Chapter 1

JAC: St. John's was never a big college, and in the fall of 1948 it could not have been much smaller. The student body was a strange mix of dedicated bookworms, intellectual dilettantes, World War II veterans on the GI Bill, parental escapees, and a sprinkling of well-off, mentally undernourished preppies with grades so indifferent that only a St. John's could see any possibility of redemption.The curriculum was organized around the Great Books of Western civilization, the Top 100 classics. My only connection with great books had been a dumb devotion to Classic Comics, which I read for the stories. I did not know that the glory of the classics was ideas. Heavy on philosophy, the well-reasoned argument, the elegance of language, subtlety of expression, the symmetry of music and mathematics, St. John's opened my eyes and mind. There were no electives; we all studied the same material. We wore jeans during tutorials, but the ritual of the Friday night lecture and the twice-weekly seminar commanded higher respect, so ties were sponged and the dust shaken from sports coats that had never seen a dry cleaner. We argued over Aristotle, Plato, Herodotus, Dante, Newton, Descartes, Kant . . . I was plunged in at the deep end, simultaneously attracted and overwhelmed.

The other overwhelming attraction of St. John's was an electronics lab, a quonset hut crammed with army surplus. For me it was a personal Cortland Street. I would hang out for hours, exploring the possibilities and permutations of oscillators and amplifiers, power supplies, test and measurement equipment, exciters. I was in love with that stuff. I could get lost in the lab, in reverie, fondling the odd shapes and making my ideas work.

JAC: Down the hall from me in the dorm was Bob Sacks. Bob was bright, with an educated musical intelligence and a wonderful record collection. He also had cerebral palsy, which occasionally made it difficult for him to position those breakable shellac 78s on the thin metal spindle of his changer. Usually Bob managed fine, but sometimes I might hear an extended screech like a cat being run over—Bob trying to get his changer going. He would call for me, tell me what he wanted played and in what sequence, and I would sort and load the records.

Bob's dorm room was where I first really listened to and really heard folk music. Burl Ives and his unrelenting 'Blue Tail Fly.' John Jacob Niles, a channeler of the purest Anglo-American ballad tradition, who played dulcimer and gushed his songs in a thin high voice that sounded like the cry of an electronic theremin, if a theremin could sing. Susan Reed, an art singer with a silky voice kissed by Irish mist. Richard Dyer-Bennet, a troubadour who sang the classic English ballads accompanied by his own very elegant guitar. Woody Guthrie, the American wanderer, socially conscious, wary-eyed, feeling injustices, chronicling them in human outrage, yet sensitively, and always in love with the immensity and potential of his country. Josh White, a black man who had earned his right to sing the blues the hard way and had become an interpreter with tremendous guitar technique. And Huddie Ledbetter, Leadbelly, another black man, jailed for murder but given early parole from a state prison farm by an about-to-retire governor who just happened to like his singing. I never heard this kind of music at home, or anywhere in New York, and I quickly fell in love with the simple directness of melodies and words.

JAC: I don't know when the idea of starting a record company first hit me, but it was moved along in the early fall of 1950, when the soprano Georgianna Bannister performed a lieder recital at St. John's featuring new musical settings of poems by Rilke, Hölderlin, and e.e. cummings, accompanied by the composer, John Gruen. Bannister had a nicely rounded, muscular voice, and Gruen's architectural and very apt musical settings struck me as worth recording. So without thinking much about it, and with an impulsiveness that was to become characteristic, I simply asked them to record for a label that existed only in my mind—a label without a name, experience, distribution, and until I raided my bar mitzvah bank account, no money.

Being a genetic loner, I wanted to avoid partners, but with only three hundred dollars to launch this venture I asked Paul Rickolt—a classmate who was a few years older, had served on an LST in the navy, was a nice guy and who didn't have a whole lot else to do—to put up his three-hundred-dollar veteran's bonus as matching money.

October 10, 1950 is the date on which Elektra became real for me. School had started in late September. I was in my junior year, slogging through the middle of the Hundred Great Books and simultaneously looking for a label name. I recalled a Greek demi-goddess, one of the Pleiades, who presided over the artistic muses: Electra. Electra with a C struck me as too soft. I had always admired the use of Ks as brackets in the Kodak trademark; I liked their solid bite. So I chose a Germanic form and substituted K for C. Much better. Unable to afford special graphics, much less a logo, I turned two Ms on their side to create a distinctive E for the label and the jacket logo.

When I was working for my Uncle Saul in Cincinnati, he said, "If you ever have a company of your own, pick a name early in the alphabet." He himself did business as Cincinnati Waste Materials. Not too clever but very practical. Why? "Because invoices are most often processed alphabetically, so your chances of getting paid are much better." A lesson worth remembering. Elektra was safely in the first twenty percent of the alphabet.

I was in business, or at least I had a business identity, so I went looking for an off-campus mailing address. Wally of Wally's Tobacco Shop on Maryland Avenue in Annapolis was student-friendly. In exchange for a free copy of the inaugural Elektra album (still no more than a gleam in my imagination) he allowed me to place a discreet sign in his window.

