Chapter 7
On a paper tablecloth a baroque label is born ... Johann Sebastian, meet the Beatles ... Ode to an Ondes-Martinot
JAC: Those singer-songwriter years were filled with change and challenge, both political and personal, and Elektra was in the thick of the movement. But I could feel the need for something more, to make a bold move unrelated to what the label had been doing, and I had absolutely no idea of what that might be. Then, without notice or ceremony, it hit me.
No experience in life goes wasted. I recalled when I was an indifferent college student at St. John's. Music was a key element of the Great Books program, but it went beyond the "harmony of the spheres" that permeated our celestial mechanics and math studies. Music would pour out of the windows of the dorms, which were really very large, post-colonial houses. And no junk. Walking across campus, you would hear folk music, music for ancient instruments, Haydn, Vivaldi, Beethoven's 'Grosse Fuge,' Johann Sebastian Bach and all his progeny, and a glorious helping of Mozart, the patron saint of St. John's music junkies.
There was only one record store in Annapolis, Albright's, on Maryland Avenue. It had a few cramped listening booths, and I would go down and graze among the classical records, especially the baroque offerings, which were stocked only because St. Johnnies were serious music people.
The Westminster label recorded with care and offered a broad range of music that fit my taste. In the early days of LPs, Westminster albums cost $5.95 each. I wanted two, but I could only afford one, and I would drive myself nuts choosing. Buying only one album was like trying to satisfy your craving with one potato chip.
Fast forward fifteen years. All that time I had been keeping detailed notes on classical records issued in Europe, subscribing to a large number of overseas record magazines, clipping reviews of whatever looked interesting and pasting them onto loose-leaf pages by label and genre of music. I had three notebooks full of information and no idea what I was going to do with it.
By late 1963 we were set up in our new offices adjacent to Rockefeller Center. Paul Rothchild was on board. Koerner, Ray & Glover were becoming known. The singer-songwriters were an established genre. And now . . . what? My mind was searching for something to get interested in.
Nina and I were at a restaurant on 57th Street for dinner with Harry Lew, our New York distributor, and his wife, and they were late. Perhaps because Carnegie Hall was right across the street, I was struck by my recollection of having to choose between two records I wanted so badly when I was a student. In 1963 classical records were $4.98, and quality paperback books, trade paperbacks, were $2.50. "Wouldn't it be neat," I mused, "to have a line of fine records at the same price as trade paperbacks?"
What kind of music? Unusual, baroque-oriented, with a very focused sense of audience—meaning essentially me as I was in 1948-1950. In sum, adventurous repertoire for music lovers with more taste than money.
Package the line intelligently. Fashion liner notes that would not only discuss the music, but also—and this was important to me—the social context, because music, sports, reading, and I assume sex, were the prime entertainments of that day. And I knew Bill Harvey could come up with some clever cover ideas that would showcase the music, with all fustiness brushed away.
The whole idea came to me so fully realized that I couldn't find the words to express it for a minute or two. I diagrammed the basic shape of it and wrote out the critical details on the paper tablecloth.
Harry Lew finally arrived. He heard me out, and thought I was crazy to try to compete in classical music with the majors and the knowledgeable established independents like Vanguard.
That was not about to slow me down. Next day I boarded a jet to Europe, my carefully assembled classical notebooks in my carry-on—this was the raw material of the idea and I wasn't taking chances with lost baggage.
Paris and London were my first stops. I cold-called everyone, introduced myself and booked appointments. Being president and owner of Elektra was enough to get me in the door to make my pitch. I wanted records the European labels never thought would or could be released in America, and here is a guy offering a $500 advance per album plus a royalty. I brought very simple licensing agreements and a raft of blank checks which were clearly visible and aching to be filled in.
I creamed seven quite nice albums from these sources, and spent many hours in further research at London's Gramophone Shop, which stocked everything worthwhile in classical recordings from Europe. I returned to New York with the certainty that if we could bring the whole concept together I could easily acquire many more albums, and I had already targeted the most likely sources of repertoire.
We gave the project a code name, Nonesuch, so that if we were ever asked we could truthfully say there was no such project—what in government is called "plausible deniability."
