Roger McGuinn: Limited Edition : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

In a version here of the public-domain ballad "Shady Grove," ex-Byrd Roger McGuinn -- who invented folk rock by plugging his twelve-string Rickenbacker into Bob Dylan's songbook -- drops a hip-hop machine beat into an ambient mist of jangle and banjo to create what he drolly calls "pho-kop." The result is better than the nickname -- a futuristic hobo's shuffle through a Kentucky mountain fog -- and, like the rest of this album, in the tradition of McGuinn's lifelong investigation of folk music's past and possibilities. His frontier-Beatle vocals and the crystal rain of that Rickenbacker are now an established part of America's roots vocabulary, and they are present and gleaming here: in the Johnny B. Goode-on-Sunset Strip adaptation of "James Alley Blues," the dark-side-of-sunshine original "Parade of Lost Dreams" and a cover of George Harrison's "If I Needed Someone," McGuinn's tribute to the Beatle who first turned him on to the glorious twang of the Rickenbacker.