Chapter 5
A tree grows in the West Village ... Paul the pistol ... The great jug band party of 1963 ... Uptown, uptempo, urban blues
JAC: Searching for someplace to live, Nina and I lucked out on our first try—a lovely co-op, at 37 West 12th Street, in a part of Greenwich Village that was tree-lined, well-bred, and in striking contrast to my old five-dollar-a-week walkup on Grove Street. It was new, tastefully modern with bronze exterior framing, very few owner-tenants, a twenty-four-hour doorman, and a garage where I could keep my scooter. The building was in bankruptcy, so we could have our apartment for $37,500, with a fresh coat of white paint and no monthly maintenance fees till legal ownership could be transferred many months down the line. I wrote myself a bonus check for many years of back pay and made the fifty percent down payment.
The apartment was blessedly quiet. You could actually hear a bird sing, which for New York was amazing. With three bedrooms we could subdivide the master unit so that each of the kids would have some privacy. Nina and I took the second, smaller bedroom, opening onto a court with one glorious tree that mirrored the seasons. The third bedroom, also facing the court, was my study, and there I assembled all the tools needed to critically edit and evaluate music. The living room was paneled in rosewood, with soft, velour-covered maroon couches that surrendered willingly to the shape of your body. Just before the walls were painted, I ran thick, multi-wire cable from my power amplifiers to play master tapes for our guests.
ADAM HOLZMAN: My dad had great stereo equipment. I had a little record player in my bedroom, but I couldn't use the main stereo. I wasn't allowed. Are you kidding?—you needed a pilot's license to use that stereo. He piped sound out of his office. He played a lot of stuff he was working on, loud, loud.
JAC: A year of LA had left me torpid. New York re-energized me—the pace of the city, the sharpness of people, the very air I breathed. I regained my panther walk and honed my edge.
My first major decision was to move Elektra uptown. The Village was comfortable, it was where I lived, it was where the clubs and the artists were, but I wanted—needed—to ratchet up, to put myself and the company at a higher level of risk and reward.
The 14th Street lease had a few months remaining, but I was already mentally uptown. I wanted to be fully set up in new offices by the next big selling season, the fall of 1963. With great good fortune, I found the perfect location, in the Sperry-Rand Building on Sixth Avenue, between 51st and 52nd Street.
Sperry-Rand was one of those tall towers with metal mullions that had sprung up on a street of mixed use, fancifully renamed the Avenue of the Americas. The old Sixth Avenue was block after block of clustered walkups, a jumble of old world shops, some tenements, and an elevated rail line that bisected the street and overwhelmed the neighborhood with the thunder of rattling metal and the screech of straining rails. Anyone who ever lived near an El line would never forget it. Stripped of the El and the tatty collection of buildings struck down by the swing of a demolition ball, New York had grown itself a brand new commercial business corridor, one upscale block west of Fifth Avenue.
JAC: In my new offices, after thirteen years making records, I had the single most important conversation of my professional life up to that time. Paul Rothchild came to see me.
I knew Paul from Bleecker Street days, when he would drop by, browse, and occasionally buy records. He had moved to Cambridge and was into the folk scene there, a director of Club 47, a remarkable little folk outpost from which blossomed all sorts of interesting artists: the Charles River Valley Boys, Bob Neuwirth, the Jim Kweskin Jug Band, and Joan Baez.
Paul's bread and butter had been selling for the Boston record distributor who handled Elektra, and when we ran a national sales competition, Paul was the hands-down winner.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: At one point Jac came out with a special incentive program. For every X number of records you sold you would get a certificate worth one book of green stamps. My wife and I needed a refrigerator. I went out and sold my ass off, I got a pile of these books, and we got our refrigerator free. When I mentioned it later to Jac—"You know, you were personally responsible for us having our refrigerator," he said, "You sold more than anybody in the country by a factor of two."
JAC: Now Rothchild the pistol was back in New York, doing A&R and producing for Prestige Records, primarily a jazz label but with folk aspirations. On the "street" I would see him doing his highly intense hang in the Village clubs and on the sidewalks out front.
In his early days with Prestige, Maynard Solomon was looking at an act that Paul was interested in and sharply warned him off, claiming that Paul had broken one of the cardinal rules among record companies, namely that once an act is talking to a label it was hands-off for everyone else. One evening Paul offhandedly asked me about this unwritten law. I looked at him with astonishment and then burst out laughing, "Paul, you've been had! You can talk, negotiate, do your dance, sing your song, until the moment the pen hits the contract." Paul never quite trusted Maynard again.
Paul had come to me to release one of my artists for a project at Prestige. I hesitated, wanting Elektra artists to build their careers at Elektra, with Elektra (meaning me) calling the shots. But, as people with similar interests and passions are wont to do, we began to talk of other things, and I was increasingly impressed. Paul had obvious energy and a hip hustle, coupled to superior intelligence and acute perceptions about music and the business of music.
