Barry: McGuire - Back from the Eve of Destruction

Now He’s ‘Trippin’ the Sixties’

By Dan Wooding
Founder of ASSIST Ministries
IRVINE, CA (ANS) -- The first time I met Barry McGuire was in London, England, sometime in the late seventies when he was performing at a concert and, as always, he brought the house down with his incredible gravelly voice renditions of a mixture of his new Gospel songs and hits from the past like the huge folk hit by The New Christy Minstrels, “Green, Green” (which he co-wrote with Randy Sparks) and then, his solo success with the 1965 epic anti-war protest song, “Eve of Destruction,” written by P.F. Sloan.

Barry McGuire performing

But then he shocked all of us in the concert hall when he produced a skate board and proceeded to skate around the room, a huge grin on his well-honed bearded face.
That was typical of this incredible survivor of the Sixties - born on October 15, 1935 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma -- who just loved life and, even today, now in his seventies and with a Pacemaker, he still exhibits that joyful persona wherever he goes.
I have met with Barry many times since then and caught up with him again on Saturday, August 27, 2011, at a unique Jesus People Reunion in Irvine, California, put on by the Upper Room Ministry, where he joined with other artist like Chuck Girard, from Love Song, Karen Lafferty who wrote Seek Ye First.., the powerful worship song, and the one and only Andrae Crouch, who performed with his wonderful backing group, and Barry agreed to talk about his long and rather amazing career in which he even played the male lead in the Broadway hit musical HAIR opposite Diane Keaton.

Dan Wooding interviewing Barry McGuire

Not wanting to waste this occasion to dig into his career, I asked Barry McGuire how he came to record Eve of Destruction, and he explained that in 1965 he was on the dance floor with about two hundred other people for the debut performance of The Byrds. Legendary record producer, Lou Adler, spotted him and invited him to sit down at his table.
Barry told me, “Lou then said, ‘McGuire, are you recording?’ I said, ‘No, but I would love to be.’ He then introduced me to Phil Sloan who had written a whole notebook full of brand new songs and he said, ‘Why don't you come by my office next week and Phil will sing some of his songs for you.’ He gave me his phone number and told me to give him a call. I said, ‘Great, I’ll talk to you next week.’ Then I went back out on the dance floor and continued dancing. It was party time at Ciro’s.
“The following week I got a phone call from Lou. He had tracked me down at a girl’s house in North Hollywood. Lou said, ‘Hey, you didn’t call me.’ I said, ‘I know, I know, I lost your number.’ Lou laughed and said, ‘I figured as much. What are you doing right now?’ I said, ‘Nothing, just hanging out.’ He said, ‘Where are you? I’ll send a car for you.’ So I gave him the address, and thirty minutes later a car pulled up and took me to Lou’s office.
“Phil Sloan was there with his notebook and he started singing some of his tunes for me. I really liked what I heard. I took five or six of them home with me to work on, and two weeks later Lou had a four-hour session booked for me in Western Recording Studios. We had recorded two songs and were working on the third one when Lou said, ‘This song sounds too much like the first one.’ He wanted to do something else. I had the words to Eve of Destruction in my back pocket, so I pulled them out and said, ‘Hey, let’s do this tune. I really like what it says.” Lou wasn’t too excited about it, but he said, ‘OK, maybe we’ll put it on the B side of a single.’
“By now, we only had twenty minutes left in the studio so the band went through the song a couple of times, with Hal Blaine on drums, Larry Knechtel on bass, Phil Sloan playing rhythm guitar and harmonica, and I was over in the corner doing the vocals. After a couple of run-throughs, Blaine said, ‘Let’s cut this turkey.’ We all laughed as Bones Howe, our engineer, pushed the red button and we recorded Eve. The song is over four minutes long, so by the time we recorded it and listened to the play back, our studio time had run out.
“There was a band already waiting in the hall to come in as soon as we were finished. I wanted to re-record the vocal track because I’d missed a couple of words and did some of my McGuire growly stuff to fill in. Lou said, 'Listen, we’ll come back next week and redo the vocals.' That was on a Thursday. Monday morning I got a call from Jay Lasker, one of the co-owners of Dunhill Records, telling me, ‘Hey, McGuire, turn the radio on KFWB.’ And there it was, that first take, just the way we’d recorded it. I never did get to go in and ruin the song by trying to do a better vocal track.
“It struck a nerve all across the country, and before anyone knew what was happening, it slammed into the number one spot.”

