Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
I'm glad Ed brought up Taj Mahal, who had a notable if minor role in
folk-rock. Though as Ed says Mahal tended to do blues, in the mid-1960s
he was in the Rising Sons, a group that also included Ry Cooder. They
were thought of as folk-rock, though they also did a good bit of blues;
at different times, their lineup also included future Spirit drummer
Ed Cassidy (and also future "Sweetheart of the Rodeo"-era Byrds drummer
Kevin Kelley. They were on Columbia and produced by the Byrds'
producer, Terry Melcher. But they only managed to release one single
that wasn't wholly representative of their potential, though they
recorded more than an album's worth of additional, unreleased material.
All of this finally came out on CD in the early 1990s. The whole
Rising Sons story can be read as a chapter in my book "Unknown Legends
of Rock'n'Roll."

With Bruce Langhorne, his affiliation for folk and folk-rock just
seemed to be what he liked, not so much (as was so often the case in
this whole movement) a conscious decision to do one music rather than
another. There's a very obscure early-'60s various-artists folk album, 
"The Folksingers of Washington Square," on which he plays (the only
other performer on the record to become a name was Sandy Bull), and his
roots in the Village scene were established at a very young age. Part
of the reason he fell in with Dylan in particular was that he'd
recorded John Hammond-produced sessions as an accompanist for Carolyn
Hester, who used Dylan as a harmonica player on her 1961 album. In fact
there's a September 29, 1961 photo from those sessions of Hester,
Dylan, Langhorne, and bassist Bill Lee (filmmaker Spike Lee's father,
and a frequently used folk revival session man) in the liner notes
booklet for "Dear Companion," the double-CD compilation of Hester's
'60s Columbia recordings. Presumably this greased the path for
Langhorne to play on some of the late-1962 Dylan sessions for
"Freewheelin' Bob Dylan" that used accompaniment, though only one of
those tracks, "Corrina, Corrina," ended up on the LP.

Langhorne's stint as a side player on Dylan's '60s folk-rock
recordings was actually brief (on "Bringing It All Back Home"), but
extremely significant. Dylan got so hot that several session players
who'd worked with him got in demand when folk-rock started to get
recorded often, and Langhorne was one of him, which led to his work
with several other folk-rock artists of note, like Richard & Mimi
Farina and Tom Rush. (Al Kooper was another Dylan sideman who started
picking up lots of folk-rock session work after recording with Bob.)

There's another reason why I think Langhorne gravitated to folk and
folk-rock. Because of a childhood accident, he's missing some fingers.
This meant he'd never be a flashy virtuoso, which is something
prevalent in the worlds of rock, blues, and jazz. But in his view, it
did mean that he got to be a very good accompanist, because he was
forced to listen to work out the best lines that would be subtle and 
sympathetic to the singer and lead performer, and didn't possess the
technique to overwhelm or overshadow with his solos. I think this
approach was especially suitable to singer-songwriters, who wanted the
emphasis to remain on the singer and the song, and flesh out
arrangements in the dawn of folk-rock without the kind of brash, full
interplay more characteristic of bands like the Byrds or Buffalo
Springfield.

With Richie Havens, possibly his own limited guitar technique made
folk-rock more attractive to him than other styles. Havens uses an open
tuning bar chord style, using his thumb to cover most of the six
strings in each guitar fret, devised to compensate for his inability to
master more traditional methods of guitar playing. This gave him a
distinctive sonic signature that was most effective in rapid acoustic
folky strumming, which would have sounded blurry and distorted if he'd
gone into fuller electric folk.

Also, before he became a famed recording artist, Havens was known as
kind of the ultimate Village yeoman, playing more "basket houses"
(where tips were thrown into baskets passed among the crowds) than
anyone else. By necessity and desire, I think this made him develop a
very versatile approach and repertoire, where he not only learned a lot
of folk songs but -- again, possibly because of his limitations, as a
songwriter this time -- made him open to folk and folk-rock
arrangements of non-traditional songs, by Bob Dylan and the Beatles
especially. His ability to improvise from a wide repertoire came in
especially handy for the most famous moment of his career, as seen on
the "Woodstock" soundtrack, where he sings "Freedom." It wasn't even
planned as part of his set, but he kept extending his slot because so
many of the other performers were delayed in the crush of traffic.
"Freedom" was improvised around a spiritual, "Motherless Child," that
he remembered hearing his grandmother sing as a child.
  

    
'if you put some background to this, you might have a
 white Ray Charles with a message.'

quite a quote.

I had heard Love's hits back in the 60's on L.A. radio, I associated
them with as a blue-psych-rock unit.  I'd also heard a few of their non
more folky hits but never quite associated them with the same group.