Paul Rothchild
PAUL ROTHCHILD: I was raised on classical music; my mother was a singer at the Met. We lived in Teaneck, New Jersey. Growing up, I used to run off into New York, to the jazz clubs, Birdland, Eddie Condon's on 52nd Street, catching old and new jazz. I started working in record stores as a salesman, and found out about early blues and their connection with jazz. And I studied conducting with Bruno Walter. He said I had a great heart for music, but others had much more talent, and I would probably wind up conducting a high school orchestra in Sheboygan, but that my passion for music would show itself later in life. I cried for years, but in a strange way his prophecy came true.
The way I was seeing things when I talked to Jac, there had been a blending of traditional music into the urban scene, a kind of mulching of all these different idioms that came before: Appalachian ballads, Child ballads, bluegrass, and all versions of the blues, up to and including electric. It was all the truth, by people who sang from the heart. And when you add to the equation Dylan and the Beatles, there lies the explosive element. It's all primed and ready. There are all these people who have the talent, and then there are these breakthrough writer-artists who change the way popular music can be made.
Dylan did it first through Peter, Paul and Mary, when they hit with 'Blowing in the Wind,' and of course his own success came after that. And the Beatles did it with their first album. I don't know anyone who didn't love that first album. Everybody from the hardest core Appalachian singer to Roger McGuinn, they all loved it. McGuinn one day said to me, "Paul, what should I do? I'm a banjo player, but I sense this new thing happening." I said, "Go get an electric guitar." So he went out and bought a twelve-string and started singing Beatles songs, and with that he was headed in the direction of the Byrds. This was a story you could tell a hundred times over. The first week the Beatles were on the radio, the possibilities changed—the world changed.
JAC: As Plato said, "When the mode of the music changes, the walls of the city shake." The Sixties weren't the Fifties, across the board, from politics to music, from Eisenhower to Kennedy, from Mitch Miller to Dylan and the Beatles.
Paul and I were breathing the same heady air of New York. We talked for two hours, and the more I listened the more I loved the way Paul thought and felt about music. We both shared a conviction that record making was, like the church, a calling rather than a career.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: I got up to go. We were shaking hands, and Jac said in parting that any time I was unhappy at Prestige to just let him know. When I hear this, I immediately sit down again. I debrief him about my complete and total anguish with my boss, who was an amazing boor. And my overwork. And my poor pay.
JAC: I said the obvious: "Why not come work alongside me at Elektra?"
PAUL ROTHCHILD: Jac had the elite, he had the cabaret folk acts, the coat and tie folk musicians, he had put out two Judy Collins records and she was getting a lot of notice, but Theo Bikel was still the biggest selling act he had. Jac said, "I want you off the street for other companies and on the street for me. I want you to bring street music to this company."
JAC: Paul was on the street more than me, and there was no doubt he was better with certain kinds of artists than I was. I was stuck in the office and couldn't go into the studio as often as I wanted or the label needed. I had Mark Abramson producing, but Mark couldn't do it all himself, simply as a matter of work load.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: Jac said, "Can you produce ten albums a year?" At Prestige, in slavery, I had done thirteen in five months. I said, "No problem."
JAC: We were averaging about twenty records a year and I figured that Paul and Mark would split the production responsibility. Paul would broaden the reach of Elektra, and being respected and appreciated at work would encourage Paul to become fully himself. I was sold on him.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: He said, "I'll triple your salary, I'll give you a car."
JAC: Actually I said I would double his meager Prestige salary and give him a car allowance.
Paul was eager but unsure. He had heard one of those untraceable rumors that Elektra was going broke. Of course we weren't. Irwin Russell, who was in the office that day, pointed out in his well-reasoned lawyer's logic that a company with a fresh lease in the Sperry-Rand Building needed a good credit rating, ergo Elektra had to be solid. Paul was hungry to make the change. He just wanted reassurance, which Irwin provided.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: The first group I worked with was the Even Dozen Jug Band.
JAC: Suddenly jug bands were hot. The strong pulse of well-played instrumental music propelled by washtub bass and a skillfully blown jug created a folky sound with an exuberant edge, new to this folk music generation.
One day there were no jug bands, then overnight there were three. The Jim Kweskin Jug Band was from Cambridge, Paul's old stomping ground. Kweskin was there first and clearly the best. The other two were newly formed in the Village: Dave Van Ronk's Hudson Dusters, and the Even Dozen.
PETER SIEGEL: The Kweskin Band was on Vanguard. Jac and Maynard Solomon were friends, but Jac didn't like it when Maynard got something before he did. He offered the Even Dozen an astounding amount of money to record for Elektra—I think it was $1,000, which among twelve people came out to eighty-three dollars each, less our manager's cut. We took the money and made up little band uniforms, which on that budget was a pair of black jeans, a blue work shirt and a vest.
JOSHUA RIFKIN: Paul Rothchild came to work with us.
PETER SIEGEL: Paul genuinely loved the music, he was very ambitious, and he had a feel for what could be a hit, what kids would like, what was cool.
