Chapter 8
Buttering up the blues ... Power dives and re-recordings ... From the south side of Chicago to the Newport electric blowout of 1965
JAC: Paul Rothchild was doing everything I had hoped for, and more. He wasn't just complementing me, he was greatly extending my reach, and was doing it with the same kind of manic energy I saw in myself.
We were talking one day about what was happening on "the street," and I said, "Paul, you don't have to go to the street. You're in a position where you can make the street."
What I meant was put Elektra out front. Paul could and did. He could gossip, schmooze, cajole, wheedle, beg, and orate—plus that most critical ability: he could "close." It was fine to romance artists. Getting them signed to Elektra, and for a modest advance, was an order of magnitude more difficult. Paul could do that.
PAUL WILLIAMS: Paul was a hanging-out guy. He almost invented something we totally take for granted now, which is that the secret of being a successful producer in the rock and roll world, especially in the drug-soaked Sixties, was the ability to hang out with the musicians and have them feel that you were one of them and that you were part of this incredible campaign that we were all on to turn the world upside down with our music and the great ideas we had when we were stoned last night and so forth. Well, Paul could run with you as fast as you were running, and talk with you as fast as you were talking, and he was just as into it as anybody.
JAC: One of Rothchild's first independent signings was the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. This was yet another beginning, and where it would take us we could never have imagined at the time.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: I'm at a party in Cambridge, Massachusetts, New Year's Eve of 1965. Fritz Richmond is just in off the road with the Jim Kweskin Jug Band. He says, "Hey, Paul, you remember that harmonica player, Paul Butterfield? Well, I've got to tell you, I've just heard the best music I've ever heard in my entire life. He's got a full-on electric blues band, and he's playing in a bar in Chicago. You should go there right away."
I got on a flight to Chicago, got off the plane, walked into Big John's about three in the morning, in time for the last set. And I heard the most amazing music. It was thrilling, chilling—changed my entire genetic code.
At the end of the set I talked to Butter and told him I wanted them to make a record with Elektra. Paul always had to have an argument. This one lasted about ten minutes over pizza. Then he said, "OK."
Then Butter said, “Are you tired yet?” I said, “No, I'm on fire, I'm ready.” He says, “Great. I've got this buddy playing at an after-hours club over on the South Side. Pepper's Lounge.” I walk in and it's Muddy Waters. Those guys were playing at the clubs every day then. So Paul showed me the last of the great era on the Chicago South Side.
Towards dawn he says, “One more stop.” We walk into a luncheonette kind of place, and there's another band playing, and it's like a pale reflection of Paul's band. But there was a guitar player that just tore my mind apart. About four tunes in I turn to Paul and say, “Who is that?” He says, “Oh, that's Mike Bloomfield. That's his band.” I say, “Wow, how come he's not in your band?” He says, “Nah, he's got his own.” I say, “How would you feel if he was in your band?” He says, “Wow, it would be great. Two guitars. Amazing. Nah, it'll never happen.” I say, “Do you mind if I give it a shot?” He says, “No, but I've tried it twenty times.” Michael comes and sits down at our table. We shake hands. We then do a half hour of intense intellectual Jew at each other. He found a kindred soul, I found a kindred soul, it was wonderful. Finally I said, “Michael, how would you like to leave your band and join Paul's band? We're going to New York to make a record.” He said, “Sure.” Butterfield is sitting there with his jaw on the table.
MARK ABRAMSON: It was the first electric music Rothchild had ever recorded. I was helping him in the studio, and I didn't know any more than he did. They were loud. Nobody on Elektra had ever been that loud before. We were a folk music label. If there were drums it was somebody going tchk, tchk, tchk, and we would do it in Judson Hall and it didn't make any difference if it bled all over the place. The Butterfield Band, though, with Sam Lay—big black man, huge arms—the way he laid into the drums, it scared the daylights out of us technically. We had to figure out how to record loud, by trial and error.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: I recorded, edited for five weeks, put the album together, sequenced it, lacquered it. Then I waited.
And an important thing happened. Jac had discovered long ago that if he put out these little promotional records, his samplers, he could introduce the hungry folk world to new talent and new albums. He did one in the spring of 1965 that was called “Folk Song 65.” Tom Rush was on it. Dick Rosmini. Judy Collins. And one of the cuts was from the Butterfield sessions, ‘Born in Chicago.'
