Chapter 3
Brando and the stereo car crash ... Flying solo ... A maid of constant sorrow
JAC: The year I bought the part of Elektra I didn't own, 1958, was also the year that we moved the company from 361 Bleecker Street to new and bigger offices at 110 West 14th Street, next to the Salvation Army. Some wag called it "The House That Theo Built."
We had managed to stay alive by fancy footwork through the kinds of problems that plague most small companies: inexperience, lack of marketing know-how, no credit rating, shortages of money, and a sawtooth revenue line. But I felt confident. Once I took full control, my sense of the possibilities expanded. We were selling more records, and we were selectively adding to our staff, now up to seven souls. We signed a five-year lease for five thousand square feet: three thousand for storage and shipping, the rest for offices. Record companies still stored and shipped their own records; they were not yet drop-shipped from the manufacturing facility.
Elektra now occupied the entire fourth floor of an old loft building. The main entrance was always locked at night, and tenants were given only one key, stamped DO NOT DUPLICATE. If we worked late and someone had to leave, they would walk downstairs with the key and re-lock the main door from the outside, and we would drop a fishing line with a hook and reel the key up again.
At 14th Street I had my first experience building a studio. My thought was to use it for solo artists or small groups of up to three musicians. With studios you design carefully and you pray. The space was too small to do very much, but we designed it as well as we could. No one was yet making mixing consoles for the record industry and the ones in use were mainly modified radio control room boards, so we commissioned a recording console with equalization, sliding level controls, plug in pre-amps, limiters and remote tape handling to be custom-built by Jan Syrjala. Now we could easily handle spoken word, voice-overs, sound effects, and overdubbing, such as it was in those days, which was very infrequent. The studio turned out to be less than successful for recording but very valuable as a mixdown and listening room. We hired our first fulltime engineer, David B. Jones—
MARK ABRAMSON:—The epitome of a techie. He was the one who hired me. I knew nothing. I spent the first week rewinding reel-to-reel tape. I hadn't met Jac, and then, the second week, in came this tall stooped person radiating energy.
After a while they took me on recording dates. We were going to record the Oranim Zabar Israeli Troupe in concert at Town Hall, and the biggest snowstorm of the year happened, the night before and all day. The streets were closed, you couldn't drive on them, but the subways were running, so David Jones and I, with two hand trucks, took all the equipment—and those Ampexes were heavy, the mixer and everything—and took the subway all the way to 42nd Street, and pulled them through these streets piled with snow. We were treading our way, tromping down the snow to get to Town Hall. We were sure that we would be the only ones there—we weren't even sure Oranim Zabar would show up. But they did, and they had a full house, and they were moved because everybody had come. It was a great recording, because everybody was so proud to have gotten there. The worst part was trundling everything back in the subway at two in the morning. But that was part of the fun.
Back at 14th Street we would listen to the tapes, and I started to learn how to edit and put things together in the studio. There were basically no record producers in those days. The engineer was essentially the producer, and everybody who was around listened. I started to do more and more of the editing and remixing. I had a knack for it. Somehow I could hear.
Jac was Production Supervisor. He was at the recording sessions. If we were talking about covers he was there. He was on the telephone. He was always part of everything that went on, with immense energy. I never felt him looking over my shoulder, but his energy was so nonstop—having a quiet moment with Jac was not something that was going to happen.
We started to get close when I started supervising recording sessions.
JAC: I spent a lot of time with Mark, teaching him tape editing, mike technique and a bit about acoustics. He had a natural musical and dramatic sense and absorbed the practical aspects of engineering rapidly. He was an artist himself, with an even temperament, able to get along very well with the artists, and he became a hybrid recording engineer/producer—our first.
JAC: Once we had the space, it was time to bring in Bill Harvey full-time, as art director. Our release schedule was based on the number of records that seemed worth doing, and that number was increasing. Bill had done fine work for us as a freelance, including the new logo which debuted on our first sampler. Graphics were becoming increasingly important, and I wanted consistency, speed and immediate input to artwork in process.
The first William S. Harvey cover EKLP-10
BILL HARVEY: The first time I came across Jac, it was back when he was still working in his record store. He was a strange dude, about six foot four, and I'm six foot two, and we were both skinny, and I didn't like tall skinny guys. He looked too much like me and I looked too much like him, and I thought, "I'm not going to get along with him."
He takes me to his apartment, which is one room, and he puts on a tape and plays the most god-awful music I ever heard: "O' Lovely Appearance of Death." I had never been subjected to this kind of music before. Everything a cappella, no guitar, just this girl, and she sang and sang, and I sat there for forty minutes, and it was July, he had a skylight in this room and the sun was pouring down, it was like five-thirty in the afternoon—you know the Village, sweat was pouring off me. Jac says, "It's exciting, isn't it? Can you do something with this?" I needed the money, I have kids, and it's fifty bucks. I said, "Well, let me work on it, you know."