He knew how to work with musicians. He came in to the first rehearsal, and some people would say, "Well, I don't know if I want to do this," but he just looked at us and said, "Hey, you wanna make records? Groovy. You don't? Beautiful." And he just stood there like he was ready to leave. And we said, "Oh, we wanna make records." And that was it. Those terms, groovy and beautiful, sounded a lot hipper than they do today. But that was his attitude. He was always on top of the situation. He knew what to say.
JOSHUA RIFKIN: After a couple of sessions, Paul said, "You guys don't need a producer, you need a group psychiatrist." This was pretty much true. But it was also a rather interesting organization in its own right. John Sebastian played harmonica with us and went on to form the Lovin' Spoonful. Steve Katz went on to become a member of Blood, Sweat and Tears. David Grisman became well known as a mandolin player. Stefan Grossman had an interesting career, mainly in Europe. Peter Siegel became a producer at Elektra, with a specialty in serious ethnic music. And we had a singer named Maria D'Amato who later achieved renown as Maria Muldaur. Quite an assortment of talent. But there were a lot of us, and it was a kind of crazy world. And of course we were all puppies. We were most of us still in our teens—I think the oldest was twenty, twenty-one.
Rothchild was a tremendous presence. I had done the usual classical child prodigy route of early piano lessons, and then in my teens I drifted much more into composition and then studying older music. When I was seventeen I went to Europe and studied with Stockhausen. This is a rather curious background for playing kazoo with the Even Dozen Jug Band, and I had in some ways the snotty kid classical outsider sort of ambivalent view of this whole scene and this whole process. But Rothchild had a very impressive classical background himself, and that gave him an instant kind of credibility with me. He had tremendous smarts, tremendous musical knowledge.
He was also someone then to whom all of us looked up. He was our great authority figure. To us he seemed the very embodiment of hip. He was well positioned already and married and had a kid, and knew more than all of us about dope and sex and everything else.
PETER SIEGEL: He always had dope and knew how to spread it around. It was part of his getting things done, part of his being a producer in the broadest sense, ambitious, getting things done that way. He was immensely talented, and as a record producer myself I can tell you that having a manipulative mind doesn't always hurt. He used language well in the service of what he wanted to accomplish. If that meant talking a lot, it meant talking a lot. If it meant not talking that much, he could do that too. He was a smart guy. I think you're talking about somebody who always had good pot, who would lay it on his friends. It was part of the way he would impress people. Just as he had the coolest suede jacket, he had the best dope.
JOSHUA RIFKIN: If Paul played all this as a card—if he did, and I'm questioning that—I'd have to say that he played it very generously. He shared the knowledge, he shared the dope. I remember stories of him and John Sebastian going out one night and getting laid together; so he didn't build barriers. He never pulled rank, never separated himself from us. He wanted to see us do our best, make the best possible record.
It was tremendously exciting, a real adventure. There we were in the record business. There we were performing, starting to do shows. There we were discovering groupies, discovering dope. It's a very heady thing when you're nineteen. We had all these expectations of great success, fame and fortune, Carnegie Hall coming up—we were going to conquer the world. I might say in parentheses that none of us had really paid much attention to these reports coming from Britain about something called the Beatles. Jug band music was supposed to be the next great thing. So it was a marvelous summer. We worked very hard, morning till night, five, six days a week, we went out, we did concerts, we hung together a great deal, and Paul was with us.
Jac, too, dropped in. He wasn't there as much, because obviously he had a company to run, and Paul was our point man. And Jac was also that much older again than Paul, so to us he seemed an absolute patriarch—
JAC:—I was thirty-two—
JOSHUA RIFKIN:—But a very hip patriarch. He, too, although he was a little bit above the fray, never set himself apart, any more than Paul did, and we had the feeling that we could relate to them easily and that we were kind of all sharing a common enterprise.
We would go to the Elektra office, to visit, just to say hello, to get records, and I could go in, as a nineteen-year-old kid, admittedly a member of one of the house acts, but I could just walk into the place, say hi to everybody, and then walk into Jac's office, and Jac, president of Elektra Records, would not be too busy, and he would say, "Come on in, sit down," and we'd just talk for an hour or so. That seems like a vanished world . . .
PETER SIEGEL: At the same time, Jac ran a tight ship. I only realized how tight later on, when I went to work at other record companies and found out how comparatively sloppy they were.
Paul in his professional life was extremely disciplined, too. He had studied classical music. He was a great one with jazz. He was a great one with folk music. It was the first time we had ever met a record producer, and he really tightened things up quite a bit for us. Our music was full of stop breaks and little starts and stops that were sloppy as hell, and he worked with us and cleaned it up. He was able to point out things that were out of rhythm, that were out of tune, that didn't make sense, that were too busy. He actually came close to conducting the band.
