Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    

The inkwell is happy to welcome RICHIE UNTERBERGER back for the sequel to
last year's visit.  Richie's new book, EIGHT MILES HIGH: Folk Rock's Flight
from Haight-Ashbury to Woodstock, is the sequel to last year's "Turn!  Turn!
Turn!"



 Richie Unterberger is the author of "Eight Miles High: Folk-Rock's Flight
 from Haight-Ashbury to Woodstock," published by Backbeat Books in summer
 2003. The book documents the growth of folk-rock rock from mid-1966 to 1970,
 examining its diversification into folk-rock-psychedelia, country-rock, the
 birth of the singer-songwriting movement, and the origination of a new
 strain of idiosyncratically British folk-rock, as well as its key influence
 on the explosion of rock festivals. It's the sequel to "Turn! Turn! Turn!:
 The Folk-Rock Revolution," published by Backbeat in 2002 (and discussed last
 year in inkwell.vue topic 160). That book covered folk-rock from its roots
 in the folk revival through the birth of electric  folk-rock in the mid-
 1960s at the hands of the Byrds and Bob Dylan and the rise to stardom of the
 Lovin' Spoonful, the Mamas & the Papas, Donovan, and Simon & Garfunkel. Both
 volumes draw on well over 100 first-hand interviews with the era's per-
 formers, producers, session musicians, record executives, and journalists.

 Richie's other books include "Unknown Legends of Rock 'n' roll" (Backbeat,
 1998), which profiles 60 underappreciated cult rock artists of all styles
 and eras. His "Urban Spacemen & Wayfaring Strangers: Overlooked Innovators &
 Eccentric Visionaries of '60s Rock" (Backbeat, 2000) contains more in-depth
 surveys of 20 underrated greats of the era, again drawing on dozens of first-
 hand interviews. Unterberger is also author of "The Rough Guide to Music
 USA," a guidebook to the evolution of regional popular music styles
 throughout America in the twentieth century, and the travel guidebook "The
 Rough Guide to Seattle." A senior editor for the All Music Guide, con-
 tributor to MOJO magazine, and liner note author for several dozen reissue
 compilations, he lives in San Francisco. More information about Richie Un-
 terberger and his books can be found on his Web site at
 www.richieunterberger.com.



 Ed Ward has been the "rock historian" on NPR's Fresh Air for the past 18
 years, a job he got after co-authoring Rock of Ages, the Rolling Stone His-
 tory of Rock and Roll. He started listening to the stuff in 1957 and hasn't
 stopped yet, although he went on hiatus as a folkie until he realized
 Another Side of Bob Dylan was a rock record that lacked a band, a mistake
 Jim McGuinn didn't make. He has written for countless magazines and
 newspapers since making his debut in Broadside in 1965, and is currently at
 work on a Secret Book Project. He lives in Berlin, but hopes not to for much
 longer.
  

    
Richie! Glad to have you back! It's like you never left. 

Eight Miles High was, as I understand it, split off from a huge
manuscript you turned in covering folk-rock from its inception until
1970, your more-or-less arbitrary cutoff date. Can you tell us why
Turn! Turn! Turn! ended where it did and/or Eight Miles High started
where it did? Was there a watershed in the history of this stuff that
made it easy to divide the book?
  

    
Originally, what ended up spread across two books was intended to be
published in one book. When I came up with such a huge amount of
material, the publisher decided to split it into two volumes. My task
was then to chooose an appropriate dividing line that would manage to
split the story about halfway, so that each book was about the same
length. (As it turned out, "Eight Miles High" was a little longer" than
"Turn! Turn! Turn!")

The juncture I chose for ending "Turn! Turn! Turn!," both because it
came about halfway through my story of 1960s folk-rock and because it
was dramatic, was Bob Dylan's famous and mysterious motorcycle accident
in July 1966. After that, he withdrew from the public eye for about 18
months, leaving folk-rock without its leading songwriter. As it
happens, this took place about a year or so after folk-rock became a
huge commercial success, and about a year and a half or so after Dylan
and the Byrds, in my view the most important folk-rock originators, had
recorded their first truly important folk-rock records. If only in
hindsight, it was the end of folk-rock's first phase. It was the one
that saw folk and rock blend for the first time with exciting,
important artistic results and commercial/social impact. It was also
one that saw many key performers (mostly, though not all, from the
acoustic folk world) go into folk-rock in the Byrds and Dylan's wake:
the Lovin' Spoonful, the Mamas & the Papas, Simon & Garfunkel, Donovan,
and others.

The Byrds' single "Eight Miles High" was actually covered in "Turn!
Turn! Turn!" But I choose it as the jumping off point for the second
volume (in which I cover the single in considerably more depth than in
"Turn!") because it was a signpost to the eclecticism and
experimentation that would make folk-rock yet richer and more
innovative for the rest of the 1960s. It was important in and of itself
that the Byrds now showed themselves capable of coming up with
original material on par with the Dylan and Pete Seeger songs they had
electrified for their earlier hits. But also, they were now bringing in
the influence of John Coltrane's free jazz and Ravi Shankar's ragas to
pioneer psychedelic music. Although, as the Byrds' Roger McGuinn told
me, at heart he views "Eight Miles High" as a folk song -- one that
tells a story, in this case of the Byrds' first trip to England, "Eight
Miles High" being the height of the airplane that took them over.
(Though many interpreted it as a reference to taking drugs and getting
high that way.)