In December 1950 I recorded "New Songs By John Gruen" in one three-hour session at Peter Bartók's small studio in New York. Peter was the son of the composer Béla Bartók and one of the most instinctively ingenious engineers I have ever known. Even the term "engineer" seems too confining. Peter paid scant attention to what was written on the science of recording and, except for the immutable laws of physics, conjured his own rules and constructed his own equipment to standards so exacting no one could afford to manufacture his elegant designs.

We recorded directly onto tape, without the interposition of mixing consoles or equalization, just two mikes, astutely placed, feeding the tape recorder direct, a technique which thirty years later would be resurrected and hailed as organic.

I sequenced the songs and took the tapes to Marjorie Tahaney of RCA Records to be mastered and custom-pressed. The first test pressings arrived the following February. Not knowing any better, I had trusted the prestigious RCA to get it right. But the sound was a mess, thin, with very low level, the music barely audible above the surface noise. RCA, wearing its cloak of corporate infallibility, insisted that the pressings matched the level of their calibration disc. "No," argued I, and borrowing a friend's car, drove five hours through a bitter winter night to RCA's studios in New York to supervise another transfer. This time I brought a Scott pre-amplifier, which had a wide variety of equalization, compression and companding controls, and inserted it into the recording chain between the tape recorder output and the mastering amplifier to achieve a warmer, fuller sound. It worked.

On a wet and wintry March day in 1951, EKLP-1 arrived at St. John's in twenty damp boxes of twenty-five LP records each. They were hefted up to the third floor of my dorm and piled into an empty adjacent room which became my shipping department. I felt as if I had just given birth, both thrilled and fearful.

There was no how-to book for running a record company. I'd just have to figure it out. Immediately I contracted with Jay Wesley Smith, a "national distributor." Jay Wesley took a hundred albums and demanded fifty more for "promotion." I later learned that what he meant by national distribution was that he would take an additional discount of twenty percent and resell his inventory to his distribution buddies in other parts of the country. Hmmm. I could have done that if I had his list.

"New Songs" received fine reviews in little-read music publications, but it sold fewer than the hundred "bought" by Jay Wesley. Evidently the combination of oblique poetry set to avant-garde music by a new composer and sung by an unknown soprano on an absolutely unheard-of label needed rethinking.

Of the original six-hundred-dollar investment, five hundred dollars was gone, and then Jay Wesley returned a hundred records for which I had to credit him. Whatever records he sold came out of his promotional stash. Here was a lesson to remember: it was possible to get back more records than you sold.

By the fall of 1951 I was at a decision point. Elektra was smelling like a failure. I could stay in college and not deal with it, but having tasted the joys of working on a project of my own, I did not want to remain in school. I could leave and get a regular job. That was something I could never see myself putting up with. Or I could regroup and try again. And this is where the genius of the St. John's program made the decision for me.

At the end of three years an "enabling exam" was required, to confirm that the student had absorbed enough to be enabled to move on to the fourth and final year. I had read three-quarters of the Great Books, but I was notoriously absent from lectures, seminars, and tutorials, much of that time having been spent experimenting in the quonset hut. I devoted a month to boning up, and passed by the merest smidge.

The acting dean, Dr. Jacob Klein, a well-regarded philosopher, summoned me into his office on a day grey with rain and misery, the kind of weather of the soul which can move people to kill themselves if they are at all so inclined. Dr. Klein's "suggestion" was that I take a year to get my bearings, then decide if I wanted to come back for my senior year.

I agreed. But what would my parents say? Especially my father: he had been an exemplary student and frequently reminded me of that fact. I asked Dr. Klein to call my grandparents, Estelle and Max, and explain the situation. Estelle told me later that Dr. Klein thought I had some kind of genius but no tolerance for or interest in anything not of my own choosing. An accurate assessment. I then gratefully let Estelle and Max explain to my parents, who wondered, in the way of parents, what was to become of me.

JAC: I moved back to New York with my books and an avalanche of LPs, to camp out temporarily and uncomfortably under my parents' roof on the Upper East Side.

Greenwich Village was the symbol of free living and free loving. I longed to live there. I walked the narrow streets, some of cobblestone, and found a room for five dollars a week in a walkup at 40 Grove Street in the residential part of the West Village.

Estelle, who had been supportive of all my choices, came unglued. "You are going to leave your parents' house?" she said in old-world disbelief. To her it seemed a major mistake, leaving me nothing to fall back on, but that was exactly what I wanted: no outs.

My weekly five dollars entitled me to one of five small rooms on the fifth and top floor, less than two hundred square feet of rotting wood and cracked plaster, with a single black Fifties sling chair butting up against a well-worn bed that I sprayed repeatedly to ward off all sorts of bugs, real and imagined, and a grungy shared bath that required major disinfecting every time I used the tub. I installed extra door locks, scoured the place down, put together book cases from boards and glass blocks, and painted the walls—I was now entering my dark period, so I slathered on a semi-gloss battleship grey.

At nineteen, I was, at last, living on my own, in the heart of the Village. I was thrilled.