"The Even Dozen Jug Band" EKS-7246
JOSHUA RIFKIN: We finished recording, and there the tapes were, ready to be edited. I worked a lot on the editing with Paul, which was a wonderful experience for me. I had written one of the tunes, 'The Even Dozens,' and Paul invited me to join him for editing it, putting the tapes together. This was in the days of analog tape editing, where you cut and spliced it, which did seem like an awesome skill. Looking back from our digital perspective, there was something rather heroic about it. It was a kind of high-wire act. I remember one particular cut, right near the end of a little piano solo, a slow downward arpeggio, and I remember our having to join two takes there, and Paul cutting right in the middle of it, sort of off the beat, on a note that you'd never expect, and my just being dazzled by this.
Paul certainly seemed to me someone who had the secrets. He was in the temple, and yes, he certainly opened it up to all of us, and here to me. It was very generous. So was Mark Abramson. And so was Jac.
What I realize, looking back, is that these people were having great fun doing what they were doing. It was still sort of a cottage industry, folk music leading into pop music—an enjoyable business. Everybody was having a good time. There were clearly, even then, people to whom rank and everything was important, but to these people at Elektra it wasn't. The headiest thing about this experience was at nineteen or twenty to become a colleague of these people, be taken into the circle, become one of them.
JOHN SEBASTIAN: There was an interesting moment that gave me a feeling of solidarity with Elektra, and by extension with Jac. This was the party for the closing of the Elektra offices on 14th Street.
What it was—and I think it was conceived partially by Rothchild—they decided to have a jug band party, that included all the jug bands known to this younger generation of old-time music enthusiasts: the Jim Kweskin Jug Band, who came down from Boston; the Even Dozen Jug Band; and Dave Van Ronk's Hudson Dusters.
FRITZ RICHMOND: That was a famous party.
JOSHUA RIFKIN: It was a great wonderful mob scene. There wasn't much furniture left, but lots of food was set up and people sat on the floor and lounged against the walls, et cetera. They brought in kegs, huge barrels of beer.
JOHN SEBASTIAN: It was the first time I had ever attended a party that had more than one keg.
JOSHUA RIFKIN: The beer, the pot, everything flowed very freely. I don't know where they stuffed the ganja, but everything was available and we were all super mellow. Our girl singer, as they were called in those days, Maria D'Amato, was living on the Lower East Side with a harmonica player, and they weren't getting on so well.
FRITZ RICHMOND: John Sebastian had been trying to get next to Maria. But when Maria saw Geoff Muldaur from the Kweskin Band, this blue-eyed, Waspy, breathy singer with that warble in his voice, her heart went bumpety-bump for him, and it was all over for John.
JOSHUA RIFKIN: Geoff was the most laconic, lackadaisical character you could ever hope to find, and I remember walking into some room and there's a bunch of people sort of hanging on the walls in various stages of far-goneness, and Geoff is slouched down on the floor, his head butting the wall, totally blotto-eyed, and I see Maria kind of stretched out across him, looking into his eyes and starting to sing in this very, very drunken voice, "Oh, Geoff Muldaur, Geoff Muldaur, I want you to walk through my door, Come and give me some more, Geoff Muldaur"—and with that, she barfed all over his chest. Geoff nodded his head a bit from side to side and looked at her and she looked at him, and two days later she was on the train up to Boston, and she eventually became Maria Muldaur.
Much later in the night there was an early proto-groupie who was hanging around and was interested in the Even Dozen Jug Band and had gone through some of it, and it was my turn, and I remember our doing it standing up on the fire escape outside and thoughts coming into my mind: "My God, it's four o'clock in the early dawn in Manhattan, and I'm outside on the fire escape with my ass bare."
JOHN SEBASTIAN: The great jug band party—there was something about the attitude of the people at that party that spoke to me of the power of this good-time music hybrid of rock and roll sensibilities and jug band instruments that would later become the Lovin' Spoonful and other strong bands.
But I would also say that party simultaneously marked the end for a slightly earlier genre of folk music and folk singer, the end of the earliest folk scene.
JAC: John whiffed that sense of change. So did Paul, and so did I.
JAC: Our new offices were right in the hard-core center of happening Manhattan. From Park and Madison avenues, across to Sixth or Seventh Avenue, and from 42nd Street up to 57th Street, there was a concentration of the hungriest people in New York, working, scheming, fighting each other for rungs on the ladder, and I was one of them.
FRITZ RICHMOND: I saw Jac's office. He had all these jazzy toys on his desk. Do you know what the Archimedes Devil is? It's a tall glass cylinder, liquid-filled, and in it are little figures, also liquid-filled, and depending on the temperature these things are either at the bottom or at the top or split. It's a very simple scientific principle why they do what they do, but it has always escaped me. Jac had one of those, a nice big one. I was impressed. It was definitely a nicer office than Maynard Solomon's over at Vanguard, which looked like a movie set for a poverty-stricken accountant. Maynard smoked, and there was an ashtray on his desk. Jac didn't smoke, and there was't an ashtray on his desk. It might have been the nicest office I had ever been in.
JAC: From my perch on the twenty-eighth floor I could see to Central Park, the playground of my early years. The breadth and clarity of the view said to me that I had made it partway, but I was poised for more. Elektra was my instrument and I was tuned and ready.
