Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Yeah, I don't much *like* Donovan's stuff, but if Richie had left him
out of the book, it would have been an appalling oversight. He comes
off as over-impressed with himself, pumping up his legend as hard as he
can, but that's the sort of defensiveness one would expect from
someone who is regarded by many today as a quaint and somewhat
embarrasing relic. 

Incidentally, the Hickory records were licensed from someone in the UK
(Pye?). The label itself was the folk label of Acuff-Rose Publishers
in Nashville, and almost certainly any original material Donovan had on
there was administered by them in the States. 

Jeez, Richie, I don't know who your friend is, but if the Sunshine
Superman album isn't folk-rock, I don't know what is. 

This, however, leads me to another thought I've had about Richie's two
books overall. "Folk-rock" is just a means of bringing a mass of
information into focus, a way of showing relationships between artists
and the way they thought about certain musical issues. It's not like
the Communist Party, where you're issued a card and you're either in
the Party or not. Certainly there are other organizational principles
through which you could examine the era of popular music in question,
but this is the one this particular author has chosen, the lens through
which he's decided to view the era, with all the distortion any
man-made focusing device inevitably adds. Plus, the subjects are human,
too. If Volunteers is your first exposure to Jefferson Airplane, well,
that's not so jingle-jangle, and it's a long way off from the Byrds or
Judy Collins, but if Takes Off is your first exposure, the folk-rock
idea seems perfectly fine. 
  

    
It's a complex issue Ed raises that's impossible to fully explore in a
post, but the I think the Communist Party reference is appropriate and
relevant. I think a big difference between folk-rock and much of the
folk movement that had fed into it was that there weren't such rigid
ideological and musical boundaries. It was okay not just to blend folk
and rock, but then to go into different directions that might not seem
too confined by styles associated with folk, rock, or folk-rock,
whether the Airplane's "Volunteers"-era rock, Judy Collins'
orchestrated art song/baroque chamber folk, or whatever. It's
understandable to me that the Airplane's folk-rock connection might not
seem blatant if "Volunteers" is the first album you hear, though the
folk-rock roots of much of the material is more evident once you hear
all of their albums up to that point.

Much of the mid-twentieth-century folk movement in both the US and UK,
however, had originated in left-wing political circles, including the
Communist Party. I think they were more absolutist about party lines,
not just politically, but also musically. The "purist" element of the
folk movement, whether Communist-Left-affiliated or not, found it hard
to adjust to a younger generation unconcerned with sticking to a
defined musical area (both in terms of the style and whether it was
"commercial" or not).

In Britain, this seems to have left a residue even among some
listeners not particularly Communist or Left, in that what's considered
"folk-rock" is sometimes restrictive, in a way reminiscent of what
earlier-'60s folkies would consider appropriately folk or not. Artists
judged too commercial, eclectic, or not having enough "folk" in the
folk-rock, like Donovan, can fall out of the picture, for reasons I
don't find compelling. This doesn't seem to have happened nearly as
much in the States (and I should note that this doesn't apply to all or
the majority of British listeners by any means, just a significant
portion in my experience/research).

More comments to follow on Donovan.
  

    
To elaborate on Donovan's early history: as Ed notes, his
pre-"Sunshine Superman," predominantly acoustic material was not
recorded for Hickory directly, but for Pye Records in the UK, who
licensed it to Hickory. Hickory probably wasn't such a good label for a
folk-rock British Invasion artist such as Donovan, both due to its
relatively small size and to its country orientation. Some of the most
successful artists who had released material on Hickory were Roy Acuff,
Wilma Lee & Stoney Cooper, Don Gibson, and Sue Thompson (known for the
1962 novelty hit "Norman").

There were actually no less than four Donovan LPs issued on Hickory
(not even counting a deceptively titled best-of record), some after
he'd started to release material on Epic. This happened although he'd
only put out two LPs covering the same time period in Britain. This was
consistent with an era in which the albums of British Invasion acts
were routinely shortened in the United States so that their American
companies could squeeze out a few more LPs out of the same material in
the States, where there was more affluence and a higher budget for
album-buying. What happened to the early Beatles and Rolling Stones
catalog are the prime examples.

Donovan actually recorded about three albums' worth of material in
what we might call the Hickory-Pye or pre-"Sunshine Superman" days,
some of which appeared on EP or 45 in Britain rather than LPs. All 34
of these tracks are now assembled on the British two-CD compilation
"Summer Day Reflection Songs" on Castle, which is recommended not only
to those who just want all the pre-"Sunshine Superman" stuff in one
place and be done with it, but also because it's good mid-1960s folk
and folk-pop music, with his move to folk-rock hinted at in a few
tracks.

