In an era when iconic bands are reuniting by the dozen, it's not surprising the Byrds have been approached to revisit their hits on the road. But if you ask principal member Roger McGuinn, the Byrds are best left as a "great memory," despite the best efforts of his former bandmates.

"David Crosby has been trying to get me to go back and do the Byrds for years now. It seems to come up every six months or so," McGuinn tells Billboard.com. "It is not something that is impossible, but it's not something I'm comfortable doing as a gig."

"I have no problem with the Byrds," he continues, adding that he has given his full participation to Columbia/Legacy's ongoing Byrds reissue campaign. "I see it as a great memory, and why mess it up by going out and doing it now just for money, because it would just be a cash grab."

Instead, McGuinn, who just turned 65, is content to tour as a solo artist, a setting in which he is captured on the recently released "Live From Spain." The show was recorded for broadcast by a local radio station in 2004 but McGuinn had forgotten about it until his wife found a CD copy on her desk.

"It sounded really good, with just the right compression on the Rickenbacker," he says. "We didn't have to do anything to it, really. All I had to do was divide it up into tracks and send it off to the pressing point and that was it."

McGuinn will return to the road in September, and says he plans to begin making a new studio album "in the next six months." Live, he's been playing one new song, "Return of the Chestnut Mare," a sequel to the song "Chestnut Mare" from the Byrds' 1970 "Untitled" album.

"I've kind of gone back to my folk roots and I'm happy being a folk singer at this stage in my life," he says. "I'm just really happy being who I am and doing what I want."