Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Rik, I believe the Sunshine Company's female singer, at least on their
recordings, was Mary Nance. I don't know what happened to her after
the band folded. Was Kathy Smith ever in the Sunshine Company? I'm not
familiar with the name.

I interviewed Larry Murray, the main singer-songwriter in Hearts and
Flowers, at length. I just did the notes for a double-CD Hearts and
Flowers collection, including both of their late-1960s albums and a
dozen previously unreleased outtakes, that will be coming out on
Collectors' Choice Music this month. The title is "The Complete Hearts
and Flowers Collection."

For those not familiar with the band, Hearts and Flowers did a couple
of good country-folk-rock LPs for Capitol in 1967-68, a bit in advance
of the first big wave of country-rock. They frequently used autoharp
and combined original material with imaginative covers of songs by the
likes of Donovan, Hoyt Axton, Tim Hardin, and Goffin-King. If they're
mentioned at all, it's usually because Bernie Leadon was a member on
the second LP, years before joining the Eagles.

To my knowledge all the Hearts and Flowers members are alive and in
good health; Murray and Rick Cunha still live in L.A. Larry Murray said
there might be a low-key reunion of the early-60s bluegrass band he
was in, the Scottsville Squirrel Barkers, which also included Leadon
and Chris Hillman.
  

    

Kathy Smith did record a couple of albums for Richie Havens' Stormy
Forest label in the early 70s, with pretty interesting personnel: Colin
Walcott, Tony Levin, Jan Hammer, Artie Traum and Jeremy Steig were among
the players who appeared on either or both albums.

I have heard conflicting stories that this Kathy Smith was or wasn't the
same Kathy Smith who allegedly administered the fatal speedball to John
Belushi.
  

    
Mary nance sounds familiar, but I'm fairly cedrtain Kathy was the first lead
singer.   We purists were appalled at how they changed Steve's song.  Steve,
quite happy to have a charting record to his credit, was more forgiving.  If
I'd known how famous all my friends were going to be, I'd have paid more
attention and maybe cut back on the drugs.   Nah, I'd just have paid better
attention.

There was a little coffeehouse/pizza parlor in a mall in Tustin called the
Paradox where I went to try out my newfound guitar skills at their Tuesday
night open mic.   When I went into the back room to unpack, Kathy came up,
welcomed me, and introduced me around...   to Tim Buckley, Jackson, Steve
Noonan, the entire Dirt Band, including Jack's replacement, John McEuen, and
a girl named Penny Nichols, who floored me, but got lost in record biz
shuffle.   Jose Feliciano showed up to do a set a bit later on, as did this
wierd little bugger leading an outfit called Dr, West's Medicine Show and
Junk Band, who did what later became a minor hit, "The Eggplant That Ate
Chicago".   Over the next few months, Brewer and Shipley became regulars,
too.  It was an amazing scene, but nobody found out about it but the
regulars and the club folded.   We all headed north to the Troubadour for a
new hangout.

Richie, you've stirred up memories of one of the most exciting periods of my
life.   Thanks much, and I'm sure I'll enjoy this book I just bought.
  

    
The weird little bugger leading Dr. West's Medicine Show and
Junk Band was Norman Greenbaum, who quickly went through his own jug
band to folk-rock-psychedelic transition by the time of that band's
later recordings. Later, though, he went solo and became *really* well
known with his 1970 hit single "Spirit in the Sky." As a solo artist,
he was produced by Erik Jacobsen, who had produced the Lovin' Spoonful
and Tim Hardin.

I was just able to hear Penny Nichols's obscure late-'60s album
("Penny's Arcade") last month. It's more promise than brilliance, but
it's an interesting record kind of on the cusp between the folk-rock
and singer-songwriter era, with some unexpected touches of jazz,
psychedelic, country, and trippy lyrics.

