Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
And before I forget, people who aren't on the Well can -- and should!
-- send an e-mail to inkwell-hosts@well.com if they want to participate
in this conversation.

Come on, we know you're out there... 
  

    
Read the Bruce Botnik interview with great interest.  In some
instances the studio arrangers and the folk/rock musicians
were a magic combination.  Funny it did not work as well
with the Doors Soft Parade. Then again compared to Love in 
retrospect the Doors were a far less sublime ensemble.

I agree with <captward> on musical purity in [the] America/s...

"...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!"

The concept of purity in music is very wierd if anybody really 
stops to really think about. Which leads one to ponder that 
perhaps musical purists are not thinking very well.

So is <jax> trying to say that the bandwidth of classical blues
was sufficient to perhaps be a greater influence on Folk than
previously thought.  The potential certainly could be there.
'Folk' is a pretty vauge term as well, for the most part meaning
NYC villagers mid-20th century acoustic coffee house music. The
greater realms of both Folk and Blues are likely about as pure
as the American English dialect.  

I suppose what people try to do, as anthropologists have errored in
the past, is attempt to view music as static, it's easier to classify
that way.  More of what we get these days though, when looking back
at popular music, is a view of more-or-less definitive works from
specific times, specific scenes. Practically boiled down to the very
tiny urban tribes, that generated the  phenomena.
  

    
<captward> describes the traditional blues form as AABA.  I don't hear 
that.  The way I've best her the standard form described is as 

First section (four bars long)

A line sung over the tonic chord. For exaple, an E7 chord if you're 
playing in E.


Second section (four bars long)  

The same melody and lyric, sung over the IV7 chord.  This would be an A7 
chord in the key of E.


Third section (four bars long)  

A response line, often with a different melody and aways with a different 
lyric.  This section is often called the turnaround, and would typically 
be a bar of V7 (B7 in this case), a bar of IV7, and then a bar of the 
tonic (I7), with the final, 12th bar typically being the I7, the V7, or I7 
then V7.

 
  

    

Well, there's 12-bar blues and there's 16-bar blues. Did one predate the 
other? 
  

    
The discussion on the general characteristics of the Blues
form is informative.

Whatever definition one comes up with though seems like a,
general (yet workable) idea of what a music form is. 

What is there to stop, a Folk musician, Blues musician or any musician
from any century and any genre from saying what
Barry Melton said 'You can throw anything in the soup...'.

Of course in earlier times they did not have access to radio,
still people traveled a little, and if they ; lived near a
railroad track or sea port, who knows what they would of heard and
worked into their music?
  

    
By AABA I was referring to the rhyme scheme. 
  

    
John from sprynet.com writes to say --



Subject: Folk rock? bo bip bip, bo bip bip, yeah? Oh yeah?


Without having read the book (which I'll happily do, once a copy turns
up), I'm concluding on the basis of this discussion that the net is
cast a little wide for folk-rock. Maybe I'm just reacting to all the
"Johnny Cash was a punk rocker" crap I've heard lately, but, I mean,
Love? Yes, _Forever Changes_ is all frilly and acousticy and stuff, and
(as I re-discovered when I got a CD of it recently), there's a reason
it's the only Love album I never bothered with on vinyl--it's precious
and damn near unlistenable. Put against a straight-up rocker like _7 +
7 Is_ it just sounds lame. Early Love sounds more like early Pink Floyd
than any sort of folk-rock.

In my opinion, there's a reason many folk-rock records are such sorry 
listening today--the songwriting lacked both sincerity and craft. 
(Think of, say, Bill Monroe, or Randy Newman, to take two polar 
extremes.) Either can make you listenable, and both at once can make 
you great. Having neither means you should get a producer, a good one.

Singer/songwriter may have grown out of folk-rock, but thank goodness 
it kept growing. The logical result of this was Leonard Cohen playing 
with a fusion band (_Field Commander Cohen_, an exceptional 
performance), Joni Mitchell playing with Jaco Pastorius (the peak of 
her career, I'd say, listening to the stuff since then), everything 
Randy Newman ever did, and even brilliant failures like Warren Zevon's
_Transverse City_.  (Snarky note: In the title song, those two nice
Jerry Garcia solos are cued by the lines "Here's the narcoleptic dream"
and "Here's the hum of desperation", which is as nice a comment on the
musical past as it is the dystopian future.)

I suppose one could, if one is making the argument that folk-rock is 
just grabbing whatever comes by--Sitars? All right! Raga rock! Musique
concrete? Ooh, call Tom Wilson, Artie, I've got an idea!--all that is
still folk-rock, but I think that's a specious argument in the first
place.

Riddle me this: How does one classify "Trouble Comin' Every Day" by 
Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention? Can that, in any meaningful 
sense of the word, be considered folk-rock? Probably not (except 
production by Tom Wilson)--but what else _could_ you call it? It's a 
full-blown protest song written in a traditional folk idiom and 
performed as a rock song.
  

