Chapter 9

The Strip ... The trip ... Love those psychedelic eyeglasses ... Inhalations and incarcerations

JAC: I loved the singer-songwriters for their originality and point of view; they were an integral part of the Elektra identity. I was fond of jug band music too, and understood the logical progression from field recordings, to folklorists singing the songs they had collected, the solo and group interpreters, singer-songwriters, and the jug band emphasis on well-played instruments. What was going to be the next unfolding, the next link in the progression? I would know it when I heard it.

Actually I had heard it in London in 1963, on a bleak winter afternoon. I was visiting with David Platz of Essex Music, the Elektra affiliated music publisher. The Essex office was upstairs in a very old but well-kept building on Denmark Street, catty corner to Foyles, the famous bookstore on Charing Cross Road. The building was from a period that predated indoor plumbing. Kitchens and bathrooms had been added, either at the rear wall or cantilevered over the alley, with a profusion of black pipes crawling up the building's backside in a rather odd geometry.

I had to go to the loo. Sitting suspended tentatively above the alleyway, with my buns freezing, I first felt and then heard a throbbing blues-rooted rock and roll—'I'm A King Bee,' as I recall—from the Regent Sound Studios a few floors below. I pulled my clothes together, rushed downstairs and slipped into the control room to find out what was going on. It was a band cutting their audition demo for the London Records division of the English Decca Record Co. I introduced myself as from Elektra, inquired about their availability, and was told that the Decca deal was almost certain. I left my card anyway, but I never did hear from the Rolling Stones.

When Dylan went electric at Newport, I definitely knew what I was hearing. Energy! And that meant electric music. I just gut got it. Going electric didn't mean falsifying anything (any more than acoustic music was a guarantee of integrity), and going electric carried an emotional wallop. There was greater tonal flexibility, a wider range of shadings. It made an order of magnitude difference. And it was new.

John Sebastian was putting together a new “electric” band. Paul and I were close to John and often used him as a session musician, so we knew early on about the Lovin' Spoonful. We went to hear them. In the dark around us were record people that one normally didn't see in Village hangouts sipping hot cider with cinnamon. Either word had gotten out or the band's management had made a lot of phone calls.

The Spoonful played their entire repertoire, including ‘Do You Believe In Magic,' a song that echoed my own feeling about music, about being young with all the possibilities open before you. Four richly schooled musicians with overpowering electric intensity—this was better than twenty jug bands in a row. I wanted them for Elektra, badly.

PAUL ROTHCHILD: Their manager, Bob Cavallo, came to me and said, “Listen, everybody wants you to produce them. They want to be at Elektra. I need to have a certain amount of money to get this thing together and work right. We need an advance of $10,000.” I went to Jac and he said, “No way. I have never given an artist $10,000 and I can't start now.” I went to Cavallo and everybody was just destroyed.

John Sebastian (right) with Lovin' Spoonful

JAC: That's not how it looked to me. The $10,000 was a bit of a shocker, not so much because the money was so large for that day and time, but this was 1965 and we could only break the Spoonful through singles. I was sure the Spoonful had a great album in them, but FM radio had yet to take up the cause of rock music, so Top 40 singles were it, and Elektra had no experience in this area, where special relationships meant everything and some of those relationships were less than savory.

The Spoonful had already recorded some demo sessions on multi-track. I said to Paul, “Make sure those tapes are safe, because I have a hunch they will never do 'Magic' any better.” I spoke from experience. Demo sessions often produced music that was more spontaneous and joyful than formal sessions.

Paul and I met again the next evening. Paul was hungry for the Spoonful and made an eloquent case. I spelled out my concerns about Top 40 radio and singles, but I agreed. Elektra would pay the $10,000.

Paul immediately phoned John, who rushed over to the house, thrilled that the family would stay together. Asti was uncorked, and when the evening was ended we all went to sleep thinking that the band was now on Elektra.

But—to raise seed money, the Spoonful had already taken an advance from a publishing company with a record arm, and these people interpreted the contract to include both publishing and recording. Or so we were told. Personally, I didn't believe it, but the Spoonful were informed that their manager had made the deal and they were bound by it. Furthermore, what did Elektra know about singles? This was a fair point. We had never had a single on the charts.

John came to see me, all apologies, feeling trapped between an obligation he had not fully understood and his affection for Paul and me. Elektra probably had some kind of case, but I liked John and chose not to pursue it.

The reality was that the Spoonful would be several generations down from any income stream. In fact the Spoonful received very little money for all their talent and great songs.

DAVID BRAUN: How much came off the top before the kids in the Spoonful got their money, between the producers and the managers and the middle guys, we'll never know.

JAC: Most of their realized income was from performances and publishing. Years later I saw John in a summer concert at the Wollman Rink in Central Park and went backstage to say hello. He ran over, gave me a gigantic hug, and said, “If we had gone with Elektra it would have turned out so differently. We would have been paid.” And they would have.

That was how I missed the Spoonful, a group that I saw as an electrical extension of what Elektra had been doing. A year later, when I heard ‘Summer in the City' all over radio, with its pulse and urgency, that gritty New York rooftop feeling, it was exactly the kind of powerful music I wanted. It hit Number 1, was ten weeks on the charts, and I came very close to putting my fist through the window.

JAC: I was on a quest for a band, and now my search area was expanded by my first experience with drugs.

In my business at that time I couldn't help but be around grass, yet I was still on the straight side of the equation. It's not that I wouldn't, it was just that no one had asked me, possibly out of concern for how I might react.