In those days there was no such thing as four-color process for record covers. Everybody did one-color, two-color jobs. No photography, or very little, except at CBS and RCA; the little companies couldn't afford that. But "O' Lovely Appearance of Death" was a perfect black-and-white job—mostly black. So I did some very ghoulish-looking line drawing of a face with the eyes closed. And that's how I met Jac.
I did more covers for him. I was always paid on time. I could see there was a market here, and I seemed to have an ability to do something with this ten-inch square.
Any money I could make this way I could use, so I did some work for another record company. Jac found out about it. He said, "I want to take you to lunch." I said, "There's a very nice restaurant on Fifth Avenue, right around the corner from Fairchild where I work." Well, to see Jac go into a restaurant like that in those days, it was kind of funny. I think he found it hard. I mean, he usually ate standing up. But I figure, "What the hell, Jac, you're buying." We sit down, we have lunch, and suddenly he comes on with this tirade about the nerve I had, doing this work for this other company. I said, "Jac, you don't own me. I like working for you, everything's fine. But don't tell me who I can work for or who I can't. Besides, I've got three kids and another coming, I've got to get all the money I can." So nothing comes of it, and I went home and told my wife, "I think we just lost an account—Jac Holzman is very angry with me."
I still had some work to deliver to him, and I took it to 14th Street, and he presented me with a portable phonograph. I thought, "Gee, that's very nice of you, Jac. Obviously I didn't lose the account." A few months later I was delivering him a brochure and he said, "How would you like to come and work for me?" He gave me a big room for my studio and my art department, with a drawing board in the middle of it, and a chair, and art supplies, and a wastepaper basket. And we went to work.
JAC: Even through Elektra's expansion in the late Fifties I still longed for the simple life: make a good record, and if it sold enough to recoup costs and a bit more, use the bit more to go to the movies, and if there was a big enough bit more left over, make another good record.
Yet when I told Nina I was going to be a millionaire by thirty-five, I meant it. Part of me wanted to make money, the only scorecard of success my family recognized, and by saying the words out loud I was committed, strict timetable and all. I wanted desperately to succeed, but do it my way.
Day by day Elektra was surviving. Inch by inch we were moving forward; but in the driven part of me, inch by inch wasn't fast enough. To this day I am like a dog who throws his own stick. Chase the stick, grab it, then throw it again, chase it, grab it, throw it, chase it—each time faster, each time farther. And trying to be faster than the next dog.
I was moaning about my slow progress to Fred Hellerman, an original member of the Weavers and a close friend of Theo's and mine who had arranged some of Theo's biggest albums. Fred had a constructive cynicism wed to a Talmudic wisdom. His advice was to keep at it. "One of these days," he said, "you will be standing in the right place at the right time, and you're smart enough to recognize it." I badly wanted to believe him.
Dressing for success, fifties style
I was taking myself more seriously, dressing better—sports jacket, quite frequently a tie, a handkerchief tucked into my breast pocket. I didn't own many clothes, but I bought good ones, generally Brooks Brothers knockoffs.
I was spending more time at the office, out listening to artists three nights a week, and weekends there would be hootenannies. All other evenings I worked at home, in a sanctuary off the living room for my photographic, amateur radio and audio equipment, to which I would retire after dinner, listen to records, edit tapes and experiment with equipment, until it was time for bed.
The volume of work was turned up for everybody, not just myself. The gradient level at which Elektra people handled work always had to expand because the workload would get heavier and more was required of each of us. If your people are fragile and likely to buckle under pressure, find out early and replace them.
MARK ABRAMSON: Jac would write me memos about coming in to work on time in the morning.
BILL HARVEY: At the other end of the working day, it got later and later, to where I would be packing up trying to make the 7:30 home to my wife and family in the dark, and Jac would look at me as if I was betraying him.
MEL POSNER: I had a military obligation. They had a thing called Active Reserve. I was responsible for going to meetings in the evening once a week and then two weeks in the summer. I said to Jac, "I have to go away on my summer camp for the Army." He said, "That's fine. Have a nice time on your vacation." I said, "No, no, I have to go—" He said, "That's your vacation."
Early jazz release, "4 French Horns Plus Rhythm" EKL-134
JAC: By 1957 I had repackaged all my ten-inch LPs as twelve-inch. The record stores had revolted against the ten-inch album, complaining that it took just as much depth to store a ten-inch as a twelve-inch, and they didn't net as much money. I was a holdout. For folk music I preferred the compactness and the thirty-minute playing time of the ten-inch. I hated to see it go. The last Elektra ten-inch was released in 1955, Josh White's double-LP set, "The Story of John Henry."