The rerelease of Forever Changes that people on the Well brought my
attention to was quite a pleasant surprise. Solid throughout -- a very
cogent work.  Perhaps too cogent -- as it does not quite jibe
with the crazy whacked out rep of the band at the time.

What it makes me wonder though is how much creative pull producers had
in the product, and especially with Forever Changes.  The mention of
Wilson on Bridge Over Troubled Waters, also makes me wonder how much
power the producers had in shaping the final product, as well as the
sounds of these bands. 

Someone slipped with Odetta.

On a more historical basis I don't recall Leadbelly as being 
exactly blues.
  

    
Interesting that some people would view folk-rock as a dilution of black
influences, since I've always thought about it on a separate track
altogether.  Most folk-rock, to my ears anyway, sounds like what you get
when you try to strip away as much of the R&B influence on rock as possible.
The result, of course, always leads back to its roots in southern forms like
country and bluegrass, which have a much deeper debt to black music than is
often acknowledged, but still, folk-rock, despite the presence of a handful
of black folks on the scene, is usually the 'whitest' music in the rock
tradition, in sources as well as practicioners.

But this discussion is going to make me rethink that a bit, I guess.
  

    
No, I'd agree with you, which is why I brought up Langhorne and Wilson
et. al. (I once had a friend say he liked Arthur Lee because "he's a
black guy imitating a white guy -- Mick Jagger -- imitating a black
guy.") It's just the fact that these people *were* anomalous that made
me ask. 

As for Odetta, I think it's important that her roots are in the
musical theater; strictly speaking, she's a performer who uses folk
material in her act, although she's become more of a folk singer. Had
opportunities for blacks been different when she was young, she might
well have aspired to opera or Broadway as a leading singer. 

However, having sat through I don't know how many hours of Richie
Havens at the Cafe au Go-Go while waiting to see innumerable acts, I'm
going to defer to Richie here about discussing him. 
  

    
I suppose you could argue that Odetta is the inheritor of the "folk song
recital" mantle from people like Paul Robeson, rather than a singer in the
folk tradition. She certainly has more of a trained voice than most
folksingers. But my point was that she was including Beatles and Dylan songs
in her concerts and records at about the same time that Judy Collins was
moving toward "art songs".
  

    
I'll backtrack here a little to get back to John's note about Odetta,
and then forward to Darrell's Love note and back to the discussion of
blues/R&B influence in folk-rock.

Odetta (and Leadbelly, as Darrell mentioned) are other notable --
well, quite major -- African-American figures in folk music. Odetta's
not primarily blues to my ears, and while more of a case is made for
Leadbelly being part of the blues, to me he's folk-blues, if such a
thing exists. Leadbelly died long before folk-rock started and so is
more of an ancestral influence than a performer I cover in my books.
But it at least has to be noted that he was one of the performers most
instrumental in revving up interest in traditional folk music in urban
areas (and among Whites) in the 1930s and 1940s, particularly in New
York. And that in turn was vital to increasing folk's popularity in the
1950s and early '60s, peaking in the early-'60s folk revival. To take
the most obvious example of Leadbelly's influence, his "Goodnight
Irene" was covered for a huge hit by the Weavers in the early 1950s,
and another song that Leadbelly was key in popularizing, "Rock Island
Line," was the biggest skiffle hit ever in the mid-1950s, by Lonnie
Donegan. Josh White, incidentally, is another highly influential
mid-twentieth century black folk-blues musician, though his popularity
had passed its peak (in part because of his controversial responses to
questions in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee, which
many on the Left found too compromising).

Odetta, however, was very much a star performer in the early-'60s
revival (and still around today, of course). Again, I see her as an
important formative influence, but not part of folk-rock itself, and
like all such figures, I didn't cover her in depth in my books, though
I cited their influence. But here are a couple of interesting things
about Odetta worth noting in the story of folk-rock.

Dylan was inspired to trade his electric guitar and amplifier for a
flat-top Gibson acoustic after hearing an Odetta record; he said in a
Playboy interview that the album was "the first thing that turned me on
to folk singing." I guess some people might see her as an influence
leading rock singers *away* from rock and into folk for a time, but I
think the more important thing to realize is that Odetta was a big
influence on Dylan, an influence retained throughout his career, after
he went back to electric rock as well. Also, Odetta used bass player
Bill Lee as a side musician, and Lee was an important session musician
on early records by folk artists who were expanding their arrangements
(though not yet into folk-rock), on albums by Ian & Sylvia, Judy
Collins, Tom Rush, and others. He also plays on Dylan's "Bringing It
All Back Home."