JAC: Normally we would expect a sampler to sell twenty-five thousand copies.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: By the third or fourth week, sales had skyrocketed past a hundred thousand!
JAC: Actually sixty thousand—which was still an amazing number.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: Jac got on the phone and called the stores to ask what the hell was going on. He finds out that people have been asking for the record with ‘Born In Chicago' on it. Big sales for Elektra. Especially for something that was not standard rock and roll and not standard rhythm and blues. It was white people performing black music. Butterfield was the first electric person besides Elvis to do this successfully.
Bells go off in Jac's head. He realizes that this is a hit act. For the album, he goes for an initial pressing of ten thousand. He had never done an initial press of anything like that—
JAC:—Not of a new artist.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: So the album is jacketed and boxed, ten thousand copies, ready to go out into the world—
JAC:—Paid for—
Paul Rothchild (center) rehearsing the Paul Butterfield Band
PAUL ROTHCHILD:—And I'm going through hell. Because from a producer's point of view, after listening to the record I realize, “Rothchild, you didn't get it. You did not get that act on tape.”
In the middle of this anxiety I get a call from Jac. “How would you like to fly up to Martha's Vineyard and visit Tom Rush at his aunt's house and eat some fresh zucchini?” So we're up in the little Elektra plane—and somewhere over Long Island Sound I say, “Jac, I got a problem.” He says, “What is it?” I say, “I want to re-record the Butterfield album.”
I thought he was going to have a coronary. The plane goes into a power dive. I thought we were headed all the way into the drink. He says, ”You want to do what?” I say, “We should junk it.” He says, “Paul, it's packed, ready to ship! It's going out on Monday!! You're insane!!!” I say, “Jac, there's all those people out there waiting for a great album, and I didn't get it.” He says, “‘What about "Born in Chicago?"” I say, “That's the only track we can salvage.” He says, “Oh my God, what do you want to do?” I say, “I want to recapture that first moment I felt when I walked into Big John's in Chicago. We don't have that on tape. We have a pale facsimile. I want to record them live for a week.” He thinks for a moment, then he says, “Not a bad idea.” And he brings us out of the power dive.
JAC: We ate zucchini on the Vineyard, and never discussed it on the way home.
MARK ABRAMSON: That shows the persuasive power of Paul Rothchild, to get Jac to dump thousands and thousands of those first pressings.
JAC: The voice of reason told me I was crazy, but Rothchild had my artistic sensibility convinced. There was much more than a single album at stake, there was everything else Paul could do in the future. To say “No“ would have been to neuter Paul as an Elektra producer.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: So—we essentially four-walled the Café Au Go Go, across from the Bitter End, one of the major high-tone folk clubs, and brought in the recording trucks. And that's when the union showed up, and that's when our costs quadrupled over our budget projections.
JAC: We had already paid the band their advance, gone to the expense of scrapping the first album, and now the union was asking for more.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: We thought we were just going to be paying recording costs, but all of a sudden there's the union threatening to fine us for not reporting sessions, and a guy in the club every night clocking it—huge dollars.
JAC: They recorded over several nights.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: I started going through the tapes, carefully, and about three weeks later I went into Jac's office and said, “Jac, you're going to love this. It sucks beyond your wildest expectations. We have nothing.” He said, “Oh my God!!! What are you going to do now????” I said, “I'm going to go back into the studio and get it right.”
JAC: And I said, “OK.” For all the same reasons.
First Butterfield album ... on the third try EKS-7294
PAUL ROTHCHILD: The band came back to New York. I put them in a musician's hotel, the Albert, in the Village. They drove up in a truck and unloaded the equipment out front. I said, “One of you stay here, I'm going to go in and register you all.” I'm at the desk about five minutes and I turn around and they're all standing there behind me. I say, “Who's watching the equipment?” They say, “It's just right outside.” We run out and it's all gone, down to the last drumstick.
JAC: So we rented equipment, and Paul took them to Mastertone and recorded for a week.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: Three productions for the release of a first album! Our costs got up to fifty thousand dollars, which in those days was enormous. But that album is golden.