When we re-packaged for twelve-inch, we either recorded additional material or combined two records, one on each side. Suddenly Cynthia Gooding had Mexican folk songs on one side and Spanish and Turkish songs on the other. New recordings were now conceived for twelve-inch, which was another animal entirely. With up to twenty-two minutes per side, more and better material was needed to give the album vector and shape. And more tunes demanded even greater care to assemble a program that worked dramatically and musically. Assuming twelve selections, the number of sequencing possibilities was in the millions.
I also experimented briefly with musical genres other than folk. In 1956 I became attracted to jazz and made some solid albums, with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, Herbie Mann, Anita Ellis, and "Hairy Jazz" with Shel Silverstein. Vanguard, on the other hand, contracted with John Hammond, a legendary jazz connoisseur, producer and concert promoter, to supervise their jazz series, superbly produced albums that just flew out the door. If you're going to do genre music, you have to know it cold. Although I enjoyed the free flow of the music and the collaborative back and forth between musicians, I recorded only six jazz albums because I didn't understand or love the music enough.
Moe Asch in his tiny Folkways Studio
JAC: In the early years my competition had been Moses Asch at Folkways. Moe resembled a rumpled Josef Stalin in build and facial structure, and his politics also leaned to the left. Moe considered me an upstart, an encroacher, but the Record Loft was a good customer, and eventually we became friends.
Folkways was headquartered on West 46th Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, across from a wonderful Mexican restaurant, Xochitl, easily the best in New York. Their combo platter was a work of art and you could make substitutions if you were a regular. Xochitl had been a favorite of my family for over twenty-five years and I was weaned on their molé. Moe and I would meet every few months for lunch to discuss the state of the business, which meant dissing just about everybody but ourselves.
Folkways was really just Moe and his associate, Marian Distler. They were devoted to the company and to each other and worked the kind of crazy hours we all did. Theirs was one of the world's great folk and ethnic music libraries.
In the early Fifties Moe issued a compilation by a filmmaker and folklorist named Harry Smith of three volumes of American Roots music titled "Anthology of American Folk Music—Ballads (vol.1), Social Music (vol.2) and Songs (vol.3)." Each of the two-record sets chronicled different tributaries of American music, from blues and hollers, to fiddle tunes and the Anglo-American ballad. These were "desert island discs." If you could have only three folk albums to listen to for the rest of your life (or until rescued) these were the ones with which to be marooned. Much of what would become ingrained and important in British and American pop music can be traced back to the material in Harry's Smith's soundings. I still treasure my original copies, dogeared and scratched as they are.
A Folkways album resembled no other. Rather than print individual sleeves they stockpiled a standard, very sturdy, pebbled jacket—blue, maroon or black—onto which Moe would hand-glue a modest descriptive label with photos, or graphics, sometimes commissioned from top-flight artists like Ben Shahn. It was a method of self-supplying "just-in-time" jacket inventory with minimal dollar outlay. The thoroughly researched Folkways booklets were inserted along with the disc and the album was complete. Except for his Pete Seeger records, Moe would press just a hundred at a time, and sell primarily to educational institutions, scholars, a select group of retailers or devoted collectors willing to pay $5.95 for a record of wedding dances from the Sudan.
Collectors would submit field recordings from their travels, and Moe would respond with a small check and then release the album. Or musicians would come by, and Moe would push some boxes aside and record direct onto his Presto disc recorder or his tape machine, pay them a very modest fee and off they would go.
OSCAR BRAND: At Folkways there wasn't much attention paid to record quality. I taped something for Moe on an Ampex 300 with a Telefunken microphone, one of the best, and I got good quality. When I got the record it sounded like a field recording made in Louisiana seventy years ago.
ED McCURDY: They used to say Moe mastered through a gravel filter. Jac was the first person who put folk songs and folk music on records of good quality.
JAC: As Elektra grew, my competition changed. In size and presence we had moved beyond Folkways, Tradition, and Riverside, and by the late Fifties we were nosing level with Vanguard.
Vanguard's offices were just down the block from Elektra on West 14th Street. They were a bigger label with more presence and larger facilities, a fully staffed and beautifully equipped engineering department, and considerably higher revenues. When the Weavers recorded a reunion concert in the early Fifties, Harold Leventhal offered the tapes first to Vanguard, and that was instant cachet for the label. They had classical cachet too, a fine series devoted to baroque and other classical music and the works of J.S. Bach on their Bach Guild series.