At Esalen on Big Sur, Nina and I would spend time with our friends Richard Fariña and his wife Mimi, Joan Baez's sister. We had met at Newport, and when they visited New York they would often stay with us, bringing their dog Lush, ferociously large but mild-mannered due to his vegetarian diet, a true Sixties counter-culture canine. Mimi did not get loaded, but Richard was always going into small rooms by himself or with friends, and you knew what was up.

I was also sure that Paul Rothchild was a “viper,” but he wasn't being obvious about it.

FRITZ RICHMOND: When I met Paul, which was when he was on the board of directors of Club 47 in Cambridge, he was a businessman-looking guy who was often in a jacket and necktie, but he seemed like a guy that I was going to be able to get along with. And it seemed we had some unspoken interests.

One of the things that went on in Cambridge was paranoia about marijuana. Almost everyone who was a player got high to one degree or another, but there was always, “This is illegal, you can get arrested and do jail time for this.”

Well, I began to get the feeling that Paul Rothchild might have got high in his life once or twice. But you didn't open up the subject of pot with another person that you weren't positive got high, or unless someone had given you the word, “This guy is OK.” It was a secret society.

I think Paul knew I turned on, just from the way I dressed, long hair, helicopter pilot boots, and a suede jacket, well-worn—I bought it in a used store, and I always carried in the pocket a comb and a toothbrush, because I never knew where I'd end up.

So one night I'm at Club 47 with Paul, in the basement, which was for the in-group and the musicians. It's about fifteen minutes before my show, and he complimented me on my boots and jacket, and that was like code words, I knew he was telling me he was a viper.

We're sitting in the middle of Marijuana Paranoia Central, and he said, “You know, if we were quick about it we could have a toke right here.” My paranoia went right off the scale and said, Ring-a-ding-a-ding! Paul Rothchild, member of the board of Club 47, is inviting me, this nefarious dope-smoking washtub bass player, to get high right here?

He was gonna roll a joint. I said, “Well, I don't know if we've got time to have a joint. But dig this.” And I pulled out my little thimble pipe. I had bought a little tobacco pipe, very short-stemmed, and I said to myself, “You know, you can't smoke pot in this kind of a pipe because it gets sucked up the stem because the pieces are too small. It's not like tobacco. Tobacco is wet and gooey and stays there, and pot is dry and tiny flakes. It needs a holder.” So I take a thimble, and it's got dimples, and I drill about a dozen holes through these dimples, and I had a perfect holder and it was a nice tight fit in the pipe. It was very convenient. If you had the pipe in your pocket it just looked like a pipe, and in your other pocket you had a dirty thimble, and it wasn't immediately obvious what it was. Except to other dopers. Every viper that saw it sort of slapped themselves on the forehead and said, “Wow! Why didn't I think of that?” And it became quite popular; everybody made their own variation.

Paul instantly knew what it was, and what a great idea it was. He loved toys, nice little toys. He had antique toys in his apartment. He had a cigarette lighter that probably had fifty-seven little machine parts. Then he'd have a nice little something or other to keep his stash in. Anyway, the significance was that we bonded over this pot thing.

JAC: By the rules of proximity and probability, it would figure to have been Paul who turned me on, but it was Arthur Gorson. Arthur thought I needed loosening up, and I'm sure I did. But, then again, I never met a temptation I didn't like.

We were at Arthur's house in the country, and it didn't take long to figure that his mission was to bring me into the fraternity of hemp. I suspected that smoking dope was something like losing your virginity, you never could get your innocence back, but Arthur was a trusted friend, Nina was with me, and the setting was beautiful.

Arthur gave me the crash course: Take a long drag, inhale and hold it for at least ten seconds, then exhale. I did. Nothing happened for about a minute. Then my head felt like a bottle of Mumm's had been uncorked. Whatever reserve I still clung to, the dope vaporized. I felt relaxed, happy, transmogrified—Doctor Jac, meet Mister High.

The following week, Arthur's friend, the “founder of the feast,” swapped me a generous stash in exchange for a one-foot stack of Nonesuch albums.

After that first happy inhalation, Nina and I would get loaded most every weekend, lying on the bed, ears wrapped in Koss headphones. I thought I heard deeper into the music, the layers, texture heaped on texture, discrete but reinforcing each other. I understood the parts and their relationship to the whole so much better, not as an observer but embedded in the cellular structure of the material. My already intense feeling about music as essential to my life and wellbeing was strengthened. I went “Wow,” which I did a lot while smoking.

After that, I would rarely commit to a record unless I heard it loaded. The normal and reasonable procedure was to make up my mind without outside influence, but once the decision was taken, to give it a final check through a cannabis filter. There was a time when I jokingly said that some of our records should only be heard if you are loaded. Nina and I shared the wealth. Dope was the classic communal sacrament and we gave parties built around the experience.

NINA HOLZMAN: If nothing particular was happening on a Saturday night we would invite people over, and I would make a wonderful dinner and a fabulous dessert—

JAC:—Nina's famous parfait pie, a combination of ice cream and fruit-flavored Jell-O neatly molded inside a homemade, brown-sugar-laden graham cracker crust—

NINA HOLZMAN:—And we would sit around listening to music. I mean, what else?

The perfect stoner's album. Incredible String Band's “5,000 Spirits or The Layers of the Onion” EKS-74010, 1967

JAC: I assembled “head” tapes, great stoner songs like Jefferson Airplane's ‘White Rabbit,' Beatles psychedelia, anything trippy, an hour of music collated on ten-inch reels running at seven-and-a-half ips, excellent quality. I had rigged a box with six headphone jacks for the living room so we could listen together—everyone loaded on cannabis cookies, or smoke, people floating away in their private reverie, head soirées.