In a broader sense, this paved a way for the diversification of
folk-rock into several unexpected areas throughout the rest of the
1960s, as explored by the Byrds and others. There was folk-rock's move
into psychedelia; many, perhaps most, of the best Californian
psychedelic bands boasted musicians who'd come from folk backgrounds,
and had played a purer form of folk-rock before heading into acid rock.
In a rootsier but also unexpected direction, many folk-rock musicians
-- again, many from California, the Byrds being an example -- headed
into back-to-basics country-rock at the end of the 1960s. Folk-rock
also paved the way for the birth of the singer-songwriter movement,
with the beginning of the careers of Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, and
more cultish talents like Tim Buckley and Fred Neil -- artists who (at
least at their outset) kept guitar-oriented folky songs at the core of
their music, but embellished these with adventurous arrangements that
weren't purely acoustic, and with literary, poetic lyrics of a
different nature than those heard in songs in the earlier '60s folk
revival. There was also a new strain of British folk-rock that looked
to British Isles traditional folk sources as well as American folk and
folk-rock influences, as heard in the work of Fairport Convention,
Pentangle, the Incredible String Band, and many others.

While all this was going on, of course, Dylan made a dramatic re-entry
into the record business with "John Wesley Harding" and "Nashville
Skyline," also recording the Basement Tapes with the Band, although
these wouldn't be commercially available for a long time (with many of
those recordings still remaining unreleased). In his absence, folk-rock
had continued to flower; with his return, he again exerted a strong
influence, though in a much more crowded field than the one he had left
in mid-1966.

I did have "Eight Miles High" cut off chronologically at 1970,
allowing room for discussion of a few especially important recordings
and events at the very beginning of the 1970s. I had to do this so that
the books' length didn't become overwhelming. But also, it's my
feeling that the era 1965-69 was folk-rock's golden age, and that's the
one I wanted to focus on in the two books.
  

    
True. It morphed into "singer-songwriter" after that, or
"country-rock," or whatever. 

One thing that makes me insane about these two books, something that's
come up again since I began re-reading Eight Miles High, is the vast
amount of stuff that's not easily found in the stores these days, stuff
I want to hear. A lot of this is the also-rans, the lost obscurities
of the period like Blackburn and Snow and the Blue Things. Your writing
about this stuff makes me want to hear it immediately, and no can do. 

What -- if any -- were your big discoveries of recordings made during
the period covered by this book? Were there any acknowledged "classics"
you found out you'd missed somehow? Any you felt overrated?
  

    
Here's a short list of the best records I discovered during, or
shortly before, writing the book:

Blackburn & Snow: Something for Your Head. This Bay Area male-female
duo (Jeff Blackburn and Sherry Snow) released just two singles while
they were together, but now those and many unreleased tracks are
available on a Big Beat CD in the UK. It's in the early Jefferson
Airplane style, perhaps slightly more country-folk-oriented.

The Dillards, Copperfields. Their prior album (1968's "Wheatstaw
Suite") gets more accolades as a country-rock-bluegrass landmark of
sorts, but this 1970 follow-up is almost as good and similarly
eclectic.

Dion, Sit Down Old Friend. Dion goes unplugged? Yes, and it's quite
good. From 1970.

Eclection, Eclection. Sole 1968 album from UK group sounds like
mixture of early Airplane, Seekers, Bee Gees, and Mamas & Papas.

The Gentle Soul, The Gentle Soul. Sole 1968 album from female-male duo
of Pamela Polland and Rick Stanley, like a rootsier version of the
Stone Poneys (Linda Ronstadt's first group).

The Gosdin Brothers, Sounds of Goodbye. 1968 album by Vern Gosdin and
his brother Rex an extremely obscure quality early country-rock album,
very much like Gene Clark's early solo work in spots.

Guilbeau & Parsons, Louisiana Rain. Almost wholly overlooked early
country-rock from Gib Guilbeau and the pre-Byrds Gene Parsons.

Dan Hicks, Early Muses. Very amusing and wistful previously unreleased
1967-68 demos, like a link between the Charlatans (Hicks's first band)
and Hicks's much more western-swingy solo work.

The Incredible String Band, U. Overlooked 1970 double-album is about
as eclectic as *anything* released back then.

The Johnstons, Give a Damn/Bitter Green. Late-'60s Irish group did
very light folk-pop-rock like an enjoyably light slant on Faiport
Convention.

Melanie, Melanie. Liking Melanie is not going to win you hip points at
any critics' convention, but this 1969 album is surprisingly strong,
and much more serious than her more childish well-known hits.

Linda Perhacs, Parallelograms. The "acid folk" Joni Mitchell, on a
1970 album that sold virtually nothing.

Satya Sai Maitreya Kali, Apache/Inca. Half extremely capable Buffalo
Springfield-Monkees hybrids (produced by Mike Nesmith), half spooky
Skip Spence-like acoustic "acid folk" tunes.

John Stewart & Buffy Ford, Signals Through the Glass. This was
Stewart's first 1968 album. It's routinely dismissed by his fans (at
least the ones I've come across), and I don't understand why. It's a
very unusual mix of early singer-songwriter, troubadour folk, and
orchestrated California pop.

The Strawbs, The Strawbs. Haunting British folk-rock on the band's
first album, from 1969.

Dino Valenti, Dino Valente [sic]. Weird, spectral, self-absorbed
hippie folk-rock from the guy who wrote "Get Together."

Steve Young, Rock, Salt & Nails. Very good moody country-rock
singer-songwriter; this has the original version of "Seven Bridges
Road," later done by the Eagles.

These records are all very good, but I should note that I wouldn't say
they're quite "classics" on the order of, say, "Buffalo Springfield
Again," Jefferson Airplane's "Surrealistic Pillow," or the Byrds'
"Younger Than Yesterday." But not many people know about them, and
they're worth hearing. Incidentally, many of them are available on CD,
with a few exceptions (like the Gosdin Brothers LP, which is very hard
to find).

