it all together. And I've been doing that since November of nineteen ninety five, and to date it's the twenty seventh anniversary of.

That unbelievable, so beautiful. I came to find folk then probably when I think when the CD Treasures of the Folk Then came out is when I got turned onto it. And I got turned onto it because I was researching folk songs and it was so hard to find them.

And exactly they were going away, They were being just swept under the rug.

Was it clear in the early days, like when you first learned folk songs when you were a kid, was it obvious that this was old music from another time? Tell me about your relationship to folk music when you first got into folk music.

Well, I first got into it. I was going to high school in Chicago, and my music teacher invited Bob Gibson to come over and play a forty five minute set on the five string banjo, and he did all this fancy picking and telling stories about the songs, and I just loved it. Before that, I'd been to Elvis and Geane Vincent Carl Perkins, Rockabilly, Tiny Cash, the Everly Brothers. But when Gibson did that, it made me run up to my music teacher and ask what kind of music is that? And she said it's folk music and I said, wow, you know I heard Burr Lives. He didn't sound like like that. So she pointed me over to a new school that had just opened up in nineteen fifty seven in Chicago called the Old Town School of Folk Music. I went over there and Frank Hamilton sat me down and said, play me something you know, and I played a rockabilly song and he went uh huh. And then he said, you know how to play the circle of fifths and he went like. I said, no, I didn't know how to do that. He said, well, you know how to play the blues. I said no, I didn't know how to do that either. I said, well what about fingerpicking? I said, okay, I got a lot to learn. So I started going to the Old Town School two days a week and I did that for three years until Frank finally Frank Hamilton finally said, I really can't teach you anything more in this format. You know, you could have some private lessons for twelve dollars an hour. Well, I didn't have the twelve dollars an hour, so that was it. I kind of quit going to the Old Town School. But shortly after that, I went down to the Gate of Horn after a coffeehouse gig, and I had my banjo and guitar and hardshell cases, and I was real proud of them because I looked like a professional musician. And I walked to the Lime Lighters and Theodore Riquel were sitting around the bar. So I walked into the bar and this jam session was going on, and Alex Hasselev from the Limelighter said, what you got there, kid? I said, I got a banjo and a guitar, and he said, great, break out the banjo. We got too many guitars going. So I did, and I played with them till five o'clock in the morning, and that's when that's when they hired me. They hired me to be a backup musician for them. But I said, well, I can't start right now because I'm still going to high school. And so they sent me a letter and my parents had to sign it because I was under eighteen, and they sent me a plane ticket in June and flew me out to la and I recorded with them at the Ashgrove a record called Tonight in Person, and that was the beginning of my professional musical career.

How old were you at that time?

I was seventeen when I went out there. I turned eighteen at the Ashgrove.

Amazing. But you started as a rock fan and then you fell in love with folk? Is that how it happened?

Yeah? I got into Elvis when I was fourteen. I had a transistor radio, which was a new thing at the time, and it meant you could listen to what you wanted to listen to on the radio instead of a big wooden box in the living room. And I used to ride my bike around Chicago and listen to WJJAD, which was a rock station, and I heard like a.

Well, it's my beloved new place to twelve.

I went, Wow, that's really cool. And I had no idea that he was combining country music and blues and you know, he was doing a synthesis of different styles because he'd grown up with that all around him.

Do you think that's what makes all great new forms of music are synthesis of other forms of music that come together to create something new.

I do, I really do. Yeah, And that's what happened when we combined the Beatles and Bob Dylan and people went, wow, that's that's different. I mean, they say, okay, well, Eric Eric Burdon had done The House of New Orleans, which was a blues a folk song, and he did that before mister Tambrieman. But somehow mister tam Brienman was a little different. It was more of a legato kind of thing, a flowing melody, and the lyrics were out of this world. I mean, you know, take me for a trip on your magic swirling schip. All my senses have been stripped. My hands can't field the grip. I tosed two number a step wait only from my boot heels to be wandering. I went, wow, this is so cool and I fell in love with Dylan's writing at that point.

Was that the first Bob Dylan song you ever heard? No.

I was in the village hanging out in the early sixties when Bob got there. I was hanging out at Gertie Folks City and I saw Bob play there and he was mostly doing Woody Guthrie stuff at that point. He had one time though. I was over at the White Horse Tavern and Theodore Bikel came running over. He'd been in I guess the Gaslight cafe and he said, I just heard this marvelous song. It was blowing in the wind and he played it you, so yeah, I'd heard Dylan's stuff before the Birds.

Was it obvious when you decided to do a cover song in the Birds of a Dylan song? Was it obvious that Tambourine Man would be the first one? How did it happen that you picked that song if you knew the others?

We didn't really pick it. Jim Dixon was our manager and he was a producer engineer at World Pacific Records in LA and he had an advanced copy of Dylan's Mister Tambrie Men, which was something like a.

Listed ham.

And he thought it was a great song. I guess lyrically the tune, and he was kind of shopping it around different people. I think some of the guys who were blue dress guys back in La heard it first, and he played it for us. It was five minutes four and a half minute demo with Bob and Ramblin, Jack Elliott and Ramblin was just kind of out there and singing out a tune. So that's why he didn't release it, because Bob never liked to go back and fix stuff, you know, it's like very like to get the impromptu thing, whatever happened when you recorded it. So we had this demo and they played it for us and Crosby said, I don't like it, man, that folky two four time. It's never going to play on the radio. And he was right because radio wouldn't play anything over like two and a half minutes, and they're playing rock and roll four to four beat instead of two four. So I rearranged it. I'd been an arranger I worked with I was a studio guy in New York and I worked with Chudy Collins and some other people. So I rearranged it with the and it changed the whole thing a million percent.

I mean, it's the it's the signature musical sound of the song, and it created a whole new genre. It's amazing. You talked about so many interesting things, and I want to hear about all of them. So let's talk about the village folk scene when you were there. What was that world like? First? How long were we therefore? Who were the other artists around. Tell me everything about it, okay.