Grass was cheap. We're talking $150 a kilo, though it didn't have the potency of today's product, but it certainly cooked up well. Nina put together clever recipes which began: “First, take a pound of grass . . ." I had heard about grass as an ingredient of haute cuisine. You boiled it in water and threw in a half pound of butter, and eventually a green-yellow viscous mixture formed at the top, and you poured it through a strainer to sift out the seeds and stems, and put what was left in the refrigerator to cool. Four hours later a greenish buttery fat would form at the top which you skimmed and stored in the freezer. If a recipe called for butter, and didn't they all, you would whack off a slab—of course, no one in the mid-Sixties had heard of cholesterol. My contribution to the art, devised in the Holzmanian drive for aesthetic perfection through technology, was to simmer the mixture in a pressure cooker for several hours, squeezing every last measure of oomph from the weed, forcing every mote of cannabis into the butter. One batch yielded months of high good times. Our buddy Bill would come over almost every weekend, get loaded, and sleep till Monday, sprawled on the floor, until he was awakened by the housekeeper vacuuming around him.

I could never get my brother Keith loaded, but I kept trying. One evening Nina made him a special batch of enriched cookies. He kept nibbling away, and I was beginning to worry that we were going to have to get him some Thorazine, or take him to the hospital. When I called the following morning, Keith said, “Thanks for the party. I can't recall ever having slept so soundly.”

JAC: I was getting antsy about finding a breakthrough act for Elektra. I had no Lovin' Spoonful, and New York was being picked over by record business players with lots of pop experience. I thought I'd try the West Coast again.

By now there were dozens of clubs in the heart of Hollywood, near Vine, and on the Sunset Strip, from La Cienega on the east to Doheny on the west.

PAT FARALLA: You could just cruise. We walked the Strip from club to club. We really felt like we owned it, that it was our street. It was our town, and we were inventing it as we went along.

MARK ABRAMSON: Every other building was a club, but it had no name, and you'd figure somebody just hired it for Saturday night, and they had beer and Coke and that was it. And all of these California girls, everybody just grooving for hours. The police were always coming to break it up because there were too many people. But just the band, completely relaxed and at home, in that groove—ah, it was wonderful. That was the best part, the music live, and being in those places.

JAC: In LA I would check all the music listings in the Los Angeles Free Press, one of the first freebie alternative newspapers. I spotted a club I had never heard of, Bido Lito's, and a band with an intriguing name, Love. I asked Herbie Cohen to join us that evening.

NINA HOLZMAN: Bido Lito's was this funky little place off Hollywood Boulevard. We walked in and it was tiny, very congested, wall to wall people.

JAC: The Black Hole of Calcutta with a door charge.

NINA HOLZMAN: We really didn't know what we were going to see. Arthur Lee got up, and he had these boots with the tongues hanging out, no laces, and his eye glasses had one blue lens and one red, and a funny shape. He was the most bizarre person I'd ever seen in my life, by far.

HERB COHEN: For the time and place, only average. You want real bizarre, there's five thousand of them on the Strip any night.

MARK ABRAMSON: Love were definitely not the folk musicians that Jac had been dealing with. He was very intrigued with them. I mean, he really liked it. I think Jac is a teenybopper at heart.

Love assembled... more or less

JAC: I was fascinated. It was a scene from one of the more amiable rings of Dante's inferno. Bodies crushing into each other, silken-clad girls with ironed blonde hair moving the kind of shapes you didn't see in New York, to a cadence part musical and all sexual. The band was cranking out ‘Hey, Joe' and ‘My Little Red Book.' Inwardly, I smiled. ‘My Little Red Book' was by Burt Bachrach and Hal David, and featured in the Woody Allen movie, “What's New, Pussycat?” Hip but straight. And here were Arthur Lee and Love going at it with manic intensity. Five guys of all colors, black, white and psychedelic—that was a real first. My heart skipped a beat. I had found my band!

We met with Love after the show, and I committed to signing them without cutting a studio demo. We agreed to get together the next day, Herbie assisting with the negotiations. Although I wasn't sure of Herbie's role, he seemed to have a relationship with Arthur, and I needed someone to watch over the band when I wasn't around.

HERB COHEN: They're all living in one hotel room, starving, and Arthur says, “I want a $5,000 advance to sign the contract—cash. “ Jac says, “OK, meet me at the bank.” Jac cashes a check. Arthur says to the band, “Go back to the hotel. I have to pick up something.” And about four or five hours later Arthur shows up with a gold Mercedes 300 gull-wing that he paid $4,500 for. “Well,” he says, “we need some transportation for the band, so we can get around to the gigs.”

JAC: The Mercedes gull-wing is a two-door two-seater. Arthur plus four in the band makes five, not to mention equipment. Arthur was not strong on the realities of cubic content.

HERB COHEN: Arthur had also bought a harmonica. He gives each of the guys a hundred bucks, and there goes the five thousand.

JAC: I hadn't recorded in an LA studio for years, and wasn't taken with the few I had used. I wanted a funky studio, preferably with a live echo chamber, and, at the top of the list, an experienced engineer who knew electric music, to avoid our painful learning curve with the Butterfield Band.

We had heard good things about Sunset Sound. There was no likelihood that Arthur would be ready to record before 7pm, so I decided to check out the facilities early, look into the mixing board, four-track Ampexes, available mikes, and schmooze with the engineer assigned to Mark Abramson and me. I sauntered in and saw this kid, whom I took to be no more than nineteen, deftly moving his fingers over the console and generally looking like he knew what he was doing. He told me his name was Bruce Botnick.

