Sunshine Superman is the third studio LP by singer-songwriter Donovan. On August 26, 1966, it was released in the United States on Epic Records.

Donovan and his record producer Mickie Most began the album at the EMI studios at Abbey Road with arranger John Cameron, guitarist Jimmy Page, and Shawn Phillips on sitar.

The landmark album featured Donovan’s hit single “Sunshine Superman,” issued in July ’66.

In early April 1966 Donovan came to Hollywood and was booked for a well-received week-long residency at The Trip nightclub on Sunset Strip. While in town, Donovan played the Hollywood Bowl and recorded at Columbia Studios on Sunset, and cut “Season of the Witch,” “The Trip,” a tune about the venue he headlined, and “Superlungs.”

Session players on those dates included Bobby Ray on bass, drummer “Fast” Eddie Hoh, and Lenny Maitlin on Hammond organ. Additional musicians on “The Fat Angel,” “Ferris Wheel,” and “Three King Fishers” were Shawn Phillips, “Candy” John Carr on bongos, and electric violinist Peter Pilifian. On “Celeste,” the MFQ’s Cyrus Faryar is heard on the bouzouki instrument. Other songs cut in Hollywood are “Young Girl Blues,” “Museum,” and “Epistle to Dippy.”

“Mickie Most was bar none the most versatile and successful British record producer of the sixties. George Martin had the Beatles, I had the Rolling Stones, Shel Talmy had the Who and the Kinks—all self-contained acts,” underlined Andrew Loog Oldham in a 2008 interview with me.

In 1973, Loog Oldham produced Donovan’s Cosmic Wheels.

“Mickie spotted great talent—Herman’s Hermits, the Animals—and he matched them with great songs, again and again and again. In August of ’64 Mickie had three in the top 10. He could smell a hit off your wrist.

“Mickie Most and Peter Noone. These two guys had a great run together and nailed down that American affection for British song and vaudeville. Mickie Most was a great song sniffer, one of the best. ‘I’m into Something Good’ and ‘There’s a Kind of Hush’ are great records. And then there was his run with Donovan.”

Donovan sound checking at the Hollywood Bowl, April 2, 1966. (Photo by Henry Diltz / Courtesy Gary Strobl)

Donovan was the first recording artist Clive Davis signed to the Epic label after he was appointed vice president and general manager of Columbia Records in 1965, and later president during 1966.

“I signed Donovan to Epic in 1966,” offered Davis in a 2008 interview we conducted. “I was in the business side of it for a year. I was working with Andy Williams, the young Barbra Streisand, and Bob Dylan.

“I was observing. I was seeing the business change. I was seeing music change, but I was waiting for the A&R staff to lead into these changes that were showing evidence in becoming important in music.

“In June 1967, I really came to the Monterey International Pop Festival not knowing what to expect, but seeing a revolution before my eyes. I was very aware that contemporary music was changing.”

Sunshine Superman is one of my desert island discs.

I first met Donovan in 1974 at a press party for his 7-Tease album by Epic Records at the Dar Maghreb Moroccan restaurant on Sunset Blvd.

The guests sat on pillows in a smoky private room and ate Moroccan food, pigeon pastilla, a sweet-and-savory pie with pigeon meat. Donovan discussed his new LP, answered my fanboy questions about Sunshine Superman, and chatted about his November 1965 taping in Hollywood at The Big TNT Show in the Moulin Rouge.

In 2007, I interviewed Donovan via email and asked about his 1966 visit to Hollywood.

“LA TV was a bit diff from British telly, but the elements were the same. Hollywood A Go Go, Shindig! and other little TV shows had the three dancers, and I had the shades on. Gypsy and I smiling at it all and the craziness. On the street, of course, the girls still in bobby socks and ponytails and the guys in plaid shorts and crew cuts that was to change. We were treated like visitors from another planet…The British Invasion…But the Planet we were from was Planet Bohemia, and soon it would change the way youth saw so-called reality.

“In May of 1966, I played a week at The Trip club on Sunset. All of Hollywood turned up. New pals. I met the Mamas & The Papas and Cyrus Faryar.

“Peer Music was and still is my music publishing family and Linda and I stayed up in the old Peer Mansion on lower Laurel Canyon. We fell in love and she is my Sunshine Supergirl. The album is dedicated to Linda. Ralph Peer of Peer Music supported me all the way and I am so grateful, as I learned early music publishing is the beginning of this music business and is the center of it all today.

“Mickie Most my Brit producer and I went into CBS Studios recording ‘Season of the Witch.’ The sound engineers in white coats! Like doctors.

“Mickie said to one engineer, as we recorded the ‘Season of the Witch,’ turn the bass level up. And the two in white coats said they needed a conference on this. They left the studio control room. They returned and said they couldn’t turn up the bass as it was going into THE RED on the dial.

“Mickie said, ‘Look guys, your boss Clive Davis just gave me a million dollars to record three artists, do you think if I asked him for a little more bass he would give it to me?’

“The bass was turned up. A real Spinal Tap Moment long before the film of the same name.”

In mid-July 2026, I asked some friends about Sunshine Superman.

“Sixty years ago, surrealism entered popular culture in the form of a new kind of rock music, the sort that would work as the soundtrack to a public dream,” suggested writer and poet Dr. James Cushing in a 2026 conversation we had.

“Revolver, Blonde on Blonde, “Eight Miles High,” East-West, and Freak Out!, all from 1966, are the first examples that come to mind. Donovan’s Sunshine Superman fully belongs on this short-list of disjunctive originality’s greatest hits. (Even Freak Out! made the top 200.)

“Start with the title song, a big hit. It plucks its title from the first words of both verses, a seemingly arbitrary gesture that fits the arrangement: upright and electric bass, harpsichord, and an electric guitar played with some very strange pedal action. Pow!

“The next cut is six slow minutes of acoustic guitar and strings, with lyrics set in some imaginary tenth century about cascading crystals and thrones of white ivory.

“The third cut opens with Sean Phillips’ sitar — yes, we are in Beatles territory, but Donovan has his own melodic imprint, and nothing sounds derivative. Then, sitar plus jazz bass plus bongoes equals ‘Ferris Wheel,’ a cool breeze of melody. The side ends up in a jazz groove. No cut is foreseeable from the previous one, and the whole 43-minute album is like that.

“Contractual disputes prevented the album from coming out in the UK in its original form, so American listeners actually had the advantage. This LP was followed by Mellow Yellow, A Gift from a Flower to a Garden, Donovan In Concert, and Hurdy Gurdy Man, all in the next two years, all of them richly rewarding. But Sunshine Superman is where Donovan stops following Dylan and starts following only his own star.”

“The first time I ever heard the song ‘Sunshine Superman’ soaring, more powerful than a locomotive, out of my childhood 6-transistors back in ’66 I thought, for some still inexplicable reason, ‘Gee, that singer sure sounds like he’s some bad guy who should be in jail!,’” admits the pre-YouTube/pre-MTV-even Gary Pig Gold.

“Of course, when images of said singer first met my eyes shortly thereafter via 16 Magazine, followed by an iconic, floral-pelted appearance on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, that first audio impression of mine couldn’t have been farther off the mark. For ‘The Phenomenon of Donovan,’ as KRLA introduced his Anaheim Convention Center soiree (captured upon my treasured-to-this-day Donovan In Concert elpee) was in truth the kindest-hearted, gentlest-souled, most-softest-spoken – usually – man imaginable.

“Nevertheless, that initially heard jailhouse vocal, and underlying behind-bars attitude altogether, did sometimes creep to the surface here and then there upon the full Sunshine Superman LP – on “The Trip” in particular. And it certainly was in evidence when, forty-five full years later, I was most fortunate indeed to witness the entire album, and then some, performed by Donovan at no less than the Royal Albert Hall …with original session guitarist J. Page right back alongside him too on stage, by the way.

“But I’d just have to continue to surmise Such was, and remains, the dichotomy, musical and otherwise, of this particular phenomenon.”

Donovan and Jimmy Page. Royal Albert Hall, London, June 3, 2011. (Courtesy Gary Pig Gold)

“Donovan was in full psychedelic rock bloom with Sunshine Superman,” emphasized musician and songwriter Morley Bartnoff, “not merely a hit record but the 1966 genesis of an artistically seminal four-way cannonball into the deep abyss; historically massive for its genre as well as his own timeline. He was welcomed onto radio with sweet folk songs like ‘Catch the Wind,’ ‘Colours’ and ‘Universal Soldier’ — then Sunshine Superman changed everything. Along with hits like ‘Season of the Witch,’ ‘The Trip’ and later, bluesy classics like ‘Sunshine Superman’ and ‘Mellow Yellow,’ the title track opened up an entirely new sonic dimension. An otherworldly sound stitched strictly for the radio made from transcendental verses, space-aged instrumentals, trance-inducing rhythms and bold studio experimentation. Now, Donovan was not following the psychedelic revolution — he was making it.

“And Sunshine Superman hits like a whole other planet. It was Donovan who proved all of these facets could coalesce, and at one time psychedelic rock music could be creative, lyrical, melodic and a commercial staple. His music pushed many composers well past the limits of conventional folk and pop, to play with Eastern elements, psychedelic imagery and wild inventiveness.

“Released before the summer had even begun, the album is one of the landmark recordings from that era now popularly referred to as the Summer of Love. It transformed him from a phenomenally accomplished folk singer to one of the genuine pioneers of psychedelic rock, and more than half a century later songs such as ‘Sunshine Superman’, ‘Season of the Witch’ and ‘Mellow Yellow’ sound every bit as mesmerizingly inventive and absolutely contemporary as ever.”

Producer-humorist-marketing strategist-polymath Martin Lewis is an unabashed Donovan-lover – who has both produced and managed him at times.

“I love Donovan. From the day I saw him singing ‘Catch the Wind’ on Ready Steady Go! in January 1965 – months before he had a record contract—through his rapid rise into the mid-late ‘60s music stratosphere—certainly considered one of the Gods of our time. Through the cruelties of the 1970s and 1980s when he was cast aside and mocked as a hippie leftover rather than revered as the pioneer he was. And all the way since.

“Several times our paths crossed.

“In 1981, at the height of our culture’s cruel indifference to him, I picked him to perform at The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball benefit show that I produced for Amnesty International. His appearance was rather overshadowed by some of the other lads I’d recruited: Sting, Phil Collins, Bob Geldof, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck. Indeed when the curtain rose to reveal him, a typical 80s-era wag in the audience yelled out, ‘I thought you were dead!’ I kept that in the film of the show so I could include Don’s instant, dry riposte, ‘not yet…’

His performance of Sunshine Superman was sublime. For the album I decided to elevate Danny Thompson’s double bass into a lead instrument dueting with Don’s singing. Because of his unique voice, it still sounds like magic in a vinyl bottle.

“I loved Donovan so much that in one of his frequent nadirs I managed him. Or tried to… This was 2003-2005. His talent was still there. I adored him, but I discovered some of the reasons for his fall from public appreciation.

“He was literally unmanageable. Not by way of personal failings. But he was so burned and scarred by the abuse and indifference of the music world—so hurt by the Rodney Dangerfield-ness of his situation in which he literally got ‘no respect’—that he had taken to speaking and writing about himself in Bob Dole-style ‘third person’ mode. He would say things such as: ‘In 1968 Donovan would travel to India with the Beatles where he taught John and Paul clawhammer finger-picking guitar style…’

“It sounded bizarre and self-aggrandizing. But the tragedy was that it was all true. But he’d not been given proper credit for his legitimate achievements—so he felt it necessary to be his own publicist in the third person. And that made him appear full of himself.

“Dammit – he had every right to be full of himself! But independent voices needed to be saying it. Not a manager… not a publicist… and certainly not the artist himself. I was frustrated by the unfairness of how he was overlooked. And by him being – quite understandably – in the way of himself.

“So finally I had to let go of my dream of helping restore him to his rightful place in music history. He understood my analysis and we parted as friends. In the end, the sheer passage of time has accorded him some of the huge recognition he deserves

“We continued to collaborate when occasion arose and I tried to do my bit when opportunities presented themselves. Such as the celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Monterey International Pop Festival that I organized in 2007 at Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood.

“Donovan had been due to perform at Monterey in 1967 until the British police—in a warm-up to drug-busting the Stones and the Beatles—had a dry-run by arresting Donovan. An action that screwed his visa status and ability to fly to the US for that festival.

“My Marty McFly Back to the Future remedy was to tell the assembled audience about this, then produce a piece of paper to read from that I had led them to think would be a written greeting to the crowd from Don. Instead I read aloud: ‘So here to perform one of the songs that he would have performed at Monterey – please welcome Donovan!’

“Out strides Donovan – who I’d hidden in the wings – with his green-topped acoustic guitar, ‘Kelly’ made for him by luthier Danny Ferrington, and he slays them with a sublime Sunshine Superman. Open-mouthed slack jaws – just like the audience at the Springtime for Hitler first night – from Michelle Phillips, Lou Adler, Grace Slick, Eric Burdon and other assorted Monterey survivors. Gob-smacked by this piece of Kabuki – and in awe of the sheer Donovan-ness of the man

“At the after-party in the adjacent Pig & Whistle I corralled Eric Burdon to duet with Don on an extended Season of the Witch jam – Eric free-styling new lyrics about present-day politics over sizzling guitar from Moby Grape’s Jerry Miller. I felt that we had belatedly compensated for a glitch in the universe that had blighted 1967!

“The Sunshine Superman album was a supreme achievement by Donovan. Because of contractual issues, we Brits didn’t get that album until October 1967. Fourteen crucial months later. And 14 months was virtually a century in the golden renaissance period of 1966-1967. Even then, the UK album was in diluted form.

“By then British music critics had rightly praised the Beatles’ Revolver and Sgt. Pepper albums and the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds —and they didn’t give proper credit to Donovan for having reached similar musical horizons in 1966—because it arrived over a year later on our shores and in our ears. It was the beginning of the British hip-erati unfairly losing respect for Donovan.

“This 60th anniversary of the original Sunshine Superman album is a very good reason to wave our Donovan freak flags! “Born-a high forever to fly…”

© Harvey Kubernik 2026

Harvey Kubernik is the author of 21 books, including 2009’s Canyon Of Dreams: The Magic And The Music Of Laurel Canyon, 2014’s Turn Up The Radio! Rock, Pop and Roll In Los Angeles 1956-1972, 2015′s Every Body Knows: Leonard Cohen, 2016′s Heart of Gold Neil Young and 2017′s 1967: A Complete Rock Music History of the Summer of Love.

Sterling/Barnes and Noble in 2018 published Harvey and Kenneth Kubernik’s The Story Of The Band: From Big Pink To The Last Waltz. In 2021, they wrote Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child for Sterling/Barnes and Noble.

Otherworld Cottage Industries in 2020 published Harvey’s Docs That Rock, Music That Matters. His Screen Gems: (Pop Music Documentaries and Rock ‘n’ Roll TV Scenes) was published in February, 2026 by BearManor Media. Kubernik is currently working as Creative Director on a book on the Beatles for a UK publisher scheduled for a 2027 publication date.

Harvey spoke at the special hearings in 2006 initiated by the Library of Congress held in Hollywood, California, discussing archiving practices and audiotape preservation.

In 2017, he appeared at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, in its heralded Distinguished Speakers Series, and as a panelist, where he discussed the forty-fifth anniversary of The Last Waltz at the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles in 2023.

Its author was born in 1966, so he wasn’t there. An obsession comes from a desire to reach the unattainable. Much scholarship is driven by this and Begnal is scholarly. Since he can’t experience the Stooges directly he zooms in on the album that followed the London concert, Raw Power, with a forensic examination of how each track came into being. Every reference is immaculately noted. His commitment revs up to an amphetamine squeal.

Begnal’s analysis is a labour of love; and in its way an extraordinary act of performance in itself. However I do feel that it is based on an underlying misjudgement, namely that Raw Power represents the Stooges career high-point simply because it is the first Punk album. Maybe it is the first Punk album. Others have said so. But Punk, for all its seering verve, was a return to snappy little numbers. Begnal’s book duly demonstrates Raw Power’s ancestry in the trad rock catalogue of short songs.

What had happened to the Dionysiac, the long-groove, the unique and special in the Stooges? David Bowie had come into Iggy’s life. Bowie, the genius of rock lieder – and of packaging. Bowie produced Raw Power and packaged Iggy. Perhaps he also gave the album its naff title. When Raw Power was released I remember feeling let down. I gave it a positive review (which Begnal quotes) but more in loyalty and hope than conviction. The promise of Fun House, of King’s Cross, had not been realised.

Dionysiac outburst flared briefly in the Sex Pistols later, then died. As for the book’s title Death Trip – Iggy is still living, comfortably, near Miami. And what of long groove/wall of sound? With the arrival of the 12-inch single, it merged with Disco, Funk and computer electronics, leading to Dance, Trance, Techno, Rave, Drone, and when all that turned into mere knob-twiddling clichés, it slipped over to the classical world where it had always had a sibling, from Corelli to Morton Feldman, and became a fruitful new form among the conservatoire set. You may sometimes hear it, not always shorn of its elemental terrors and drive, on BBC Radio 3’s wonderful New Music Show.

Viewing the uncensored Def Comedy Jam broadcasts on HBO from three decades ago and also seeing the popularity of ribald comedians this century headlining theaters, arenas and stadiums, I’m reminded of the obscenity arrests, trials, and prosecution of comic, storyteller, and freedom of speech advocate Lenny Bruce endured in the sixties for all of them with his stage and recorded routines about race, religion, hypocrisy, politics and sex. He reshaped stand-up comedy. Bruce is the counterculture prophet whose unfiltered style opened up new frontiers in self-expression.

May I recommend reading Steven Armstrong’s July 4, 2026 story in The Telegraph on how Netflix became the home of ‘cancelled’ comedians.

Over half a century ago, critic Ralph J Gleason of the San Francisco Chronicle and a founding editor of Rolling Stone magazine, said, “So many taboos have been lifted, and so many comics have rushed through the doors Lenny opened. He utterly changed the world of comedy.”

In 2003, a court case conviction from 40 years earlier was overturned with a posthumous pardon by New York governor George Pataki, who exonerated Bruce in a statement saying, “a declaration of New York’s commitment to upholding the First Amendment.”

“Lenny Bruce started as a comedian, turned into a prophet, and ended as a martyr,” suggested author and former Grateful Dead publicist Dennis McNally in a 2026 email. McNally in 2025 penned The Last Great Dream: How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties.

“Although he used street language, he was never truly obscene. Instead, he pursued a mission to expose fraud, particularly as it manifested in daily sexual and religious life. Unfortunately for him, one of his favorite topics was the Roman Catholic church. A considerable number of district attorneys in America were of that faith, and they took offense because Lenny was indeed blasphemous. They suspended the First Amendment as it applied to him and crucified him with an endless succession of obscenity trials. Broken, he overdosed and died. But his heritage of seeing the lie in daily life affected an entire generation,” summarized McNally.

Lenny Bruce was born as Leonard Alfred Schneider on October 13, 1925, in Mineola, New York, to a Jewish family. Lenny’s father, Myron Schneider, was a shoe clerk, and his mother was Sally Marr, whose maiden name was Sadie Kitchenberg. Sally was a stage performer herself and had a strong bond with her son as well as an enormous influence on his career.

Lenny Bruce’s brand of Jewish humor developed out of the Shtetl and Borscht Belt circuit, before he became a headliner in top clubs across the United States, later appearing on the nationally televised The Steve Allen Show.

Playboy magazine’s publisher Hugh Hefner was an early supporter of Lenny, and introduced one of his routines, “Jewish-Goyish,” in an edited version in the pages of his periodical, after it was heard at Bruce’s November 1961 booking in San Francisco at the Curran Theater. “Dig: I’m Jewish. Count Basie’s Jewish. Ray Charles is Jewish. Eddie Cantor’s goyish. B’nai B’rith is goyish; Hadassah, Jewish. Marine Corps, heavy goyim, dangerous.”

On August 3, 1966, the monologist, social critic, satirist, and philosopher Lenny Bruce (October 13, 1925-August 3, 1966) was found dead at age 40 inside his Hollywood Hills home from an acute overdose of morphine.

Many folks in my neighborhood were saddened when reports of his death were on our television screens. His Hollywood home was on my route to The Preview House on Sunset Boulevard, where I distributed admission tickets.

Nearly sixty years ago on August 21, 1966, over 500 mourners paid their last respects at Eden Memorial Park Cemetery in Mission Hills, California. The eulogy was read by the Rev. William Glenesk. Record producer and songwriter Phil Spector paid for the funeral.

There was an earlier memorial held August 12, 1966, at the Judson Memorial Church in New York City, which Paul Krassner officiated. Among those paying tribute were Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, the Fugs, Jean Shepard, the Tony Scott Quartet, Charlie Haden, the Rev. Al Carmines and Allen Garfield.

Lenny Bruce was certainly not forgotten around Southern California after his 1966 burial.

In August 1968, The Los Angeles Free Press presented the Murray Roman-hosted LennyBrucemas at Venice Pier. Roman was a standup comedian and writer on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour television series. Over 20,000 people attended. The Barry Goldberg Reunion, Black Pearl, the Alice Cooper band, Pacific Gas & Electric, Illinois Speed Press, C.T.A. (Chicago Transit Authority), Sweetwater, and the Outlaw Blues Band provided the musical entertainment. AM Radio station KRLA and FM outlets KMET, KPPC, and KPFK were involved in promoting the event.

On November 7, 1974, I was at the movie premiere of Lenny, a biographical drama film about Bruce starring Dustin Hoffman, Valerie Perrine, and directed by Bob Fosse. I was somehow asked to join the “movie business guest list” box office window with Bob Dylan, Lucille Ball, and her comedian/actor husband, Gary Morton.

In May 2026, Lenny was released in 4K by The Criterion Collection.

Lenny is a complex portrayal of one iconoclast by another—director Bob Fosse’s nervy, freewheeling showbiz drama about taboo-shattering comedian Lenny Bruce, portrayed with live-wire intensity by Dustin Hoffman. Valerie Perrine lends the film its soul with her deeply affecting performance as his wife, Honey, an innocent lost on the dark side of bohemia. Fosse’s film makes deft use of stark monochrome photography and kinetic editing to vividly capture Bruce’s smoky, seedy backstage world.

Lenny was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Hoffman), and Best Actress (Perrine). This Criterion edition is a new 4K restoration of the film; audio commentary featuring film historians Nick Redman and Julie Kirgo; interviews with Hoffman, Perrine, and editor Alan Heim; and more. Fosse really delivered on screen.

I prefer to write stories and tributes that celebrate arrival: 50 and 60-year anniversaries of epic albums, landmark music events and/or birthdays, not entirely focusing on or acknowledging day-of-death reminders or prepared obituaries.

I’ll do those occasionally upon editorial request, but mine are multi-voice narratives with unique and revealing bio-regional information from my own archive of personally conducted interviews.

However, let’s be realistic: We all know about the passing of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, but how many people even remember his birthdate of May 17, 1917?

So, here’s a 60-year memoir on Lenny Bruce, praising his work and saluting his departure from this particular world-is-a-stage in 1966.

Lenny Bruce was a frequent guest on black-and-white television shows I watched on my parents’ television set on 5th Street.

In 1957, I viewed the Teddy Bears (Phil Spector, Marshall Lieb and Annette Kleinbard) on the local KTLA TV program Rocket to Stardom, sponsored by salesman Bob Yeakel, who used to hawk Oldsmobiles during the broadcast from his showroom. Lenny Bruce with Joe Maini, Jack Sheldon, Dennis Hopper, and Jim Keltner also appeared on the show.

During 1963-1972, my family and I would see Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, Al Jarvis, Miles Ciletti, Mantan Moreland, Nik Venet, Jack Nitzsche, Steve Allen, Peter Piper, Rodney Bingenheimer, Micky Dolenz, comics, actors, actresses, directors, screenwriters, prostitutes, pimps, and Vine Street-based American Federation of Musicians 47 Union session men including Don Peake, Sonny Bono, David Kessel, Leon Russell and Don Randi, at the Hollywood Ranch Market on 1248 N. Vine Street. Their big sign read WE NEVER CLOSE.

“We all went to the Hollywood Ranch Market,” exclaimed Randi. “The tater tots and the chicken gizzards! In the late fifties they even had a donut machine there! I saw Lucille Ball one late night in a full fur mink. Desilu Studios was nearby. She gave me the biggest smile.”

“In spring, 1964, I glimpsed Lenny as he was going into a theater at La Brea Avenue and Hollywood Boulevard,” recollected author/musician Jan Alan Henderson in a July 2023 interview we did. “We were going to ABC Books to buy the first books on the Beatles on the way to Le Conte Junior High in East Hollywood. My mother knew Lenny’s wife, Honey, as they were neighbors. My mom was a volunteer for the United Way, and the Bruce household was in the district. Lenny was the one who fought for First Amendment rights.”

I attended Fairfax High School in Los Angeles near the border of West Hollywood. Lenny’s daughter Kitty was in my younger brother Kenny’s grade, sitting next to her in Spanish class. Kitty is the goddaughter of Phil Spector. I met Kitty again in June 1972 after a Rolling Stones concert at the Fabulous Forum in Inglewood when she had a late-night waitress shift at Shipp’s restaurant on La Cienega Boulevard.

In 2014, Brandeis University acquired the personal papers of Lenny Bruce from a collection kept by Kitty Bruce, who has helped to preserve his legacy. It houses photographs, news clippings, recordings, manuscripts, and other material. A generous gift from the Hugh M. Hefner Foundation made the transfer possible.

In 2016, a two-day symposium at Brandeis University was held, which presented a keynote address by Brandeis alumni Christie Hefner—daughter of Playboy Magazine founder Hugh Hefner—on free speech, comedy, and Bruce’s legacy imprint on social change. Her appearance was a part of Comedy and Constitution: The Legacy of Lenny Bruce. She commented on the special and deep friendship her father had with Bruce, and their joint passion for free speech.

“In Hef’s battles, he had a large company behind him and a powerful platform in the magazine. Lenny had none of that. Just friends. And Hef was one of those friends.”

On May 13, 2026, Kitty Bruce died at age 70 in Pittston, Pennsylvania, following complications from a surgical procedure, her family confirmed to Variety. “Her death, in a hospital, was caused by complications of double knee replacement surgery, according to her cousin Jennifer Coleman Hesson.”

In 2013, Kitty had arranged for actor Ronnie Marmo to narrate the Hachette audiobook How to Talk Dirty and Influence People from a script written by Lenny Bruce, Lewis Black and Howard Reich.

A special memorial benefit performance on July 25, 2026, of the one-man play, I’m Not A Comedian… I’m Lenny Bruce, starring Ronnie Marmo, directed by Joe Mantegna, will honor the memory of Kitty Bruce. It will be presented at Theatre 68 Arts Complex in North Hollywood.

This performance will help generate funds for the Lenny Bruce Memorial Foundation, a charity Kitty Bruce started in 2008 to support people in recovery programs for drug and alcohol abuse.

Marmo has performed the Bruce role for more than 485 performances across the United States and Canada since the play opened in Los Angeles in 2017.

Playboy magazine first introduced me to Lenny Bruce in the sixties. I actually read the articles and devoured the multi-page interviews.

Forty years ago, I spent a delightful afternoon at a jazz event held inside the Playboy mansion in Holmby Hills. Longtime Bruce supporter and benefactor Hugh Hefner briefly reminisced about his friend Lenny. I complimented the host on a video I watched from an October 1959 television episode of Playboy’s Penthouse, where Lenny was introduced on screen with two Playboy playmates. He smiled and lamented, “Lenny Bruce sadly died for our sins.”

“When I watched Lenny Bruce on TV—mostly on Playboy’s Penthouse, the Hefner show, and that one footage of him performing— he’s very much like a musician,” observed writer and author Tosh Berman, publisher of Tam Tam Books. “What I noticed is that when he tells a narrative, he snaps his fingers in a specific rhythm. In a way, he does that to pace his audience. In that sense, I find him to be very musical. I was intrigued by his intensity, and again, the music aspect of his performance and body movement.

