Roger McGuinn, Back from Rio (1991)

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 4^th 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.