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.

No matter what has been said about him, as a man, as a musician, or as an artist, McGuinn remains alive, vitalizing and involved, on several levels. Involved with life. Super-dimensional life, life right now: in the way he explores concepts and possibilities, and in his music, which has the vision and the faith that things are, after all, gonna work out all right.

His speech is calm, often monotoned and precise, but also filled with detours and asides. What’s remarkable is that this same eccentric man, this Roger Jim McGuinn, this Byrd, has also given us some of the most easily-accessible — and beautiful and ... songs ever written. When describing Byrds-music, you sometimes have to fall back on the word magical, or maybe religious. But there is nothing magical or religious about it that I can point a finger at, except in the way it makes me feel. McGuinn’s magic, created mechanically, has touched me as deeply as any storyteller.

Hollywood, the emptiest, gaudiest, saddest place in the whole world, the city where it all began for the Byrds (was it just five years ago?), hasn’t changed all that much. It remains a frightening symbol of reality in this hip, enlightened, miserable twentieth century. The sun still beats through the air. Life is one continuous movement of car stereos and tacky leather vests and lethargic dope and much stooping of the shoulders and hype and saturation Top40 rock and autos resembling shiny, obscene wheel chairs laid side-by-side in bleary parking lots, and generally having nothing to do. Words are dead or dying, and old reasons for doing things are no longer quite good enough, and I feel a tremendous empty longing and keep trying to make sense .out of why I stay

It’s ineffaceably Summer, though it’s. coming on the middle of October, and no less than forty-seven authentic varieties of goggle-faced, sloe-eyed super star types have come and passed through town since McGuinn and his fabulous Byrds, a mysterious band out of nowhere, first played Ciro’s on the Strip, put Dylan on the juke box, gave budding rock critics the heraldic words “eclectic” and “folk-rock,” and made American popular music circa 1965 a topic to rap about and a subject worthy enough to inhabit our most delirious, blushing, tripping dreams and feelings. Nowhere in the Western Hemisphere had man, as creature and media manifestation, loomed so large and promising.

In the interim, of course, four of the five original Byrds have scattered to form, in part, at least three other bands (Dillard and Clark, Flying Burrito Brothers, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young). Which brings us to a dark period for McGuinn filled with constant internal hassles and tempting invitations to compromise and a bitter estrangement from the mass of the recordbuying public, a time which hardly needs to bere-stressed. A few years back, recalls McGuinn, with no more than his, normal quota of cynicism, “People would come to the Whiskey just to see how bad the Byrds were going, to be.” (The current Byrds, relatively stabilized, are McGuinn: vocals, moog, and 12-string guitar/Clarence White: lead guitar/Gene Parsons: drums/Skip Battin: bass).

Of McGuinn, it’s true to say that neither bitterness npr apathy, nor the separation from popular tastes and/or critical perceptions, has dulled his spirit for long, npr prppeiled him helterskelter intp the wierd, ffantic rat race economics of rock music that transforms artists into hustlers — and hustlers into “revolutionaries” and “superstars”. McGuinn has taken the recurrent Byrd-deaths and transfigurations in stride. Says Billy James, his long-time friend and manager, “Roger is not the sort of guy to brood over what’s happening or what people are saying about him. He likes to keep moving too much.” Still, there sometimes is a sad, blank, faraway look in his eyes, as if he’s remembering an unutterable hurt or loss. “Sure 1 remember the sad things sometimes,” he says, “but then I’m pleased about the way everything turned out.”

“People say we were magic,” says McGuinn, of the original Byrds. “I don’t know. I was too busy doing it. I couldn’t see a thing. Maybe it’s all been built up through the folk process. I know it was fun. I don’t know if we sounded good, but I think the feeling in the room was sort of a mass hypnosis thing that made us sound beautiful, even if we, were rotten. It probably worked as a feedback thing and made us sound better than we sounded, say, in front of our first English audience which was ready to tear us apart, no matter how good we were.” James, who has known the Byrds since before the beginning, has written that, unlike most other groups, the Byrds shaped, rather than were shaped by„their times: “The Byrds were the first American supergroup, before hippies, riots, Haight, love-in, freak-outs, DMT, STP, Moog, Dolby, Hair, and psychedelic bubble gum.”

But the puckish, soft-spoken McGuinn crinkles up his blue eyes and flashes his cocky, boyish smile, now reflecting on the intense calculations that went into their creation.