Odetta did actually eventually record with band accompaniment; her
late-'60s album "Odetta" on Verve, with a cover of "Strawberry Fields
Forever," was produced by early Byrds manager Jim Dickson, with John
Seiter (of Spanky & Our Gang and the Turtles) on drums. The album isn't
that good, and I think it's part of the sub-genre of
little-known-for-good-reason records by folk revival icons who weren't
suited to going into folk-rock. Perhaps that's in part because many
such records were done by artists who were a little (or a lot) older
than most of the folk-rock musicians, without nearly as sound a
grounding in rock as a fan or listener. Pete Seeger, Eric Von Schmidt,
the Kingston Trio, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Dave Van Ronk, and even
Malvina Reynolds and Burl Ives made records with band/folk-rock/pop
accompaniment. In some cases they actually wanted to do it; in more
cases, I would suspect, the record company pressured them to go in that
direction so they would sound more contemporary.

By the way, the Odetta album of Dylan covers John mentioned -- "Odetta
Sings Dylan," from 1965 -- is very good (though acoustic folk, not
folk-rock). It might be the best of the "[Fill in the Blank] Does
Dylan} albums, which were usually lousy or exploitative. In part I
think that's because it was virtually the first of the Dylan cover
albums, and therefore the idea was much fresher then; the only one that
preceded it, to my knowledge, was an obscure (and not very good)
all-Dylan cover album by Linda Mason. "Odetta Sings Dylan" has some
rarely covered Dylan tunes ("Baby, I'm in the Mood For You," "Long Ago,
Far Away," "Walkin' Down the Line," "Long Time Gone"), and an
extraordinary ten-minute version of "Mr. Tambourine Man." It's been
reissued on CD, with a couple 1963-64 Odetta Dylan covers added as
bonus tracks. And who accompanies her on guitar on "Odetta Sings
Dylan"? In another instance of folk-rock's tight interlocking
connections, it's Bruce Langhorne. And Bill Lee's on bass.

By the way, for those who want to find out more about Bruce Langhorne,
I've posted a transcript of my interview with him on my website at
www.richieunterberger.com/langhorne2.html, and also I prior interview I
did with him specifically about Richard & Mimi Farina at
www.richieunterberger.com/langhorne.html.
  

    
Tying some of my own memories together, I saw Bill Lee playing behind
Ronnie Gilbert of the Weavers in an after-hours club in Sheraton Square
with Len Chandler when I interviewed him. (That whole night is a very
weird story, but irrelevant here; just that I hadn't thought of it in
ages). 

Not all black acoustic music is blues. Blues only came into being
around 1900, and it succeeded a form known to folklorists as "songster"
music. There are songsters like "Ragtime" Henry Thomas, who played
guitar and had some panpipes on a rack like Dylan's harmonica, Richard
"Rabbit" Brown from New Orleans, and (I'd argue, and so would others)
Mississippi John Hurt, who had a significant amount of songster
material in his repertoire. 

Leadbelly, being an all-round entertainer in Houston when he wasn't in
 jail, had to sing what people wanted to hear, so his book included a
lot of weird material, including "Goodnight Irene," which, far from
being blues, is a composed pop song, written by a black songwriter who
was extremely successful in the 1880s. Forget his name, but he worked
out of Cincinnati, and Leadbelly's grandfather had the sheet music.
Sure, he had blues, but like, say, a wedding band, he had to have all
kinds of stuff ready to play at a moment's notice. Unlike at Jewish
weddings, they shot people whose music they didn't like on Fannin
Street. 
  

    
To get back to a question about Love from Darrell: Love's music
differed a great deal between their first three albums (when Lee and
Bryan MacLean, the only other songwriter of note in the group, were
both in the band) and their subsequent work. The first three albums,
all released in 1966-67 -- "Love," "Da Capo," and "Forever Changes" --
were far lighter and folk-rockier than their later albums, where Lee
was the only remaining original member of the band. (Though "Da Capo"
was the least folk-rock-oriented of the three, also getting into garage
rock, flamenco, jazz-rock, and blues-rock jamming.) I could see why
someone whose introduction to Love was through their post-1967 albums
would never think of the band as folk-rock.

I differ with a lot of Love fans in this regard, but I actually think
I'm in the majority of listeners in holding the opinion that Love's
first three records were *far* superior to any of their later work. I
don't care for any of the post-"Forever Changes" albums; it's like Lee
lost his muse entirely. They are also so dissimilar to the first three
albums, in part because of different personnel but also in part because
Lee went into far inferior hard rock without distinguished
songwriting, that it's like comparing the work of two completely
different bands. Kind of like comparing the Peter Green-era Fleetwood
Mac with the Buckingham-Nicks-era Fleetwood Mac; the name's the same,
but that's virtually all.