In late 1965, Donovan underwent a complicated legal dispute with his
original management in which he tried to terminate his contract with
them. As a result of this, he was unable to release material for quite
some time (there was a similar situation with the Who for several
months in early 1966, when they broke their recording deal with their
original producer, Shel Talmy). He was successful in changing
management, but as part of the resolution, he switched his US label
from Hickory to Epic, though he had to remain on Pye in the UK. He was
able to start resuming releasing new material in the US (on Epic now)
in mid-1966, starting with the "Sunshine Superman" single. However, he
was still prohibited from releasing new material in the UK for some
time longer, and "Sunshine Superman" didn't come out there until the
end of 1966. The pop scene was moving so fast at the time that this
created an impression in the UK that he was of a trendy psychedelic
bandwagon jumper, though actually he was more like an originator, since
the material had been recorded quite a while before.

Ironically, in the case of the "Sunshine Superman" album, the US
customers for once got the better deal than the UK ones. In the States,
it was reissued intact, as originally intended. But because of the
enforced release lag in the UK, the material was chopped up, delayed,
and spread piecemeal over more than one LP, making the UK version of
the "Sunshine Superman" album distinctly inferior to the American one.

I don't know how much a desire to leave Hickory would have figured
into Donovan's struggle to change management and contracts in the
mid-1960s, but it would make sense if it was. As a subsidiary of
Columbia/CBS, Epic was far more powerful in the pop market than
Hickory. Also, Donovan was the first major artist signed by Clive Davis
to Columbia after Davis became a powerful executive there. I haven't
researched this, but it would make sense that Davis and Epic would have
thus tried to give Donovan a very big push with his first Epic
release, "Sunshine Superman." I think that song got to #1 mostly on its
own considerable merits, but the increased promotional muscle of Epic
must have helped.
  

    
Continuing a little more on the early Donovan period, as John says,
the Hickory/Pye-era material had a minimum of production. Not only in
the respect that they were primarily acoustic, sometimes with just
Donovan and his acoustic guitar. Even when you compare them with some
American folk albums of the time with similarly bare instrumentation,
the sound seems thinner, sometimes as if it was just being recorded by
a single mike in a bare room. (Donovan buddy Bert Jansch's fine
mid-1960s debut LP, incidentally, was recorded in yet more primitive
circumstances: just Jansch singing and playing his acoustic guitar,
singing into a microphone plugged into a tape recorder, Jansch sitting
on the edge of a bed in a London flat.)

Donovan's management struggles and eventual switch to Epic coincided
with his switch to Mickie Most as producer. Most likely this was
because Donovan wanted to make his production fuller -- not just in the
sense of using electric instruments, but in using a lot of colors and
different kinds of instruments -- and didn't see his original
management team (who were also involved in his record production) as
conducive to this. Most, in turn, probably wanted a much bigger outfit
than Hickory as Donovan's US outlet, as most likely Donovan did too.

All of this contributes to a pretty sharp division, both artistic and
commercial, between what we might call Donovan's Hickory-Pye era and
his Epic-Mickie Most one. And as John says, many American listeners
would have been hearing Donovan for the first time as an Epic artist,
with little or no knowledge of his folk beginnings. Donovan had some
commercial success in the US in 1965 with his Hickory releases; "Catch
the Wind" made #23, and his cover of Buffy Sainte-Marie's "Universal
Soldier" made the middle of the Top 100. But this success was miniscule
compared to "Sunshine Superman" and "Mellow Yellow" in 1966.

This division, however, wasn't nearly as sharp in the UK, because
Donovan was much bigger in the UK than the US in 1965. "Catch the Wind"
and "Colours" were both Top Five singles in Britain, and his first UK
LP (called "What's Bin Did and What'd Bin Hid" there) made #3. Combined
with the much bigger lag time between his 1965 folk recordings and the
"Sunshine Superman" single and album in the UK than in the States (not
to mention the famous sequences in the Dylan '65 British tour
documentary "Don't Look Back" in which Donovan is slightly ridiculed),
this I think has meant that the perception of Donovan as a sub-Dylan
imitator has persisted far more strongly in the UK than in the US.
That's an unfair perception, in my view -- the Donovan folk period in
which he sounded a good deal like Dylan only spanned one year of
recording, followed by a long career in which Donovan didn't sound like
Dylan at all -- but it's one to which a good deal of people still
stick.

Also as a consequence of this, I think Donovan is more respected in
the US than in the UK. He was actually more commercially successful
here after 1965 too, though only a little more so than in the UK, where
he continued to have hits. But the big difference seems to be in
audience perception. Donovan himself agreed with me that he found his
most appreciative audience in the States.

I think John's also right that Donovan was never highly respected in
the British folk community, even in his pre-electric days. One of the
earliest references I found to Donovan in the press was in an early
1965 issue of the British folk periodical Folk Scene, which classified
him as a "pop-folksinger," a term that probably wasn't considered high
praise.
  