But how was I going to live? What did I know about business? Not nearly as much as I didn't know. Still, I knew I loved music, was an early member of the Audio Engineering Society, and a facile electronic tinkerer. There were other people like me, and they were inventing high-fidelity sound, puttering around in little store fronts trying to improve the breed with new amplifiers, better tuners and odd speaker designs. I created some small cash flow for myself by designing and building the earliest compact bookshelf speaker with a tiny ducted labyrinth, and assembling full-on systems for a very tiny roster of particular clients, some of them friends of the family. I survived.

From a broader perspective, it was clear to me that the convergence of early hi-fi, the rapid refinement of the tape recorder, and the LP album—long-playing, and unbreakable too—were going to change the way we listened to music. The concert hall and live performance had been the ideal, but as people slowly transitioned to listening in their homes they began to pay closer attention to the quality of sound. As the recordings improved, more listeners were attracted. The availability of static-free FM radio in the early Fifties, and stereo discs in 1957, were part of an ongoing line of evolution that continued over the horizon. Already I could see—the view from five flights up on Grove Street—the dawning of an opportunity. As the Chinese political philosophers might have said, the hegemony of the major labels could be broken.

This was not my vision alone, but also of several hundred other people who decided to start their own personal record companies almost at the same time, and for the same reasons. It was truly a revolution of the musically undernourished and disenfranchised. They could not find what they wanted on the major labels and so created it themselves.

Atlantic was begun by Ahmet Ertegun out of his deep devotion to jazz and blues. (By coincidence Ahmet was a St. John's boy, seven years before my time—and he graduated.) At Vanguard, Maynard and Seymour Solomon's primary interest was classical. There were tiny folk labels: Tradition, Riverside, and Moses Asch's Folkways, which was very ethnically oriented, very esoteric, with a small but ferociously loyal audience.

I adored both classical and folk, but decided to avoid the classical repertoire because of the large-scale musical forces involved, and because there was no chance of exclusivity on a Haydn symphony or a Beethoven sonata. I was much more comfortable with folk music. It fitted my one-to-one approach and my almost nonexistent budget. The equipment and recording techniques were straightforward, mistakes would not be catastrophic, and I could create a label with a stylistic niche.

In those years we independents made it up as we went along. The sense of shared risk took the edge off natural competitiveness and made for camaraderie. We would exchange horror stories and grumble over dinner. We traded information and experience freely, about recording equipment, acoustically good halls, the best distributors, what dealers were up and coming, and most important, who was not paying their bills. There were advantages to knowing what everybody was doing. We helped each other because whenever one was successful, it made it easier for all—it showed what the independent labels could do.

It was a benign, fun kind of business to be starting out in. The innocence was sweet, the pace agreeable. There was nothing cutthroat about it. You were only struggling to keep your own head above water, not to push the other guy under. People treated you honestly; you treated them with similar consideration. Everyone cared deeply about what they were doing, and as a secondary consideration you might even be able to make a living.

JAC: One day I ambled into a sheet music store at 189 West 10th Street, next to an archetypal Chinese laundry where you could get shirts done for a quarter. The sheet music lady wasn't doing very well. I convinced her that to attract customers she needed records. I had a few hundred dollars, and I bought a startup inventory. After two months during which her sheet music still didn't sell, I took over the lease—very inexpensive, a hundred dollars a month, and re-named my store the Record Loft. It wasn't a loft, it was at street level, but Loft sounded folksy.

The designer look I gave the place was Salvation Army Living Room, with a few chairs, and oak tables against the walls stacked with wooden bins of LPs. In back was a little curtained-off area with a sink, a drawing board for a table, and a hopeful cigar box for attracting cash. Across the front window I stretched chicken wire to display record jackets, and I showcased my Elektra E, the M turned on its side. Instead of conventional business cards I printed record labels with all the pertinent information. If a customer wanted to audition an album I would play it on my store system: a Rek-O-Kut turntable with a Pickering arm and a GE variable reluctance cartridge, an Electronic Workshop pre-amp, a McIntosh 250-watt power amp that came in two very heavy metal cases with tubes sizzling on top, and an infinite baffle speaker system, huge, about twice the size of a late-twentieth-century Sub-Zero refrigerator. In 1951 that added up to about fifteen hundred dollars worth of serious equipment.

With five thousand dollars you could have bought me out of everything, and my suppliers would have been thrilled, since much of the time I was living off the cash from their inventory, buying my records on thirty-day open terms.

My stock was less than a thousand albums, perhaps four hundred folk titles, the rest baroque and what these days would be called world music: African rhythms, Indian music, and Flamenco, to which I was powerfully attracted. Both Flamenco and Indian were indigenous musics with a rich tradition, classical precision, and dramatic intensity. My Flamenco titles came from the Westminster catalog. Most of my folk titles were from Moses Asch at Folkways, with a smattering from other independent labels.

The Record Loft was open seven days, and my plan was to clear enough each day to meet my nut and have enough left over for a meal and a movie. Rent and electricity averaged five to six dollars a day, so twenty dollars would cover necessities and anything over that a few indulgences.

People came into the Record Loft as much to talk as to buy, and that was one of my first big lessons in business: Listen to your customers. They were mostly white, teachers, social workers, students, bohemians, a leftish fringe, and professionals living in the Village. The Village was an appealing walking area, and people would come from all over the city for a taste of bohemia.

