Way back in the mid-’60s, who’d have thought that Roger McGuinn of the Byrds would end up one of rock music’s elder statesmen? In 1965, McGuinn’s burgeoning band was banned from the O’Hare Inn for trying to go into the motel’s dining room in bare feet (“You cannot have a vice president of General Motors and a group like this on the same floor,” sniffed the motel’s owner in a Tribune story from July 22 of that year.)
How things have changed. In 1991, the Byrds were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and nowadays, McGuinn is in demand as a solo performer (he comes to the Park West on Thursday). When the earlier Tribune article below first ran, however, the Byrds were still a bunch of shaggy young rock stars on the rise.
The Byrds, a Los Angeles rock `n’ roll aggregation that enjoys a considerable degree of popularity among the teenage set, fluttered into the Civic Opera House yesterday, with a resultant furor that nearly brought the house down.
More than 4,000 teenagers, the majority of them girls, caused such an uproar over the group with long tresses that the police had to take stern measures.
The performance was ended by police before it could develop into a mass stampede, but one girl was injured when she was pushed into the orchestra pit. Two other youths were arrested.
“It was just awful,” said a member of the staff at the Opera House. “They tried to lower the curtain to control the group, but they just kept coming up the aisle and finally it was mayhem! What is this country coming to?”
Police said that most of the youths were well-behaved, and that the situation could have been worse.
