Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
But it ends just as things get really interesting. (I just finished it).
Can't wait for the second half.
  

    
Yep, I'm definitely in line for part 2.
  

    
I'm a-hopin' KPFA audio is online? 
  

    
www.kpfa.org or www.kfcf.org
  

    

Reminder:

Tonight's Dead to the World features Richie Unterberger, author of
"Turn! Turn! Turn! The Sixties Folk-Rock Revolution" on for two hours,
playing rare gems and masterpieces that he covers in that excellent
book.  Richie knows this material very well, and I expect a very cool
program.  On the web at http://www.kfcf.org or http://www.kpfa.org -
8-10pm Pacific time.
  

    
This just in about a member of a very important group covered in
"Turn! Turn! Turn!":

Zal Yanovsky believed in magic.

Lovin' Spoonful guitarist dies at 58


NICOLAAS VAN RIJN
STAFF REPORTER
Toronto Star

Zal Yanovsky believed in magic.

As a member of the Lovin' Spoonful it got him his first big hit, the
1960s "Do You Believe in Magic," which helped put the group second only
to the Beatles in record sales for a while.

And, after the music died, it got him to Kingston, where the man known
as the Jewish version of Ringo Starr - for his resemblance to the
Beatles drummer - started a restaurant, Chez Piggy, that is known
across the land for its fare and welcoming atmosphere as a meeting
place.

"He had an unorthodox style of playing, to say the least," said Denny
Doherty of the Mamas & Papas, who was inducted into the Canadian Music
Hall of Fame with Yanovsky in 1996. "There was not any book anywhere
that he followed.

"And he is gone too soon."

Yanovsky, 58, died suddenly at his farm home just outside Kingston
Friday of a heart attack.

Survivors include his wife Rose Richardson, his daughter Zoe,
2-year-old grandson Max, a sister Buba and his first wife, the actor
Jackie Burroughs. A private family service will be held Monday in
Kingston.

Kingston Mayor Isabel Turner, who said she was "shocked" to hear of
the death of the man she'd casually greet on the city's streets, hailed
him as "a part of the very fabric of our community.''

"He took a very old building, went in and not only cleaned it all up,
but brought it back to its former glory," she said of the work Yanovsky
and his wife Rose put into restoring an 1880s livery stable for their
Chez Piggy.

"He was one of the first to do that, and because of it, others looked
at what he had done and followed suit, with the result being that quite
a renovation has taken place in downtown Kingston."

To recognize their work, Turner said, the couple was last year
recognized with a heritage restoration award.

"He had a really wonderful life in Kingston," said Toronto writer
Marni Jackson, who used to work at Yanovsky's first Kingston
restaurant, the lakeshore Dr. Bull's, making cappuccinos.

"He's a heart guy, the guy at the heart of Kingston. He and his wife
Rose were really crucial in restoring Kingston's downtown and keeping
the tourist economy kicking along because Chez Piggy's was really the
city's first gathering place."

Born in Toronto, Yanovsky dropped out of Downsview Collegiate at age
16 to begin the peripatetic lifestyle that marked his early days.

"I was late the second day of school," Yanovsky recalled in an
interview. "They wouldn't let me in school 'cause I didn't have all my
books. I never really went back to get 'em. I guess I really didn't
want to get back to school."

Since he'd just learned to play the guitar a year before, Yanovsky
turned to the stage, working "the Toronto coffee houses with a cat
named Roy Gural," he recalled. "Then I worked in a coffee house in
Kitchener and then I packed it in and went to Israel," where he worked
on a kibbutz.

But, Doherty recalled, Yanovsky didn't last long.

"He was fired because he'd driven a Caterpillar tractor through a
building. He was trying to help his people rebuild the country, not
tear it down, but... So they said `You'll do better in Tel Aviv,' and
he tried busking in Tel Aviv, but it didn't go, so he came back to
Toronto."

For the next year he survived by sleeping in an all-night coin laundry
at the corner of Dupont and St. George Sts., busking, playing coffee
houses and swiping milk bottles off front porches in his neighbourhood.