I had asked Bill Harvey to mock up a few covers, and I contacted Ed Canby to write the liner notes. Bill thought the best approach to create an identity was original artwork in a well designed frame, with the label's logo prominently on top, for instant recognition as people flipped through the record racks.
Once we had the first releases looking good, and about sixty days from initial launch, I decided to tie up the richest lode of material available from a single source, Club Français du Livre et de la Disque in Paris, which had a fine music division (also a major book club reprinting European classical literature in complete sets, handsomely bound, much beloved by the French). My reasoning was twofold. If the idea caught on, I would have to move fast to build a catalog, because I didn't have one of my own to draw from as did Vanguard, Vox, and the majors. Anxious to preempt anyone else from accessing the riches of Le Club, I telexed the owner-president, M. L'Hôpital, and followed up with a visit.
BILL HARVEY: Jac learned his French from Berlitz. A forced education—a guy would come in every day, I think for a couple of months, and Jac had the door closed, and he learned French, you know. Like anything else Jac did, if he put his mind to it, he was going to do it.
JAC: Le Club did business from a formidable stone mansion on a prestigious street in central Paris. Outside M. L'Hôpital's office door were two lights, one red, one green, so his secretary would know when she could enter. The door was tufted brown leather, and when it was opened there was an identical door reset about eighteen inches, forming a leather airlock.
The office was in elegant Empire style, and behind a gold leaf desk was M. L'Hôpital, a cultured, quite handsome gentleman in a blue pinstripe suit, the most perfectly ironed shirt with a collar to envy and an immaculately knotted tie. He spoke excellent English, but had never heard of Elektra. I showed him preview samples of the first Nonesuch releases, and told him I was willing to commit immediately to twenty albums, and that I wanted three years exclusivity to comb his list. And I just happened to have a check with me for $10,000 for a contract to be negotiated. My hunch about M. L'Hôpital was that he could make the deal and that his handshake would seal it. He gave his commitment to twenty masters which would be air-shipped to me as soon as they could be duplicated, and I left with him a sample agreement that Irwin Russell had prepared. Then we went out and had a civilized French lunch of several courses and wine. It's a good thing we got the business done first.
IRWIN RUSSELL: The way Jac went about it was really clever. We drafted up a very simple form, and he would go wandering around Europe picking up this quartet and that master.
JAC: I was doing this all very quietly, but still there were rumors around the office about some new record label. I would deny them, saying there was no such thing.
One evening as I was driving Judy Collins home, she asked me what was going on and I gave her the basic outline of the project. She asked what I was going to name it. I was undecided between 'Caravelle," a lovely-sounding word meaning a light, agile ship, and our code name, "Nonesuch." Without hesitation, Judy said, "Oh, call it Nonesuch, it has such a positive ring to it."
Bill Harvey's Nonesuch Logo
BILL HARVEY: When I started on the covers, I used to read the liner notes very intensely and absorb as much as I could before I did anything. The first two or three, I was feeling my way. Then suddenly I got this idea. Jac is pitching to the college audience, trying to get to young people who like this music but can't afford the full-price records. So I said, "Why don't I bring some humor, some fun to this stuff?" And I went to a sort of stylized drawing that I used when I was doing promotional illustration for Fairchild Publications. It's common in album artwork now, but you never saw it then. I did the first couple, and then I started to hire guys that I'd used when I worked at Fairchild. It gave them an opportunity to work in full color, and with a sense of humor. My main idea was to get a multirange of styles, in the sense of the illustrations, but I wanted to keep one format that would stamp Nonesuch as Nonesuch. And it really worked.
JOSHUA RIFKIN: Edward Sorel is an illustrator I first came across through Nonesuch; he did a lot of the earliest covers. The point to be made is that Jac was maybe one of the first post-modernists, liberating classical music from solemnity.
JAC: The covers became so commented upon that seven years and many hundreds of albums into the label, we mounted a traveling art show of the originals and toured it to colleges around the country, to great enthusiasm.
SUZANNE HELMS: Those Nonesuch covers, the original art, are collectors' items now, very valuable.
JAC: On February 14, 1964, we formally launched Nonesuch at our new Sperry-Rand offices, more or less combining an office warming with a defined musical purpose. Originally we had planned to have a big party between Thanksgiving and Christmas of 1963, but JFK was assassinated and I lost all heart for celebration just then.