MARK ABRAMSON: At Elektra we didn't know anything about recording this kind of music. I think that we did folk music as well or better than anybody. Butterfield type blues we learned from scratch. When rock and roll came in, we had to start all over again. A mike here, a mike there, ten mikes on the drum, all these baffles around the drummer, people in the studio with earphones on. We watched Bruce with our mouths open. Wow! He saved our asses.

BRUCE BOTNICK: Recording Love went quickly. It was very fast in those days.

JAC: Bands had yet to get into their bad habits in the studio.

BRUCE BOTNICK: Love came in already prepared. They'd been playing live. And whether they were straight or whether they were smoking hemp or doing acid or whatever, they came in and they just played it. Jac had seen the band, he knew the songs, he had made his notes, who had the lead vocal, where the chorus was, who was going to take a solo. He knew the music almost as well as they did. And because he knew a lot, the group worked with him real well.

JAC: We were completing three fine tracks a day. Arthur frequently played someone else's instrument if he thought he could play it better, and he always could. Once, we had completed a take using up all four of our available tracks. Arthur still wanted to add a harmonizing vocal on track #3. With no tracks available, I asked Arthur if he was sure he could get it on the first take. He stared at me over his glasses as if I was some sort of alien bug. Bruce Botnick pulled the erase head on track #3 so we could record to the track without obliterating the material already there. We gave Arthur his cue and it was perfect. It was a one-week album.

BRUCE BOTNICK: Jac left the masters with me and I mixed the album and sent it back to New York.

"Love" EKS-74001 front, back

JAC: Mark and I reviewed the mixes, made some corrections, and it was done.

We had the music—music that was new to Elektra. The album cover deserved a visual style unlike any other Elektra album that had gone before.

Elektra, now an established label in 1965, was besieged by hungry suppliers eager for business they would have turned down in 1955. It became such a drag on Bill Harvey's time that I asked him to restrict salesmen's calls to Thursday mornings.

A printing supplier showed Bill a new process. A standard jacket was normally printed front and back on paper, then the paper was cut and glued to reinforced cardboard. With this new, entirely automated process, the jacket could be printed both sides at once, directly onto board, in four-color. Full-color front and back was a first, and it was cheaper as well as better, the ideal combination.

I liked to watch people in record stores. If they were at all caught by the look of an album they would pull it from the rack, scan the cover, and instinctively flip it over to check contents and basic information. I thought that having different photos of Love on each side would increase the visual impact—and hopefully sales.

Bill Harvey's Love Logo

I also asked Bill to design a distinctive logo for the group, to appear on the album and all promotional materials: advertising, T-shirts, and the like. These days they call it “creating a brand identity,” but at the time it just seemed like common sense. My thinking was twofold: create a logo for each group that the public could easily recognize, and since the logo was our design and our trademark, it was a negotiating point at contract renewal time.

For Love, Bill devised an elaborate psychedelic design, with male and female symbols. Seen large, it looked great. But when it was reduced for small ads, it was so busy that it didn't hold up well. Lesson learned: Future logos not only had to look good large but be legible and impactful when reduced. In every way Love was a fresh beginning and an experiment—in repertoire, recording technique, packaging, marketing, and the behavioral sciences of rock and roll.

KEITH HOLZMAN: With the Love LP we started a new cataloging system: the 4000 series, our new pop line. “Love” was EKL-4001 (mono), EKS-74001 (stereo).

JAC: The first time I ever had a single on the charts was ‘My Little Red Book.'

KEITH HOLZMAN: We were always an album label. We couldn't get arrested with singles.

JAC: Before 1965, Elektra had released less than thirty singles, primarily as calling cards for albums, not knowing what to do with them. “Marketing” sounded very Madison Avenue and un-folky, and I couldn't define it very well. Our music had pretty much sold itself, tying it in with artist appearances. We spent some money on advertising and publicity; we lavished our time getting the covers right and cadging radio coverage on the few stations that played our kind of music.

Elektra did not have its own radio promotion people. We relied instead on our distributors who maintained a minimal staff to cover their immediate territory, so we piggybacked on their capability, hoping that in the process we might learn the ropes.

Singles required specialized promotion and the ethics of a polecat. It was not clean. Stories abounded of money and favors passing hands. I didn't want to know about that. I had a private chat with Sid Talmadge, the owner of our LA distributorship, Record Merchandising. We were not the biggest of his labels, but we were growing the fastest. We had done well together and there was no point in moving Elektra away if he could deliver. We weren't asking him to perform miracles; Love already had a solid local following. Others were asking to distribute us, and I laid it out for him.

To supplement our distributors' efforts we hired local radio promoters on a project-by-project basis. They would report in frequently and send in Top 40 reports which we tabulated, gradually acquiring a more national sense of the Top 40 radio world. We learned the stations and introduced ourselves to the DJs, who could often choose their own music. I was surprised at how many of these Top 40 jocks knew and cared about Elektra and Nonesuch. Our past successes and our fifteen years' track record helped to make us more real. Although many were amused by my pop aspirations, no one said it couldn't be done.

Now that I was committed to pop music, I listened to Top 40 stations wherever I went. They were all AM, usually with very powerful signals that covered a wide footprint—you could tune in one station and follow it over several states.