Well, after the Limelighter's gig, I got a Sideman gig with the Chad Mitchell trio and I actually moved to New York and lived on I had an apartment with Mike Settle on Fourteenth Street. This is early sixties, I guess sixties sixty one, sixty two, sixty three round there, and the village was very vibrant with folk music. At the Gaslight Cafe, Dave van Rock was there and other artists and Bob would be around played Gerty's Folks City. I used to watch all the acts at Cisco Houston and all the guys that played Folk City, and I'd go to like the other coffee houses, the Cafe one. But I got a gig at the Cafe Playhouse. It was on McDougall Street and it was one of the pass ahead around kind of place, and I remember Richie Havens was there at the time. John Sebastian and Peter Tork was playing banjo at that point, and I remember Sebastian saying, you don't want to follow Richie Havens because if you passed, they had after Richie, there's no money left, that's all gone. So there was a vibrant folk scene. I remember Freddie Neil there hanging out and all kinds of folk singers.

Around, and the majority of them were playing traditional folk songs.

Yes, they're playing acoustic traditional songs. And then the Beatles came out while I was still living in New York and I heard the Beatles and I went, wow, they were using folk music chord changes. I thought, wow, the million folk songs had that, and it gave me the idea of combining folk music and rock and roll. And I started doing some Beatles songs at the Cafe Playhouse and people going, what's he doing? Man? It's like you know, but one clue I think. I was on the Bleaker Street and there were a couple of promoters that I'd seen around and they pointed to me and said, what we need is four of him, and I went, oh, I think I'm onto something amazing.

And then when did you decide to put the band together or did you decide or did it just happen?

It happened. So I was playing these Beatleaf kind of songs at the Cafe Playhouse and people weren't going for it. But the promoter liked it. He put a sign outside that said Beatle impersonation, and the tourist buses were coming around, and I thought, this is embarrassing. I want to get out of New York. So I flew out to la and I got a gig at the Troubadour opening up for Hoyd Accident, and I was doing the same kind of material and nobody liked it there either, except for Jean Clark. Jean Clark came backstage and said, hey, I get what you're doing. I like the Beatles, I like folk music. Let's write some songs and see what happens. So we started writing songs every day in the front room of the Tributur, which was open all day and you could go there for free. And then Crosby came in. Now I had met David Crosby years earlier when I was with the Lime Lighters, and we played the Ashgrove. The night before the Lime Letter's engagement. At the Ashgrove, there was a play going on called Endgame by Samuel Beckett. There was a one act play with four characters and two of them were in garbage cans and they pop up and save their lions and pop back back down again, and this is years before Sesame Street got the end. I stuck around to the end of the play and I met the guy who had been in the garbage can, and it was a young actor named David Crosby, so I met him. I think he was eighteen. I was seventeen by there. Maybe I was eighteen, but he was about a year older than me. And after the gig with the Lime Lighters, I wanted to go up to San Francisco, so David took me up to Santa Barbara, which was his boyhood home, and I stayed there overnight and his mother me and his lamb and avocado sandwiches and they were delicious. And then I went up to San Francisco and that's where I got a call from the Chad Mitchell Trio to fly to New York and work with them. So that's when I was in the village. I was living in New York around that time, this is nineteen sixty maybe the end of nineteen sixty, sixty one sixty two, and then I traveled extensively with the Chad Mitchell Trio. Didn't really have a home base. I had this apartment with Mike settle, but I didn't really spend any time.

There was John Denver yet in the Chad Mitchell trio when you were part of it, or he was after.

No, John Denver was a replacement for Chad Mitchell, who either left the trio to become a solo artist or I know he got busted for a large amount of marijuana over the Mexican border and I think he did some time for it. So the Mitchell Trio became the Mitchell Trio without Chad, and that's when they got John Denver to fill in for Chad.

How did you connect with Bobby Darren?

He was in the audience at the Crescendo Club when we were opening up the Chad Mitchell Trio was opening up for Lenny Bruce and Bobby came backstage after the Chad Mitchell set and said, Hey, I liked what you were doing up there. I'm thinking about putting a folk segment in my act and i'd like to hire you. I said, well, I've already got a job with a Chad Mitchell trio. And he said, yeah, what are they paying you? I told him, and he said I'll double it. I said, okay. I was getting ready to move on. I'd been hanging out with some people from the New Christie Minstrels and I thought about jumping ship with them. Bobby said, no, man, if you do that, you just get buried in a group that size.

Did he ever talk to you about why he wanted to go from, let's say, a Sinatra esque singer to doing folk music.

Well, I think he just appreciated it. I think he liked it. He was quite good at it. We didn't do just like Kingston Trio stuff. We did real prison songs. Makes a long time man feel bad?

Yeah, that song?

Yeah. And so he'd come out and do splish splash and his rock and roll hits for about fifteen minutes. He'd bring me on and I'd stand next to him and sing a harmony and play some folk songs with a twelve string, and then I was off for the rest of the night, and he'd go out and do his Sinatra stuff, Mac the Knife and all that. And this is fun because I used to on the strip in Vegas. I used to go up the strip and check out the other shows, and I remember I used to like Don Rickles, So I walked on the Don Rickles show one time, and he saw me coming in. He said, hey, there's this kid here. He plays for Bobby Darren. He walks around Vegas going I'm a star, I'm a star. I said, Wow, Don Rickles knew who I was.

That's amazing. I'm just thinking about the world that Bobby Darren was in, and just based on what you already said, he went from splitsh splash, which is how we knew of him, to the more Frank Sinatra style, which it was already a style shift. So I guess for him doing folk music, he was already a chameleon stylistically he was.