Hindsight's everything, but I think the key mistakes in Love's career
were A) Arthur Lee not giving more room for Bryan MacLean songs on the
albums, particularly "Da Capo," where side two was completely given
over to a dull 19-minute blues-rock jam, and B) Lee keeping Love going
without MacLean in the band. MacLean didn't write much for Love, but
his songs had a very fragile folk-rock prettiness that set off Lee's
own high-quality work very nicely; he also wrote what might be Love's
most famous song, "Alone Again Or" (on "Forever Changes"). He *was*
writing more songs that could have been used on the albums,
particularly "Da Capo." MacLean's solo demos of some of those songs, as
well as other demos of his from the 1960s and 1970s, can be heard on
two recent CD releases of previously unissed material ("ifyoubelievein"
and "Candy's Waltz"), which are highly recommended to big early Love
fans.

Although "Forever Changes" might not on the surface jibe with Love's
crazy rep, I think the lyrics do; they're very oblique, sometimes in a
crazed surreal way, like the L.A. smog's finally become more than
Arthur Lee could take. Darrell infers he suspects that the producer had
a strong hand in that album, and though I've gotten varying accounts
of who was responsible for what and how much, I think that was the
case. The record was co-produced by Arthur Lee and Bruce Botnick, who
engineered on a lot of Elektra's rock records in the 1960s (most
notably for the Doors). Botnick told me he brought in arranger David
Angel for the horns and strings, and Lee sang the brass and string
lines to Angel, with Lee very much willing to incorporate this into the
arrangements. The transcript of my interview with Botnick is on my
website for future reference, at
www.richieunterberger.com/botnick.html.

This leads into Darrell's overall question about the role of the
producer in folk-rock, which is a big one that I'll go into next.
  

    
First, to clarify, Tom Wilson didn't produce "Bridge Over Troubled
Waters." His association with Simon & Garfunkel was pretty brief; in
addition to producing their first (wholly acoustic folk) album, he
added electric guitar and drums to "The Sound of Silence" track from
that debut album to release it as a single when folk-rock took off.
Then he was replaced by Bob Johnston (who'd also replaced Wilson as
Dylan's producer), but my impression is Wilson stopped working with S&G
largely because he stopped working at Columbia, becoming East Coast
A&R director of Verve Records, where he continued to do some important
work as a producer. While I think of it, I also want to add Dion to the
list of important folk-rock artists Wilson produced; people don't
think of as Dion as a folk-rock singer, but he did some underrated,
barely heard tracks in that style for Columbia in 1965 with Wilson
producing.

As to how much power producers had in shaping the final product of
folk-rock, that varies enormously from case to case, as it does
throughout pop music, in all styles and all eras. Generally, I would
say that artists got more and more of a voice in how to produce stuff
as the decade went on. And it could be that folk-rock itself was
important in giving the artist a greater voice in production throughout
rock music, since folk-rock was crucial in making the industry pay
more attention to long-playing rock albums, and elevating the
perception of recorded rock music as an expressive art form, as well as
product. Certainly Simon & Garfunkel, to take one example, were
greatly involved in their own production and became more and more
ambitious as their recordings progressed, to the point where they
shared production credits (with engineer Roy Halee).

Tim Rose, who I interviewed shortly before his death, went as far as
to tell me, "'The singer sings, the writer writes, the producer
produces' -- in the '60s, most of the major labels, that's what they
understood. The musicians took control of the direction of the music,
against the wishes of the music business itself. This is
un-fucking-precedented in music."

Gary Marker of the Rising Sons (who was also a session musician,
playing bass on Buffalo Springfield's "I Am a Child" for instance) told
me, "Studios and engineers day after day constantly had their eyes on
the clock and worried more about their quarterly budgets than producing
groundbreaking, musically challenging records. The whole rock-thing on
the charts around '65 changed all that...Suddenly, the industry--
almost overnight -- fell into the hands of airy-fairy, artsy-fartsy
brooding wandering minstrel types who spent endless hours noodling in
the studio until some kind of inspiration hit them. This drove the
profit-driven, bottom-line corporate types right out of their minds --
and eventually out of the business. At least for a while. The bean
counters are back and have seized control."

But there were some folk-rock producers who did exert a very audible
influence on the records, where you can hear their personal touch.
There are the orchestrations on Leonard Cohen's debut album by John
Simon (who also produced the Band and Big Brother & the Holding
Company), which I think were very necessary; as Chris Darrow (from
Kaleidoscope, and who played on the album) told me, Cohen's guitar
skills were so limited that he had students he gave lessons to who were
better than Cohen, and Cohen had great trouble communicating the kind
of musical settings he wanted. There are also the Joshua Rifkin string
arrangements on Judy Collins's "In My Life" and "Wildflowers" albums,
which were essential to making those "chamber-folk" standard-bearers.