“My dad, Wallace, and mom Shirley met Lenny only once, in some nightclub with Phil Spector, who introduced them. My mom told me an interesting tale. They went to a club to see Bruce perform, before my dad was introduced to him, and he had this bit when a spotlight hits one person in the audience, and Lenny does a bit about them. Sort of a Don Rickles moment when he insults that person. The light hits my dad in the audience, and Bruce went up to him. He looked at him. And then said that this guy is a total angel. And then he went on to another person—victim—in the audience.”

Wallace Berman and Lenny Bruce are two of the faces on the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

In 1997 I interviewed Allen Ginsberg. He described the socio-political climate of the fifties and sixties that Lenny rebelled against.

“I thought the whole ‘40s, ‘50s literary movement was historically really important, and was kind of a wall built against authoritarianism, that there would be a counter reaction and maybe a police state in America someday, building on the drug thing, and the suppression of literature. So, I thought it would be best to build a complete archive of the whole transaction of the cultural change, including all the printed stuff, tapes, newspaper articles, anything that had to do with cop – selling of cop trading, or cop/mafia relationship, or CIA mafia/ cop relationship, or repression of literature or censorship, or foreign reactions to Beat Generation translations, interviews. So, everything put together as a cultural, historical resource.

“Audiences now are really interesting owing to the renaissance of beat interest. Maybe it’s the actual expression of emotion that interests people who have been deprived of emotion, and not really been able to express their erotic joy or grief for a long time, under the Reagan and Bush repression era.

“Also, in the ‘80s, the renaissance might have been a reaction against the mid-70’s disco music, which was totally mechanical, and characteristic of that retreat from feeling. The later generation now feels a sense of alienation, so what is really needed is another shot of emotion, or a renaissance of people being able to express their emotions in music or in poetry.

“People now want to say what they really think because they are faced in every direction by plastic, corporate protrusion of fear, and the substitution of violence, kitsch, stereotype, discontinuity, and no sense of ground. But there is a real ground in everybody, and there is longing and desire. Desire for affection, desire for tenderness, desire for love, desire for security and safety, desire to be cuddled.

“People are now more receptive to candor, cheerfulness, and some kind of openness and reality against the pessimistic, negative FBI in the closet, J. Edgar Hoover secrecy then, when we were proposing a better world. In fact, I remember when (Jack) Kerouac was asked on The William F. Buckley TV Show in the ‘60s. ‘What Beat Generation meant?’ Kerouac said, ‘Sympathetic.’”

Numerous stand-up comics, lyricists, and musicians owe a tremendous debt to Bruce’s albums, and the books and documentaries on him.

Art Garfunkel and Paul Simon first met as classmates in 1953 at Parsons Junior High School in Queens, New York, and later bonded over James Dean, Lenny Bruce, and the Everly Brothers. Their initial single, released as Tom & Jerry, came out in 1957,

A radio clip of a news broadcast in “7 O’Clock News/Silent Night” by Simon & Garfunkel on their Parsley Sage Rosemary and Thyme, has a radio station report of Bruce’s death, while another LP selection is “A Simple Desultory Philippic (or How I Was Robert McNamara’d into Submission” with the lyric, “… I learned the truth from Lenny Bruce, that all my wealth won’t buy me health.”

In his autobiography Life, Keith Richards wrote about listening to Lenny Bruce albums as a teenager. “I thought from there I could get a thread to the secrets of the culture. He was my entrée into American satire.”

Keith nicked a phrase for his Rolling Stones’ tune “Little T & A,” “The pool’s in but the patio ain’t dry,” from an adaptation of Bruce’s interaction with an agent about a job in his 1960s stand-up routine, Comic at the Palladium. Bruce’s line is, “The pool isn’t in yet, but the patio is dry.”

The last time I talked to Keith was in October 2016 inside a rehearsal room at Third Encore Studios in North Hollywood when the Rolling Stones were preparing for two headlining shows at Desert Trip Coachella in Indio.

During a break, I gave Keith a copy of an original 1962 performer contract Lenny inked with Gene Norman when Bruce performed at the Crescendo. Keith was very appreciative. As I was getting up to leave the rehearsal, Keith and Ronnie Wood started strumming “Little T & A” and tossed me their guitar picks

In 1989, I was the Project Coordinator on The Jack Kerouac Collection box for the Rhino/Word/Beat label. I had interviewed the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia in 1976 for the now-defunct Melody Maker. Besides chatting about Kerouac, Jerry mentioned that he worked briefly in San Francisco as Lenny Bruce’s secretary for a lawyer during Bruce’s legal troubles. Garcia handled the task of transcribing taped performances to aid trial records.

Before joining Jefferson Airplane, singer/songwriter Grace Slick was a member of the Great Society, and penned “Father Bruce,” a tune about Lenny.

“I saw Lenny Bruce a couple of times,” Slick mentioned in a 2002 interview I conducted with her. “He was fabulous. After he got into the trial segment of his life. The legal thing. He got so attached to that, and it was tedious for other people because they weren’t as strung out, literally and figuratively, with the legal system. It wasn’t as interesting to people. So, his performances during that time got somewhat tedious. But before that, the guy would hit all different kinds of subjects. He was just amazing.

“When I saw his album cover The Sick Humor of Lenny Bruce on Fantasy Records at a record store, where he was having a picnic in a graveyard, I had never seen any bashing of so-called sacred cows. Having a picnic in a graveyard. We are talking about the fifties. They just didn’t do stuff like that. It was Leave It to Beaver time. And ‘Father Bruce’ came out of that experience. Comedians very often are letting us know about morality through humor. That’s why I called him Father Bruce. They are preachers telling you what it’s like in society without being particularly dogmatic. It’s an easier way to swallow morality, listening to a comedian.”

“I met Lenny Bruce in 1964, ’65,” recalled photographer and musician Henry Diltz, then a member of the Modern Folk Quintet.

“We played some gigs together. MFQ did a week opening for him. And Lenny said marijuana, I call it God’s herb, would be legal one day because he knew too many law school students smoking it. We used to say, ‘Someday it will be legal. Because someday we’ll grow up and we will be the lawyers, judges and the senators.’”

When bluesman John Mayall first moved to the United States in the summer of 1968, he lodged in Laurel Canyon for a short period in the basement of engineer John Judnich’s house. Judnich was a confidant of Lenny Bruce and his right-hand man. John owned the Tyco Brae sound company supplying the Pinnacle Dance Concerts at the Shrine Exposition Hall. While visiting Judnich’s pad, Mayall also catalogued and notated rare Lenny Bruce tapes for Judnich.

John Mayall’s 1969 live album The Turning Point opens with the song “The Laws Must Change,” with the lyric “Lenny Bruce was trying to tell you many things before he died.”

Multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Al Kooper, at age sixteen, went to the recorded February 4, 1961, Lenny Bruce at Carnegie Hall midnight show. I wasn’t surprised when Kooper’s pal Bob Dylan in 1981 placed “Lenny Bruce” on his Shot of Love album. It describes a short taxi ride the two men shared. In its concluding lyric, Dylan sings, “Lenny Bruce was bad, he was the brother that you never had.”

During 1998, I interviewed Chrissie Hynde. We talked about Dylan.

“I’ll tell you another great Dylan album that was not one of his most popular ones was Shot of Love. The song ‘Lenny Bruce.’ Jim Keltner is the perfect drummer for any band if you ask me. He’s great with Bob Dylan and played on that recording. Keltner is a genius drummer.”

Former Wall of Voodoo frontman Stan Ridgway covered this song for his 2010 album Neon Mirage. Ridgway told Songfacts: “It’s not so much that Lenny Bruce affected me, although I’m certainly aware of his life and his career and his recordings, and his place in culture. But the song itself is about a lot more than just Lenny Bruce. That’s the great thing that Bob did with that song. There’s always something deeper than just what’s on the surface. There’s always some sort of other facets, and once you get to that, you see a reflection into some other place. I look at it as a kind of celebratory tribute to anyone that’s laid his body on the barbed wire for a cause or for a perspective or for an idea about what art is or freedom of speech or any of those things.”

In a 1999 interview I did with Ridgway, he happily confessed, “If I could have four people over for dinner, living or dead, I wouldn’t mind having a dish with Lenny Bruce and Lord Buckley. They were both masters of the word and how it sounded. And Miles Davis, for his intuition about music and to hear him talk in that rasp. And Rahsaan Roland Kirk, to thank him for all the great music and performances he left us.”

The sonic legacy of Lenny Bruce can still be heard in Genesis’ “Broadway Melody of 1974,” and the R.E.M. song “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine),” where Lenny is mentioned twice in the lyrics. In the Stranglers’ “No More Heroes,” there is a reference to Bruce, “Whatever happened to dear old Lenny?”

Keyboardist and arranger Don Randi is the author of You’ve Heard These Hands. Randi had opened for Lenny Bruce in the fifties in Los Angeles at the Cloister nightclub on Sunset Boulevard and camped out in the wings watching the action. Randi had grown up in the Catskills and seen all the great traditional comedians who headlined in the mountain rooms.

In his book, Randi writes, “The audience was a large group of ladies sitting at tables from a Hadassah [Jewish women’s society]. I don’t know why they chose to have their social event at a Lenny Bruce show. I don’t think any of them laughed at the raunchy material. They might have been shocked or didn’t really understand his material. But the guys and I were in stitches laughing so hard.”

A few years earlier, Randi had been employed as a stock boy at California Records Distribution. The company was distributing the Contemporary, World Pacific, Prestige, Riverside, and Blue Note labels and handled the Fantasy Records catalog, which often pressed their records on clear red vinyl. Randi was already a Lenny Bruce fan and loved Bruce’s catalog on Fantasy.

“Fantasy was my label,” Randi explained to me at a 2015 engineering awards function in Culver City at the Sony Pictures Studios. “His records made me laugh. I loved the ‘Religions, Inc.’ story. As a young guy with CRD, I took Lenny Bruce on a day-long promo tour, driving owner Jack Lewerke’s Austin Healey convertible, schlepping Lenny to radio stations and then to record stores. I took him to 105.1 FM radio station and a couple of record stores. He was a good-looking guy. The girls went gaga over him. He was very cool and a chick magnet.

“I wrote a commercial for Zeidler and Zeidler, a men’s clothing store that Lenny read the copy to my underscore. They never used it. I used to have coffee with his mom, Sally Marr, at Schwab’s Pharmacy drugstore on the Sunset Strip in the sixties. Lenny was ahead of his time for his style of comedy. A true genius.”

Guitarist/producer and arranger Don Peake, former lead guitarist (1961-1963) with the Everly Brothers and recording session veteran with Barry White, the Jackson 5 and Ray Charles, witnessed several Bruce gigs in the early sixties as well as enjoying a handful of gatherings inside Bruce’s Hollywood home, formerly owned by the actor W.C. Fields.

“I was dating Lenny’s secretary, and she invited me over several times to his house,” rhapsodized Peake inside his Van Nuys recording studio during a July 2023 interview. “Then we’d all go together and see Lenny headline the Crescendo.

“The first time I actually met Lenny, I blurted out part of his stage show act which I had memorized. Lenny cracked up, and we became instant friends. What I said was ‘Papa, Papa, it’s so good to be out of the box!’ I went on to say, ‘Shut up! Drink your blood, bite Mama goodnight.’ And that was a riff from his Count Dracula bit.

“Lenny was the voice of the bebop jazz comics. Along with Lord Buckley. His passing was a real tragic loss. He was a jazz comedian that all the cats in town really dug.”

In my 2009 book, Canyon of Dreams: The Magic and the Music of Laurel Canyon, I spoke with jazz deejay, music impresario, GNP Crescendo Records founder, Gene Norman, who owned the Crescendo and Interlude venues. Norman headlined Lenny Bruce and was a friend of his.

Norman and his son Neil lived at the top of Sunset Plaza Drive for 60 years, and they would have Christmas parties at their residences. Every day after school, his son Neil Norman would skateboard all the way down to Sunset Boulevard right past Lenny’s house. Occasionally, Lenny would wave at Neil as he went by.

They knew each other well since Lenny worked for Gene at Norman’s clubs. Neil was at many of Lenny’s shows, and they would often walk down the Strip on Lenny’s breaks to get Wil Wright’s Ice Cream on Santa Monica Boulevard.

Norman showcased Bruce and stood by Lenny when Lenny was engulfed in legal woes.

“The Crescendo had been a restaurant and had a wonderful décor,” recounted Gene in a 2008 interview with me. “The Interlude opened a year after the Crescendo. I started with comics. Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Bob Newhart, to name a few. Lenny Bruce got arrested in the parking lot during his gig. I was a little concerned about Lenny’s language because I had never seen that, but I recognized his originality. Sometimes we had trouble with Gerry Mulligan and Lenny Bruce at the beginning. I got them out of jail because I was friendly with the sheriff. Because I was on the radio and TV, and if they had an event, I would always help them.”

In a letter to The Los Angeles Times Calendar section on August 21, 2016, former Los Angeles sheriff deputy Wilmer Abram confessed to a vice squad assignment monitoring Lenny Bruce one night on Sunset Strip at a comedy club, most likely the Crescendo.

“As he began his act, he spotted my lieutenant and me and said something like, ‘I see we have some police present tonight. Since I can only be arrested if the police witness me committing a crime, let’s turn out the lights.’ So, the lights went out and stayed out for 20 minutes of Bruce’s set. He did his bits in the pitch dark to a captivated audience. We would have busted him if the lights had been on. Today his act would be considered to be on the clean side.”

“I saw Lenny perform a bunch of times around Hollywood,” volunteered the drummer/percussionist, Jim Keltner. “When he was at the top of his game. Once at the Crescendo Club I took my girlfriend Cynthia with me. Lenny was so charismatic. He’d sit on a stool with a cigarette and just talk. You hung onto every word. As a teenager, you wanted to be cool, and no one was cooler than Lenny. I wanted to talk like him and act like him. I already thought I sort of looked like him.

“When the saxophonist Joe Maini died, they had a tribute to him in Hollywood at Shelly’s Manne-Hole club. I was sitting at a table, and Lenny walked by. He was with two other guys. He was wearing a long coat with the collar up. And as he passed by,” Jim sheepishly admitted, “I heard him say, ‘Joe banged every chick in this room.’”

“Lenny Bruce’s name was spoken with such reverence on ‘the street,’ i.e., Bleecker & Macdougal,” proclaimed singer and songwriter Mark Sebastian. “Home to the clubs where I performed as a teen. We got Paul Krassner’s The Realist at the newsstand on our block, and I could read about his trial and quotes from his routines. Someone played me his records, and I was hooked! I read How to Talk Dirty and Influence People…and was won over by the depth his material possessed. I saw it was more profound than the ‘working blue,’ or ‘sick comic’ tag with which he was saddled. I listened to or read every recorded word he ever issued and saw he was the greatest. The awful part was watching him become Lenny Bruce, a legal defendant, getting banned and crucified by law enforcement. This chapter must’ve become tedious for his audiences. It was awful, like a film where your heroes get slaughtered at the end.

“I grew up in the time of the comedy record like My Son, The Folksinger (Allan Sherman) or Vaughn Meader’s The First Family. It was hard enough to get access to Lord Buckley, let alone Lenny Bruce. As a musician, I appreciate that Lenny’s work, well, you need to HEAR it! The syncopations, the unexpected beats, are all musical. So much is lost for those of us who read most of it and had so few recordings in which to glory. If only some lost treasure trove of his performances could be unearthed. We got so little.”

“When I was 22 in 1968, I worked for most of that year in the Melbourne University Book Shop,” emailed Australian-based musician and author, David Pepperell. “It was a particularly interesting time as the Australian government – finally – brought in an ‘R’ certification that allowed the thousands of books previously banned in this country to be published here – stuff from Henry Miller, William Burroughs, Marquis De Sade etc. etc.

“One book I grabbed as it came in was a paperback called The Essential Lenny Bruce, a collection of Lenny’s routines. It was hysterically funny, and I could not put it down, reading it between customers at the front desk of the shop.

“I had read about Lenny, remembered his catastrophic tour of 1962, and wondered what the fuss was about – he was referred to as a ‘sick’ comedian, but I could never work out what that exactly meant. That became very clear to me reading The Essential Lenny Bruce!

“Lenny exposed all the smug hypocrisy of the fifties and the people who took part in it, and they got him, and they killed him.

“Lenny Bruce came to Australia in September 1962 for what was intended to be a two-week stand-up stint. Brought over by promoter Lee Gordon, his visit turned into a legendary disaster, and he left the country after 13 turbulent days following media backlash, venue cancellations, and police harassment. His records were never released in this country but were available at some specialist shops on US import.

“It was a shocking tour – the police attended what few shows he did, the newspapers went nuts demanding ‘this sick comedian’ be thrown out of the country, and he was even pilloried in Parliament. Truly tragic, as he was really broke and hoped to make good money in Australia to get himself out of the financial hole the fines and trials had put him in. Alas, that was not to be. I regret being only 16 in 1962, so I had no hope whatever of seeing him perform here – well, nobody did really, as he only did a couple of shows.

“I managed to get the records a bit later when I had my own record shop in Melbourne, but they seemed to fall flat without an audience. The live shows released a bit later were better, but I still do not believe they were anything like seeing him live.”

British-born, L.A.-based Martin Lewis is a noted polymath. (“I’m not a Renaissance Man. I’m so ancient that I’m a Dark Ages Man!”) Among his many hats, he is a respected producer, marketing strategist, Beatles scholar and humorist. He also knows the roots of the British love for Lenny Bruce.

“Lenny Bruce had a small but significant impact in the UK. It was primarily in the way that he impressed and influenced cultural leaders rather than a mass effect. Musicians who were taken with Lenny Bruce and became fans included two of the Beatles – John Lennon and George Harrison. They first became acquainted with his work through imported copies of his three albums released by San Francisco-based Fantasy Records.

“When in 1967 the concept came up for the cover art of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the individual Beatles were asked to nominate heroes that they would like to see on the cover as club members. Both John and George proposed the then recently departed Lenny Bruce.

“An instrumental jam on disc three of George’s triple-disc 1970 album All Things Must Pass featuring George, and most of Delaney & Bonnie and Friends needed a title. George had just received a copy of the posthumously released Lenny Bruce double album The Berkeley Concert – issued in the UK by the pioneering indie company Transatlantic Records created in 1961 by one of my mentors – Nat Joseph.

“Nat had licensed the album from Herb Cohen, who ran Frank Zappa’s Bizarre/Reprise label. That album was all the rage in London in 1969 and 1970 when George was working on his album. One of the routines on it was called ‘Religions, Inc.’ Lenny Bruce is portraying a slick, Madison Avenue advertising executive fast-talking the Pope in Rome. He ends the phone call in which he’s discussing the Catholic Church’s latest products with the line ‘thanks for the pepperoni!’

“Bingo! The savage irreverence of the line tickled George – and he grabbed it for the title of his new instrumental.

“I had the privilege and joy of being friends with the person most responsible for Lenny Bruce becoming known in the UK – the comedian Peter Cook. I first got to know Peter in the mid-1960s as a teenage fan. He lived very near my school. Then in the mid-1970s I became a producer of various projects with him. That rapidly grew into a close friendship that continued for 20 years until his sad and very premature passing.

“In 1976 I co-produced the first show, film and album of what became The Secret Policeman’s Ball benefit series for Amnesty International that I co-created with John Cleese. That was when I started to spend large amounts of time with Peter.

“My relationship with Peter had similarities to my bond with my first and most influential mentor – former Beatles publicist Derek Taylor. Working as a protégé of Derek, I would sit at his feet and encourage him to regale me with tales of his time with the Beatles.

“With Peter, I listened eagerly to any and all of his reminiscences from the 1960s. I recall asking him about Lenny Bruce. He recounted a fabulous story that was one of his prized anecdotes.

“Peter was a wunderkind who was a huge success in the UK straight out of Cambridge University. Beyond the Fringe was a hit at the Edinburgh Festival when he was 22 – a West End smash when he was 23. He opened his satirical nightclub The Establishment in Central London before he was 24. (He promoted his club by telling the media ‘I expect it to emulate the success of the Berlin satirical nightclubs of the 1920s & early 1930s that did so much to thwart the rise of Hitler and the Second World War…’)

“Peter didn’t visit the USA for the first time until late 1962, so he knew of Lenny Bruce only through those imported albums – but it was enough for him to take the leap of faith to book him to do a two-week season in London at his new club. So, in April 1962, Peter Cook brought Lenny Bruce to London.

“He personally picked up Lenny Bruce at London’s Heathrow Airport in a Rolls Royce then dropped him off at his Central London hotel. Acting the gracious host, he asked Lenny if there was anything he wanted. The first thing that Lenny Bruce asked him for was to score some heroin!

“Now Peter Cook enjoyed drinking, but he was not a drug taker of note and certainly not in 1962. So, he knew nothing of drug culture. He thought, ‘Where do I get heroin? That’s the sort of thing that jazz musicians use…’

“His comedic partner Dudley Moore was also a noted jazz pianist, so he went to him. ‘I asked Dudley if he had any drugs. But all that Dudley had was some junior aspirin – and I didn’t think that that would entirely satisfy Lenny Bruce.’

“So, in the middle of the April 1962 night Peter Cook goes on a search of London’s underground dives trying to score heroin. And since Peter was not remotely au fait with drug culture, he didn’t know where to go. After several hours of fruitless searching, he got back to the hotel and reported apologetically that he’d not been able to get any heroin.

“Lenny Bruce responded, ‘That’s all right… can you get me some chocolate cake instead?’

“Irritated by this twist after his Sisyphean quest for a bundle of Smack – yet ever the dry wit, Peter alluded to it being an even more exotic narcotic than high-grade Horse. ‘Sorry, Lenny – it’s very hard to score chocolate cake in Britain…’”

Richard Pryor loved Lenny Bruce. I met Pryor in 1974 at Pip’s Backgammon Club, which later became a discotheque. Monti Rock III and Bob Crewe were in the room.

What an education I received as a welcomed listener hearing my dear friend Robert Marchese talk with Pryor. Marchese won a Grammy for producing the 1968 Richard Pryor Live at the Troubadour for the Dove/Reprise label. Henry Diltz took the album jacket front cover photo.

In a November 2022 phone call, Marchese told me, “I knew Lenny from around Hollywood 1964-1966. I watched his act a few times and worked for Phil Spector and [musical director] Don Randi on The Big T.N.T. Show.

“In 1966 I saw a show Phil booked for Lenny at The Music Box Theater in Hollywood. Lenny was in a down period. Richard was a big fan of Lenny, and I later said to him, ‘Don’t try and be a crusader like Lenny Bruce. Be a comedian.’”

In 2026 I interviewed Howard Wolf, an important figure in the 1962-1965 San Francisco comedy world, before he became a talent supplier for the city’s Avalon Ballroom and The Kaleidoscope venue in Hollywood.

Wolf caught Lenny’s club act many times at The Hungry I in San Francisco and knew Lenny Bruce and his mother, Sally Marr. “In late 1965, I was managing the folk- rock group Deep Six, who also did comedy, and later had an LP out in 1966 on Liberty Records. I saw Lenny several times at The Hungry I. His humor was so different. I asked him, ‘Where did you get it from?’ And he replied, ‘I got it from my mom Sally.’

“Sally and I became good friends, and she also managed him. On stage, I had never heard any humor like this. Lenny’s act was unique because he used four letter words! I saw Mort Sahl at The Hungry I, and in the mid-sixties at lounges in Las Vegas I would watch Don Rickles and Shecky Greene.

“Sally was then married to a much younger guy, and he had a much younger sister. The gal was technically Lenny’s aunt. Sally kept saying to me, ‘I got the perfect girl for you…’ We went out a couple of times…

“In Hollywood I would see Sally at The Comedy Store. I was with her the first time Robin Williams ever performed in the upper room. It was the funniest set I ever saw in my life. Sally was a real Jewish mama.”

As a talent scout, Sally helped discover Tommy Chong & Cheech Marin, Pat Morita, and Sam Kinison.

“I also knew Sally Marr,” reiterated songwriter, record producer and music publisher, Kim Fowley. “She used to bring me down to the Coronet Theater on La Cienega. I’d get in the delicatessen room and take on all the comedians from back east, and even Lenny Bruce wouldn’t come up. ‘Ma, he’s good.’

“Lenny would not freestyle with me because he knew better,” boasted Fowley.

“She taught me. Roy Silver was my manager in 1966. He was the original co-manager of Bob Dylan with Albert Grossman.”

Lenny Bruce made a big impression on writer/author and spoken word artist Paul Krassner, publisher of the satirical magazine The Realist since 1958.

In the mid-nineties, Simon & Schuster published Krassner’s autobiography Confessions of a Raving Unconfined Nut. Krassner’s literary career began at Mad magazine and writing for The Steve Allen Show.

Paul edited Bruce’s autobiography How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, published by Playboy Press in 1965. In 2016, the book was re-published by Da Capo Press in a paperback edition, with a Preface by Lewis Black and Foreword from Howard Reich.

During 2004, I interviewed Krassner.

“Groucho Marx once called me Lenny Bruce’s successor. It’s like you are part of a myth and handed some kind of torch,” mused Krassner. “The audience are your peers, not your inferiors. And a lot of performers treat them like that. When Lenny Bruce would meet people, he wouldn’t do shtick. He would ask questions and learn. And then sometimes that would become part of his act; the dialogue that ensued. Lenny’s exact words were: ‘I am part of everything I indict.’
“He made it a point to try to never get a laugh because of a four-letter word. He’d be doing a character, and for that aptness of character, he would use the language, or he would analyze the language. Many comics today get their laughs with profanity, on the beat,” he continued.

“I was just at the Montreal Comedy Festival. 350 stand-up comics and the janitor had to come up on-stage to sweep the dick jokes off the stage. But there were a few that shone out in the midst of it.

“I learned a great deal from Lenny. When I first started performing, I was billed as Paul Maul, and he told me to use my real name. I learned compassion from him. He would take things from the point of view of the villain, you know, and carry it to the ultimate. He had empathy for all points of view. It didn’t necessarily get laughs, but he became a communicator, not just a comedian,” Krassner reinforced.

“When I first met him in 1959, Lenny would come out with a newspaper headline, or he’d play ‘Spanish Harlem’ from a record when he came on stage. He would do ‘show and tell’ things like that. Later on, it happened to be the legal briefs that he would be doing. I started with an envelope of press clippings, and I would just go off on that. And after a while, I dropped the clippings.

“Phil Ochs and I became friends. He’s one of those people who are still with me. On occasion, I’ll hear Lenny say, ‘Don’t tell that joke, it’s a cheap shot.’ Or I’ll go to an afternoon movie alone, and Ochs will have a reaction to the film.”

Phil Spector is the co-writer with Jerry Leiber of “Spanish Harlem.” A favorite song of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who sang it live with footballer Roosevelt Grier on guitar during his 1968 Democratic Presidential campaign. Phil once played a game of pool with Kennedy at The Factory Club.

In the mid-seventies, Spector released an LP on his Warner/Spector label, The Law, Language and Lenny Bruce. It was recorded the night before Bruce’s death.

Jerry Wexler, the former Atlantic Records executive and record producer, supplied the illuminating liner notes to The Law, The Language and Lenny Bruce.

“Dear Phil: Thank you for the test pressing on Lenny. I think it is fantastic.

“Many of the bits in this LP surpass in brilliance, insight, and compassion anything I’ve heard of Lenny’s. I had come to the point where his judicial musings were beginning to put me off, and I was beginning to regard his obsession with his trial (and trials) as a bore. I have a new insight. Lenny really achieves new dimensions as a prophet when he addresses himself to the nature of the law, the judge and policeman in the same sense as the Old Testament prophets did when they attacked kings and commoners alike, exposing the unending cop-outs and rationalizations with which people protect their paltry possessions and nurse their hard-won neuroses and precious foibles. Those in power are better able to perpetuate their grip on their baggage, both material and psychic, than those they oppress; but both the haves and the have-nots are uptight in this regard.