We released the first ten records with a simple ad campaign in the monthly Schwann catalog and High Fidelity magazine. The copy read, "Quality Recordings [not "Records"] at the Price of a Quality Paperback." The ads were full-page, in my most convincing prose, describing what the label meant to us and the care and consideration that would be lavished on each release, despite the low price. For emphasis and specificity there was an adjoining one-third-page column listing the initial releases. I thought my copy was great. It spoke to everything I felt when I was too impoverished to buy all the music I craved as a student.
So much energy had gone into the creation of Nonesuch that I was astounded when there was absolutely no discernible public reaction. For six whole weeks.
MEL POSNER: I was having a tough time introducing Nonesuch.
JAC: Mel couldn't convince our distributors that this was a serious, ongoing effort.
MEL POSNER: That $2.50 price—everybody in the industry said, "Who needs it? Who wants to be involved in another bastard price?" In Washington, DC, the only way I could sell this one account, Discount Record Center, was to buy the rack. I said, "OK, I'm buying this space. Now let me put my Nonesuch records in on consignment. If they don't sell, I'll take them out." That was OK with Jac.
JAC: Placing Nonesuch records with retailers on consignment was a major concession because, except for singles, when records were shipped in 1964 they were sold with only a modest exchange privilege allowed the distributor.
At the beginning of the sixth week after release, the re-orders began, first a trickle, then a downpour. Thousands of albums by composers no one, except musicologists, had ever heard of, so obscure that they weren't even listed in the Schwann catalog. The Decca plants, which we had contracted to press Nonesuch, could not fulfill orders fast enough.
I quickly realized that I had better set up a very aggressive release schedule before everybody figured out what I had tumbled onto. Vanguard, especially, had a huge library, and they could kill us. By April 1966 we were pouring them out at the rate of about ten a month, especially milking the riches of the Club Français du Disque catalog.
Seymour Solomon of Vanguard came by the house one evening for drinks before dinner. He looked sagely through the early titles and commented knowingly about the origin of many of the records. He couldn't believe that anyone would try such a crazy stunt, especially a folkie like me. He tried to convince me (and himself) that I was in over my head. I allowed that he might be right, but why not indulge me and see what happens.
I was actually much better prepared than he knew, and I had Josh Rifkin squirreled away in the back room giving me guidance when I was unsure of myself. Josh was the Even Dozen's kazoo and piano player, but he was also a full-on musicologist who could tell you in what library and on what shelf in Europe you might find a particular composer's "lost" work.
JOSHUA RIFKIN: Many of my interests, virtually all, in fact, coincided with Jac's. My generation and the generation immediately before, which was Jac's, were the first to really grow up musically through recordings. When I was a kid, a teenager, records were the medium through which in many ways we thought about music, which gave them a special cachet, and which also meant that already well before I ever came to Elektra, I was very keen somehow to be involved in the record world. That was the coinage, in the sense of status, of achievement.
I was interested in out-of-the-way repertoire, particularly Baroque and Renaissance music and so forth, so I started telling Jac about labels and records that might interest him. Certain records that were submitted to him for licensing, Jac gave me to take home and check out. I started doing that informally, and pretty quickly I said to Jac—I was kind of brash in those days—that the information, the titles, the artist listings, were really not up to snuff, that they were taking too many things from the French original releases, which were very sloppy. I would get these things from France, "The Greatest Hits of the Renaissance," with everything completely misidentified; you didn't know what the hell it was.
JAC: I was impressed. This was an important talent of Josh's. Since he was of an age with our college audience, why not have one of their own write the liner notes?
JOSHUA RIFKIN: I can remember the first set I brought in to Jac. He copy-edited them, and did a very skillful job. He's terrific with words, and not only that, he knew the mechanics of seeing things through the press, which I hadn't yet learned. The guy was an all-around pro.
Before long I was overseeing most of the printed copy on Nonesuch. I edited people's notes, I wrote notes, I did the research on the titling, I helped work out details of the covers. Where I learned my musicology, my music history, and where I learned to write well, was all at Nonesuch—the discipline of writing something about music that is understandable to people and yet does say something, and fitting this all into a ten-by-eight inch square area: the greatest possible training.