He was a very talented guy. He could do a lot of stuff. He could tap dan and play the vibes and piano and guitar and do impressions. And it was kind of the old school of talent, where you know, suit press shoes shined in tune on time. It was like a discipline that rock and roll just threw out the window when I got into rock and roll bands. But working for Bobby was good experience. And I used to follow Bobby around and ask him stuff about how to make it in the business, and he said, well, you got to get up in front of audiences as much as you can, because it doesn't matter how good you are in your room. You got to test it under fire. And that was good advice. And then I mentioned that I wanted to do a movie. He said, well, I'm having a hard enough time getting myself in the movies around and see what I can do. So about a week later he came up with the script and he said, this is from Jackie Cooper. I said, okay. So I opened it up and it was about a banjo player. Said, oh, I'm a banjo player. I could do that. I turned to another patient. It was about a banjo player in petticoat junction. I said, oh, man, I don't think I could do this. Man, he said, well, you don't want to turn down Jackie Cooper because you'll never work in Hollywood. And you know what, I never have.

It all worked out.

It worked out great.

We're going to take a quick break and then come back with more from Rick Rubin and Roger mcgwen. We're back with more from Rick Rubin and Roger mcgwen.

So it's interesting that you're in the village either playing folk songs or beatles songs. Everyone there playing cover songs. What was the impetus to start writing songs if you're coming out of a scene that's bas stun historic music. When did it become obvious we have to write our own songs.

Yeah, the singer songwriter thing, well, well before that, I had a job with Bobby Darn and I worked at the Brill Building as a songwriter. So you know, that was the impetus for me to write songs. And I think what happened was the folks thing kind of just started to fade out. It was like the end of it by sixty four, you know, starting to fade out, and people started writing more. So I don't know what made Joni Mitchell Bay Clouds or you know, I have no idea. Dylan was very inventive. At first he was doing kind of wood he got through imitation, and then he developed his own style. I remember I was friends with John and Michelle Phillips and I showed them some stuff I was doing it, you know, the Beatles' influence, and they said, oh, that's just bubblegum, that's kid stuff, and I said, well it's got something to it.

Cool. Tell me about Jim Dixon. How did you come in contact with him. What was he like?

Okay, I first met Jim back in nineteen sixty three and he was hanging around the Troubadour and Ashgrove and all. He was going around kind of scouting talent because he was a producer and he knew David Crosby. He had already recorded David and he was looking around for different ideas. And I remember when Gene Clark and I started writing songs at the Troubadour, David Crosby came in and started singing harmony with us, and he said, I want to be in your band. And I said, well, we don't really have a band here, David, we're just kind of writing some songs. He said, oh, come on, man, if I can be in your band, I know this guy's got a recordings today we could use for free. I said, you're in. That's how we met Jim Dixon cool, and he took us under his wing. He was still working at World Pacific. He'd recorded Lord Buckley there and he knew some jazz guys and he let us work out on the machines after all the sessions were over, and that's where we kind of honed our skill as a singing playing band in n I guess sixty four or sixty four by then. So we started working out at the studio and became a parent that we needed more musicians and more instruments. So we went to see the Beatles movie A Hard Day's Night and took notes on Ringo had Ludwig drums, and Harrison had a gretch guitar. John Lennon had a Rickenbacker, Paul McCartney at a Hoffner bass, a violin style bass, and then George Harrison came back out with another Rickenbacker. It looked like a six string from the front, but when he ch oed it sideway so you could see six other tuning pegs sticking out the back, and I went, oh, man, that's an electric twelve string. I got to get one of those, because I was already a twelve string player on acoustic twelve and we traded in. So I traded in a five string banjo and a Gibson acoustic twelve that Bobby Darren had given me, and got the Rickenbacker, and that became my main instrument for the rest of the Birds.

Was the electric twelve string and new instrument at the time.

Yes, it was. It was a brand new invention. George had the very second one ever made. First one went to a woman called Susie who played in Las Vegas and some sort of girl band, and George had the second one. Well, when Rickenbacker learned the Beatles were playing one of their instruments, FC. Hall, John Hall's father, flew to New York, had a meeting with the Beatles and gave George Harrison. Well, it was actually intended for John Lennon, but John was out and George had the flu and he was hanging around the hotel, so they gave him the twelve string and it became his kind of toy. He played it really well, and he did this cool thing that I learned from him. He did this thing on see the Achard strings. He used to play leads up and down the Jeeves string pair like had a lot of punch, much more than if you just want the you know. So I learned that trick from him.

Did you incorporate that into any songwriting?

Yeah, yeah, well it was in quite a few songs. The way I played lead on say Turn, Turn Turn and so on. I got out the riffs from other musicians like the Seekers and the searchers. You know, I stole whatever I could, but the Ricken Rocker had this really great sound. And then Ray Gerhard was the studio engineer at Columbia Records in la and he put I think it was two now I'm not sure the designation la uas it was a tube compressor, and he put the Rickenbacker into one and then out of the back of the one into another. So I had double compression on it, and it clamped it down and made it sustain more like a wind instrument because the original the Rickenbacker would fall off rather quickly. It was kind of a thuddy sounding instrument. So that's really what made the twelve stringth sounds so distinctive on mister Tambriene Man and Turn Turn, Turn eight miles high.

So do you think without the compression, was it more like a harpsichord? Would you say?

No?

It sounded okay, but it didn't sustain as well. It wasn't as good for lead work. It was okay for recording, for strumming and so on, but it wasn't really a good lead instrument at that point.

How did you find the other members to make the birds? The Birds?

Geene Clark and I started writing songs. David Crosby came along and turned his son to Jim Dixon, and we got a free studio to work out you and Dixon recommended we get a drummer and a bass player, and we saw Michael Clark walk in front of the tributary. It looked like two of the Rolling Stones, and we got him mostly on looks.

This is like nineteen sixty five, nineteen sixty six, sixty four, sixty four, Wow, incredible.

Sixty four into sixty five. We recorded Mister Tamburin Man in January of sixty five, and Columbia didn't release it until I think June or May or sometime. They sat on it for a long time. I like to tell a story, but Columbia was very conservative. They had Steve Lawrence and ediegur May and Doris Stay. They didn't have any rock and roll, and their attitude toward rock and roll was they thought it might be distasteful, you know, like the Mob not wanting to sell heroin. But there was a lot of money in it.