“When Lenny is really popping and cooking, as he is in this LP, I get so turned on that I get a euphoric kick. It is a case of terrific rapport and shared viewpoint, and an electric-like phenomenon of awareness takes place, perhaps what James Joyce refers to as ‘epiphany’ in Portrait of the Artist. Lenny induced this in me many times in clubs, but I don’t remember it happening listening to his records until this time. Again, I thank you for the record.”

Last decade, Wexler and I talked about the liner notes I was preparing on the first-ever CD release on Water Records of Allen Ginsberg’s 1965 Kaddish album. It’s a live recording from a radio station on the Brandeis University campus in Waltham, Massachusetts. Wexler initially issued it as an LP on Atlantic Records.

I asked Jerry to comment on Phil Spector.

“I’m still very fond of him,” stressed Wexler. “All of Phil’s aggressions and talents were apparent to us at Atlantic when he was a kid. He was brash, cocky, and talented. A pop genius like Jerry Leiber.

“I respect Phil. He could do it all. The song and the recording existed in his brain. Phil’s records were made in his head before he even entered the recording studio. When Phil went into the studio, it came out of him, like Minerva coming out of Jupiter’s head. Every instrument had its role to play, and it was all prefigured. The singer was just one tile in this intaglio,” underlined Wexler.

“Phil was born on Christmas Day in 1940,” posed writer and novelist Daniel Weizmann, who authored A History of Rock. “But I see him as the first truly post-Holocaust American Jew. He refused to grovel and play the Borscht Belt guy, the entertainment guy. And yet he had one foot in that old world grandiosity. His music was for the new utopian free-spirited teenagers, but it also contained the secret mania of having grown up with the shadow of genocide and the bomb. He meant business.

“In a way, he is the link between Lenny Bruce and Bob Dylan. Once Phil planted the seed, the sixties just had to happen.”
In a 1976 interview I did with Fairfax High graduate Spector for Melody Maker inside his Beverly Hills mansion, we discussed Lenny Bruce. Spector touted Malcolm X, Lenny Bruce, Paul Robeson and Muhammad Ali as his heroes.

“My graduating theme was ‘Daring to Be Different,’ Phil announced. “The moment I dared to, they called me different. I always thought I knew what the kids wanted to hear. They were frustrated, uptight. I would say no different from me when I was in school. I had a rebellious attitude. I was for the underdog. I was concerned that they were as misunderstood as I was.

“Lenny Bruce is a star, but they won’t bring him back, which they did with Chaplain. Lenny was my brother,” he emphasized. “He was one of the greatest people who ever lived. One of the greatest philosophers who ever lived. I was fortunate enough to know great people to be inspired to do things.

“I refer back to Lenny a lot. I believe he played a great part in my life. You know, he was misjudged, mistreated, and misunderstood. To say he died for Deep Throat is bull. Lenny was murdered!”

Drummer Hal Blaine was booked on Spector’s production of Ike & Tina Turner’s “River Deep, Mountain High” at Gold Star recording studio. In the mid-fifties, as Harold Simon Belsky, he did gigs with Bruce in San Bernardino at a club called The Magic Carpet.

I was very fortunate to know and interview for a few of my books, writer and deejay Dave Diamond, a powerful rock ‘n’ roll voice on the Southern California airwaves during 1965-1967. Initially on AM radio stations KHJ, KBLA and KFWB, Diamond in 1965 had a KHJ 6:00 pm slot, following the legendary Real Don Steele that helped launch the game-changing Boss Radio format.

During a 2004 email exchange, Dave detailed a 1966 escapade with travel companion Spector when Phil took him to see Lenny Bruce in San Francisco.

“One Sunday Phil calls and asks if I wanna go see Lenny Bruce, the midnight show at the Basin Street West in San Francisco. It was about 8:00pm, and he said we could make the midnight show if we caught a United flight at 9:00pm Which we did.

“We made the Lenny Bruce show after having a drink with [deejay] Tom Donahue, whom we met in the bar. Lenny, of course, was sliding downhill at that point, and his show consisted of him in jeans, lumberjack boots, and a newspaper, from which he quoted and tried to make political comments with humorous kickers. It really wasn’t working. The place was fairly empty.

“Phil and I had cocktails and coffee, and Phil and Lenny talked business for a few minutes. One could see Phil did love Lenny and wanted to help him. We were back on the plane for L.A. around 9:00 am the next morning.”

“Once I left for San Francisco, we drifted apart. I did send him a glowing letter about ‘River Deep, Mountain High,’ and he sent me a gracious reply.

“I later went back to work at RKO in San Francisco, where they gave me a little more slack, and I tightened up and held # 1 rating at KFRC radio for four years.

“I can truthfully say that in all my dealings with Phil he was a friend, a peaceful man, a gentleman. He was meek, tender, and an incredible talent.”

“I readily confess to spending – much opposed to wasting – beyond my fair share of time beneath headphones with Monty Python and even more word-wisely the Firesign Theatre when I should have been studying through high school,” offers Canadian “eh”-student Gary Pig Gold.

“Yet it was in the throes of Zappa collecting back then that I first came across a 1969 Bizarre/Reprise release called The Berkeley Concert, a posthumously released recording from December of ’65 by someone I’d heard of – via his obvious disciple George Carlin – but up until that day had never actually heard.

“Then, a good decade-and-a-half later at the dawn of what we may now call the Video Age, I came into possession of (via some mysterious far-off P.O. box) a VHS tape called The Lenny Bruce Performance Film …which came complete with an ‘opening featurette’ animation of the man’s classic ‘Thank You Mask Man’ to boot. Again, I was – quite eagerly and happily so – delivered another bout of mental whiplash care of this absolute master of the meticulous.

“Of course, in every single year since and counting, I have made it a point to avail myself of each and every interview, biography (Albert Goldman’s is highly recommended), newspaper clipping, magazine profile, audio and/or video recording and sometimes even re-creation (yes, including Dustin’s) that I can of the man and his mindful art, as I like to call it. I consider this all more than necessary food for thought, from a giant who was even more prescient, as it turns out, than he was delightfully ‘perverse.’ Long may he swear.”

There is another memorable encounter with Lenny Bruce, courtesy of record producer and artist manager Denny Bruce. In 1965, Bruce worked as a drummer with Frank Zappa, and at the time had an encounter one very late evening with Lenny Bruce, Zappa and Spector at Canter’s Delicatessen.

Denny emailed me in August 2016.

“Frank Zappa had the feeling that perhaps Phil Spector could appreciate what the Mothers of Invention stood for, on all levels. The band had been turned down already by most of the L.A. labels, all of whom were ‘majors.’ We had Elliot Ingber on lead guitar. Phil knew him from high school and earlier played with him.

“Frank saw Phil as an indie label guy, who was doing well with his own label, making hits. And, looking at his track record, not to mention the Rolling Stones, he would be open to getting into business with us.

“I think it was Herb Cohen who talked to Phil about meeting with Frank and seeing what happens. A meeting was set up for 2:30 a.m. at Canter’s Deli, on Fairfax. Frank wanted to me to come and keep him company. We are a little early, have some coffee, and now it is 3:00 am. Frank said, ‘I wasn’t expecting him to be on time!’ Maybe at 3:20 a.m. we see Phil walking in, and he has Lenny Bruce with him.

“We had heard that Phil had been helping Lenny out, financially, as by now he was broke, and nobody would hire him. Lenny looked pale and tired. He had a big blue ‘law book’ and a legal pad. So, it’s the four of us in a booth for four, under the bright lights of Canter’s. A waitress who looks like she has worked there all of her life asks if we need menus. ‘No, we will order.’

“Lenny goes straight into opening his law book and says, ‘Dig this silly shit!’ Now he is reading about another case that is somewhat similar to what he is going through. Fifteen minutes later he is still reading aloud, and writing things down.

“Frank finally says, ‘Hello, I am Frank Zappa. It is a pleasure both of you are here.’

“Lenny looks at me and says, ‘And, who are you?’

“I said, ‘Denny Bruce.’ He laughs really loud. He says, ‘C’mon, what is your real name?’

“I responded, ‘Dennis Bruce.’ He loves it, and tells the story of how he had to change his name for ‘showbiz’ reasons, from Leonard Schneider, and needed something ‘Goyim,’ so he could get dates in the Midwest. He picked Bruce out of the sky.

“Needless to say, it was hard to ask him to be quiet, as this is a business meeting. But on the other hand, it felt like Phil wasn’t ready to say, ‘What kind of deal are you guys looking for?’ And it just kind of ended without any business mention at all.

“I walk out with Frank to his Chevy station wagon, and he looks at me and says ‘Is Denny Bruce your real name?’ I said ‘Yes!’

“Zappa shrugged, ‘I was under the impression you changed your name as a tribute to Lenny Bruce!’”

Zappa’s manager Herb Cohen, with Frank, formed Straight Records and released Lenny Bruce The Berkeley Concert and Lord Buckley’s A Most Immaculately Hip Aristocrat, a compilation of unissued tapes.

Buckley had an avid cult following of jazz and rock musicians, hippies, beatniks, and FM radio deejays. In 1977, George Harrison’s hit single, “Crackerbox Palace,” was inspired by Buckley’s home in the Hollywood Hills. Buckley was heard on the ABC-TV nationally syndicated Beany and Cecil animated television series created by Bob Clampett when he was the voice of “Go Man Van Gough.”

“What I love about Zappa is the way he connects to the pre-Beatle world of American bohemianism,” noticed essayist Daniel Weizmann.

“Even long after he became the reluctant king of hippiedom, Zappa always struck me as a beatnik at heart, with that same Mad [magazine] trickster spirit of Lenny Bruce, Russ Meyer, early Bukowski, Venice cats like Lawrence Lipton and Stuart Z. Perkoff, and the whole crosshatch of subcultures that were just under the surface in Cali ’59 to ’63—bikers, surfers, poets, bongo-heads all pulling for exotica, for erotica, for something else—‘the left behinds of the Great So-ci-e-ty!’ (Cue the kazoos!) Case in point: In early ’65, Zappa got busted by a vice squad undercover officer for agreeing to produce a ‘sexually suggestive reel-to-reel’ for a stag party.”

In late 2000, Columbia Records released the soundtrack album to the Paramount Pictures film Wonder Boys, featuring singer/songwriters including John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Neil Young, Tim Hardin, Tom Rush and Leonard Cohen.

t’s directed by Academy Award-winner Curtis Hanson (L.A. Confidential), stars Michael Douglas, Toby Maguire, Frances McDormand, Katie Holmes, Rip Torn, Richard Thomas and Robert Downey, Jr.

The soundtrack and film incorporate a new recording by Dylan, “Things Have Changed,” which won an Oscar for Best Original Song at the 2001 Academy Awards Show.

I interviewed Hanson in 2000 for HITS magazine. In the mid-sixties, he attended college at Cal State Los Angeles and had a stint as a movie reviewer/entertainment writer for the school newspaper.

In 1966, former San Fernando Valley boys, Curtis and his pal, budding screenwriter Michael Jenning, who later wrote Next of Kin and Spot Marks the X, schlepped to Hollywood and witnessed Lenny Bruce at the Music Box Theater.

“Lenny was very funny on stage. Curtis introduced me to Bruce’s work from his red vinyl albums on Fantasy Records,” Jenning remarked in 2026.

“When I was 18,” Hanson reflected, “I went to Cal State L.A., over on the other side of town, pretended to be a journalism major, became the movie critic for the paper, and turned that into entertainment editor. They gave me a page a week.

“So, then I was at The Ash Grove, The Troubadour, Shelley’s Manne-Hole, The Light House, and McCabe’s Guitar Shop. I was seeing people like Tim Hardin and Tom Rush. And seeing them free (laughs).

“Tim Hardin I’ve been a fan of since day one. The album Tim Hardin 2 was an LP that I wore out a couple of copies back when it was new.”

Hardin’s fourth album, Tim Hardin 3: Live in Concert, released in 1968, includes the song “Lenny’s Tune” about his friend Bruce.

The Official Website of Lenny Bruce

https://lennybruce.org

© 2026 Harvey Kubernik

Harvey Kubernik is the author of 20 books, including 2009’s Canyon Of Dreams: The Magic And The Music Of Laurel Canyon, 2014’s Turn Up The Radio! Rock, Pop and Roll In Los Angeles 1956-1972, 2015′s Every Body Knows: Leonard Cohen, 2016′s Heart of Gold Neil Young and 2017′s 1967: A Complete Rock Music History of the Summer of Love.

Sterling/Barnes and Noble in 2018 published Harvey and Kenneth Kubernik’s The Story Of The Band: From Big Pink To The Last Waltz. In 2021 they wrote Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child for Sterling/Barnes and Noble.

Otherworld Cottage Industries in 2020 published Harvey’s Docs That Rock, Music That Matters. His Screen Gems: (Pop Music Documentaries and Rock ‘n’ Roll TV Scenes) was published in 2026 by BearManor Media. Kubernik is currently working as the Creative Director and author of a book on the Beatles for a UK publisher scheduled for 2027 publication.

Harvey spoke at the special hearings in 2006 initiated by the Library of Congress held in Hollywood, California, discussing archiving practices and audiotape preservation.

In 2017, he appeared at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, in its heralded Distinguished Speakers Series, and as a panelist where he discussed the forty-fifth anniversary of The Last Waltz at the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles in 2023.

During 2025, Kubernik was interviewed in the Siobhan Logue-written and -directed documentary The Sound of Protest, airing on the Apple TVOD TV broadcasting service. The film also features Smokey Robinson, Hozier, Skin (Skunk Anansie), Two-Tone’s Jerry Dammers, Angélique Kidjo, Holly Johnson, David McAlmont, Rhiannon Giddens, and more.

Harvey was an interview subject along with Iggy Pop, the Beach Boys’ Bruce Johnston, Love’s Johnny Echols, the Bangles’ Susanna Hoffs, Victoria, Debbi Peterson, and founding members of the Seeds for director/producer Neil Norman’s documentary The Seeds: Pushin’ Too Hard. In summer 2026, the GNP Crescendo company will release it on DVD/Blu-ray).

Nearly a half century ago on August 16, 1975 in Orange County, California, I interviewed Johnny Cash for the now defunct UK music weekly Melody Maker at the Royal Inn Hotel in Anaheim when he was touting his autobiography, Man In Black, at a Christian Book Sellers convention.

In our conversation, I asked Cash about Bob Dylan.

“I became aware of Bob Dylan when the Freewheelin’ album came out in 1963. I thought he was one of the best country singers I had ever heard. I always felt a lot in common with him. I knew a lot about him before we had ever met. I knew he had heard and listened to country music. I heard a lot of inflections from country artists I was familiar with. I was in Las Vegas in ’63 and ’64 and wrote him a letter telling him how much I liked his work. I got a letter back and we developed a correspondence.

“We finally met at Newport in 1964. It was like we were two old friends. There was none of this standing back, trying to figure each other out. He’s unique and original. I respect him. Dylan is a few years younger than I am but we share a bond that hasn’t diminished. I get inspiration from him.

“I keep lookin’ around as we pass the middle of the ‘70s and I don’t see anybody come close to Bob Dylan.”

##

The Bob Dylan Blonde On Blonde Bob Johnston-produced recording sessions began in New York City in October 1965 at CBS studios and relocated to Nashville, Tennessee at the company’s facility until March 10, 1966.

Dylan and Johnston during April ’66 in four days did the bulk of the final monaural mixdown session at Columbia’s studios in Hollywood. A stereo mix was subsequently done in a four-hour booking before the double LP was released to AM radio stations and retail outlets on June 20, 1966.

I bought my first mono copy of Blonde On Blonde at The Frigate record shop in Los Angeles on 8101 W 3^rd Street and then the stereo one at Wallichs Music City in Hollywood at 1501 Vine Street.

Opening on July 18, 2026 at The Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma will be Thin Wild Mercury: Dylan 1966. It’s an immersive multimedia exhibition that captures the spectacle, power and fury of Dylan’s landmark year following his controversial electric performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.

From his fall 1965 US concert dates with The Band, to the recording and release of Blonde On Blonde and the writing of his first novel, Tarantula, to the raucous and defiant 1966 World Tour, Thin Wild Mercury: Dylan 1966 features numerous never-before-seen manuscripts, photographs and newly restored film footage from the era.

Along the way, visitors will experience Dylan’s emergence as a cool and at times combative rock star, rubbing shoulders with the likes of the Beatles, the Stones, Marlon Brando, Françoise Hardy and Andy Warhol, who captured Dylan in two iconic yet seldom-seen screen tests. Visitors will be able to make their own screen tests by way of an interactive Screen Test Machine, on loan from The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.

Highlights include: original Blonde On Blonde lyrics including “I Want You” and “One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)”; original typescript drafts from Tarantula and associated writings from his mid-’60s oeuvre; never-before-seen photos and documents and footage from the 1966 World Tour; brand-new hour-long film program featuring never-before-seen footage and newly conducted interviews with key figures from the era including Jerry Schatzberg, Richard Alderson and Harvey Brooks.

“The year following Newport is one of the most visually and musically exciting periods of Dylan’s long career,” says Mark Davidson, exhibition curator and senior director of archives and exhibitions at American Song Archives. “With his wild hair, impenetrable sunglasses, and hip tailored suits, Dylan was unequaled in style and attitude. And yet, he bristled at being called a pop star, sparring with the press and audiences alike. It was Dylan and The Band against the world.”

##

Since 1975 I’ve interviewed sound engineers, record producers, session musicians, and photographers who helped create Blonde On Blonde.

I’ve also asked writers, authors, poets, and filmmakers about it.

John Hammond: When I first heard Bobby… It was his natural talent, repertoire, and originality in the recording studio.

Billy James: As an actor, I appeared on Broadway and then television. I saw Dylan in the Village. I met James Dean around the NBC TV studios in New York. I then was a publicist at Columbia Records. In 1961 I taped an interview with Bob Dylan for the company and prepared his first biography. I worked for Columbia as a talent scout as well. I went to Bob’s solo acoustic recording sessions and continued as a writer for the Columbia label.

Regarding the early Dylan that I met, I wrote an article for the weekly edition of Variety when I worked at Columbia Records. My headline ran “Folk Fans Find a James Dean.”

On January 1, 1964 I moved to Los Angeles and worked for the company at their Sunset Boulevard offices. At the time I was Manager of Information Services for Columbia Records. I met the Byrds in November 1964. Terry Melcher invited me to a session. We had fabulous times together. As for the Byrds, I was on the dance floor with everybody else at the nightclub Ciro’s. Agent Ben Shapiro got them on Columbia through his client, Miles Davis, and Terry was assigned to produce them. I wrote the liner notes for their debut album Mr Tambourine Man.

My two heroes at Columbia were label president Goddard Lieberson and talent scout/record producer John Hammond. I introduced Phil Spector to Bob Dylan at the Fred C Dobbs Coffee Shop on Sunset Blvd. I arranged local press conferences for Dylan in 1965, and in 1966 before he performed at the Hollywood Bowl.

One of the ways I have bracketed my life as a grownup is to describe my relationship with four people: James Dean, Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, and Jackson Browne.

Allen Ginsberg: Dylan said that Jack Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues had inspired him to be a poet. That was his poetic inspiration. We were being more candid and truthful than most other public figures or writers at the time. We were switched over to writing a spoken idiomatic vernacular, actual American English, which turned on many generations later.

In the days of Wordsworth, who in his preface of lyrical ballads suggested that poets begin writing in the words and diction of men of intelligence, or talk to each other intelligently, instead of imitating another century’s literary style.

I thought the whole ‘40s, ‘50s literary movement was historically really important, and was kind of a wall built against authoritarianism, that there would be a counter reaction building on the suppression of literature.

I don’t think I would have been singing if it wasn’t for younger Dylan. It was a concert with Happy Traum that I went to and saw in Greenwich Village. And I suddenly started to write my own lyrics, instead of Blake. Dylan’s words were so beautiful.

The first time I heard them I wept. I had come back from India, and Charlie Plymell, a poet I liked a lot in Bolinas, at a Welcome Home Party played me Dylan singing “Masters of War” from The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, and I actually burst into tears. It was a sense that the torch had been passed to another generation. And somebody had the self-empowerment of saying, “I’ll know my song well before i start singing it.”

Jerry Wexler: Ginsberg and Dylan both are geniuses. Top of the line. Allen Ginsberg may not have influenced the generation as such but he sure influenced a hell of a lot of writers. And Bob Dylan, of course, changed the culture. So, there is a correspondence between the two guys.

(Courtesy Gary Pig Gold Archives)

Fred Catero: I was a Columbia Records studio staff engineer from 1962-1972. I started as a mixing engineer. Roy Halee did most of the rock stuff. John Hammond introduced me to Dylan. I worked with producer Tom Wison on Dylan [1964 and 1965] sessions.

The head of Columbia engineering, Eric Porterfield, designed all-tube hand-built consoles from the former radio rooms. Columbia studios had a custom Ampex 8-track, a live chamber and Altec Lansing A7 speakers. ‘The Voice of the Theatre.’

For microphones I used a Neumann U47 and maybe a SM57 on lead vocals. The studios had great natural echo, reverb and leakage. You wanted that. In fact, it added to the drama. I knew the rooms and where the best place was for piano or bass or the singer. I used two Neumann mikes. One for the guitar which I aimed at an angle down, so it’s not picking up too much voice, and then the vocal mike, not in front of him, almost where the same mike is for the guitar is facing upward. ‘Cause they tend to look down anyway as they play.

I had worked with Mel Torme. I mixed The Tender Land opera (and music) by Aaron Copeland. So, there was a variety of people I had to deal with. I knew concepts of chamber recording.

I did some work with producer Bob Johnston at Columbia. He was blasting the music so loud and saying, ‘turn it up!’ And I got to the point where I said, “Here’s the volume button. Close the door when I leave the studio control room. Turn it up as loud as you want. But wait ‘till I get outside since I have to make my living with my ears. I can’t risk it.”

I remember him saying once, “Damn it! If I don’t feel it in my chest, I can’t tell if I have it. It’s there.”

Al Kooper: When I recorded with Dylan on Highway 61 Revisited it used to be on 799 7th Avenue. And that was Columbia Records and they had the studio in the same place as the offices. So, when moved to Black Rock they then moved the studio further east. So, it was on 49 E. 52^nd.

They duplicated the studio on 7th Avenue. There were three studios there. Second, third and fourth floor. And, so they could do a lot more sessions. And they had the same monitors and the same gear at every place. In those days they had rotary pots instead of faders that slid up and down. It was very archaic. It was also a union shop. With required breaks every three hours. If you were signed to Columbia, you couldn’t record at any outside studio.

I used to cop Dylan acetates out of producer Tom Wilson’s office. He was a very bright and high-class guy, and he really saved my life that day on that Dylan ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ session.

I went to him and said, “Man, let me play the organ.” They had just moved Paul Griffin from the organ to the piano. And I went over to Tom Wilson, and I was invited just to watch, you know. And I said, “Man, why don’t you let me play the organ? I got a great part for this.” Which was bullshit. I had nothing. And he said, “Man…You’re not an organ player…” And then they came to him and said, ‘phone call for you Tom,’ and he just went and got the phone. And I went in to the studio and sat down at the organ. He didn’t say no. He just said I wasn’t an organ player. OK.

On “Like A Rolling Stone,” I was waiting to see what chord they were going to do. There was no music or lead sheet, or anything. I was just playing by ear and I didn’t want to be the one making a mistake because I was doin’ like a rebel run there.

That was the moment he could have just thrown me out and rightfully so. And you know what? He didn’t. And that was it. That was the beginning of my career. Right then and there.

I was supposed to play guitar on that record. I packed up my guitar when I heard Michael Bloomfield warming up. It never occurred to me that somebody my age, and my religion could play the guitar like that. That was only reserved for other people. It never even occurred to me that that was an option for someone my age and my color. I had never seen that, or heard that up to that day. So, that pretty much ended my guitar playing by and large. I said, “Well, OK, he’s as old as me and he can play like that. I’m never gonna be able to play like that. Thank you. Goodbye.” I ended up playing organ on that record, and then I became a keyboard player really that day. So, it was a damn good thing because, you know, that was competition I couldn’t deal with. I brought [bass player] Harvey Brooks into the sessions.

The pianist Paul Griffin. Oh…man…A big influence on me as well! Paul Griffin came from the Baptist church. On Highway 61 Revisited we did the tracks to “Tombstone Blues” and “Queen Jane Approximately” in one day. Done at Columbia studios in New York.

The best thing I can say about Paul Griffin is take five minutes out of your busy day and get a time where you have nothing to bother you at all. Find a real nice stereo system and sit back and put on “One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)” from Blonde On Blonde. And just listen to the piano… And tell me if you can find on a rock ‘n’ roll record anybody playing better than that. And I would really like to hear what your decision is.

To me it is the greatest piano achievement in the history of rock ‘n’ roll. I don’t hear anything than him playing the piano when I hear that record. And I’m thrilled that I’m playing organ but I’m embarrassed. And I think that Dylan should be embarrassed too. ‘Cause Paul just steals that fuckin’ record. It’s the most incredible piano playing I’ve heard in my life. If you’re a piano player try playing that note for note. Paul Griffin on piano was so brilliant. He plays amazing things. And the thing that is really eye-opening about it, are the drums.

During Blonde On Blonde, I was astounded by everything. (laughs). I was astounded by the musicians. I mean, astounded by the musicians. Do you know at one point in “Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine,” Dylan refused to overdub things. He just wanted to play it live right there, and forget about the fact that you could overdub. OK. I said to Bob, “Horns would be really nice on this.” (imitates marching horn line). And he said, “Well…There’s no horns here.” So, Charlie McCoy says, “I play trumpet.” So, Bob said, “I don’t want to overdub anything.” So, Charlie said. “I can play the bass and the trumpet at the same time.” And Bob and I looked at each other, and Bob was laughing, and Charlie said, “No really, I can.” He played them at the same time.

There are a few reasons Blonde On Blonde holds up. The main reason is the chemistry of the participants. That’s the main reason. And the other reason would be the songwriting. I think the combination of those two things could make if they were as wonderful as those two were on that record it could make any record last a long time. The credit has to go to Bob Johnston. It was his idea. He had tried to get Dylan to record there in late 1965. He knew about the chemistry. I also think he felt more comfortable there because he lived there and knew all the musicians intimately.

I had the benefit of whatever time differences there was between Highway 61 Revisited and then the Blonde On Blonde record of being a better player. So that was helpful. I knew how to operate the machine a little better, the Hammond organ. And then I ran in to a methodology thing. Because in New York I was raised, all the sessions I played on and everything, it was three songs in three hours. I had never seen what they did in Nashville. They just hired the musicians and they were booked until we were done that day, or night, or whenever it was. They didn’t have any other distractions, there were no breaks, just whatever it was and I had never worked like that in the studio, but it was a big eye opener for me.

During the day, Bob had a piano in his room and I would go up to his room and he would teach me the song and because there were no cassette machines in those days, I would play the song over and over for him and he would write the lyrics. Actually, I think of myself as the music director of that album. ‘Cause that’s what I did.

I learned after I did Highway 61 Revisited that these sessions were going to be heard for a very long time. So that one time during Blonde On Blonde I started thinking, “You know, wherever my hands move next it’s gonna be around for all time.” I started thinking like that and I said to myself ‘Will you please shut up and just do what you do.’ It can completely freak you out if you thought like that. I had that thought for one second, and then I said, “I really can’t think like this and do this job.” So, yeah, but not on Highway 61 Revisited but on Blonde On Blonde I did have that thought…

The other thing was, by then, Bob and I were friends. We had spent a lot of time together. Off hour time together. Just sitting around bars and shit like that. Going to the movies and all this kind of stuff, so it was a much more comfortable situation and Robbie Robertson came to. Robbie and I split a room together at Roger Miller’s King of The Road Motel. So, Bob brought Robbie and I for his comfort level, rather than just go in there cold. You know what I mean?