    

I think in this instance for the purpose of discussion,
folk-rock seems to be the work of a specific group
of popular artists (as well as slightly less popular artists)
who managed to achieve a specific sound. A sound rooted
in a combination of 'Rock' as it is popularly known and
'Folk' as it it popularly known as a core influences.

Zappa's 'Trouble Happening Every Day' somehow falls out of
the category IMHO.  For several reasons. Zappa was not
really part of any 'Folk-Rock' scene, he did not make
the gestures (read postures), fashion statements, and did
not have the typical creditentials of most folk-rockers
of a background in the coffee house scene and other such 
trappings.

I'm sorry if I got anybody off track with my questions about
LOVE. But I was hoping to explore the possible origins of
Arthur Lee's electic leanings outside of a what most people
think as a typical afro-american approach to music.  Maclean
who was 50% of LOVE's writing crew was from all past and
future activities a folk-rocker, as Richie has documented
here and elsewhere.  Lee obviously was an eclectic.

It seemed an O.K. point of reference at the time.
  

    
I can't speak for others who've posted here, but in the books I'm not
trying to contend that folk-rock was grabbing whatever came by. My
coverage might be too wide for some, but basically I wrote about music
of the last half of the 1960s that in my view was centered around
blends of elements of folk music as it had evolved through the
mid-1960s, and elements of rock music as it had evolved through the
mid-1960s (similar to Darrell's perception above). If folk-rock had
only combined folk and rock, or had remained where it was when folk and
rock first came together to form the music labeled "folk-rock" in 1965
and 1966, it wouldn't have been nearly as interesting. I think one of
the main reasons it remained interesting and evolved through the entire
1960s was the willingness of many artists to take in other influences
such as Indian music, jazz, and country (and in Love's case on "Forever
Changes," Latin-influenced orchestration and Johnny Mathis-like
vocals), though keeping a folk-rock blend central to what they were
doing.

Love didn't only do folk-rock, and as noted earlier some people don't
see them as a folk-rock band. But much of their first album is quite
similar to the kind of folk-rock the Byrds were doing in the beginning
of their career, and the songwriting and acoustic-guitar-driven
arrangements of "Forever Changes" in my mind put that album into the
folk-rock camp, althogh we disagree about its quality. I don't hear
much similarity to Pink Floyd in "Forever Changes" myself, though in a
digression, early Pink Floyd was influenced by Love in taking the riff
of Love's garage-rock cover of "My Little Red Book" as the inspiration
for their psychedelic instrumental "Interstellar Overdrive."

Here's a perspective on how Love fit into folk-rock that I heard from
Paul Williams, who published the first widely distributed intelligent
rock magazine in the US, Crawdaddy: "It was interesting and very cool
that Love was on Elektra. That would cause folk music fans at college
radio, which I was, actually, to start listening to 'Message to Pretty'
and the first Love album, and discover they liked it. But they would
listen to it *because* it was on Elektra. 'Message to Pretty,' you
couldn't resist that if you were a folk music fan. And it wasn't just
like, 'Well, I like Love, but I only like these songs.' Pretty soon you
liked the whole thing. It was like you were discovering that the new
rock and roll was *your* music."
  

    
I'd agree with Darrell that Frank Zappa, and the Mothers of
Invention's "Trouble Every Day," falls outside of the folk-rock
category. I hear it as being rooted in the early electric
blues-R&B-rock'n'roll that were among Zappa's biggest loves and
formative influences, though with lyrics different from what you would
have heard on most (all?) early R&B-rock records. I do note in the book
that there were plenty of other non-folk-rock-rooted bands writing
ambitious lyrics, often with social conscience and/or poetic-literary
leanings, in the late 1960s: the Doors, Procol Harum, Sly & the Family
Stone, Pink Floyd, the Who, the Velvet Underground, and Traffic are
just some of them. I think folk-rock had a huge influence on the rest
of popular music in that regard, but it doesn't mean that everyone who
wrote in a style bearing that influence was doing folk-rock.

It probably doesn't come as a surprise to anyone familiar with Zappa,
but he wasn't big on folk-rock, blaming "folk-rock 12-string swill" as
"the predecessor of the horrible fake-sensitive type
artist/singer/songwriter/suffering person, posed against a wooden fence
provided by the arner Bros. Records art department, graciousl rented
to all the other record companies who needed it for their version of
the same crap" in a column in Guitar Player. Though for what it's
worth, folk-rock musician Chris Darrow (in Kaleidoscope and the Nitty
Gritty Dirt Band) remembers Zappa sometimes showing up and playing at
hootenannies in the early 1960s in Claremont, a Los Angeles suburb. 
  

    
stepping back to 154 - I think 12-bar blues came first.  At any rate it's 
more common than a 16-bar blues.  