I'll cover Ed's question about any acknowledged classics I'd missed or
ones I felt overrated in the next response.
  

    
Maybe it's a function of my close familiarity with the subject before
starting the book, but it seems like my opinions about acknowledged
classics in the genre didn't shift one way or the other in the course
of writing it. Having heard the albums for 20-30 years or so, they were
pretty firmly embedded in my consciousness.

As for albums that I might have appreciated more after re-scrutinizing
them, they might include Leonard Cohen's first album "Songs of Leonard
Cohen," which sounds yet stranger and more unique when you're putting
it up against the many other early singer-songwriting efforts of the
era.

I don't know if Judy Collins's "Wildflowers" and "Who Knows Where the
Time Goes" albums are considered "classic," but I think they're kind of
underrated and little-discussed these days, although they sold well at
the time. To my generation (under-45) at least, she's sometimes
dismissed as a soft-rock/adult contemporary singer if she's mentioned
at all, but her '60s work was pretty innovative.

Joni Mitchell's first album is usually not considered among her best
in the critiques I've read, but it's actually my favorite, with a very
sparse and haunted atmosphere that her subsequent records didn't have.

Poco's "Pickin' Up the Pieces" is one of my favorite country-rock
records, but doesn't seem to get its due, critics giving a lot more
attention to the Flying Burrito Brothers and Byrds' late-'60s
country-rock records.

For overrated records, this is bound to step on some toes, but here
goes:

With the exception of the classic "Lay Lady Lay," I really find Bob
Dylan's "Nashville Skyline" lightweight and dull. It split opinion at
the time it was released too, but I've come across vociferous defenders
of the record.

Gene Clark's solo work is coming in for a lot of revisionist accolades
these days, but I just don't hear it. It sounds to me far inferior to
what he did as a member of the Byrds.

Crosby, Stills, Nash (& Young)'s albums I always found pretty uneven
and not as great as their massive sales figures would suggest.

Fairport Convention's "Liege & Lief" is often singled out as the
greatest British folk-rock album, and it did undeniably mark an
important achievement inasfar as it went back to British traditional
folk music and rocked it up. But I don't think the album's as good as
what Fairport did when they were blending a pretty even balance of
original material, covers of American folk-rock singer-songwriters, and
folk-rock arrangements of traditional folk songs.

The Flying Burrito Brothers, and Gram Parsons, to me aren't as
exciting and innovative as they're often built up to be.

The Incredible String Band's early records are worshiped by some, but
I find their dissonance and drone jarring in large doses.

James Taylor's "Sweet Baby James" was a huge seller and hugely
influential, but not so great to my ears, and it also opened the doors
for some of the more indolent soft rock of the 1970s.
  

    
That first list is incredibly tantalizing: you've made me *really*
interested in hearing Blackburn & Snow, and I guess you know that all
of a sudden all the trendy young Brit stars are talking about how
they've just discovered U by the ISB. I got the Gentle Soul reissue,
too, and was very pleased that it wasn't as mushy as I'd remembered;
some good stuff there. And Judy Collins' sort of chamber-folk approach
might be hard to "hear" in retrospect, although she, I think, kicked
Sandy Denny's ass with her version of "Who Knows Where The Time Goes."

That said, though, I gotta take issue with you on Liege & Lief. That
has always been one of my favorite records, mostly due to Sandy's
ferocious version of "Tam Lin," which, even after a decade of listening
to the stuff, sort of got my "I didn't know you could do that with
folk music" award. The album's version of "Matty Groves" isn't bad,
either, and the band at this point was strong enough that when she left
they went on to produce yet another of my favorite all-time records,
Full House, where the emotional freight her voice had been carrying was
taken up by Richard Thompson's snaky, weird, and definitely *not*
folkie guitar. 

I'm pretty much with you on the rest of the overrated stuff: I
remember just before the first CSN album came out, Ahmet Ertegun (head
of their label) was saying "I've never heard singing like this," and
then it came out, all full of static harmonies, and I thought, Hey, I
should buy Ahmet a Stanley Brothers album. The Burritos and Gram both
fall into my "Huh?" category (and Emmylou "Ice Queen" Harris by
association -- wow! look at everybody throwing things at me!) and as
for the ISB's first couple, that reminds me of a story. I was working
at the Princeton University Store (I wasn't a student; it was a job)
selling hi-fis and this nice lady down in the camera department saw me
heading to the record department one lunch-break. "My son has just
produced an album," she said, all proud. "Really, Mrs. Boyd?" I said,
and she showed me the ISB's first album. I didn't have the money to buy
it right then, and I'm glad I didn't because someone else in the house
where I was living did and I hated it -- still do. 

Some day I'm going to have to ask Joe about how he got over there
(I've already told him the doting Mom story), but there were several
Americans buzzing around the English scene around then, weren't there?
Joe from Princeton, Shel Talmy from, I think, Nashville, and Paul Simon
(I once stood at the railroad station where he wrote "Homeward Bound")
stealing "Parsley Sage etc" from Martin Carthy... What were all the
Yanks doing over there, anyway? Did they make a big difference, do you
think?
  

    
(And, dammit, in the process of writing that last one, I managed to
get "Tam Lin" stuck in my head, where it's now living happily. That's
the damn thing about folk music: it does that!)
  