One very rainy night, I saw two eyes boring in through the chicken wire of my front window. It was a black man, clearly drenched. I invited him in out of the wet. We sat and talked. He was a jazz musician, charming company, and the soul of politeness. He was playing at the Village Vanguard, just a few blocks away. He played uptown too. Then he told me his name: Charlie Parker.

JAC: Sooner or later everyone in the very narrow world of city folkdom came into the store, singers, guitar players, collectors, aficionados like George Pickow, a photographer, whose wife was from a family of Kentucky mountain singers. Ken Goldstein dropped by, and that was the start of a long friendship. Ken was far more knowledgeable than I about traditional folk music—he knew all the Folkways titles, advised me to get an index of the Library of Congress collections, and generally pointed me in useful directions.

GEORGE PICKOW: Ken used to hang around Jac's store and give him information. He was an accountant, and he saw folk music in an accountant's way. He knew the number of every song in the Child collection of folk ballads. It used to amuse me that the two of them would chat in numbers. "Oh, Child '793.'" "No, '792.'"

JAC: Edward Tatnall Canby was another fascinating character and a strong influence. He was the son of Henry Seidel Canby, founder of the Saturday Review of Literature. Ed was an early hi-fi enthusiast, rare in that he understood and was thrilled by new technology but always in the service of music. He wrote an article for Audio Engineering magazine titled Binaural Rats, analyzing problems inherent in two-channel recording—what was eventually to become stereo. It was a knockout, prescient piece. Ed and I became friends and I learned a great deal from him about broadcasting and recording technique. In 1951 I offered him a chance to buy into Elektra. He turned me down. Years later he said it was the stupidest thing he had ever done.

My meeting with Ed, following on my enjoyment of Bob Sacks's folk music collection at St. John's, pointed me toward my first folk record, my second release: "Jean Ritchie Singing Traditional Songs of Her Kentucky Mountain Family." Jean was George Pickow's wife.

GEORGE PICKOW: Canby wasn't really interested in folk music. His interest was totally classical. He just felt that what Jean did was, in a way, classical.

JEAN RITCHIE: I was born in the Cumberland Mountains, at Viper, Kentucky. We were kind of shut away there in the hills, didn't have much of the outside world coming in. Music was something you did, like walking and talking and breathing and working. There were no instruments, even, for a while; people just sang, and maybe made music with their clapping or patting their foot or dancing. When Mom and Dad were little, they did everything by singing. When I came along there were fiddles and dulcimers and banjoes.First talking machine we ever had, my dad sent away to a mail order company. And then he had to take a mule and wagon and go about sixty miles to the nearest freight office and pick it up. Along the way home he'd stop at people's places and stay the night, and to pay for his lodging he'd play them some music on the talking machine. It was one of those record players with a big horn in front, and you cranked it up. They'd all run around, look behind, to see what was making the sounds. They all thought there must be a little man in there making music.

PAUL RICKOLT: Ed Canby got Jac together with Jean, and we decided to bring out our second record. We each invested another two hundred dollars.

JEAN RITCHIE: We recorded most of it in Ed's living room, in his apartment on West 4th Street. His walls were full of records, and you know how heavy 78s can be. He kept saying, "Tread lightly, because my floor is very unsafe. One more record and the landlord is going to ask me to move out."

Ed was propping the mike on books and sometimes moving it back and forth to get the instrument and the voice. The funny thing was that the tape recorder was running slow. Jac corrected it somewhat, but never got it perfectly right, so I sound like I'm about twelve years old, very young and my voice very high, whereas it really was a little bit lower and more serene.

JAC: Total recording cost was about twenty dollars, for tape.

JEAN RITCHIE: I still have a copy of my contract with Jac. Two pages, five clauses. Jac is "a minor," represented by his guardian, his father. "The party of the second part"—me—"as self-accompanied singer will perform the folksongs before a recording machine and the party of the first part"—Elektra—"will provide such recording machine and studio including services for the recording, manufacturing and commercial distribution of such recorded songs." I got twenty-two cents per record sold and three copies free.

JAC: It was a ten-inch LP, a grand size I thought for albums of less than thirty-five minutes, which seems so short by current practice. George did the cover, and he drew an improved logo, yet still preserving my stylish E. The retail price was $4.45.

We were working now through a new distributor, Harry Lew, who was a bit more aggressive than Jay Wesley Smith. And we actually sold about a thousand units.

JEAN RITCHIE: When George and I went to England for a year, we sublet our apartment to Jac.

While we were away Jac wrote us several letters, typewritten, that I still have. "The apartment is in fine shape and shall be spic and span for your return. It has been so well cleaned that you will not recognize it ... Your record has received magnificent reviews and should do quite well. Our distribution is wider and we have sold about 600 so far. It will sell 2000 before it is through... By the time you return we shall have twelve LPs on the market, which will further solidify our status as a top-flight record manufacturer... Business at the Record Loft has steadily advanced. We are doing triple what we did last year at this same time. I have a weekly program on Folkmusic over WNYC. It's been going on since last November and has been very successful. I am writing articles; have been asked to teach at New School and am also working on an outline for a book. In addition I have written some technical articles that have been published ..."