    
Certainly the hard-left folks who were in the People's Song movement
and so on were the most rigid in the folk era, causing such nonexistent
divisions as "commercial" versus "pure" and "folk" versus "pop" to
become part of the discourse, but what I meant to say there was that
folk-rock wasn't a club where they could look you up on the membership
rolls and say "Sorry, Mr. Airplane, you're not a member." Pete Seeger,
for instance, saw the necessity of embracing some of the new, but I
don't think that in his heart he's ever been particularly happy with it
or listened to it with any pleasure. Still, with the dough "Turn Turn
Turn" brought in from the Byrds (not to mention "Bells of Rhymney" and
a couple of his other copyrights), he couldn't exactly denounce the
phenomenon. 

And you can see above for the Bobbi Fox/Gordon Friesen story I posted
for more of the hard left reaction. Gordon was an unrepentant Oklahoma
communist, CPUSA member, and quite proud of it. 
  

    
And a few more lingering thoughts on Mr. Sunshine Superman...Donovan
did appear at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, the same one at which
Dylan went electric. There's some footage of him in the hard-to-see
documentary "Festival," which has clips from the 1963-66 Newport Folk
Festivals. He also duetted with Joan Baez on "Colours" at the event
(the recording is available on the Joan Baez box set "Rare, Live &
Classic"). That, of course, gave more fodder to those who wanted to
brand him as a Dylan copyist, since Dylan's onstage duets with Baez in
his just-pre-folk-rock era had done a great deal to increase his
popularity.

This is hindsight, but I think one reason why Donovan is not more
respected by history is that although he was versatile, the balance of
his material was tilted too much toward his fey flower-power
minstrelsy. He could actually rock out really hard at times: "Sunshine
Superman," "Hurdy Gurdy Man," "Season of the Witch," and other songs.
Had he done that more, his albums in particular would have held up
better.

Also judging from the live material I've heard on records and tapes,
he emphasized the acoustic flower-power minstrelsy even more in
concert. Again, I think history would have respected him more in this
regard had he used fuller arrangements in concert, or perhaps done the 
acoustic-electric concert division that Dylan pioneered and other
artists such as CSNY sometimes followed: an acoustic portion, followed
by an electric rock one with a full band for songs like "Hurdy Gurdy
Man" that really benefited from such a backup. Even when he performed
songs like "Hurdy Gurdy Man" and "Sunshine Superman" in concert in the
'60s, he often did so solo acoustic, which I think was underselling
them to a degree.

I can see how someone who would only hear one particular song of
Donovan's as an introduction, say "Jennifer Juniper," might think of
him as a pop artist without exposure to the full context of his work.
However, there really are a lot of shades of folk-rock combinations if
his albums are explored in depth, some of them not too well known,
whether the song is "Get Thy Bearings" (covered by King Crimson in
concert in the late 1960s, oddly) or "The Trip" or "Sunny South
Kensington." But the hits are all that a lot of people have exposure to
these days, and his legacy suffers in some respects as a result.

Melanie was brought up in passing, and she's an artist who suffers yet
far more heavily for being typecast as a flower-power child. Donovan
splits opinions, but there are a lot of people in his camp, probably
more in his favor than not. But as I wrote, you risk serious
ostracization from fellow critics if you praise Melanie in public. I
don't like her kiddie-rock hit "Brand New Key" myself, but again, for
the relatively few who bother with the non-hit material on her early
LPs, there's a lot more depth and versatility there than you'd suspect.
Not that I'd consider her to be nearly as significant as Donovan, but
she did have her place in folk-rock, and not merely as a novelty.
  

    
And that was equally true in England. Topic Records, which traces back to
the Workers Music Association, was the dominant folk music label until
Nathan Joseph started Transatlantic, and Bill Leader started Leader and
Trailer. Largely due to Alan Lomax's influence on people like MacColl and
Bert Lloyd, the same kind of "music as an organizing tool" repertoire laid
some of the roots of the folk revival.
  

    
Slipped by #182. I was agreeing with Ed about the lefty influences, not
about Melanie.
  

    
When I talked to Pete Seeger, he said he'd only heard the Byrds'
version of "Turn Turn Turn" "once or twice," which I found most
surprising. I mean, many people who have virtually no interest in rock,
folk, records, the counterculture, or leftist politics have heard the
Byrds' version of "Turn Turn Turn" more (sometimes a lot more) than
once or twice. He did say he was delighted with what the Byrds did with
it, although they changed the melody. I got the impression he wasn't
too fond of actual folk-rock music -- and probably didn't honestly
listen to much of it at the time, as he was never the type to listen to
commercial radio -- but had no problem with musicians actually doing
it if that's what they wanted to play.