"I used to steal milk bottles, sell them to the candy store and get
deposit money," Yanovsky once confessed. "Listen, I needed the dough,
so I mooched around a lot. I still got a lot of debts to pay when I get
back, but I wasn't very original with the milk bottles - and my
technique was not very lucrative."

Longtime friend Larry Zolf, in a 1966 interview, laughed "I remember
Zal from the days he was so poor he was claimed as a tax exemption by
27 people. I remember Zal in the days when he was so dirty he was
condemned as unfit for human habitation by the Toronto Board of
Control."

Yanovsky finally caught a break when Doherty, then with a group named
The Halifax Three, asked him to come aboard, and for a while it was The
Halifax Three Plus One.

"He played lead blues, kind of a single string picking, when I met him
in 1961," Doherty recalled.

"Zal had been into rhythm and blues, and folk music. Our gig paid him
a couple of hundred bucks a week, and we toured a lot, so through that
he met other musicians and started hanging around New York.

After a stretch playing with Doherty in Washington's Georgetown
district, Yanovsky returned to New York where he teamed up with John
Sebastian who wanted to put together a group.

The result was the Lovin' Spoonful, with Sebastian on guitar,
harmonica and autoharp, Steve Boone on bass and piano, Joe Butler on
drums and Yanovsky on guitar.

The group was so impressive so quickly that it and Doherty's Mammas &
Papas were hailed by Time magazine in the mid-1960s as the two top
groups in America.

The band's reputation soared as "Do You Believe in Magic" took over
the charts, and for several years the Spoonful had a loyal and fanatic
following. But by 1967 Yanovsky was ready for other challenges.

A clash with San Francisco police over marijuana contributed to his
decision, friends say.

"I left because I don't want to compromise any more," he said. "I want
to be completely responsible for myself. I want to make decisions for
myself."

With the cash settlement he received from the Spoonful, one that he
candidly confessed made him "crazy rich," Yanovsky spent several years
casting about for a new life.

He attempted a musical comeback of his own in 1968 with the album
Alive and Well and Living in Argentina, but it was, to put it kindly, a
flop.

Still, he would occasionally pull out his own review of the album,
published in the Star in 1968 under his own byline, and cringe.

Then came a shot at television producing - Magistrate's Court, a
mercifully short-lived and unlamented soap Yanovsky himself admitted
was "awful" - and a brief period playing with Kris Kristofferson in
1970.

Finally came the challenge of running a restaurant in Kingston.

"Zal's father Avram was a cook," Doherty recalled yesterday.

"He was a bohemian himself, an artist and a writer, so Zal was raised
rather 21st-century. There was cooking in the family."

Yanovsky "loved his later life," Doherty said.
  

    
THank you for the news.  What a life.
  

    

I wish I hadn't had to read that.  But ramming a Caterpiller through a
building!  Wow!
  

    
Thanks, Richie.
  

    
There goes the reunion. 
  

    
A ways back in this discussion, there was some talk about Judy Collins' 45
rpm record of "I'll Keep It With Mine", which was never released on LP or
CD. A copy of the 45 just sold on eBay for $80.

Yikes.
  

    
Whoa.

Richie will be on KPFA wth me and Larry Kelp Wednesday, February 26, 8pm til
midnight PST.  It's a KPFA fund-raiser, and you can hear it on the web at
www.kpfa.org or www.kfcf.org

Rihie will play lots of great rare stff and some of the key records that tell
the story of this music.  I'm looking forward to it!!
  

    
Yikes, indeed.  Even Judy slagged it.
  

    
Hey, do those who plan on maybe listening to David and me on KPFA
later this month want to hear the Judy Collins version of "I'll Keep It
With Mine" on the show?

I've never seen a copy of the 45 myself. I had to get a collector to
tape it for me. And Collins told me when I interviewed her that she
deliberately decided not to put it on her "Forever" CD compilation.
  

    
I have to admit never figuring out what it was about.    Some Dylanesque
relationship problem was as far as I got.
  