I did liner notes for the Sunshine Company CD compilation "The Best of
the Sunshine Company" (Collectors' Choice Music). For that Steve
Gillette talked with me about the Sunshine Company's cover of "Back on
the Street Again":

"I had broken up with the first real love of my life, and had written
most of the song. I was home for the Christmas holidays, 1966, when
John [Bettis] and Maury [Manseau] came in to hear me, and I sang 'Back
on the Street Again' for them. As far as I know they had no tape,
probably not even any written notes. It wasn't until later that I
finalized the bridge. The version they recorded was based on partial
memory and, I'm sure, some improvisation, aided by the amazing
arrangement George Tipton did. I loved everything about it."
  

    
Gary, that was not the same Kathy Smith.    Definitely, and no shit.

The bridge to "Back on the Street Again" was our big bitch.   We thought
Steve's scanned better, but now that I know that the Sunshine Company never
heard it, it all makes sense.    John and Maury were a dynamite duo in their
own right, BTW.   Their voices fit perfectly, and they just exuded music.
I'm not surprised they memorized the tune on one pass.   John wrote
"Slowhand" which was a hit for the Pointer Sisters.

How did Ian and Sylvia like the serious re-arrangement the Wee Five did to
"You Were On My Mind"?
  

    

>Gary, that was not the same Kathy Smith.

I didn't think so, but I know people who insisted that it is.
  

    
The pictures don't look like her.   God, I hope it wasn't.   Kathy was the
first person i ever heard use the term "Love Generation", and she was
housemother to the bunch of us.   And she had this 100 megawatt smile.   I
wondered, at the time, if that had been her, but I couldn't find anything of
the Kathy I knew, except for the hair color, in the news photos.  Oh man.
I hope that wasn't her.
  

    
Here's what Sylvia Tyson, author of "You Were on My Mind," had to say
to me about cover versions by the We Five and others:

Q: Was it a surprise to you that "You Were on My Mind" was covered by
the We Five for a big pop hit?

ST: Quite a surprise. It was actually a hit before I knew about it. We
were on the road in California. We were driving down Highway 101
(laughs), and turned on the radio, and there it was, by god.

Q: Do you know what channels the song passed through to get to the We
Five?

ST: I think they had our albums. I don't think it was a publisher or a
third party. But I may be wrong on that.

Q: What did you think of their version?

ST: I wasn't that thrilled with how they changed the lyrics. But I
certainly knew the limitations of pop radio in those days, and that the
lyrics "I got drunk and I got sick" probably wouldn't pass muster
(chuckles).

Q: I think your version had a much more gospel, bluesy feeling.

ST: Well, it definitely was gospel-influenced.

Q: Did you ever hear the version that became the hit in England, by
Crispian St. Peters?

ST: I did hear it, ages and ages ago. The thing that really pissed me
off was that he put his name on it. He claimed he'd written it.

Q: Did he get any of the publishing money, or did that get
straightened out?

ST: I think it got straightened out pretty quickly, but I thought it
was pretty stupid on his part.

Q: It's a really odd version -- very slow and lugubrious.

ST: We did have an odd experience with it. When Ian and I did a tour
in England with Gordon Lightfoot, with the Ian Campbell folk group, oh
gosh, who else -- I can't remember who all was on that tour. But we
toured England and Scotland. And it was just after the point when
Crispian St. Peters had had a hit with that song. And we were doing
that song as a regular part of our show, and of course, the folk Nazis
in the audience (laughs) just started booing and hissing and carrying
on.

But the good news is, that there was a group out of Spain called the
Barracudas who did it, and had a huge hit with it in Europe.

Q: Did they translate it into Spanish?

ST: Spanish and Italian, yeah. And it continues to make me money from
Spain and Italy (laughs).
  

    
God, she takes no prisoners, does she?   They were onstage at the Golden
Bear one night and she walked up to the mic between songs and said, "Do you
have any idea how hard it is to sing with someone you're not talking to?"

Since Mike Stewart, of the We Five, is John Stewart's little brother, he
probably took the song right off an Ian and Sylvia album.   The guitarist,
Bob Jones, became a very funky drummer and was part of a Stax/Volt style
band up here in the Bay Area called Southern Comfort.  He and Karl Severeid
played behind Alice Stuart in the local clubs, too.
  