No one talks about Bob’s piano playing because they don’t know. Bob had a very unusual way of playing in that he didn’t use his pinkies. So, both his pinkies were up in the air when he played the piano and that’s very interesting to me. It was very interesting looking to watch that. I used to really get a kick out of that.

I had played live in 1965 with Robbie and Dylan. The Hollywood Bowl and Forest Hills in New York. The Hollywood Bowl show was the only place where Bob played where he wasn’t booed. How ‘bout that?

In 1966 I got the itinerary for the Dylan tour. I said to myself “I can’t do this.” They were playing Dallas, Texas. Two years after JFK. I said to anybody who would listen, except Bob, of course, “You’re going to fuckin’ Dallas. I don’t want to be the John Connally of rock.” That was my line (laughs). I thought I’d be sitting in the fuckin’ front seat and I’ll get killed.

(Courtesy Gary Pig Gold Archives)

Bob Johnston: After Tom Wilson produced “Like A Rolling Stone,” I was working with Bob Dylan in New York on Highway 61 Revisited and I flew in Charlie McCoy from Nashville. I introduced him to Dylan, and the first thing we cut was a version of “Desolation Row,” with Dylan on acoustic, Charlie on electric, and Harvey Brooks on bass.

I was standing by the sound board and I said to Dylan “Listen, man, you ought to come to Nashville sometime. I got a fix up down there with no clocks and the musicians are fuckin’ great.” He’d never answer you, he’d just go “hmmm,” like Jack Benny.

So, I finished Highway 61 Revisited and then Dylan called me about six months later and he said, “I got a bunch of songs. What do you think about going to Nashville?” “That’s what I was talkin’ about!”

In 1966 we went down there for Blonde On Blonde and the first thing was beautiful. He said, “Well, I got an idea…” He stayed out in the studio ten or twelve hours. He never left it. He’d eat candy bars and drink milk shakes and all, and nobody does that much.

I sent the musicians away and told them to do anything you want to and be in phone contact. Don’t go home… you can be in the studio down here if you need some beds or something. About 2:00 in the morning Dylan came out of the studio and said, “I got a song, I think. Is anybody left here?” First thing we did was “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.”

I told everybody if they quit playing, they were gone. It didn’t matter because I could overdub anybody but Dylan. But if you quit with him, you’ll never hear that song again. And he’d go to the count and play something else. So, they came out and got all around. And Dylan said, “It goes like this. C. D. G.” And then he went over the thing and they said, “Man, we haven’t heard this thing.” I said, “That’s right. The first one who misses just walk out of the room. Don’t stop.”

And he went out there and started counting off, and that’s another thing. Nobody ever counted off for Bob Dylan. Every other artist in the world that I’ve been around has a drummer or somebody else counting. He went one, two, with that foot and it was gone. When we got through, he said, “Let’s hear it back.” And he came in the studio and played back “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” Eleven or twelve minutes. And that was the first thing that we did for Blonde On Blonde. And from then on, it just went up and up and couldn’t go up any higher and higher. I think that’s one of the best tracks ever cut along with “Desolation Row.”

Dylan and I were notorious for using first takes. I don’t see any sense in doing it over and over. They knew what I wanted them to play not what I gave them. That’s why they were there. When I started with Dylan he said, “My voice is too loud.” Good enough. So, I turned it down. Then I’d turn it up. “Man, I can’t hear myself,” and had that voice out there. Finally, we got to the place where he said “I can’t hear myself.” ‘Cause I’d brought it so low. So, I told him I’d take care of it and never asked him about it anymore and turned everything up and had that voice out there.

I would place glass around Dylan for recording. He had a different vocal sound. I didn’t make his different vocal sound. He always had different sounds on. I always had four or eight speakers all over the room and I had ‘em going. The louder I played it the better it sounded to me. This is the way I really did it.

I’ll tell you something else I did recording with Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash. Everybody else at the time was using one microphone. Which means you have to sacrifice something. If you’re gonna have a band you can’t have the band playin’ full tilt, if you’ve got him in the middle because and can’t understand everything with different people in there raising the guitar up, raise the drum up, and do shit like that. And what I always did was that I had three microphones because he was always jerking his head around, and I put the microphone on the left, center and right and it didn’t matter where in the fuckin’ room he went. And then I’d mix and start on the left and go all the way over on the right.

So, I’d usually have the piano on the outside left, without any echo. And then I’d put the echo on the right side. And then I’d have one of the guitars on the right and put the echo on the left. And then I’d match it all alone and brought up everything even so they could fight it out. And then that’s the way the band was.

They didn’t have to raise this and lower this, and fifteen people sitting around doin’ all that shit. The band was there and he was full tilt. Then you could go any place in the room and understand him. And I never heard another word from him about anything. What I did was put a bunch of microphones all over the room and up on the ceiling. I would use all those echoes when everything got through and I could do that as much as I wanted. I wanted it to sound better than anything else sounded ever, and I wanted it to be where everybody could hear it. And I don’t know what Dylan would have been if he stayed in New York with those people, and been mixed like that. And I know he would have never done that shit like he did in Nashville.

During Nashville Skyline I had Cash in the Columbia Music Row studio and thought it would be nice to get Dylan in there, too and I didn’t say anything to them. Cash was in the studio and Dylan came in. “What are you doing here?” “Gonna record.” “Well, I’m recording too.” So, they invited me to dinner, but I said “no thanks.” And when they returned, I had a ‘café set up outside with microphones and their guitars, and they came in, looked at the lights, sorta smiled at each other. June (Carter Cash) was there. We did like eighteen tracks.

As a songwriter, I wrote songs, too. Dylan changed the world. Every song he did I loved. I was a Dylan freak and I knew he was changing the world. I knew he was changing the society as we know it.

Leonard Cohen: I came to New York City in 1966 and was unaware of what was going on at the time. I had never heard of Phil Ochs, Bob Dylan, Judy Collins or any of these people, and I was delighted, overwhelmed and surprised to discover this very frantic musical activity. Producer John Hammond was extremely hospitable and decent. He signed me to Columbia Records.

I liked the work Bob Johnston did with Dylan, and we became good friends. Without his support I don’t think I’d ever gain the courage to perform. I admire Dylan’s work tremendously, especially the later work.

Charlie Daniels: One thing that needs to be said about Bob Johnston and bringing people to town like Dylan and Leonard Cohen. There was skepticism about Bob coming to Nashville because he was taking the place of a legendary producer, Don Law, who was an institution in town.

Here’s this guy Johnston from New York, who had been doing Simon & Garfunkel, Bookends, Dylan, and now Leonard Cohen, who were not really thought of as being country. But the first thing Bob did when he came to town was to do a number one song with Marty Robbins. And in ‘68 produced the albums John Wesley Harding, Flatt & Scruggs’ The Story of Bonnie and Clyde, and of course, Johnny Cash’s live album at Folsom Prison.

He had gained credibility. He was also at the same time, bringing Al Kooper, Dylan and Leonard Cohen into town who had never lived here. Dylan recorded in Nashville in 1966 for a while, but it was he’d come to town, do his stuff, and leave. Dylan happened to record in a studio in Nashville and worked in it.

Hassles with long hairs, prejudice, racism, didn’t exist in our world. In the sixties everything was pretty much in the throes of a lot of upheaval. This was back in Martin Luther King, Jr’s salad days, when he was going around, doing things that a lot of people didn’t understand it or didn’t get it. I was in Nashville when Dr King was assassinated in Memphis. The thing was, when you’re goin’ in to make music that is a whole other thing.

Nobody wanted to work in the big Columbia studio until Bob Johnston came to town and basically took it over. Nobody else wanted to be there. He worked with it, got engineers he enjoyed working with like Neil Wilburn, and he actually brought an engineer from New York with him when he first came down.

The Columbia Studio was union. In Nashville, in the studios, you had to have the machines to be a certain distance away from the boards so the engineer could not work them both. But the thing I remember mostly about Studio A., the big studio, it was the new studio. The old studio, the Quonset Hut, was the legendary studio where the hits had been cut. Everybody wanted to work in that room.

With people like Cohen and Dylan…Most of the Nashville sessions, the country artists they would bring a demo in, they’d play the demo, you play it like the demo, you may change a key on it, but basically, it’s gonna be the same thing, how they want the demo. So, you’re playin’ pretty much inbounds.

Charlie McCoy was the band leader. And he was asked “How much do you want him to play? How many bars? How much do you want him to do?” And Dylan replied, “All he can.” Well that really describes what this is all about.

Bob Dylan (Photo by Jerry Schatzberg ©)

Jerry Schatzberg: Everybody was trying to figure out what kind of drug trip we were trying to portray for the Blonde On Blonde cover since it was out of focus. Nothing to do with that. It was January. Dylan had on a light jacket and I just had on a light jacket and a number of the images while we were moving around were moving, you know. So, they were blurred a little bit. I must say Dylan chose that one and I was delighted. I knew there are a number of other good images from that shoot that were quite good which I use now. For a while I used just the Blonde On Blonde cover. But now, at shows and different places, I show them. They are quite good and absolutely sharp. But people thought we were trying to say something more than what we were.

I think any photographer that photographs another person tries to capture that person as best he can. By this time, I knew Dylan quite well. I’d been photographing him for about a year. We’d hang out together and go places. When you’re in that kind of a relationship you are getting into somebody’s soul.

That is one thing. A lot of people want to know where it was photographed. To the best of my recollection, it was a meat packing district in Manhattan which I had gone over a number of times to find out exactly where and it just doesn’t exist anymore. So, it was either a building that was torn down or totally surfaced and I have no idea. Sony is now in the process of doing a search on a number of albums and where they were shot in New York. A while ago, we went down to the meat packing district with a camera crew and Sony looking for it. But we found a couple of places they might have. I liked the meat-packing district in contrast to Dylan. I felt that would be a good place to shoot.

In color and black and white, it’s the same guy. It’s me photographing Bob Dylan. The first set of photographs I took of him were in 1965 in the recording studio with a Nikon. In color I used a Hasselblad camera.

I had asked Al Aronowitz who was in my studio who was talking to a disc jockey that I knew and I was probably photographing somebody. My ear heard them say, “Dylan, I saw him yesterday. I’m quite friendly with him.”

I said, “Hey. The next time you see him tell him I’d like to photograph him.” The next day I got a call from his wife Sara. Who I knew before she even knew him. She was the one who kept telling me about Bob Dylan. Sara said to Bobby that I would like to photograph you and he said OK. And I replied, “I’d love too.” She gave me the address where they were recording Highway 61 Revisited.

Next day I went over and was welcomed. He even let me hear some of the sides they were doing and comment on it. I must say I was a little intimidated at first but they really made me quite at home. I had photographed a lot of people. The Duke of Windsor when he was once the King of England. I don’t have to be intimated by anybody.

But, you know, when you come across a talent like Dylan…I didn’t catch on to him at the beginning. I was listening to him and it was Sara and Nico from the Velvet Underground they kept yelling, “Genius.” I was very impressed what I heard and what he was doing. He was funny. We used to go to my club, Ondine’s. I was a stock holder, sit at the bar and hang out.

Because the first shoot was during the Highway 61 Revisited recording studio and, of course, that’s his kingdom. He could do anything he wants because he’s comfortable there. He was also comfortable around me because of Sara and Al. I got the photographs in and wanted them to like them and they did. And that’s when I wanted to get him into my studio where I had more control. And once he came to my studio, there was nothing he’d say no to, basically. I’d find a prop that I might have used in a previous photograph, I’d give it to him and he’d do something with it. He was just very cooperative and he felt at home too. My studios and film sets are always that way. I want people to feel comfortable and I want them to do something usually a little bit different from what they do in real life. I make them comfortable and they do it.

The reason is, the period we’re mentioning was such a special time. I mean, it started in the fifties with the beat generation. 52^nd Street jazz. The poets, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti were talking to the people. Listen to the rock music in the early and mid-sixties. It was really about the people. It was the revolution of saying ‘we’re not getting into what we did yesterday. We want to do something different.’

The special time, and a bit later, 1967, the Summer of Love. LIFE Magazine putting rock groups in the pages and cover.

I don’t think it happened after Dylan’s motorcycle accident. I think it really happened at the start of the fifties. With the beat generation and poetry that went on. Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti and all those people. They were saying, “You don’t have to write things the way they used to be. You can do this and you can change.”

I think that just crept into the music, and of course, maybe the Beatles and all that music coming. It wasn’t exclusively America. It really started in London England where the music was coming through differently. It all started with our own rhythm and blues. It took the French to tell us that we started jazz, you know. But we did have those roots. And I think you can go back all the way to there. Like the rock ‘n’ roll 1952-1960. The early rock people, the blues recording artists. Those artists were not gonna give up what they were doing. The rest of us had to catch up to them in some way. And we eventually did.

The 1966 UK photographers of album covers, along with myself were seen in 1967 by everyone. They were struggling to get things out. We were struggling to get things on. There were still some great photographers from the older generation when I started. And I was working before [David] Bailey. People found out about the music from the photographers because we were all friends with each other. My favorite club in London was The Ad Lib.

You look through the sixties and that was the golden age of advertising. Really was. Advertising was a big thing. You look at advertising today and it’s so awful, and it was really creative in those days. The literature of that period. I think we go through periods and I guess we have to get release.

Andrew Loog Oldham: I worked as a press agent for the Beatles, Chris Montez, Bob Dylan and the Little Richard/Sam Cooke/Jet Harris 1962 tour before I met the Rolling Stones in 1963.

I worked for fashion designer Mary Quant in 1960 when fashion was the pop business – the only pop Britain had. It was a time when American Cinema gave us hope and attitude, and the pill gave us time and disposable income.

In 1963 I managed to score some press for the still-unknown-folk singer in England. I was doing PR in January ‘63 and bumped into manager Albert Grossman at the Cumberland Hotel, Marble Arch. His client, Bob Dylan was in London to play a minor role in a BBC2 television drama, Madhouse on Castle Street. He would eventually perform two songs: “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Ballad of a Gliding Swan.” [It was broadcast on January 13, 1963].

It was written by Evan Jones and the director was Philip Saville. I got a fiver for ten days of work. I managed to get Dylan into Melody Maker. Thanks to Max Jones or Jack Hutton. They were doing me a favor. Nobody else cared…

Dylan and his manager Grossman were very happy together. They acted like they knew something we didn’t know yet. In a different realm it was like being in a room with Dylan and Grossman. There was this conspiratorial thing that was so powerful; you knew it had to work. And then I met the Rolling Stones and said hello to the rest of my life…

I’d always regarded Sam Cooke and Elvis Presley, and later Bob Dylan as the real self-producing artists of the era. Sinatra and Bing Crosby had to be the guv’ners – Joe Smith at Warner Bros/Reprise in 1966 invited Keith Richards and I to watch Mr. Sinatra record in Hollywood at United Western, that was an education in form and producing thyself. To know thyself and how to dress yourself in sound, song and polish every word so that it belongs. It places you above anything that can be deemed the A&R domain.

Dylan did look back. He looked back at the Beatles and the Stones, went hmmm, went into the studio and changed the goal posts.

Richard Williams: In the summer of 1966, everything about Blonde On Blonde was a mystery. The title, certainly. The bold statement of a vinyl double album (before the Mothers’ Freak Out, the Beatles’ White Album and Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland). That cover photo: great hair, great scarf, great suede coat, and the most enigmatic facial expression since the Mona Lisa – but out of focus. Why on earth would Bob Dylan choose that one? What was he trying to tell us?

And then to kick off with the Salvation Army Band march of “Rainy Day Women Nos 12 & 35”: as uncool a piece of music, despite the injunction that “Everybody must get stoned,” as you could imagine in the year of “Reach Out, I’ll Be There” and “Walk Away, Renée.” Followed by the Chicago-style eight-bar blues ordinaire of “Pledging My Time,” a throwback to Highway 61 Revisited, although that shivering harmonica solo at the end suggests that something different might be in the offing.

As it indeed is, with “Visions of Johanna,” where the mysteries stop being riddles and become poetry. A song whose incantatory melody and atmospheric, image-filled lyric – “Lights flicker from the opposite loft / In this room the heat pipes just cough” – take everything we already know about Bob Dylan one step further. And adding Johanna herself to his gallery of elusive, sphinx-like women.

Here is where the album really begins, the album we knew we wanted back then without knowing what it would be, sweeping us through one mystery after another. The exuberant piano of “One of Us Must Now (Sooner or Later),” the spring-heeled jangle of “I Want You,” the low-slung narrative of “Memphis Blues Again,” the Beefheart pre-echo of “Leopard Skin Pill Box Hat,” then the plunge into the beady-eyed erotica of “Just Like a Woman” – “her fog, her amphetamine and her pearls” – and on and on and on through cryptic hints (“Temporary…” “Absolutely…” “Obviously…”) all the way to the culminating eleven minutes of “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” an endlessly unscrolling love letter to the muse and to a world of matchbook songs, gypsy hymns, dead angels and a cowboy mouth, a world that was his alone and yet in which he invited us to immerse ourselves.

Six minutes and 31 seconds into this masterpiece, at the start of the fifth line of the fourth verse, Joe South, who is playing bass guitar in Columbia’s Nashville studio, makes a mistake. He forgets that the first four lines of the melody are repeated and picks the wrong chord change. I love that. His minor lapse of concentration would normally mean the junking of the take. But we’re in the early hours of the morning. Even though this is the fourth take, Dylan hasn’t made it clear to the exhausted musicians how many verses the song will have.

Was there even a decision to be made? South’s little goof is left in, acting as a reminder that this music was made by human intelligence and skill, prizing the intuitive and spontaneous. It survives as part of a work that has lost none of the power to enthrall and mystify so coolly wielded by its maker 60 years ago. We were hungry then, and it fed us.

Michael Simmons: Blonde On Blonde perfected what Dylan had created on his two preceding albums. It’s the sound of an entire branch of American popular music busy being born. “I’ve never heard it before,” Dylan said of his own music at the time — and no one else had either. A line was drawn and from there on in, rock songwriters and musicians strove to elevate their standards to match what Dylan had achieved. What followed Blonde On Blonde was rock music as art and literature. While the Beatles, Beach Boys and others had been experimenting with great success, Dylan was leader of the quality lit pack of rock ’n’ roll.

Heather Harris: In Blonde On Blonde Bob Dylan generated the same sophistication as his previous political, folk and protest phases with this double album about-change of humorous tunes, love songs and the normal Dylan crypto-musings of any of his eras that we always loved and will love. The musicianship is of course flawless with that pedigreed bunch on board.

I liked the sea change since I believe artists should do whatever they want. This was even more fun listening than his last two sea-changes Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited. And hey, purists, Dylan already made the finest protest music ever. The end. Time for something new. (And who knew that the pendulum would swing back a half century later with his writing the astonishing “Murder Most Foul,” a protest with all the bite, poetry and precision of his younger self.)

Since Blonde On Blonde was released while I was in college, of course all we art students loved the impudent blurry album cover portrait, since this was a meme before the word existed. (Art teacher: You photo is out of focus. We art students: I meant to do that!) And I hope my fellow college student who lived in the dorm room next to mine fries in Hades for his having played Side 4 (just the one song ‘Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’) over and over and over sans variation for a full semester. Perhaps he grew up to be the one who thought up torturing Manuel Noriega via music…

Mark Sebastian: I was in Spoleto, Italy, running errands for my Godfather, Gian Carlo Menotti, the first time I heard “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” I’d been listening to Radio Caroline that July searching the dial of an old timey radio, for any sign of my song, “Summer in the City” getting airplay back in the States. Dylan’s song seemed a silly adolescent ditty, a march begging for a bust. Cannabis experimentation was so clandestine then and only alluded to obliquely in songs. It was a hidden thing, extremely illegal. This was a joke song, sung to the sounds of a party, with Bobby Neuwirth providing silly whoops and hollers.

The day after arriving home on the RMS Queen Elizabeth, I went uptown to Matthew Cowles’ apartment. Matthew was my best friend, and as rabid a devotee of Dylan’s work as existed. We sat in amazement and pored over “Just Like a Woman,” “Memphis Blues Again,” “Visions of Johanna” all the wondrous gifts of Blonde On Blonde. And, of course, the unexpected “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” This song was an Iliad: a storm of Dexedrine-propelled lyrics, taking up a whole side of the record. I realized Dylan had reached a new height. So much for the three-minute song, tailored and sped up to fit radio. The gates had been flung open and those of us writing lyrics in that time realized the era of the teen lament was over, for better or worse.

Over time, Blonde On Blonde became one of my favorite records. I would put it on all the time, usually skipping “Rainy Day Women,” which still seemed like a silly space filler. I knew that many of the characters in Dylan’s songs were part of the music scene in the Village. I figured Suzy Rotolo was part of the landscape, who fed and sheltered Bobby, with little reciprocal generosity once he was in the ducats. I could imagine Neuwirth or David Blue, Phil Ochs, all the people on whom Dylan unleashed so much of his ire. I later understood that Edie Sedgwick was in there, poor, starved Methedrine muse to Warhol, though she wasn’t on my radar yet at 16.

I could feel the ambiance of my native Greenwich Village, could smell the musty air of clubs like the Gaslight, where I later played, I could sense the foreignness felt by this tramp from Hibbing. No wonder he felt he had to create all the fictions about ‘ridin’ the rails with Woody and Cisco.’

Many of us felt the line “Shakespeare, he’s in the alleyway” was about John Maurice Beaton, aka Ian Orlando, our marvelous Village eccentric, who dressed in Elizabethan garb. Joan Baez, (her stunning cousin had been my babysitter!) was certainly included, an object of both Bob’s affection and disregard, even as she introduced him to anyone who mattered in the folk music circles of the Village and the Newport Folk Festival. She fed the paper to his typewriter as he sped and free-associated lyrics. We should all have someone like Joan in our lives.

I met Bobby on Washington Square a few years later. I was being developed in demo recordings by the great A&R man, John Hammond, who signed him to Columbia. I was spending a lot of time at Dylan’s friend, John Hammond Jr’s loft, passing guitars around, swapping songs and I told Bobby I hoped we could meet there someday.

He was very unfriendly and I realized he looked at me as competition and probably a spoiled brat and not his new best friend, even though my family was very friendly with the Hammonds and my brother John had hung out with Bobby a lot. The world of folk music wasn’t all camaraderie at the Kettle of Fish and passed joints. It gradually became very competitive, especially as some artists migrated to pop and made fortunes, and others didn’t.

This album is still always at arm’s length, so I guess, at least during that period, I was taken in by his magic. The musicians were chosen so well; some of my buddies like Area Code 615’s Kenny Buttrey.

There is a theory among some rather extreme music buffs that Dylan was a case of mass hysteria; the theory is that everyone was waiting for “the next big thing” after the Beatles and they made him it. I don’t ascribe to that theory but I find it intriguing.

Photo © by Bob Dylan, courtesy of the Bob Dylan Archives.

Robbie Robertson: When I would visit the Brill Building with Ronnie Hawkins, one of the things that I really took away from that was Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman or Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, or Otis Blackwell, and really got from them, because the obvious thing was that they tapped into something that felt good. But it had to feel good writing for others. The song could be about anything but it had to feel good.

Then, the other door was Bob Dylan. Who it wasn’t about that. It was about emotion and an energy. But it was really about saying something. It wasn’t about “these words could be anything.” No. No. It was specific. So, to me it was rebelling in a beautiful way against this other thing.

Blonde On Blonde was an unusual time which caused all those songs to be written.

We’ve been playing with Bob for years there’s no surprises involved. We know the technique very well.

There was a thing that happened between Bob and us that when we played together that we would just go into a certain gear automatically. It was instinctual, like you smelled something in the air, you know, and it made you hungry. (laughs). It was that instinctual. And the way we played together was very much that way.

And whether, we were playing in 1966, or 1976, or when we did the tour together in 1974, we would go to a certain place where we just pulled the trigger. It was like “just burn down the doors ‘cause we’re coming through.” And it was a whole other place that we played when we weren’t playing with him. It was a whole place that he played when he wasn’t playing with us, so it was like putting a flame and oil together, or something. I don’t know.

When we did the Dylan and Band tour in ’74, where we went and did a lot of the same things we did back in ’66, and peoples’ response was “this is the shit and I knew it all along.” It was like you weren’t really there all along. It’s interesting and it’s one of the things I talked about in my keynote speech that I had to make at this [SXSW] conference. It’s really a very interesting experiment to see.

Al Stewart: When the Byrds released “Mr Tambourine Man,” and Dylan did “Like A Rolling Stone,” I thought, ‘My God!’ This folk-rock thing was in the back of my mind as being interesting, but I thought it had no commercial applications whatsoever, and all of a sudden, it’s the biggest thing in the world. And I thought, “That’s it. I’m going to be a folk rocker because that’s the future.”

In 1966 I saw Dylan and his group at the Royal Albert Hall. But I had a completely different take on it because I had been around rock bands and around sound systems. And so, I knew the technical side of it.

The Royal Albert Hall had one of the worst PA systems imaginable. It was set up for political speeches. Winston Churchill made speeches there. That’s fine if the audience is sitting and listening and you’re talking into the microphone you can hear it. With an acoustic guitar you can still hear it. That’s fine. You put a rock band in the Royal Albert Hall and Dylan I think was using the house system. You couldn’t hear a word. It was totally underpowered. It was like if you had a rock band behind you and you’re singing through a transistor radio. And there was no way anybody could hear what was happening.

So it wasn’t that I didn’t think it worked, because I had his album Bringing It All Back Home and I knew that it would work with a band, but it just didn’t work with the sound systems of the day. They just weren’t powerful enough in the UK. And that I think is the problem. [A sound board tape by a hired engineer did record a pristine 1966 UK performance.]

Patti Smith: The Bob Dylan Live 1966 Royal Albert Hall record. I can tell you this. I saw Bob Dylan in that period. I saw him right before he went to England in 1966. I was really lucky. I saw him in 1963 when Joan Baez introduced him. I saw him through various changes. Then when he started wearing a jump suit, this lion-like hair and had a band, The Hawks, behind him. I saw him booed by the people even though he was really great. When I hear that record, I see him in my head because I can remember when he sang ‘Visions of Johanna’ acoustically for the first time. He said, ‘This song is called “Seems Like a Freeze-Out.” He didn’t have that title, you know. So, when I listen to that record it’s almost like a visual experience for me.

Photo © by Bob Dylan, courtesy of the Bob Dylan Archives.

David N. Pepperell: The major revelation to me of seeing Bob Dylan and the Hawks in Sydney and Melbourne Australia in 1966 was not Bob himself – I had followed his career via all his album releases and expected the best although I have to say that I thought his vocal vivacity on stage was far superior to the performances on his recordings – but rather the five young men he brought to Australia to back him on his electric set.

This group, known as the Hawks before hooking up with Bob, and known later as just The Band probably in homage to their superiority over most of their contemporaries, gave this country a whole new view of what Rock Music could achieve.

We were so excited at the prospect of finally seeing and hearing Bob Dylan in Australia that we didn’t notice he was on the stage until the first few strums of his acoustic guitar, apparently loaned from a Sydney musician after Bob’s own guitar was damaged in transit, rang out through the old Sydney Stadium, more used to wrestling and boxing than musical genius.

He cut an amazing figure on that stage, dressed in an orange and brown hounds-tooth suit, floral shirt and Cuban heel boots whilst his hair was teased out in an afro reminiscent of the corona of the Sun. At certain times when the light struck his hair you could see right through it and it resembled a halo.

From the opening strummed chords of “Mr Tambourine Man” the whole room was hanging on every word. What was interesting was that despite everyone in the audience knowing the words no-one sang along, the song was accepted with deference and awe. Still the applause was deafening as Bob left the stage for the interval.

Following the interval things got dark.

After we got back to our seats after smokes and cokes, he walked back on to the stage, again with no introduction, a Fender Stratocaster electric guitar hanging around his shoulder and accompanied by five musicians playing piano, organ, guitar, bass and drums.