    
Cool story about Joe Boyd's mom, Ed. As Joe Boyd told it to me, he
went over to England in 1964 as the tour manager with a gospel tour. He
didn't move there then (as some know, he was working the sound at
Dylan's famous 1965 Newport Folk Festival electric concert). But then
he went to London in November 1965 to work for Elektra Records over
there. Although his work as a UK-based Elektra employee actually didn't
last long, I think that gave him a big springboard into doing
production work in the UK (with major folk-rockers Fairport Convention,
Incredible String Band, Nick Drake, and others). Joe should really do
a book of his own about his music business experiences. He's worked
with an incredible variety of important artists (not just in the '60s),
and unlike some such figures that write autobiographies, he can
actually write well, based on some pieces of his I've read.

Shel Talmy was a Los Angeles recording engineer before moving to
England in 1962. Briefly, the story was he was in England on vacation,
thought he'd see if he could do some work while he was over there, and
took some acetates over that Nik Venet (a producer of some note who'd
worked with the Beach Boys and others) had done. With Venet's
permission, he went to Dick Rowe of Decca Records (famous both for
turning down the Beatles and signing up the Rolling Stones) and played
a couple of them -- the Beach Boys' "Surfin' Safari" and Lou Rawls's
"Music in the Air" -- to Rowe and passed them off as his own
productions. In Shel's words, "Nobody picked up the phones those days
to find out if you were bullshitting or not. They wrote letters, a
couple of which went to people [in the U.S.] that knew me. And so they
wrote back, saying, yes, of course he had done all these things. By the
time they found out it was all bullshit, I'd already had my first hit,
and they were very gentlemanly. Never mentioned that they knew that I
knew that they knew."

Anyway, Talmy went on to produce a lot of British records in the
1960s, most notably the early hits by the Kinks and the Who. He wasn't
an especially folk- or folk-rock-oriented producer, but he did like the
music, so he was happy to work with Pentangle and Roy Harper in the
late 1960s. He hooked up with Pentangle as the result of knowing yet
another expatriate American, Jo Lustig, who was managing Pentangle and
numerous other folk or folk-rock acts in the UK, like Ralph McTell.
Another of Lustig's clients was yet another expatriate American,
folksinger Julie Felix, who though not an impressive singer was an
important figure in the UK media as a television show host for music
programs, on which she'd introduce not only British artists, but
visiting American ones like Leonard Cohen.

As far other American musicians based in the UK for a time, as Ed
notes Paul Simon's the outstanding example. He lived there in 1965 and
put out his first solo album (the rare "Paul Simon Songbook") on CBS UK
in 1965, with solo versions of some songs (including "The Sound of
Silence" and "I Am a Rock") much better known via the hit Simon &
Garfunkel renditions. He produced an album around the same time for
another American expatriate, Jackson C. Frank, an early boyfriend of
Sandy Denny, who covered several of Frank's songs; Al Stewart played
second guitar on the Frank album. Shawn Phillips was an important
sideman to Donovan during the "Sunshine Superman" period.

Also, James Taylor started his solo career as a UK-based artist for
the Beatles' Apple label, though his UK stint didn't last long and he
soon returned to America. Also, Joni Mitchell had an extended visit in
the UK in 1967 when Joe Boyd brought her over to play support on a
British Incredible String Band tour in autumn 1967 before she had a
recording contract, helped her get a British publishing deal, and
introduced some of her songs into Fairport Convention?s repertoire.

As to what the Yanks were doing over there and whether they made a big
difference, it's important to note that there weren't *huge* numbers
of Americans over there, and they didn't make a *huge* difference. But
they made a notable one, one which isn't noted too much in rock
histories. I think for the important business/production figures (Boyd,
Talmy, and Lustig), by chance and opportunism, they'd found more
opportunities to make quick headways into the music business in the UK
than they had at home.

But in part I think this was because being American gave them some
advantages. I hesitate to make blanket generalizations because they
might come across as unfair stereotypes, but I do think that, generally
speaking, the British folk scene was staider and more conservative
than the American one, or for that matter than the British Invasion
rock scene. (Which is one reason that, with the exception of Donovan,
there wasn't the same deluge of folkies going electric in 1965-66 that
there was in the US, though that's a large issue that might be better
to address in a separate question.) Some Americans boasted an
adventurous can-do attitude that was relatively rare on the UK folk and
folk-rock scene, and I think made it easier for people of limited
experience such as Joe Boyd to quickly make an impact than it would
have been for them back home.

As for why people like Simon, Taylor, and Phillips were over there, I
think the novelty of their being American might have helped them stand
out from the crowd more in the UK than at home, and again given them
some recording and concert opportunities not as easily available to
them back in the States. I think Simon and Bob Dylan (who made
extremely successful and controversial tours of the UK in the
mid-1960s) helped give some courage to folk-rooted performers in the UK
to start writing their own contemporary material, in a scene where
deviation from traditional forms wasn't as encouraged as it was in the
US (and was often seen, inappropriately in my view, as something of a
commercial sellout). Al Stewart was certainly substantially influenced
by Paul Simon. Not that I would put Stewart on the same level as Simon
by any means, but he did do some worthwhile things in his early career.
  

    
As a shameless plug, I should add that for those interested in finding
out more about Shel Talmy, I did a whole chapter on him in my book
"Urban Spacemen & Wayfaring Strangers: Overlooked Innovators &
Eccentric Visionaries of '60s Rock" (Backbeat Books, 2000). There's
also a transcript of a long interview I did with Talmy on my website,
at www.richieunterberger.com/talmy.html. My website also has the
transcript of an interview I did with Joe Boyd, at
www.richieunterberger.com/boydfolk.html.