Was Mister tambrien Man the first rock record that came out on Columbia. I think it might have been it might have been.

Certainly was something they weren't really into it yet, you know, they were kind of lagging behind the other labels RCA and Capital.

But in some ways, wasn't the world lagging behind? Like was it yet the popular form of music or was it still sort of underground or well?

No, no, rock and roll was a craze and people kept hoping it would go away quickly because it was creating juvenile delinquents.

That was the story.

Yeah, there was a story and so but RCIA had Albus back in what was fifty six, so it had been around a while. And then we had Chuck Berry, and we had Geene Vincent, Carl Perkins and Everly Brothers and Johnny Cash. There was quite a bit of rock and roll out there.

All of those artists, though, have more of a country flavor in their rock. It's all coming from the South and it's more like an extension of the Sun record sound, which yeah, it was rockabilly, yeah, more rockabilly than rock and roll. And it seemed like, I guess Little Richard might have been more rock and roll, and Chuck Berry was rock and roll.

Well. Billy Hally and the comments are credited with starting the craze, and they were kind of like a holiday in band. You know, they weren't really rocking or rolling. Geane Vince that really rocked, so did Elvis and Carl Perkins.

The places you'd be playing in, those like Cero's in those days, would hold fifty people, one hundred, two hundred people. How many people would you say, I'm.

Not sure of the capacity of Cerro's. It might have been one hundred, might have been one fifty. It was all these like sort of plush booths with tables. It was almost like a casino.

Yeah.

I was going to say, like Las Vegas.

Yeah, like Vegas. Yeah, there's something like that. It was old hat had been popular in the forties with all the movie stars, and then it lost its appeal. But when the birds got there, we started attracting Jack Nicholson and Peter Fonda and Marlon Brando, and then we had this group of dancers, Vito and his gang, and they were wild. They were just you know, they and they were just a scene by themselves, and so the whole thing really changed Hollywood a little bit.

How did you meet Vito Pelicis? Yes, yeah, how did you meet him?

I don't remember, I remember going to a studio and take an acid. That's all I remember. I don't know how we got hooked up with him, but they became our dancing troupe, and they even went with us on the road on our first tour, and they took him on a bus tour to Indiana and you know, Michigan and places where people were freaking out. They've never seen anything, never seen anything like it.

No, did they dance on the stage or in the audience?

In the audience cool? In front of the.

Stage, amazing, But did they face the band or did they face the audience? Like, did it feel like they were part of the show.

They were totally No, they weren't facing anybody. They were totally absorbed in what they were doing. There just you know, they're just doing it.

So it was like a traveling dance party that happened between you and the audience.

Yeah, yeah, that's wow.

It's some wild to imagine, you know.

Yeah, it was wold. The audience like teenagers, they're pretty square, you know, they're like preppy looking, most of them. And there may be thirteen, fourteen, fifteen year olds and they're just looking on in amazement at this whole spectacle. We did get screams. We got screaming fans at one point.

How long did it take for the audience to go from square fans to starting looking like more like people who could have been in bands.

Yeah, well, I remember I used to wear those little glasses. I remember looking out in the audience and there'd be people with those little glasses on. So I was starting to catch on. Maybe not more than a few months.

How's your relationship to music changed from the early days to now.

Well, it's a labor of love. I do shows. I still do shows, and I do like a one man show. It's like a play that has a lot of these stories I'm telling you, and I fold in the songs that go with the stories. I changed it up. It's not always the same. Got about We got all these modules, can put in different modules of stories and songs, and my wife and I just hit the road together. It's the idea I got from rambling Jack Elliott when I was on the Rolling Thunder review and Ramblin said, yeah, one of the most fun things I ever did was throw the guitar in the back of the land Rover and me and Polly. That was as why hit the road. And we did all these little gigs and it was so much fun. And I've been in a band with you know. I had instrument cases and trucks and a lot of logistics and people to deal with, and I thought, man, this would be more fun. So I started doing that, and then gradually it became kind of a scripted one man play.

It sounds great. Tell me about Rolling Thunder. What was that experience? Like?

Rolling Thunder was great? It started off with Bob used to come over to my house in Malibu and he noticed a basketball hoop over the garage and he said, you have a basketball. I said no, because when I was fifteen, I jammed my finger on a basketball and I couldn't black guitar for a few weeks. But I bought a basketball the next day and I called up his house and he was out, but I got Sarah and I said, well, tell Bob I got a basketball. She said, oh, he'll be thrilled. So Bob came over the next day and we're shooting baskets in the backyard. He said, I want to do something different and I said, wow, what do you mean? He said, I don't know, something like a circus. Okay. So a couple of weeks later, I was on the road with a band and I had some time off and I went to the village, went to Gerty's Folk City, and I ran into Larry Sloman, who at the time was a reporter for Rolling Stone magazine. And Larry said, I think Dylan's over at the Other End or the Bitter End what it was called me. So I said, let's go see. So we went over there and walked in the back room and there was Shock Levy, my writing partner, and Bob Dylan sitting at a table with a couple of brandies. And I walked and they sit up and the brandy's went flying. They said, Roger, we're just talking about you. We're putting this tour together. We'd like you to go on it. So I had a band and I was on tour myself, but I postponed those states and went on Rolling Thunder, and it was all Bob's friends from the village. You know. It's Bobby NewART and Ramblin, Jack Elliott and Allen Ginsburg and Joan Bias came along, Joni Mitchell, and we'd pick up people like Willie Nelson in Texas and Gordon Lightfoot in Toronto and Leonard Cohne in Montreal. You know, it was an amazing, amazing tour, about one hundred people on the road in buses and cars, and it was like a parade, and it was like a circus. It was like a circus, and it wasn't exactly like this Corsese film portraits that. I think it was even more fun than that.