So there I was, at twenty, twenty-one, helping to run a record company. Doing stuff like this, being involved in production and having been an artist, meant that you'd crossed the threshold between "us" and "them." You were now what you had always considered "them," and now you were part of a new "us."
JAC: Nonesuch turned out to be a bulletproof concept. For five hundred dollars I was able to audition the record first, and if I didn't like it, it went unreleased and the advance was applied to the next album. The all-in cost of production was low. We were paying only eleven cents in royalties, twenty-five cents for pressings. That totaled thirty-six cents. Add another twenty cents for the elaborate covers and the full cost was somewhere between fifty-six and sixty cents per unit. And there were no copyright royalties on baroque music. We were getting $1.10 per unit, so our profit margins, percentage-wise, were close to normal.
I had the contracts worked out to pay royalties on a $2.25 list price rather than on $2.50, because I would be giving dealers and distributors an additional ten percent discount to carry the line. This was known as a "functional" discount, originally intended to provide extra margin to rack jobbers, an intermediate layer of distribution supplying large drug chains and discount stores. Our regular dealers, who in the normal run of things were shut out from the "functional," thought the extra margin was great incentive. They were getting something for nothing, and they responded by displaying the line prominently. It was all rather symmetrical and graceful, and in the quantities they were selling, hugely profitable.
By the early winter of 1965, reports began coming back from the field that Nonesuch was a winner, but few in the classical record world put much credence in those reports—at first. The numbers proved real, and inevitably others began releasing their own similarly priced classical lines. Vox launched Turnabout; their ads screamed, "Turnabout Is Fair Play." Vanguard countered with their Everyman series. But by that time it was too late to bump us. Nonesuch was there to stay.
MAYNARD SOLOMON: Every major classical label had to scramble to catch up.
JAC: The New York Times ran a very complimentary feature on Seymour Solomon of Vanguard that heralded him as "The Baron of Baroque." I dropped Seymour a note of congratulations, signing it "Jac Holzman, Pretender to the Throne," and he got a big chuckle out of that. We rooted for each other, if with some wariness. Deep down, I think Maynard always believed I was more interested in the money than I was in baroque music.
"Brandenburg Concertos" gatefold HB-73006
MAYNARD SOLOMON: I was afraid of upsetting the balance between budget lines and high-priced LPs. Jac said, "I couldn't care less, as long as I make money on it." I was impressed with his boldness. Nonesuch was great packaging. Bill Harvey was a brilliant artistic director and thus a brilliant packager. And that's what made Nonesuch the forerunner of all budget labels. I was impressed by the shrewd moneymaking clever effort, but I also thought of the overall long-term welfare of the record business.
KEITH HOLZMAN: Jac had been after me to come and work at Elektra. I joined the company after I left the army. They were just getting ready to ship the second Nonesuch release, five records. The company was starting to do music that really intrigued me.
JAC: It was excellent timing, to have Keith come on board when he did. Nonesuch was perfectly suited to his training and his musical instincts. It was something solid for him to sink his teeth into.
KEITH HOLZMAN: We went on shipping five to ten albums a month.
JACLYN EASTON: I remember a lot of Nonesuch music in the house.
KEITH HOLZMAN: Nonesuch was hugely profitable. It was the tail wagging the Elektra dog.
MEL POSNER: At one point Nonesuch was fifty-five percent of our business.
JAC: In Nonesuch's first year we issued sixty records, selling in excess of a million units, and earned about $550,000 net, doubling our profitability. It's one of those rare instances in the record business where success in the classical music area was so enormous that it could fund popular music.
"Baroque Beatles Book" EKS-7306
JAC: By the early fall of 1965 the Beatles songbook had grown so large that it dominated Top 40 radio and had spilled over into the MOR (middle of the road) format for easy listening. It was in the elevators, it was everywhere. From this sprang an idea.
I called Mark Abramson and Steve Harris together and asked them about doing Beatles songs that would lend themselves to baroque interpretation, as a serious musical exploration, but packaged with humor and an eye toward the Christmas season.
The gating issues were who would do the arrangements, and could I get permission from the Beatles. Their publisher, Dick James, had a platoon of lawyers protecting the sanctity of the copyrights. Early on, Brian Epstein, the Beatles manager, had given Dick the publishing which he guarded like the golden goose it was. I didn't want to start an album and have problems. Better to find out immediately.