I was driving to Annapolis, to St. John's College, where, fifteen years after being tossed out at the end of my junior year, I was now a member of the Board of Visitors and Governors. I tuned to the local Baltimore station, and out of the Mercedes speaker blew ‘My Little Red Book.' It was the first time I ever heard one of my singles on Top 40 radio, a small but sweet triumph, a validation. My world sang. I pulled over to the side of the road with the joy of it.

The single struggled onto the bottom of the charts. The album sold steadily and in solid numbers. Within nine months it had reached a hundred fifty thousand units, which in those days was mighty impressive, and our biggest record to that time.

We had signed a three-year, six-album deal with Love. After the first flush of success, Arthur told me that he was no longer recording for Elektra and he could walk away from his contract because he was a minor when he signed.

To look at Arthur, it would never occur to anyone that he was a minor. He was a heavy ingester of substances and he wasn't Dorian Gray. I didn't know Arthur's age, and Al Schlesinger, the attorney who represented Arthur and Love in the formal contract negotiations, didn't suspect either. Al, an honorable man, was beyond embarrassed.

I was urgently trying to keep the door open, because I needed the group and it would look like hell if I lost them. In the music world, perception is often confused with reality. Al indicated that Arthur might re-sign for a higher royalty, ten percent, because he was considering having ten members in the band. I said to Arthur, “By that logic the Mormon Tabernacle Choir gets a one hundred-ten percent royalty.”

With Al's help we worked out a resolution, increasing Love's royalty from five to seven percent, plus other reasonable adjustments. Love stayed on Elektra.

After the dust had settled, Al said to me, “Jac, I'm sorry, I honestly didn't know, but you handled it like a gentleman. If something good should ever come my way that I feel would be right for Elektra, I promise to give you an early shot at it.” And he would be true to his word.

By the time we had gone through all these machinations, Arthur had finally turned twenty-one. I asked to see his driver's license, Xeroxed it, and attached an initialed copy to the contract.

BRUCE BOTNICK: Came time for the second album—

JAC:—"Da Capo"—

BRUCE BOTNICK:—And Paul Rothchild was made producer. Jac was going to produce, but things were starting to hit on all cylinders and he couldn't do it. He did produce 'Seven and Seven Is,' where I put an atomic bomb explosion at the end. That was a pretty cool recording.

JAC: Side two was all one cut, 'Revelation'—the first full-sided track in rock history.

MARK ABRAMSON: Love, the whole band, was just about as strange as you could get. And Arthur—what an incredible guy. He was this kind of brooding, dark presence. He wore these jeweled glasses that he obviously couldn't see through, low on his nose. He always looked at you over them, so he had this look of a kind of berserk intellectual or teacher or a judge or a guru of some sort. He would sit back and talk, and it would make a lot of sense until you tried to figure out what he was actually saying, and it didn't scan. But it didn't make any difference, he would just go on. ‘Your Mind and I Belong Together'—once he explained that title to me for about five minutes.

Love “Forever Changes” EKS-74013

BRUCE BOTNICK: I've never heard anybody talk the way Arthur did. He was on acid twenty-four hours a day, or smoking hemp—something. But he was so high all the time that he wasn't high. He had achieved what they call clear light.

I have a fond spot in my heart for Arthur, because he's a very, very gentle human being.

MARK ABRAMSON: I loved Arthur's house, up in the Hollywood Hills. Everything was kind of sunken and covered with furs. And he always had a couple of white girlfriends around.

ADAM HOLZMAN: Arthur took me up to his place. I was nine. He drove really fast and I was scared to death and I thought it was the most exciting thing in my life; I just knew I wasn't going to get in a car accident. He had one of those houses where the swimming pool comes into the living room. We sat around and listened to the new Jimi Hendrix “Are You Experienced” album. Arthur and Jimi were supposed to have formed a band a long time before Love ever happened. I think Hendrix would have liked to have someone like Arthur write the lyrics and sing so he could just play. That would have really been one of the all-time bands. But it never happened. Arthur loved Jimi Hendrix, and he played that record over and over again. He kept getting up and saying, “I'm going to have to listen to that one more time.” And he would put it back to ‘Purple Haze.'

Arthur was real nice to me. One Christmas he gave me a present, a little box you look into with lights that blink on and off.

JACLYN EASTON: Adam emulated whatever Elektra artists he liked at the time. He dressed like a mini-Sixties person—the fringed jackets, the striped pants. There's a great photo of him looking exactly like a mini Arthur Lee, even down to the pink sunglasses.

JAC: Arthur was phenomenally talented, probably more talented than anybody in town, and he knew it. He hungered for success, always reaching for the brass ring, but it would just pass him by. In his career and his relations with the company he was a basket case. We did four albums with him, each different. “Love,” “Love Da Capo,” and most famous of all, “Love Forever Changes,” which was—and remains—a classic, and finally, “Four Sail.”

Yet Arthur was only famous in a very narrow neighborhood. It's not that Love wouldn't play, it's that Arthur wouldn't travel. I finally insisted that he come to New York to meet the East Coast staff who had worked so diligently for the band. He stayed less than thirty-six hours. We could never tour him anywhere, and the result was that his records were mainly popular on the West Coast, and in England, where he had a big reputation precisely because he was so mysterious and refused to travel.

Deep down, I have always believed that Arthur's refusal to travel was because he wanted to stay close to his connections. Which is not to minimize the importance of connections . . .

ADAM HOLZMAN: I remember once my dad and Arthur had these little chunks of hash that they were checking out in my dad's study. Arthur's chunk was really dark, and he said to my father how he'd heard that it was stronger if it was darker, the darker shit was better. And my father said something about how the light shit was pretty good too. I was looking over and I said, “What is that?” My father said, “It's a special kind of tobacco, Adam.”

