Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
I think Antonio's correct that there were a good number of fine and
influential African-American folk musicians in the 1950s and
early-to-mid-1960s, and in general it's not realized or acknowledged
that they were a significantly large part of the scene (though not the
majority). Even excluding the many acoustic blues performers and
rediscovered elderly country blues players, there were, in addition to
the names he lists, Herb Metoyer, who wrote a song that Fred Neil
covered on his "Sessions" album, "Fools Are a Long Time Comin'"
(Antonio himself made me aware of Metoyer). There were also some
not-so-great African-American folk performers who nonetheless made some
records and had their live admirers, like Brother John Sellers (with
whom Bruce Langhorne played when Bruce was starting on the Village folk
scene), Len Chandler, and Casey Anderson (who recorded for Elektra).
The Staples Singers, too, were big on the folk circuit in the early
1960s -- they even covered Dylan  --  before moving from gospel-folk to
secular soul.

But, I think it's also true that not many of them moved from folk into
folk-rock, and that there were not many African-American folk-rockers
of note. The major exceptions were, of course, Richie Havens, the one
black performer from the Greenwich folk circuit to make the leap to
considerable pop-folk-rock success, and Arthur Lee of Love, who had a
rock rather than folk background. As session musicians, Bruce Langhorne
and Bill Lee (who played on albums by Ian & Sylvia, Bob Dylan, Judy
Collins, Gordon Lightfoot, Tom Rush, Tom Paxton, and Carolyn Hester,
though he played on a lot of acoustic folk albums by the likes of
Odetta) were important, and other less celebrated African-American
names can be heard as folk-rock session players (though they're not
always credited on the records). Tom Wilson, as noted a while back in
this topic, was a very important folk-rock producer. There were other
African-Americans more on the periphery, like Johnny Echols (a member
of Love but not one of their important songwriters) and Dorris
Henderson (an American who made a splash in mid-1960s England as a folk
singer and recorded with John Renbourn, though she only went into
folk-rock briefly as a member of Eclection in the late 1960s).

The absence of African-Americans in folk-rock was rarely noted, though
some folk-oriented writers (like a couple for Sing Out) criticized
early folk-rock heavily for borrowing and, in their view, watering down
African-American idioms. I disagree with that criticism myself --
folk-rock added a lot to popular music and drew from a lot of
influences besides African-American-identified ones. But it's true that
the small number of blacks involved in folk-rock meant that it didn't
reflect as wide or large a part of the popular music audience as it
could have, and that their relative absence was regrettable in view of
the inclusive and egalitarian values folk-rock often espoused.
  

    
While I think of it, I wanted to note that I've posted the full
transcripts of my interviews for "Turn! Turn! Turn!" with some
musicians we've discussed in this topic on my Web site
(www.richieunterberger.com).

For the interview with Bruce Langhorne, go to
www.richieunterberger.com/brucelanghorne2.html

For the interview with Barry McGuire, go to
www.richieunterberger.com/mcguire.html

For the interview with Sylvia Tyson (of Ian & Sylvia), go to
www.richieunterberger.com/tyson.html

For the interview with John Sebastian about Fred Neil, go to
www.richieunterberger.com/sebastian.html
  

    
What a pack of great stories, Richie. Thanks for sharing them.  John
Sebastian certainly seemed to be "in the room" with many key figures
when folk and rock started mingling. I'm curious ... how do you view
Sebastian's own impact as a musician with regard to the folk-rock
revolution? And how do you think the music of the Lovin' Spoonful has
held up with the passage of time? 
  

    
John Sebastian's impact as a musician was large. Though his
contributions as a session musician and facilitator of contact between
others were important (and overlooked), his biggest impact was actually
as the most important member of the Lovin' Spoonful, and its chief
songwriter. Lovin' Spoonful producer Erik Jacobsen described
Sebastian's songwriting this way in "Turn! Turn! Turn!": "It was like
an all-American potpourri of pop and rock and folk, drawing from a
termendously wide palette of American musical types." Not just folk and
the Beatles, but also from Motown, the Beach Boys, country, comedy,
soundtrack music, and more. The Lovin' Spoonful were also the premier
folk-rock ensemble for putting some of the good-time jug band music
ethos into a rock'n'roll context, and multi-instrumentalists who
actually played most of their unusual instruments on their records.