Mickie Most did some lousy work with some of his artists, but I think
he helped make Donovan sound a lot fuller and more diverse on record
than he could in concert, with help from arranger John Cameron. Erik
Jacobsen (who also produced the Lovin' Spoonful) had very sympathetic,
understated string arrangements on Tim Hardin's early records, and
though Hardin coarsely told some reporters later he hated the strings
and they were put on against his will, Jacobsen refutes this and says
that Hardin liked them at the time they were done. Shadow Morton did a
great job with Janis Ian's "Society's Child."  Nico couldn't stand what
Tom Wilson did with "Chelsea Girl," but actually I really like the
baroque-folk orchestration there. Jack Nitzsche did some fine
orchestrations for Bob Lind, Tim Buckley, and Neil Young.

Conversely, a producer can be most effective by *not* imposing a stamp
on the sound and letting the artists be themselves. Tom Wilson has
been criticized by some of his artists for not being attentive during
the sessions, spending most of the time on the phone to various
girlfriends. But as Bruce Langhorne pointed out to me,  the hands-off
attitude could be an asset for an artist as volatile as Dylan, seeing
Wilson's contributions as putting the right people together and letting
the universe do the job, trusting that the music would emerge best if
it came together organically without outside clock-watching pressure.

Bob Johnston was like this in a way too. Some artists have disparaged
his abilities, but he was good at letting the artists be themselves,
claiming to me that he'd have insiders call him when executives were on
the way to the studio, after which he'd lock the doors, leave the
studio with the artists, and come back after they left, thereby keeping
record company interference at bay. Al Kooper told me that he thought
Johnston might have gotten the Dylan gig in part because "he patted Bob
[Dylan] on the back quite a bit more than Wilson ever did," but added,
"Maybe that's what was needed." In any case, in spite of some artists'
view that Wilson and Johnston had shortcomings, my feeling that it's
unlikely that such a large number of fine recordings come about by
accident, and that if their contributions might have been subtle in
some instances, their approaches certainly seemed to often have been
"what was needed."

As an example of less-is-more, in producing Joni Mitchell's debut
album, David Crosby in my view (and certainly in Mitchell's view) made
the right decision in making the whole thing virtually entirely
acoustic, though it was recorded in such a way as to produce unusual
echo and overtones, with Crosby having Mitchell sing into a grand piano
with the ringing pedal down. The let-the-artists-be-themselves
approach wasn't always optimum, though. Nik Venet (Fred Neil, Linda
Ronstadt & the Stone Poneys, Hearts & Flowers, John Stewart) went for a
pretty basic, organic acoustic-dominated sound, but his productions
have been criticized for being too dry, and also in the case of Neil's
"Sessions" album, he seemed to have given Neil too much leeway for
unfocused raga-folk-rock jamming, as opposed to concentrating on more
effective, concise songs/compositions.
  

    
I never heard that before about Joni Mitchell and the piano. That was a
beautiful album in all respects, except that it was far too delicate for
vinyl. The smallest scratches marred the sound.
  

    
On the subject of producers, I think a lot of folk-rock production
illustrates I thought I've expressed from time to time here, that much
folk-rock innovation was spontaneous and aided and abetted by very
unlikely figures. Tom Wilson and Bob Johnston are two, and here are
some others:

Terry Melcher had done mostly lightweight surf music and California
pop-rock before doing the Byrds. Why did he do the Byrds? Because he
was about the only young rock producer at all in Columbia's L.A.
branch. Why was he a Columbia staff producer at such a young age? Well,
probably in large part because he was the son of one of Columbia's
biggest stars, Doris Day. Why were the Byrds at Columbia in the first
place? In large part because of an unlikely recommendation by Columbia
jazz star Miles Davis, who'd happened to hear about them from someone
in the business and passed on the tip to the head of Columbia's West
Coast office.

If producers rose through a meritocracy, Melcher would probaby never
have been there in the first place. But he did a very good job with the
Byrds, on the "Mr. Tambourine Man" and the first two albums. He also
did far more obscure folk-rock with the Rising Sons and the Gentle
Soul.

Incidentally, it's little known that Melcher had actually recorded
with McGuinn before the Byrds. The City Surfers, a studio-only group,
did a Beach Boys-type song called "Beach Ball" in 1963 that McGuinn
played on, with Melcher on piano and Bobby Darin on drums. McGuinn also
co-wrote the song, which is another piece of evidence of how some
folk-rockers had obscure rock ventures in their pre-folk-rock pasts,
even during an era when they were for the most part folkies.