Continuing the thread of folk-rock and the Left, it's interesting to
me that the folk-rock musicians who might be considered to be the most
leftist and politically radical -- the Fugs, Country Joe & the Fish,
Phil Ochs -- never in the least felt obligated to be purist in their
musical styles. All of them at times branched out so far from folk and
folk-rock as to eventually not sound much like conventional folk-rock
(if there is such a thing) at all -- the Fugs and Country Joe & the
Fish on their most way-out late-1960s psychedelic records, Phil Ochs in
his ornately orchestrated baroque period.

Far from seeing their move from folk into rock as a sellout, these
musicians seemed to see at as an absolutely essential part of making
their political agenda as effective as possible as well. As Barry
Melton of the Fish told me, "Our thing was political action. And
somehow, it became manifest to us at some point in time that we'd have
a bigger voice if we stepped into a popular idiom. This perception
proved correct. We were glad we were there, because it made us more
relevant." Early Fish manager ED Denson added, "If you are going to
swim in the ocean of the masses you have to look like you belong there,
or else the fish will not recognize you as one of their own."
  

    
But something in the back of my brain tells me Seeger did at least one
track somewhere with an electric band... Damn, but I can't quite bring
it forward. 
  

    
Seeger used some very mild band accompaniment on parts of his album
"Waist Deep in the Big Muddy and Other Love Songs," produced by John
Hammond, and released August 1967. In the liner notes, he wrote: "Here
let's thank Danny Kalb [guitarist, of the Blues Project], and two of
his electric friends for giving some rhythmic assistance which the
foregoing songs needed. I suppose this will shock some of my friends.
But remember, I started out playing in a high school jazz band. And
anyone who uses a microphone is electrified. The problem of who is
going to rule, Man or Machine?, is an ever-continuing tussle. Also
thanks to John Hammond, Jr., for the harmonica. He strolled by the
studio and we snagged him."

As an interesting note of trivia, Seeger did a cover of Country Joe's
"I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die" in 1970 on a single that was pressed in
small quantities as advance DJ copies, but never released. Seeger once
commented that distributors refused to handle it; he was also
prohibiting from singing it on Spanish TV. You can hear the track on
Country Joe's website, at http://www.countryjoe.com/seeger.htm.
  

    
I know that Richie does not like Donovan's 'Open Road' LP much,
but it was a small ensemble that had integrity and rock
dynamics he could of toured with.  I get the feeling his
other studio recordings would of been far more expensive
and difficult to reproduce on stage.

I've 2 Donovan compilations here and they make for fine listening
from beginning to end, even if they do overlap.  He studio work
after Open Road though is often enough to leave his biggest fans,
shaking their heads in wonder.

Richie, here is a question for you, whatever happened to Ron
Elliot? I used to have his solo LP, which had a long pleasant
surrealistic guitar based piece on it...some really beautiful
work, Then he vanished.

About the communist-folk music connection, there was a maniacal
writer in the sixties who wrote numerous 'exposes' on how
folk music and rock music were a complete communist plot.
  

    
As Greil Marcus once observed on some public television documentary
about the '60s, that hysteria about how rock music (not just folk-rock
music) was a complete communist plot was absolutely ludicrous
considering that rock'n'roll to a large degree (and to some degree all
of pop music) is produced and marketed in one of the most capitalistic
ways imaginable.

Yes, there's a sharp dropoff in Donovan's work, which is another
reason he hasn't fared too well in the critical/credibility
sweepstakes...his peak was early.

Darrell, Ron Elliott is living in San Francisco, only three miles or
so from where I live, actually. I interviewed him four years ago for
the Beau Brummels chapter in my book "Urban Spacemen & Wayfaring
Strangers." His solo album. "The Candlestickmaker," was recently
reissued on CD by Collectors' Choice Music. I did the liner notes,
which can be viewed on my website, at
www.richieunterberger.com/elliott.html.

For some reason Elliott never did another solo album, although he did
work in the 1970s as a session musician, as well as doing some
production and songwriting. He (and the Beau Brummels) are extremely
underrated. We're not talking quite the same syndrome as Donovan, but
there's a similarity in that they're sometimes mistakenly dismissed as
a one- or two-trick pony that said everything that needed to be heard
in their two hit singles. Actually their '60s albums (with the
exception of the boneheaded LP of Top 40 covers they did in 1966) are
very good and show increasing maturity. Plus the Beau Brummels were
unheralded groundbreakers in a number of ways: the first American group
to play British Invasion-styled music with success and a satisfingly
original musical spin (slightly predating the Byrds), one of the first
groups to play folk-rockish style music period (though the Byrds took
these tentative steps much further), and a group whose harmonies and
melodies were overlooked influences on forming the '60s San Francisco
rock sound. Quite a few people I interviewed expressed admiration for
Elliott's songwriting and guitar playing, as well as for the singing of
lead Beau Brummels vocalist Sal Valentino.