Ed's high opinion of "Liege & Lief" comes as no surprise since I came
across his Rolling Stone review of the album during my research, and
quoted part of it in the book. As he wrote, "England has finally gotten
herself her very own equivalent to the Band...By calling Fairport an
English equivalent to the Band, I mean that they have soaked up enough
of the tradition of their countryfolk that it begins to show all over,
while they still maintain their roots in rock."

And speaking of American influence on the British folk-rock scene,
it's interesting that although "Liege & Lief" is thought of as an
extremely English take on folk-rock, it was in fact heavily influenced
by the Band, who were thought of as an extremely American group. As Joe
Boyd told me, "Music from Big Pink came out, that was a big influence
on them. They were very stunned by that record. It was so rooted in
American traditions that they felt that if they could come up with a
kind of music which was as English as that record was American, that it
would justify reforming as a group. They also wanted to get the same
snare drum sound."

Dave Pegg, who would join Fairport on bass, told me that "when we
lived at the Angel [the converted pub in which the band dwelled in the
early ?70s], it was like all you heard was the Band, every room you
went into, either Big Pink or The Band. It was more or less the
petrol." Also, the Band?s influence on British artists was not limited
to Fairport; as Ian Anderson (editor of the UK's leading folk magazine,
fRoots) tells it, "I remember John Martyn coming down [London folk
club] the Cousins one night with a copy of Music from Big Pink,
insisting that it was put on the record player immediately. That was
like bringing the Band right into the center of the den of folk-rock."
  

    
And by the way, I think "Tam Lin" from "Liege & Lief" is definitely
the best song on Fairport's "Liege & Lief" album, too. I'm not as big
on the rest.

To backtrack a sec, Ed, who are the trendy young Brit stars talking
about how they've just discovered U by the ISB? That's such an obscure
album, much less well known than their "5000 Spirits or the Layers of
the Onion" or "The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter," though it's just come
out on CD again. (Another website plug: my liner notes to the "U"
reissue can be read at www.richieunterberger.com/isb.html.)
  

    
I'm not sure who they are; you can check recent issues of Mojo or
fRoots (which I'm boycotting because Anderson is a bigot and a fool)
and wade through the interviews. It all smazes together when the
interviewees don't have much to say and I don't have the musical cues
to hitch onto the names. Also, when all the records get four stars or
better, which they pretty much do in Mojo these days, that doesn't help
stuff stand out, either. But trust me, if you're 21, acoustic, and
British, you can't go wrong quoting U and Nick Drake (another one I
never got) as influences when the Mojo man comes around. 

Interesting you should mention the Band. Are they folk-rock? At least
when they're not backing Dylan -- is Big Pink folk-rock? I don't think
I'd call it that, but what do you say? It's weird, though, that it
would be a deciding factor with the Brits rather than the Byrds. Why do
you think that is?
  

    
The Band, I would say, is more folk-rock-influenced than they are
folk-rock, in the Dylan/Byrds or some other sense. Of course a lot of
that influence came from backing Dylan, first on tour in the mid-1960s
when they were still called the Hawks, then on the Basement Tapes (bear
in mind that a *lot* more Basement Tapes were recorded than were
eventually released on the mid-1970s; enough to fill up five bootleg
CDs, with about 100 songs). I think there's no question Dylan heavily
influenced the Band's songwriting; in fact, he was instrumental in
getting them to lean heavily on original material on the first place,
as they'd been an R&B-heavy bar band, albeit a good one, before hooking
up with Dylan.

What you hear on Big Pink, though, is more the sound of a band being
influenced by folk-rock than a band combining elements of folk and
rock. And the Band brought more into it than the broad categories we
call folk and rock: also a good amount of gospel, blues, and country
music. To continue with categories that weren't in place at the time
and often offend the actual musicians when they're applied, in
retrospect the Band are one of the definitive Americana rock bands,
putting pre-rock American indigenous music forms into a contemporary
rock context. And yes, I know that four-fifths of the Band were
Canadian, not American. But they were based in the US when they began
recording, and their musical roots were very based in the United
States, via their love of early rock'n'roll, blues, and country, as
well as their years of work as the backing group for Ronnie Hawkins (a
southern American rockabilly singer who moved to Canada).

The Band's debt to folk-rock, and their influence on the folk-rock of
the late 1960s, is undeniable. In instances where it might be a close
call as to whether an artist was folk-rock or not, but their music was
exceptional and/or very influential, I decided to move more on the side
of including such artists in my book rather than excluding them.

As to why it was more influential on the British scene than the Byrds,
I think that has to do with the factors Joe Boyd cited: it had the
sense of reaching back to a national tradition but sounding
contemporary, which the likes of Fairport could extend to finding and
updating roots in England's music. (I do wonder if they knew at the
time that the Band were mostly Canadian!) The Byrds' influence on the
British scene wasn't negligible, though. If you listen to Fairport's
early records, there's an influence from not only the Byrds, but also
California harmony folk-rock in general. Fairport were even dubbed the
British Jefferson Airplane in early press reports. Also they did
actually record the Byrds' "The Ballad of Easy Rider" (written by Roger
McGuinn with a little help from Dylan) during their "Liege & Lief"
sessions, though it didn't make the album. (It's now available as a
bonus track on the CD reissue of Fairport's "Unhalfbricking" album.)
  

    
Be careful: when you're in Canada and say "Well, the way we do it in
America..." they look at you and say "You're IN America. North.
America." So I guess that makes the Band proto-Americana, too. (For the
record, I hate that label, and I'm even more pissed at Liza Carthy for
calling her album Anglicana, but at least that never took off -- or
hasn't yet). 