Within a month of moving, I was invited to lunch at the Friars Club by Dave Kapp, the owner of Kapp Records. Dave was one of the founders of Decca Records, a company that had been launched at the height of the Depression as a low-cost singles label and was best known for its early recordings of Bing Crosby.
The conversation was amiable. Dave wanted to acquire Elektra, but he wasn't quite sure why. We didn't talk numbers, we tried to talk about music, but the world of Kapp wasn't the world of Elektra. The Kapp logo was a bandmaster's hat, all tassels and polished brass; the Elektra logo was a folk musician, sitting on a barrel, playing his guitar.
Like a kid who likes to count the change in his piggy bank, I was curious to find out what someone experienced in music business values might offer. I called Dave a week later, after they had looked at some very rudimentary numbers, and the offer was $1,000,000. At thirty-two, I was three years ahead of my schedule.
I graciously turned it down. For starters, I didn't think it was nearly enough. I believed in my own ability to build the company into something far more substantial. Our offices were classier than Kapp's. And never, ever, did I want to work for someone else.
On reflection, I noticed that when I first tasted success, on the cusp of the Sixties, I had been able to save perhaps a hundred thousand dollars. That was real money then, and I found myself acting more conservatively, frightened that I might blow it. But the music spoke to me with greater urgency than the business ever could. As I did with flying, I finally just let the fears go. Not risking was a worse risk in itself. If I blew it, at least I knew I was talented, had some reputation, and could land a job that would take care of survival. So I said to myself, "I'll just pretend I'm right and move ahead—follow my ears and my heart more, and my analytical mind less."
Nina and I discussed the offer, but agreed that having our own company was so much more satisfying. Still, knowing that it was worth a million to someone was comforting.
Josh White's "Chain Gang Songs" EKS-7158
JAC: Paul Nelson and friends put out a home-brew music magazine in Minneapolis called the Little Sandy Review, quite influential in the tightly-wound folk world of the time. The magazine had caustic opinions, and often took me to task for making albums they considered insufficiently ethnic.
PAUL NELSON: It was either Elektra or Vanguard who put out a chain gang album with banjoes and strings and heavenly choirs, and I wrote this review that said, "Instead of sending your kid to summer camp this year, why not send him to the chain gang, because it really sounds pleasant, these records make it seem like so much fun."
JAC: Our only chain gang album was by Josh White, so I wrote to Paul about the piece, as I wrote to so many supporters and critics of Elektra. I wanted them to know that I was reading their stuff and paying attention. I never once complained about what they said, just wanted them to hear our side.
PAUL NELSON: If we panned one of his records he'd always write a funny little note back, and I sort of felt I knew him through the letters.
JAC: One day I received a record from Nelson: three beardless, rumpled white kids calling themselves Koerner, Ray & Glover, on the Audiophile label, a one-man operation somewhere in the Midwest. I shoved it to the bottom of the "To Listen" batch. Four or five days later it floated to the surface, I put it on, and absolutely fell in love with it. It was gutsy, down home in the holler, totally unselfconscious roots music, and those guys could stomp and play their asses off.
PAUL NELSON: "Spider" John Koerner, Dave "Snaker" Ray, and Tony "Little Sun" Glover—
PAUL ROTHCHILD:—One doing almost perfect incarnations of Leadbelly twelve-string guitar, another writing his own songs in an uneven bar style that blew your mind, and one guy on the moon who played the strangest harmonica you ever heard.
TONY GLOVER: The Audiophile guy wouldn't give us any comps, but he'd sell us records at cost. Big-hearted guy. We bought three, sent one to Billboard, one to Cashbox, and Paul Nelson sent one to Elektra, to Jac Holzman, because he thought he might be into it. I thought that was kind of dubious, because at that time they had like Josh White and Oscar Brand and to me kind of ersatz people. But I thought, "What the hell, a couple of bucks, if we lose it we lose it."
So we sat around and nothing happened and nothing happened, and finally somebody, I think Paul, got a letter or a phone call from Jac saying, "Holy shit, what's the deal with these guys, can we talk?"
JAC: The Audiophile owner had recorded them very simply, which was absolutely right, and he was fanatical about sound quality, which I also appreciated. The music got to me, and within forty-eight hours I hopped a plane to Minneapolis.
Tony 'Little Sun' Glover and John 'Spider' Koerner at Newport
TONY GLOVER: My first impression of Jac was that he was kind of a young dapper Ivy League sort of guy. In a way he was a yuppie of that day, but it was really a more elegant kind of style, almost literary, East Coast literary kind of style, the kind of guy that carried an umbrella and a briefcase. I didn't know how well we were gonna get along with him, but he seemed pretty enthusiastic, and I figured we didn't have a damn thing to lose, so why not, you know?
We had a meeting over at Dave's dad's office—he was an insurance salesman—sat down and worked out a contract which then got reworked at dinner.
JAC: I had to pass muster with both parents. They were nice, solid Midwestern people, slightly bemused that someone would fly in from New York because he liked what these three kids were playing.