Ron Elliott hasn't played music for quite a while, due in part to a
severe diabetic condition that, while not life-endangering, requires
vigilant monitoring.
  

    
One of the things that the Donovan discussion brings to mind is the
regionalism of the market back in those days.  For instance, seeing the
chart postions of his early songs makes me realize that he must have been a
much bigger deal here in Seattle than he was elsewhere, since "Catch The
Wind," for instance, was in heavy rotation on the local top forty stations -
I don't know where it charted, but I'd certainly guess top ten, anyway.

So did you come across some great stuff that was only heard in a few cities.
Richie?  And were there particular hotbeds for folk-rock we might not
expect, or places that hardly heard it at all?
  

    
Hmmm...very interesting questions, and ones I didn't touch on much in
the books. But that's a good thing about being on inkwell.vue, it
allows opportunities to go into some things that escaped the books.

I'd hear anecdotal evidence of songs and albums that got especially
strong regional play but didn't catch on across the country, or
sometimes were not even heard anywhere else in the country. That's the
case not just for folk-rock, but also for all kinds of rock in the
1960s (and 1950s, in that matter). In other projects I've done besides
the folk-rock books, this will come up often too -- I'll be doing a
chapter or liner notes on some album I assume barely anyone's ever
heard of, and someone in the band will say something like, "Actually
that song did get quite a lot of airplay in Seattle" or "this station
in Portland, Oregon was playing that album that sold only a thousand
copies quite a bit."

In the days before radio programming across the US had become nearly
as homogenous, and in the days when local/regional stations would
actually be willing to play releases by local artists/labels that
didn't have national distribution, these kinds of anomalies were far,
far more frequent.

One non-folk-rock example, just as illustration: when I was seven or
eight years listening to AM radio in Philadelphia,  the original
version of "Hello It's Me" by the Nazz (Todd Rundgren's first band) was
just a huge, huge local hit, getting as much airplay to my memory as
something like the Beatles' "Hey Jude." I was astonished to find out
years later that the song wasn't any kind of national hit whatsoever
(well, barely, peaking at #66); I'd just assumed it was a hit
everywhere. And I was astonished when Todd Rundgren's solo version
became a huge (#5) national hit in 1973. I thought, even at the age of
11, why do people want to hear this when it was a huge hit just a few
years ago, by the guy's original band?

I couldn't determine what folk-rock was only heard in a few cities,
and how widespread this sort of regionalism was, without going through
local charts (if stations even kept their own charts) and playlists. I
admit that would have taken too much time and effort to locate and
survey if I'd wanted to complete my book on a reasonable schedule. But
I'll note some regional breakouts I did find out about in the next
post.
  

    
Something else I should have noted above was that sometimes even when
a song was a massive nationwide seller, it would kind of "roll" through
the country if it had uneven distribution or if some stations were
slower to catch onto it than others. Thus a record might have been #1
at various points on various local charts throughout the country, but
never at the same time, and thus only peaked at #8 or something like
that nationwide. This sort of thing again got ironed out when the music
and radio business got generally more corporate in the later parts of
the twentieth centuiry. On to some examples of  regional folk-rock
flames...

There were some good garage-folk-rock singles that were primarily or
only local hits, or got any play they got only in their own region.
Examples: Bob Seger's "Persecution Smith" (actually a very good ripoff
of Dylan's "Tombstone Blues"), in Michigan; the Ides of March's "I'll
Keep Searchin'" (yes, the same Ides of March who would go on to have a
huge nationwide hit in 1970 with the Blood, Sweat & Tears imitation
"Vehicle"), in Chicago; Terry Knight and the Pack's "A Change on the
Way," in Michigan. The Pack would become Grand Funk Railroad; Terry
Knight would become Grand Funk's manager.

The Blue Things were much more prominently mentioned in "Turn Turn
Turn" than "Eight Miles High." But to recap briefly, I think they were
the finest mid-1960s unknown folk-rock group, combining aspects of the
Byrds and the Beau Brummels. Well, *usually* unknown. They were *huge*
in their native Kansas, and in other parts of the Midwest. I've gotten
a few emails since my books have come out from people in Kansas and
Nebraska that remember the Blue Things vividly. They were worshiped on
par with the Beatles and Stones in some parts of the Midwest, and some
of their singles and sole album sold well there and charted in local
regions. But believe me, I'd never heard of them until the 1980s,
though most of their releases were on one of the biggest labels in the
world, RCA. Most of the people I know never heard of them (or never
heard them at the time) either.

