When Bob Dylan gifted Roger McGuinn the “holy grail” of music
The old adage always goes that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Bob Dylan took that to the next level when he scrawled some lyrics on a napkin and gifted them to Roger McGuinn.
That may seem like an over-simplification for dramatic purposes, but really, when Dylan and his typically unerring blasé style are involved, it’s nothing but the truth. So, yes, he actually did just write some words down off the cuff and send them to McGuinn. But with this call coming down from on high, it turned out to be one of the greatest things The Byrds ever did.
The movie Easy Rider came to be known as a touchstone of the counterculture of the 1960s; the beacon of an uprising, the poetic ode to life, young people, drugs, and everything that came in between. But for most people, the film is made all the more memorable not by any number of its actors or iconic shots, but by the soundtrack itself.
That’s where Dylan and The Byrds come into the fray. We all know the band’s ‘The Ballad of Easy Rider’, inserted as the crown jewel of the defining film, but perhaps lesser known is the fact that Dylan had a large hand in being the catalyst for the full thing. It’s probably best to hand over to McGuinn to take over from here. After all, he tells it best.
“The story goes that Peter Fonda put a couple of Byrds tracks on the soundtrack of Easy Rider, I think, as placeholders – or maybe his engineer did it for him,” he recalled in a recent interview with Guitar World. “But they kept listening to it, and they were like, ‘Instead of putting some other kind of music on here…’”
Yet in the late 1960s, there was only one man whom Fonda had in his sights for a huge piece of kudos to his film. “Peter got the idea that he wanted Bob Dylan to write him a theme song, so he flew up to New York and screened [the film] for Bob. Bob wrote some notes on a napkin and said, ‘Here, give this to McGuinn. He’ll know what to do with it,’” McGuinn continued.
From there, the frontman said he was gifted the “holy grail” from Dylan, as all he did for it was bring out “my guitar, made up a tune for it, wrote the second verse, and that’s the way it came out.” If only all songwriting were that easy, you can imagine other artists would say – but then again, they didn’t have Dylan in their back pocket.
Over time, of course, ‘The Ballad of Easy Rider’ became a song that bore far more of The Byrds’ imprint than it did Dylan’s. Indeed, the songwriter even asked for his name to be removed from the credits eventually. Evidently, he didn’t pay much mind to those pivotal opening words he penned. He only wrote them on a napkin, after all.
But regardless of whether the world’s finest pieces of poetry were written on screeds of the most luxurious paper or scribbled down on a piece of rubbish, none of it matters when it comes to the end result. For McGuinn and the rest of The Byrds, that’s something they learned very quickly: always be careful about the trash you want to throw away.
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