Lou Adler and Jack Nicholson pictured at a Laker's game

By the way, if you are a LA Laker's fan, you can see the bearded Lou Adler sitting next to Jack Nicholson at most of the home games at the Staples Center. Adler, himself, has quite an amazing career. He was born in Chicago, Illinois and raised in East Los Angeles. In 1964, Adler founded and co-owned Dunhill Records. He was President of the label as well as the chief record producer from 1964 to 1967. That summer he sold Dunhill for three million dollars to ABC Records. Later in 1967, he founded Ode Records.. In June 1967, Adler helped to produce the Monterey International Pop Festival, as well as the film version, Monterey Pop.
He formerly managed Jan & Dean and produced Sam Cooke, The Mamas & the Papas, Johnny Rivers, Barry McGuire, Scott McKenzie, The Grass Roots, Spirit, Carole King, The Weaver Temptations (which he signed in 1968) and Cheech and Chong.
So then, we got talking about the Mamas & Papas who once featured Barry and his close friend, Roger McGuinn of The Byrds, on Creeque Alley in which they sang, “McGuinn and McGuire's just a-getting’ higher, In L.A., you know where that's at.”
At the time, Barry was not only known for his music, but also for his heavy drug taking during those heady years.
So I asked him if it was true that he played a role in helping to launch the Mamas & the Papas by introducing them to Lou Adler.
“Yes, that is true,” he said. “I was working on my second album with Dunhill when [Mama] Cass Elliot called me saying, ‘Hey, McGuire, I'm out here with some of my friends from New York and we're singing some really great stuff. It'll knock your socks off. You've got to hear what we’re doing.’ I asked her where she was living, and off I went on my brand new Royal Enfield motorcycle with a brown paper bag full of herbal medicine tucked up under my arm, to Cassie’s house. They were all sitting on the floor with a newspaper spread out in front of them waiting for me to arrive with my bag full of grass. They had just come back from the Virgin Islands and they were flat broke. There wasn’t a stick of furniture in the house. I mean I was doing OK, I had a hit record, but I didn’t have any furniture either. We didn’t use furniture in those days. Even if there was a chair or a couch, we’d sit on the floor. It was kind of like a tribal thing. I said to John, ‘What’s this music I’m hearing about?’ and he picked up his guitar and started to play. I had never heard anything like that before.
“Right then and there, I went to the telephone and called Lou Adler and said, ‘Lou, I've got some friends here from New York and they've got some music that will blow you away.’ He said, ‘Well, bring them down to the studio tomorrow, and I’ll hear what they sound like.’

Barry McGuire in the studios recording with The Mamas & The Papas

“So they came to the studio and sang a few songs for Lou. Lou couldn’t believe his eyes or his ears. As he heard their new sound, his jaw hit his chest and he goes ‘whoa.’ He signed them on the spot and called their first album ‘If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears,’ which became their 1966 debut album.”
So how did California Dreamin’ come about?
“Well California Dreamin’ was a song that John Phillips had written and I was looking for some material and I liked the song so I recorded it,” said Barry. “The group was broke and when Lou signed them, he said, ‘Why don't we let them do your background vocals so they can make some money to live on until they can do an album of their own.’ I thought that was a great idea and they did the background vocals on several of my songs including California Dreamin’, Hang On Sloopy and Do You Believe In Magic?
"After we heard the playback on California Dreamin', John Phillips took me out in the hallway and said that they would like to do this as their first single release. I said, ‘That's cool man. It's your song. You wrote it.’ I didn’t know it at the time, but they took my lead vocal off the song and replaced it with the four of them singing in unison. If you listen to California Dreamin’ right now and you pay attention to the left track only you'll hear my voice singing 'All the leaves are brown.' and then it’s gone. I didn't know that for twenty-five years, until one day my son called me into his bedroom and said, ‘Dad, listen to this.’ His stereo wasn't working properly at the time and so he could only hear the left track and we heard ‘All the leaves are brown…’ and he said, ‘Dad, that sounds like your voice.’ I said, ‘That is my voice. The bums, they used my track.’”

Barry paused for a moment and then said, with a huge smile on his face, “So my trivia question is, what is the first karaoke song to ever become a hit record? It's California Dreamin’ because they sang karaoke to my track.”
I was then intrigued to discover how the group came up with the name of The Mamas & the Papas?