Sebastian's contributions as an auxiliary figure, though, were also
substantial. He was a sideman, on early recordings and sometimes on
stage, to interesting very early (circa 1964-65) ventures into
folk-rock by Tim Hardin, Fred Neil, and Jesse Colin Young. He played
onstage, but did not record with, the Mugwumps, the 1964 group who
included future Mamas & Papas Denny Doherty and Cass Elliot, as well as
future Lovin' Spoonful member Zal Yanovsky. As many but not all
Crosby, Stills & Nash fans know, Sebastian helped the group in their
early days. When I talked to John, he remembered that Stephen Stills
asked him to be the group's drummer at a very early stage, which
Sebastian declined, both in realistic knowledge of his drum skills and
a desire to go solo at that point rather than be in a band. He plays
harmonica on "Deja Vu" and, beyond folk-rock, played harmonica on the
Doors' "Roadhouse Blues."

As to how the Lovin' Spoonful's music has held up with time, some fans
disagree with me on this, but I see a pretty big gap between their
best hits and much of the rest of their stuff. The big hits will always
endure as buoyant and optimistic rock music: "Do You Believe in
Magic," "Daydream," "You Didn't Have to Be So Nice," "Younger Girl,"
and "Summer in the City" especially. I don't think they were as good an
album group as some other major folk-rockers like the Byrds and
Buffalo Springfield, though. Their albums contained a good share of jug
band tunes and blues I find dispensable, and some filler that was only
okay.
  

    
If someone'd just reissue Hums, I might take issue with that, but
relying on my aging cranium for evidence isn't fair. To me. Or them. 
  

    

I *love* the so-called "filler" on the Spoonful's albums (the canonical
first three, that is) -- I think I cherish it as much as, or more than,
some of the hits. In fact, I probably prefer the Spoonful's filler to
most of the hits by the Byrds and Springfield, for the simple reason
that it's a hell of a lot more fun, and devoid of that aura of self-
importance that mars a lot of folk-rock for me.

The Spoons' first-album filler was mostly folk-pop covers and
jug/blues/roots tunes, but what a great selection -- "Blues In The
Bottle," "Other Side Of This Life," "Fishin' Blues," "You Baby," "Wild
About My Lovin'"; the second album, "Daydream," had just one cover (but
a classic -- "Bald-Headed Lena," with Zal's immortal "Electric Gorgle"
solo), and was full of originals reflecting Sebastian's rapid growth as
a writer ("Didn't Want To Have To Do It," "Jug Band Music," "Warm Baby,"
"It's  Not Time Now"); by the time they got to "Hums," the line between
"hits" and "filler" was, IMO, completely erased. Every song on that
album is on the high end of the good-to-great scale, with the best-known
single releases ("Summer In The City," "Nashville Cats") matched in
quality by gems like "Rain On The Roof," "Darlin' Companion" (which
Johnny Cash and June Carter covered nicely), "Coconut Grove," "Four
Eyes," "Henry Thomas," etc.

I've always linked "Hums" in my mind to "Revolver" -- probably because
they came out almost simultaneously (or at least that's how I remember
it). What's more, I think "Hums" is as *good* as "Revolver" -- which,
since almost *nothing* is as good as "Revolver," is saying something.
BMG Heritage had better get on it and get that album out on CD soon!
  

    
Don't hold your breath unless you think you look good in purple,
though. 
  

    

I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that the Spoonful's complete Kama Sutra
catalog was supposed to come out on CD -- but then, it took BMG a year
longer than originally planned to get the first two albums out. So,
point taken.
  

    
Regarding mid '60s folk-rock recordings that have yet to be reissued
on CD and can only be found today by pawing through used vinyl record
bins (or scrolling though ebay), what "buried gems" come to mind? 
  

    
God I adored "Hums."
  

    
When I was compiling my selective (but still pretty long) critical
discographies for inclusion at the end of each volume of my 1960s
folk-rock history, I was actually surprised by how much obscure
folk-rock *had* made it onto CD. Even the Blue Things and Blackburn &
Snow, my nominations for the best obscure 1960s folk-rock acts, are
pretty well represented on CD. The problem is that even though this
kind of stuff is on CD, it's still, well, obscure, and not many people
are hearing it.