JAC: I knew people in California, or somebody would know somebody, and you would go and connect up, and I would bring the grass back to New York on the plane. This was long before baggage inspections and sniffing dogs. I flew into JFK once with a kilo destined for the pressure cooker neatly Saran-wrapped in my suitcase, and that suitcase was not among the baggage being offloaded. Everyone else's tumbled onto the conveyor, and I'm still standing there. Finally this lonely little suitcase comes trundling off, and I thought long and hard if I should pick it up or just get out of there. I nonchalantly retrieved it and went to my car. No one followed. But I was scared.

And then Paul Rothchild got busted.

TERRY ROTHCHILD: Paul of course considered himself a big wheeler-dealer in whatever he did. He liked the idea of big money, and he was a big record producer, and I suppose he was thinking he was a big drug distributor. I was his wife, and I loved him, and I had no idea what he was doing, and I didn't want to know most of it.

I was never much of a one for smoking weed. Marijuana made me hungry and put me to sleep. I liked the other psychedelics—acid, mushrooms. But I was getting very tired of the drug scene anyway. We had a baby at that point, and I was thinking family, I was thinking stability, I was thinking neighborhoods, schools, stuff like that, the nesting instinct.

But Paul was in the music business. He was traveling back and forth to LA. I don't know who he knew, who he ran into, but somebody there sent a whole trunk full of marijuana to our house in New Jersey. Huge, like three feet by about a foot by about eighteen inches.

JAC: Reflect for a moment. Having a trunkload of dope delivered to your home, addressed to you, would be the ultimate in uncool, and Paul was not uncool. This did not compute. There were rumors about a setup. Others suspected that someone in Dylan's entourage had done it, for what reason I would have no idea. A third story, by the way, had Paul turning Dylan on to acid, and if that's true it's a significant moment in the history of American pop culture. Anyway—

TERRY ROTHCHILD:—This package shows up at the door. I didn't know what it was. The guy says, “Sign here, lady,” so I signed, and all of a sudden there are cops everywhere, police cars all over the place.

MARK ABRAMSON: I was with Paul at the office when they came and arrested him.

TERRY ROTHCHILD: It was photographs and fingerprints and it was just dreadful, being treated like an object, totally dehumanizing. It was an awful experience and something I don't ever want to have to repeat.

They dropped the charges against me. But not Paul.

FRITZ RICHMOND: It was the thing that we all dreaded to hear about our friends, because it's being eaten by the lions.

JAC: Paul was released on bail just before the weekend. We usually went to the Sunday hootenanny at the Village Gate, but Paul felt so ashamed he couldn't bring himself to go. I told him that he was going and that I would be at his side, confirming Elektra's support. I almost had to drag him, but he went, and the moment we walked in there was an excited hubbub and then silence. A friend came over and gave him a big hug, others crowded around and, in that moment, Paul was transformed from contrite doper to outlaw folk hero.

PAUL ROTHCHILD: When I went on trial, Jac testified for me. He was a brave man, because in those days no one aligned themselves with anybody who was on a drug charge.

JAC: At least no one who cared what the straight world thought.

PAUL ROTHCHILD: One joint could ruin your public life. Albert Grossman testified for me too, and so did a New Jersey state senator, Matthew Feldman. I thought I had plea-bargained my way to probation, but I was sentenced to two and a half years, and—a fascinating moment—I watched the Butterfield Blues Band album make the charts from the New Jersey pen.

TERRY ROTHCHILD: The thing I remember about Jac is his incredible compassion. He stuck with Paul the whole time.

PAUL ROTHCHILD: Whether I was guilty or not, what my involvement was, didn't matter to Jac—

JAC:—I never knew, and I never asked.

TERRY ROTHCHILD: All the time Paul was in jail, Jac kept him on the payroll at half salary. And Jac also provided me with work, things I could do from home, typing names on mailing lists and so on.

MARK ABRAMSON: Jac and I would drive down to see Paul.

JAC: I'd bring technical publications and Xeroxes of articles I thought he might find useful or amusing. It kept us connected and reassured him that his job would be waiting.

MARK ABRAMSON: He was working on the farm. He had gained about twenty pounds eating potatoes. He had been listening to the radio and he was all excited, he had all these ideas about what he was going to do when he got out. He says, “This is great, I can just listen. Boy, I really got all these great ideas about things. I know what's next, I know what we need to do.” That was Paul.

JAC: Worse than jail, Paul hated his isolation from the street. He had a very hard time imagining how the world could get on without him. That thought resonated for me too.

Seven months into his sentence there was an automatic parole hearing at which I spoke with eloquence about his importance to the company and to his artists. I vouched for him and guaranteed his job.

PAUL ROTHCHILD: I was released on parole. I walked out of prison, went home, had a good night's sleep, and went to work at Elektra the next day.

JAC: John Sebastian called and asked when Paul would be at the office. This was during the peak week of the Spoonful's huge hit with ‘Summer in the City.' John was in demand everywhere, yet he came to the office and sat in reception, waiting to welcome his friend and mentor home. Paul didn't arrive till midday, so John helped out in the mail room, doing grunge work. I remember that with great affection. People mattered to John.

PAUL ROTHCHILD: Jac gave me a big welcome hug and said, “Tom Paxton needs a record made right away.” And I said, “That's good. Because while I was in there I think I invented a new concept for recording vocals in my mind.” I went into the studio with Tom, tried it out, and it worked. I was back in the record production business.