There are also 8-bar blues.

The form I described in 153 is simply the most common form - there are 
plenty of exceptions.  

Hell, I wrote a tune which didn't follow halkf of what I described as the 
standard blues form, but I think it still qualifies as a blues.
  

    
I don't think John was inferring in post 157 that folk-rockers were
necessarily grabbing a lot of sitars on impulse, but just as an aside,
not much folk-rock did use sitar. Some listeners mistakenly thought
that the Byrds used one on "Eight Miles High" and its flipside "Why"
because the guitar solos sounded so different at the time, and the
Byrds perhaps knowingly reinforced that misconception when Roger
McGuinn was photographed playing a sitar at a press conference around
that time. In fact McGuinn didn't know how to play a sitar, and the
instrument had been rented for the photo session by CBS. One of
McGuinn's great achievements, though, was in synthesizing the sound of
a sitar doing ragas with the 12-string electric guitar (the actual
instrument he used) on "Eight Miles High."

Folk-rock-with-sitar is a very lightly traveled subgenre, but a few
people actually did use one on occasion -- actually more in Britain
than in the US, on some recordings by Donovan, the Incredible String
Band, and Pentangle. I think the instrument's best use in folk-rock was
on Donovan's "Sunshine Superman" album; there is a very good film clip
of him performing material from the LP on Pete Seeger's TV show, live,
with Shawn Phillips playing the sitar as an accompanist. Richie Havens
used an electric sitar on some of his '60s records, which I thought
sounded a little cheap and cheesy.
  

    
The electric sitar really came into its own in Nashville, of all
places, where Jerry Kennedy, a great producer and first-call dobro
sessioneer, made it part of the texture of some of the rockier country
productions in the early '70s. 
  

    
For instance: Joe South, "Games People Play." I *think* that's
Kennedy. 
  

    
It's getting beyond folk-rock, but as the subject of the electric
sitar in rock and pop doesn't come up often, I'll also add that it was
put to good use in a bunch of early-'70s Philly soul productions, like
the Stylistics' "You Are Everything." I think a key to its success in
this context was that no one involved was trying to pretend it was a
real sitar, or play it like one; they actually dug the sound an
electric sitar made on its own terms.
  

    
And it wasn't actually a sitar, either; it was a sort of electric
guitar with some sympathetic strings, and they'd do the twanging. 
  

    
The sitar @ Sigma Sound Studios, 212 N 12th Street in Philly, was a
Danelectro.

(I played it once!)

See http://www.provide.net/~cfh/dano.html#models
  

    

Just want to butt in here to plug some music I heard recently,
a young "folk-rock" band called Blackfire.  They do a Woody tune
with electric guitars and drums that really works for me.  
That impresses me because I find it difficult to play Woody's 
style on electric guitar,  things get fuzzy and distorted quickly
with all that strumming.  But they get it right.

Blackfire,  "Mean Things Happening in this World"

http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/blackfire2
  

    

Blackfires actually using some lyrics from Woody that
have not been sung before, via a special arrangement
with Arlo.  I've yet to hear their new material, but 
as a Punk band they are fun. They are also from the 
Nahavo tribe and trained as native dancers. I saw
them once with their father on stage singing in 
Navaho, with their metalic punk backup a new twist
on fusion.
  

    

Right,  it's their music to Woody's lyrics.  I'm glad
someone has heard of them.  They're a good bunch and they
play all over the world,  but they were news to me when
I met them a few months ago.  

Their mom used to book one of the big folk clubs in 
NYC, so they have an in in the music business. 
  

    
> So is <jax> trying to say that the bandwidth of classical blues
> was sufficient to perhaps be a greater influence on Folk than
> previously thought.

No, I'm trying to say that any living music that becomes preservation
music narrows down and the compositions tend to exhibit the narrow
range of characteristics that popular taste has defined as typifying
the preserved genre.

Happened to blues. Happened to bluegrass. Happened to cajun. The
edges get smoothed down, the eccentric conforms, the experimental
vanishes.
  

    
A few days ago I had a feisty conversation with someone about my
treatment of Donovan in my folk-rock books. He was "shocked" that I had
given him such prominence. He is British, and maintains that back in
the late 1960s when he was a teenager in England, Donovan was thought
of as a "pop singles" singer, not a folk-rock artist. He said that the
folk-rock artists that his crowd took seriously were ones like Bert
Jansch, John Martyn, and Roy Harper, not Donovan, and that Donovan was
never written about in Karl Dallas's folk column in Melody Maker. I
noted that Donovan was written about a *lot* in Melody Maker as a
whole,  and sold a *lot* more albums than the likes of
Jansch/Martyn/Harper. He agreed, but returned to his contention that
Donovan was just "pop singles," not folk-rock. Indeed, he pointed out
that even though Melody Maker wrote about Donovan a lot, it was not in
Karl Dallas's folk column -- i.e., it was in the "pop" section of the
paper (which comprised the overwhelming majority of Melody Maker's
space). Though I don't see why someone getting covered as a pop star in
the pop section means that he can't be doing folk-rock, or that he
should be considered any less significant or a part of folk-rock in the
overall scheme of things if he doesn't get covered in the folk
section.