Vanguard was owned and operated by the Solomon brothers, Maynard and Seymour. Seymour was brash, emotional, with great enthusiasms. Maynard was more contained, exceptionally literate and somehow didn't seem to belong in the same play pen as the rest of us. Later he wrote elegant and authoritative biographies of Beethoven and Mozart.
I admired Maynard. He had taste, intellect, focus. And he was his own man. Seymour was the violinist of the family, but Maynard looked it, with a shock of hair like a Chia Pet that had sprouted wire. He was the first person I ever knew who wore sneakers with a suit and tie and made it look stylish. He was soft of speech and manner and I never felt the iron fist in the velvet glove, though I suspected it was there. His wife, Eve, was equally gentle and contained, and Maynard had a lovely, sweet way with her. Nina and I enjoyed going to dinner with them, and it was Maynard who in 1960 introduced us to Japanese cuisine, at the Kabuki restaurant near Wall Street.
I envied Maynard his range and his self-image. And Maynard might have wished for more of my energy and willingness to take risks. When I thought of it, and I did, we might have made a terrific team.
Yet deep down—in fact from the top down and the bottom up—I really didn't want a partner. Not Paul Rickolt, not Leonard Ripley, not even Maynard. One aspect of my solitary individual drive was to prove that I could succeed by my own efforts. And as my own boss, doing things my way, I would work my ass off.
Jac's first plane
JAC: Ever since my frightening experience on United in 1955 I had been wary of flying. If I was going to travel and build the company I had to get over the fear. In the summer of 1959 I took myself across the Hudson River to Teterboro airport in New Jersey and nervously signed up for ten basic flying lessons.
The instructor stuck my ears between a headset and helped me maneuver my long legs into the front seat of a Piper J-3 Cub, built of doped fabric over a frame of aluminum tubing held together by wires that seemed frighteningly fragile. The entire aircraft, without occupants, weighed just about a thousand pounds.
We called the tower on a very rudimentary aircraft radio, taxied out and took off, with me following the instructor's coordinated hand and foot movements on the controls. I was surprised at how little effort it took to guide the plane and soon I was so involved in the process of flying that my fear just vanished . . . as long as I was in control.
I learned that it took a lot to make a plane fall out of the sky. The instructor, having been briefed about my white-knuckle concerns, put the plane in slow flight, the nose pointed skyward, hanging on the prop. Then he intentionally stalled, pulling the stick back so that insufficient air was flowing smoothly over the wing and the lift was bled off. Kicking in a little rudder, we began to spin gently downward, in a maneuver that terrifies most fledgling pilots. A little opposite rudder to correct the spin and some gentle back pressure on the stick with the throttle simultaneously moving forward—and we were flying comfortably straight and level again. I wasn't scared. The airplane wanted to fly!
As I got further into flying, an interesting thing happened. I had been having stomach cramps from internalizing my problems. Elektra was coming up to its tenth birthday, I felt behind schedule in my ambition and I was running out of clarity. At first I thought it was an ulcer, but it turned out to be a severely spastic colon. I tried all kinds of drugs and nothing worked. After six weeks of flying twice a week, my internal body began to relax and my symptoms vanished.
I earned my private pilot's license in 1960, and that same day bought a Cessna 172, single-engine, four-place, high-wing, fixed-gear, new, for $10,700 cash. The moment it was delivered I took Nina up. We flew over the slow-moving midget autos crowded bumper to bumper, winging toward Montauk at the tip of Long Island, enjoyed a leisurely picnic, and returned home the same afternoon.
Jac's longer-range Beechcraft Debonair
Two years later, with 250 hours in my logbook, I was aching for a more complex aircraft, so I upgraded to a Beechcraft Debonair, high-performance, single-engine, low-wing, retractable gear, new, $26,000. I had it configured to my requirements, with a wing leveler autopilot and dual navigation and communications avionics.
If road traffic from the Village was light, it was only twenty-two minutes through the Lincoln Tunnel to Teterboro. From 1960 to 1962, I flew several days a week and left all my concerns on the ground while I enjoyed the freedom and fraternity of the air. In this plane I was to fly all over the United States.
Oscar Brand
JAC: In a funny way, my flight path crossed my recording path, by way of Oscar Brand.
ED McCURDY: Oscar and I were strange friends. He's not my favorite singer. He knows that. He called me up once and said, "Don't you think I'm singing better?" I said, "I hope so."
But we all owe Oscar a great deal. He has a filing system in his house, and an additional one in his brain, and if ever I want to know anything about a song, I call Oscar.