JAC: Judy Collins had come a long way from being a folkie maid of constant sorrow. Her first two albums had been traditional. By the third she had been listening to Jacques Brel and was opening to European influences. I was happy recording all kinds of music: folk, singer-songwriter, pop, or classical, so long as it was distinctive. Quality mattered. And Judy, in her choice of American writers, was uncannily perceptive: Dylan, Pete Seeger, Richard Fariña, Shel Silverstein, Mike Settle, John Phillips, Randy Newman. You can hear all this emerging on her third through fifth albums. Underpinning everything was her classical background. Judy was a gifted pianist who debuted, in Denver, at thirteen playing a Mozart concerto.

JOHN HAENY: Every record Judy did was courageous, and I've always admired that part of her artistry. I guess others can talk about her long hair, and her big blue eyes, and the special quality her voice had, because it did. But there was something else going on. I think you look at her earlier life as a classical pianist, and later on her great skill in working on her documentary film about Antonia Brico, and some of the other things she's done in her life, and you maybe get a sense of where the real artistry was in her career.

JAC: The risk-taking and the sensibility were parts of the same artistry.

JUDY COLLINS: One of the nice things about Jac was that he was always willing to explore those directions. His openness was paramount to their getting done. He could have said, “No. I can't afford that. Don't do that.” But you know, if I walked in to him and said, “Look, I want to go climb Everest and I'm planning to take a sound crew with me and I'm going to sing all these a capella songs up there in the wind,” he would find something positive about it, and he would make sure that it happened. And the interesting thing is that he would have found a way to sell it. Jac is brilliant about how to figure out how to make his taste everybody else's taste.

MARK ABRAMSON: The greatest thing about the Sixties, I think, even more than the wonderful stuff that got created, was the possibility that you could do anything. There were no inhibitions. You didn't any more have to make a folk record that had twelve folk songs on it. You could do almost anything and it was possible for it to be a giant hit. The Beatles probably had more to do with that than anybody. Who knew what they were going to do next? And I think in her own special way that was what Judy was onto—no boundaries. It was exciting.

Judy chose all her own stuff. There was never any filler on her albums. Every song was meaningful in some way. It was a very serious kind of thing. It was always a long process, and eventually it got to be real agony, not from a personal point of view, but because the level of selection got to the point where only a few things would filter through her consciousness to where she really wanted to do them.

JUDY COLLINS: Mark and I had our steamy moments over various issues. We fought and wrestled one another to the ground.

Judy Collins “In My Life” EKS-7320

JAC: In 1966 we were preparing Judy's sixth album, “In My Life.”

JUDY COLLINS: Mark and I wanted to break rules. We were sitting around thinking up what to do to make trouble, start the next fire, change the world. We wanted to be very dramatic, very theatrical, and we said that out loud. Jac was one hundred percent behind us. He was very interested in where his people wanted to grow. If he gave you a record contract and you had an agreement, he was really depending on that. These days—maybe I'm wrong, but I think the viewpoint is narrower, the goal is to make money. That was not really our goal. Our goal was to make something fantastic.

So Jac would be saying, “Where can we go? Let's start listening to things, talking about things.” He would take me to a Dylan concert, and we would agree that such and such was the best song of this new batch. We would sit around at Jac's place and he would play records. He would dig things up from his very esoteric and eclectic past. Mark would do the same, I would do the same. Going to classical concerts. Ploughing through your record collection. Woodshedding. I was living in the Village, seeing people in the clubs, and one would call another and somebody would call me and say, “Have you heard Eric Andersen's new song? He should come and sing it for you,” and he would. Lennon and McCartney's ‘In My Life' came into the picture because I fell in love with it. ‘Pirate Jenny' came from me listening to Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's “The Threepenny Opera.” I'm a theatergoer, I see “Marat/Sade,” a revolutionary piece of theater, I flip out over the music. I call the composer, Richard Peaslee, just as years later I called Hal Prince about ‘Send In the Clowns.' I get a reel-to-reel tape. I play it. I call Jac right away, and Mark: “Oh, my God, I can't wait to tell you what I've found! “ And they were all excited.

Now for a wonderful coincidence of artistic matching. Jac had a wonderful label called Nonesuch, run by Teresa Sterne, and Josh Rifkin did a lot of work for Nonesuch.

JOSHUA RIFKIN: During the course of editing and mixing “The Baroque Beatles Book,” Judy Collins was a frequent visitor. Mark Abramson and Judy had a relationship at the time. I remember her stretched out on a sofa in front of the mikes, nuzzling up to Mark a bit, or just talking. That she's a beautiful woman goes without saying, and that certainly made its impression. And how unobtrusive she was. She was very, very nice, very gracious, well-spoken, very articulate and very engaging, but in no way drawing attention to herself, in no way the grande dame. And she was very musically alert, interested and curious.

I was invited down to Jac's house in the Village, to meet with Mark and Judy to talk about arranging her next album. Which was a total surprise to me. But I think, seeing what I had done with "The Baroque Beatles Book," they were all kind of looking me over. And I was up for anything.

JUDY COLLINS: Josh was young, cute, darling, sweet, great sense of humor, and very much the scholar, the Nonesuch musicologist. He knew his stuff. Very intense. And a wunderkind orchestrator. The main thing he had was musical intelligence. He made wonderful suggestions. So here we have this great music from "Marat/Sade." I had it in the shape that I wanted. I had cut it, interspersed it, and put songs together, made it into a sort of suite. Obviously it was going to be orchestrated. So who can do that? Josh. And he's in the family. I asked Teresa, "Do you think he'd be interested in doing something like this?” And she said, "By all means."