Although I respect my friend's musical opinions, I am kind of baffled
as to how Donovan could *not* be considered part of folk-rock, and how
any responsible writer could *not* include him prominently in a 1960s
folk-rock history, even if they disliked Donovan. Which I certainly
don't; quite the reverse, I like him a lot, although I think his work's
uneven.

This led me to thinking more about how Donovan, more than almost any
other figure I wrote about, seems to have polarized opinions among my
readers. Quite a few have told me how much they I appreciated that I
wrote about him positively and prominently, as they consider him to be
overlooked. There seem to be quite a few closet Donovan fans out there,
including some prominent music critics who I had no idea were Donovan
fans; some of them are even fanatics.

On the other hand, numerous critics dismiss him as relatively
insignificant, or as a gauche lightweight flower-power sap. And there
are also those readers, like the fellow I was talking to, who don't
even see why he should be a big part of the discussion at all, though
that seems to be particular to some British fans. To muddy that water
further, some of the most fanatical Donovan fans (among both critics
and listeners) I've encountered are British.

Any thoughts on Donovan's stature in folk-rock out there? I'm
particularly interested in any memories of how he was perceived (both
in terms of where he fit into folk-rock and how good his music was
considered) during the late 1960s, at the time he was at his commercial
and artistic peak, as I'm too young to have first-hand memories of
that.
  

    
Seems strange to me that someone would dis Donovan as a folk-rocker for
appearing in pop columns rather than folk columns, since I think of folk-
rock as a pop rather than a folk genre.

My first-hand memories are that Donovan was considered very much folk-rock
and much of his music was considered very good folk-rock indeed.  Of course,
I was probably as big a Donovan fan as anyone in my circle back then, and
I'm one those who appreciates the prominence you give him in the books.

But he emerged as a folkie and moved into rock - what the heck would you
call him but a folk-rocker?  And he had huge hits, which isn't always a
measure of quality, of course, but it can be, and in his case I think it is.

Of course, I appreciate the notice you give to Melanie, too, who I still
enjoy whenever I break into my vinyl, so my opinion may be suspect to some.
  

    
It's my impression that Donovan never had much respect among the English
folk club set. Brian Pearson (who later sang with the Ewan MacColl
influenced Critics Group) once told me that he and Donovan had both been
regulars at the same folk club in St. Albans (I think that's right, might
have been someplace else). "When Donovan got up to sing, that was the signal
for lots of people to go to the bar for another pint."

But he was certainly seen as a folkie singer-wongwriter in this country.
Especially when his first two LPs on Hickory were all we knew about him.
Other singers were picking up his songs like "Colours", and he was doing
things from other singer-songwriters, including Buffy Ste. Marie's "The
Universal Soldier". Just looked up the discography. There were three LPs on
Hickory, all in 1965-66.

And he played the Newport Folk Festival at least once.

I know nothing about the Hickory label, but I would guess that those albums
had a minimum of production. When he went over to Epic and did "Sunshine
Superman" and the other early psychedelia, it was as if he had emerged out
of noplace for most of the people hearing him. I don't think there was a
significant carry-over audience from the folkie stuff to the psychelic and
later hippy-dippy records. The Epic things were much more highly produced,
and of course Epic as part of Columbia/CBS had a promotion machine that got
him onto AM radio.

Was he a folk rocker? Looking at the body of his carreer, I have to say he
was. But if you ignore the pre-Epic stuff (as most of his audience probably
did), it's possible to argue that he was a pop-psychdelic act (whatever that
means).
  

    

I quess after he more or less founded Led Zepplin that
was his deathknoll of respect with serious UK Folkies.

Sounds a bit like the Dylan split with the 'Folk' 
'Purists' in the U.S.. Really though Pentangle and
crew were doing far more consistent LP's back then,
so I can see why perhaps a UK Folkster would not
want to waste their time with Donovan.  We did not
have as good of exposure to Pentange/Fairport and
so on in the U.S., until a little later on. I did
not hear Nick Drake until the 80's, as to Roy Harper
I had to wait until I traveled to England in 1976 to
pick up one of his LP's. So in someways in terms of UK 
folk and UK folk-rock for U.S. listener's Donovan 
was IT, he had no competition.

If the Donovan I saw on stage circa 74 up in Alaska, delivering
an absolutely riveting set with only his guitar wasn't a 
folk-rock artist, then bears don't eat berries.