I've always loved the songs of the sea. I was first introduced to them back in 1957, at the Old Town School of Folk Music. I used to go to Pete Seeger concerts, and he would do songs like 'Ruben Ranzo' and talk about how the sailors sang songs to do their work - to raise the anchors, pull up the sails and that sort of thing.
I think the good thing about the Internet is to give something away and to sell something else. Get a business model like that because the old brick and mortar record stores are falling apart, and the big record companies are collapsing under their own weight.
I don't want to be an oldies act, kind of dragging around on the road just for the money.
I didn't really enjoy reading until I married my wife and we began reading the Bible out loud to each other every day. I enjoy reading now, and there is a whole world of books out there to explore.
I've always considered myself a folk singer, even though we strapped on Rickenbacker guitars and played pretty loud.
But in my imagination this whole thing developed and I started mixing up old folk songs with the Beatles beat and taking them down to Greenwich Village and playing them for the people there.
I've got an electric little motorcycle that I go to the supermarket with every day, and it's powered by the solar panels, so it's really got a zero carbon footprint.
I'm happy with the Byrds as a good memory.
I always got a kick out of it when they called it the California Sound because it really came out of Liverpool and Greenwich Village.
Well, I guess that early 12 string. The first Martin I bought. I bought it around 1957 with money I earned as a janitor assistant. I bought brand new. I still have that.
I'd like to be remembered as a keeper of the flame who kept traditional music alive, because I've been doing that twice as long as I was in the Byrds.
I got into computers back in the early '80s, so it was a natural progression of learning about e-mail in the mid-'80s and getting into the Internet when it opened up in the early '90s.
Once I've written a song, I sometimes refine them.
I was raised a Roman Catholic and had to go to the eight o'clock Mass every morning and have communion and wear a tie, kind of like a restricted life style. Then in the '60s, we got wild and let it go and started looking in other places to see where God really was, and I came back to the Christian thing.
I think what makes the Byrds stand up all these years is the basis in folk music. Folk music, being a timeless art form, is the foundation of the Byrds. We were all from a folk background. We considered ourselves folk singers even when we strapped on electric instruments and dabbled in different things.