Jac knew everything. He was the genius in the room, and you knew it at all times. Very young and green, smoking a pipe in order to look older. And pushy, a little bit. He wanted to get things done in a hurry, and he wanted to do a lot. He wanted the whole world to fall in for him. And it did. After a while.

We got to be very good friends, but you had to get by the first impression he made on you—here's a pompous person who knew everything. Once you got to know him you came to like him. But we all thought it was kind of funny, because he was a different personality than any other I had run into before.

Jac used to love to have me come and sit in his shop with my greyhound. We had a beautiful brindle that we named Lady Gay, after a ballad, and Jac said, "Come sit with your greyhound in my shop so that people will be impressed."

You know, the folk world was very small. We sort of helped to bring Jac into the scene. I introduced him to Frank Warner—

JAC:—At Peter Carbone's Village String Shop. If you sat there long enough, you could meet every person of any celebrity who ever played a guitar, from Carl Sandburg on.

ANNE WARNER: Frank walked in and this tall lanky young man was sitting there, and that's how he met Jac.

JAC: Frank was the traveling secretary of the railroad YMCAs. He and his wife, Anne, were diligent and talented collectors, mining the Appalachians for material, collecting hundreds of songs and variants.

ANNE WARNER: The first time Frank and I went into the mountains was 1938, and the first song we collected was 'Tom Dooley.' We learned it from Frank Profitt, and Frank—my Frank—put it on one of his Elektra recordings. He sang it across the country, because he did a great deal of traveling, and the Kingston Trio must have heard it.

JAC: The Kingston Trio released 'Tom Dooley' in 1958, at the beginning of the first wave of popular interest in folk music. It charted at Number 1, sold a million, and earned a gold record. We were years ahead of our time with it.

JEAN RITCHIE: Frank was from Alabama. A very fine man. Very ethical, very formal, dressed like a preacher does. But he was full of fun and a love of life. He could imitate any performer he ever heard, sing a song to sound just like that person. He would have big photo blowups of each person, he'd say the name and sit the photograph on the chair and say, "Charley will sing the song. Now, don't listen to me, listen to him."

Frank was like everybody's uncle. As soon as he took a liking to you, you were his friend for life. Anne was a very good cook. She was one of those women who would come into the kitchen and put on a great big apron and be there all day. She'd make old dishes from the South, and Jac loved it.

ANNE WARNER: When we met Jac he was living on Grove Street in a hole in the wall. We sort of adopted him. He spent a great deal of time with us. He usually came at dinner time, because he was very low on money.

NINA MERRICK: Anne made a dish called Brunswick stew that Jac was crazy about, an old Southern recipe, with chicken, originally with rabbit or squirrel, and corn, and Jac ate it up. Jac was very close to the Warners. He met them way before I met him, when he was sort of bumming around the Village, not getting on that well with his family, and they really became very emotionally supportive to him.

ANNE WARNER: My two sons were small. Jac would baby-sit for us, and the boys and he would wrestle, and it was great fun. He spent the night several times, went to bed by an open wood fire, and that was a new experience which he loved. He had his first traditional Christmas with us, because he hadn't been brought up with a real Christmas, and he was thrilled.

We were very devoted to him. We saw an awful lot of him for years. We always knew that he was bound for some kind of great career because he had all the earmarks. He was totally convinced that he was capable of doing anything he put his mind to. I said to him once, jokingly, "Do you think, Jac, there's anything you can't do?" And he considered it seriously and said, "No."

JAC: Frank's banjo head was graced with the signatures of the great folk singers and folklore preservationists. Years later, when he thought my accomplishments were sufficient to add my signature to those of Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie, and Alan Lomax, I signed and inwardly wept for the joy of being included, accepted, recognized.

JAC: I knew Susan Reed's voice from Bob Sacks' collection. She owned a shop a short walk from my place, on Greenwich Avenue, dealing in English and American antiques. Susan was in her thirties, with the rosy complexion of an Irish lass crowned with the most vibrant red hair. We talked about recording and she was willing to consider it, but she had previously been on Columbia, and it was emotionally difficult for her to move to a fledgling label. But no one else was asking her.

PAUL RICKOLT: Susan was a union musician, which meant we had to have a union contract. Jac wouldn't have anything to do with the union. He said, "You go." I walked in, and I felt like I was in the stevedores' hall, guys sitting around with their hats on, smoking big fat cigars: "Whatcha want, kid?"

JAC: We recorded in a small Village church in the evening, when the city quieted down. If traffic noises intruded we stopped and waited for the last tremor to fade away. Susan was easy and gracious to work with. Most songs were recorded in less than three takes. Total recording costs were under a hundred dollars, plus the church rental of fifty dollars, and we came away with astounding quality. Musically the record was like the finest crystal. The New York Times reviewer called it the best vocal recording he had ever heard—which was considerable acoustic bang for practically no bucks. I began to feel that I knew what I was doing.

JAC: Cynthia Gooding was the first artist I had a crush on. She was Amazon tall, dark-haired, slender, with long legs you could just die for. And piercingly intelligent.