“We were the first of the long-haired rock groups. That was very important then. And you can’t underestimate the influence of the Beatles, The competition over here was low; and we approximated the style and feeling of the Beatles, with enough other things. It was a sandwich between the Beatles and Dylan, both popular items at the time. We sort of intersected the two. I took the rock side of the Beatles, and Dylan’s folk thing, which we had natural cause to do, since we were all into these things. As far as the application of it, though, it was done on purpose. I calculated the voice — between Dylan and Lennon for Tambourine Man’ — like a computer calculation. In time, we got our own style.”

At times McGuinn seems to be completely out of it, expanding moments undefined in beats or ticks, making his own private study of whatever it is in all of existence that has happened to catch his swift and deft fancy. He has the endearing gift children have of curiosity and candor, and of making the moment seem an end in itself. He has always had curiosity; candor, you feel, developed slower. His active mind stems from a childhood diet of unfeigned, imperishable wonder. McGuinn remembers going to the. Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago with his grandfather when he was three, and pushing a lot of buttons, and learning physical functions of things, and examining, always examining, and looking at World War I airplanes.

“I was curious. I always have been. The first thing 1 ever made was a jeep out of tinker-toys that had a working steering system.” (He has since graduated into radio electronics and kinetic sculpture). “I had the jeep worked out so that the leverage was just right and the ... ” The rest of the sentence hangs in the air, stillborn, like any other enormously wondrous memory. “I used to look up and see Constellations going over. I remember the noise they made. When you’re young, a Super Connie makes a lot of noise. I used to go out to the airport and hang out, and watch the planes with my grandfather.”

“Did you want to be a pilot?” I asked.

“Still do. I guess I’ve always wanted to. But the process is so hard. You have to start with Cessnas or a Beechcraft single engine, then you’ve got to work up to multiple engines, all those ratings, it’s like boy scouts.”

We’re in his den, crammed with a crying baby; five television sets; a row of guitars; a letter from Pete Seeger thanking the Byrds for their recording of ‘Turn, Turn, Turn”; a photograph of Albert Einstein; a well-thumbed paperback copy of Robert Heinlein’s Stranger In a Strange Land', a sturdy mahogany table holding a moog-synthesizer manufactured by R.A. Moog Co., Trumansburg, N.Y.; a dozing manager; innumerable electronic toys; gadgets; and souvenirs. Time passes, but it isn’t clock time. I don’t know exactly, Byrd-time maybe. We talk haphazardly— about sinister British journalists; about the difficulty of Working within a monolithic recording organization; about laughter as a way of alleviating the true fucking true pain of living; about his aspirations to act (“but not in any folk-rock-doc”); about clairvoyance; about motivational research; about ‘Tryp,” his off-and-on Broadway collaboration with Jacques Levy; about Van Dyke Parks; abput his theory that artists are either underestimated or over-estimated in their time (“I prefer to be over-estimated”); and about the heartache of you yourself over-estimating your audience.

“It’s really painful to think you’ve got a really hip audience, a mass of them. And so you write this real hip song, ‘5D,’ and they don’t like it, don’t understand it at all, think it must be about dope.” A rare, brief expression of gloom is soon replaced by an ingenuous smile. “ ‘5D’ was an ethereal trip into metaphysics, into an almost Moslem submission to an Allah, an all-mighty spirit, free floating, the fifth dimension being that mesh that Einstein theorized about. He proved theoretically — but I choose to believe it — that there’s an ethereal mesh in the universe, and probably the reason for the speed of light being what it is is because of the friction encountered going through that mesh.

‘How is it that I can come out to here and be still floating, and never hit bottom and keep falling through, just relaxed and paying attention.’

“We were talking about a way of life, sort of a submission to God or whatever you want to call that mesh, that life force. In order to get it, you have to understand what it is and how to do it to some extent. It takes some experience, and most people haven’t encountered that, our culture being so dogmatically-oriented, with everything cutand-dry, and black-and-white, and no gray. These days, the only way you’re going to get it is through your own head.

. “I believe the universe is alive. And I’m into science fiction to the point that I’m long past doubting that there’s a way of exceeding the speed of light. I believe this race will eventually get into teleportation.” He pauses for an instant. He rubs his face and confesses that he has little faith in the homo sapien species. “Ithink it will survive only if it’s supposed to. I sometimes speculate that it will evolve, temporarily at least, into machines. Whatever we are inside these robots will move into bigger, stronger robots, and time will be less important.

