Creativity Quote by Barry McGuire

Name-dropping here isnt about status; its a way of testifying to a vanished ecology of music-making, when proximity to greatness felt casual and communal. Barry McGuire frames Fred Neil as the kind of songwriter you dont just admire, you physically respond to: Neil would sing and we would just melt. That verb does a lot of work. It suggests awe without hero-worship, intimacy without pretension. McGuire isnt selling a myth of solitary genius; hes describing a room where talent dissolves defenses, where the audience is a peer group reduced to pure feeling.

The setting matters: L.A., not as the polished industry machine but as a porous social circuit. Used to hang out signals a scene before branding, before every encounter needed a camera and a caption. McGuire positions himself as someone who has seen the real thing up close, yet the tone is more witness than gatekeeper. I know great songwriters is a credential, but the point isnt that he belonged; its that the music was so immediate it reorganized the social hierarchy on the spot.

The final detail, we would go to his recording sessions, pushes the intimacy further. Recording sessions are usually workspaces, not fan events. McGuire implies Neil drew people into the process, and that presence was part of the era: songs as living acts, still forming, with friends as the first audience. Underneath the nostalgia is a quiet critique of todays distance from craft. McGuire is remembering a time when being near a voice, unmediated, could be its own cultural currency.