JEAN RITCHIE: We met Cynthia through Bill Pressman, who took us to hear her in a little tiny hole in the wall in the Village. It was where Leadbelly used to sing. She was so tall her head touched the ceiling. Jac and Cynthia were a funny pair, both so long.

CYNTHIA GOODING: Jac wasn't half as attractive as he was later on. He used to be built like a conga, with the narrow part on top and the wider part in the middle. He looked not at all physical, like a sweet roll, and he shambled when he walked.

JAC: Cynthia was married to Hassan Ozbekkan, a Turk who was a strategic planner for General Electric. He beat me every time we played chess because he could think many more moves ahead. I hated to lose. I was so desperate to develop the skill that I took several months of formal training. Our games improved but I never did beat him.

CYNTHIA GOODING: Jac and Hassan got along very well because I don't think either of them thought what women had to say was terribly important. I don't think Jac would have recorded me except that my husband was a very good talker, and the two of them talked a lot. I think Jac liked what I sang but not necessarily what I said.

JEAN RITCHIE: Cynthia sang songs from different countries, but highly arranged and very elaborate. Great sort of flamenco licks on the guitar. She didn't sing them like a peasant, but they were ethnic songs to begin with. And she was very good as a singer.

MARK ABRAMSON: A commanding presence. Nothing prima donna about her, but very dignified. Later on I saw her at the Newport Folk Festival, which was always kind of bedlam and chaos, and when Cynthia performed everybody quieted down, like, "Oh, we'd better pay attention."

JAC: At parties the guitar would be passed around and some young girl would do a lovely little song, and Cynthia would look down the bridge of her very regal nose and say, "Well, that's sweet, dear."

CYNTHIA GOODING: Jac never really put me at ease, though he tried a lot. But I always trusted him when he recorded. He hears well. The artists really sounded like themselves, and that's saying a lot.

JEAN RITCHIE: Jac was a very good businessman even in those days, and very honorable. He consistently paid royalties on time. They weren't very much, but at least I'd get a little, and at least he gave accountings. If I didn't make anything, he'd send an accounting anyway. No one else did that.

Artists generally signed the agreements without question. In the case of a female artist, the husband might look the documents over. Rarely a lawyer—lawyers were not the growling gatekeepers they are today. Our relationship was always direct and with the artist and we insisted on keeping it that way. We put out solid records, the artists were paid, if not very much, and we were generous with free copies.

It was gloriously uncomplicated. The only big deal was the music.

PAUL RICKOLT: Our fifth record was "Voices of Haiti," from wire recordings that Maya Deren had made in Haiti. Maya was a famous avant-garde film maker. Her father was a Russian psychiatrist. She wrote "The Divine Horsemen," which is considered by many to be the best book ever written about Haitian voodoo. She was very striking looking—short, redheaded, long wiry hair. She ate at Simple Simon's in the Village, and I spoke to her there. I think she thought I was trying to make a pass. Then, seeing her a number of times, we got to know each other and she told me about her trip to Haiti and the recordings. And this led to our idea of bringing out a record.

The sessions with Maya were horrendous. Maya was a strong character and she could be very difficult. And she had all these voodoo things, supposedly. In the kitchen the light often wouldn't go on, and Maya would just snap her fingers and it would go on.

Everything had to be transferred from wire to tape, and the wire had a tendency to stretch. Jac souped things up a little bit, adjusting the bass and so on. We brought out the record, and people, including critics, thought it was high-fidelity.

We did things that we didn't know we couldn't do, we just went ahead and did them. And—we felt very adamantly about this—we made the very best recordings we knew how. Our recordings, compared to most, were ten times superior.

OSCAR BRAND: Jac has a very good ear. He knew when something didn't ring right, and he would say so. A lot of people would stay out of it—if the beat is wrong, well, that's folk music. But Jac brought requirements to recording. He wanted people to live up to high standards. Ergo, he got better recordings.

JAC: Life in the Fifties was not a constant rush. The fast lane hadn't been invented. But eating took valuable time away from work, so I decided that one well-balanced meal a day was enough. My refrigerator held the bachelor's minimum: the odd piece of fruit, cheese, crackers, fruit juice, milk, beer, week-old bread. I certainly didn't need coffee to get started in the morning, but I might grab some juice for breakfast. Around noon at the Pam Pam I ate my daily quarter-pound of grilled ground sirloin, with peas and a baked potato, and cobbler for dessert, pretty much the same thing every day, and I got out for under a buck, including the afternoon paper.

The most excitement in the air was the Army-McCarthy hearings on TV, centering on the publicity-hungry anti-communist witch-hunting Republican senator. My sense of fair play was deeply offended by McCarthy. So as not to miss a moment of him getting his, I would ride my bicycle to the office balancing my TV set under my arm. It was an old eight-inch Motorola which weighed about twenty-five pounds, but somehow I made it back and forth without once dropping it.

The McCarthy hearings had more inherent drama and were more compelling than anything on radio, a lot of which was Elvis Presley. My folk inclinations just did not include hip-swinging, yet-to-be-revered, neo-rock icons. I thought most rock and roll had nothing to say. It didn't seem like real music to me. I was in my head, and rock and roll totally missed my gut.