From the moment after the count-in “1,2,3,” when they deluged the Sydney Stadium with gorgeous sound, The Band made all the previous groups we had seen – including the Beatles, Kinks and Rolling Stones – sound like amateur outfits, almost kids’ bands.

This was an aggregation of Adults, people who understood dynamics as much as volume, tapestry of sound rather than just harmonics and the way that playing less can be playing more.

As Bob said in a speech from the stage of his last concert of the 1966 World Tour, “This is not English Music we’re playing, this is American Music” and he certainly proved that on stage in Australia. Many folkies booed and walked out of the second half of the show complaining that the band were too loud. This was untrue.

The Band just played with an amazing dynamic sound that fully engaged anyone listening and colored the night with magic. To this day I will still say that Dylan and the Band was the greatest music concert I ever attended and I attended so many in the 60’s and 70’s.

Bob’s singing was full of fire and light. He whooped up to the top notes and growled the low ones but the main aspect of his vocals was the immediacy and meaning he put into those wonderful words. The Band added so much to his performance by filling in the empty spaces between the lines of poetry and illustrating them with power and maybe even exultation.

Having the unusual combo of piano and organ gave the group so much rhythmic and harmonic variety and the songs lived with a wall of sound filled with excitement, madness and ecstasy – all the things that make Rock Music the miracle that it is.

Richard Manuel and Garth Hudson formed a keyboard juggernaut anchored by Mickey Jones’ skittering drums, (who had replaced Levon Helm just for the World Tour), Rick Danko’s bedrock bass and Robbie Robertson’s guitar which howled keening cries in the thin, wild, mercury sound of it all.

This event provoked a furious response from a section of the crowd who began catcalling and booing. Dylan ignored them and started the electric half with “Tell Me Momma” another new tune. However, it wasn’t the tune that was so surprising but the volume of his backing band who played louder than I had ever heard a band play, including the Rolling Stones and the Kinks. It was wonderful music though that swept you up in it and it was obvious Bob loved playing like this as he was dancing around, sometimes raising one arm up in the air in a kind of mad joy. I looked at the people with me and they reacted the same was as I did, enraptured by the best music we had ever heard.

At the end of that song the noise was horrific. Again booing, shouts of “Traitor! What happened to Bob the folkie?” and a slow handclap, although I could see that this response came from one section of the audience who seemed to be organized in some way.

Dylan’s response was to look more bemused as the stage rotated and go into a rocked-up version of another oldie, “I Don’t Believe You,” which again seemed to gain so much from the electric backing compared to the rather spare version on Another Side. “Baby Let Me Follow You Down” was rocked up next – well, why not, when the Animals had already had a hit with it as a rock tune two years before – and Bob had me and practically everybody else in his sway, except of course the yahoos. This was amazing, inspiring music played brilliantly and sung by a singer whose ability was only half shown by his records. Dylan sang and whooped and hollered and hit notes right off the scale. My heart was beating so loud I felt it could almost be heard above the tornado of Bob and the band’s music.

A totally glorious version of “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” ensued with the same Latin, south-of -the-Border feel that it had on Highway 61 Revisited.

Regrettably the detractors, many of whom had symbolically walked out, yelling epithets and insults, were still booing and slow clapping after every song – the band were far too loud to hear them during songs which was a blessing. It seemed obvious they were some kinds of folk purists/leftie dogmatists who had decided that Dylan was a fake and a sellout – I heard these words often used – and they were determined to disrupt and destroy his performance. How they were unaware of Bob’s two most recent, electric albums I couldn’t work out. They failed in their intent anyway as the bulk of the audience was totally enraptured with the music and only wanted to hear more, so there then began screaming matches between the pro- and anti-Dylan forces in the audience which didn’t make being there any easier.

Undeterred the group and Bob continued with a comic “Leopard Skin Pill Box Hat,” which really drove the folkies into a frenzy, followed by a beautiful re-arrangement of “One Too Many Mornings.” The harmony on the last line of the verses sung by Bob and the group’s bass player was just gorgeous.

On “Ballad of a Thin Man” Dylan crossed to the piano and, seemingly annoyed at the nay-sayers response, really spat the words in the direction of the section of the crowd still cat-calling. They couldn’t wreck the show – it was far too good for that – but they were so annoying you just wished they would either stop or get out.

Those elements must have got under the Bob’s skin because instead of ending the show with “Like A Rolling Stone,” as we all had expected, he finished with a vicious “Positively Fourth Street,” again aimed at the goon squad, then stormed off the stage despite the tumultuous applause from most of the people there. It was a sad end to a magnificent show but it could not spoil it for me – I was just dazzled by Dylan’s performance. I had never heard musicianship like that and had never heard such a cavalcade of extraordinary songs and could not remember ever hearing a greater singer.

I left the concert hall in a state of almost perfect bliss, believing that a new world was possible and I was seeing its beginning in the music of Dylan and his Band. After we left the Show to walk and to our car my four friends and I did not say anything for about half an hour.

What we had experienced was really beyond words.

Gene Aguilera: So, how do you follow Highway 61 Revisited? Simple… you just make one of rock’s best double LP’s… Blonde On Blonde. This is Dylan’s one-two knockout punch for you all. In my humble opinion, the crest of Zimmy’s career: 1965-1966. Following the formula of Highway 61 Revisited, Dylan brings back producer, Bob Johnston, who then convinces him to relocate to CBS Studios in Nashville for that trademark country ‘butter’ sound. Parlay Highway 61 Revisited returning musicians Al Kooper (piano and organ) and Charlie McCoy (guitar); then toss in key musicians Joe South and Jaime (Robbie) Robertson just for good measure.

Some trivia on Blonde On Blonde for its 60th anniversary. The original inside cover pressings of the album included a picture of ‘60s Italian movie actress, Claudia Cardinale – used without her permission. After complaints from her management, Claudia’s photo was removed from subsequent pressings, making it a collector’s item. Also on the album cover, note there is no title, no artist name (no writing, except for the spine and record company logo) … if you know, you know.

It was an honor to personally meet Bob Dylan on two sit-down drink occasions in the ‘90s. Photos or autographs were not in the cards; but knowing Dylan was a gentleman, a true artist, and an all-time favorite, is a memory worth keeping forever.

Mick Farren: The weight of anticipation that was loaded upon the release of John Wesley Harding was probably more than any artist should be expected shoulder. How in hell was Dylan going follow something as monumental as Blonde On Blonde? And in the landscape that I inhabited, not only were fans, musicians, writers, and rock critics asking the question. So were individuals who had regularly spent entire Sunday afternoons skulled to Neptune on the best obtainable acid listening to “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” over and over again, searching for some nebulous electric dharma of their own imagining. And when the answer turned out to be relaxed, controlled and even reserved, conflict broke out between those how just wanted more, just B-on-B 2, and others who were frankly baffled and studied the cover photo for mystic clues. Acidheads did not come to blows, but they glared at each other with their third eyes. Me? I accepted what I was given, and then I learned to love it. So, we had no more recklessly complex, declamatory monoliths like “Like A Rolling Stone.”

Dylan had constructed cottages; neat formal songs that smelled of Jerry Lee Lewis, Sam Phillips, Hank Williams and A.P. Carter. He had edited and simplified, and in so doing had created tunes that, down the years, proved to be of incredible durability. Think of all the songs from JWH, that are still covered, to the point that “All Along the Watchtower,” the song itself, can, in 2007, function as a crucial, cliffhanging, metaphysical, deep-space entity in the TV sci fi cult series Battlestar Galactica.

Steven Van Zandt: The Byrds introducing Bob Dylan to the world, really, with “Mr Tambourine Man” was a major factor. I can’t give them enough credit for that. I don’t know if Bob Dylan would have been accepted at Top 40 radio if it hadn’t been for “Mr Tambourine Man.” I mean that. That gang has been a great service to the world. I was a huge Byrds’ freak. Still am. As you know they lead you to Bob.

I’ve played Dylan’s songs with Bruce and in top 40 bands earlier. Dylan was an extremely good folk guitarist as far as the folk style he played on his first few albums. Extremely adept at that.

Then Dylan went electric and started having some fun. His first solo might have been the intro on “Leopard Skin Pill Box Hat.” It’s a funny solo and expresses that part of him. And when he wasn’t playing the guitar himself, he brought in Michael Bloomfield for Highway 61 Revisited and Robbie Robertson for Blonde On Blonde.

I tuned in for Highway 61 Revisited and then Blonde On Blonde, which I think is the greatest record anyone ever heard.

Robby Krieger: I saw Dylan perform in 1963. I was in high school in Menlo Park, near San Francisco. There were some guys there from Boston and New York in the dormitory with me and they were into Bob Dylan. I had never heard him before. They had his debut LP. So, they played the first album and I got totally into him.

On Dylan’s first album I really liked his guitar playing. I thought he was a great fuckin’ acoustic player. He did some stuff that was pretty damn good. And his harmonica work. I had never heard anyone play harmonica like that. Not a blues harmonica player sucking in the notes. I was amazed he could do all that stuff and sing at the same time.

Then, what do you know. He came to Berkeley for the first time and we saw him at the Community Theater. We just got tickets. I wasn’t hooked up then. (laughs). It was a good experience. He had the buckskin jacket. I bought into the whole thing, basically. I later bought a harmonica rack holder.

When I saw him live, I sort of realized at the time there were some interesting and unique tunings on stage. I thought he was pretty cool at that first concert, and then the week after that we saw Joan Baez play at Stanford University.

I loved his Bringing It All Back Home LP. That was my favorite. It all made sense. The lyrics fit exactly what I was thinking when I was acid. It registered, you know. “Wow. I’m listening to this guy.”

My favorite song was “Mr Tambourine Man.” I might have been in my band then called the Psychedelic Rangers. I had been playing guitar for a couple of years and started at age 15. At the Long Beach concert at first, I didn’t know what to think. Because I was expecting it to be how it was before. But then I realized this. I didn’t really get into Dylan until I saw him the next time in Long Beach in ’65. An auditorium. That’s when he first came out with the electric set. Not only that, but I was on my first acid trip. It actually was not even acid but Morning Glory flower seeds. I think I drove down from Menlo Park.

I went by myself. I had two tickets, and I had taken these seeds with my girlfriend and she didn’t want to go. So, I went by myself and my mind was blown. I expected him to be the same as he was earlier in Berkeley, and here he comes out with an electric band and wearing a Hollywood Zoot suit. I didn’t know what to think. In Long Beach he was totally different. And that was one thing about Dylan that was always great. He always changed. I loved Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited album. I loved Michael Bloomfield’s guitar playing on that album and loved Bloomfield on the first Paul Butterfield Blues Band album.

I never saw Bob Dylan again except when the Doors were being inducted into The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame when the ceremony was held locally in Los Angeles at the Century Plaza Hotel. We all hung out backstage for a few minutes.

Jackson Browne: What Bob Dylan did for me, everybody and our generation it will never have to be done again. The way he opened up our thinking and our feeling and our view of the world only has to be done once. Maybe it’s done in other fields like film and painting and other art. As a people, we’re constantly growing, expanding but the changes that Bob Dylan brought to rock and roll and songwriting are permanent. They’re part of us. People who are just being born into it now are being born into a world that wasn’t that way until Bob Dylan made it that way. It’s a particular skill to write something in a few words that speaks volumes.

It is very difficult to say how I feel and how I think about Bob Dylan in a few words.

Bill Walton: I played the albums of Bob Dylan before my UCLA Bruins basketball games and I recited lyrics to Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released” on the free throw line in the NBA. Music has a big role in the game and creates atmosphere.

Gary Pig Gold: Although in actuality not rock ‘n’ roll’s first-ever double long-player – that honor belongs to Frank’s Freak Out! – our boy Bob’s 1966 piece-of-resistance remains as undeniably inventive today as it was to innocent listeners six long decades ago.

And while Jerry Schatzberg’s utterly iconic 12-by-26 cover image may appear a trifle off-focused, the Dylan imagery across all four sides therein is as precise, clear and surgically cutting as anything he had up until then created …or has blessed us with since for that matter.

Said words of wit and wisdom were then accompanied by downright flawless arrangements and performances via some of Music City’s finest – despite their initial misgivings towards this high-voltage cat from NYC – and ultimately Bob Johnston’s production of perfection resulted in, with “I Want You” in particular, three minutes absolutely without equal during a year that also gave us “Paint it, Black,” “Tomorrow Never Knows,” and, dare I say it, even Brian’s “Vibrations.”

After emptying my teenaged bank account circa 1971 and bicycling home with every single Dylan album I could carry from the nearest record store, it was Blonde On Blonde I eagerly slit the shrink wrap to play first …right after Self Portrait, that is. And I’ve been most merrily stuck inside its leopard-skinned blues ever since.

P.S.: Yes, and the true mixes are of course the mono’s, need I remind anyone.

Dr. James Cushing: The website rateyourmusic.com lists 31 ‘popular music’ double-LPs released prior to 1966. (The list excludes opera recordings, which were double or triple-LP packages out of necessity.) Of those 31, eight were by Ella Fitzgerald, two by Judy Garland. Other artists included Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong, Stan Getz, Glenn Miller, Stan Kenton, the MJQ, Dave Brubeck, Charles Mingus, and Miles Davis, with most of those being concert recordings. The closest thing to Bob Dylan was Peter, Paul & Mary In Concert (1964), only because it included “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

You see the pattern: the double-LP was made for sophisticated grown-ups, not for teenagers. To make a double-LP was to announce that your target audience was adults, and to own one was evidence of one’s adult status — doubles cost twice the money, after all. They were an investment, and what kind of person thinks in terms of investments, kids or adults? So, it’s not too far-fetched to say that Freak Out! and Blonde On Blonde served as ‘announcements’ by Frank Zappa and Bob Dylan that their music had now achieved adult status, and had to be taken seriously as an art form for grown-ups. And both albums insisted on that seriousness with their endings, “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” and “The Return of the Son of the Monster Magnet,” both AM-radio-unfriendly at 11-minutes-plus, and both examples of Modernism in lyric (Dylan) and sound (Zappa). So, in a way, these albums suggest that the very definition of ‘adult’ was in flux.

I was age 13, certainly not an ‘adult,’ when I first heard and fell in love with these albums, and I love them both to this day. Part of why I loved them then was the sense that they were ‘adult’ music and hence conferred that status, at least while they were playing, on me. These double-albums offered a kind of map out of the frustrations of childhood, and suggested that the adult world, in all its bizarre complexity, could be negotiated with humor and honesty. The surreal parables of “Help, I’m a Rock” and “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again” were contained enough to be digested (even memorized, and I memorized both), yet opened out into the larger world. They gave me lenses through which the world around me could actually make sense, even thought was changing as fast as I was.

Jerry Schatzberg’s cover for Blonde On Blonde must have worried a lot of squares at Columbia Records.

I’m pretty sure it was the first ‘rock’ album not to have the artist’s name or the album’s name printed anywhere on the front or back – the cover has virtually no printing at all. Dylan’s face became the ‘word’ on the cover. If you know the word, you’re in…

Furthermore, this was the first time to my knowledge that an album cover photo was deliberately out of focus. Almost a year earlier, Robert Freeman had elongated the Beatles’ faces on the cover of Rubber Soul (and omitted the group name), but despite that distortion, the focus was sharp, and the meaning clear: The Beatles were stretching their ambitions.

Dylan and Schatzberg made a more radical move, and it fit Blonde On Blonde as well as Freeman’s move fit. Schatzberg’s Dylan is captured in an ambiguous moment of blurring; the subject is veiling himself in an urban shimmer. The face on the album cover is ‘in motion,’ suggesting the constantly shifting perspectives of “Visions of Johanna” or “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again.” Dylan’s scarf and hair are as large as his face, and the viewer’s eye goes up and down the image, trying to read the man’s expression through his veiled eyes.

Does anyone still make those tan suede coats with the long buttons? Can I get one? They were way cool in 1966 and I say they’re way cool now.

We must remember that, as far as I or anyone in my circle knew, Bob Dylan’s June 1966 motorcycle accident had left him either 1) dead, or 2) so permanently disfigured that he would never tour or record again.

Like the Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits LP released that same season, Pennebaker’s movie functioned within the context of the star’s disappearance; this movie was as close as you were ever going to get to seeing this brilliant-but-now-vanished legend in concert… And the Dont Look Back movie kept functioning that way until early 1974, when the legend returned to the boards…

On its own terms, the mono Dylan bestows a single-sound-source structure on the music. The reason the mono is preferable to the early stereo LP’s is that with solo acoustic Dylan there is one single sound source. Instead of two sound sources. You get much more of a natural sound with the thing blended as it is right now.

The first few acoustic albums ought to sound as good on the CDs as they do right now. It’s the three rock albums, Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde that really make the big difference. Also, I bought the original LPs in mono in 1965-66. So, I first fell in love with those records in mono.

The mono does give that single sound source and that evenly blended sound that adds to the mysterious of it, whereas the stereo mix somewhat separates the instruments and add an additional clarity. Which is not always exactly what you want. I think some of the early Beatles’ records are terrible in stereo and much better in mono.

The stereo mixes, when I first heard them, added separation-definition to the instruments, so that I heard the two guitars and the upright bass in “Desolation Row” clearly – but is clarity the most valued goal with music that creates/inhabits a surrealist dreamscape? Also, other minor details are different, such as “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry” being 40 seconds shorter in mono, or the lead guitar on “Visions of Johanna” coming in at different places.

Armed with the knowledge that the mono mix took up most of the studio time, both in the case of Dylan, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, given that, I think that the mono need to be taken seriously in the spontaneous sense and the need to be thought of as an alternative sound experience.

Dylan brings his own private lexicon of images. Mythic and circus images and literary and fantasy images swirling them into this marvelously surreal stew that has the effect of those of us who partake in it the energy to explore our own subjectivities.

I think the meaning of many of the songs has much to do with how one can explain the statement they make then it has to do with that the way the song gives every listener a kind of permission to explore his or her own private imaginative world and take it seriously to present it to others. Bob Dylan gives people permission to speak. And permission to sing,

Dylan takes the idea of modern poetry, which is that the poem is a dramatic monologue, spoken by a character and whatever the character is talking about the character is also describing his own interior state of mind. Which includes his analysis of society. That’s what Walt Whitman is doing. That’s what T.S. Eliot is doing. That’s what Ezra Pound is doing. And that’s what Bob Dylan does. So, the character that Dylan creates in these albums is one that he is perfectly suited to play. And he plays it magnificently.

Dylan is a genius and we are fortunate to be able to share the same time and space with him. Geniuses do that. Geniuses continue to grow and develop. Geniuses have different periods in their art. Geniuses continue to have work that resonates with people. And Bob Dylan is the one genius to have come out of American rock music. And there are no others, except possibly for Jimi Hendrix. But he died too young for us to really tell.

James Williamson: Where do I start about Bob Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone”? I was in eighth grade when I first got excited about Bob Dylan and in quick succession his annual releases. By the beginning of tenth grade, I had been sent to Juvie (for not cutting my hair) and once out was sent to Upstate New York to a boarding school for fuck ups….by then I was so enamored with Bob Dylan, that I actually went out to the highway outside the school and stuck out my thumb trying to hitchhike my way to Woodstock where he lived. Sadly, a guidance counselor happened by and shortly I was asked to leave the school and was back in Detroit. Bob Dylan had that effect on people! The following year, “Like A Rolling Stone” came out and shattered my musical world. Not only was the song writing par excellence but the guitar work of Mike Broomfield just blew me away (shortly to be followed by The Paul Butterfield Blues Band initial release). I was never the same.

Daniel Weizmann: The romantic love songs on Blonde On Blonde, are as radical, more radical than ditching protest or embracing surrealism or going electric. They’re cinematic, intimate, filled with complex feeling, ambivalence, longing and, ultimately, a sense of defeat and catharsis that was not just totally new for him but totally new for the romantic love song. To cite just one example, “One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)” wavers like a flickering electron between defensiveness, loss, guilt, and finally a total bewilderment about communication and miscommunication, attachment and detachment. It’s like a high stack of misunderstandings, an apology that reverses itself yet somehow manages to still be contrite and it’s a permanent farewell that permanently bonds. We already knew he was a visionary and a poet, we already knew he was a wizard, but Blonde On Blonde might have been Dylan’s first appearance as a man.

It’s no accident that Dylan ultimately settled in Los Angeles to the degree that he ever settled anywhere.

As a cowboy-pioneer of language crossing the American landscape, he knew that the Pacific is the end of the line. You haven’t completed the journey until you’ve arrived. Also, Dylan has always had showbiz in the blood—he’s a cinematic song and dance man and classic Hollywood iconography is always showing up in his work. For our greatest songwriter, L.A. is adversary, inspiration, hideaway, and shoreline.

What is it about Bob Dylan that gives a certain sort of person permission to speak? Is it the spinning, kaleidoscopic verbal energy that distinguishes his finest songs? Is it the throng of traditional voices from an older America that can be heard resonating in those songs? Is it the sheer bulk of his legacy? Or is it the way his untrained voice, startling imagery and charismatic animal presence encourage his listeners to discover and enact their own uniqueness?

Dylan is the last man standing from the sixties rock revolution, the only dignified superstar. While the Stones, McCartney, the Half-Who and Clapton harden into sclerotic irrelevance, Dylan continues creating vigorous, compelling new work, shaped by folk and blues traditions and flawed not by formula but by risk.

By now, no one can give accurate measure of Dylan’s influence on forty years of singer-songwriters who discovered their own voices through hearing his. But as the shelf of books about Dylan grows into a wall, a reader might find some measure of those books useful. If the recent spate of Dylan-related books is a fair sampling of what his critics, commentators and chroniclers have discovered in his music, it seems they still have much to learn from his example.

Bob Dylan has, over the course of his 64-year career, become something more than a music icon, visionary, or ‘the voice of a generation.’ He speaks to us through that ineffable marriage of words and music, suffused with the rarest emotional candor, compassion and empathy. Yet he remains an impenetrable, enigmatic figure.

It is this very paradoxical character that entices generations of fans. Dylan is there to console in the dark of night, to provide succor at the dawn of a new morning.

It’s only of marginal importance that he’s had X number of hits, sold Y number of records, or that digital platforms have recorded Z number of streams, downloads, etc. The one irreducible fact is that Dylan, like Gershwin, Ellington, Aretha, and maybe one or two others, has come to define an essential American character, an exceptionalism that Whitman described as containing multitudes.

(Courtesy Gary Pig Gold Archives)

Reflections on Blonde On Blonde (Excerpted from the upcoming book, A Bob Dylan Primer, by Michael Hacker. Used with permission.)

1966 saw Dylan get more comfortable playing with a band, not just as a way to get electric backup for his songs, but also to prime his creative pump and give him a broader field to sow for new ideas. That January, Dylan went back into the Columbia recording studios in New York City where he’d recorded the first six albums. And in four separate sessions that month, he used a core group of musicians that he’d hooked up with just after the Newport Folk Festival the year before. And some of these musicians, including guitarist Robbie Robertson, keyboard player Garth Hudson, piano player Richard Manuel and Rick Danko on bass, were members of a tight-knit Canadian band known as The Hawks. They’d later become Dylan’s touring band and then one of the most important rock units of the late 1960s and early 70s – calling themselves simply, The Band. At this moment in time, Dylan was going all in with electric backup, and he needed a solid band. So, while Dylan was trying to assemble a group of musicians to record new songs, he was also looking for a touring band that could handle the upcoming live shows. In these January and February sessions, Dylan was also developing a close relationship with Robbie Robertson.

There are a few examples throughout Dylan’s career of Dylan enlisting a sort of a surrogate-brother male figure to keep other people at bay – a sarcastic, cutting presence that served as a kind of alter-ego for Dylan. Someone coined the term “mind-guard,” to illustrate this, as in, not a bodyguard so much as someone to protect Dylan’s psychic and mental presence. Earlier, this role was filled by songwriter Bobby Neuwirth, and now Robbie seemed to be the one – so, as talented as a guitar player as Robertson was, it’s my sense that Dylan kept him around more for his personality than his chops.

Anyway, the sessions in New York weren’t all that successful, and probably Robbie and the band were just a little too fixed in their ways for what Dylan was trying to accomplish in the studio. He was restless to get his new songs recorded the way he was hearing them in his mind. For that, he turned southward – Dylan’s producer Bob Johnston had suggested he try and record in Nashville and use some of the superbly talented studio musicians down there. And you also get the sense that Dylan, with his relentless impulse towards reinvention, was thinking that maybe he needed to break away from the tight hold New York City had on him. And from this point forward, although Dylan would still spend a lot of time in Manhattan, it would no longer be his pole star and his geographic center – from now on, he would remain much more an artist of the world than any particular location. So, on Valentine’s Day, 1966, Dylan went into the Columbia Studios in Nashville, Tennessee and recorded a few songs for the new record, including the haunted and haunting “Visions of Johanna,” which contains what might be Dylan’s single greatest line – “The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face.”

Robbie Robertson was still there, as was Al Kooper for a lot of it, and Kooper had played with Dylan when he went electric at Newport and was all over the Highway 61 Revisited record, but the heart of the new songs was kept beating by three Nashville musicians: Charlie McCoy, who played guitar and a few other things, Joe South, who mostly played bass, and Kenny Buttrey on drums. Just to give you a sense of Kenny Buttrey’s chops, he also played drums on Neil Young’s Heart of Gold and Margaritaville by Jimmy Buffett. And Charlie McCoy, who played mostly guitar on the album, was probably the finest harmonica player working at that moment in time. But all the harmonica on Blonde On Blonde was played by Dylan, except on the song “Obviously Five Believers” – so you gotta think Dylan was trying to up his game with the best harmonica player in the world sitting there watching him. These guys were amazing musicians and even though they were still very young, they were professionals in the best sense of the word. They didn’t get wrapped up in Dylan’s sometimes distant and strange affect, or the way he seemed pretty stoned a lot of the time – these guys just laid down a groove that was both tight and elastic enough to contain the smoky song poems that Dylan was putting out into the ether.

So, pretty much all of the tracks for Blonde On Blonde were recorded, and it was already too much material for a single album, so a double album was planned, and Dylan went back into the studio in Nashville for two more days, and on the very last day of recording sessions for Blonde On Blonde, Dylan and the musicians ran through a song, sort of as a warm-up, a joke, a one-off, and it’s what was later titled “Rainy Day Women # 12 & 35,” better known as “Everybody Must Get Stoned.”

The song is full of carnival sounds, a blaring trumpet, drums, crowd noise, and basically, it’s a one-note joke about “they’ll stone you when you’re doing this, and that,” so everybody must get stoned. Obviously a drug joke, and one of the first overt drug songs in the rock idiom, although there was an R&B hit the year before called Let’s Go Get Stoned, and Ray Charles had a smash with the same song, but anyway, Dylan records this song, kind of as a goof, and then, what does he do, he goes and puts it on this major double album as the first track. The very first thing you hear when you put on Blonde On Blonde, arguably one of the greatest albums of all time, is this kind of jokey, novelty number. And so, the question is why Dylan put that one first, and my feeling today is that Dylan was kind of looking for some misdirection, because he was in the middle of his own insane rat race and he needed to get out and get off the wheel, and even though he’d just written these mysterious and surprising new songs, my gut sense is that he didn’t want to be thought of anymore as a kind of folk messiah, or any kind of hero or savior, so it makes sense to me that he put this joke song on there to kind of subvert expectations, and if there’s anything that Dylan inarguably does better than any performing artist who’s ever lived, it is to subvert expectations.

The experience of listening to record albums from the 1960s has become a very different experience today, and Blonde On Blonde represents one of the extreme examples of this shift. Imagine you went to your record store in the spring of 1966 and bought this thing. Right off the bat, this album was the ‘first’” of several things: to start with there’s the album cover, it had no writing on the front, which was incredible, and just a picture of Dylan wearing a brown leather jacket and a houndstooth checked scarf wrapped around his neck. But the photo is COMPLETELY BLURRY!!! What major pop artist in 1966 would have had the gall, or the balls, to put out a record with a blurry cover? Only one. It doesn’t seem like that big a deal today, but trust me, it was.