I bet it sounds incredible, And the recordings from that era are some of my favorite of his, Like his might sounds great, his singing is great, The song sounds so good.

He was really on his game at that point. And some of my favorite songs are the ones he wrote with Shaq Levy for Desire Agreed.

Tell me about subud Okay.

Well, when I was in the village, I was hanging out with Bob Carey, who had been in a group called the Terriers with Eric Darling and Ellen Arkin. And there was this mine Lionel Shepherd, and we're walking around and Bob and I are are sharing a joint and I offered it to Lionel and he said, now I got something better. I said, was that? He said, it's called subud I said, what is it? Something you put in your coffee and drink it? Or he said, come on down, you know, next Thursday and see what it is. So I did, and it was this spiritual exercise. It was kind of like the Holy Spirit, but it wasn't Christian or anything. It was just you know, So I got into it. It was something I did for a while.

I had a friend who was who was in Subu, grew up in Subud and she followed Ramadan.

Yeah, a lot of people were into is well. It came out of Indonesia. So the head guy, Bob Pak they called him, He was a Muslim, so it was a kind of non verbal Islam. There was no doctrine or anything. It was just you go in and do these It's almost like a dance. You do a spiritual dance and yeah, it's supposed to be good for your soul.

Yeah it's great. I didn't realize that there was a physical component. Would you say that this was like TM, like a spiritual fad of the time.

I think so, you know, I got out of it. I didn't stay in it, and later I accepted Jesus, so you know, that's all I needed.

And how did that happen.

It happened in seventy seven when Elvis Presley died and he was seven years older than I was. I was thirty five, and he was doing Quailud's and uppers and downers, and I had a doctor in LA who'd give me anything I wanted, and I was doing that too, plus the illegal drug so I got my hands on. So I thought, man, Elvis just died and he was seven years older. If I only got seven years, I'd better start cleaning up my act. And so I started working on that, and in the process, that's when I ran into this jazz guy named Billy, and he prayed with me about Jesus and I accepted Jesus beautiful.

Yeah, so it changed your lifestyle to a healthy lifestyle, and you have this spiritual connection right, speutiful inspiring.

And my wife and well, I turned my wife onto it. I met her in an acting class. We were both starting the same night, and we had to do method acting and the assignment was to get her to do something she didn't want to do. And I had talked to her before and found out she'd been a Baptist when she was a kid but got away from it. So I knew something she didn't want to do, so I started singing. They shun me since I through Jesus.

They see I'm listening World.

Of Fun and she's I said, what do you think of that? She said, it sounds kind of country? I said, yeah, what do you think of the words? She said, Oh, man, you're trying to tell me about Jesus. And she stopped off the stage and all the kids in the class clapped and I said, wow, what was that. That sounded like, you know, a real play. And then a couple of weeks later she accepted Jesus. And now we've been together for forty four years and we read the Bible every morning.

Beautiful, congratulations. Can you play that song for us? Now?

Let's see, Ah tell me I should away?

Did you say? I'm missing the whole World of Fun? But I still love it?

Walking the creation line, Oh Blue, the friend he in God's calm, bo is the friend?

What beautiful?

There is calm, pleasure and things are tune line the creatu line.

That's beautiful. I never heard that song before.

Really, No, it's a Living Brothers song. It's a it's a it's a written song. In the twentieth century. Not a gospel song, but it's the Living Brothers did it.

It's beautiful. I would hearing that makes me want to hear a whole album of you doing acoustic devotional material, just just sharing that I could do that. That's what I want to hear.

If you wanted to hear something else. The Kane bluesy said.

Oh yeah, yeah, yes, So this is my favorite written. My favorite of the folk den songs that I'm aware of is this one.

That's interesting, that's interesting. The story goes, it's an old prison song and I recorded it back when there was a website called MP three dot com. Michael Robertson is an entrepreneur. He put together this website and he would take MP threes and make little CDs of him and he give you fifty percent, which is unheard of in the record business. So I signed up for that and I did Kane Blues. First. It was called Ain't No mo Cain on the Brazos and nobody was clicking on it. I changed the title to Caine Blues and it shut up the chart.

He no Moquin?

Pound it all into Eliza.

Well, what's the matter. Serping must be wrong?

Ooh, we're still here rolling in shorty George gun gon.

oOoOO down old, don't you rise no more?

O you ris anymore?

Ring judgment shall.

Look at my whole Hallo, she's a turning rest.

Oo.

Look at my eye partner, he's almost dead.

Then you should have been here fround nineteen four.

It was a dead man at every turn, Rome marking all the surprizo round it all into alas.

I love that song. I love that song.

It's a cool song I heard from Bob Gibson. First time. He did a little different. I think I changed the chords on it, but I like the chord pattern. It's unusual, and that it's uh, it's got a lot of pasting chords, you know, and instead of just to see a minor to D and then it goes to a B minor. So it's got some interesting pasting chords it.

There's so much emotion in it. And and I've played this. I've played that song for many artists that I work with, just to talk about the amount of emotion that can be held in a song, even when you don't necessarily know what all the words are about. And it's what's also interesting about it is it's so repetitive. You know, it's it's a very simple structure that just keeps repeating. There's no chorus or anything, but it doesn't it doesn't get old, you know, it doesn't get old. That loop can go on for a long time, and it does feel like this, the emotion, and it just keeps getting deeper and deeper with the story. It's beautiful, beautiful song.

Okay, Well, Old Hannah is the sun sunrise.

I didn't know that.

Uh huh, Old Hannah is the sun sunrising?

What did the other? Yeah, decode as much as you can for me, it'd be grateful.

Okay, Well, no more cane on the broseet. It was a sugar cane like a work farm for a prison, and they cut all they came down and turned it into molasses. Something.

Brazos is the river.