I asked Josh Rifkin to give things a try before I took off for London. My thought was for Josh to write a trio sonata arrangement of 'Ticket to Ride' for us to evaluate. Josh did a wonderfully inventive job and I headed for London leaving Josh and Mark to draw up a list of other tunes and ways of adapting them.
Dick James was a music publishing legend—tall, thickly set, up from the streets, with an accent that George Bernard Shaw and Lerner & Loewe must have meant with the line from "My Fair Lady" that an Englishman's speech absolutely classifies him. Dick was midway between Cockney and Mayfair.
Dick was heading over to the studio to see the boys and I tagged along in his Silver Cloud Rolls. Dick went in first while I waited. In a few moments he came and got me, and I made my very simple pitch. John Lennon's first comment was, "You did Koerner, Ray & Glover." I nodded a proud "Yes." "Well, that's alright then. Anyone who records Koerner, Ray & Glover is OK with me." The others thought it was a cute idea, and that was it, plus an autographed picture: "For Adam from The Beatles." He adored it. And Paul McCartney took me over and introduced me to his bespoke boot maker.
The album was completed in good time for the holiday season and Steve Harris managed to get WMCA, the crucial Top 40 station in New York, to feature it on Cousin Brucie's morning show.
STEVE HARRIS: They played it twenty-eight times in a row! Unheard of! All that radio play for an Elektra album—also unheard of! I remember Jac striding up and down, beaming, saying, "Fuck 'em, we'll beat 'em at their own game."
JAC: Flushed with success, we sponsored a "Baroque Beatles Book" concert at Lincoln Center. And nobody came. It was one of those nights where there are more on stage than in the audience. But the album sold very well.
Three generations. Harry (Jac's Grandfather) top, Dr. Jacob (Jac's Father) center and Jac at five years old
JAC: My paternal grandfather Harry Holzman, who was born in Liverpool on his family's way to America from Lithuania, was a good-natured charmer. His business interests included bits and pieces of hotels, pawn shops fronted by his relatives, and the buying and selling of precious metals. He died when I was six, but he imprinted on my young mind something which at the time had no meaning for me, but over the years proved to be one of the verities. Grandfather Harry hoisted me onto his knee and told of calling on potential customers without an appointment, a normal practice in days when not everyone had a telephone. When asked who was calling he would reply, "Tell Mr. So-and-So that CASH is calling." And then he pressed a silver dollar into my hand. Point taken, lesson learned: Get liquid and stay liquid.
Elektra, together with Nonesuch, had grown to a critical mass where the company's financial needs could be met from current cash flow without ever requiring interim loans from banks. My personal concerns about money were now past. I loved the comfort of knowing I could "write the check."
Late in 1964, in a rare vagrant moment with not much to do and nothing on my mind, I strolled Park Avenue and was drawn to a Mercedes showroom. The window displayed an immaculately crafted four-door sedan, which appealed to my aesthetic sense. In California my car had been a crummy Ford Falcon that kept dropping parts along the freeway. Without a moment's thought I signed up for a new Mercedes four-door sedan, burgundy with tan leather interior, very smartlooking, $4,500. Two months later it arrived and I hired a driver.
JAC: Nonesuch was bringing in over half a million dollars per year in retained profit, and that money was recycled into our expansion program. We could staff up a bit. Nonesuch had been me, working with Josh Rifkin and Ed Canby as primary consultants, but I needed a knowledgeable assistant who could handle the routine daily matters with precision and class. I found her in Teresa Sterne, who had worked with Seymour Solomon at Vanguard.
I would never have raided Vanguard, but Tracey had already quit and spent a summer in Italy. I was primarily looking for someone to assist on Nonesuch in the way she had been assisting at Vanguard, but I soon found that I could give her substantial autonomy. Tracey was immensely savvy, had great sensitivity to the music, and was tight with music publications, reviewers, university music departments and the like. She would bring a formidable range of contacts to bear on what we were doing.
Teresa 'Tracey' Sterne
TERESA STERNE: Jac was very busy, involved with his Elektra doings and making original records, and he immediately left a lot to me. I said, "I'll be very honest, I haven't run a label before. I've been around it, I've helped to do it, but I haven't taken full responsibility." He said, "Well, it's really on wheels, the thing is going. You'll see for yourself what needs to be done."