As far as good stuff that's never come out on CD, though, there's the
1966 Jim & Jean "Changes" album, discussed a little earlier in this
topic. Dion's mid-1960s Columbia folk-rock recordings have never gotten
the thorough two-CD set they deserve, though much of it's shown up
scattered on a few erratic CD compilations. The Mugwumps album (the
1964 group with Denny Doherty, Zal Yanovsky, and Cass Elliot) has never
come out on CD, which is a shame, although the LP's importance is more
as a historical document than as great music. Jesse Colin Young's 1965
solo album "Young Blood" was reissued on Edsel in England on CD a few
years ago, but doesn't seem easy to find now.

Moving a little further into the late 1960s and what's going to be
covered in the second volume, "Eight Miles High," the Gosdin Brothers'
"Sounds of Goodbye" is a way-obscure, very good country-folk-rock LP.
The Gosdins played on Gene Clark's first solo album and were friends
with the Byrds; they also played with Byrds bassist Chris Hillman in
the Hillmen, Hillman's pre-Byrds bluegrass group. John Stewart's first
solo album, "Signals Through the Glass" (1968, co-billed to his wife
Buffy Ford although Stewart wrote the songs and is the dominant
singer), is a quirky but pretty good record, sounding like a passe folk
revival veteran suddenly waking up to the turbulent late 1960s and
doing his damnedest to catch up in a hurry. The Strawbs' late-1960s
debut album was pretty good British folk-rock; I've never seen it on
CD, though perhaps it's come out on some obscure import. Steve Young's
"Rock, Salt & Nails" is good solemn country-folk-rock, and doesn't seem
to be in print on CD now; Young is most known for having written
"Seven Bridges Road," covered by the Eagles (the original version is on
this album). The Gentle Soul's self-titled 1968 album, featuring
singer-songwriter Pam Polland, is pretty good though not astounding
rootsy L.A. folk-rock, somewhat like the Stone Poneys with Linda
Ronstadt. Oddly it's been reissued as a collector-targeted vinyl LP,
but not on CD.

Moving a little tangentially from LPs that haven't come out on CD or
aren't in print on CD, there's also some notable 1960s folk-rock that's
never been released. Foremost among such recordings are the full Bob
Dylan & the Band 1967 Basement Tapes sessions (bootlegged as a
five-volume set); early Joni Mitchell live concerts, referred to
earlier in this topic; early (pre-Fairport Convention) Sandy Denny
demos, home recordings, and BBC broadcasts, bootlegged on the "Borrowed
Thyme" and "Dark the Night" CDs; 1965 acoustic Jackie DeShannon
publisher demos; and a 1969 David Bowie acoustic demo tape, recorded
with John Hutchinson on additional guitar and backup vocals, that
doesn't sound too unlike a British Simon & Garfunkel, as difficult as
that might be to fathom. There are some more details on unreleased
1960s folk-rock of note, as well as various other lists of folk-rock
esoterica and oddities, on my web site at
www.richieunterberger.com/turnlists.html.
  

    
I still have a vinyl copy of "Sounds of Goodbye", and was lucky enough to
have caught a couple of live sets at the Ash Grove.   Clarence White played
lead guitar on the gig, and they were just amazing.  I went right out and
bought the album, thinking I was hearing the future of country music.   I
was right, but surprised at how long it took Nashville to find out.   The
top end is very Everly Brothers, but there's a bit of Motown in the rhythm
section, especially on "Love of the Common People".   Clark, the Byrds, and
the Burrito Brothers were all sharing floating pool of musicians, and White
was THE guitarist.   Poco was in a similar bag but standing a bit apart,
with a formal line-up.
  

    

Speaking of Pamela Polland, did her debut album on Columbia ever make it
to CD? I liked that album quite a bit when it came out, and saw her
perform a couple of times, at the Bitter End in NY and Passim in
Cambridge.

Another nice cover of "Seven Bridges Road," which predates the Eagles'
version, was on Tracy Nelson and Mother Earth's album "Bring Me Home"
(it's only available on CD as a Japanese import, but the song also turns
up on the domestically-released "Best Of Tracy Nelson and Mother Earth"
on Warner Archive).
  

    
Did Pamela ever have a followup?  She came out of that amazing Orange
County folk scene that I stumbled into back in 66.   The Dirt Band (When
Jackson Browne was still in it) and her band, the Gentle Soul, had made a
group buy of bumperstickers and plastered the county with them, much to the
curiosity of most of the OC population, who had never heard of either of
them.   This was 1966 in John Birch country, and what the hell does "The
Nitty Gritty Dirt Band loves the Gentle Soul" mean, anyway.
  