    
I remember being amazed by that Penny Nichols LP. It was on Buddah, which
specialized in Bubble gum music, and the cover has this huge head shot of a
blonde girl who looked like she might
have been the inspiration for a Beach Boys song. Knowing nothing of her
connection to the Orange County scene (this was in Cambridge, at WTBS), we
just assumed this was nothing special. But then somebody listened to the
record...and we decided it was a hidden treasure.

A quick web serach says she did a lot of backup singing through the 70s and
80s, and got a PhD from the Harvard School of Education. She also made a
bunch of vocal instruction tapes for Happy Traum's Homespun Tapes.

Which brings up another interesting name. Happy was another old New York
folkie who moved in a couple of directions--his solo albums are among the
purest folksinging I can think of on record, but the work he did with his
brother Artie, including the two Capitol Happy and Artie Traum albums and
the later Mud Acres records on Rounder are straight-ahead folk-rock. You
mention his work with the New World Singers in the book (as one of the first
to record Dylan's songs), but do you have an opinion about his later work?
Never had a hit single, but the albums were mainstays of progressive FM
stations.
  

    
I couldn't find the two Capitol albums by the Traums anywhere. That's
one disadvantage of being born in 1962 and doing a book like this. I've
found a great many obscure 1960s albums that I wanted to hear over the
course of the last twenty years, for research and pleasure, but not
those.

Happy and Artie Traum, incidentally, had some other peripheral roles
in folk-rock. They were in a mid-1960s rock band called Children of
Paradise that had a single on Columbia Records (I couldn't find *that*
one anywhere). That band also included Eric Kaz and Marc Silber, and
for a time future Blood, Sweat & Tears drummer Bobby Columby. Happy
admitted to me that electric guitar folk-rock wasn't his forte, though
he didn't object to it per se. Silber told me, "Happy never was into
playing electric and I could never get him to change any settings on
his amp!"

Artie Traum was briefly in an early version of the Blues Project,
though he doesn't appear on any of their records.

Happy Traum was also editor of Sing Out in the late 1960s; he helped
do that magazine's famous 1968 interview with Bob Dylan. Plus he wrote
a big piece for Rolling Stone in May 1969 that was one of the first big
features to intelligently discuss the early singer-songwriter
movement. And he played on some Bob Dylan tracks in the early 1970s,
like the single "Watching the River Flow" and "When I Paint My
Masterpiece."
  

    
Seems to me the Traum Brothers' first Capitol album was from the
mid-'70s, although I could be wrong. If the University of Texas would
finish (or start) cataloguing all that vinyl I gave them... 
  

    
The first H&A Lp was issued in 1969, the second a year or two later. They
have been reissued as a double-CD by Vivid music in Japan (VSCD-534). Seems
to be available online from Neotlith Records.
http://www.neolithrecords.com/happy-artie.html
  

    
I remember picking up a couple of Happy Traum "finger-style" guitar
books (used for .50 each at Logos bookstore in Santa Cruz in 1973) that
included plastic instructional records. There was great style and
precision happening there. 

In the early days of folk-rock, though, instrumental precision did not
seem to be a major priority. And a number of players learned
instruments "on the job" (e.g. Chris Hillman, an accomplished mandolin
player, switching to bass in the Byrds; Michael Clarke, who "looked
like a drummer," learning the instrument from scratch during the Byrds'
infancy; Al Kooper, just getting his sea legs on keyboards, grabbing
Dylan's attention with simple patterns on "Like A Rolling Stone;" and
later, Neil Young using guitarist Nils Lofgren on piano for his "After
the Goldrush" sessions). I'm curious, Richie, why do you think there
was so much of this "feel approach" to folk-rock instrumentation going
on?
  

    
Happy's books have become a big business.

http://www.homespuntapes.com/


He and Stefan Grossman have done very well in the instructional materials
biz.
  

    
Did you ever come across a 1964 Prestige LP by The Folk Stringers? It's
another of those early conglomerations of New York session musicians, but
the leads are Barry Kornfield and Danny Kalb, so it could count as a
precursor to The Blues Project. Others on the date include Artie Rose on
mandolin, Ann Charters on Piano, and Bill Lee on bass.

