Stuff You Don't Know
About the 60s
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This excerpt is from the book "Follow the Music," the story of Elektra records as told by its founder, Jac Holzman. Order your autographed copy today.
Dylan Goes Electric at Newport 1965 -- Laurel Canyon in the Sixties
Dylan Goes Electric at Newport 1965
JAC HOLZMAN: The event of the folk year was the Newport Folk Festival. It was launched in 1959 by George Wein, who was also founder of the Newport Jazz Festival and an accomplished jazz pianist himself. At the folk festival, Elektra was always well represented with performers on stage. I went every year from the first. You'd see all the people you normally would run across in New York or LA, but out of the city there was time for relaxation that transcended business or party loyalties. For me it was a mini-vacation. I loved just wandering around, catching the workshops and the impromptu get-togethers of musicians showing off their licks and trading songs . . .
. . . On the Saturday afternoon of the 1965 festival there was a blues workshop. Alan Lomax was hosting the black traditionalists. Alan was the son of John Lomax, two great white collectors, for whom traditional music seemed to freeze-frame about the time of the Tennessee Valley Authority. Alan was the last protector and refuge of the lone voice from Mutton Hollow.
The second segment of the workshop was slated to be white urban blues, featuring the Butterfield Band. Due to the amazing sales of 'Born In Chicago' on the Elektra sampler, and the buzz that went with it, I had arranged for them to perform at Newport. Albert Grossman, the manager of Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary, was in full hover over them as future clients.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: I had introduced Butterfield to Grossman.
JAC: The crowd at the blues workshop was enormous. Instead of a few hundred this one had nearly a thousand.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: Lomax was loaded for bear. After the traditionalists and ahead of the Butterfield set, he got up and said something like, "Today you've been hearing music by the great blues players, guys who go out and find themselves an old cigar box, put a stick on it, attach some strings, sit under a tree and play great blues for themselves. Now you're going to hear a group of young boys from Chicago with electric instruments. Let's see if they can play this hardware at all."
JAC: Lomax was so condescending, I was embarrassed for him.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: Grossman took it the worst way. Lomax comes down from this little stage and Grossman coldcocks him. And for about the next five minutes these two leviathans, monsters, both kings in their own right-
JAC: -Dueling behemoths. Two big growlers, overweight, unfit, far from agile-
PAUL ROTHCHILD:-Groveling in the dusty dirt of Newport over the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. It was wonderful. Holzman was laughing his ass off.
JAC: Al 'If I Had A Hammer' Grossman versus Alan 'Mighty Defender of the Status Quo' Lomax. One very short round, split decision. And this was only the preliminary bout. The main event was the following night when Dylan went electric-
THEODORE BIKEL:-To the delight of some, to the dismay of most.
JONATHAN TAPLIN: Grossman, upon hearing that Bob wanted to play electric, hastily put a band together. And the only guys who had electric instruments were Butterfield's band.
JAC: Albert had Al Kooper flown in by charter from New York to play organ. Al was always a reluctant flyer, and winging to Newport in a tiny plane with one engine was not his preferred mode of travel.
DAVE GAHR: I knew what was coming, because in the afternoon I was the only photographer allowed in to shoot Dylan with Butterfield's band.
JONATHAN TAPLIN: We kicked everybody out of the stadium and did a short sound check, which Peter Yarrow was mixing. The problem was the rhythm section. They were great blues players, but Dylan didn't play twelve-bar music. He played very bizarre music in terms of its structure. So they didn't really understand what was going on at all. And Bob refused to do much of a rehearsal-
JAC:-Ten or
fifteen minutes. Let's say that musically, Dylan's electric set was not
going to be tightly wrapped.
I could feel the tickler go up on the back of my neck, the hairs rising
in happy resonance. My friend Paul Nelson of the Little Sandy Review was
standing alongside, and we just turned to each other and shit-grinned.
This was electricity married to content. We were hearing music with lyrics
that had meaning, with a rock beat, drums and electric guitars, Mike Bloomfield
keening as if squeezing out his final note on this planet. Absolutely stunning.
All the parallel strains of music over the years coalesced for me in that
moment. It was like a sunrise after a storm, when all is clean . . . all
is known.
Then suddenly we heard booing, like pockets of wartime flak. The audience
had split into two separate and opposing camps. It grew into an awesome
barrage of catcalls and hisses. It was very strange, because I couldn't
believe that those people weren't hearing the wonderful stuff I was hearing.