    
There is some interesting confusion about who "I'll Keep It With Mine"
was written for that will probably never be resolved. The Nico
biography "Nico: The Life & Lies of an Icon" reports that Dylan wrote
it "with her in mind." They had a brief affair in Europe in mid-1964,
and Nico is quoted in the book as follows about the song: "We went
together to Greece for a short time, a little place near Athens, and he
wrote me a song about me and my little baby." The book also reports
that Nico did a demo of the song in the spring of 1965 with Dylan on
piano when Dylan was in England for his British tour. It reports that
Dylan played Nico "Like a Rolling Stone," announcing that it was going
to be his next single, but Nico said it wasn't as good as "her" song,
i.e. "I'll Keep It With Mine." A great story if it's true; I'm not sure
about that.

Nico held on to the demo and when she had a recording deal briefly
with Immediate Records in England in mid-1965 (this is pre-Velvet
Underground), she wanted to record it as a single. But Immediate's
Andrew Loog Oldham (also Rolling Stones manager/producer) had her
record a Gordon Lightfoot cover, "I'm Not Sayin,'" instead. She only
recorded that one single for Immediate. I've never heard the Nico demo
with Dylan supposedly on piano; it's not on any bootlegs I've seen.

However, the liner notes for the Dylan box set "Biograph" say that the
previously unreleased early '65 Dylan tape of "I'll Keep It With Mine"
on the record was recorded for Judy Collins. If so, I would assume
that it was meant as a demo for her to consider for a possible cover
version, which of course she did later in 1965. In her interview with
me, she said, "I love the idea that he said, at least said to me, that
he wrote the song for me. Then he told Joanie Baez that he wrote it for
her. And then there was some talk about that, as to who did what. Of
course, he says, in his bootleg tape album, and also his retrospective
album, that he wrote the song for me."

Nico did record it on her first solo album, "Chelsea Girl." While I
like that album very much, I don't like her version of "I'll Keep It
With Mine" too much; it sounds like it's trying too hard, with a
too-jaunty string arrangement. The best version of "I'll Keep It With
Mine," with the possible exception of the one on Dylan's own biograph,
was by Fairport Convention in the late 1960s, with Sandy Denny on lead
vocals.
  

    
I have a copy (for which I paid a lot less than $80!). It'd be easy enough to
post a copy online, if anybody wants to hear it.
  

    
I've just ripped a copy of "I'll Keep It With Mine". You can listen at
http://www.well.com/~johnross/IllKeepIt.mp3.
  

    

She really butchered it, didn't she?
  

    
I think she did the best with what she was given.   Not much of a song, as
far as I can hear.
  

    

Doesn't even resemble Dylan's piano version.
  

    
whereditgo?
  

    

Reminder:  Richie will appear tonight, 8 pm until midnight PST, on KPFA 94.1
fm in northern California (and online at www.kpfa.org and www.kfcf.org)

It's a KPFA fund-raiser.  Richie will play lots of great music, mainstsays
of the genre as well as rarities from his stash.
  

    
Some great tapes last night -- I heard part of it, while driving, and it
was remarkable!
  

    
I thought some of you might not know that the second volume is out
now.

http://www.richieunterberger.com/eighthome.htm

EIGHT MILES HIGH: FOLK-ROCK'S FLIGHT FROM HAIGHT-ASHBURY TO WOODSTOCK

About the book:

Just published by Backbeat Books, Eight Miles High: Folk-Rock's Flight
from Haight-Ashbury to Woodstock is the second volume of the first
comprehensive history of one of the greatest movements in rock music,
drawing upon interviews with more than 100 musicians, producers,
managers, and journalists involved in the music. Where its predecessor
( Turn! Turn! Turn!: The '60s Folk-Rock Revolution ) documented the
birth and growth of folk-rock through mid-1966, its sequel, Eight Miles
High, covers the branches and evolutions of folk-rock from mid-1966 to
the end of the 1960s. Together, they form an epic history of the
entire style as it evolved throughout the 1960s, following its growth
chronologically from the streets of Greenwich Village at the dawn of
the decade through the 1969 Woodstock Festival. The innovations of
giants such as the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, Simon & Garfunkel, Joni
Mitchell, Fairport Convention, and Bob Dylan are covered, of course.
But so are the contributions of lesser-known heroes, from Tim Buckley,
Fred Neil, and Nick Drake to the labels, producers, session musicians,
managers, and fans that helped made the music happen.