OSCAR BRAND: I had plenty of songs—folk songs, working songs, game songs, silly songs, political, bawdy, dirty.
I was on radio in New York, WNYC, every week, prime time on Sunday. I got letters from all over the world. I put out a book called "Singing Holidays for Children." When I got to Armed Services Day I had a Navy song, Army songs, Marine Corps songs, and I didn't have an Air Force song. So I wrote one, based on an old Army song.
I started getting sheets of songs from all over the country, all over the world. Fighter pilots, bomber pilots—"What, you never heard this?" or, "Interested in these songs?" One of the collections I got was about two hundred forty-six songs.
JAC:—'Save a Fighter Pilot's Ass,' 'Cigarettes and Sake,' inspired titles like that. And I decided to make the record.
OSCAR BRAND: We got six musicians I had worked with. No rehearsals, we just sat in the studio and did head arrangements.
JAC: We chuckled and charged our way through sixteen songs and recorded the entire album over three evenings.
OSCAR BRAND: For the cover, George Pickow put me in a studio, hung me from the ceiling. Then he had the idea of putting a bird on my cigarette holder, which meant my mouth kept drooping. He had me pouring champagne, and I'm a temperance man.
At that time I weighed about a hundred sixty-eight pounds. I just hung there, and after about six hours I started to settle, my ass sticking out, dumpy and fat, looking like a hundred ninety-two.
"The Wild Blue Yonder" EKS-7168
JAC: We called Oscar's album "The Wild Blue Yonder, Songs for a Fighting Air Force, Sung by Oscar Brand and the Roger Wilco Four," released it with a modest promotion to the AAFES (Army and Air Force Exchange Service, the PX) and. . . nothing happened.
Then one Monday morning as Mel and I were opening the mail we came upon a thick envelope from the AAFES. A bundle of papers in quintuplicate tumbled out with an order for ten thousand units. I was in shock. I called the AAFES office in Texas and cautiously asked, "Did you slip a zero or two? Is that a hundred or a thousand?"
Keenly amused, the AAFES told me what had happened. The staff had listened to our promotional sample record and decided it was perfect for their hundreds of PX locations. Starting in Texas, the album caught on at barbecues, in officers' clubs and enlisted men's beer halls. We had never received an order for ten thousand pieces of anything. We shipped them, cracked a bottle of champagne, and kept on shipping, by the thousands.
OSCAR BRAND: Jac said, "Let's do more." So we did a Navy album, then "Tell It to the Marines," and another Air Force album—
JAC:—And then we did them for civilians: golfers, skiers, boaters, sports car enthusiasts, you name it, we did it.
JIM DICKSON: Jac discovered that there weren't modern sound effects albums in stereo. He did the classic smart American thing: find a need and fill it.
JAC: We produced a set of thirteen LPs of freshly recorded sound effects. It was a first in 1960, the only encyclopedic library, and it became one of our most successful projects.
High-quality portable battery-operated stereo recorders were nonexistent, so we kluged our own, using a transportable, conventionally powered Ampex connected to a special inverter to operate from a duplicate set of car batteries. A young engineer named Mike Scott actually did most of the recording, from a list of sound effects I had developed over a dozen evenings of watching TV till my eyes ached, writing down every effect I heard and then prioritizing them. Boiling water, escaping steam, door buzzers, body falling down stairs, Good Humor truck, whip cracks, railroad crossing bell, sonar pings, shotgun blasts, heart beats, hospital waiting room, bank interior, lumber yard, building demolition, earthquake tremor, avalanche, strafing from low-flying fighter plane, Geiger counter, A-bomb. There were five hundred of them.
"Sound Effects" ... thirteen volumes in all
JIM DICKSON: I made several hundred dollars without leaving my house. Drill going through wood, drill going through metal, door closing, door opening, faucet running, faucet dripping. I could sit around the house, and Jac was paying five or ten bucks apiece for them.
JAC: One of the most spectacular—and popular—was our car crash. We drove to Long Island and slicked down an out-of-the-way dead-end street and repeatedly skidded a junker car. Then we hauled what was left to a junk yard where we spread a layer of old car parts under a huge magnetic crane. Our junker was lifted and dropped over and over, with metal clanking, glass shattering, and very important sounding destruction. The tape edit made it much bigger than life, and it was perennially licensed for TV and radio.
SUZANNE HELMS: Marlon Brando, for some reason, loved those sound effects. His secretary would call up and say, "OK, we need Volume 8." God knows what he did with them.
JAC: In time, we sold over a million units and there were no artist or publishing royalties to pay.
JIM DICKSON: Jac was very wise. It was a bonanza. It turned out they were a backbone of Elektra's financial stability during the folk period. It allowed him to do things that the other labels just couldn't afford.