That evening I was standing next to Dave Gahr in the photographer's pit,
below and in front of the stage. Peter Yarrow introduced Dylan for the very
special artist that he was, and from the moment he launched into 'Maggie's
Farm,' now fleshed out with an incredible electric intensity, it was clarity
and catharsis.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: I was at the console, mixing the set, the only one there who had ever recorded electric music. I could barely hear Dylan because of the furor.
JAC: I looked directly into Dylan's face as he squinted into the darkness, trying to figure out what was happening.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: From my perspective, it seemed like everybody on my left wanted Dylan to get off the stage, everybody on my right wanted him to turn it up. And I did-I turned it up.
JAC: Backstage, an un-civil war had broken out. Alan Lomax was bellowing that this was a folk festival, you didn't have amplified instruments. Pete Seeger was beside himself, jumped into a car and rolled up the windows, his hands over his ears.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: On one side you had the old guard, George Wein, Alan Lomax, Pete Seeger. Pete, pacifist Pete, with an ax: "I'm going to cut the cables!" The other group is Peter Yarrow, a festival director, Albert Grossman, not a director but on the other side. There were about eight people on each side of the cable, and more gathering, one group trying to defend it, the other trying to cut it. Seeger's a tall thin guy, and Yarrow's a short thin guy, and they are nose to nose, screaming at each other.
JONATHAN TAPLIN: Out front it was turning into a disaster.
JAC: Crazier and crazier.
JONATHAN TAPLIN: Bob was getting booed and he walked off.
JAC: Dylan left the stage hurt, angry and shaken. Peter Yarrow took the stage again, very rattled. Like a wounded cheerleader, he attempted to rally support, urging the audience on until there was enough positive emotion that Dylan could return with dignity.
JONATHAN TAPLIN: I saw Dylan backstage from a little bit of a distance, and he seemed to be crying. Johnny Cash came up and gave him a big Gibson guitar, a jumbo, much too big for Bob, and told him to go back out there.
JAC: His face set with determination, Dylan walked back onto that stage and stared down ten thousand pairs of eyes.
JONATHAN TAPLIN: He says, "Does anybody have a D harmonica?" And all these harmonicas were being thrown from the audience. The audience thought they'd won-here was Dylan, no band, back into acoustic folk stuff. And then he sang 'It's All Over Now, Baby Blue' and walked off.
JAC: And Dylan and folk music and Elektra were never the same again.
JONATHAN TAPLIN:
It was unbelievably dramatic. At the party afterwards he was pretty much
by himself. I mean, all the other singers and everything were very supportive
of him, but it was clear that he didn't like what had happened.
I ended up working with him, touring, all over the country and then all
over the world, for two years, and he was booed everywhere. Every time.
He would play the first half folk, with just harmonica and guitar, and the
second half rock and roll, and get booed.
PAUL ROTHCHILD:
To me, that night at Newport was as clear as crystal. It's the end of one
era and the beginning of another. There's no historical precedent. This
is a folk festival, the folk festival, and you couldn't even say it's blues
and the blues has moved to an electric format. This is a young Jewish songwriter
with an electric band that sounds like rock and roll.
There were two very big passions happening here. And it was an election.
You had to choose which team you were going to support. I expected Peter
Yarrow to join with the future, because of his peer group and his dedication
to Dylan, whose songs had made Peter, Paul and Mary's success so resounding.
At the same time it changed Peter's professional life. Peter, Paul and Mary
were acoustic folk singers, and Peter had to know that their moment had
passed; but personally, Peter's commitment was to the future. Albert Grossman,
that was an obvious one. And Jac. Jac could just as easily-more easily-have
joined with the Newport board of directors, the Weins, the Lomaxes, the
Seegers, and said, "No electric music." But he didn't. I was very
proud of Jac at that moment, watching him choose the unknown rather than
the comfort of the known.
JAC: I followed my instinct and my heart. I followed the music.
JOHN HAENY:
My Laurel Canyon house was on Ridpath. In the living room was my stereo
system, with big electrostatic speakers, extraordinarily exotic for then,
and a five-foot hookah that I was keeping for my drug dealer whose mother
wouldn't let him have it at home. I extended visiting privileges to him
provided he brought the grass. He would show up from time to time with his
friends, and I would invite my friends. We would lock all the doors and
windows so the smoke would stay in the room. We were all into popsicles.