Brazos River, Yeah, down in Texas. Uh, what's the matter. Something must be wrong. We're still rolling. That's being still in prison. Shorty George done gone. He got out, Shorty George got out somehow. What's something wrong? We're still here and he's gone. Yeah, look at my old Hannah. She's a turn in red. Who the sunrise or sunrise or it could be sunset. Yeah, look at my partner, he's almost dead. They just worked the people to death. There, go down, old Hannah. Don't you rise no more? Okay, that's the sunset. And if you rise anymore, your judgment, Sure you're we're gonna get in trouble tomorrow, you know, because we get in trouble every day. Yeah, yeah, every day is trouble. Should have been here a bund nineteen four. It's a dead man on every turn row. So people are, you know, getting work to death. There was one that should have been here in nineteen ten that work and women just like the men. So it's a prison song about harsh labor, intensive you know, work you to death kind of stuff.

Wow, I had no idea it even was prison related. You know, again, without knowing the context is nothing in the lyric if you don't know what what it means. It was clearly a sad song, and it was it was clearly a work song, but I didn't understand that it was a prison song.

Yeah, and that's the kind of thing that gets lost with the singer songwriter genre. People aren't doing those old songs anymore.

Yeah, I'm so thankful that you're that you're doing the folk then, and that these songs live on and if people want to hear them they go to the website.

Is that the best mcgwin dot com The Folk Done section.

Great, we have to pause for another quick break, but we'll be back with the rest of Rick's conversation with Roger mcgwin in just a sack. We're back with Rick Rubin and Roger mcgwen.

How has recording changed over the course of your life? So it started you said it was tape in the beginning, but really more specifically technologically, from the early days of recording until now, what are all the changes that you've seen.

The first recording I did was on an MPEx three track three track, and that was we recorded beach Ball on that Bobby Durna played drums and Frank Carey played piano and I played guitar, and we all sang and clapped her hands and we got a record deal on Capitol called herself the City Surfers, and that was a three track. He couldn't really overdub very well. And then when I got in the Birds, they had a four track at Columbia Studios in LA and they had an eight track. Who was over against the wall and somebody had written with a sharpie or you know, like felt pent big bastard on this eight track, and they didn't want to hook it up because it was too too new, too much trouble. They finally did, they finally got the A track going. But so I went from three track to fod track, to eight track, to sixteen track to thirty two tracks, sixty four track and digital. And then I told you about the digital audio workstations and got into couldn't afford Pro Tools when I first ran into it, it was like ten thousand dollars for rudimentary set up. So I got something called Digital Orchestrator Plus. It was like a ninety dollars program and it did the same thing. It recorded in forty four point waveforms, you know, sixteen bit. It sounded pretty good. I recorded the Treasures from the Folk on that system. And then gradually I got pro Tools, and I've had pro Tools for years and years now, and you know, I find it very easy to work with and fun. I love being able to pop things in and move them around like a word processor.

And I imagined the advantage of being able to record at home versus in a big studio with all this equipment is a good It's a good change in terms of being able to make whatever you want, whenever you want.

Absolutely. I mean I tell kids, I say, you don't need to go to a recording studio and spend thousands of dollars. You can just get a Mac and pro tools and do it at home. All you need is a good microphone, maybe some editing skills.

Yeah, you said you went into the earliest version, the three man version of The Birds. I don't know what you were called at that time, into.

The jet set called the jet set the jet set.

Do you remember what you recorded in that first session when you decided we need more players.

I think it was some stuff that Geene Clark and I had written, like the Only Girl that I Adore or whatever you showed me, which the Turtles later picked up. Was one of the songs that Sheen and I wrote, and it was rejected for The Birds. We didn't get to do it, but the Turtle's got a hit with it.

Cool. Do you remember it at all? You showed me, Yeah? Can you play me a little of it?

Yeah? Well, first, the original version was down there down here. You showed me how exactly what you do.

In love with you.

It's incredible.

It's true.

I'm in love with you. And when I tried, I could see you.

And it's not a tele You told it to me too, exactly what you do and now you love me too.

It's true too.

And I always loved that relative minor thing to the g ju minor.

Like.

I could see and uh, it's not a.

True Are the chord changes rooted in classical music? It feels like it is.

Well it was if it was. It was subliminally in classic because Gene Clark and I wrote it. We were standing in Jim Dixon's driveway and we both had a crush on the same girl, and we wrote it about this girl that we both had a crush on. And I remember something interesting. There's something like spiritual in it because as I was playing it my guitar, it was almos. It's like a divining rod. It was moving around in like you know figure eights, like an infinity sign. It was it was kind of unusual for that to happen.

Amazing, Yeah, yeah, like a like a dowsing rod or divining rod.

Yeah yeah, something like that, like a you know, divining water amazing. I've got a BMI Award for one million plays. It's probably had more than that by now, but it's been covered by Salt and Pepper and Let's see You two Kanye West.

Wow, it's such a beautiful song. I love that song.

Thank you.

Have you had any other mystical experiences?

Oh?

Yeah, I mean yeah, tell me, well, you know, I sometimes I see stuff through the walls, you know, like little dots of light and things like that. You could call it hallucinating whatever. And also I've always I've always had this thing, this tactle thing where you know, I could feel something in the air, something that isn't there. I used to do that. I remember in the Columbia studio. I'd be waving my hand around while I was singing, and when I sang mister Tambrieman, Oh. Jim Dixon had made us read an Actor of Preparers by Stanislavsky. Jim had a little experience in the Hollywood area. He was married to Diane Varsi for a short time and he helped her with her career until she decided she didn't want to live in Hollywood and do that, so he made us read an Actor Prepares which is about method acting. So when I got the lyrics to mister Tambourine Man, I wanted to do a parallel meaning. And I was singing, Hey, mister tamberine Man, play a song for me. I'm not sleepy and there is no place I'm going to. I wasn't singing to an abstract tamburrie man. I was singing to God beautiful. So that was a mystical experience to it. I think the reason that song was as popular as it was because it had some real heartfelt truth in it.