TONY GLOVER: Over dessert, Dave's old man played Jac a good Minnesota rube routine and ended up getting us a much more favorable deal.
JAC: We agreed that I would buy the masters of the Audiophile album, and we'd cut some additional tunes in New York.
TONY GLOVER: Jac put us up at the Hotel Earle.
JAC: It was an old music scuffler's spot, close to where I lived and to the Sixth Avenue bus line, easy for the boys to move around without a car.
TONY GLOVER: The thing I remember about it was there were a lot of strange chicks, and spikes and orange peels in the elevators.
Jac was living in this kind of staid co-op, with a doorman who looked horrified at the sight of us. One time Jac and his family were all out of town and he said we could stay at his apartment. The doorman practically had shit fits, he'd see us walking up with our suitcases and had to be held back. We had orders not to hassle the maid, because they were hard to find, so we should clean the bathtub after ourselves.
I still have this mental picture of Jac riding down the street on his motor scooter with his black suit, white shirt, tie, umbrella, and white gloves. Actually I'm not positive about the white gloves. But a very dapper sort of New York looking cat. He also kept unpaid parking tickets in his car that he would carry around, different kinds, like rainy, dry, mud-splattered, and ones that had been rained on and dried. He'd pull out the appropriately weathered parking ticket, slap it on and go about his business. Sort of a crazy guy, but very straight looking.
When it came to recording, he went out and bought a pair of jeans so he could do the group better. Brand new pair of Levi's.
JAC: I put the three of them into the studio with Paul Rothchild and me, at Mastertone on 42nd Street.
(L to R) Koerner, Glover and Ray
TONY GLOVER: It was like coming in out of the carnival. This is before the days of user-friendly recording studios. I mean it's a square fucking room, rectangular, with high ceilings, bare walls, and fluorescent lights, and the lights were either off or on, no in between, and it was driving me nuts, I couldn't record with fluorescent lights, too bright, too green, so Jac went out and bought a couple of candles and labeled them Elektra Illumination Unit #1 and #2, which I thought was a real Holzman kind of thing to do.
JAC: I took some back cover pictures, including one of a trash can overflowing with beer cans and whiskey bottles. It was appropriate for the sessions.
TONY GLOVER: One time I was giving Jac some shit about Oscar Brand and all those kinds of guys, and he got uppity and said, "It's guys like those that give me the money and the time to record guys like you." Which I thought was a pretty good comeback.
When Jac signed us he expected to lose money on us. He was really surprised when we sold enough records to pay back the thing. He was just doing it because he liked the music and thought it was good.
JOHN SEBASTIAN: It was raggy, it was bluesy. Good-time music. It was played a little bit faster than the original guys did it. That was because they were excitable young white boys who sped up.
PAUL WILLIAMS: That first album had a terrific energy and freshness. Koerner had a tremendous personality. In the early writings about Dylan, the people in the Minnesota scene, the Minneapolis scene at that time, expected Koerner to be the one who would make a national impact. Dave Ray, to me, during that period, was creating an incredibly powerful music, often a closer identification with Leadbelly than I can remember anybody else trying, and yet it was something that was just totally relevant to me, a seventeen or eighteen-year-old white kid. And the music still sounds good to me now. There's some extraordinary art in the performances.
JOHN SEBASTIAN: It was a step along the path towards what became a style that the Lovin' Spoonful drew upon, and so did a lot of people—Tim Hardin, and Fred Neil, of course.
ADAM HOLZMAN: Koerner, Ray & Glover were one of the few bands I appreciated as a little kid. They had the hippest tunes and they threw in a lot of tricky little musical riffs, weird time changes. Snaker Ray would come and stay at the apartment, in my room, and I had to move into my sister's room. I remember he had these huge boots—
JAC:—Black shit-kicker motorcycle boots with a strap across the instep and thick no-nonsense heels, clearly made for stomping bad dudes—
ADAM HOLZMAN: And he was always fixing them.
NINA HOLZMAN: I really loved Koerner, Ray & Glover. They were very dear to me. Adam got very sick at one point, and Dave Ray was staying at the apartment while Jac was off somewhere, and Dave went with me to take Adam to the hospital.
JAC: I thoroughly enjoyed KR&G as friends and as artists. Over the years, music people would tell me about records that had influenced their lives, and Koerner, Ray & Glover always came up.
Their music helped me decide what I wanted to do at Elektra. If I asked myself whether I would rather have recorded Koerner, Ray & Glover or Peter, Paul and Mary, the answer was clear. I just wanted to make records I genuinely loved and believed in.
"The Blues Project" EKS-7264
PAUL ROTHCHILD: One of the directions I was guiding Elektra towards was an exploration of root American music as performed by new urban interpreters. There was so much talent out there. I didn't think we could justify a whole album of each of them. I wanted a catch basin. So I went to Jac and said I wanted to do a series of what I called project albums: blues, urban blues, string bands, solo banjo, singer-songwriters.