Tom Rush's "Urge for Going" was released on a single long before it
came out on LP. Apparently it sold very well in the Boston area, and
got heavy Boston airplay, particularly on WBZ.

When I told someone that Janis Ian's "Society's Child" made #14 on the
national charts, she was convinced that I was mistaken. She grew up in
Brooklyn and was sure it was a #1 hit or close to it, because it got
played so much on New York radio. If that was the case, probably
"Society's Child" made "only" #14 because there were probably a lot of
stations in less liberal areas than New York that didn't play it all,
particularly in the South, since the lyrics were about an interracial
romance.

The Leaves' "Hey Joe" peaked at a relatively modest #31 nationwide,
yet went all the way to #1 in some Southern Californian markets in
1966.

Love today are thought of as a cult band, yet the impression I have
from talking to people growing up in California in the mid-1960s was
that they actually sold very large numbers of records in Southern
California, and were thought of as stars there. Some of them have been
shocked when I've told them I don't remember hearing them once in
Philadelphia when I was growing up, and that when I took a chance
unheard and got the "Forever Changes" album in 1979 when I was 17, only
one person I knew had even heard of Love, and no one I knew had heard
the "Forever Changes" album.

To a milder degree, this seems to have occurred with Buffalo
Springfield. "For What It's Worth" was a genuine huge national hit --
their only one -- but other singles of theirs, like "Bluebird" and
"Rock'n'Roll Woman," seem to have done quite well in local L.A. charts,
without becoming nationwide smashes (though they should have).
Dennis has noted in some prior posts that WMMR in Philadelphia gave
British folk-rock bands like Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span
considerably heavier airplay than they would have received throughout
most of the US.

Tom Rapp of Pearls Before Swine has estimated that their first album,
"One Nation Underground," sold a quarter of a million copies. As that's
a lot by late-1960s standards, and as it did not make the Billboard
Top 200 charts, I have to assume that if Rapp's estimate is anything
close to how it sold, it must have done so partly or primarily on the
backs of heavy regional underground radio airplay in places like New
York and Boston.

It's worth noting that a couple of the absolute hugest and most
important folk-rock hits started as regional "breakouts." The Byrds,
"Mr. Tambourine Man," the very first folk-rock hit, broke not in their
native L.A. but in San Francisco, where David Crosby had given an
acetate to his friend Tom Donahuse, DJ at SF pop station KYA. (Donahue,
as some of you probably know, went on to become a pioneer of FM rock
radio; he had already been involved in folk-rock as a partner in the
local Autumn label, which put out the Beau Brummels' hits, and did some
demos with Dino Valenti, the Charlatans, and the Grateful Dead, as
well as putting out a single by the Great Society, Grace Slick's
pre-Airplane band.)

Simon & Garfunkel's "The Sound of Silence" was originally buried as an
acoustic LP cut on their first album. About six months after its
release, however, WBZ in Boston began playing the song and getting an
avid audience for it among the area's college students. This helped
give producer Tom Wilson the brainstorm that if he added guitars and
drums, he could have a hit single. Which he did, and which caused Simon
& Garfunkel, who had actually broken up, to get back together. In a
very real sense, had it not been for WBZ, it's possible that S&G might
never have lasted long enough to become stars.

This doesn't have too much to do with folk-rock, but as an example of
a freakish breakout, the Association's 1971 single "P.F. Sloan" (about
P.F. Sloan, author of "Eve of Destruction") didn't make the Top 100,
yet made #1 in Davenport, Iowa, according to the Association's Jim
Yester.

There must be some other folk-rock regional breakouts/anomalies. If
anyone out there remembers some, I'd love to hear them.
  

    
To go a little further into the regionalism questions in post 189, as
to whether there were particular hotbeds for folk-rock we might not
expect: I'm not sure if you mean for folk-rock performers/records, or
for folk-rock airplay/sales. For folk-rock performers/records, as we've
covered some previously, the dominance of New York and Los Angeles
(later amended to New York and California after San Francisco got
involved) was really pretty overwhelming. Although there were some
cities with thriving folk circuits that gave invaluable experience to
some leading folk-performers, like Toronto and Boston, those cities
didn't themselves yield a good deal of folk-rock records or
folk-rockers based there during their primes.

To recap quickly, that's in large part because they didn't have the
major labels, media, management/publishing companies, or studios to
compete with those in New York and L.A. The same deal in the UK, to
some extent, where the overwhelming concentration of the entertainment
industry was in London. It certainly seems possible and even likely
that there were good folk-rock scenes in places like Chicago or Texas,
but for whatever reasons, they did not leave a strong or even
particularly sizable legacy on record.