JAC: And if there were any snags, we would work our way through them together.
TERESA STERNE: Josh Rifkin was coming in a couple of times a week, and this had been going on for several months when I came to work. I remember Bill Harvey telling me, "Watch out, Josh is a pretty arrogant kid. He really almost knows too much. If you don't get along with him, or he doesn't serve your needs, just change it. It's up to you. You have to be the boss here." Of course, I very quickly found that Josh was invaluable, and it was wonderful. He had the musicological scholarly knowledge which I didn't have. I mean, I was a trained, very educated musician, but there's a different level of knowledge when you get into early music.
None of us was paid very well. Josh was getting a token honorarium. I came on a secretarial salary—
JAC:—Executive secretarial.
TERESA STERNE: It took years to fight my way out of that. And there was no budget for help; I couldn't have a secretary. I went to work on October 25, 1965, and it was way into 1968, the late summer, that I finally sat down and wrote Jac a memo. I said I couldn't go on without at least a part-time secretary. I'm doing everything. I need help. I mean, three years. I had lots of energy, but I couldn't do it any more.
JAC: Yes, she was taking on the world and not getting much money for it, but her visibility in a field she loved had risen remarkably. She was able to green-light records swiftly, and this was real power in a musical arts community always begging for scraps.
Tracey was releasing forty to fifty albums a year. Each week we would have a long sit-down and review all problems and repertoire issues, considering how each proposed record would fit into the catalog. To me a catalog was not an agglomeration of records, there had to be a certain symmetry. Our weekly sessions were always a pleasure because we got so much done and they were enormous fun. Tracey prepared well and I rarely turned her down on any request. At the end of each meeting we always gave each other a huge hug. There was that kind of affection.
If Tracey drove people up the wall—and she did—it was because someone had not come through and it impinged on the rhythm of her work. If she got testy—and it was rarely more than that—I was thrilled. Tracey was just doing her job and I was well served. Because she handled Nonesuch so well, she provided me the freedom to run Elektra. She gave Nonesuch a hearty, full-throated voice, and for me it was great that the voice belonged to a woman. Tracey was a jewel.
"Music from the Morning of the World" H-72015
JAC: In Nonesuch's second year we introduced the Explorer series. I knew a number of ethnomusicologists doing field recordings who could be enticed to release through Nonesuch if we could demonstrate that we would treat the material with reverence and attention to detail.
To prime the pump and give the Explorer series some shape, we deleted our Flamenco, Japanese, Indian and African music from the Elektra catalog and switched them to Nonesuch with new covers, some re-editing and better mastering. With Elektra moving toward pop music, these specialized records deserved a new life in a more nurturing environment.
TERESA STERNE: They were called the Explorer International Series. When I came, there were already about five or six such records. It wasn't yet a big focus.
Peter Siegel played a major role with Explorer. He came to work the same day that I did, as a producer.
PETER SIEGEL: Over the next few years I recorded something like fifteen or twenty albums. The stuff was low profile, relatively non-commercial, and inexpensive to produce, so that I was pretty much able to do what I wanted. I would say to Jac, "I think we should record this," and he would say, "Fine, just do it."
TERESA STERNE: Peter had a great love for this music. Asian music, Indian music, was becoming very—not to use the word fashionable, but people were tuning in to it, and it was a part of the Sixties and meditation and all that. Peter treated it very seriously.
David Lewiston called up soon after I came to work, before I was taking responsibility, this guy with an English accent—
JAC:—A very winning English accent—
TERESA STERNE:—And he said he had some tapes he'd made in Bali of gamelan music and would we be interested to hear them? I said, "Well, you know, before you even get involved, let me switch you to the head of the company." Jac set up an appointment for him to see Peter Siegel. And the next thing I knew, I heard this great sound coming out of the studio and Peter dashed out, saying, "Oh, my God, this is fantastic." And they made a deal with him.
JAC: A $500 advance against a royalty for the use of the tapes which included liner notes to please the fussiest world music fanatic. David's notes were so fulsome we had to set them in eight-point type to fit them on the back cover, readable only by owls with magnifying glasses.
