After some time off here, a comeback album seems about
right. And to give credit where credit due, while McGuinn has always seemed clueless, whichever A&R dude came up with
this knew what he was doing—as far as I can tell, the basic logic was, “McGuinn
can’t write a song to save his life, but he can still make a guitar jangle, so
let’s just bury him in purchased talent and pray he follows their leads.”
He does. When the guitar on the second track momentarily
seems to launch into “So You Wanna Be a Rock and Roll Star,” it might be a
knowing wink, or it might signify the creative dead end McGuinn had been stalled
at for twenty years, but the thing is, it doesn’t matter: it’s sharp and punchy,
and it doesn't pause to think. In many ways this is second-tier major-label rock at its finest.
Okay, not always lyrically. “Car Phone” comes about ten
years late (wasn’t McGuinn himself already carrying a mobile phone on the cover
of The City ten years ago? Maybe it
was a walkie-talkie, but whatever—this is get-off-my-lawn music); “The Trees
Are All Gone” is nearly trite enough to be a Graham Nash eco-ballad; “Your Love
is a Gold Mine” takes a deeply unpromising structuring conceit, and excavates
every ounce of forced metaphor it can. When Elvis Costello shows up to write
some snarling music-biz swipes at a sell-out on “You Bowed Down,” it’s
positively not 4th street, but maybe somewhere in the vicinity. Yet
it seems a little rich being sung by the guy who’s been the Platonic embodiment
of bland corporate rock since at least the early 70s.
But Back from Rio
hardly lives or dies by its words; they’re more like a rhythm section to hang
the hooks on, and there, it delivers. McGuinn jangles. The melodies soar and
crash into rousing choruses. There’s not a dud track here—and there damn well
shouldn’t be, since the suits brought in ex-Byrds (Hillman and Crosby),
Costello, Tom Petty and a good chunk of the Heartbreakers, Michael Penn, Dave Stewart, Jules
Shear on songwriting duty, and even outlier Stan Ridgeway for a cameo. It might
be akin to shooting a dying athlete full of speed for one last game, but
McGuinn stays awake all the way through.
Alas—and an “alas” is inevitable with a McGuinn solo LP: the
track lengths. Good Christ, they drag. The first few Byrds albums often hovered
around two minutes per track, and were perfect for it; here, songs lumber to their death at double that, and needlessly so. “King of the Hill” is a killer duet between
McGuinn and Petty, but at 5:27 it’s practically a goddamned Soundgarden tune,
running itself painfully into the ground. Did Arista pay so much for the hired
help that it insisted on squeezing extra choruses out of them? I have no idea,
but it’s a colossal mistake. Every song here is good-to-very-good on the merits; every song
here is also too long by a minimum of 30%, and the result is a plodding record
that, pared down, could easily stand with the best of the non-Parsons/Clark
post-Byrds albums. McGuinn co-wrote “The Time Has Come,” but sadly, did not
sufficiently think through its implications.