Of course you could say that New York and L.A. dominated the entire
record and entertainment industry to some degree, but it really did
seem particularly strong as regards folk-rock. After all, there were
many hits being recorded by regionally based acts in a lot of cities
other than New York or L.A. in the 1960s, including Nashville (where
some folk-rock acts actually did start to record, though few were based
there), Memphis, Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia. But there weren't
buzzing folk-rock scenes in those cities, on record at least.

If the question's more about whether there were regional hotbeds of
folk-rock airplay, my impression is that for the folk-rock stars at
least, their exposure was pretty widespread all across the country.
However, the airplay/media impact did seem strongest on the coasts, not
only in New York or California, but also in Boston, Philadelphia, and
San Francisco -- perhaps not coincidentally, cities which had strong
folk circuits, with a lot of listeners likely moving in the folk-rock
direction and able to catch the acts on tour more readily than those in
a city like, say, El Paso or Tampa. Particularly for emerging
album-oriented artists, sales and airplay were strongest in areas with
large college and youth populations, Boston being an obvious example.

The South and non-urban areas were probably the least fertile for
folk-rock sales and listeners. Though folk-rock did penetrate the South
sometimes in concert; one of the things I learned in my research was
that Gene Clark once told a Huntsville, Alabama audience that "Eight
Miles High" was written there. The Byrds played at Huntsville in the
mid-'60s, and it's appropriate that this particular song originated
there, as the city is nicknamed "Rocket City" and "Aerospace Capital of
the World" since it's a center for rocket research and production.

I don't know if there were any areas that hardly heard folk-rock at
all; it seems unlikely given the number of large folk-rock hits, and
the nationwide TV exposure of many of those artists. Certainly it was
possible for some audience to hear little of it, though, if their
tastes were tuned into soul or country stations, where folk-rock would
have gotten hardly any airplay. And if Pete Seeger only heard the
Byrds' "Turn Turn Turn" once or twice, it's difficult he and people
like him -- presumably people who deliberately chose not to listen to
or watch much or any commercial radio or TV -- heard much folk-rock.
  

    
Saw the note about Ron Elliot's great "Candlestickmaker" being reissued. 
Amazon says it'll be reissued October 7. A related release the same day: 
Stoneground's first cd, featuring Sal Valentino and a cast of 
thousands...!
  

    
And who do you guess wrote the Stoneground liner notes? They're on my
website too, at www.richieunterberger.com/stoneground.html.
  

    
Before the main action on this topic winds down tomorrow, I wanted to
post a note about an author event I'm doing in San Francisco in a few
days, for anyone in the region interested in coming:

On Wednesday evening, October 8, from 7:00-9:00pm, I'll be discussing 
my new book "Eight Miles High: Folk-Rock's Flight from Haight-Ashbury
to Woodstock" at the Park branch of the San Francisco Library at 1833
Page Street (in Haight-Ashbury). I'll be showing an hour of rare 1960s
folk-rock film clips, including footage of Bob Dylan (going electric at
the 1965 Newport Folk Festival), Donovan, the Byrds, Richard & Mimi
Farina, Love, Big  Brother & the Holding Company, Fairport Convention,
Tim Buckley, the Pentangle, Leonard Cohen, and others. Peter Albin of
Big Brother & the Holding  Company will be present to participate in
the discussion.

Feel free to pass on this note to anyone else who might be interested.

The clips will include:

Bob Dylan: performing "Maggie's Farm" at the 1965 Newport Folk 
Festival, at his first electric rock show as a recording artist.

The Byrds: performing "Turn! Turn! Turn!" live circa late 1965-early 
1966, with their original lineup.

Richard & Mimi Farina: performing "Joy in My Brain" live in early
1966.

The Byrds: performing "The Times They Are A-Changin'" live with their
original lineup.

Donovan: performing "Guinevere" live in 1966, with Shawn Phillips on 
sitar.

Love: performing "Message to Pretty" in 1966.

Big Brother & the Holding Company: performing "Coo Coo" live in April 
1967.

Fairport Convention: performing the Richard Farina song "Reno Nevada" 
live in 1968, with a teenaged Richard Thompson on guitar.

Tim Buckley: performing "Song of the Siren" acoustically in November 
1967.

The Pentangle: performing "Light Flight" live in 1970.

Leonard Cohen: performing "The Stranger Song" live in the late 1960s.

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young: performing "Down By the River" in 
September 1969.
  

    
Richie - it's been a pleasure hanging out with you!

Thanks!
  

    
Oh, man, would I like to see those clips! I've never even heard of the
existence of the majority of them, and I have a good friend who's a
major video collector. Wow. 