Blonde On Blonde was also the first rock double-album. So, you had to slide the two discs out of their pockets, and then slide them out of their paper sleeves, and then put Side 1 of the record on, and first song on the album was “Rainy Day Women # 12 & 35” with Dylan shouting the refrain, Everybody must get stoned! in his most cartoonish nasally whine – and the song hit number two on the pop charts, tying Like A Rolling Stone for Dylan’s highest charting single. Then, when Side 1 was finished you flipped it over for Side 2 and then when that was done, there was a whole other record to play, so you played Side 3 and then flipped that over and lo and behold there’s only one song on the last side of the double album – but it’s eleven and a half minutes long. “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” Try and find eleven and a half minutes where you can sit quietly and listen to the song. If your mind wanders, try and focus on Dylan’s vocal delivery, this voice of weariness, pleading, and somehow, wonder. One of the reasons that Blonde On Blonde is so magical is that it can represent so many different things, it’s kind of like a sonic hall of mirrors that changes drastically depending on where you happen to be standing. For me, the anchor songs on Blonde On Blonde are the three astonishing sort-of love songs, “Visions of Johanna,” “Just Like a Woman,” and the worn-out majesty that is “Sad-Eyed of the Lowlands,” which Dylan referred to around this time as “the best song I ever wrote.”

One more thing about the album specifics – there’ve been many paragraphs written about the meaning of the title, Blonde On Blonde, all sorts of theories and stuff. But one day I was writing down a list of Dylan albums using acronyms, so Bringing It All Back Home became BIABH, and Highway 61 Revisited became H61R, and then I came to Blonde On Blonde, which became BOB – which spells ‘Bob.’ So, I think that’s where the title comes from, just a little joke in the midst of all of Dylan’s other shenanigans.

© Harvey Kubernik

HARVEY KUBERNIK is the author of 21 books, including 2009’s Canyon Of Dreams: The Magic And The Music Of Laurel Canyon, 2014’s Turn Up The Radio! Rock, Pop and Roll In Los Angeles 1956-1972, 2015′s Every Body Knows: Leonard Cohen, 2016′s Heart of Gold Neil Young and 2017′s 1967: A Complete Rock Music History of the Summer of Love.

Sterling/Barnes and Noble in 2018 published Harvey and Kenneth Kubernik’s The Story Of The Band: From Big Pink To The Last Waltz. In 2021 they collaborated on Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child for Sterling/Barnes and Noble.

Otherworld Cottage Industries in 2020 published Harvey’s Docs That Rock, Music That Matters. His Screen Gems: (Pop Music Documentaries and Rock ‘n’ Roll TV Scenes) was published in February 2026 by BearManor Media. Kubernik is currently researching a book on the Beatles for a UK publisher with a summer 2027 publication.

Harvey spoke at the special hearings in 2006 initiated by the Library of Congress held in Hollywood, California, discussing archiving practices and audiotape preservation.

In 2017, he appeared at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, in its Distinguished Speakers Series and as a panelist discussing the forty-fifth anniversary of The Last Waltz at the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles in 2023.

Harvey was an interview subject with Iggy Pop, the Beach Boys’ Bruce Johnston, Love’s Johnny Echols, the Bangles’ Susanna Hoffs, Victoria and Debbi Peterson, and members of the Seeds for director/producer Neil Norman’s documentary The Seeds: Pushin’ Too Hard. During 2026, GNP Crescendo will release a DVD/Blu-ray. Author Miss Pamela Des Barres narrates).

Eddie Cochran, guitarist, singer, and songwriter was a pioneering rock and roll icon who left an indelible mark on countless musicians. Dying and just age 21 in 1960, his unique rebellious spirit and influence still resonate with recording artists, deejays, fans, record collectors and rock music historians.

The first official documentary about him, Don’t Forget Me, is due later this year. Director Kirsty Bell has lensed on-camera interviews with Keith Richards, Rod Stewart, Ronnie Wood, Roger Daltrey, Peter Frampton, Linda Perry, Alan Jackson, Alice Cooper, Sting, Billy Idol, Suzi Quatro, Brian Setzer, Yungblud, Kiefer Sutherland, members of Cochran’s family and additional talking heads. Bell is a UK based filmmaker, producer and executive producer of well over 90 feature films in her career including Executive Producing the 2023 Best Short Film Oscar and BAFTA winner An Irish Goodbye. The Cochran Estate has partnered with Goldfinch Entertainment, Universal Music Enterprises and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

The documentary blends these interviews with rare archival material and selected reconstructions, tracing Cochran’s meteoric rise, pioneering sound and enduring cultural impact.

The documentary screened to two sold-out audiences in June 2026 at Raindance Film Festival in London, where it received an outstanding response. It was nominated for Best Documentary, Best Director and Best Cinematographer, with  Kirsty Bell winning Best Director. The film also premiered at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, where it received an enthusiastic response.

Created with the blessing of the Cochran family estate, which provided access to never-before-seen archival material, and with support from Universal Music Enterprises, the documentary captures the enduring impact of Cochran’s music.

Director Kirsty Bell said: “It has been the deepest honor to be entrusted by Eddie Cochran’s family to tell his story. His life burned fast and bright, but the ripples of his sound reached across oceans and decades, shaping the very language of rock and roll. Don’t Forget Me is not just the title of this film. It is Eddie’s own plea, echoed in autograph books and in the lives he touched. I hope is to bring him vividly back into the world’s consciousness, to remind us not only of what we lost, but of the brilliance he gave.”

Fremantle is handling international distribution for the documentary. The theatrical release dates will be announced shortly.

Paul McCartney, as a 15-year-old performed a rendition of Cochran’s “Twenty Flight Rock” as the first song when he informally auditioned for John Lennon’s skiffle group the Quarrymen on July 6, 1957 in Liverpool.

Bob Dylan’s The Philosophy of Modern Song published in 2022 has a 1957 photo of Cochran, Little Richard, and Alis Lesley in Australia as the front cover image.

In 1987 Eddie Cochran was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by Mick Jones.

Born Ray Edward Cochran on October 3 1938 in Albert Lea, Minnesota, his family relocated to Bell Gardens, California in 1952 and he began playing guitar in 1954. He subsequently joined with songwriter Hank Cochran forming the Cochran Brothers, but weren’t related. It was then when Cochran started working a session musician and began writing songs which led to making a demonstration recording with Jerry Capehart. Eddie’s first solo single was released in 1956 on the Crest Record label, owned by a music publisher Sylvester Cross.

In 1956, Eddie made his screen debut in director Frank Tashlin’s The Girl Can’t Help It, singing his rockabilly-inspired “Twenty Flight Rock.” Cochran then co-starred in the 1957 teensploitation flick Untamed Youth alongside Mamie Van Doren directed by Howard W. Koch. He played guitar and occasionally contributed vocals and arrangements for Van Doren, rockabilly giant Johnny Burnette, country music singer and songwriter, Wynn Stewart, and friend, songwriter Baker Knight.

During 1958, Cochran did television appearances on the Philadelphia-based American Bandstand and Dick Clark’s Saturday Night Beech-Nut show.

Eddie had a seismic February 7, 1959 live booking on the Los Angeles (Compton-based) and Hadley’s Furniture sponsored Town Hall Party program in 1960 that was broadcast on KTTV-TV with Dick D’Agostin and the Swingers.

In 1959, Cochran, Ritchie Valens, Jimmy Clanton, the Cadillacs, Harvey Fuqua, the Moonglows, Sandy Stewart, Jackie Wilson, Jo Ann Campbell, DJ Alan Freed and other acts starred in Go, Johnny, Go! directed by Paul Landres.

On January 24, 1960 Eddie and rockabilly star Gene Vincent embarked on nearly two-month British tour. After a show at the Bristol Hippodrome on April 16^th, a hired cab driven by George Martin carrying agent Patrick Tompkins, Vincent, Cochran and his fiancée songwriter Sharon Sheeley was involved in a horrific car accident at the end of their trek in Chippenham, Wiltshire.

Vincent and Sheeley were seriously injured and Cochran died the following day in Bath, Somerset at St Martin’s Hospital. He was buried April 25th at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Cypress, California.

Sheely had co-written “Somethin’ Else” with Eddie’s brother Bill Cochran and “Love Again” and “Cherished Memories” for Cochran. She penned “Poor Little Fool,” recorded by Ricky Nelson, and “Hurry Up” for Ritchie Valens. Following the tragic 1960 accident, Sheely wrote Brenda Lee’s “Dum Dum” with singer and songwriter Jackie DeShannon.

Two previous documentaries about Cochran’s life have been made before Don’t Forget Me: Three Steps to Heaven in 1982, and 2001’s Cherished Memories.

#

In his memoir, Life, Keith Richards crafted a playlist of the most influential songs in his life. “Summertime Blues” was in it.

On their 1981 US tour the Rolling Stones included “20 Flight Rock” in their repertoire. On his 1993 Main Offender tour, Keith Richards and the X-Pensive Winos, opened their set nightly with “Somethin’ Else.”

During June and July of 1997, I attended recording sessions by the Rolling Stones for their Bridges to Babylon album in Hollywood at Ocean Way recording studios on 6050 Sunset Blvd. Drummers Charlie Watts and Jim Keltner extended an invitation to me.

One evening in the kitchen lounge I was chatting with Jim. We were discussing Liberty Records formerly housed nearby at 6920 Sunset Blvd. Keltner in 1965-1967 played on many Snuff Garrett produced and Leon Russell arranged Gary Lewis & the Playboys sessions released by Liberty. Cochran, Gene McDaniels, Timi Yuro, the Fleetwoods, Jan & Dean, Del Shannon, the Ventures, Canned Heat, Johnny Rivers, Bobby Vee and Jackie DeShannon were Liberty recording artists. In fact, it was Eddie in a late fifties mid-west tour who told Kentucky-born former Sharon Lee Myers aka Jackie DeShannon to head to Hollywood and find a career as “a California girl.”

Just when my Liberty-centric conversation with Jim turned to Cochran, the lounge door swung open and like on cue Keith Richards dashed in, carrying a bottle of Stolichnaya Vodka and a can of cherry juice.

Richards sat silently and then politely interrupted me. “Hey, son, who played drums on Eddie’s records?”

I replied, “Earl Palmer was on many dates, but Eddie was the drummer on some sessions and demos, playing on a suitcase.”

Richards immediately stuck out his hand. “My name’s Keith.”

I declined the alcoholic drink offered but took a puff on a joint he lit up.

“Hang around for [“You Don’t Have to Mean It”] I’m mixing with [engineers] Rob Fraboni and Dan [Bosworth].”

Keith continued to chat about Eddie. He had total recall of Cochran on “the tele” in 1960 on Jack Good’s landmark Oh Boy! and Boy Meets Girl television programs.

On February 3, 1999 I interviewed Keith around a Rolling Stones concert in San Diego. We talked about his just issued Wingless Angels album.

It wasn’t lost on each of us that 40 years earlier, Buddy Holly, one of his musical heroes, died. An early Rolling Stones hit single was “Not Fade Away,” produced by Andrew Loog Oldham, was the B-side to Buddy Holly’s “Oh Boy!”

Keith and I briefly discussed how his Wingless Angels collaboration, anything he heard on the Sun, Chess and Stax labels, along with Holly and Cochran made a lasting impression on him, decades after initial radio airplay or retail discovery.

“I think because it’s timeless music. I call it ‘marrow music.’ Not even bone music. It strikes to the marrow. It’s like a faint echo . . . The body responds to it and I don’t know why…”

#

Over the last half century, I’ve asked friends and associates about Eddie Cochran and his legacy. Some worked and recorded with Eddie, others knew him, caught Cochran on stage, and inspired by his catalog.

Just about every Cochran recording, and his Billboard hit singles, “Summertime Blues,” “Twenty Flight Rock,” “C’Mon Everybody” and “Somethin’ Else’ were done in Hollywood at Gold Star Recording Studios with producer and occasionally co-writer, Jerry Capehart, for Liberty Records.

In an interview published in my 2014 book Turn Up The Radio! Pop, Rock and Roll in Los Angeles 1956-1972, Stan Ross, co-founder/owner with Dave Gold of the Gold Star recording studio, built in 1950 at 6252 Santa Monica Boulevard. Many chart records were cut there during 1956-1968 by Cochran, Ritchie Valens, the Champs, Sonny & Cher, Dobie Gray, the Ronettes, the Crystals, the Righteous Brothers, the Mermaids, Chris Montez, Buffalo Springfield, Chan Romero, the Turtles, Larry Verne, Thee Midniters, Iron Butterfly and Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass.

Gold Star closed its doors in 1984, owning to shifting economics, the increase in home studios, and a fire in ’84 that destroyed the property.

In 1958, Stan Ross was at their legendary sound board on the Phil Spector-produced Teddy Bear’s record, “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” and with engineer Larry Levine at the console for Spector’s 1962-1966 studio excursions. “He was as concerned as they were about the song — one of the reasons Phil’s songs have durability and are copied. I saw a lot of growth with Phil very early. He came out of our studio tradition.

“Eddie Cochran used our Studio B, down the stairs by the parking lot. I did a whole lot of Eddie’s records with engineer Larry Levine, including ‘Summertime Blues,’ ‘Twenty Flight Rock,’ and ‘C’Mon Everybody.’”

“As far as the room sound and the drum sound for the Eddie and Phil recordings,” clarified Levine in a 2002 interview we did, “because the rooms were small with low ceilings, unlike other studios with isolation, your drums sounded the way you wanted them to sound. They would change accordingly to whatever leakage was involved. The echo enhanced the melding of the Wall of Sound, but it didn’t create it. Within the room itself, all of this was happening, and the echo was glue that kept it together.”

Gold Star also had a reputation for their on-site mastering room which enhanced final vinyl products, pleasing many independent and corporate record label clients.

“Gold Star was built for the songwriters,” Stan Ross underscored. “They were fun, wonderful people to be around—Jimmy Van Heusen, Jimmy McHugh, Ben Weisman, Bob and Dick Sherman, Johnny Mercer, Frank Loesser, Sammy Fain, Don Robertson, Sonny Burke.

“[The studio’s echo chamber] gave it the Wall of Sound feel. Dave [Gold] built the equipment and the echo chamber. We had so much fun with that echo chamber; it never sounded the same way twice.

“Gold Star brought an emotional feeling. Gold Star was not a dead studio, but a live studio. The room was thirty by forty feet. It was all tube microphones. We kept tubes on longer than anyone else, because we understood that when a kick drum kicks into a tube, it’s not going to distort. A tube can expand.

“The microphones with tubes were better than the ones without the tubes, because if you don’t have a tube and you hit it heavy, suddenly it breaks up. But when you have a tube, it’s warm and emotional. It gets bigger and it expands. It allows for impulse. We didn’t use pop filters and wind screens—we got mouth noises. Isn’t that life?”

Multi-instrumentalist, record producer, deejay David Kessel is CEO of CaveHollywood.com and an avid fan of Eddie Cochran. David is the son of guitarist and jazz legend, Barney Kessel, and step-son of background singer and vocal contractor B.J. Baker, who were both on dozens of record dates at Gold Star.

As a child in the sixties, and as a musician and record producer in the seventies and eighties, David logged more hours at Gold Star than anyone I know. This century he emailed some technical observations about Gold Star and the influential sound and pound of Eddie Cochran’s records.

“The board at Gold Star was very important and essential to the records cut there. Because of the quality of the metal inside the board and the wiring. It was very thick and extremely powerful. Not like today where you have all the digital stuff and then you have to bring in all the boxes and try to beef it up. You know what I mean, where at Gold Star that was the real deal. The metals made after World War II were sufficiently degraded from the metal before World War II. Much weaker metal because they had to use so much during the war. It became thinner, got into aluminum, transistors. Stuff like that.

“When they have the real deal metal, real deal magnets, and the real deal wiring, that really informs the sound. And when you bring in brilliant acoustics with a powerful board and you have Phil Spector, Ritchie Valens, Eddie Cochran, Shel Talmy, Jack Nitzsche, Sonny Bono working the musicians, hearing those sounds in their heads, being able to articulate it with the help of Larry Levine, Stan Ross and Dave Gold.

“Eddie Cochran was a powerhouse. He was completely rock and roll. As a teen himself, he delivered the passion and angst of the teenagers of that era. His swagger and pounding rhythm helped create ROCK AND ROLL. With him you get a guy who put together the multi-musical genres happening at that 1956-1960 time period.

“Eddie was a great musician. He played drums and guitar, overdubbed sounds and had a great songwriter music producer understanding of what he wanted.

“I grew up at Gold Star starting at age six. My father and step-mom always took us to the studio if we weren’t in school. There was no such thing as day care centers 60 years ago in Hollywood. You sat on a couch, watched the cats set up their equipment, play and smoke cigarettes.

“My brother Dan and I produced recordings at Gold Star and did all kinds of sessions with the American Federation of Musicians Local 47 union members. They were never called the Wrecking Crew.

“I worked there all the time with Phil Spector, recording with Leonard Cohen, Dion and the Ramones, played on their album End of the Century, and more.

“You can explore Gold Star and Eddie’s history in the room, but you need to really take note: The guitar we hear on Eddie’s records is a Gretsch 6120 hollow body electric guitar. It had some punch power and was a very versatile guitar with F holes, huge pickups and added more depth to the sound.

“It’s the F holes. When you have a hollow body electric guitar with F holes, it makes the guitar breathe. When you’re putting it through an amplifier, it breathes extra. It’s the F holes that allow it to get air in there and breathe.

“Gretsch instrument company was founded in 1883 and had a major renaissance in the 1950s and 1960s.  Many artists grooved to Gretsch, and there are many: Duane Eddy, Malcolm from AC/DC, Pete Townsend from the Who, and the Stray Cats’ Brian Setzer. George Harrison used a Gretsch Chet Atkins Country Gentlemen in the height of Beatlemania.”

In 2012’s Kindle edition of British author and broadcaster Spencer Leigh’s THINGS DO GO WRONG which tells the story of the ill-fated Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran UK 1960 tour, English musician, singer and guitarist Joe Brown further illuminated Cochran’s unique guitar prowess.

“Eddie had a great trick, it had probably been used in America for years, but we didn’t know about it over here. He used to put a second string instead of a third string on his guitar, so that he had an unwound string and he could bend it and get those bluesy sounds that you never heard in England.”
#

Marshall Berle started his career at the William Morris Agency in 1960, signing the Beach Boys to an agency contract representing the band from the beginning of their career through 1965. As a booking agent, he repped Little Richard, Spirit, Canned Heat, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Ike and Tina Turner Revue, Marvin Gaye, Taj Mahal, Rufus, and Bachman-Turner Overdrive.

“I went to Fairfax High School with Phil Spector,” recalled Berlein a 2012 interview we conducted. “We both earlier went to Laurel Elementary. I met Eddie Cochran at Gold Star just before he died. Phil invited me down. I went into the Navy in 1956, ‘57 and out in 1960. I was still in the Navy and Phil wanted to play me something. And in the other studio was this guy, Eddie Cochran.

“In those days instead of using a drum they sometimes used a cardboard box or a suitcase. It was really cool. He had not gone to England yet and this was before Phil moved to New York.”

Russ Titelman is a record producer and songwriter. He’s won three Grammy awards producing Steve Winwood and Eric Clapton. In the early sixties Titelman spent many hours at Gold Star around Spector sessions. In 1965 he was the rhythm guitarist on the Shindig! television show. He was later a staff producer for Warner Bros for 20 years.

“In 1959 or ’60 Lou Adler and Herb Alpert produced a TV pilot for a dance TV show that they shot at the Renaissance Club on Sunset,” reminisced Russ in a 2014 interview we conducted.

“Eddie Cochran was the guest and I was on as one of the dancers. He had magic. Man, I’ll tell you. ‘Summertime Blues.’ ‘C’Mon, Everybody.’ The sound that he got with his guitar and bass was so completely compelling.”

Music man Robert Marchese won a Grammy for producing in 1968 the live Richard Pryor album at The Troubadour. Robert witnessed Elvis Presley in 1957 and Eddie Cochran during 1959 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

“I saw Eddie at the Syria Mosque,” emphasized Marchese by telephone. “Buddy Holly played there four times in 1957 and ’58. Elvis blew the roof off the house.

“Believe me, Eddie Cochran was the only person I ever saw who could ever give Elvis a run for his money. He sang about girls, cars, had moves and nervous energy we all had. Cochran actually wrote a lot of his stuff. Good lookin’ boy. The chicks were swooning. Eddie was on a bill with Chuck Berry and Huey “Piano” Smith &d His Clowns, who were terrific. Mickey & Sylvia were on the show. Her dress was so tight she couldn’t walk! The brothers were going crazy.”

Malcolm Leo is a film director who with Andrew Solt wrote and directed the documentaries This is Elvis, The Beach Boys: An American Band, and in 1979 the groundbreaking television movie Heroes of Rock and Roll.

“I saw Elvis at the Pan-Pacific Auditorium in October 1957,” proclaimed Leo. “The appearance of Elvis in Los Angeles not only changed the culture, but he catalyzed the whole record industry. The world before Elvis was the 5/4 Ballroom at Fifty-Fourth and Broadway in downtown L.A. I had an older friend, Leland States, who could drive and he took me to see Eddie Cochran. Leeland and I were classmates at North Hollywood High School. It was Eddie’s hair, shiny shirts, cool slacks that packed the punch when we caught him doing ‘Somethin’ Else.’”

“I heard the Spector and Cochran records in the UK,” volunteered author, and 1964-1967 record producer of the Rolling Stones, Andrew Loog Oldham in a 2000 interview with me.

“It made an impact because of the use of room. The usage of tape delay. You knew something was going on, even if you didn’t know what it was. Later, after, I’d recorded the Rolling Stones’ ‘Not Fade Away’—or let’s say ‘Little Red Rooster.’ You realized, by recording in similar mono circumstances, in London’s Regent Sound as opposed to Gold Star, or where Phil did ‘To Know Him Is to Love Him,’ what the room brought to the game.

“There is a lot of magic to that record. Maybe one of the things that drew me to it was that there was a subliminal audio text from Eddie Cochran records. Eddie had already done ‘Summertime Blues’ at Gold Star. So, we didn’t know, but you do know, man. That’s my memory of it.

“In my book Stoned, Soho was the playground, London was where we made all the pieces fit – the growing pains of pop and vision. How vaudeville and World War II begot a middle-class trad-jazz which begot skiffle and imitative well-meaning pop and eventually this little cluster of about 300 white kids with a passion for rhythm ‘n’ blues.

“How before the Beatles there was a Jack Good, Eddie Cochran, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, Billy Fury, Marty Wilde and Cliff Richard and the Shadows that ran that first all-important mile.

“How bigger than life, defining our behavior, up there on the screen was Elvis and Jimmy Dean.

“There is also The Girl Can’t Help It film. There’s no soundtrack album to it.

“The Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran sequences aren’t just slotted-in videos. I saw it before I saw Eddie play live. I saw them on-screen, and later in the UK at a personal appearance. Both galvanized me. Dark-haired guys didn’t interest me, only blondes, because I could be it.”

“After we were at the Monterey International Pop Festival [in June 1967], emailed Pete Townsend of the Who in a 2007 correspondence, “a side issue was that we played at the Fillmore [in San Francisco] on this trip, and that was probably more important to us, because Bill Graham insisted that we play a longer set than we were used to. It was around this time we began to include songs like ‘Young Man Blues’ and ‘Summertime Blues.’”

(Gary “Pig” Gold Archives)

#

Ian Whitcomb was an English piano player, singer-songwriter, record producer, historian, author and broadcaster. I spoke with him in 2013.

“I’m rooted in Eddie Cochran, Jerry Lee Lewis and George Formby. I also love rock ‘n’ roll. Elvis Presley, Gene Vincent, and Fats Domino. Cochran is sort of overlooked in history. He didn’t make that many records and got killed too early,” lamented Whitcomb.

During 2014 I had a conversation with record producer and songwriter Kim Fowley about Cochran and Gold Star. Fowley was a deejay on satellite radio SiriusXM’s Little Steven’s Underground Garage.

“I went to Gold Star my first day in Hollywood, on February 3, 1959. It was the day Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper died in an airplane crash in Iowa,” reminisced Kim.

“I met the rockabilly cats Johnny and Dorsey Burnette in 1959. It was during that day in Hollywood at Gold Star, around a Champs recording session I was covering for Dig magazine. I was their campus correspondent and invited to have lunch with Dorsey and Johnny.

“I then encountered Eddie Cochran, songwriters Sharon Sheeley, Jackie DeShannon and Eddie’s record producer and co-writer, Jerry Capehart.

“As a visitor to Gold Star, it was the epicenter of teenage rock ’n’ roll recording culture in 1959. If you were in Memphis, Tennessee, you would knock on the door of Sun Records. If you were in Detroit, Michigan, you would knock on the door at Motown. But in 1959, I went to Gold Star.

“It was possibly a double-edged sword for Larry Levine, Stan Ross, and Dave Gold, because they figured they would service the emerging rock ’n’ roll community. At that point, the other studios in town had a suit-and-tie vibration. So, if some kid had a hundred dollars, he couldn’t even get in those places but he could cut a record at Gold Star for a hundred bucks if he saved money or got his friends and family to pitch in with band members.

“You could go in there and not get intimidated. You had equal footing with legendary guys like Eddie Cochran who I saw work at Gold Star. He invited me in to watch, listen, and learn. I also attended his session for ‘Sittin’ in the Balcony’ that came out on Liberty.

“Eddie, Sharon Sheely, Jimmy O’Neill, Danny Hutton, Bobby Womack, Sam Cooke and I shared the same music business attorney, Walter E. Hurst.

“In 1960 I was throwing shows on Sunset Blvd. for teenagers at Jimmy Maddin’s venue, The Summit-later The Red Velvet. Deejays Frosty Harris and Jimmy O’Neill, who were on radio station KRLA, would come down.

“I was the last guy to book Eddie Cochran in America before he died. He came out and did ‘Three Steps to Heaven.’ Eddie then died six weeks later in England.”

#

A deejay on Little Steven’s Underground Garage with Rockabilly Rave-Up is Slim Jim Phantom, drummer of the Stray Cats.

In 2022 I bumped into him in Sherman Oaks, California. We chatted briefly about Eddie Cochran. Slim Jim praised the sonic aspects of the Cochran/Capeheart discs and Eddie’s threads.

The Stray Cats have a tune called “Gene and Eddie,” and at every concert you can hear them play “Twenty Flight Rock,” “Summertime Blues” and “C’Mon, Everybody.”

“Eddie Cochran. A great one for sure,” Slim Jim emailed. “We always say Eddie is the greatest rock star ever!”

“I first became aware of Eddie via Blue Cheer’s ‘Summertime Blues’ on their turns-air-into-cottage-cheese masterpiece Vincebus Eruptum,” admits twenty-flight rocker Gary Pig Gold, “which my teenaged garage combo spent the entire summertime of ’69 struggling to learn.

“That most seasonal of numbers next popped up on yours truly’s Live at Leeds of course, and then – and most indelibly – as the subject matter of the Joe Meek-produced gem ‘Just Like Eddie,’ a battered UK 45 of which my drummist at the time happened to bring to practice one afternoon.

“Curiosity completely piqued by then lured me straight to United Artists’ exemplary Legendary Masters Series No. 4: a, yes, legendary 30-track, Lenny Kaye-liner’d compilation circa ’72 whose four long-playing sides rightfully spent almost as much time on my high school phonograph as UA’s adjacent Jan & Dean Anthology Album, I’ll have you all know. Though I later ‘graduated’ to Liberty of England’s Eddie Cochran 20th Anniversary big boxed set, with its four, as opposed to ‘just’ two LPs …85 generous tracks, including Sides 7 and 8 full of audio from his (sadly, only) British tour plus television appearances.

“Needless to say, the sound and rugged spirit of all things Cochran lived most durably upward and onward across the ages, clear through Sid Vicious’ two – count ‘em! – covers on the Pistols’ aptly-named Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle soundtrack then well beyond indeed as we can hear right here in Century 21.