I had the world's largest collection of popsicle sticks. We would fill the
bowl of this huge hookah, a cup, cup and a half, and keep it lit by throwing
popsicle sticks in, and pass the rope around till everybody passed out.
I woke up one morning to some chaos, and there was Judy Collins nude in
my front yard. The yard had a high wooden fence and succulents, and there
was Judy with her clothes off and a photographer. They were shooting the
album cover for "Wildflowers." They ultimately came into the house.
She was sitting on the floor, with some clothes on now, by a curtained wall
with light coming through the window and one of my exotic brass vases with
some dried flowers in it, and that became the back cover. The nude pictures
were scotched.
Also at the Ridpath house I introduced Judy to Stephen Stills, and that
resulted in their romance, and their romance resulted in Stephen writing
'Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.' Carole King was in and out of Ridpath-it was a
dog owned by Carole and Gerry Goffin that sired my dog Niki's first litter
of puppies. Neil Young was around. I was at some friend's house with David
Crosby-we were all in a pack, you know, all buddies then-and somebody had
brought a tape in of a young girl that nobody knew much about, except Judy
had discovered her as a songwriter, and it was Joni Mitchell.
Joni was living on the next road up from Kirkwood. David Crosby was producing
her first album. The people who recorded it were basically incompetent,
and the tapes were a mess. David was having serious problems with the mix.
I was exclusive to Elektra, but David came to me and asked would I sneak
out and remix. We did it in the dead of night in a little studio at Sunset
Sound. I didn't have a written contract with Jac, but it was a violation.
Years later Jac told me he had always known I did it. There wasn't much
going on that Jac didn't know about; he was a fox. He let it go because
he knew Joni was important. David gave me a Swiss army knife. I still have
it in a box out in the garage.
JACKSON BROWNE: I met John on Ridpath. A great guy, an interesting guy, very funny. He had these two white dogs, huskies, that he loved like they were his family. He was a genius engineer. Intensely talented. He made everybody sound great. Through his mind and his mike placements, he could shape things. And his demos sounded like completed records. He was sort of odd, a little goofy-looking, very sincere, not much of a hipster, probably a kid who had grown up taking apart Wurlitzer theater organs. Very anal retentive. In the studio he was fastidious beyond belief about how he wanted to do things, and he talked about it all the way: "I want to do this, I want to do that." Most people reserve a lot for the mix: "It'll really sound great when we mix it," and then you play this game, Beat The Demo. But John right there in the session could make it sound fantastic. He could hear it all at once.
BOB ZACHARY: He used to say, "Watch my hands, when you see them starting to sweat, we are only a take or two away from the best take."
JACKSON BROWNE: John was neurotic as hell, with little tics. "I've got a bladder the size of a walnut," he would say, and go to the bathroom. One time he nearly cut my thumb off in the middle of recording. He was doing an edit, he had the razor in his hand, I was reaching for a book of matches, and he thought I was going to step on the loops of tape cascaded onto the floor waiting for him to take up onto another reel. He screamed, "LOOK OUT!"-and he did like an umpire's safe motion with his hand and cut me right across the thumb, and the blood poured out, blub-blub-blub.
NED DOHENY: I met John on Ridpath too. We were all crashing on that street, in every sense of the word. The Incredible String Band was there. Gentle Soul. And Nico, talking about Dr. Hoffman on his bicycle.
JUDY JAMES: Around Ridpath was always an alternative area, with dirt roads, fire roads.
JAC: I remember someone saying the streets looked like they had been laid out by earthworms.
JUDY JAMES: It had gotten rundown and cheap before us, a lot of garages turned into one-room thises and thats, so there were always actors and musicians. There was a sense of hanging-outness, of finding out what was going on in the music business if you walked up and down Ridpath.
JACKSON BROWNE: There was amazing tribal life. There were houses supported by record companies, groups living with an account at the health food store.
JAC: Billy James' mailbox had listings for twenty groups, plus companies and artists.
JACKSON BROWNE: Billy was my manager, and he ran the Elektra office for a while. Sort of a hipster cat, something like a dancer. And he was very funny, very smart. Like somewhere in between a James Dean and a Mort Sahl. He was older than us, must have been in his thirties, but he was still one of us, he was a freak.
JUDY JAMES: No one owned furniture. People would be living on the floor, many of them on our floor. Runaways. Kids who were parentless. Groupies. This tremendous influx of kids from Orange County.