FRITZ RICHMOND: It was the sort of an album you could take to a party and the mood of the party picked up when you put that record on, just as well as if you brought in a keg of beer or a bottle of whiskey.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: It still sells. Far more than that, certainly all through the Sixties and Seventies, I didn't meet a guitar player who wasn't influenced by that album. Most of them have one comment: “The first two Butterfield albums taught me how to play guitar and changed my life.”
Butterfield was the genuine article. He was blessed with really being a blues musician, feeling the blues. And his instincts about musicians—I believe he was one of the greatest band leaders this country has ever had. He's right up there with Benny Goodman or Nelson Riddle. He had the ability to pick personnel who are great players, and who you know will join with your concept. Some of the greatest musicians in the world up through the mid-Eighties were ex-members of one version or the other of the Butterfield Blues Band.
Butterfield Blues Band's classic “East West” EKS-7315
MARK ABRAMSON: The original band were a very intelligent group of fellows. Butterfield was very laid back, very quiet. The dynamo in the group was Mike Bloomfield. He was hilarious. We would go on a trip, he would have us rolling on the floor. We never knew what exactly he was saying. He was in the genius category. And I think he couldn't handle the world. He was on everything. How somebody that nervous can be on speed without destroying himself in five minutes, I don't know.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: Bottom line, the Butterfield Band opened another door to American musicianship. It made the electric blues a viable form for popular music, made it possible for hundreds of American performers to play electric music.
JAC: In the mid-Seventies I was living on Maui. The phone rings. It is the two Pauls, Rothchild and Butter. It's late in Hawai'i, so God knows what time it is wherever those two characters are. They had been hanging, talking of old times, and suddenly Butter says, “Let's call Jac.” They both got on the phone and said that if they had ever given me any trouble, any grief, they wanted to apologize, because once they were gone from Elektra they had both discovered what a swamp the rest of the record business was. They never fully appreciated who I was and what the label meant to them, and they just wanted me to know.
In late 1994 Paul was asked by Rhino Records to locate the masters of the original (pre-power dive) Butterfield tapes for release under the title “The Long Lost Original Paul Butterfield Blues Band Album.” Paul and his son Dan eventually located the original tapes and prepared the masters. If Paul was unhappy with those sessions in 1965, thirty years later he was thrilled. They were rough, gritty and real—everything a blues record should be. What Paul considered inferior recording quality was actually much better then either of us remembered, giving the music a growling authenticity we would not have recognized or understood in 1965. Paul turned out to be very proud of that album.
JAC: The event of the folk year was the Newport Folk Festival. It was launched in 1959 by George Wein, who was also founder of the Newport Jazz Festival and an accomplished jazz pianist himself.
At the folk festival, Elektra was always well represented with performers on stage. I went every year from the first. You'd see all the people you normally would run across in New York or LA, but out of the city there was time for relaxation that transcended business or party loyalties. For me it was a mini-vacation. I loved just wandering around, catching the workshops and the impromptu get-togethers of musicians showing off their licks and trading songs.
THEODORE BIKEL: We brought artists from all over the world. From Hawai'i, from Fiji, Maoris from New Zealand. We brought a penny whistler from South Africa, a black man, at a time when people couldn't even get a passport.
We were non-profit. If there was any money left over, we'd give it to folklorists to get proper equipment to record songs, or to resuscitate Cajun music, or we'd sponsor smaller regional festivals, or give money to indigent musicians for good instruments.
Each year at Newport we were not only presenting artists, we were housing them, we were feeding them—there were tables laden with food. It was a nightmare to be a director, because we had to be everything. Caterers. Counselors. We had to place people for gigs, we had to be apologists for the presence of the cops. But it was the place to be. There was an extraordinary spirit in the air.
The 'Folk Mafia' (left to right) Jac, Theo Bikel, Pete and Toshi Seeger, Harold Leventhal, Fred Hellerman and Maynard Solomon
JAC: Every year there was something fresh to catch my interest. Newport is where I met Paul Williams, an eighteen-year-old college dropout with an armful of his homemade, very perceptive rock magazine, Crawdaddy.
PAUL WILLIAMS: I started Crawdaddy before Rolling Stone. In the first year it was a few mimeographed pages, with aspirations. The time Jac is talking about, I was walking around selling it by hand, me and two girls. We had brought four hundred copies, and we sold them for a quarter. And one of the people who bought was Jac. Jac being Jac, he took an interest in it, and in me. We hung out and had a good talk. He was very willing to meet me as an equal, very enthusiastic about what I was doing. I had brought my three back issues with me, just one of each. Jac being Jac, he wanted to see them all, and he bought them, and the current issue, for $1 the lot—the first person to acquire a complete set. And Elektra was the first record company to take out paid ads in Crawdaddy.