    
It's great to hear from someone who not only knows who the Gosdin
Brothers are and has heard "Sounds of Goodbye," but actually saw them.
They are still barely known, though some people know of Vern Gosdin
(one of the two Gosdin Brothers, with Rex Gosdin) from his subsequent
career as a country star.

"Sounds of Goodbye," for those who haven't heard it, doesn't sound too
unlike some of Gene Clark's best solo stuff.

Gene Parsons, drummer for the Byrds in the late 1960s and early 1970s
when Clarence White was also in the group, played on "Sounds of
Goodbye." He had this to say about the LP and the Gosdins: "Some of the
finest music of the period came from Vern and Rex, and I think Gene
Clark took a lot of his inspiration from that. I think he's the best
songwriter in the bunch of the Byrds, and spoke the same language as
Vern and Rex. [It's] haunting, more than slightly melancholy, and
Gene's got that same quality: honesty in the music. It's not an
affected style. It's plain, honest, and straight from the heart. There
were a lot of younger musicians [who] would come and listen to Vern and
Rex, and get pretty excited when they'd hear them sing. They were
never real strong stage personalities. They were into the music; they
weren't into the showmanship.

As for "Sounds of Goodbye" itself, Gene told me, "I don't think
Capitol ever did anything with it. It was right in the gray area that
didn't fall into any playlist category, either on the rock stations or
the country stations. It was a little too out there for the country
stations, and a little too out there in another way for the rock
stations. Both these guys were trying to raise families, and it was
difficult. They were getting a little older, and a little desperate
about what direction they should go to have some monetary success. That
might have been one of the factors that influenced them."

White, Parsons, Gib Guilbeau, and Wayne Moore played on a good number
of proto-country-rock sessions around 1966-68, many unreleased, before
White and Parsons joined the Byrds. (During part of this period, this
outfit was known as Nashville West.) The Gram Parsons-era Byrds and
early Flying Burrito Brothers get a lot of credit for innovating
country-rock, and it's not misplaced. But White, Parsons, Guilbeau,
Moore, and the Gosdins were also doing it, earlier in some cases.
Unfortunately the records of this sort they played on were very
obscure, and as noted some of the sessions weren't released. Ace
Records in England, I've been told, is working on getting quite a few
of these obscure releases and unreleased sessions onto CD compilations.
  

    
Pamela Polland's self-titled CBS solo album, which came out in 1972,
hasn't been reissued on CD to my knowledge. I'm always finding out that
things like this have come out on CD in Japan, though, so it's
possible.

She's done some new age music in recent years. There's info about her
past and current activities on her web site at
http://www.kula.com/pamelapolland/index_swf.html. She's living in
Hawaii. A very nice woman, who answered a lot of my questions for my
books.

In my opinion -- and she didn't seem to disagree with it -- she and
the Gentle Soul got lost in Columbia/Epic's huge roster, which was so
large that it was inevitable some of their artists couldn't have been
promoted effectively. The 1968 Gentle Soul album, produced by Terry
Melcher (who produced the first two Byrds albums), is quite rare, and
not many copies could have been pressed up. Epic credited a bunch of
session musicians on the back cover (including Ry Cooder, Paul Horn,
and Van Dyke Parks), but somehow neglected to list/credit the two
actual singer-songwriters who comprised the Gentle Soul -- Polland and
Rick Stanley.

The Orange County folk-rock scene was indeed a fertile one. In
addition to the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and Jackson Browne, there were
Tim Buckley, his frequent lyrical collaborator Larry Beckett,
singer-songwriter Steve Noonan, songwriter Greg Noonan, and the
Sunshine Company, who covered Steve Gillette's "Back on the Street
Again" for a small hit single and did some fair pop-folk-rock on some
of their album cuts.
  

    

>Did Pamela ever have a followup?

I think she made a second album that never got released by Columbia.
Then she sang around the Bay Area for several years with Dick Oxtot's
Golden Age Jazz Band (using the stage name Melba Rounds). She moved to
Hawaii more than 20 years ago, has been performing traditional Hawaiian
music, and put out a new album of original material a few years ago.
  

    

Richie slipped in with much more info.
  