"The Limeliters" EKS-7180
JAC: After a decade making records I enjoyed my first chart album, with the Limeliters—Lou Gottlieb, Alex Hassilev, and Glenn Yarbrough. Glenn had been at St. John's with me. When I bought my first decent tape recorder in 1949, Glenn's was the voice I used for experimentation, and later I had recorded him as a folk artist.
HERB COHEN: I knew Lou from San Francisco. And I had hired Alex and Glenn both to work at my club in LA, Cosmo Alley, and then when Lou called me to say he was looking to put together a group, I told him to come down and I introduced him to Glenn and Alex.
MEL POSNER: They came up with a folk album that had pop potential, more mainstream. Suddenly we were getting on the radio. The album sold fifty or sixty thousand, enough to get us on the charts—at the low end, but still . . .
Nina and Jac at Elektra's Tenth Anniversary Party
JAC: In October of 1960, on the tenth anniversary of Elektra, I bought Nina a pearl and gold necklace at Tiffany's and threw a party at the Maisonette Room of the St. Regis. We invited our artists, distributors, reviewers and the suppliers who had carried me for so many years. It was black tie, quite soigné, and I was given a lovely statuette of the Elektra logo. It was nervy to throw ourselves a party, but it had been an eventful ten years and the label was beginning to solidify. The party was by way of closing out one phase in anticipation of another.
JAC: I first heard of Judy Collins from Bob Gibson, an Elektra artist who was an uncanny judge of talent as well as a terrific guitar player and banjo picker. In 1959 Bob had introduced Joan Baez to the world at the Newport Folk Festival, not long after Paul Rothchild had seen her at Club 47 in Cambridge, still in her larval state. Paul's one-line take was: "Bare feet, three chords and a terrified attitude." By Newport, the chrysalis was unfolding; she was an instant sensation. Coming onstage with a brief introduction from Bob, Joan humbly and very smartly waited until everyone quieted down and then unleashed her astonishing voice in an a capella ballad. Albert Grossman snapped her up for representation and made a swift deal with Maynard Solomon at Vanguard. When the record was released Vanguard had difficulty pressing them fast enough. In 1960 Joan returned to the festival a star, ceremonially chauffeured in a hearse with motorcycle escort. Not having an artist as exquisite as Joan rankled me.
MARK ABRAMSON: Jac would say, "We'll find our own." And he did. I saw him do that several times over the years.
BOB GIBSON: I suggested to Jac that he listen to Judy and look at her very favorably. Because, good as Joan was, I thought Judy had more depth and life, and I told Jac so.
JAC: I listened to a tape of "The Great Silkie," pure folk, recorded at a coffee house in Denver, the Exodus, where Judy was a regular.
JUDY COLLINS: A funny little record.
JAC: Judy was still a step away from serious recording—promising but not ready. I saw her again in 1961 at the Village Gate and it was clear that she had made enormous progress.
JUDY COLLINS: The Solomon brothers and Harold Leventhal and Manny Greenhill and John Hammond were always around in the same places, Jac too, hearing the same music, talking with the same people. Everybody kind of knew everybody; this wasn't a huge group.
JAC: In the late Fifties and early Sixties there was still time to watch an artist evolve without rushing to sign them immediately. It was some months before I stepped up.
"A Maid of Constant Sorrow"
JUDY COLLINS: It was a dark and stormy night in the basement of the Village Gate, Art D'Lugoff's wonderful place. Jac loomed up, a tall, slender, attractive, very clearly businesslike man, put his hand on my arm, and said with absolute conviction, "Dear"—which he continues to call me even today—"you're ready to make your record." And I said, "What are you talking about?"
He seemed to know what he wanted, and he seemed to know what I was doing. But I didn't know him. And making records wasn't foremost on my mind. I was very involved in my own family situation, a personal life that was very different from the folk scene. I had a husband who was teaching literature, I had a baby, I had a life in Connecticut in the countryside to which I was very devoted but from which I had to go out into other places and make a living doing my work.
I don't know how Jac heard what he heard. A storyteller, yes. He heard the stories, most definitely, and I think he heard the eclecticism of the material even then, roaming in a lot of directions. Gutsy songs like 'The Bullgine Run,' and sea songs, which were a real passion of mine. Railroading songs—I loved railroad songs. Truckdrivers—give me a truckdriver song and I'll sing it. I think Jac liked the choice of material, and I think he saw this twenty-one-year-old with a guitar singing 'The Greenland Fisheries' and thought, "This is what I want to do next." I think he saw that it was very commercial and viable, and he might have heard the singer through whatever else was going on.