Shel Talmy did good production for Pentangle, one of the best acts in
British folk-rock. Butd as noted a while back, he only became a top
producer in England in the first place because he'd been on vacation in
the early '60s and lied to Decca about his credentials, playing some
singles he claimed as his own work though he'd only been an engineer.

Joshua Rifkin was only in his early twenties when he began working
with Judy Collins and his primary credentials were with his classical
interpretations of Beatles songs for the album "The Baroque Beatles
Book," though he'd been in an Elektra jug band (the Even Dozen Jug
Band) with John Sebastian, Stefan Grossman, David Grisman, Maria
Muldaur, and Steve Katz. But Elektra took a chance on him, probably
because he was around and he like Collins had a folk-classical
background, and it worked out very well. While Rifkin told me that
these kinds of things happened as a result of an era when possibilities
in general were opening rapidly, he was also frank in saying that the
other factor in roping people from different fields into folk-rock was
that "I think everybody was, to be honest, attracted by the notion of a
higher level of success."

There's a whole shaggy-dog story about how Peter Schekryk ended up
producing Melanie (and marrying her), but basically Melanie went to
audition for a theatrical production in the Brill Building in New York;
in asking for directions, met the production team Hugo & Luigi; and
through them, met Peter Schekeryk. Schekeryk traded his financial
interest in the Balloon Farm's hit single "A Question of Temperature"
to get Melanie out of her deal with Hugo & Luigi.

Arthur Gorson had gotten into the folk music scene via being a
political activist, and somehow ended up not only managing but also
producing Jim & Jean, David Blue, Phil Ochs, and Tom Rush. To me, he
emphasized that folk-rock was such new territory that producers such as
himself were learning as they went, much as the musicians were. As to
why so many of the same session musicians turned up on early New York
folk-rock albums, he said, "We ended up using a very small group of
musicians who perhaps played on a Dylan album or something like
that...We knew the people who played with Dylan, because they were
around the same scene. We didn't *know* anyone else. *We* were the only
people we knew!"

Shadow Morton was producing the great teen girl group the Shangri-Las
before he somehow got to produce the teen folk-rock singer Janis Ian.
To my surprise, Ian was very complimentary about Morton, saying he let
her have free rein to direct the band and do the charts, intros, and
outros.
  

    
I agree with Andrew about the first Joni Mitchell album being too
delicate for vinyl. It's the kind of record where you want to make sure
there'll be no cars passing on the street outside for at least an hour
before you put on the LP.

Although like I said I think Crosby did a really good job with the
production, his methods and technical naivete did lead to some
problems.  His strategy of having Mitchell sing into the grand piano
created a lot of hiss because he recorded it at far too low a level.
Then they had to try to take off the hiss, which, as Joni told DJ Gene
Shay in a 1968 interview, "took off a lot of the highs, which is the
reason it sounds like it's under sort of glass...under a bell jar,
that's what Judy [Collins] said. So you really need the words inside
the book to follow my diction, which is pretty good, usually."
  

    
Tying up a few lingering threads about the black/blues influence in
folk-rock, I'll second Ed's feeling that blacks in folk-rock were an
anomaly rather than a big part of the scene. Although a few folk
purists went into print castigating folk-rock as a dilution of black
music in the mid-1960s, I think those rants were rather cranky and
ill-informed, not accurate or valid criticism, unless one takes the
line that all white rock'n'roll of any sort is watered-down black music
(which I don't). In one of my recent BBC radio interviews, the host
asked me, in a rather accusatory tone, if I didn't think that folk-rock
was a *whitewashing* of rock music, stripping the black influence out
(which he clearly disapproved of). So folk-rock's been attacked from
both sides of this question over the years.

I never thought of Odetta as a particularly theatrical vocalist, but
that theatrical, sometimes stilted quality is something I notice a lot
in '50s and early-'60s folk recordings. It's heard in a few black
performers, such as Casey Anderson, but also in many white ones. In
what I'll call "The Mighty Wind" or wholesome folk combo era, this
theatrical quality often seemed dumbed down to a sort of variety-show,
we're-hear-to-all-around-enteratin-you presentation.

I think the great majority of such records have dated poorly, which is
why many haven't been reissued, but more importantly why many are
forgoten or virtually ignored these days (and often unlikely to get
reissued), particularly by listeners of younger generations who didn't
hear them the first time around. While earthy early folk and old-time
music recordings by, say, Woody Guthrie or the Carter Family seem to
have eternal appeal and get perpetually discovered, the more
consciously theatrical ones seem to have little or nothing for a
contemporary audience to relate to.