My copy has the price written in the lower right corner of the back, so it
appears that I must have bought it at Sam Goody's for $1.49.

Another really odd one on my shelf is "Railroad Bill" by the Homesteaders on
Riverside. It's one of those generic mixed folk quartets, but the liner
notes don't identify any of the singers. It does have a note from Bobby
Darin. One of those things you'd never look at twice. But one of the voices
is unmistakable: it's Judy Collins (who has since confirmed that yes indeed,
she is on that record).
  

    
>the leads are Barry Kornfield and Danny Kalb, so it could count as a
 precursor to The Blues Project

No it couldn't. Kornfeld is on a lot of records, but he wasn't part of the
BP. My mistake.
  

    

>Artie Traum was briefly in an early version of the Blues Project

I think this was before Al Kooper joined, when they were still called
the Danny Kalb Quartet. Steve Katz came in as a temporary sub for Artie,
who decided not to come back.

Both of the Traums' Captiol albums are terrific, and very worthy of CD
reissue. Around the time of those records, the Traums started gigging,
revue-style, with a loose confederation of their buddies from the
Woodstock folk-rock mafia, which included, at various times, luminaries
such as Maria Muldaur, John Herald, Jim Rooney, Bill Keith, John
Sebastian, Eric Andersen, Eric Kaz, Paul Butterfield and various others.
Known variously as Mud Acres or the Woodstock Mountains Revue, they
released several excellent albums on Rounder. I saw them do a wonderful
sprawling mess of a show at Washington Square Church sometime around
'72 -- it went on for more than four hours, and nobody in the building
wanted it to ever end.

Bob Dylan, who hung out with the Traums and a lot of their co-
conspirators quite a bit in the early 70s, is said to have been inspired
to do the Rolling Thunder Revue, in part, by the example of the Mud
Acres bunch.
  

    
As to why there was such a "feel" approach to early folk-rock, in many
cases it was indeed because the players were just learning their
instruments. Even when they were playing the *same* instruments as they
were playing as folk musicians (most often the guitar), they had to
make a big adjustment to using electric, amplified instruments. Even as
an amateur guitarist, I know there's a huge difference between playing
on acoustics and electrics -- not just in playing different
instruments, but also learning to explore and control all the
differences in volume and textures that are possible with electric
guitars and amplifiers.

Also the very quickness of it all meant that some instrumentalists
wound up having to learn entirely new instruments very quickly. Chris
Hillman learning bass and Michael Clarke drums with the Byrds are the
best-known examples, but there's also Skip Spence being appointed
drummer of the early Jefferson Airplane just because Marty Balin
thought he looked like a drummer. Spence was really a guitarist, and
that's what he switched back to shortly afterward when he left the
Airplane and joined Moby Grape.

Al Kooper was more of a guitarist when he started playing with Dylan,
but it was the vacant organ that gave him his window of opportunity at
the session for "Like a Rolling Stone," and he grabbed it. As he's
recounted, he was invited to the session purely as an observer-friend
by producer Tom Wilson, and actually brought along his guitar hoping to
have a chance to impress his way onto the session, but gave up on that
idea when he started to hear Mike Bloomfield play. And ironically,
because of his work with Dylan, Kooper began to make his name in the
business as a keyboardist (primarily as an organist), not a guitarist,
though he was new to the instrument. But because he was *new* to it
didn't mean he wasn't *good* at it. He had a very distinctive sound, on
sessions and with the Blues Project, perhaps in part because as a
novice he wasn't afraid to experiment with electric keyboards in ways
that more established players might not have thought of or might have
considered crude.

Folk-rock was really made up as it went along, particularly in the
first couple of years in the mid-1960s. That's why on many early
folk-rock records you hear a kind of tentativeness in the guitar
picking and riffs, almost as if the players are reluctant to go to hard
or too fast for fear of busting strings or blowing out an amplifier.
Actually this can work to the music's advantage: the characteristic
"jingle-jangle" early folk-rock guitar sound is a combination of
delicate folk picking and 12-string textures with electric resonance
and chime. As the players got more comfortable and accomplished on
their instruments -- Stephen Stills with Buffalo Springfield seems a
good example to me -- they sounded more and more like rock players with
folk influences, rather than folk musicians adapting to rock music.
  