It gave Elektra something the label needed badly. Which was an association with not just the most commercial aspects of folk music, but the roots of it and the people who were actually the progenitors, the germinal ideas and where they came from. I wanted to start with the blues.
JAC: I said to Paul, "This is the prototype. Make it great. And keep the costs reasonable."
PAUL ROTHCHILD: I brought in the best white urban blues interpreters. Spider John Koerner and Dave Ray, of course; Geoff Muldaur, Dave Van Ronk, Eric von Schmidt, Ian Buchanan, Danny Kalb, Mark Spoelstra, John Sebastian. They were sitting waiting to go on next, barbershop style. I got Bob Dylan to come down and play piano—we wrote him in on the liner notes as Bob Landy.
I did all the tracks in a single twelve-hour session at Mastertone. It was a brilliant session. Jac was just back from one of his trips. I called him, woke him at two in the morning and said, "I have an album completely recorded. I'll have it edited within a week."
JAC: "Wonderful," I said, and went back to sleep.
Another "Project" album EKS 7276
PAUL ROTHCHILD: No song royalties, and total recording costs were $996.00. Try that today. Within the first three months it sold about thirty-five thousand copies. For a record with no star artist on it to become, in a short period of time, such a street buzz was unheard of at Elektra.
JAC: Or anywhere else.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: So here Jac Holzman is prepared for the new urban blues era.
JAC: On the back of our album we did something we were always happy to do—we plugged an artist on another label: "No survey of the urban blues scene would be complete without calling to your attention the debut album of JOHN HAMMOND on Vanguard Records (VRS-9132). The New York Times hailed John as a 'young giant of the blues.' We at Elektra concur."
JAC: When Judy Collins performed at Carnegie Hall with Theo Bikel, it moved her forward professionally, but in her personal life things were rough. Her marriage was breaking up and she was fighting for custody of her son. She went into therapy. She also had her first experience with psychedelics—in the East Village, with John and Michelle Phillips (still a few years away from being a Mama and a Papa), and it was not an idyllic trip. And then she was diagnosed with tuberculosis.
The best treatment was at the Jewish National Hospital in Denver, Judy's home town. I called Theo, who was hugely influential in the Jewish community, and he helped smooth her admission. Judy had no insurance and I recall giving her advance checks on albums yet to be made.
In addition to first-rate medical care, Judy needed visitors who could help keep her connected with her career, so I went to visit her. It was seventy-five degrees when I left LA and twenty below when I hit Denver wearing only my wool sports jacket. A stockman's convention was in town and it took two hours shuttling between hotels before I could find a room.
The immediate good news was that Judy could leave the hospital for the day to visit with me and her family, including her father Chuck, well known in Denver for his long history on local radio.
Judy had been told she would be finished with her treatment within six months. I never doubted that she would be coming back to Elektra.
Among the gifts I brought her were LPs by Jacques Brel, recorded in concert at the Paris Olympia.
JUDY COLLINS: What attracted me to Brel, one, he was writing his own songs, and two, he graduated from a guitar to working with a symphony.
JAC: Judy was a classical pianist, and she appreciated the progression. The Brel records were what started Judy moving beyond the boundaries of conventional "folk." On her next album, "Judy Collins #3," she began her interpretations of new songs written by her contemporaries.
MARK ABRAMSON: Before that, if you were a folk singer you did folk music. If you happened to write stuff, you would do that. But only your own. It was a tremendous time of transition, and Judy was the first to make the transition to being an interpreter of contemporary folk-oriented songs.
JUDY COLLINS: That's where my real strength was, as an interpretive singer.
JAC: "Judy Collins #3" is where it starts to show for the first time. Judy was back and in better vocal shape than ever. Her interpretation of Dylan's 'Masters of War' was edgy and unsettling, a mother's lament over man-made stupidities that murdered the young.
Everyone involved with the making of that record was rooting for her. The gods smiled. It was a knockout album.
JUDY COLLINS: Bill Harvey did the art work. I did all my covers with him. We sweated, we argued, we had scenes, we tore our hair out—you know, we really cared about how the album was going to look.
"Judy Collins #3" EKS-7243
JAC: The twelve-inch LP was a great format visually. You would do a lot with its size. Compared to the limited five-inch square of the CD, it had grandeur.
Bill Harvey knew how to present an artist. For Elektra, compelling covers were essential to capture the eye of the browser and convey the drama of the music to people forced to buy on faith, because we had very little radio support, and retailers no longer provided listening booths. Elektra graphics—by intention and hard work—were a key part of our identity.
I always thought that Vanguard's graphics for Joan Baez failed to do her justice. With the album cover for Judy's "#3" we hit a home run. A whole square foot, one hundred and forty-four square inches of four-color—it just leaped out of the rack at you. It was a simple close-up,but with those challenging, intensely piercing blue eyes staring directly into yours. A knockout.