Absolutely, and there's something about the like Lyrically, there's nothing obviously devotional in in Tambourine Man, but when you're connected in a devotional way, there's an energy that can come through that you can just feel it. I never knew that. It's a beautiful story. I love hearing that story.

Yeah.

Do you feel things in space in general or just in certain places?

Well, it's not all the time. I wouldn't say it's dependent on the place so much as the time. And they you know, mental spiritual attitude I have whatever. I remember they asked Tom Petty about how he writes songs. They said, well, you know, they come down from I don't want to know. He said that you might go away. Tom was a great friend and a wonderful inspiration to me. I know I inspired him somewhat, but you know, he was just an incredible performer and songwriter and a really sweet guy. He was just the sweetest guy.

He was the best. You inspired him a lot, and he talked about you all the time. This is the first time we're a meeting, but he talked about you all of the time.

Oh well, we had a good friendship.

It was such a great He was a great songwriter. He was such a great musician and had such a beautiful voice. But he knew everything about making records, like in the studio. He was a total craftsman. He could do anything. And uh, it was just fun to be around him. I learned so much being around him.

Yeah.

Wow, while we miss him absolutely. Have you heard other versions of songs you've written that made you hear them in a new way? Yeah?

Well, eight Miles I got covered by husker Doo houtsker Doo.

Yeah yeah, hohoskar doo.

And they did sort of a real headbanger version of it, like loud and raucous. That was good and so you want to be a rock and roll star? Got covered a lot, yeah by Patty's and Tom Petty.

When you hear other people do your songs, does it feel like that's my song? Or does it feel like, oh, oh, I like what they're doing with this thing? Like what's the experience like hearing someone else sing a song they've written?

It's a nice feeling, you know, even if you don't appreciate the whole way they did it, it's a nice feeling to know that they did do it.

Yeah, they picked you, They picked your song, they picked your work. Yeah yeah, and they could have picked anything and they picked yours. So tell me about Terry Melcher.

Okay. When we got signed to Columbia Records, Jim Dixon assumed that he would be a producer because he was a record producer, and Columbia had a strict policy. They were a union house and they only used their staff producers. So they assigned us a twenty three year old son of one of their biggest artists. Do or a Stay It's Terry.

Had he already produced a lot of stuff at twenty three.

Well, he knew what he was doing. He was friends with Brian Wilson, and he knew Brian had used Wrecking Crew on some Beach Boys stuff, and he also knew that Michael Clark couldn't play the drums and we were a fledgling band just kind of learning how to play together. So he got the Wrecking Crew to come and do the band track of Mister Tambriene Man and the Flip Side. I knew I'd want you, and I was allowed to play on it because I'd been a studio musician in New York and I also had the Rickenbacker and the the lick, so I got to play on it, and then the band went nuts. It said no, we want to be like the Beatles, we want to play in our own stuff, and okay, so they got to. Ever after that, we just only did two tracks with the Wrecking Crew, but with the Wrecking Crew we knocked out two songs in a three hour session, and when we got the whole band playing, it took us seventy seven takes to get turnturn turned.

What was it like playing with the Wrecking Crew.

It was really fun. You know that they were so polished and professional. You know, they didn't do us trick beat I analyzed some of this stuff. And they're like a school of fish. You know, they go around together. You know, they maybe go up tempo, down tempa and sideways and you know, but they were always together. They were tight. And I was a little nervous. Hal Blaine said, you go out and have a couple of beers, kid, you know, I didn't, so but I got We got the session done and it came out good.

So were they older than you guys at that time?

Oh yeah, they're about maybe like seven years older, like Elvis's age. It was hel Blaine, Leanne Russell on electric piano, Cherry Cole on a six string guitar, and Cherry was playing Chinks like and that was something they got from Don't Worry Baby, because they played on Don't Worry Baby for the Beach Boys and the Chinks in that, and then Bill Pittman played on it. Bill Pittman was guitar, Cherry Cole guitar, and Larry Nektell, who usually did keyboards, play bass.

Wow, he's great, Yeah, he was.

He was great. It was a fun experience, a little nerve wracking, but fun for sure.

But I think that some people know the story of the Wrecking Group but they're one of the greatest bands of all time.

Really absolutely, and I you know, I didn't know they were the band that played on Phil Spectra's Wall of Sound steps. You know, I used to love to do Ron Ron and my Boyfriend's Back or whatever, all all those songs that And then when Hal passed away, the story came out. See I always thought this was a beatle beat le let's see, h okay. So the story goes that Hal dropped a stick. He was in one of the sessions, and so he couldn't he couldn't play boom boom boom boom. He could go boom boom boom boom boom boom. As a musician, when you make a mistake, you want to continue it so it sounds like you did it on purpose. And that's what he did. So he invented that boom boom bom beat because he dropped a stick.

That's unbelieva. Yeah, that's the sound of all the Phil Spector records that it is.

That's the sound. And then the Beatles picked it up and I called I used to call it a beatle beat because I didn't realize that Hall had come up with it for Phil Spector.

That's amazing, and came up with it by mistake. This is a great thing to talk about. How much do mistakes play into the process of writing something?

Well that one Shirre did. Yeah, I don't know, but I love the man.

On Sunday anything was to do Run Run Run, Do Run Run run.

Oh yeah. At the Brill Building, Kenny Young and I used to analyze Phil Spector records, you know, and we look at that. He used the scribbled little stuff on the vinyl. It's like audio matrix. He wrote with little stylist the Wall of Sound. Wow.

Why did Gene Clark leave the band?

Well, there's two stories about that. The first one goes, we were ready to fly from LA to New York to do a TV special with Murray the k And back in those days, you could kind of get on a plane whenever you wanted. They didn't have the screening and all the stuff they got now. So I used to show up late, you know, I'd get there just before the close the door. And so I got on the plane and everybody's on the plane and Jean Clark is standing up in the aisle in a cold sweat. He's gone, man, I can't do this man, you know, and we thought, wow, this maybe he's psychic, maybe you know something. Anyway, he got off the plane and I remember saying, well, if you can't fly, you can't be a bird.