    
I've never seen the Folk Stringers Prestige LP, though I have a cut of
theirs on a compiation. Danny Kalb and Artie Traum also contributed to
some other obscure early Prestige sessions; they both played on cuts
credited to "the True Endeavor Jug Band," and Danny Kalb was part of
"the New Strangers."

I've never heard the Homesteaders either. There's a lot of stuff in
the Prestige catalog that hasn't come out on CD.
  

    
The Homesteaders was on Riverside, not Prestige. Both labels are now owned
by Fantasy, who are extremely tight-fisted about licensing their old
catalog. Probably makes sense with things like the van Gelder jazz albums of
the fifties and sixties that must be cash cows for Fantasy, but they're
never going to resissue the Riverside folk stuff that Kenny Goldstein made
before the Folk Scare--things like Ray Boguslav's "Songs From a Village
Garrett". The early Prestige folk stuff (before Paul Rothchild went to work
for them) has similar stuff like "The Art of the Concertina". I've
approached them about the nine-LP set of Child Ballads sung by Ewan MacColl
and Bert Lloyd, but they don't answer my letters or return my phone calls.

I suspect that the True Endeavor Jug Band as assembled for that record,
as part of the jug band craze that lasted for about a year, after the
Kweskin albums on Vanguard started selling--the Even Dozens on Elektra, and
Dave van Ronk's Ragtime Jug Stompers on Mercury showed up around the same
time. And RCA did a reissue of original jug band 78s in their vintage series
that includes many of the sources of the Kweskins' repertoire.
  

    

>As the players got more comfortable and accomplished on their
instruments -- Stephen Stills with Buffalo Springfield seems a
good example to me -- they sounded more and more like rock players
with folk influences, rather than folk musicians adapting to rock
music.<<

That's a good point, Richie.  Dubbed "Captain Manyhands" by Graham
Nash during the making of the first CSN album, Stills could literally
play every instrument -- including drums and bass. In the Springfield,
Stills came into the group with strong folk chops, rooting most of his
songs with acoustic guitar picking patterns. As he became more
accomplished on electric rock guitar, he melded the two styles
together, most powerfully on "Bluebird." Later, though, in CSN, solo,
and with Manassas (his vastly underated band, featuring Chris Hillman),
Stills would often divide his music into "acoustic" and "electric"
songs, furher adding elements of blues, Latin, jazz and even Indian
music into his stylings (cue the middle instrumental section of "Suite:
Judy Blue Eyes") to both.

Probably my favorite Stills vocal during his "early years" was his
lead vocal on the Au Go Go Singers' cover of Judy Henske's "High Flying
Bird." I've heard other versions of the song (including the
Airplane's), but, for my money, they never matched Stills's. 
  

    
Stills's vocal on the Au Go Go Singers' "High Flying Bird" is the only
notable song on that 1964 album, and the only strong aural evidence of
his pre-Buffalo Springfield talents. The glee club background vocals
really diminish the track's impact, though, in a contrast that has to
be heard to be believed.
  

    
This has been a truly wonderful retrospective of my musical past -
thanks to all who contributed, especially to Richie - I am loving the
book.

I'll put in a word for Kaleidoscope, which included Dave Lindley and
Chris Darrow. An amazing amalgam of folk, rock, old-timey, middle
eastern, and general psychedelia.
  

    
>Stills's vocal on the Au Go Go Singers' "High Flying Bird" is the
only notable song on that 1964 album, and the only strong aural
evidence of his pre-Buffalo Springfield talents.<<

Agree completely, Richie. The gravel and honey quality of Stills's
vocal still raises goose bumps. The rest of the album, as you point
out, does not stand up to repeated listenings, though "San Francisco
Bay Blues" (I think that's the name of it) is interesting.

As for "High Flying Bird's" writer, Judy Henske ... why do you think
she never really experienced broad success?