"Voices of Africa" H-72026
TERESA STERNE: And he was on his way almost immediately to do more, to South America. In the Sixties, for goodness sake, you could take a thousand dollars and do a whole field trip. So David would get a little licensing money from us and make another trip. He came back a year later with the makings of four magnificent records. He ended up doing a lot of recordings for us.
But the Tibetan stuff—when he handed me that first tape, I didn't know what to make of it. I said, "My God, it sounds like everybody's groaning." I talked to a couple of musicians who were more into this and they said, "This is great stuff.' And you know, somehow I zoomed into it. I listened and I listened, and I began to hear what it was about. One night, it just hit me suddenly. I was listening to it and I was sort of half falling asleep and it got into my soul.
PAT FARALLA: A chorus of monks chanting at dawn. It was musical nirvana. It was the temple. It was Holyville. It was our friend that soothed our fried brains. Everybody was addicted to that music. We listened and understood, and Jac made it possible . . .
FRITZ RICHMOND: When I was in the Jim Kweskin Jug Band, one of my favorite tapes was one that Jim had, by Joseph Spence, a Bahamian singer and guitar player. We'd listen to it over and over. There was never anyone quite like him. Ry Cooder is maybe like him, Taj Mahal a little, but really no one. Joseph played finger-style guitar, based on church music, shaped note hymnals, highly complex. He taught himself how to do it, and it was so complicated that it seemed no great guitarist could even play it.
I had to get down to the Bahamas and see this guy do what he did before I died. Down I went to Nassau and went around the bars and music clubs. I found Blind Blake, a famous local player there—he wrote 'Sloop John B'—and he knew Joseph. His bass player wrote down "St. Thomas More." It was a church, and at the church they knew how to direct me to Joseph. First to a little grocery store, and they sent me across the street to his house. His wife answered the door: "Come back at nine." I was so happy. I cabled Elektra for some recording gear—
JAC:—Which I happily sent.
Jac, Bill Harvey, Josh Rifkin and Tracey Sterne
FRITZ RICHMOND:—And I recorded him. He was marvelous. I got a camera and shot the front album cover pictures. And when the record came out I took some to Joseph.
JOHN SEBASTIAN: That album was radically different. For New York City finger-pickers, it was required reading.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: It was done in Joseph's living room. Total production costs were under a thousand dollars, including air fare, cheap hotel down there, tape stock, paying Joseph, guitar strings. It was called "Happy All the Time." It was probably the best, the purest Explorer record of that time. And it sold ninety-three copies.
JAC: It actually sold a few thousand, but the point was, Elektra had recorded and proudly released Joseph Spence‘s album because it was tremendous music.
PETER SIEGEL: We recorded Joseph again for Nonesuch, and those albums were deeply important in the long run. You can hear his musical influence in many places, from the Incredible String Band to Ry Cooder to David Byrne to the Grateful Dead.
JAC: I wanted to keep Nonesuch moving in interesting new directions. Open mind, open ears—and it continued to pay great dividends, musically and culturally, long-term.
The album that rebirthed the music of Scott Joplin. Nonesuch H-71248
JOSHUA RIFKIN: I had known some of Scott Joplin's ragtime music in my pre-teen years, and I then forgot about it for a long time. Then I became friends with a composer and critic named Eric Salzman, who was starting to get interested in ragtime, largely through his friendship with another musician, William Bolcom, who later did a lot of recording for Nonesuch. Talking with Eric and Bill reawakened my interest. I would sit with Eric and play endless rags. I started playing ragtime publicly. For Nonesuch I was doing nice little finely produced records of Baroque and Renaissance music and at some point I said, 'You know, Joplin is great stuff. We ought to record this music. Instead of selling five hundred copies as we did of my last recording of fifteenth-century French secular music, we might sell fifteen hundred." Tracey liked the idea. We took it to Jac, and he liked the idea—and that it would be cheap because I would be the performer. So we just went into the church and recorded.
JAC: I had heard of Joplin but knew very little about him except for 'Maple Leaf Rag.' That he was a serious classical composer who had written operas, ballets, marches and songs was all new to me. Joplin's struggle as a black man to overcome a general indifference to his music piqued my interest, and I quickly agreed to do the album with Josh performing and the recording to be done at a church that Josh thought would give the music the right acoustic frame.