“I also believe in the immortality of a spiritual essence of everyone. That’s sort of a universally accepted concept among all religions. I wouldn’t say that I was religious, because there’s no religion that I fully subscribe to. But I believe in the same things they all believe in, what they all coincide on. That, to me, is like scientific analysis., where you find enough factors to weight and balance, and you find common denominators and take those as truths.”

From examining, recounting, revaluing spirituality with the ease of someone who has been quoting some sort of personal chapter and verse for all his life, McGuinn once again turns to talk in his calm, wry, matter of fact, meandering way about new and old Byrds.

“After ‘5D’ .1 was discouraged — at least, as to putting out spiritual data to a record buying public for AM radio consumption. Now you’ll have to understand,” he digresses, “I was also spiritually involved in ‘Tambourine Man’ and ‘Turn, Turn, Turn.’ Like my interpretation of ‘Tambourine Man,’ whether Dylan meant it or not, the tambourine man was Allah, the eternal life force, and ‘take me for a trip upon your magic swirling ship’ was just like let my soul go where you want it to, and I promise to go under it. It was sort of an Islam concept. Perhaps, I got too intellectual with ‘5D,’ because the other two had a heavy sugar-coating over the spiritual message that was in there. I think the vibrations in my voice, sort of telepathically conveyed it.

“ ‘So You Want To Be A Rock ’n Roll Star” was sort of sour grapes. It was tongue in .cheek, more of a parody, a joke. Bringing it out into the open was funny to me: here’s alist of the ingredients, here’s what you have to do.

‘The Byrds got very intellectual for a time. I think David was the driving force behind it. If you look at his career after he joined Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, he’s done ‘Deja Vu,’ which is an intellectual interpretation of the reincarnation phenomenon. These are concepts he and I used to play with back when we were working together. David wasn’t exactly resistant to the muse, just sort of apathetic at the time as I recall.

“When he left, there was an interim period where we were just sort of in a daze, and we didn’t know what was going on. We recorded Notorious Byrd Brothers. That had the last traces of David on two vocals, the rest we did ourselves just to kinda show David we could do without him, I guess. A lot of people like the album the best. I don’t, particularly, because of what went on during the course of it. But if some guy was making it with a girl for the first time when he heard it, it makes it a great album.

“Then we mellowed out into country music, and we’re curving out of it into something else.”

Of the Byrd’s latest album, (Untitled), he says: “‘Chesnut Mare’ is the most impressive piece on it. I could wish the song would have been a little more perfect. Say, the last note on the end, where I just ran out of breath, it would take Ezio Pinza to sing that song. There’s no stop to it, it’s really up there. I like ‘Truck Stop Girl.’ It really has a groove to it. I like ‘Take A Whiff a lot, although I think it has too many whiffs in it. ‘Hungry Planet’ falls, short in a way, but I still like the synthesizer on it towards the end. I like ‘Just A Season.’ ‘You All Look Alike,’ I don’t particularly like. Maybe I’m just prejudiced against it because I did a better vocal that wasn’t used.”

McGuinn relaxes, he starts smiling more. He’s at the peak of his craft, with ten albums under his belt, and more people want to talk to him now. The Byrds have even risen several notches in Columbia’s corporate graces, thanks to Peter Fonda, ‘Easy Rider,’ and Bob Dylan (“Dylan didn’t want to write the title song, so he recommended me. He wrote a couple of lines. He wants me to lie and say he didn’t, but that was a long time ago. I don’t think he gives a shit anymore. Just ask him.”). The Byrds have just finished a new single, are working on a new album (three actually: the 11th Byrds, a McGuinn synthesizer one, and a collaboration between Byrds and Burritos), and McGuinn is happy. Most things are ecliptical for him, there are fewer sharp curves, less hassles, and things seem like thay are going to turn out all right after all. As he keeps talking, the room gets smaller and smaller, melding about him. The myth seems justified: McGuinn is the Byrds and his recent music is the most fantastic yet. He cares a lot, this tempermental, strange, brash Byrd, a lot more than perhaps he seems to, and I think Crosby was a god-damn fool or maybe it was just sour grapes or identity crisis or something when he said McGuinn should be ashamed of keeping the name Byrds.

Just before I leave, back to the yellowing streets below, back to newspaper headlines abou the Mideast and bombings and Charlie Manson, back to my own world, he shows me an ad he’s just received for cemetary plots. “I thought I’d get myself a plot to go out and cherish,” he says. He flashes the cynical smile. Innocence and experience and intelligence and cruelty and vulnerability mingle for one more instant. “This is going to be my place. To everything, there is a season: a time to plan, a time to die, a time to buy a plot at Forest Lawn.” He almost sings it.