A week after Jac, John Hammond of Columbia came to see me and said, "You're ready to make a record." And I said, "Well, you're a week too late, because I've already made a verbal agreement with Jac Holzman." We often laughed about that, John and I. He was another great music man. Perhaps John and Jac had a singular gift in that they saw the artist and the talent and they said, "I want to work with that." They didn't say, "I wanna lay such and such on this artist."
JAC: What I saw in Judy was a captivating voice, a good story sense, but still unsure of herself and lacking authority.
JUDY COLLINS: What I saw was a man who could float around as many clubs in the Village as he wanted, and he would never lose the look of somebody who was thinking and reasoning and filtering everything through that brain of his. He was not a hanging-out kind of laid-back kind of drifting mindless folkie by any means. There was no vagueness around him. He was very, very clear, always articulate, very determined about what he wanted to do. No ambivalence. And I need that and want that from people. It was just a meeting of minds.
JAC: We recorded Judy's first album at Fine Sound on 57th Street, within whispering distance of Carnegie Hall. The studio itself was a hotel ballroom, very live, with a wide open, slightly echoic feel, but a natural echo. Robert Fine, who owned and managed the facility, was an excellent technician who had engineered the famous Telefunken U-47 miked sessions of great bombastic classics for Mercury Records, albums that were routinely used by audiophiles to show off their equipment. For Judy's session we had Fred Hellerman on second guitar, with Erik Darling (a Weaver at one time, and later of the Rooftop Singers) on banjo. Fred had also played on Joan Baez' debut recording.
Judy was new to studio work. There were many false starts, and it took longer than I would have liked. I pushed her very hard, bringing her close to tears: "You can do better. Try it again." Deep down Judy understood that I cared about getting it right.
JUDY COLLINS: Then we fought over sequencing the tracks. Jac generally won. He was usually right. He had a big-picture idea about how things worked. He knew how to take things that were wonderful and make them work in a sequence that was even more so. Linda Moser took my picture, a very blue picture, and I had sung my saddest of all songs, 'Maid of Constant Sorrow,' and that was what the album was called, and I was thrilled when this actual record arrived at my home in Connecticut.
JAC: The record sold about five thousand copies with the expected comments citing Judy as a Baez clone. I shrugged it off, having learned during our sessions that Judy and I shared a mania for getting it right. Immediately, we began planning her follow-up album, "Golden Apples of the Sun."
My thought was to co-produce with Mark Abramson, but as we got into the first evening and I watched Mark bonding with Judy, I decided to let him solo. He was gentle, they were getting on terrifically, so I just turned them loose with each other.
MARK ABRAMSON: Judy looked like a skier. She was blond, athletic, strong forearms, that kind of snub-nosed freckled look, she looked like definitely a product of the West, and there was a certain fresh-air feeling to her, which was not really too much in evidence at Elektra, with people like Dirty Ed McCurdy. There was Jean Redpath from Scotland, also a breath of fresh air, and Jean Ritchie, who was from the South, but she was more homespun. Judy wasn't really homespun, she was more that kind of fresh Western energy folk singer. Very fresh voice, powerful guitar player. And on top of that she was a pianist, classically trained.
With Judy there was a feeling that now we had somebody who could break out into the general market, really the first person who was seen as someone to get Elektra on the map on a larger scale, who in that sense could be a star.
JEAN RITCHIE: I was very excited when Judy Collins came along, because she was more pop than the rest of us. Somebody asked Jac about her, and he said, "Oh, she's just great. She's Jean Ritchie with balls." And that got back to me and I was so mad. But Jac was always thinking ahead.
THEODORE BIKEL: Jac said, "You have a Carnegie Hall concert coming up. Why don't you introduce Judy?" I listened to her at the Bitter End, and she was lovely, with a gorgeous voice. So I said, "Sure."
JUDY COLLINS: Theo gave me a very big break, because that was an important concert. He was very sweet to me always. He's a very good man.
THEODORE BIKEL: That was very shrewd of Jac. It gave Judy a push upward, it married her for a brief time to a big artist, and it helped the label and the records and everything.
"Music of Bulgaria" EKL-282
JAC: As the Sixties began, Elektra had issued a steady stream of folk albums, most of them worthy, some of them notable.
"Music of Bulgaria," originally released on EMI, had never found its audience. Sales had slipped below an acceptable level, and the record had gone to the boneyard where superb albums that don't sell sadly languish. After a few phone calls, EMI agreed to license the masters to us, and it was a gratifying success. Its vocal layers, with their soaring harmonies and open-throated exuberance, turned many sets of ears towards the richness of world music, though that term was not yet in common use. The album was so hip that its release on Elektra further burnished our image. Artists and producers from other labels were forever asking for free replacement copies. It echoed all the way through the Sixties and beyond—David Crosby told me that it influenced the harmonies of Crosby, Stills and Nash.
