Great Advice for Future Rock Stars from a Rock Hall of Famer

San DIEGO TROUBADOUR: Any sage advice to budding young troubadours starting out? I think one of the advantages you had starting out was the same opportunity Jackie Gleason had – a comedian who was also a great actor. He had vaudeville experience. You had the experience of going out on the road with Bob Gibson and playing at the Gate of Horn folk club in Chicago. Any advice for the current generation?

ROGER McGuinn: Sure! I’ll give you the advice that Bobby Darin gave me. And Bobby Darin got this probably from George Burns, who was a vaudevillian before he was a movie star and a stand-up comedian. Get up in front of audiences as much as you can. It doesn’t really matter how good you are at home. You have to do it under pressure. You have to test it under the pressure of a discerning audience who may or may not like what you’re doing. That makes a big difference, you know. You may be fine at home, you could be sailing through this thing and think you got it down. And then you get in front of audience and the whole thing goes out from under you – you don’t have it anymore. Your fingers go numb and you can’t play, or you can’t sing and remember the words. It’s quite a terrifying experience. Get up in front of an audience as much as you can. That’s it! Even if you don’t intend to be a live performer, it will help you with your recording. It will help you have confidence when you sing into a microphone. Record yourself, play it back and record yourself, play it back...get used to that. There’s a little tendency to get what they all red light “itis.” When the red recording light goes on, you kind of freeze up a little bit. So, it’s practice. That whole “10,000 hours” thing is just work it, work it, practice, and practice. It takes 10,000 hours to get something down.
 If you are technologically oriented, get yourself a MacBook Pro and a set of ProTools and start recording in your house if you want to make CDs and sell them. And give some of your music away. Put stuff up on You Tube, Facebook. Twitter about yourself, work your brand over the Internet with various social networking sites. There’s a whole list of stuff you can do, 100 of sites you can use.

SDT: When I last interviewed you two years ago, you were excited about your solar-generated Vespa and the way you could toot around your town in Florida. What is the latest gadget that has your attention?

RM: We have the whole house covered with solar panels; we have 34, 250-watt solar panels. That runs pretty much everything. We even run the hot water meter on it. We don’t use hot water solar panels, we use electric solar panels to heat hot water and it works! It works efficiently and we just do it for 20 or 30 minutes at a time, before you take a shower – it works great! I got a better scooter, it goes faster. I really haven’t got a lot of new toys. I got an iPad, iPhone, a few MacBooks. I enjoy taking them apart. I took my MacBook Pro apart and changed my hard drive. That takes something like 21 screws just to get the keyboard off. They don’t really want you working on it. And a friend just spilled coffee on hers, and I have it opened up on my desk right now. I’m cleaning it now with alcohol… backing up the hard drive for her [laughs].