That's really funny. So you said there are two versions of the story. That's one, okay, Well that was one.

He had a nervous breakdown on the plane and left.

Yeah, and it was and you think it was he's just afraid of flying.

He was afraid of flying and it just.

Got worked by that time. The pressure.

Yeah.

Well, he was doing some heavy LSD and stuff, and you know, I don't think he was on ASCID at that point, but something had damaged his nervous system. He is not a well man. He was, but Jim Dixon in his later years developed some kind of illness where he had to go to the hospital and we didn't know if he was going to make it. So I went to the hospital with my guitar to share him up and played some songs for him, and that's when he gave me what I think might have been a deathbed confession, although he didn't die then, but he said, well, you know, Jean left the band, but Eddie Tickner and I that was his co manager. We're thinking about spinning him off to be a new Elvis Presley.

So he was going to go solo.

Yeah, and he did. Wow, Wow, he did and he didn't become Elvis Presley.

But yeah, yeah, interesting, he.

Did some good stuff. He did some really crystal like no other is really a fine album.

When did Ticket to Ride come out? In relation to Bird's time?

It came out after the Birds.

So guitar wise, it must be inspired by because it's so much of the Birds sound.

Yeah, I think so. I know we did influence George because he he sent Derek Taylor back from London with a tape of If I Needed Someone, and he got the riff from My Bells of Rumney and he asked Derek to tell me that, and I was wow, Man, the Beatles inspired us, and we've inspired the Beatles back. Isn't really a cool thing.

It's the best. It's the best to make something you love and to also to be recognized by someone that do you respect their works. There's no better feeling.

I know.

It's great. And we became friends, the Beatles and the Birds became friends, and we hung out together and took acid with him.

This is a weird thing I was thinking about right before we started talking. I looked at your discography and started thinking that we tend to think of musicians' lives through their discography, and I was feeling like it doesn't make sense, and I feel like it's not fair. I don't think the discography does is a true reflection of you.

Doesn't do justice.

Yeah, I don't think so. Thought. I never thought about it before, but for some reason it hit me today that the discography it's just another detail.

Well, it's just so the gig. It's just what we do for a living, and then there's a life that goes on beyond that. But it's an exciting gig. I've enjoyed it. I've been very blessed that I could make money as a musician my whole life and never really had to do a day job except the real building.

Yeah, which is not bad and it's a good story.

That was good experience. And then being a studio musician was good experience.

Do you write songs all the time?

No, not anymore. There's no market for me doing that at this point. I don't really feel inspired to do that. I'm happy just doing the folk and keeping the traditional stuff alive. And it keeps my chops up and keeps my recording chops up and my playing chops up in vocal, so it's really fulfilling. I'm working on a project. It's a slow going labor of love kind of thing. But Jack Leedy and I collaborated on a musical back in nineteen sixty eight called Trip troyp Geene. Tripp was an anagram of pure Gant, and he got the idea for the story from Ibsen's peer Gant, but he wanted to move it to the Western United States and nineteen sixty it is when the Bird Sweetheart of the Rodeo came out, So he thought I'd be a good guy to co write the music with him, and we wrote about twenty six songs and the thing never got mounted on Broadway. It did finally get played when Shock became the theatrical instructor at Colgate College in Hamilton, New York, and the kids there did a version of it. But I'm re recording some of the songs, and some of the songs were on the Birds records, like Chestnut Mayor. And I'm a little conflicted because I've rerecorded Chestnut Mayor, but you're never going to get it to sound like the Clarence White version that came out on the untitled album. I was thinking, man, do I want to license this stuff from Sony or what do I want to do? You know? Anyway, I've rerecorded it. It sounds pretty good. I got Marty Stewart to play the Clarence White parts on Chestnut Mayor and they're they're spot on. He got that part right. So I was going to do a narration between the songs, kind of like Peter and the Wolf. Nice and some of the songs have never been recorded before, like the song over stage, over stage, you got to be proficient. The robin over the stage with the cold smith in wesn't Reminton engaged, so it's up pure again, went around, he had to the board. It's like this supernatural force that kept him going from job to job. And so that's what happens in the Gene Tripp thing. He goes he's a preacher, he's a riverboat gambler, and he becomes a stagecoach robber at one point and a politician. And that's where the song I want to grow up to be a politician came from.

That sounds great. I can't wait to hear the whole thing. I have one thought when you when you talk about doing covers of songs you've already been involved with, think about it like you're doing a cover of a song that you had no part in, and do you want to reinterpret it in your own voice, making believe that the other one was not you? Like, what what would be the new? Do you know what I'm saying? Instead of trying to.

Read it's a metal adjustment, it's a mental adjustment intimidated by don't get intimidated by the original.

No, let go of the original completely and make the most interesting version to you today forgetting what the old one was. Just look at the chords and the melody and rethink, rethink the approach, and it's great. U. Yeah, it's great because you can also there's a chance you'll make one that's better than the original. You're never gonna make one better than the original trying to do the original. But now you know it happens sometimes where a cover song transcends the original because you find a new way in and it's really interesting.

Okay, thank you, my pleasure.

Well, Thank you so much for talking to me today. This is great.

Look I had fun. I had fun. It was great.

Thanks again to the great Roger mcgwinn. You can hear a playlist of our favorite Roger mcgwin and Bird songs at Broken Record podcast dot com. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube dot com slash Broken Record Podcast, where you can find all of our new episodes. You can follow us on Twitter at broken Records. Broken Record is produced with help from Leah Rose, Jason Gambrell, Ben Holliday, and Eric sam Our editor is Sophie Craig. Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show and others from Pushkin, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content an uninterrupted ad free listening for four ninety nine a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple podcast subscriptions, and if you like the show, please remember to share, rate, and review us on your podcast app. A theme music is by Kenny Beats. I'm Justin Wischer

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