“In fact, just as the above-mentioned Meek melody recommends, to this day (and I quote), Whenever I’m sad, whenever I’m blue, Whenever my troubles are heavy, Beneath the stars I play my guitar… Just like Eddie.”

© Harvey Kubernik 2026

HARVEY KUBERNIK is the author of 20 books, including 2009’s Canyon Of Dreams: The Magic And The Music Of Laurel Canyon, 2014’s Turn Up The Radio! Rock, Pop and Roll In Los Angeles 1956-1972, 2015′s Every Body Knows: Leonard Cohen, 2016′s Heart of Gold Neil Young and 2017′s 1967: A Complete Rock Music History of the Summer of Love.

Sterling/Barnes and Noble in 2018 published Harvey and Kenneth Kubernik’s The Story Of The Band: From Big Pink To The Last Waltz. In 2021 they wrote Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child for Sterling/Barnes and Noble.

Otherworld Cottage Industries in 2020 published Harvey’s Docs That Rock, Music That Matters. His Screen Gems: (Pop Music Documentaries and Rock ‘n’ Roll TV Scenes) was published in 2026 publication by BearManor Media.

Harvey spoke at the special hearings in 2006 initiated by the Library of Congress held in Hollywood, California, discussing archiving practices and audiotape preservation.

In 2017, he appeared at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, in its Distinguished Speakers Series and as a panelist discussing the forty-fifth anniversary of The Last Waltz at the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles in 2023.

The Doors’ 60th anniversary celebration continues with the re-release of Tom DiCillo’s Grammy award-winning documentary film When You’re Strange. Remastered in 4K for the first time, the film will feature an introduction from John Densmore and Robby Krieger and the worldwide exclusive debut of a newly recorded performance of “Riders on the Storm” featuring Densmore, Krieger, and special guests in partnership with Playing For Change. The film will be released worldwide in theaters on December 4th and 6th.

Ticket info for When You’re Strange can be found at WhenYoureStrangeMovie.com.

The Doors took the stage on July 21, 1969 at the intimate Aquarius Theatre on Sunset Boulevard for what would become one of the most captivating—and criminally underrated—performances of their career. Live at the Aquarius Theatre: The First Performance captures Jim Morrison, Ray Manzarek, Robby Krieger, and John Densmore in peak form: loose, loud, and locked in.

On November 21 it was released as a 180-gram 3-LP Set on Analogue Productions. This definitive edition, limited to just 2,000 copies, is pressed at Quality Record Pressings and features a 2016 mix by longtime Doors’ engineer Bruce Botnick, who revisited the original eight-track analog masters for a stunning new high-resolution transfer, using the same lacquer cut by Chris Bellman who did the Record Store Day release in 2016. The result is a crystal-clear, high-fidelity experience that transports listeners straight into the charged atmosphere of that summer night in 1969.

“The new mix is a revelation,” says Botnick in the liner notes, which also feature Robby Krieger, Ray Manzarek, John Densmore, Danny Sugerman (who would go on to become the band’s second manager), music critic and former editor of the Los Angeles Times Robert Hilburn’s review of the show, which originally ran on July 28, 1969, and extensive production notes by Botnick. “It’s almost like hearing the show for the first time. Using tools we didn’t have in 2001, we were able to remove most of the hum and buzz that permeated the original tapes,” says Botnick. “The resulting clarity gives this concert new life—and as a bonus, side six features material from the soundcheck that preceded the show, offering fans something they’ve never heard before.”

The setlist spans the full range of the Doors’ alchemy—part blues ritual, part psychedelic seance. From a swaggering “Back Door Man” to a hypnotic, fever-dream reading of “The End,” the performance unfolds like a trance. Morrison teeters between mystic shaman and wry provocateur; Krieger’s guitar slices through the haze; Manzarek’s keys swirl like a haunted carnival; and Densmore’s pulse keeps it all tethered to earth. Live at the Aquarius Theatre: The First Performance isn’t just a live album—it’s a portal. A snapshot of a band at the height of its creative powers, caught between chaos and transcendence. Pressed on the highest-quality vinyl and restored with unprecedented clarity, this release invites listeners to step back in time and experience the timeless music of the Doors.

In 2011 I spoke with Bruce Botnick and asked what astounds him 40 years later listening to his collaboration with producer Paul Rothchild and the Doors.

“The thing that still works for me is, first and foremost, the music. The musicianship. The performance. And all of those when these guys connected as a unit and became unconscious is good or better than anything I’ve ever heard. And that’s one of the things I have to hand to my friend producer Paul Rothchild. That we went for performance and tried to stay out of it not to become too technically in the front of the albums that were manufactured.

“In the case of the Doors, Paul was the man who drove the train and kept it on the tracks. But the reality is that there were six of us in the studio making these records together. And it wasn’t a matter of one person ‘being the person.’ Paul never took that point. At some point during the relationship and especially when Jim got busted in Miami, where Paul had to step up and take more control. Because somebody had too or otherwise it would have never got done. But generally, his approach was to get the performance. And we weren’t afraid of editing between takes. You get an amazing first verse and second verse and a chorus and verse into the bridge and it would sort of fall apart and we would grab another take that had it and edited it all together. And it was about the performance. It wasn’t about overdubbing. Because in the majority of what the Doors played on their records was played live.”

Over a forty-year period, I interviewed Ray Manzarek a dozen times.

During 2003, I asked him about Botnick and Rothchild, who helmed and guided the Doors in the recording studio.

“Paul Rothchild was the guy who had produced the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and also Love, along with engineer Bruce Botnick. The two of them did those albums together. So, it was a great combination of six guys. That first album was basically the four Doors and the two other Doors in the control room making the sound. We made the music. They made the sound. And they did an absolutely brilliant job. And it was a real joy and a great learning experience.

“Rothchild and Botnick were two alchemists with sound. We were the alchemical music makers but they were alchemists with sound-adding a bit of this-a bit of that. Some reverb. Some high end. Let’s hit it at 20k or 10k. Let’s dial in a bit of bass in there. They were making this evil witches brew concoction as we went along. And the sound just got better and better.”

Ray Manzarek.
(Photo Henry Diltz/Courtesy Gary Strobl, Henry Diltz Archive)

In a 2009 interview, Ray and I discussed the 1969 Doors.

“After The Soft Parade and the Aquarius shows, we said, ‘Let’s go back to the blues. Let’s get dark and funky for Morrison Hotel.’ [Issued in January 1970].

“The Doors are a collective journey that’s a good way of putting it. It’s of course Jim Morrison as the charismatic lead singer, and I’ve got to address Jim Morrison, but it’s Densmore, Krieger and Manzarek (too). It’s a journey of these four guys, The Four Horsemen of The Apocalypse, the diamond-shaped, no bass player that made a five-point pentagram, shape of the diamond. It’s the inverted pyramid, it’s an archetypal journey of four young men into the unconscious, and coming out of that and creating a musical art form.

“The whole Doors’ organ sound, what makes that work, that’s my whole Slavic upbringing. That’s being a ‘Polish Pianist.’ That’s that dark Slavic Stravinsky, Chopin, that great mournful Bartok type thing. Dark, mournful Slavic soul married so perfectly with the southern gothic American Florida ‘Tennessee Williams’ boy poetry, that the two of us went ‘Crunch!” and the whole thing came right together perfectly.

“The Doors were never part of the folk-rock country rock/laid back ‘Peaceful Easy Feeling’ of Los Angeles. The Doors were part of Raymond Chandler, John Fante, Dalton Trumbo. It was the dark streets and The Day of the Locust, Miss Lonelyhearts. That’s where the Doors come from. You see, nobody came here to make it. Jim and I came to go to the UCLA School of film school, and John [University High School] and Robby [Pacific Palisades High School] are natives. Westside boys who surfed for God’s sake. The Doors are LA. The beach, and downtown LA,” Ray summarized.

I remember mulling around the Aquarius on Sunset Boulevard after the Doors’ show and eating with future author Jan Alan Henderson at the Hollywood Ranch Market.

I had to work earlier in the evening before their local appearance at the West Los Angeles Junior College library in Culver City. The school had just opened that month and I had to stack books and magazines for summer school the next morning. It just wasn’t cool for me to ask anyone on the campus to sub and do my $1.35 an hour job in a newly opened facility.

Besides, in November 1968 I had already witnessed a Doors’ concert at the Inglewood Forum.

At the time, I was still upset by the July 3, 1969 swimming pool misadventure sudden death of Rolling Stones’ founder, Brian Jones.

On July 21, 1969 when the Doors gave two performances at the Aquarius Theatre in Hollywood, a poem Jim Morrison wrote for the occasion, Ode to LA while thinking of Brian Jones, was printed as a four-page pamphlet on textured yellow paper with dark green ink, and distributed to concert goers. Morrison’s work is a meditation on the death of Jones.

Last decade I asked two friends of mine who attended the Doors’ Aquarius Theatre booking to reminisce about the event: Musician, singer/songwriter and actor, Bill Mumy and boxing scholar and author Gene Aguliera.

Bill Mumy: The day before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, I was at the Aquarius Theatre with my Barnes and Barnes partner, Robert Haimer, seeing the Doors. We attended the early show and we got there early and secured seats in the very front row. The gig was great. Morrison was focused and low-key, but he was a mighty force. I thought he looked great. Thick beard, Mexican peasant shirt and orange Aviator sunglasses. Ray wore a white T-shirt. I took several photographs during the gig and have one of the few pics of Morrison onstage looking directly into a camera lens. “Celebration of the Lizard,” “You Make Me Real” and “Soul Kitchen” were highlights for me. The Doors were such a unique band. To this day, I appreciate Morrison’s poetry and lyrics. He was a genuine artist. They all were great and had musical styles that were/are instantly recognizable. I consider myself fortunate to have been there.”

Gene Aguilera: As an inquisitive teenager with a wandering mind, I used to love to look through the Los Angeles Free Press, the infamous, radical, underground newspaper of the ’60s. One day, there it was: a small ad saying the Doors were coming to the Aquarius Theatre on July 21, 1969! Elektra Records, the Doors’ label, had begun a policy of renting the venue on Monday nights (this being the dark night of the play Hair) to showcase their roster. Naturally, I had to go, but was without wheels at that point; so, after much begging (my 16th birthday was coming soon), my aunt, Julie Gillis, agreed to take me and my two cousins to see one of my favorite bands.

As we departed East LA, making our way toward the Sunset Strip, my aunt Julie began to worry about taking her 11-year-old daughter, Debbie, with us. Just a few months earlier in Miami, the Doors’ lead singer Jim Morrison had been arrested for indecent exposure onstage. She said, “What if he takes it out again? I don’t want Debbie to see any of this.” But it didn’t matter to me, there was no other place in the world I would rather be. With its painted psychedelic exterior and an exquisite art-deco interior, we had arrived at the Aquarius Theatre and sat about halfway up from the stage. With the band still reeling from the Miami bust, an aura of danger lurked thick in the air; when suddenly to the stage strolls a dwarf (adding to the circus-like atmosphere), named Sugar Bear, to announce the band, “Ladies and Gentlemen… the Doors!”

We were now ready for the Lizard King. Jim Morrison looked so much different in person than the album covers I had studied; he arrived with sunglasses, a thick beard, and a paunch around his waist. But for this hometown ‘live’ recording Morrison introduced an edgy new trick to his usual theatrical drama. With the spotlight on, Morrison appeared incredulously high up in the rafters, grabbed a rope and swung to the stage, Tarzan-style, leaving the entire crowd gasping at what they saw. My aunt Julie had her coat ready to cover Debbie’s eyes (if Jim was going to whip it out, as he did in Miami), but that never happened, thank God, Morrison instead throwing Styrofoam balls out to the crowd.

In my youthful excitement, I ran toward the stage and caught a few. A pretty hippie girl next to me was disappointed at not catching anything, so I gave her one, and in turn, she gave me a great big kiss; witnessed by all my group. This was the dawning of the age of Aquarius.

##

Jim Morrison
(Photo by Kurt Ingham, courtesy Heather Harris/all rights reserved)

“I knew Jim was a great poet,” Ray Manzarek reiterated to me one afternoon in 1995 as we watched a UCLA NCAA championship basketball game on television with my brother Kenneth, father Marshall and Burton Cummings of the Guess Who.

“See that’s why we put the band together in the first place. It was going to be poetry together with rock ‘n’ roll. Not like poetry and jazz. Or like it, it was poetry and jazz from the ‘50s, except we were doing poetry and rock ‘n’ roll. And our version of rock ‘n’ roll was whatever you could bring to the table. Robby, bring your Flamenco guitar, Robby bring that bottleneck guitar, bring that sitar tuning. John, bring your marching drums and your snares and your four on the floor. Ray, bring your classical training and your blues training and your jazz training. Jim, bring your Southern gothic poetry, your Arthur Rimbaud poetry. It all works in rock ‘n’ roll. Jim was a magnificent poet.”

In July 1995, at the MET Theatre on Oxford Avenue in East Hollywood, I produced and co-curated a month-long Rock and Roll in Literature series with director Darrell Larson and associate producer Daniel Weizmann.

Manzarek, Densmore, and Krieger reunited for us and played “Peace Frog,” “Love Me Two Times,” and “Little Red Rooster” on July 8. Music journalist Kirk Silsbee read from Art Pepper’s Straight Life, John Densmore recited an entry from his new novel, and actor Michael Ontkean recited Ode to LA by Jim Morrison.

Last decade I discussed the Doors and Morrison’s relationship to cinema with novelist Weizmann. He subsequently emailed me Motel Money Murder Madness: Jim Morrison and the Noir Tradition.

“Some like to make fun of Jim Morrison for his poetic ambitions—he was young, ultra-serious, and at times he had the somber college student’s yen for Hamlet-like navel-gazing. What’s more, like Michael Jackson and Elizabeth Taylor, the force of Morrison’s stardom at times threatens to overshadow his artistic gifts. Patti Smith recently wrote that she felt ‘both kinship and contempt’ watching Morrison perform. But Jim Morrison’s lyrics did introduce a whole new and highly literary sensibility to pop music—the Southern California noir of Raymond Chandler and the Southern Gothic tradition of William Faulkner. And pop music has never really been the same since.

“Of course, new things were already happening to the song lyric before Morrison made his move: Dylan shocked the airwaves with biblical passion and Whitmanesque frenzy. The Beatles followed with colorful utopian imagery that had roots in James Joyce, Lewis Carroll, and Edward Lear’s nonsense verse. But nobody brought the gravity, the hard realism and the psychological pressure of noir to the popular song before Jim. He represented a major leap toward adulthood in ’67 and the boomers flipped for it. After a youth saturated with sunshine and goody-goody-gumdrops consumerism, they had secretly been craving just such a counter-move.

“The first album’s shadowy album cover and billboard, shot by Guy Webster, was a knowing nod to noir film posters like Out of the Past and In a Lonely Place. And Jim’s crooner voice and movie-star good looks defied the rock template, as well. But most of all, the words, their impressionistic, nightmare-like alienation, were strange and yet instantly recognizable.

“We can’t know exactly what inspired Morrison to fuse the noir dreamscape to the popular song… but he was a military brat, raised in Florida and New Mexico. The South, with its backwoods quiet, its open highways, its malevolence, and its anti-culture, was in his bones. Throw a UCLA dose of Nietzsche, Rimbaud, the exotica of Eastern philosophy, Jungian psych, and the Native American tragedy into the mix, and you’ve got a potion powerful enough to challenge the lyrical norms as deeply as the sound of Hendrix’s guitar did.

“One of the last of the Venice Beach beatniks, Morrison self-published slim volumes of verse, even at the height of his rock stardom. He certainly had a hard time straddling his roles as shaman, youth leader, pop icon, and serious artist. But he struggled in earnest, and it’s impossible to talk about the Los Angeles tradition that stretches from Chandler, West and Fante to Didion herself, Bukowski and beyond, without seeing Morrison’s part.

“What’s more, for better or worse, whole music genres have Morrison to thank for forging darkness to the pop song. Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy, post-punk, and even grunge couldn’t have happened without him. Some, like the Cult, seemed only to get the histrionics; others, like Jane’s Addiction, reached harder for poetry but lacked the warmth of Morrison’s highly intimate voice. Because, in the end, despite the shaman poses, the billboards and the spotlights, Morrison really portrayed himself as a lone human, in true noir fashion, struggling through the night. He wrote from the personal inner space that is poetry.”

On January 28, 2018, I attended the memorial tribute and service to Rabbi Isaiah “Shy” Zeldin at the Stephen Wise Temple in the Bel-Air neighborhood of Southern California. Rabbi Eli Herscher praised Zeldin’s spiritual and visionary leadership in 1964 as he established an open-minded religious and musical community in the region, perhaps a mile from the UCLA campus where Manzarek and Morrison in 1964 were enrolled as students. From the Bima, Herscher encouraged the congregation of mourners “that today, memory is the only agenda.”

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s Library & Archives on July 10, 2017, invited me to be a guest speaker in their Author Series in Cleveland, Ohio. Before my appearance, one of the curatorial assistants took me into the private air-conditioned storage locker room not open to the viewing public. “We knew you were coming today and pulled out some specific items we wanted you to see.”

I was given an envelope containing Jim Morrison’s UCLA diploma.

It was a signal.

Time to fly back home to Los Angeles. I was immediately reminded of Morrison’s lyric line in “Celebration of the Lizard”: “Tomorrow we enter the town of my birth. I want to be ready.”

Harvey Kubernik is the author of 20 books, including 2009’s Canyon Of Dreams: The Magic And The Music Of Laurel Canyon, 2014’s Turn Up The Radio! Rock, Pop and Roll In Los Angeles 1956-1972, 2015′s Every Body Knows: Leonard Cohen, 2016′s Heart of Gold, Neil Young and 2017′s 1967: A Complete Rock Music History of the Summer of Love. Sterling/Barnes and Noble in 2018 published Harvey and Kenneth Kubernik’s The Story Of The Band: From Big Pink To The Last Waltz. In 2021 the duo wrote Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child for Sterling/Barnes and Noble.

Otherworld Cottage Industries in 2020 published Harvey’s Docs That Rock, Music That Matters. His Screen Gems: (Pop Music Documentaries and Rock ‘n’ Roll TV Scenes) is scheduled for a late 2025 publication.

Harvey Kubernik wrote the liner notes to CD re-releases of Carole King’s Tapestry, The Essential Carole King, Allen Ginsberg’s Kaddish, Elvis Presley The ’68 Comeback Special, The Ramones’ End of the Century and Big Brother & the Holding Company Captured Live at The Monterey International Pop Festival. During 2006 Kubernik appeared at the special hearings by The Library of Congress in Hollywood, California, discussing archiving practices and audiotape preservation. In 2017 he lectured at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, in their Distinguished Speakers Series. Amidst 2023, Harvey spoke at The Grammy Museum in Los Angeles discussing director Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz music documentary.

Kubernik is in The Sound of Protest documentary now airing on the Apple TVOD TV broadcasting service. Director Siobhan Logue’s endeavor features Smokey Robinson, Hozier, Skin (Skunk Anansie), Two-Tone’s Jerry Dammers, Angélique Kidjo, Holly Johnson, David McAlmont, Rhiannon Giddens, and more. Harvey is interviewed along with Iggy Pop, Bruce Johnston, Johnny Echols, the Bangles’ Susanna Hoffs and Victoria Peterson, and the founding members of the Seeds in director Neil Norman’s documentary The Seeds: Pushin’ Too Hard now streaming online on Vimeo. This November 16, 2025, a DVD/Blu-ray is scheduled for release via the GNP Crescendo Company.

As part of Elektra Records’ 75th Anniversary celebration, Rhino Entertainment has just released an extensive collection of iconic Elektra titles on vinyl. The series encompasses acclaimed albums issued from the ‘60s through the ‘90s that underline the label’s timeless, genre-defiant catalog. Titles from the collection were issued each Friday in July. They are available at participating brick-and-mortar stores across the country.

The July albums included The Afghan Whigs – Gentlemen, Anita Baker – Rapture, Bread – Best of Bread, Grover Washington Jr. – Winelight, Keith Sweat – Keith Sweat, Nanci Griffith - Other Voices, Other Rooms, Public Image Ltd – This Is What You Want… This Is What You Get, Superdrag – Regretfully Yours, Television – Adventure (High Fidelity), The Stooges – The Stooges (High Fidelity), Third Eye Blind – Third Eye Blind, Tim Buckley – Happy Sad (Rhino Reserve), Sisters of Mercy - First and Last and Always, The Cars – The Cars (High Fidelity), Television – Marquee Moon (High Fidelity), The Cars – Shake It Up (Rhino Reserve), Love – The Elektra Singles, The Doors – Golden Doors 2.

Rhino’s Quadio continues the Elektra 75th anniversary with four hits collections: Judy Collins’ Colors of the Day (1972), the New Seekers’ The Best of the New Seekers (1973), and Carly Simon’s The Best of Carly Simon (1975).

Each disc pairs the original quadraphonic mix with a hi-res 192 kHz/24-bit stereo transfer, both sourced from the original analog four-track quad master tapes. Available exclusively through Rhino.com and select Warner Music Group stores worldwide.

As a highlight of this special Elektra 75 collection, label founder Jac Holzman has assembled an album featuring Bob Dylan alongside other influential folk artists such as Fred Neil, Tom Paxton, and Judy Collins, entitled Dylan’s Circle. It’s available as a 1LP/1CD that highlights the collaboration and competition between these legendary musicians and honors the Greenwich Village music scene of the early 1960s. From Dylan’s “North Country Blues” to “Maggie’s Farm,” the compilation showcases the era’s defining sound. It’s a tribute to the artists who helped shape the folk revival and to Jac Holzman’s legacy.

Jac Holzman in his home studio.
(Courtesy of Rhino)

Jac’s initial 1950-1972 sonic navigations were fearless and forensic. Today his catalog, now distributed by Rhino, continues to resonate and penetrate.
Jac Holzman was born September 15, 1931 in New York City. The son of a Manhattan doctor, he co-founded Elektra Entertainment with Paul Rickolt as a small independent folk label in his St. John’s College dormitory room in 1950 in Queens, New York, At 19, Jac decided to employ the name Elektra for his new record company, and in December 1950 recorded New Songs by John Gruen and pressed up 500 copies.

Helming Elektra, Holzman would eventually discover, sign, and nurture recording artists Theodore Bikel, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Love, the Doors, Josh White, Tom Paxton, Tim Buckley, Carly Simon, the Stooges, MC5, Harry Chapin, Bread, Judy Collins, the Cars and dozens more. He inked Queen to their North American deal.

In 1964, Jac launched the groundbreaking Nonesuch Records, which began life as a rich source of classical and world music. In 1970, Holzman’s Elektra and Nonesuch Records were acquired by Kinney National Services, who soon changed its name to Warner Communications. In 1972 a new conglomerate company became Warner-Elektra-Atlantic, or WEA for short. He continued to run Elektra until 1973, when he became Senior Vice President and Chief Technologist for its parent company, Warner Communications (WCI). Holzman helped usher WCI into home video and the first interactive cable television system, Qube, and set up a pilot program on Warner’s Nickelodeon Channel that evolved into MTV.

In 1991, Jac returned to Warner Music Group as Chief Technologist, helping define a broad spectrum of issues relating to Warner’s expanding music interests. His work centered around digital developments, DVD Audio, and multichannel sound. Holzman devised the plan for Warner’s DVD-A launch and supervised a rounded catalog of DVD-Audio discs, developing now-standard recording and mixing techniques for this high-resolution sound medium.

When Edgar Bronfman, Jr. and some investors acquired Warner Music Group from Time Warner in 2004, Bronfman brought Jac back to Warner to help revitalize the company.

In 1998, Jac Holzman wrote and published his autobiography Follow the Music: The Life and High Times of Elektra Records in the Great Years of American Pop Culture (with Gavan Daws).

During 2008, Holzman was given the NARAS Grammy Trustees Award. In 2011, Holzman, along with Art Rupe, founder of Specialty Records, were awarded the Ahmet Ertegun Award by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and welcomed into the non-performer category. The Doors’ John Densmore gave the induction speech for Holzman.

Since 2011, when WMG was acquired by Len Blavatnik’s Access Industries, Jac has remained at the center of music innovation, serving as a trusted advisor and mentor to leaders across the company.

He spent more than a year overseeing the creation of the ingenious Doors iPad app, released to great acclaim in 2013, which he describes as “a 1600-piece, three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle, elegantly pre-assembled.”

Jac also brought his unparalleled audio expertise to the acoustic design of WMG’s studios at its new Los Angeles building – the landmark former Ford Factory in the city’s Downtown Arts District.

Paul Butterfield, 1968.
(Photo by Henry Diltz/Courtesy of Gary Strobl)

##

Mark Sebastian is an acclaimed singer and songwriter. He co-wrote “Summer In the City” a number one hit for the Lovin’ Spoonful. I asked him about Elektra Records and founder Jac Holzman.

“Growing up in Greenwich Village, our record stores were rife with international and folk records. Jac Holzman’s Elektra Records offered a lot of unique releases like Theo Bikel’s Folk Songs Of Israel, Jean Ritchie, some blues greats like Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. Many of his artists were family friends of my parents, like Sonny Terry and Josh White. So we had all those records in our apartment on Washington Square.

“Jac delivered his records around the Village on his Vespa, so he cut a unique figure. I used to see his scooter in front of the record stores that carried international and folk records.I later crashed that hallowed Vespa into a tree, but the less said about that, the better. Maybe it was a harbinger of my gradual conversion to pop music.

“I began to listen more deeply when Tear Down the Walls by Vince Martin and Fred Neil came out. Also, albums my brother John played on, like Judy Collins album interested me, of course… I really liked the sound of the 12-string on the Martin & Neil albums, just as I did on Bob Gibson cuts. John took me to hear Martin And Neil at the Village Gate and I was very impressed, both by Vince’s personality and Fred’s voice, which was otherworldly. They sang many songs I knew from Sing Out magazine and Pete Seeger records.

“The first time I heard Fred I realized he was in a class apart from any other singer. Vince’s voice was more theatrical and he shone in the Jamaican music that was so popular at the time. He knew how to cater to the audiences in the Village on week-ends; collegiates and tourists. Calypso was king for a short time in Folk clubs!

“When the Lovin’ Spoonful contributed tracks to What’s Shakin’, it was evident Jac was trying to make an entree into blues/rock. It featured very early recordings by Eric Clapton and the Powerhouse, Paul Butterfield Blues Band, and the Lovin’ Spoonful.

“I was already a fan of the Butterfield band, as I had heard recordings of them at the Newport Folk Festival. I was around Paul Butterfield a lot at gigs in the Village and concerts at venues where the Even Dozen Jug Band or Victoria Spivey performed. The early band was comprised of players my brother had told me about. Drummer Sam Lay was a legend to me.

“Of course, I understood that Butterfield was great, having heard the influences that formed him, like Little Walter and Sonny Terry. My brother confirmed that Paul was the real deal and not one of the many who just repeated a few riffs they knew. My father [musician, composer and master of the classical chromatic harmonica] was always rehearsing in the next room. Dad appreciated Butterfield’s gift after John took him to a couple of his concerts Our house was built on the harmonica. I acquired an ear for blues, both country and city blues, like Lightnin’ Hopkins’ music. I met him when I was sent almost every blues and folk record Jac put out on Elektra, I guess I began to be considered a tastemaker at 14.

“I first became aware of Love when their records came to New York’s FM stations. In roughly ’69 and ’70 we had unique on air talent like Rosko and Allison Steele. The DJ’s we had on FM were known for long sets involving lots of variety; Ritchie Havens or Moody Blues….

“Love worked into those sets perfectly. I was captured by the production on Forever Changes, and the popular single, ‘Alone Again Or.’ The Mexican brass Banda horns chart by arranger David Angel were totally novel, at least to me, in pop music. Love’s ‘Orange Skies,’ specifically, turned my head around. I was invited to Jac’s house in South Salem, New York. On occasion he’d play Love albums on his turntable.

