Politics & Power Quote by Barry McGuire

He’s telling a tidy origin story that flatters a whole scene while quietly staking his own era’s claim to legitimacy. McGuire frames the mid-’60s folk-rock shift not as a messy collision of commerce, youth culture, and technology, but as a clean relay race: Beatles spark the change, “Roger” (almost certainly Roger McGuinn of the Byrds) upgrades it, then the Lovin’ Spoonful and “everybody else” flood in. That sequencing matters. It turns influence into a chain of custody, a way of naming who gets credited when folk music stopped being only earnest and acoustic and started competing on AM radio with electric guitars and backbeats.

The subtext is partly defensive. Folk purists treated electrification as betrayal; McGuire recasts it as evolution, even inevitability. Notice how “American folk music” sits at the center: he’s acknowledging the genre’s identity politics (authenticity, tradition, protest) while admitting the destabilizing truth that the decisive catalyst was British pop. The Beatles aren’t just a band here; they’re a cultural force that made it safe, profitable, and exciting for folk musicians to embrace hooks and amplification without surrendering their seriousness.

The offhand “everybody else” is doing work, too. It compresses a crowded, competitive moment into a single wave, suggesting how fast the transformation happened once the dam broke. Coming from McGuire, whose “Eve of Destruction” rode that exact crossover, the line reads like lived history: a musician marking the moment the margins became the mainstream, and everyone had to plug in or be left behind.