BILLY JAMES:
Penny Nichols stayed in the laundry room downstairs for a while. Jackson
slept over. Pamela Polland. Tim Buckley. Jimmy Spheeris, Greg Copeland,
Steve Noonan, wonderful writers. All coming out of Sunny Hills High, Orange
County. We were never alone. We had a dining room table made of three-quarter-inch
ply with two-by-four legs. Seated a lot of people. Ray Manzarek came to
dinner and told me it was the first time he had ever seen an artichoke.
Cass Elliott was living up the hill with Butchy. Tim Hardin was a couple
of doors up. Leonard Cohen came calling. Frank Zappa was on Kirkwood, which
is the street you take to get to Ridpath, and then he moved to a log cabin
at the corner of Laurel Canyon, with a bowling alley downstairs. Lots of
people lived in that house with Frank.
JOHN HAENY: Then there were Deering and Billy Howell, rich kids who liked to have stars around. They had a big house. We would head up there at midnight. David Crosby and Paul Rothchild and I ended up in the shower there with lots of Vitabath, which was very big in those days.
BARRY FRIEDMAN: And Jack the castle man, this guy who owned a bunch of castles. Different stars would rent them and move in with their entourage. They could make wonderful entrances down the stone staircases and they were good for practicing in and careening about on the parapets in various states of undress. I remember Nico with Jackson in tow coming down the stairs one day. That was quite a sight.
JACKSON BROWNE: Paul Rothchild lived on Ridpath too. Paul was like a superman. He knew about all sorts of things. He sat me down and had me listen to Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, long before the Doors recorded 'Alabama Song.' He drove a Porsche and wore a velour hat, a Borsalino. These were things that denoted one's station, these were the people who had made a fortune or were on the way to making a fortune.
FRITZ RICHMOND: Paul's main room was one of the nicest music listening rooms that anyone knew of in Hollywood, and because of that people would come by with their tapes. I had my juke box there, and people would come over to check out what things sounded like on the juke box. The Doors would come up for playbacks. And Janis Joplin. I would wake up in the morning and hear her cackling away downstairs. She had a unique laugh, that woman.
DAN ROTHCHILD: My father had a story about a couch that Fritz eventually donated to a rummage sale in Portland in 1989. Among those who sat on the couch were Janis Joplin and the Full Tilt Boogie Band, Jim Morrison, Ray Manzarek, Robby Krieger and John Densmore, Joni Mitchell, John Sebastian, David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash, Paul Butterfield, Glenn Frey, Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne, and another dozen butts of distinction. That couch should have great vibes.
JACKSON BROWNE: So there were interesting houses we could walk to. Or we would catch a ride to Peter Tork's house on Willow Glen. Peter had been a dishwasher at the Golden Bear in Huntington Beach and now he was a TV star, a Monkee. My friend Ned Doheny and I would say, "Let's go up to Peter's house, see what's going on." Sometimes you would walk in and there would be twelve girls in the pool, naked. And they were beautiful women, people of substance, not bimbos-not that we would have minded if they were bimbo s. One time Jimi Hendrix was up there jamming with Buddy Miles in the pool house, and Peter's girlfriend was playing the drums, naked. She was gorgeous, like a Varga girl is gorgeous, this physically flawless creature. She looked like the drawings of Indian maidens that they airbrush on motorcycle tanks. I don't think she was as good a drummer as she was an object of desire, but she was something. Barry Friedman was on Ridpath too, about a block from Billy James, two blocks from Paul Rothchild.
JUDY JAMES: Once, Barry phoned everyone and got us all to drop the needle on the new Stones album at exactly the same moment, so that the canyon would echo with music.
BARRY FRIEDMAN: One night it was full moon, we're all sitting around in various states of decomposure, and a voice is heard echoing over the canyon, "This is God speaking. I have a message for you." And He gave His message. Well, thousands of people throughout the canyon were somewhat freaked by this experience and talked about it for days. It turned out it was Barry McGuire, the 'Eve Of Destruction' guy, who had set up this huge sound system, I think at the Mamas and Papas' house up at the top of Lookout, and blasted this diatribe to the stoned minions below.
"Follow the Music" is the must-read story of Elektra records, as told by its founder Jac Holzman and the artists and staff of one of America's legendary record companies. (441 pages, softcover, 140 illustrations) Order today from this site and from Amazon.com
Copyright 1998 by Jac Holzman and Gavan Daws. All rights reserved.