JAC: Newport was set up with formal concerts in the evening, and during the day workshops based on a variety of themes: guitar and banjo picking, Delta blues, city blues, ballads, every kind of folk-tinged music. Each workshop was overseen by a moderator to move things forward. Perhaps Pete Seeger and fifty young, dexterous, and very ambitious five-string banjo pickers. Or Delta bluesmen, Mississippi John Hurt or Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, sharing songs and licks with eager, scrubbed, predominantly white faces.
THEODORE BIKEL: We had anywhere from twelve to twenty areas where things were happening—under a tree, in a corner, on a tennis court, in a gym. Mouth organ, Appalachian, Slavic, ballads here, storytelling there, work songs there, songs of protest there, international songs there. It was like a smorgasbord of folk music.
JAC: On the Saturday afternoon of the 1965 festival there was a blues workshop. Alan Lomax was hosting the black traditionalists. Alan was the son of John Lomax, two great white collectors, for whom traditional music seemed to freeze-frame about the time of the Tennessee Valley Authority. Alan was the last protector and refuge of the lone voice from Mutton Hollow.
The second segment of the workshop was slated to be white urban blues, featuring the Butterfield Band. Due to the amazing sales of ‘Born in Chicago' on the Elektra sampler, and the buzz that went with it, I had arranged for them to perform at Newport. Albert Grossman, the manager of Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary, was in full hover over them as future clients.
Butterfield and band wailing at the Newport Blues Workshop
PAUL ROTHCHILD: I had introduced Butterfield to Grossman.
JAC: The crowd at the blues workshop was enormous. Instead of a few hundred this one had nearly a thousand.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: Lomax was loaded for bear. After the traditionalists and ahead of the Butterfield set, he got up and said something like, “Today you've been hearing music by the great blues players, guys who go out and find themselves an old cigar box, put a stick on it, attach some strings, sit under a tree and play great blues for themselves. Now you're going to hear a group of young boys from Chicago with electric instruments. Let's see if they can play this hardware at all.”
JAC: Lomax was so condescending, I was embarrassed for him.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: Grossman took it the worst way. Lomax comes down from this little stage and Grossman coldcocks him. And for about the next five minutes these two leviathans, monsters, both kings in their own right—
JAC:—Dueling behemoths. Two big growlers, overweight, unfit, far from agile—
PAUL ROTHCHILD:—Groveling in the dusty dirt of Newport over the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. It was wonderful. Holzman was laughing his ass off.
JAC: Al "If I Had a Hammer" Grossman versus Alan "Mighty Defender of the Status Quo" Lomax. One very short round, split decision. And this was only the preliminary bout. The main event was the following night when Dylan went electric—
THEODORE BIKEL:—To the delight of some, to the dismay of most.
JONATHAN TAPLIN: Grossman, upon hearing that Bob wanted to play electric, hastily put a band together. And the only guys who had electric instruments were Butterfield's band.
JAC: Albert had Al Kooper flown in by charter from New York to play organ. Al was always a reluctant flyer, and winging to Newport in a tiny plane with one engine was not his preferred mode of travel.
DAVE GAHR: I knew what was coming, because in the afternoon Iwas the only photographer allowed in to shoot Dylan with Butterfield's band.
JONATHAN TAPLIN: We kicked everybody out of the stadium and did a short sound check, which Peter Yarrow was mixing. The problem was the rhythm section. They were great blues players, but Dylan didn't play twelve-bar music. He played very bizarre music in terms of its structure. So they didn't really understand what was going on at all. And Bob refused to do much of a rehearsal—
Dylan goes electric at Newport 1965
JAC:—Ten or fifteen minutes. Let's say that musically, Dylan's electric set was not going to be tightly wrapped.
That evening I was standing next to Dave Gahr in the photographer's pit, below and in front of the stage. Peter Yarrow introduced Dylan for the very special artist that he was, and from the moment he launched into ‘Maggie's Farm,' now fleshed out with an incredible electric intensity, it was clarity and catharsis.
