![]() ![]() He was the West Coast representative for Gerry Goffin and Carole King and Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. Sloan: At the time I worked for Lou Adler. He said, “You didn’t call me.” I said, “I lost your number.” He said, “I figured as much.” He sent a car over that took me to his office in Beverly Hills. I said, “I’m dancing.” He said, “Well, are you singing?” And I said, “No, man, the Byrds are singing-I’m dancing!” Then he said, “Would you like to be recording?” I said, “Absolutely I would.” He gave me his phone number and said, “Come to my office.” So I danced that night and lost the number before I even left the club.Ībout a week later he tracked me down out in the San Fernando Valley somewhere at a girl’s house. When the club closed he led a conga line out the door and onto Sunset Boulevard. I danced over in that direction and Lou Adler was sitting in a booth there. The Byrds were at Ciro’s and I was on the dance floor when I heard somebody call my name. His stuff just knocked me out, but I couldn’t find a record producer or company that wanted to record me. ![]() But he wanted something more edgy than what the Minstrels were doing.īarry McGuire: I came out to California looking to record some Bob Dylan tunes. He had left the New Christy Minstrels, and he was looking for a hit song. He wrote a song with Hoyt Axton called “Greenback Dollar.” That song really affected me when I was 14 or 15. I sat down with my guitar and wrote a very simple melody.īarry McGuire showed up about a year later. About a week after writing the lyric, just for a lark, I decided to write some music to it. In the Wake of Ferguson, a Brief History of Protest SongsĪt first the song was just words, no melody.I’m saying, look at all these terrible, scary things going on around you-atomic war, assassination, race hatred-and asking, “You don’t believe there’s something terribly wrong here?” Ultimately, I was trying to say that my generation is not gonna stand for this bull-anymore. The song basically poses a simple question about war and segregation and injustice. The line about the River Jordan-that to me was about the sacrilege of war. The only reference to it is in the line “the poundin’ of the drums.” But when the song came out, people got the cryptic-ness of it, of the funeral procession. I think I tried to express my complete destruction, devastation from Kennedy’s being killed in that song. President Kennedy had been assassinated months before. This was in the spring or early summer of 1964. I said “Listen, something wonderful, extraordinary has just happened to me.” She said, “Shhh you’ll wake your father.” When I finished I had to tell someone, so I went in to wake my mother up. ![]()
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