My day was defined and circumscribed by the Village. My friends were there, and most everything that was happening in my kind of music, or of any interest to me, occurred south of 14th Street, the Village's official northern boundary.

In 1952 I bought a motor scooter, which extended my range considerably. It was an early Vespa (meaning "wasp" in Italian), privately labeled for Sears. Mine was the first Vespa in New York, which meant problems getting it registered. I kept it chained outside my house, or I could wrestle it inside. One of its great blessings was that it could be parked anywhere, and it proved to be amazingly ticket-proof. Even the cops thought it was cute. It attracted so much attention that I printed a little information flyer giving detailed specs. Everyone wanted to know how fast it could go. Answer: with a gentle wind at your back, close to fifty miles per hour.

The tires were three-and-a-half inches thick, the legal minimum, just wide enough to get me over the bridges and through the tunnels. I rode it everywhere and in all kinds of weather. I would drive in the snow without chains, my thick boots a half inch above the pavement, sort of a protective outrigger balancing act if I were to skid or slide.

Most significantly, the Vespa extended my territory for going to the movies. Along with music, movies were all I cared about. They were still my primary connection to my emotions, and my life was calibrated to seeing as many as possible. I would go four or five times a week. I hated taking the bus anywhere, but especially up to the Thalia Theatre at 95th Street and Broadway, a tedious hundred blocks by city transport. With the Vespa, a hundred blocks was a song.

The Vespa was also a great dating vehicle. The lady could choose to ride sidesaddle or astride. Astride was less genteel but more promising. If a woman wouldn't mount the scooter, there was no future to the relationship—the young Holzman's elementary version of sexual triage. With the juices burbling, my priorities were Elektra, the movies, and getting laid. The ratio of movies to getting laid was about thirty to one.

I wasn't a drinker and certainly not a doper. Once in college I had gotten dead drunk and threw up so long and hard that my abdominal muscles cramped for days. My drinking stopped before I had really started. My bar-hopping around the Circle in the Square was mostly to pick up women, which was very tough to do in the Fifties, at least for me. There were women I'd meet, some who were customers of my record store. After I moved out of that cell-like walkup on Grove Street and sublet Jean Ritchie's apartment, I could bring them home without embarrassment—the place was neat, and I made the bed.

JAC: In 1954, with seven or eight records released, I decided to close the Record Loft and move Elektra around the corner to larger offices at 361 Bleecker Street. The shop plus the label was just too much, and I wanted to zero in on Elektra. In 1955 I bought out Paul Rickolt's interest for $1,000.

Financing expansion was a continuing problem. New releases were paying for themselves out of moderate sales but not much more. Elektra needed cash to grow. I talked another St. John's schoolmate, Leonard Ripley, into buying a piece of the company.

Over two years, Ripley invested $10,000. I was drawing a meager salary, a hundred dollars a week; Ripley, who was born to money, I think oil, was living off family largesse. He was a fun guy, debonair, with a bristling mustache, a dilettante in record land, ambling in and out of the office on his own schedule, always taking excellent care of his personal life.

Ripley (no one ever called him by his first name) had a natural flair for engineering and good musical ideas. It was Ripley who suggested we record the amazing Flamenco guitarist Sabicas. Sabicas had fingers so fast you could barely see them move for the blur. They galloped over the strings and riveting Flamenco poured into your ears.

Sabicas was distrustful of record companies ever paying royalties and insisted on receiving a flat sum, in cash—for his first album on Elektra it was $1,000, the largest advance we had ever paid. For the cover we did a photo of his hands in motion, a Gjon Mili time-lapse knockoff. The album sold wondrously well, so we recorded another. Sabicas could sell between fifteen and twenty thousand units, which was a bargain for us. If he had accepted royalties he would have earned four times his cash fee.

Ripley had gone to school at Le Rosey in Switzerland, an institution for the young royalty of Europe and America, and he was always jaunting back and forth to the Continent. In Paris he recorded two American expatriates, Gordon Heath and Lee Payant, who were the rage among Americans taking the hip summer tour to France. They performed at L'Abbaye, a semi-basement club on the Left Bank near St. Germain des Près. The local gendarmes had forbidden the audience to disturb the tenants upstairs with the noise of applause, so you snapped your fingers instead, which started that whole beatnik finger-snapping affectation. Heath and Payant were so popular that fans returning from France would leave the boat and cab directly to Elektra on Bleecker Street to pick up their commemorative copies of "An Evening at L'Abbaye."

After Ripley started working with me, a Parisian friend introduced him to a true belle of the old South. Mother and daughter go after Ripley. They get him to commit to the altar. The bride-to-be goes through his address book, sending out invitations, and discovers that Ripley is a former classmate of the Aga Khan. A florid postscript to the invitation urges the Aga to attend the ceremony. There is no response. As Ripley told me the story, three months later a call comes from US Customs: there is a package from a Mr. A. Kahn that must be picked up personally. So, with visions of her weight in diamonds, Ripley's wife sends him down to customs. Ripley is led to the Aga's wedding gift—a baby elephant, four hundred fifty pounds of the thought that counts. What to do? Send it back, what else? First the animal has to have its immunization shots, and then be crated and freighted, and on landfall Sabu must be hired to return it to the jungle. Years later the Ripleys are divorced, and years later again the ex-wife's Southern belle charm finds perfect financial and cultural expression: Alexandra Ripley writes "Scarlett," the sequel to "Gone with the Wind."