But speaking of Dylan, he's the guy who made it okay not to make sense
with your lyrics. That, I gather, was beginning to happen with the
artists in Eight Miles High, even the ones who appear in the first
book, Turn! Turn! Turn! There had always been pot around the folk
scene, but now the harder psychedelics were coming in. I've always
wondered what it was about acid that made people want to plug their
guitars in. (I do, however, understand what made them write lyrics that
defied common understanding.) But it seems that there was a moment
when all sorts of folkies were "going electric," and many of them used
folk-rock as sort of a waystation. Was this only Dylan's influence?
  

    
Whew, I'm glad the second shoe (this book) is dropping. And I think you're
right to focus on The Band as an important part of folk rock.

But I gotta say, this is the first time in thirty years I've ever seen
anyone other than me mention Linda Perhacs and "Parallelograms." I never saw
such an interesting artist and record drop out of sight so fast. Is her
music available at all? And for a somewhat less obscure but still wonderful
female folk/rocker, how about Ellen McIlwaine? She in the book?
  

    
Did you used to hear "Parallelograms" on Rosko's show on WOR-FM back
in ancient times? That's the only place I've ever heard it, including
friends' dorm-rooms. 
  

    
If you mean was Dylan the only or main influence on all sorts of
folkies going electric, in my opinion he wasn't. He was a *big*
influence, but not the only one. One of the things that surprised me in
researching the books was that when the people I interviewed spoke of
going electric or at least starting to think about going electric in
the mid-1960s, the Beatles were cited as the main inspiration far, far
more than Dylan, particularly for those who played in groups rather
than as solo acts. And the Beatles were influenced people in this
manner before Dylan had gone electric, the Byrds being the most
prominent example (they had started recording demos with electric
instruments in 1964, well before "Mr. Tambourine Man" became a hit for
them in mid-1965). One of the things I wanted to demonstrate with the
books was that the move from folk to folk-rock wasn't single-handedly
led by one or two main figures, but was more an almost unconscious
large, collective generational movement toward blending the forms.

But once Dylan had gone electric, I think it did make many of the more
folk-rooted and singer-songwriter types far less reluctant to go
electric than they had before. And I *would* say that Dylan was
probably the main influence on making it okay not to make sense with
your lyrics. You might be able to cite some obscure early Holy Modal
Rounders tune or something along those lines as an example of someone
else doing that, but really there were very, very few if any such songs
to my knowledge in rock, folk, or pop music prior to Dylan's mid-1960s
endeavors. And once he had done that, it gave license to *lots* of
people to do that. Some of them didn't do it well, granted, but some of
them did. And it happened very very fast.

It also gave license to people with less wildly surrealistic, but
still poetic and oblique, lyrics to write rock songs. I'm thinking of
people like Leonard Cohen, to cite an obvious example, but also less
obvious ones, perhaps, like Jim Morrison, and Larry Beckett (Tim
Buckley's lyrical collaborator on his early records). It also
influenced people who were already writing songs in a more normal
fashion to get further out, like Neil Young, Donovan, and even some of
the Beatles' work, particularly when John Lennon was the dominant
composer.

Peter Yarrow had this comment about Bob Dylan's songwriting: "What
began to evolve, particularly in Bob's writing and singing, was
something that of course incorporated music and influences from the
past, but became uniquely his own poetry. And [he] introduced the kind
of lyric and intent that was unprecedented. Because it was never
difficult to understand the intent of, let's say, Pete Seeger's songs,
or Woody Guthrie's songs. But Bobby brought it to a different place."

In writing the books, it became clearer to me that folk-rock was
indeed often more a "waystation" for performers finding their identity
than a final stylistic destination. Paul Simon and Joni Mitchell, to
use two obvious examples, went into music utilizing much different
influences than folk and rock, though they first emerged as recording
artists using folk and then folk-rock (discounting Simon's pre-Simon &
Garfunkel rock'n'roll records, which were barely known prior to the
first S&G hit). The stop at the waystation seemed to get briefer after
the initial 1965-66 folk-rock rush. San Francisco Bay Area psychedelic
bands, for instance, seemed to have relatively brief basic folk-rock
phases before moving into harder acid rock, almost as if it was
training in electric rock playing and arranging prior to finding their
true metier.
  

    
Andrew, you're in luck. "Parallelograms" has been reissued on CD by
the small independent label The Wild Places, and now with six bonus
tracks of previously unreleased demos and outtakes! Granted, it might
not be the easiest thing to find in stores, but you should be able to
find it in the better independent/specialty outlets in urban areas, or
through on-line/mail-order means. If all else fails, email The Wild
Places at aceofdiscs@aol.com.

I'm real interested to hear that both Ed and Andrew were already
familiar with Linda Perhacs. Apparently the album circulated a little
more than I realized. I'd never heard her until the first CD reissue of
the album came out, about three or four years ago I think. I was able
to interview her for the book, and I think that might have been the
first time she's been interviewed by anyone.

Ellen McIlwaine's not in the book, as she missed the 1970 cutoff date;
her first album was in 1972.
  

    
> I've always wondered what it was about acid that made people want to
plug their guitars in. 

The feedback, man!  :-)

Ritchie, it's wonderful to have you here to discuss the topics in and
around your books.  I'm curious about the influence (symbiotic?) that
the folk-rock scene had on the commercial music of the time.  Granted,
I think it would be safe to say that many of the artists we are talking
about were doing music that felt true to them at the time, and they
happened to get swept into commercial success.  But, was there a swing
where things started to "sell out" overall?  And can we fix the blame
on the music business?  Was this after 1970?  I'm thinking about the
James Taylor and/or Bread leanings of folk-y music that wasn't really
part of the scene before 1970 so much, but certainly grew into what we
find on any town's radio version of Lite-FM or Soft Rock music.
  