JOSHUA RIFKIN: It was a labor of love. Joplin rags were known in those days, if at all, to a fairly small coterie, and known as kind of fast, loud music. Our intention was to present it on Nonesuch, on a classical label, with a dignified cover and literate notes, as music to be taken seriously, not honky-tonk or catchy.
At Elektra and Nonesuch it was all music-driven, not market-driven. It seems like another world now. We knew absolutely zero of such things as marketing or promotion. We did with the Joplin record what we did with every Nonesuch record, which was, put it on the market and see what happens. But within a few weeks we began to sense that something was afoot. Journalists started writing about it: "I'm going to have So-and-So do a feature review of it." Radio stations started playing it: "God, I love this record!"
JAC: And the rest is, as they say, history: a robust revival of ragtime, a special and uniquely American kind of urban folk music, cresting in a Joplin craze; and in terms of direct popular culture influence, a straight line from Joshs recordings to Marvin Hamlisch's Academy Award-winning score for the immensely successful Paul Newman and Robert Redford film "The Sting" to the production of a new musical of E.L. Doctorow's novel, "Ragtime."
JAC: On Nonesuch we could bring the musical and cultural past back to life in the present, and we could project music and culture into the future. Nonesuch was the first American label to seriously address electronic music.
BERNIE KRAUSE: Jac introduced me to Paul Beaver. Paul had a place in LA, on Hyans Street, a one-story red brick warehouse, pretty funky, falling apart more with each earthquake. Inside he had the largest collection of Novachords, the first synthesizer, built by Hammond in the Thirties, with many presets—
JAC:—It had a hundred sixty-nine tubes and weighed a quarter of a ton.
BERNIE KRAUSE: Paul had an Ondes-Martinot too, a little French synthesizer, also from the Thirties. He built all kinds of other instruments. He was doing a lot of effects work with "Creature of the Black Lagoon"-type B-movies—on the sound stage he would have a series of oscillators and other devices on a table thirty feet long and scurry back and forth. He did the effects for "War of the Worlds," "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," movies all through the Fifties. He had quite a reputation. Paul was also a conservative Republican. He wore blue serge suits with dandruff on the shoulders. He was one of the world's greatest Wurlitzer theater pipe organists—his big dream was to build a restaurant in the round where he would come up with his organ through a water fountain and play all night. He was also a Scientologist and a believer in UFOs.
I was a folkie—I had been a banjo player in the Weavers, the last replacement for Pete Seeger. I was looking for a different musical voice to express myself. At Mills College, at the music center, they had early prototypes of the modular synthesizer, and I got very excited about the potential of the instrument, the medium of electronic music.
Paul and I bought a synthesizer, a Moog, but we couldn't get Hollywood interested in using it, and we couldn't get record companies interested in electronic music. We had something like a hundred rejection letters from all around the world. We were almost broke.
I had done some consultant producer work for Nonesuch with Tracey Sterne, and I knew of Jac's proclivity for experimentation. He was the only one with the vision to see what this instrument, the synthesizer, could do.
JAC: It didn't take much genius to figure out that the record was the ideal medium for electronically generated music. I had been aware of the possibilities for years. My dad had a lawyer named Abe Frisch whose hobby was creating tapes of music, synthetically generated, only Abe did it with a massive inventory of tiny magnets which he pressed, one by one, onto the tape, re-arranging the ferrous oxide tape particles into something resembling a sound.
First Nonesuch commission for electronic music to Morton Subotnick H-71174
BERNIE KRAUSE: Jac took the risk, got behind it, and gave us a contract to record a guide to electronic music as a boxed set with LP and detailed booklet. The album was on the Billboard charts for twenty-six weeks, one of Nonesuch's best-selling records to that time. It was the key to introducing the synthesizer into pop music and film. This was something really important, something that broke down all the walls in the music business.
More broadly, Jac's vision gave a voice in the world to a new musical instrument, in effect the first to be successfully introduced since the saxophone a century before.
JAC: I decided to take a leaf from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century musical life and be the patron of an electronic album. After talking it over with Tracey, we decided that Morton Subotnick would be an ideal recipient for the first-ever commission of a piece to be created for the medium of home stereo. Subotnick was not only a gifted composer, he also helped design the Buchla keypad on which the album was created. "Silver Apples of the Moon" was honored with numerous prizes.