JUDY COLLINS: Jac knew how to make records go out into the world. He was very single minded about business, and so was I. I was working. I was always in the clubs. You did the routine. You go to a club and sing for a while, and you get a phone call from somebody in Boston: "You wanna come to the Golden Vanity?" You say, "Sure," they give you the money and you buy your ticket and you go and sing for a couple of weeks, then off again. That's what all of our lives were on the folk circuit. I was slowly coming on the concert circuit. I did Newport in 1963. It all worked together. I could have been as gifted and interesting and talented and intelligent and musical as you would like, but if I'd chosen to lock myself up and not tour, I don't think it would have worked. But I was a worker. That's how I was raised. And for Jac, that's what made sense from a business point of view. He could tailor things around the planning of the tours. There was always a lot of dialogue with Jac about where I was, what I was doing.
NINA HOLZMAN: Judy depended on Jac a great deal. Jac was and is one of the best career counselors. He's always very, very perceptive. His advice to people, when they're stumped, is usually right on the money. Jac was really guiding her career in a lot of ways, choice of material, choice of tour, musicians playing with her, that kind of thing.
JUDY COLLINS: Slowly the different professional pieces came into play. After the third album, Jac and I talked.
JAC: We decided she should have a serious manager.
Harold Leventhal
JUDY COLLINS: I went with Harold Leventhal.
JAC: Harold was top of the line in the folk world. He was a former song plugger for music publishers, knew the folk music scene from the beginning as friend, adviser and manager for Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, the Weavers, then Theo Bikel, and later Woody's son Arlo. Harold had a droll sense of humor that could come at you from the most unexpected angle and delivered deadpan from a roundish face framed by a fence of sideburns. And he was the Rock of Gibraltar of honesty.
JUDY COLLINS: We did promotion by the seat of our pants. In Cleveland we set up in the college cafeteria at lunch time, while all the students were eating. Then the college audiences were there for me, and once a year I did a big college tour. "Oh, good," Jac would say, "you're in Boston, we'll be sure that the Harvard Co-Op has plenty of records."
JAC: The "#3" album began selling immediately at the Co-Op, which was the record mecca for every college student within a ten-mile range of Cambridge, the best concentration of audience for Judy and for Elektra. The "coop," as it was called, was reordering almost daily. A box lot of twenty-five one day, two boxes the next. That's when we were sure that something important was happening, and we stepped up our promotion. We even managed some limited airplay.
HAROLD LEVENTHAL: You begin to knock off city after city. By the mid-Sixties, Judy was primarily a concert performer.
JUDY COLLINS: All the festivals began to hire me. There was a lot of opportunity for radio, just not in the mass doses that became a habit later. I was singing all over the country. Jac knew that I would be out in such and such an area, and he got the right people to work with.
All my education as far as making, producing, mixing, programming, and then marketing, collaborating in everything, making the whole thing add up to more than the record and the concert separately, was very much tied up with the Elektra people. It's as though I had gone away to college and the college that I landed at was Elektra. That was where I got my higher degree.
Maybe we get into our lives the people that we need. Maybe we attract the people who are going to fundamentally help us to shape who we are. I always think of Jac as one of those people.
That's why the collaboration was so important. That's why it was always so exciting. And so difficult. I don't think you have relationships like that, that just go along smoothly through the daisies. That was a time when a lot of people wanted to prance through the daisies. I was not a daisy prancer. I was raised studying, I was raised cogitating, meditating, searching, and that was where Jac and I came together.
We come from very different points of view, but there is a similarity. We're very particular, both of us. And we have a strong, strong sense of ourselves—we're inner-directed people, who deal with the outer world. We did differ. We could argue about anything—we would argue about what to order at a Chinese restaurant. In the music, Jac always pushed for what he thought was best. But he also respected the people that he chose to work with, or else he wouldn't have been involved with them in the first place. So whatever the argument might have been about, whatever he might have been in disagreement about, his original decision to involve himself with the person would be the thing that carried the day. He let you have your honorable place in your own decision—not to feel pushed around as an artist. Very valuable. I took up the space that was given to me at Elektra, and I was given a great deal of room, and I always felt supported.
MICHAEL OCHS: Judy Collins earned her way up. She just kept getting better and better, album after better album.
JAC: There were other Elektra folk artists whose careers faded away like a morning mist, for a variety of reasons, and none more poignant than Kathy and Carol.
"Kathy & Carol" EKS-7289
PAUL ROTHCHILD: Ah, "Kathy & Carol." The most beautiful Renaissance ballad record I ever heard. It's just perfect. If you like Joan Baez, here's Joan Baez times two, with gorgeous harmony, singing purist songs like angels. Angels. And they meant it. It was real for them.
JAC: Just read Kathy's liner notes for their first album, all about how she and Carol sing in harmony, how they even laugh in harmony, how in a way they feel sorry for people who sing by themselves. She tells us how their music is intricately interwoven with everything good and healthful—sunshine, fresh air, mushrooms, lichens, mold and rain, love and laughter, birth and death—as a part of a kind, serene world, which none of man's follies can ruffle.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: They were both virgins. I prayed to my God every day, "Please don't let these girls get porked." We went back almost a year later to make the second album, and Kathy had gotten porked. The innocence was gone. It all went away.