    
Janis Joplin, incidentally, also sang with Dick Oxtot's band, a few
years before she underwent her rapid transformation from folk-blues
singer to rock star with Big Brother & the Holding Company.

Pamela Polland told me about an album that never happened shortly
after the Gentle Soul broke up. "Terry [Melcher] came up with a
brilliant idea?he asked me and Ry [Cooder] to make an album of the
blues music we had done as a duo some years earlier. He wanted us to
take the train to New Orleans and record live at Preservation Hall with
the authentic players of the day who were still alive, though
dwindling. Ry was thrilled beyond his wildest dreams, and I thought it
was a great idea too, but I didn't want to give up my career as a
singer-songwriter (not labeled as such yet, but I knew I wanted to
continue recording my own songs). 

"Terry had the whole thing set up, but no matter how many times I
asked him, 'And when do you think I'd be able to get back to recording
my own material?,' he never had a clear answer for me. So, I went to
the top. I called the President of CBS, Clive Davis. I told him about
the blues project which he thought sounded great, then I told him about
my desire to also pursue my singing/writing career. He gave me the
following advice: that if I went to New Orleans, 
and the end result was a popular album, the record company would 
consider me obliged to continue in that vein, to follow suit with 
other albums in that ilk. He said if I really wanted to pursue my 
career singing my own songs, that I shouldn't even go to New Orleans,
that I should just do that (record my own songs) and stay on one track.
This was not an easy decision for me, as you might imagine.

"After a lot of painful grappling with my own heart, I called Terry
and told him I didn't want to do the blues album, I wanted to record my
own songs. So I wound up being signed to this label with no producer
and no one else really knowing what to do with me." 
  

    
Do you know anything about Pat & Victoria Garvey? They did one LP for Epic
in 1968, produced by Bob Johnston, with a bunch of first-rate Nashville
session musicians. Maybe not pure folk-rock, but on the edges. Far as I
know, the record (and the act) never got much attention.
  

    

Re the filler tracks on Spoonful albums, let me just add: 

I've always thought that Full Measure (b side of a single and also on
Hums) is great in a weird sort of way. It reminds of Dutch invasion stuff
like Ma Belle Amie by the T Set and Little Green Bag by the George Baker
Selection (which actually came later).

that's a *good* thing.

And: 

The lyrics to Jug Band Music are beyond brilliant. 
  

    
John, I've never heard or seen that Pat & Victoria Garvey album; I'd
be curious to hear it. I'm still finding out about albums of this sort
I'd never known about before, though they usually turn out to be more
"interesting" than great. There's a very obscure decent-but-not-great
late-'60s country-folk-rock one, for instance, by Monte Dunn & Karen
Cruz (Monte Dunn was an accompanist on some Ian & Sylvia records).

Bob Johnston didn't mention the Pat & Victoria Garvey album when I
interviewed him. The obscure one he produced that he brought up was an
album by West, which I did find. To me it sounded like the country-rock
late-1960s Byrds, but not nearly as good.

Bob Johnston, incidentally, deserves note as an important
behind-the-scenes figure in 1960s folk-rock. He produced Dylan from
1965 to 1969, of course, and that's mostly what he's known for. But he
also produced Simon & Garfunkel for a time, Dino Valenti's little-known
but quite interesting 1968 solo album, Dan Hicks & the Hot Licks,
Johnny Cash, Leonard Cohen (he also played in Cohen's road band), and a
very obscure record by Esther Ofarim, an Israeli singer who on her
Johnston-produced album sounded quite a bit like Judy Collins in her
orchestrated art song phase. Some of the artists that Johnston produced
say that his contributions weren't that great, but I tend to think
that someone doesn't get to work on so many worthwhile records by
accident.
  

    
Omigod, I haven't thought about the Sunshine Company in 30 years.  Richie,
do you know what became of Kathy Smith?   After the band folded I heard she
went east and was going to record on Richie Havens' label, but I lost track
of her.   She and Steve Noonan were a couple at the time I met them, which
was about the samed time that Jackson took his trip to New York and got
eaten alive by Nico.
  

    
e-mail me your address and I'll send you a copy of the Garvey record.
  

    
Another folk rock obscurity I'd like an update on is Hearts and Flowers.
They, along with the Stone Poneys and Hedge and Donna, were big draws at the
Troubadour monday night hoots.