JEAN RITCHIE: The Village was a very exciting place. I used to go everywhere at night by myself, as a young girl, to the Country Dance Society, or to do a concert. I never had the slightest worry. A few of us used to go down into the subways and sing, because the acoustics were so good; we'd sing rounds and madrigals and things down there. And we'd have parties at each others' houses; all the people lived in lofts, you know.

OSCAR BRAND: That was the scene from the end of World War II, before Jac's time, when Leadbelly lived in the East Village, and Pete Seeger was living on MacDougal Street, and Lee Hays was staying with Will Geer, and Woody Guthrie was living on Coney Island but coming in all the time, usually not going home.

THEODORE BIKEL: Folkies would meet with cheap wine and beer and no eats, in smallish rooms, just large enough to have some elbow room so you could play a guitar or banjo, and most everybody played and sang. Sometimes there were people who neither played nor sang, and one wondered what they were doing there. Jac was one of those.

OSCAR BRAND: He was out of place in the folk scene. His looks, his language, his attire. He was definitely a WASP, even though we knew he wasn't—he was WASPish anyway. We were chipping at his exterior a lot, but there was always something different about Jac. My feeling was that he was always apart.

THEODORE BIKEL: Jac took me aside and said, "I think you're very charismatic. But I have no idea how much of what you do is visual and the impression of your personality. I make records, and personality has to translate itself only in sound and nothing else. Would you be willing to come to my apartment and do a tape of two or three songs? I'd like to play it for people who can't see you while you're singing and get their reaction."

It wasn't a career move for me at all. I was an actor, brought over here to do a Broadway play. I had always sung, in England, everywhere, but I'd never thought of wanting to make records, or making money from making records. America's a strange place—they won't tolerate your doing anything well without forcing you to accept money for it. But I was intrigued by the notion that what I did was so tied in with how I did it.

So I remember going to Jac's place, walking up all those flights of stairs, and recording some songs. Several weeks later he called me and said, "I played this tape for quite a few people and they're all very taken with you and would you like to make records?" I said, "What do you want to record, because I'm kind of eclectic in my taste and I know a lot of music of many countries and languages." He says, "Why don't we do a record of what you know best?" At that time Jewish music, Hebrew music, Israeli music was very big in the United States. There was a hunger for it, suddenly a market for it, he felt. And so we made an LP, ten-inch, "Folksongs of Israel," and it did very well indeed.

JAC: That was the beginning of a long and satisfying association with Theo who became a close friend, neighbor and star artist with his rich repertoire of unusual material in many languages. Theo was born and raised in Vienna, then moved to Palestine before World War II, studying drama. He was to become our principal musical—and financial—mainstay from 1956 to 1961.

JAC: In 1955 I flew to the West Coast to visit my distributors in San Francisco and Southern California. They were mom-and-pop at best, and I was planning to abandon so-called national distribution and sell to the regional independents directly. It would cut out the middleman profit and give us more direct control, and we needed both the improved marketing and the additional gross margin of about thirty cents per album to expand the label.

On my United Airlines flight to San Francisco one of the four prop engines caught fire, belching smoke into the cabin, and another began to sound asthmatic. Serious trouble. The priest next to me began fingering his beads at just under the speed of light. Mothers were running up and down the aisle lamenting, "I'll never see my baby again." From the cockpit, not a word.

We were twenty minutes from Denver. I sat staring at my watch as the second hand moved very s-l-o-w-l-y. We were far enough out that they had time to foam the runway. We jounced to an OK landing, but at that point I had serious problems with flying. I cashed in what was left of my ticket and took the train, a Vistadome streamliner where you could perch in a bubble top and view the world passing by, and at night curl up in a sleeper.

On that train I met a Catholic nun, a Maryknoll sister from New York State, transitioning to her new convent in Stockton, California. She was a bright and wise lady in her early thirties, and I was attracted to her wisdom and gravitas as well as to the fantasy aspect of nuns. We talked, shared a table in the dining car, and entered that zone of quick and deep intimacy, so easy when you know you will probably never see that person again.

Sister Anne (not her real name) had the bottom berth and I the top. In the middle of the night she thrust her head between the curtains and said she hadn't had a man in ten years and wasn't likely to have another, so I joined her. You don't make noisy love in a Pullman, but very quiet, very sweet love. And the next morning she was off the train before I awoke.

In San Francisco, my Uncle Dick took me aside and said, all mock-seriousness: "There are three things I want to tell you. One if a woman asks you and you like her at all, never say no. Two—don't ever talk about her afterwards." And here I've talked about Sister Anne. What was three? "Never eat brown gravy you haven't cooked yourself."

Aside from the train ride, the West Coast visit didn't amount to much. Musically, California was very sleepy except for pockets of contemporary jazz.

I took the plane home, white knuckles all the way. And for several years after I was too scared to fly.

CONTINUE TO NEXT CHAPTER