And then I meet Leonard Cohen. My friend Mary Martin calls me and says, for about the tenth time, "I've got this friend who's a Canadian"—she grew up with him—"He's just written his first songs. He's written poetry before, he's got a novel out, but these are his first songs, and I really want you to hear them, because they're great." She brings him to the house, and the first song he plays is 'Dress Rehearsal Rag.' Very dramatic, into something new; it fits right in. I call Mark and say, "You'll never believe what I found! I can't believe this song. It's exactly what we want." And then Leonard sings 'Suzanne'. . .

JOSHUA RIFKIN: We recorded in London. This was the summer of 1966, which was a wonderful summer to come to London. I hit the city the day the Beatles' "Revolver" album was released. I walked straight to HMV on Oxford Street and bought it. I was taken to all of the shops on Kings Road; I was buying Mod clothes. It was a wonderfully exciting time. To be getting a foothold in the pop world was musically very thrilling. And this was perhaps the most exciting period in pop music.

There was nobody with whom I would rather have done this sort of thing than Judy. Judy's voice and her style of singing, her delivery, that very cool, to some people's way of thinking understated, but to my way of thinking very subtly inflected manner that she had—it fit my stylistic predilections at that time hand in glove. In a certain way I banked on her just singing them in that very fine straight silvery way of hers, and then embedding that into everything else that the instruments were doing, creating a very fine line through which she was to thread her singing. I could have wonderfully outlandish combinations. On ‘Sunny Goodge Street' we had two harps, two pianos, guitars, everything that could make strumming and banging sounds, a kind of gigantic music box effect. I was turning to use everything that I had known as a high modernist classical composer, in fact using a lot of the colors, a lot of the sense of spacing, a lot of other things that had gone into my knotty, miserable, unlovable serial music, turned to this much more approachable and accessible language.

There was a genuine feeling of excitement at what we were doing. And we were doing it pretty well. Mark as producer was always extremely calm, extremely relaxed, appreciative; his job was to get beautiful balances and thus transparency. We knew we were making a good record, something living up to what we had hoped for. So it was an enormously happy project.

JUDY COLLINS: ‘Suzanne' was the song that jumped out of the “In My Life” album in a big way. And I formed this wonderful bond with Leonard.

DANNY FIELDS: Judy attached herself to him. “This is Leonard Cohen, you must know Leonard Cohen, you must appreciate and love Leonard Cohen, he's my friend, my idol, my muse.”

JUDY COLLINS: I brought him to Newport. I was on the board of the folk festival foundation at that point, and I said, “You've got to open up to new things here. You've got to stop living in a very isolated mode, in Lomaxland.” So I structured a singer-songwriter workshop. Leonard was on it, Joni Mitchell, Mike Settle, Janis Ian. It was wonderful. People still talk about that afternoon and all those songs.

DANNY FIELDS: There was also a weekend at Newport when Albert Grossman had Janis Joplin before her show in a pig pen backstage. It was after Monterey Pop, and there were so many people pestering her that Albert put her in a pen—police barricades, like fifteen by eighteen, and she could stand in this thing and people couldn't get that close to her. If anyone wanted to speak to her, they would have to speak to Albert first, and he would call her over. After the show she was perfectly mingling with the crowd. In fact she was screwing my assistant. I had to fire him for fucking her when I needed him to work for Judy. I had to go up to Janis's room and the door would be open and her legs would be flopping up in the air, and there was my little assistant humping away. I'd say, “Judy needs us.” And he'd pull out, and she'd go, “There's your boss again. Aw, shit.”

JUDY COLLINS: At Newport, Leonard and I also got Danny through an acid trip, which was very exciting for him—

DANNY FIELDS:—Watching the rug turn into the universe—

JUDY COLLINS:—Going out to the ocean and watching the mussels and staring for hours at the rocks. I took two serious acid trips in my life, and this wasn't one of them. I think I was trying to stay on the planet so that I could be present for Danny. But of course in my usual manner I drifted off with some young man. Leonard was sitting on one bed writing songs, and I was in the other bed with somebody I can't even remember, writing my erotic history, I suppose. But the sign of how much I trusted Leonard was that was OK with me; I mean, he could sit on the other bed and write songs all week, all month.

DANNY FIELDS: Judy was very glamorous to me. She was very wise and wonderful and warm and she was a big star. She wasn't like these rock and roll bands that they throw together in a studio that had to prove something about themselves. She was my muse. I loved her. She was to me the essence of upper bohemia. She made pots and she was in all these movements and she slept with who she wanted to.

JUDY COLLINS: The fall after the singer-songwriter workshop, I put Leonard on stage at a Town Hall benefit. He was articulate, but very shy, and he couldn't sing his way out of a paper bag. I pushed him out on stage to sing ‘Suzanne.' He got halfway through it and went dead cold, couldn't sing it, and walked off. It was wonderful! I said, “You've got to finish this song,“ And I came on and sort of picked up the pieces and brought him back and sang with him. So I like to think that I encouraged him at least as much as he encouraged me. Because he made the difference for me. He sent me things that he was writing, and he allowed me after a ten-year hiatus of not writing to start writing songs again. He was very powerful. And his work, in the next fifteen years, kept me on the planet, because his work is so deeply spiritual. I recorded a lot of his songs, great songs: ‘Dress Rehearsal Rag,' ‘Suzanne,' ‘Sisters of Mercy,' ‘Bird on a Wire,' ‘Take This Longing,' ‘Famous Blue Raincoat,' ‘Story of Isaac,' ‘Hey, That's No Way to Say Good-bye.'

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