I could feel the tickler go up on the back of my neck, the hairs rising in happy resonance. My friend Paul Nelson of the Little Sandy Review was standing alongside, and we just turned to each other and shit-grinned.
This was electricity married to content. We were hearing music with lyrics that had meaning, with a rock beat, drums and electric guitars, Mike Bloomfield keening as if squeezing out his final note on this planet. Absolutely stunning. All the parallel strains of music over the years coalesced for me in that moment. It was like a sunrise after a storm, when all is clean . . . all is known.
Then suddenly we heard booing, like pockets of wartime flak. The audience had split into two separate and opposing camps. It grew into an awesome barrage of catcalls and hisses. It was very strange, because I couldn't believe that those people weren't hearing the wonderful stuff I was hearing.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: I was at the console, mixing the set, the only one there who had ever recorded electric music. I could barely hear Dylan because of the furor.
JAC: I looked directly into Dylan's face as he squinted into the darkness, trying to figure out what was happening.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: From my perspective, it seemed like everybody on my left wanted Dylan to get off the stage, everybody on my right wanted him to turn it up. And I did—I turned it up.
JAC: Backstage, an un-civil war had broken out. Alan Lomax was bellowing that this was a folk festival, you didn't have amplified instruments. Pete Seeger was beside himself, jumped into a car and rolled up the windows, his hands over his ears.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: On one side you had the old guard, George Wein, Alan Lomax, Pete Seeger. Pete, pacifist Pete, with an ax: “I'm going to cut the cables!” The other group is Peter Yarrow, a festival director, Albert Grossman, not a director but on the other side. There were about eight people on each side of the cable, and more gathering, one group trying to defend it, the other trying to cut it. Seeger's a tall thin guy, and Yarrow's a short thin guy, and they are nose to nose, screaming at each other.
JONATHAN TAPLIN: Out front it was turning into a disaster.
JAC: Crazier and crazier.
JONATHAN TAPLIN: Bob was getting booed and he walked off.
JAC: Dylan left the stage hurt, angry and shaken. Peter Yarrow took the stage again, very rattled. Like a wounded cheerleader, he attempted to rally support, urging the audience on until there was enough positive emotion that Dylan could return with dignity.
JONATHAN TAPLIN: I saw Dylan backstage from a little bit of a distance, and he seemed to be crying. Johnny Cash came up and gave him a big Gibson guitar, a jumbo, much too big for Bob, and told him to go back out there.
JAC: His face set with determination, Dylan walked back onto that stage and stared down ten thousand pairs of eyes.
JONATHAN TAPLIN: He says, “Does anybody have a D harmonica?” And all these harmonicas were being thrown from the audience. The audience thought they'd won—here was Dylan, no band, back into acoustic folk stuff. And then he sang ‘It's All Over Now, Baby Blue' and walked off.
JAC: And Dylan and folk music and Elektra were never the same again.
JONATHAN TAPLIN: It was unbelievably dramatic. At the party afterwards he was pretty much by himself. I mean, all the other singers and everything were very supportive of him, but it was clear that he didn't like what had happened.
I ended up working with him, touring, all over the country and then all over the world, for two years, and he was booed everywhere. Every time. He would play the first half folk, with just harmonica and guitar, and the second half rock and roll, and get booed.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: To me, that night at Newport was as clear as crystal. It's the end of one era and the beginning of another. There's no historical precedent. This is a folk festival, the folk festival, and you couldn't even say it's blues and the blues has moved to an electric format. This is a young Jewish songwriter with an electric band that sounds like rock and roll.
There were two very big passions happening here. And it was an election. You had to choose which team you were going to support. I expected Peter Yarrow to join with the future, because of his peer group and his dedication to Dylan, whose songs had made Peter, Paul and Mary's success so resounding. At the same time it changed Peter's professional life. Peter, Paul and Mary were acoustic folk singers, and Peter had to know that their moment had passed; but personally, Peter's commitment was to the future. Albert Grossman, that was an obvious one. And Jac. Jac could just as easily—more easily—have joined with the Newport board of directors, the Weins, the Lomaxes, the Seegers, and said, “No electric music.” But he didn't. I was very proud of Jac at that moment, watching him choose the unknown rather than the comfort of the known.
JAC: I followed my instinct and my heart. I followed the music.
