Stuff You Don't Know
About the 60s
About the Book
Back to Top of Page
Back to Home Page
Back to Top of Page
Back to Home Page
Gavan
Daws on Follow The Music
I get to say a few words up front.
Jac Holzman started his own record company when he was all of nineteen. His total assets amounted to a handful of dollars, a brain fizzing with ideas, and a heart pumping with naive late-teenage hope. He christened his label Elektra. The first album he produced sold a swift zero copies, the second a few hundred over twelve months. Not great numbers. But Jac kept at it, Elektra survived, and the rest is, as they say, history. Twenty years later, Jac had brought five hundred albums into being. He built the hippest, most advanced studio in the known world, its walls lined with gold and platinum records. More than a hundred people were working with him out of offices in New York, Los Angeles, and London; and Elektra's reputation was global.
Elektra was Jac's reason for being, his work and his play, his professional and personal garden of delights. It gave him a box seat on life.
He saw, close up, the United States going through its amazing cultural transformation from the Fifties to the Sixties. Music was the beating heart of that change: from acoustic to electric, from folk to rock, from "protest" songs to the music of the late Sixties, when for the first time a popular art form had become a universal medium of expressive yearning for a whole generation-making it possible to believe, as one young American put it, that if you sang long enough and loud enough you could change the world. Millions believed; and at Elektra, Jac was leading the chorus and turning up the volume. In the creative social turmoil of the times, Jac Holzman was a significant agent of change.
Jac was a player. For him the sport and pastime of watching the great procession of American pop culture winding from coast to coast, New York to LA, Greenwich Village to the Sunset Strip, was an endless fascination, and Elektra was a prime place to be, a sweet spot. Andy Warhol, at exactly the seven and a half-minute mark of his own fifteen minutes, was more than pleased to be invited to Jac's party. And any number of others, from the justifiably celebrated to the obsessively heat-seeking, to the notoriously scabby and worse, were attracted to the radiance of Elektra on their way to finding their own place in the sun: from Harrison Ford when he was a journeyman carpenter to Jann Wenner as he was setting out to become Mr. Rolling Stone; David Geffen before he was even the babiest of moguls; Marlon Brando as a fan of bizarre sound effects; Jackson Browne, teenage troubadour; Iggy Stooge, premature father of punk; Jim Morrison, rock icon, darkly romantic, lethally intelligent, forever testing the locks on the cage doors of American cultural and sexual taboos; Nico, an apparition, a disapparition, a naked dancer, a waver of guns, a death-talker; and a wannabe guitar player named Charles Manson, casing Elektra just weeks before he announced to the world his true vocation. And a cast of hundreds more . . .
How to get down on paper those years in all their richness? When Jac and I first talked about trying, we weren't sure we would be able to recover the substance, the style, and the flavor of those lives and those times. The Fifties have been gone long enough to seem almost a different world-the past as another country. And of course there is the famous one-liner that if you remember the Sixties you weren't there. (Who said that? David Crosby? I don't remember.)
Jac does remember, though. He and I spent uncounted hours together over a period of more than three years, Jac talking, me listening and asking questions, with the tape recorder running. But we made an early decision not to do the book as a first-person "as told to." For my money, and Jac's too, that kind of celeb autobio is a bastard art form, and neither of us has any interest in fathering yet another such literary illegitimacy upon the world. On his own, Jac fired up the word-processing program and labored endlessly to make sure of saying exactly what he meant, exactly the way it needed to be said. And when I went out to do reconnaissance among others who were there, what I came back with was wonderful: the uproarious sound of life as it was lived, harmonies and discordancies, the rich and complex music of memory. Such a range of recall, and such different takes on experience, in so many distinctive voices-Rashomon in stereo. It was a natural choice to arrange and orchestrate the book so as to give full play to all these tonalities, people speaking for themselves, with Jac's voice soloing over the chorus.
At Elektra, any number of interesting things happened while Jac was out of the room. But in or out of the room, Jac was the dominating presence, an object of fascinated study and endless discussion. All testify to that, and with reason. Professionally, there had been no one before in the record industry (and there has been no one since) with his outstanding combination of business smarts, technical expertise, vision, and pure intelligence, all put passionately at the service of music. The greatest American record men agree on this. In personal terms, of course everyone sees Jac from the particular angle of his or her own vision. And Jac, for his part, knows that he does not see himself as others see him. He has been more than willing to allow others-Elektra artists and staffers, friends, lovers, competitors, adversaries, everyone-full candor in what they say about him. The portrait of Jac Holzman in these pages is imperfections-and-all, and the more true and human for that.
We see him stumbling from his late teens into his twenties, gaining his footing, striding through his thirties into his early forties. He had to thread his way through minefields of power plays and mazes of elaborate pretense. He had to learn to deal with sensitive artists and sellouts, to detect and deflect opportunists, and to appreciate loyalty. He met with triumphs, and with disasters, some of his own making. He lost his way and found it again. And-central to his life and being-he was present at the creation of some of the most remarkable music of his remarkable times.
Would he have predicted any of this? Not for a moment. The next voice you hear will be Jac, recounting his awkward and unpromising beginnings, his first steps on the road to Elektra . . .
GAVAN DAWS
GAVAN DAWS and Jac have been friends for more than twenty-five years. Daws first heard of Elektra Records when he was hanging out in beatnik coffee houses, on the cusp of hippiedom. The mature and responsible Daws still has a shelf of vintage Elektra LPs in the living room of the home that he shares with his wife in Honolulu. His ten previous books include the best-selling history of Hawaii, Shoal of Time; and his documentary films about the Pacific have won awards internationally.
Gavan's most recent book, prior to Follow the Music, is an in depth study of English, American, Dutch, Australian and other prisoners held by Japan during World War II. Titled Prisoners of the Japanese (published by William Morrow & Company, 462 pages) the book was an enormous success and has gone through numerous printings.
COPYRIGHT ©1998 BY JAC HOLZMAN AND GAVAN DAWS