    
I'm not going to cite the Rounders for obscure lyrics: they were too
grounded in traditional music. They'd warp the lyrics lots, but in ways
that made sense. 

And of course, the Beatles famously said "Dylan showed us the way"
when it came to songwriting. I think there may be something of a
chicken-and-egg thing happening with that, or an
invention-of-television thing, something that was in the air and Just
Happened. Rubber Soul: folk-rock album or not? I'd say so. 

I'd also like to remind off-the-Well types (I know you're out there)
that you can submit questions to us via inkwell-hosts@well.com, right?
  

    
Generally, I think folk-rock's influence on commercial music in the
1960s was extremely positive. It was crucial in elevating the lyrical
intelligence of pop music, and more subtly, it demonstrated that
musical forms considered by many to be at opposite poles from each
other could blend into something greater, without compromising artistic
integrity.

But even when folk-rock shot into the public consciousness in
mid-1965, there were moves to commercialize and assimilate it into a
more mainstream form. An obvious example is Sonny & Cher, who, it can
be hard to imagine to some these days, were classified as "folk-rock"
when "I Got You Babe" became a hit (and Cher covered Dylan's "All I
Really Want to Do" for a hit, charting higher than the Byrds'
immeasurably superior version). Sonny & Cher were mainstream
entertainers who happened to find folk-rock as an entry into stardom,
quickly moving on to the all-around entertainment field. (Having just
watched a DVD of Cher's "farewell tour," it's hard to conceive that she
could have once been designed as part of folk-rock, so bombastic was
the presentation, whose cost likely exceeded the annual GNP of several
small third world nations.) There were also acts like the Turtles and
the Association who found their true calling as more mainstream
pop-rock bands, but who actually started with Dylan covers (the Turtles
with "It Ain't Me Babe," and the Association with the much less
well-remembered "One Too Many Mornings").

I think it's a tribute to folk-rock's quality and artistic integrity
that it did largely survive attempts to dilute or co-opt it throughout
the 1960s, in part also because it kept evolving into different things
instead of being a static form that got stale relatively quickly. I
can't really pinpoint a part where things started to "sell out." I
think it was more a matter of folk-rock gradually becoming such an
entrenched part of rock music that it became less and less distinctive.
In part this was due to acts like James Taylor and the Eagles (there
were many others, I don't want to sound like I'm picking on them
especially) adding large dollops of pop to folk-rock and country-rock,
so that the specifically folk-rock elements became more submerged. In
part it was due to non-folk-rock singer-songwriters like Carole King
(who, I hasten to add, did some excellent work both as a Brill Building
songwriter and a recording artist) absorbing some of folk-rock's
musical ideas and lyrical expressiveness into a more crafted pop-rock
setting. This all led to a lot of 1970s "soft rock," which had some
superficial resemblances or roots in folk-rock, but was in my view far
less challenging and interesting than 1960s folk-rock.

And also, the music business became more corporate and consolidated in
the years after folk-rock, which I think cut down on some of the less
predictable innovations that had come through in the mid-to-late 1960s.
Warner Brothers in particular cornered the singer-songwriter market
with a large roster, and many of those singer-songwriters recorded in
Los Angeles with highly proficient studio musicians that gave the sound
a more homogenous veneer. Smaller labels had a hard time competing,
with some that had made stellar contributions to folk-rock largely
retreating from the field (Vanguard), going out of business
(Verve/Folkways, which did benefit from MGM distribution, and Joe
Boyd's Witchseason Productions company), or merging with bigger labels
and becoming less idiosyncratic (Elektra).

I go into this in my book, but I don't want to paint this as a
black-and-white situation of the evil big majors versus the smaller
good guys. Columbia was a huge record company, yet they managed to
release an enormous amount of great folk-rock that didn't seem
compromised by commercial considerations: the Byrds, Bob Dylan, Simon &
Garfunkel, Leonard Cohen, Donovan, even cult oddballs like Skip Spence
and Dino Valenti. Warner Brothers released a lot of good records, and
have often been praised for allowing singer-songwriters artistic
freedom and time to develop without undue pressure. And Vanguard,
Elektra, and Verve/Folkways all put out some turkey records, and made
some poor business decisions.

But in general, I think folk-rock music would have stayed fresher if
the business climate wasn't moving as much toward the
commercial/corporate. Yet that's something that happens to virtually
all genres of music after they ascend to commercial viability, isn't
it? 
  

    
Seems to me like folk-rock *was* the commercial music of the time, or a big
part of it, anyway.  There were certainly plenty of voices around to call
them all sell outs.  A scan of some vintage copies of Sing Out! will confirm
that.
  

    
While the Beatles were already extremely accomplished (well, great)
songwriters by the time they first heard Bob Dylan in early 1964, I
think Ed's absolutely right that Dylan was a huge influence on their
songwriting, particularly on making their lyrics more sophisticated and
multi-dimensional. This was something I covered in "Turn! Turn! Turn!"
rather than "Eight Miles High," but the Beatles' admiration of Dylan
was actually public record even before Dylan went electric in 1965. In
1965, John Lennon told the New Musical Express, "We began admiring him
during our visit to Paris in January of last year [1964] when we cadged
a Dylan LP off a DJ who came to interview us. Paul had heard of him
before but until we played that record his name did not really mean
anything to us. We went potty over the LP -- I think it was
Freewheelin' -- and tried to get more of his records." Then Dylan and
the Beatles actually met in a New York hotel room in 1964, where Dylan
introduced them to high-grade marijuana.