There are some people who disagree with me about this. One of the most
negative emails I ever received was from someone who was extremely
upset that I criticized the Mitchell Trio's 1966 "Violets of Dawn" LP
(with John Denver as one of the Trio) as "just about the last of the
unbearably wholesome, sterile commercial folk revival LPs." But I do
find the Mitchell Trio, whether with Chad or not, unbearably corny to
listen to, even if some of their political sentiments were
left-of-center.

One thing folk-rock seemed to do was to wash the corniness and
theatricality of the commercial folk-pop groups they'd been trained in
(like Chad Mitchell's, to whom Roger McGuinn was an accompanist) out to
sea. And this is one reason -- not the only or major reason, by any
means -- that I think that folk-rock has dated better than early-'60s
folk-pop,  and has a lot more appeal and relevance to contemporary and
younger audiences than much of the folk music recorded in the 1950s and
early '60s.

Ed, you mentioned that you'd sat through innumerable hours of Richie
Havens opening for acts at the Cafe Au Go Go, though from your post I'm
not sure whether that's something you enjoyed or not. Is there
anything particularly interesting, positive or negative, about the
Havens gigs you saw that might have seldom or never gotten into the
history books?
  

    
Richie -

How about The Chambers Brothers?
  

    
I think the Chambers Brothers occupy a tangential position in
folk-rock a little similar to that of the Staple Singers. Like the
Staples, they were very popular on the folk circuit for a time,
although their roots were in gospel and R&B. And like the Staple
Singers, they made the transition to much more secular, fully arranged
music, but not to my ears in the folk-rock style. The Staple Singers,
of course, became soul stars. The Chambers Brothers -- with producer
David Rubinson (mentioned in passing by Ed earlier today) -- sound much
more to me like soul-rock with some psychedelic influence, not
folk-rock.

It's interesting, though, that the Chambers Brothers played with an
electric guitar and drums at the 1965 Newport Folk festival, the same
one much more famous for Bob Dylan's electric set. Barry Melton of
Country Joe & the Fish made the interesting, possibly controversial in
some quarters, observation to me that it seemed permissible for
African-American artists to use electric instruments and amplification
on the folk circuit, but not young white musicians. This, he continued,
was one reason the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and the Blues Project
were so influential on some folk-rock musicians, even if their
repertoire might have seemed much more blues than folk-rock -- because
they were extending the permission to use electric instruments on the
folk circuit to young white musicians.

Going back to the Staple Singers again, they did actually make #66 in
the charts in 1967 with a cover of a folk-rock classic, "For What It's
Worth," though their version isn't too interesting.
  

    
Richie Havens, like Skipper's Scary Karate Show and Tiny Tim at Steve
Paul's Scene, was something to be endured, not looked forward to. But
you couldn't go to the Cafe au Go Go and not see him. I've always
wondered what Howlin' Wolf felt seeing him out there warming up the
crowd for him: who *is* this guy? If a couple of his folk-rock albums
showed up in the mail one day, I'd listen to them, but I wouldn't go
out of my way to do so. 

Both the Chambers and the Staples were gospel singers at root, and
unlike blues, there's not a smidgen of "folk" in gospel, which has
always been a composed, deliberately commercial, music, except that its
marketing goes through the churches. It was inevitable that some
members of the gospel scene would hook onto the protest movement --
after all, as black people, they were certainly involved in the issues
-- but I would imagine that the Staples' version of "For What It's
Worth" is about as successful as Aretha's version of "The Weight,"
where you can almost see her thinking "What is this damn song *about,*
anyway?" as she paces through it. 

The Len Chandler memories brought back an incident that, I think,
encapsulates a lot of what Richie's writing about. The Len Chandler
interview was for Broadside, a mimeographed magazine of social protest
music run by a couple of old Communists from Oklahoma, Sis Cunningham
and Gordon Friesen. They published my first stuff (hey, I didn't know
you were supposed to get *paid*), and when I was at college, one
weekend a bunch of us went off to New York. Among us was a folkie, a
gal from Cleveland named Bobbi Fox, who was way ahead of most of us:
she had a boyfriend named Robert Crumb who was a talented artist, and
she'd taken a bunch of acid. Anyway, she was really eager to meet Sis
and Gordon, and I had a manuscript to drop off, so we went over to
their house/office, and Gordon met us at the door. Someone was sick, so
we couldn't go in, so we stood in the hallway talking for a while.
"How's the new Dylan album?" Gordon asked. Oh, it's pretty good. Some
of the songs are pretty out there, but they're really excellent. "I
don't know," he sighed. "I just wish he'd stop all this malarkey and
write a good song about Vietnam." Bobbi just stared at him, and then
said, "But Mr. Friesen, they're ALL about Vietnam." 