Barry with his wife Mari

“Well the story I got from them was that they were all sitting on the floor watching a Hell’s Angels documentary on TV one night,” Barry began. “So Cass heard that the guys in the Angels called the women ‘their Mamas’ and she flipped over on her back and started thumping the floor with her elbows and kicking her heels in the air and said, ‘I want to be a Mama. I want to be a Mama.’ So John said, 'Well, I guess we'll have to be the Papas.’ So they called themselves The Mamas & the Papas.”
As the months rolled by turning into years, Barry said that his life totally disintegrated and, in a previous interview, he told me how he had discovered the teachings of Christ through reading a modern translation of the New Testament, Good News for Modern Man.
“One night, I was sitting on the floor watching what was happening around me,” Barry said. “Everyone was smoking dope, drinking champagne, eating peyote and watching television, and I remember thinking to myself how I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It was happening exactly like the Scriptures I’d just read had said it would. So here I was in a house full of happy, drugged-out friends, banging my head on the wall, and the days of Noah were happening right before my eyes.
“That’s when I spoke my first prayer. My opening line to God was, ‘Hey man.’ I figured if He was really there, He’d know who I was talking to. I said, ‘Listen man, this is really weird. I don’t know if you’re here, I don’t know if you’re not here. I mean I’ve never heard voices or seen visions, but I gotta know, once and for all, ‘Are You Really Here?’ I remember telling God, ‘Listen, if you’re not here, don’t tell me that you are because I don’t want to go on another head trip.’
“And that was my moment. I didn’t hear voices. I didn’t see visions. I just felt something deep within me break like an egg, and love and healing started to flow out of that sacred place. That cleansing love filled me with an affirmative ‘Yes, I’m Really Here.’ That night I surrendered to God, and I told Him, ‘If I wake up alive tomorrow, I will follow You wherever You lead me.’ And guess what, the next morning I woke up, and the journey began.
“That next morning I told my friend, Owen, ‘Listen, there’s something about Jesus. I don’t know what it is. I don’t know Who He is, but I’ve got to go check Him out.’
“My Uncle is a Christian man who lives up in Fresno. My Uncle Eddie had been like a father to me through my adolescent years. My mother had been married four times, and had many boyfriends between the marriages, but my Uncle was the masculine anchor in my life.
“Soon after arriving in Fresno, my uncle invited me to go to church with him and since I had told God I would go wherever the path led me, I accepted his invitation. During the service, some street hippies who looked just like me, talked about how Christ had changed their lives. They didn’t use church words, they just told their story plain and simple.
“As we left the building, I struck up a conversation with a couple of them, telling them I was wanting to know more about Jesus – who He was and what He was all about. So we prayed right there on the sidewalk, and they asked God to open my eyes that I might see Christ as He truly is. Then they invited me to come to some Bible studies they were having over in Reedley.
“Mel Harrell was the pastor of the Full Gospel Tabernacle church where we all got together for our studies. On Father’s Day, 1972 Pastor Harrell baptized more than twenty of us in the King’s River.
“The team of street Christians I had met at my Uncle’s church were part of a group called the Agape Force. Being of like mind and heart, we started hanging together asking God to reveal Himself to us and to use us in whatever way He wanted. One evening, Winkie Pratney, a man from New Zealand, walked into the room. He looked like a cross between Columbo and Inspector Gadget. He was a little skinny guy with a knee length beige trench coat on, four or five satchels, hanging from shoulder straps, filled with books, papers, cameras and a huge cassette player. I thought to myself, ‘Who is this character?’ But when he started to explain spiritual truth, I thought, ‘Man, this guy must be a metaphysical engineer.’ He made it all sound so simple.
“Nearly a year later. Winkie came back from a New Zealand trip with a team of 15 Kiwi kids, along with his Mom and Dad who were their team parents. I was sent to ride shotgun in one of the three vans driving down to LAX to pick them all up. The first time I saw Mari, she was part of this gaggle of funny talking New Zealanders. Little did I know that eighteen months later this beautiful young lady would become my wife.
“The story of our courtship and marriage is a whole other book in itself. But suffice it to say, 38 years later we still have pillow fights when we make our bed in the morning and she always wins!”

Trippin' the Sixties logo

I thanked Barry McGuire for sharing his story with me and then discovered that besides singing at Jesus People reunions and on multiple PBS fund raisers, he is also now doing a show, called Trippin’ The Sixties with John York from The Byrds.
He explained, “It’s a show that reveals my journey through that decade; I tell the stories about all the people that I hung out with, performed with, partied with, and recorded with. I tell the stories behind the scenes, stuff that was happening in our personal lives, and we do the songs that everybody knows, like Tambourine Man, a Bob Dylan song that I wanted to record, but Roger McGuinn and his Byrds got to it first. We do California Dreamin’, Monday, Monday, Creeque Alley, Everybody’s Talkin’, Carpenter, City of New Orleans and many, many more. If you’d like to see some of our videos, just go to mywww.trippinthesixties.com Video page.”
I would like to thank Robin Frost for transcribing much of the above and Mari McGuire for editing this article.
For more information on Barry's work today, please go to: www.barrymcguire.com

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Dan Wooding, 70, is an award winning British journalist now living in Southern California with his wife Norma, to whom he has been married for 48 years. They have two sons, Andrew and Peter, and six grandchildren who all live in the UK. He is the founder and international director of ASSIST (Aid to Special Saints in Strategic Times) and the ASSIST News Service (ANS) and was, for ten years, a commentator, on the UPI Radio Network in Washington, DC. He now hosts the weekly “Front Page Radio” show on KWVE in Southern California which is also carried throughout the United States. The program is also aired in Great Britain on Calvary Chapel Radio UK and also in Belize and South Africa. Besides this, Wooding is a host for His Channel Live, which is carried via the Internet to some 200 countries. You can follow Dan on Facebook under his name there or at ASSIST News Service. He is the author of some 44 books. Two of the latest include his autobiography, “From Tabloid to Truth”, which is published by Theatron Books. To order a copy, press this link.Wooding, who was born in Nigeria of British missionary parents, has also recently released his first novel “Red Dagger” which is available this link.

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