And Dylan was hugely influenced by the Beatles too, again even before
1965. Here's his famous quote on the matter (in 1971, to biographer
Anthony Scaduto):

"I had heard the Beatles in New York when they first hit. Then, when
we were driving through Colorado we had the radio on and eight of the
ten top songs were Beatles songs. In Colorado! 'I Wanna Hold Your
Hand,' all those early ones.

"They were doing things nobody was doing. Their chords were
outrageous, just outrageous, and their harmonies made it all valid. You
could only do that with other musicians. Even if you're playing your
own chords you had to have other people playing with you. That was
obvious. And it started me thinking about other people.

"But I just kept it to myself that I really dug them. Everybody else
thought they were for the teenyboppers, that they were gonna pass right
away. But it was obvious to me that they had staying power. I knew
they were pointing the direction of where music had to go. I was not
about to put up with other musicians, but in my head the Beatles were
it. In Colorado, I started thinking it was so far out that I couldn't
deal with it?eight in the top ten. It seemed to me a definite line was
being drawn. This was something that never happened before. It was
outrageous, and I kept it in my mind. You see, there was a lot of
hypocrisy all around, people saying it had to be either folk or rock.
But I knew it didn't have to be like that. I dug what the Beatles were
doing, and I always kept it in mind from back then."

Also, I'd say that Rubber Soul was in the main a folk-rock album, not
explicitly on every track perhaps, but on most of it. The Dylan
influence had affected the sound and lyrics of a few previous Beatles
tunes ("I'm a Loser," "Help!," "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away"),
but here folk-rock's influence was all over: "Norwegian Wood," "I've
Just Seen a Face" [which was on the US version of Rubber Soul, though
it had appeared earlier on the UK version of Help!], "Girl," "I'm
Looking Through You." And it wasn't just Dylan influencing the Byrds in
a folk-rock direction: George Harrison's "If I Needed Someone" is very
Byrds-influenced, as he made clear in a note to publicist Derek
Taylor: "Tell Jim [McGuinn] and David [Crosby] that 'If I Needed
Someone' is the riff from 'The Bells of Rhymney' and the drumming from
[the Byrds B-side] 'She Don't Care About Time,' or my impression of
it."

Just last night I ran across an unexpected quote from Brian Wilson of
the Beach Boys about Rubber Soul's folk-ness, which might also interest
Noah re: his previous query about how folk-rock might have affected
other parts of commercial music. Wilson said, "Rubber Soul was like a
folk album by the Beatles that somehow went together like no album ever
made before, and I was very impressed. I had to go in there [the
studio] and experiment with sounds. I really felt challenged to do it
-- and I followed through with it [with the Beach Boys' 1966 classic
album Pet Sounds]."
  

    
I think that's a good point in post 21: folk-rock *was* a big part of
commercial music of the time. In some ways, whether perceived as such
at the time or in hindsight, it's been thought of as extremely
counter-cultural. In some ways, I think it was: it's amazing to think
of songs with lyrics like those in "Positively Fourth Street" and
"Eight Miles High" as being particularly commercial, even though they
were both hits. And folk-rock, even some of what we think of as
indisputably classic folk-rock today, was often dismissed as the worst
kind of commercial sellout by folk purists. It wasn't just the like of
Sonny & Cher accused of doing this; more often, in fact, the heavy
criticism went the way of Bob Dylan, the Byrds, and the like.

The impression I got from my research was that this sort of purist
outrage wasn't nearly as widespread at the time as some accounts have
had it. Sing Out! and some other folk magazines were the main forums
for backlash against folk-rockers as sellouts, they really didn't have
such wide circulations, and not all of their readers agreed with them
(as lively letters defending the electric Dylan, the Beatles, and
folk-rock in their own letters section helped prove). And virtually
every young folk performer of note doing original or contemporary
material went electric to some degree by the end of the 1960s.

By about 1967, whether because they'd given up the battle of defending
purism, because they were resigned to having lost the battle against
folk-rock, because they'd actually started to like folk-rock anyway, or
they were tired of the whole thing, rants against folk-rock seemed to
virtually disappear from the pages of Sing Out, Broadside, and the
like.

On the other side of the coin, if you look at mainstream coverage of
folk-rock in magazines like Newsweek and Time in 1965 and 1966, they
seem to treat folk-rock as a freakish oddity, a commercial fad, barely
or not disguising their condescension toward the music and its
listeners. They didn't seem to see the folk-rockers as commercial
sellouts so much as commericial novelties, and not terribly talented
ones. Interestingly, by 1968 that had changed too, with the magazines
running very complimentary articles about singer-songwriters (and rock
in general) that treated the lyrics as poetry, and were written by
writers who actually seemed to be fans of the music, rather than beat
reporters assigned the pieces against their will.
  

    
(I heard "Parallellograms" once on WABC-FM, then found the record at my
station, WUNH, where I played it a lot. Never saw the record in the stores,
though.)
  

    
Of course, everyone in the rock lineage was written off as a commercial
novelty at some point - Elvis, the Beatles, whoever - but I was a teenage
kid when the music the book covers was coming out and they were deliberately
making music that would get on the radio so I'd go buy it.  That's
commercial, but I think much of the music of the period also proves that the
tendency to write off commercial as somehow inferior just ain't always so.

I think it's notable that Dylan, in the story related above, was as
impressed by the Beatles having 8 singles in the top ten as he was by the
music itself.  He wanted to be a rock star as bad as anyone, more than he
wanted to be a poet or 'spokesman for a generation' I think.