There's your generation gap!
  

    
I dunno, I think I'd have to quibble with the notion that black gospel
didn't contain a "smidgen" of folk - certainly some gospel music has roots
in the spiritual tradition, which I think is definitely folk, that are no
more tenouous than some of the roots folk-rock has in any kind of folk
music.

In fact, most of what we think of as folk music - Carter family, Woody
Guthrie, Pete Seeger, etc, etc. - is as composed and deliberately
professional as anything in gospel.  I imagine there are even Child ballads
that were composed on commission for some local hotshot by some professional
troubador or another.

So I think the Staples, Chambers and Mahalia have as much claim to being
'folk' artists as The Weavers, Woody or Dylan ever did.
  

    
Well, if you want to cast the net that far, fine, but my point was
that looking to the Staples or the Chambers for folk-rock was pretty
fruitless. 

Gospel, though, does *not* have roots in the spiritual tradition, but
in blues, having been pretty much invented by one man, Thomas Dorsey,
who had been known as Georgia Tom before a lightning conversion. 

And don't get me going on Mahalia Jackson. At least until you can
prove you've listened to her Apollo sides. 
  

    
Well, I don't know how to prove it, Ed.  I could say that that's where I
first heard Mildred Falls play piano, or where I was introduced to the
Southern Harmonaires. But I can't prove it from here.

And yeah, Dorsey 'invented' gospel, but I'd say there was some spiritual
influence in his brand of blues, and certainly some spiritual influence on
some of his contemporaries and followers in the gospel field.  But that's
pretty drifty, I guess.

Actually though, in the right place, I'd love to get you going on Mahalia
Jackson, who my daddy introduced me to over 50 years ago, and who I'll stop
doing damn near anything to listen to.
  

    
While the influence of gospel in folk-rock is mild, it might be worth
noting here that Donovan described Dylan's 1966 sound to me as "direct
blues-gospel-soul organ and electric guitar." Some of Dylan's Basement
Tapes (released and unreleased) and the Band's early work has a gospel
feel to me, which I think can be traced to Garth Hudson's organ. Hudson
didn't play on many of Dylan's mid-1960s studio recordings, but Al
Kooper's organ on those sometimes had a gospelish feel too, I think.

As for other stretched gospel-folk-rock connections, of course there's
Simon & Garfunkel's "Bridge Over Troubled Water." Much more obscurely,
there's also a little gospel in the folk-country-rock of Steve Young's
late-'60s album "Rock, Salt & Nails," on tracks like "Love in My
Time."
  

    
Oh, and also Sylvia Tyson confirmed to me that her song "You Were on
My Mind" was gospel-influenced, which you can hear much more in the Ian
& Sylvia original than in the We Five's hit cover.
  

    
Part of the difficulty in talking about "blues" is that the term is not well
defined. On one hand, there's a body of music that emerged out of the Lower
Mississippi valley that is pretty central to the genre--the Delta Blues that
moved up and down the Illinois Central Railroad to New Orleans and Chicago--
but there's also a broader definition that included more melodic singers
like Mississippi John Hurt and Elizabeth Cotten.
  

    
But those "more melodic" singers are actually songsters, not blues
musicians. Blues is, in fact, a fairly well-defined form: AABA rhymes,
a standard chord pattern, inclusion of the African-American flatted
3rd, and the rest. It became a huge fad around 1900, possibly
originating in Mississippi, and spread all around the South. There are,
true, regional styles, but the form itself is fairly static. 

With all respect to Sylvia Tyson, I'd say the majority of the gospel
influence in "You Were On My Mind" is in the energy with which she and
Ian sing it, which is the equal of a gospel group in full cry. 

But folk-rock and any other kind of American popular music isn't pure,
not any more. There may have been a time when black and white musical
styles didn't influence each other, but my guess would be that it would
have been around the end of the 18th century. 100 years later, it was
all a hodge-podge. And we're better off for it!
  

    
> Blues is, in fact, a fairly well-defined form: AABA rhymes,
> a standard chord pattern, inclusion of the African-American flatted
> 3rd, and the rest.

Maybe nowadays, but it was more versatile than you describe in the
heyday of Blues performing. As a matter of fact, "classical" Blues
isn't very much at all like the modern canned, commercial 12-bar blues
which you describe. E.g., "Prodigal Son", most of Rob't. Johnson, etc.
  

    
Yeah, what I described (just trying for a thumbnail description) is
subject to all kinds of variation (hey, how bout that John Lee
Hooker?), but I was just trying to make a distinction between songster
music and  blues. You'll find that most classic blues does, in fact,
adhere, if somewhat uncomfortably, to that format.