A small, stiff piece of paper, carefully cut from a children’s book, is pinned to a den wall at Roger (ne James) McGuinn’s house, and has the following inscription:

“ ‘Hello, Jimmy,’ said the Machine.

‘I’ve been waiting for you.’ ”

One could learn a lot about McGuinn just from studying his walls. But that takes time, and McGuinn, like his Bxyds-music, keeps turn turn turning.

The primary thing to know about McGuinn, who lives with his wife Ianthe and two sons in a rustic hilltop house, ten miles outside of Hollywood, is that he is a man of many changing parts. A man of intense energy and ideas and insanely sane logic. A man with a taunting gleam in his eye, a good-natured sort of defiance in his voice and a smile that seems to say: the world is falling to pieces. There are times when McGuinn appears to combine the blood of a priest, the mind of a scientist, the soul of a storyteller, and the mysterious baiting smile of a soft-sell man. He gives the impression of evolving in all these directions at once.