Other excellent ethnic folk records were Jean Carignan, a Canadian fiddler; Saka Acquaye's highlife album, "Gold Coast Saturday Night," a first in the US; Jean Redpath's "Scottish Ballad Book" and "Laddie Lie Near Me;" plus several albums of Japanese music featuring shakuhachi and koto. None were significant sellers but the music was so worthy that I felt a happy commitment to record them.
During this period, Elektra continued to enjoy substantial success with Theo Bikel. Theo could do his regular two albums per year. Good as they always were, that was a lot of times to be going to the well, so we exercised Theo's acting muscles with readings from the Bible, passages from Genesis, the Song of Songs and others, set to music composed by Dov Seltzer of the Oranim Zabar Israeli Troupe, and played by the Vienna Opera Orchestra.
Oscar Brand's concept albums were good for a chuckle and ten thousand units, but neither Oscar nor I would ever claim these as substantive. They were fun to plan and record, but we were doing them to death.
What it was coming down to was that the Elektra catalog of the late Fifties and into the early Sixties was missing a thematic direction. There was no arc to it, and the music I was hearing in clubs, audition tapes and on the radio yielded no clues.
To keep the label active while I awaited the muse, we recorded whatever struck me as reasonable, or that interested or amused me. Children's folk songs. Flamenco guitarist Juan Serrano. Renaissance music. "Catches and Glees of the English Restoration." "Bobby Burns's Merry Muses." "Four French Horns + Rhythm." An audio test record for professionals to calibrate their pickup cartridges and playback system. A Morse Code LP, for which I had the neat notion that one could vary the speed of the code by playing it at 33 1/3, 45, and 78 rpm, and selecting a pitch low enough so that when the LP was played at two-and-a-half times its normal speed it was still readable. Folk banjo styles. The Greenbriar Boys. The Irish Ramblers. "Our Singing Heritage." Jean Shepherd, a radio personality who did quiet, idiosyncratic personal monologues.
Adding to this odd collection, I re-released an album Jim Dickson had made several years before—Lord Buckley, the original hipster comedian. Buckley came out of the Chicago speakeasies, and how he got from there to a pith helmet and a waxed mustache and inventing The Church of the Living Swing, I have no idea. His riff on Jesus Christ as The Nazz was and remains a classic—this white aristocratic-looking figure with an absolutely black-sounding voice and a weird, antic wit.
The Irish Ramblers EKS-7249
JIM DICKSON: When I first put that record out, there were probably not more than three hundred people who could understand him. He was the first of a kind, before Lenny Bruce, before all of them. He was the first one to really capitalize on the language.
Henry Miller wrote about him, compared him to Rimbaud. Miller thought that he was black for years and years, and when he saw his photograph he was outraged: "My God, I've told everybody about this guy, thinking he was black!"
JAC: I had always been charmed by the English comic actress Joyce Grenfell, so I phoned her American agent. She was just back from a holiday in sunny Australia. She dropped by the office and showed me photos she had taken with a tiny Minox spy camera. The film negative was miniscule, and the photos were so grainy you couldn't tell the koala from the goanna, but I loved the absurdity of it, and I thought it would be wonderful to have this toothy, funny woman in the studio doing monologues that only the most rabid of anglophiles might understand. It was one of the nice things about owning the label; I could indulge my personal taste. The album cost under two thousand dollars, including her advance, and it did better than break even. Who else would be crazy enough to record her?
So many albums, some wonderful, a few dreadful. I was rudderless, less concerned about uniqueness and vision than I was about staying in the game.
The needle went deeper because Vanguard was just down the block, and they had the rights to record the Newport Folk Festival, plus Joan Baez who had risen to icon status. I was feeling second-rate and I hated it.
The company had to grow musically if we were to be taken seriously, but I didn't know what to grow it with. A hit would not be enough. I needed a breakthrough. I was bored, losing my way, and for the first time I could not see the road ahead.
JAC: In November 1961 our daughter Jaclyn was born. Jewish tradition frowns on the naming of male children after their fathers (as my father had done) but the rule didn't apply to females and I didn't care anyway. To preserve my full initials, JEH, Jaclyn was given a middle name, Estelle, after my grandmother who had been the most profound and supportive influence in my life. Estelle beamed.
Though I was a family man with two children we could all still fit on the motor scooter. I would drive, Nina would sit on the pillion holding Jaclyn, while Adam stood in front, protected by my arms and legs, peering over the handbars.