The discussion of regionalism brings up a point that I think is very
relevant today. Back when radio stations were regional, not responding
to programming imposed on them by national consultants, they responded
to what was going on locally. This didn't necessarily mean just playing
local bands: there were touring circuits in those days. I first became
aware of this in Ohio, but Texas is a much better example because of
its size and cohesion, and the Pacific Northwest was another very
powerful regional center. In Ohio, the big band was the McCoys, Rick
Derringer's first band. They were based in Indiana, but played a lot of
the "down" beer bars in Ohio (18-year-olds could drink 3.2% beer; "up"
beer was only for 21 and older, but the "down" beer circuit was where
the pop action was). They influenced a lot of bands, most of whom never
became famous, but one of them was the Lemon Pipers from Cincinnati, I
believe. Although they're remembered these days for "Green
Tambourine," which was produced as a bubblegum record, they were
actually stupendous live, playing a lot of obscure covers plus some
fine originals, and opening for all the bands that came through. And
this was another factor of regionalism: how many bands wanted to play
Dayton? The ones that did made a big impact on the local kids. Example?
The Jefferson Airplane, who had three hits in Dayton off their first
album. I don't know if they'd ever toured there, but their sound was
enough like the more obscure bands that did that the local audience was
primed for it. 

These days, when there are bands all over the place, the idea of
regional radio responding to local tastes is very appealing. A local
touring circuit can greatly enhance the demand for your records. The
records can then go on to  penetrate an area where a band might not be
able to afford to tour yet, and create a demand whereby a local
promoter over there could put together a package that made it
financially possible for the band to crack that market's live venues.
This isn't overnight success, but it's a lasting success, and part of
the reason, I think, that a lot of '60s bands are still held in such
warm esteem by those who saw them, as opposed to a lot of today's
stars, who are up and down in a couple years' time. 

What does this have to do with folk-rock? Well, that  was just one of
the flavors. You might not expect Detroit to go for it as much as San
Francisco, but today, if you can't crack Detroit *and* San Francisco --
and plenty of other culturally unrelated places -- with a record, the
record doesn't happen. And I'd say that's everyone's loss. 
  

    
Picking up on a couple of things: the book about communist influence on
music is "The Marxist Minstrels; A Handbook On Communist Subversion of
Music" by David A. Noebel. It's one of those highly researched things that
traces every possible connection between the Internetional Communist
Conspiracy and popular music--e.g, because Irwin Silber, a known red was
connected with Sing Out!, and Sing Out! was connected with Folkways, who had
a deal with Verve, which was owned by MGM, therefore MGM is suspect. Noebel
was very big on the Christian Right-wing lecture circuit in the sixties.
He's still around, but he has moved on to other targets.

It's my memory that Tom Rush did a series of live appearances at WBZ, WTBS
and some other Boston-area stations where he played "Urge for Going". I'm
pretty sure that both we (WTBS) and WBZ were playing our own tapes rather
than a DJ single of the song before the album arrived.

I would add Sweet Stavin' Chain to the list of Philadelphia folk-rock acts
with a strictly regional following. They had one LP on either Atco or
Atlantic, and played the Philly Folk Festival a couple of times, but I don't
think anybody outside the Delaware Valley ever paid much attention. No, I'm
wrong, the album was on Cotillion, who probably had the same art director as
those other Atlantic labels.
  

    
Danny Starobin - the great guitarist of Sweet Stavin' Chain - died way
too young.
We went to summer camp together, and where he taught me how to
finger-pick  "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out, " including
two weird demented chords, when most folks were working out  songs in
G/Em/C/D7
  

    
I did what might have been the last interview with Jerry Schoenbaum,
head of Verve/Folkways, whose passing nearly a year ago unfortunately
seemed to go unnoticed by the media. He confirmed to me, "I got a lot
of criticism from the board of the old MGM. They got calls from a very
conservative think tank telling them that there may be Communist
influences in the people I signed. Of course it was far-fetched."

It was indeed a live tape of Tom Rush doing "Urge for Going" broadcast
on WBZ that was heard by George Hamilton IV, who then had Gordon
Lightfoot put him in touch with the song's composer, Joni Mitchell.
Hamilton's country-oriented cover of "Urge for Going" was a country hit
and the first composition by Mitchell (who at that time was unsigned)
to achieve commercial success.

I haven't heard Sweet Stavin' Chain, but did find one review of the
album on the Internet, from their entry to the "Fuzz Acid & Flowers"
on-line discography: "From Philadelphia, Sweet Stavin Chain were a
white blues group with horns which sounded remarkably like the latter
Butterfield Blues Band (but without harmonica). Their album was
recorded in New York and produced by Shel Kagan, who was also in charge
of the second Unspoken Word. The best tracks are a 11 minute version
of Stormy Monday Blues and the original Take A Minute, but overall this
album doesn't offer anything special, probably because the vocals
sound a bit flat on places."