“I soon realized that Jac, the label owner, was unique; not someone who emerged from the New York City Brill Building music publishing world. He was independent, open-minded, a visionary. I was too young to appreciate what comprised good or bad record label, but here was a company who did Israeli, folk, blues, and, later, experimental music.

“Now looking back, Love, Doors, Phil Ochs, Tim Buckley, Judy Collins, Jac gave each artist room to be themselves. There was room for Theo Bikel, and banjo pickers, bluegrass musicians, the Charles River Valley Boys and the Dillards. He didn’t have tunnel vision as far as what his label was all about.”

In December 1963, Holzman issued the The Even Dozen Jug Band. The members were Stefan Grossman, Peter Siegel, Joshua Rifkin, David Grisman, Steve Katz, John Sebastian, and Maria Muldaur, then Maria D’Amato.

Beatle Country is the fourth studio album by the bluegrass band Charles River Valley Boys. It was in the shops and retail outlets in November 1966. The Elektra LP was produced by Paul Rothchild and Peter K. Siegel in Nashville. Beatle Country houses only covers of the Beatles. Holzman in 1965 issued The Baroque Beatles Book, and suggested to the group they cut an LP of Beatles songs.

Multi-instrumentalist Chris Darrow, co-founder of the Kaleidoscope, onetime member of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and the Corvettes in a 2000 interview with me reinforced how Beatles Country anticipated the progressive bluegrass movement of the 1970s.

“It had upright bass, banjos and extra long instrumental breaks. It’s a common element of bluegrass music, where everyone got the chance to solo. In those days, the hard-core bluegrass guys didn’t talk or think about rock and roll,” underlined Chris. ‘“But the times were a changin’’ and the Beatles hit hard, especially the folk scene. Bob Dylan and Joan Baez were the scene-stealers and groups like the Kweskin Jug Band, the Greenbriar Boys and the Charles River Valley Boys were the East Coast favorites.

“The folk boom filled the musical gap for most of us and now the Beatles were bringing our own music back to us and it was familiar. ‘Act Naturally’ and ‘I’ve Just Seen a Face’ from Rubber Soul were on the AM radio dial. Almost instantly, most of us bluegrass guys got into some sort of electric outfit and tried to do it,” confessed Darrow.

“I had met bass player, Don McAllister as a mandolin player in the early bluegrass days. It seemed that all us bluegrass mandolinists like Don, Chris Hillman and myself gravitated towards the bass. Maybe it’s the four-string deal. Don went on to play on Dr. John’s first album

“In the summer of 1964 I was in the Scat Band was playing at the Ash Grove and I ran into Chris Hillman, whose group the Scottsville Squirrel Barkers had taken our place at Disneyland. They were the San Diego version of our band and the group also spawned Larry Murray on dobro and later on, Bernie Leadon on banjo. By this time, however, Chris Hillman was playing in a group that later was dubbed the Hillmen with Vern and Rex Gosdin and Don Parmley on banjo.

“On the way to the stage I asked him what was cookin’ and he sheepishly said, ‘ I joined a rock and roll band. I need the money. They’re called the Byrds…’ In those days, the hard-core bluegrass guys didn’t talk or think about rock and roll,” declared Chris, who played fiddle and violin on James Taylor’s Sweet Baby James.

“I’m a kid coming out of bluegrass,” volunteered singer/songwriter Chris Hillman during a 2007 interview we did. “Where you didn’t move on stage and had a glum look on your face ‘cause you had to keep concentrating and playing at breakneck speed on a musical thing. Chris Darrow can attest to the ‘bluegrass showmanship,’ which is nothing there.”

In 1967 Elektra released The Incredible String Band debut LP produced by Joe Boyd for the American market and The Zodiac: Cosmic Sounds, a collaborative concept psychedelic spoken word and exotica excursion exploring astrological signs.

The disc was produced by Alex Hassilev, a member of the Limeliters. Music written by Mort Garson, Moog synthesizer from Paul Beaver, words courtesy of Jacques Wilson, and narration by folk singer and record producer Cyrus Faryar. Session musicians Emil Richards, Hal Blaine, Carol Kaye, Mike Melvoin and Bud Shank, members of the Amercan Federation of Musicians Local 47 were the percussion and rhythm section. The back cover had the written instructions: “Must be played in the dark.”

(Courtesy of Gary Strobl)

Justin Hayward of the Moody Blues cited the LP on the band’s pre-production period going into Days of Future Passed. In a 2010 interview with me, Hayward praised The Zodiac Cosmic Sounds. “That really turned us on. And we have to give that album some credit for really influencing us.”

The epochal Delaney and Bonnie album, The Original Delaney & Bonnie & Friends (Accept No Substitute) shipped to rack jobbers, distributors, retailers and radio stations in July 1969.

“In February ’69 I was asked to do the Delaney, Bonnie and Friends at Elektra studio,” recalled drummer Jim Keltner in a 2005 interview we did.

“Leon [Russell] played piano on everything but ‘When This Battle Is Over,’ which was Dr. John, Mac Rebennack. It was a song Mac wrote with Jesse Hill. There was a fusion of the Southern people beginning to play with the Hollywood cats. Everyone at the time was being influenced by that scene. George Harrison loved the Delaney and Bonnie LP when he heard an advance acetate of it and tried to get it on Apple Records. Delaney and Bonnie had tremendous magic and chemistry.

“When I got to know John (Lennon) he told me he liked the Delaney Bonnie and Friends Accept No Substitute album. George Harrison had actually tried to sign Delaney and Bonnie to Apple Records in the U.K. Leon is all over that. His piano playing on the ‘The Ghetto’ is the greatest. No one else can do that,” Jim summarized.

Ian Hunter, the bandleader of Mott the Hoople was also a fan of The Original Delaney & Bonnie & Friends (Accept No Substitute).

“My thing was Leon,” confessed Hunter in our 1998 interview. “The piano playing… ‘In The Ghetto’ was the first time I heard Leon. It was on an album. I just couldn’t believe it. It was gospel rock. It was unbelievable. And I know where he got it from, like Dr. John and a couple of other people, but for me the style of playing. I went home and tried to do that for months. I tried to learn that song for months. The feel. I got near it but never got it right.”

##

In 2017 I interviewed Jac Holzman for my book 1967: A Complete Rock Music History of the Summer of Love.

Jac Holzman, 2020.
(Courtesy of Rhino)

HK: The 1967 Summer of Love.

JH: The [1967] Summer of Love was also the summer of psychedelia and things of that nature. But along with the Doors, Love, Tim Buckley and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, I’d like to amplify on. There were two Doors albums out that year. Which was unusual but it was done on purpose to get them really established as an act and not a one album wonder.

So we had the first album that came out in January and then we had Strange Days which came out in October, and recorded in summer. So there were two Doors albums which gave them a heft, a solidity to the Doors’ position vis a vis anybody else’s recorded music. We did have Paul Butterfield, we had Tim Buckley, Goodbye and Hello, which was a very emblematic of that time, and Love’s Forever Changes, their third album. But there are a couple of other albums that contributed to the ambience of the label that sold well although they didn’t score in the top ten of the charts. Judy Collins’ Wildflowers. Which was a whole different sound for Judy and The Incredible String Band, 5,000 Spirits Of The Layers of the Onion, and The Zodiac Cosmic Sounds are all part of that Summer of Love.

What I was finding was new. Or at least I thought it was new or I was creating it so as to be new. By that I mean you can take the Zodiac Cosmic Sounds, the first use of the Moog synthesizer on records. It was ‘cause I knew we could have that sound and that sound would give a cast to the album that nothing else could. And it sounded futuristic. So I decided to do it that way. But the whole label was me looking for something that I hadn’t heard before. Or something that I had heard but it had a new face on it or it felt intrinsically different to me.

HK: Elektra Records had a west coast office very early in the sixties in Los Angeles.

JH: I’m a student of history. The motion picture industry had started in New York and moved west. I saw absolutely no compelling reason why it was not gonna happen. And it was gonna happen where the weather was good. And I believe that theory so much that I came out in 1962 and opened up an office for a year and all I could come up with was Judy Henske. I was in L.A. when Bob Dylan came to Elektra in New York. I wasn’t around because I was out here. And my people who saw him, I wasn’t there. Everybody said, “Jac has to hear the artist.” But based on his first album I don’t know if I would have ever signed him or not. The first album was a lot of Woody Guthrie. But by the beginning of his second album, and by album number three, it was fully found.

HK: Can you discuss record producer Producer Paul Rothchild, the band Love and engineer/producer Bruce Botnick.

JH: My relationship with producer Paul Rothchild started in 1963. He was unhappy at Prestige Records. He came over to get me to release an artist for an anthology series he was looking to produce for Prestige. And I knew he was working with Tom Rush, and I desperately wanted Tom Rush. I’d see Paul around and he was a sharp guy. I offered him a job to work for me after he started to complain about his boss. Mainly because Paul and I could see things. He started out with folk records and he learned about how to deal with groups”

L.A. was where I finally found what I was looking for. The time was the summer of 1966, and the place was the Sunset Strip, which had suddenly morphed before everyone’s astonished eyes into the hippie navel of the universe. The first rock group we did I did with Mark Abramson. Love.

I went into the studio and there was this kid there and I thought he was the guy who handed the engineer the tapes. I got there really early. It was Bruce Botnick, and we hit it off real well. And at the end of the sessions he took me out to dinner and asked if there ever a chance for me to work for Elektra I’d like to do it because I like the way you guys go about things. I produced Love’s ‘7 and 7 Is.’ He engineered it. And because I was so comfortable in that studio and I trusted Paul Rothchild implicitely and I also trusted Bruce and I felt Bruce and Paul would make a combination where two would add up to three. That’s exactly what happened. Bruce has solid producer chops. Forever Changes would not have happened without him. Arthur Lee and Botnick produced Forever Changes.

HK: Did you attend the June 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival?

JH: I went to the 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival. I didn’t sign anything. I had expected the Doors to be invited but they weren’t. But they pissed off everybody anyway because their song ‘Light My Fire’ was number one in L.A. I had to be there myself. I thought it was great because of the putting together of many disparate acts and having it blend majestically. The mood that was triumph. Rock ‘n’ roll was here to stay.

Jim Morrison, 1967.
(Photo by Heather Harris)

HK: Can you comment on the Doors.

JH: Jim Morrison. The Doors. Morrison died young. Jimmy Dean. That’s part of it. But he lived his life as full and he lived his life without any attention to convention, or what anybody else thought and a flame that bright usually does not burn long. Jim and Arthur Lee were interesting characters. Arthur admired the Doors. And he was the one who said, “You ought to stay around for their show at the Whisky A Go Go. That band is pretty good.”

Now I stay around for the Doors show in March of 1966. When I saw them I heard a lot of blues and I didn’t need any more white blues singers. And the band did not feel that comfortable. The band could do the blues but it was later when I heard the adventurousness of their approach of taking something like ‘The Alabama Song’ and converting it so it could be done as a rock-infused song. That told me a lot.

“I was more impressed by Ray Manzarek at the beginning than I was by Jim. Jim had the vocal chops but that personna crept out once he knew he had a safe home or a safe perch to work from.

“Remember: The Doors were a band that had been signed to Columbia and they couldn’t even get to make a single. And the reason I offered them a three-album guarantee was that I never wanted them to feel that they would get booted out the door if the first LP didn’t sell. So that was the genesis of that.

HK: The artwork and photos on Elektra packages were always cool. I was drawn to the debut Doors’ LP and the cover photo by Guy Webster.

JH: As for the art work on our albums. I was an amateur photographer and Guy Webster was very good. So you let the people who you know who are going to do the job do their job and leave them alone. You have your chance to manipulate the photos. Look at the first Doors album. We had all of these shots. The conception for the cover with Jim’s face floating on top was Bill (William) Harvey. Because the Doors said, ‘we’ve got to feature Jim.’ So you take the photography and you create something with it. Bill Harvey and I would almost get into fist fights over stuff. But this was part of the creative process. My part of the creative process is to be involved but not buried in the middle to the extent that I lost my perception or position to be able to look at it from slightly afar. So as to determine what we got was what I thought was going to work. Because album covers were important to the sale of music.

I didn’t listen to much of what was going around me except to hear the most contemporary of things so that I could kind of avoid it. Because it’s like shooting a bird in the sky. If you want to shoot a bird you shoot ahead of the bird and the bird and buck shot gets there at the same time. So I always wanted to be out ahead and looking for things I hadn’t heard before.

The function of someone like me, who owned the label one hundred per cent, I saw myself as a mid-wife to their music. I think the word channeler is better. They recorded it. I helped supervise how it was going to be taken in and what I hoped would be willing ears. That’s my job. And it’s my job to talk tough when I need too. But I never had that kind of problem with the Doors. The only time was when there was much screaming about Miami. I said, ‘if you’re shows are being cancelled, we will figure something out about how we’re going to bring you back live. In the mean time, go into the studio. Start writing another album. And that was Morrison Hotel. And then we did two evenings of Doors’ concerts at the Aquarius Theater and those tickets were two dollars. We underwrote the rest. We picked up the tab. But it was there where we launched them. And that idea came from us. That’s kind of what you do when you live your artists anguish and you try and help them and you over the tough spot.”

##

“I loved Michael Bloomfield’s guitar playing on the first Paul Butterfield Blues Band album,” wrote the Doors Robby Krieger in an email to me last decade.

“Bloomfield was my favorite for a while. To me he was the first white guy who could play blues better than the black guy. I liked East-West, the second Butterfield band LP, but the first one, oh my God…I wore the grooves out. He could play harmonica and I got to know him later in life. I was really excited when we signed to Elektra in 1966 and Paul Rothchild was going to produce our first album and he had produced Paul Butterfield.”

In 2008, Ray Manzarek of the Doors talked to me about the band and Holzman.

“Everyone voted to include the use of strings and horns on our The Soft Parade album. We had made three albums with the same formation and at some point or another when you make albums you want to do an album with expanded sound. So you want to have some horns and strings. My God, everybody did it. And we were gonna do it too. I want some strings. I want some jazz arrangements. I want some classical arrangements. And everyone said yes. Great idea. And a record label that said it was fine.

Ray Manzarek, 1967.
(Photo by Henry Diltz/Courtest Gary Strobl/Henry Diltz Archives)

“What was great about the record label was that Jac Holzman said, ‘Boys, do whatever You want. Just don’t use the seven illegal words.’ George Carlin’s seven foridden words. Other than that, anything goes. Whatever you want to do. And Paul Rothchild encouraged it.

“We have left Sunset Sound. The first two there and the Third at TT& G. on Sunset and Highland in Hollywood. We then went into Elektra’s new place. Fabulous. It was all wooden. Brand new state of the art facility. A great recording studio and they had a great funky organ in there. Gnarly organ. George Harrison dropped by one of your Soft Parade sessions. He was visiting the Elektra studios. He mentioned all the musicians reminded him of the Beatles’ Sgt. Peppers because of the orchestra booked.

“The Doors were part of Raymond Chandler, John Fante, Dalton Trumbo, City of Night, John Rechy, and downtown Los Angeles. It was the dark streets and The Day Of The Locust. Miss Lonely Hearts. That’s where the Doors come from. Morrison Hotel was definitely blues.

“Film school guys founded the Doors. When we made the music, each song had to have a dramatic structure. Each song, whether it was two and a half minutes or an epic like ‘The End’ or ‘When The Music’s Over,’ you had to have dramatic peaks and valleys, and that’s the sense of drama within the Doors’ songs which comes right from the theatre. The point of art is to blow minds.

“You see, nobody came here to Hollywood to make it. Jim and I came to go to the UCLA School of Film. Before I enrolled at UCLA, I lived in Redondo Beach with my family. John [University High School] and Robby [Pacific Palisades High School] are natives. Westside boys who surfed for God’s sake. The Doors are L.A., the beach and downtown L.A.”

“I wasn’t thinking cinematic, but certainly Ray and Jim coming out of the UCLA School of Film were cinematic dudes. That’s for sure. I mean, I hear the world,” observed Doors’ drummer John Densmore.

“In May of 1966 the Doors were at the London Fog and I would go right up the street to the Whisky and hear Love play. Arthur Lee told Jac Holzman of Elektra Records about us when we played the Whisky. That was an incredible sweet gesture, ya know.

“Forever Changes is a fuckin’ masterpiece. The first two albums they did in 1966 and ’67 blew my mind. Here’s this racially mixed group, not playing funk, playing electric folk. Ridiculous, with real tight pants. What!”

Forever Changes was produced and engineered by Bruce Botnick with string and horn arrangements by David Angel. The album was recorded at Sunset Sound and Western Recorders studios in Hollywood with additional vocal and guitar overdubs at Leon Russell’s home studio.

Guitarist Johnny Echols is the co-founder and bandleader of Love, although revisionist history, print and digital documentation has, on occasion, displayed the group as the sole brainchild of Arthur Lee.

I first encountered Arthur Lee and Johnny Echols in the Susan Miller Dorsey High School swimming pool in the Los Angeles Crenshaw Adams District in 1957. I was in kindergarden and learned how to swim from my mother Hilda in the newly built Dorsey facility.

“There were no racial problems. Things were different there,” reminisced Echols in my book Turn Up the Radio! Rock, Pop and Roll in Los Angeles 1956-1972. “We did not have that kind of chaos or animosity, or racial shit, pre summer of 1965 Watts riots, or after it. It’s so strange that it started later on.

(Courtesy of Harvey Kubernik Archives)

“We started Forever Changes with kind of an idea after hearing the Beatles’ Sgt. Peppers. We decided that we wanted to do something that had horns and strings and we knew from the very start how this album was going to be. And what we were going to do and that we were going to try to make this what we would consider our magnum opus. This was gonna be the thing that defined us. And it was either we were gonna take off and just go all the way or something was gonna have to happen. We were going to really leave the three-minute pop song format. We were getting bored of the three- minute rock tune and wanted to push it. We knew with Sgt Pepper’s there was a whole new sonic thing going on. Absolutely.

“Lyrically Arthur was writing some absolutely phenomenal lyrics. I was knocked on my ass. Hell yes it did! Because I am expecting the pedestrian same old stuff that I’d heard before. Then I started reading these lyrics and looking at them. And this isn’t Arthur I know. A dude that I’d fought with and wrestled around the ground with. This was a poet. And I am listening to this poetry and it was absolutely shocking. Because it just came out of no fuckin’ where and still to this day, and it was only for this brief period of time that it was just profound,” marveled Johnny.

“The writing for that brief moment of time was just extraordinary. And I don’t understand it. I’ve asked him over and over and he did not understand. He did not realize how fuckin’ profound that was. He didn’t know. Forever Changes could only happen in the city of L.A. And could only happen at that particular point in time. Because you did have that cosmopolitan freedom, you know. You were able to go anywhere.

“My theory on why the Forever Changes album is so popular and in the top ten of all time. The magic of the record is that it is unexpected. It just came all of a sudden there is the atom bomb. You are dealing with regular TNT explosions and all of a sudden you’ve got an atomic bomb. It just pushed the envelope so far outside of the mainstream that it took a while. But back then people were just kind of stunned. All of a sudden you go from here to there and then stunning Arthur lyrics. Everything was just different. The way the horns were done. The way the jazz was blended in with folk music, was blended in with kind of show tunes and rock ‘n’ roll. But also because the times we were living in. We had civil rights movement, we had the Vietnam war. All of this turmoil and out if the turmoil there’s a rose landed in all of this shit. There are assassinations. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis. Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles in Wilshire Boulevard. So there we got a rose coming out of all this shit and it is blooming. And it is kind of permeating the air with sweetness.”

“Most praising Forever Changes focus on the adventurous music, the way it blends high orchestra and low garage,” enthused writer and novelist Daniel Weizmann. “But equally unusual is the record’s lyrical p.o.v.– aggressive disillusion in the original sense opf the word. Forever Changes is the only album of the Summer of Love that is totally anti-utopian.

“In song after song, Love tests the limits of ‘pop life,’ its inability to save souls. ‘A House is not a Motel’ brings the jungle terror of Vietnam home — literally, home to your bathtub — connecting the bloodshed overseas to the spiritual malaise in the West. In ‘The Daily Planet,’ the sun – the ultimate symbol of good California vibrations — is an agonizing alarm clock to be waited on night after night.

“Then there’s Arthur Lee’s vocals on ‘Bummer in the Summer,’– narrator as cuckold and stray dog, stripped of identity. Like Tommy Wilhelm in Bellow’s Seize the Day, the singer reaches an uneasy satori when he realizes that all spirits are interconnected, shattered mirrors of the human condition.

“It’s been said that Forever Changes is a timeless album, one that rises above its specific environment, etc. Maybe. But I find it hard to separate these dark portraits from Los Angeles in the middle of the sixties.

(Courtesy of Gary Strobl)

“Here in the petri dish of ultra-modernism and counterculture, Love touched the edge of the sixties vision first. They were vanguards of a whole new kind of dismantling. The radio was blasting songs about marmalade pies and peppermints and strawberries back then yummy fantasias for affluent children. Forever Changes unmasked the loneliness, the alienation, and the dread that TV dreams seek to hide.

“The title itself, which can be read about 18 different ways, also turns the idea of limitlessness on its head. There’s something tragic about it, something resigned, and something grown up.”

##

The last recording artist Jac Holzman brought to Elektra during 1972 was Queen. Jac beat out eager representatives from Columbia Records and the legendary talent scout/A&R man Russ Regan, Vice-President at MCA/UNI Records. Regan had signed Neil Diamond, Elton John and Olivia Newton-John to the label and was in hot pursuit of Queen for their North American rights.

When Queen’s manager was negotiating with record labels in America, Regan instinctively knew the commercial recording potential of the group and wanted them for MCA Records. “Queen were the ones who got away,” Russ lamented in an 2010 interview we conducted. “But if I had to lose out on a band, glad it was Jac Holzman and Elektra.”

In 1972, Jack Holzman, wrote an internal memo to his staff about Queen. “I have seen the future of pop music, and it is a band called Queen! I knew in my bones they were it, that Queen would thrive at Elektra and we were the perfect label for them.”

Holzman kept up the pressure on the band’s management, visiting them in London, and he slowly began to convince Queen and their manager Jack Nelson, of his commitment.

“We offered the same lure that worked so well with the Doors and Harry Chapin: we wouldn’t release any other album the same month as Queen’s debut appeared. Although we were now part of the Warner Music Group we were still flexible. We eventually signed Queen for over 60 percent of the world. EMI had Europe. We sold far more Queen records than EMI.”

In 1976, I interviewed Freddie Mercury of Queen in Beverly Hills for the now defunct Melody Maker.

Mercury regally waltzed into the room, stuck out his hands, and greeted me and fellow journalist Justin Pierce with “Hello darlings. What do you think of my black finger nail polish?”

I replied, “Freddie, I grew up in Hollywood. I know what kind of paint real queens buy and wear on their finger nails. So, while you’re in town, why don’t you go over to Ball Beauty Supply on Fairfax Ave? My cousin Shelia Kaye and Cher get their makeup at that shop. It’s near Norty’s Music Center. Ask one of the girls at Elektra’s office on La Cienega Blvd. to drive you there.”

Mercury poured a glass of champagne and requested “to please put the tape machine on.” Freddie was a yenta and thoroughly enjoyed trumpeting Queen and discussing the machinations of their mid-seventies career. The lad had an air of confidence and mega-stardom destiny about him. A singer/songwriter who really enjoyed being a star on and off the stage.

During our chat, Freddie lauded Jac Holzman and the label’s promotional support.

I then asked Freddie what has been key to their still growing devoted following?

“We came out with ‘Keep Yourself Alive’ as a single, which is raunchy, and then we decided on ‘Killer Queen’ for a latter release. The first thing they do is go up to you and ask ‘What are you up to?’ This is our music and it’s up to the individual to interpret it. It’s not up to us to come out with a product and label it. It would be boring if everything was laid out and everybody knew what it was all about all the time. I like people to make up their interpretation.

“They also want to catergorise my stage image. I remember back in an interview where I said, ‘I play on the bi-sexual thing.’ Of course I play on it. It’s simply a matter of wherever my mood takes me. If people want to know and ask me if I’m gay, I tell them it’s up to themselves to find out. I’m just being my flamboyant self and having a good time,” he smiled.

##

In his tribute essay, My Soul Fueled Romantic Relationship with Elektra Records, musician, keyboardist and composer Morley Bartnoff acknowledged the deep imprint the label’s albums had on him.

“In my senior year at Clark High in Las Vegas, my brilliant theater teacher Joan Snyder Moran introduced me to Wildflowers by Judy Collins. She played it during our rehearsal breaks, and I still haven’t stopped listening.

Judy Collins, Newport Folk Festival, July 1966.
(Photo by Henry Diltz/Courtesy Gary Strobl)

“The music sunk into my bones. One of my high school crushes — the impossibly elegant Michelle Ritz, daughter of one of the original Ritz Brothers — noticed my obsession. One day, she came by my house with her flute, only to find me out. She told my mother: “Please tell Morley I came over to play music from Wildflowers with him. And that I’m leaving in the morning to move to Paris, never to be seen or heard from again.”

“That moment was as heartbreaking and cinematic as the songs on Wildflowers — beautifully orchestrated, emotionally haunted, eternal.

“I could easily spend pages on The Circle Game by Tom Rush — a record that opened my ears to early Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, James Taylor, and Tom’s own timeless “No Regrets.” I’ve never stopped playing it. Like so much of the Elektra catalog, it felt carefully chosen, curated with purpose. Jac Holzman didn’t just sign artists — he assembled a universe.

“Then there was Love. Arthur Lee’s first four albums with Love are, to this day, some of the most spiritually aligned music I’ve ever heard. They changed how I listen — and how I write. I dreamt of playing some of those songs with founding guitarist Johnny Echols and Arthur’s final band, Baby Lemonade. A dream I literally danced awake.

“But it wasn’t just the front-line artists that defined Elektra. I’ll never forget when James Bennett handed me an LP back in Vegas and said, ‘Take this home and study it.’ The album was What’s Shakin’.

“At first glance, it looked like a Lovin’ Spoonful showcase. And perhaps they should have ended up on Elektra — but that’s a separate story. What blew me away was the richness of the lineup: Paul Butterfield, Al Kooper, Tom Rush, Eric Clapton, and of course, the Spoonful.

“It was my first real understanding of how a compilation could carry weight — how it could expand your mind and taste. Each artist had multiple songs, which gave you space to live in their world. Blues, folk, soul, proto-rock… it all pulsed through that record. Elektra didn’t just put out albums; they built listening experiences.

“Years later, I found myself at Book Soup on Sunset Boulevard. I’d arrived early to hear Jac Holzman speak about his book on Elektra’s history. He glanced across the room, noticed my top hat and smiled, and pointed: ‘Well, there’s someone who’s DEFINITELY an Elektra appreciator!’

“Indeed I am.”

##

Bruce Botnick recorded and mixed many landmark albums at Sunset Sound Recorders in Hollywood on Sunset Blvd by Elektra artists Love, Doors, Tim Buckley and Clear Light.

In 2010 I interviewed Bruce.

Q: What amazes you, after over half a century, listening to your collaboration with Paul Rothchild, the Doors, and Love?

A: The thing that still works for me is, first and foremost, the music. The musicianship. The performance. And all of those when these guys connected as a unit and became unconscious is good or better than anything I’ve ever heard. And that’s one of the things I have to hand to my friend producer Paul Rothchild. That we went for performance and tried to stay out of it not to become too technically in the front of the albums that were manufactured.

In the case of the Doors, Paul was the man who drove the train and kept it on the tracks. But the reality is that there were six of us in the studio making these records together. And it wasn’t a matter of one person “being the person.” Paul never took that point. At some point during the relationship and especially when Jim got busted in Miami, where Paul had to step up and take more control. Because somebody had too or otherwise it would have never got done. But generally his approach was to get the performance. We weren’t afraid of editing between takes. You get an amazing first verse and second verse and a chorus and verse into the bridge and it would sort of fall apart and we would grab another take that had it and edited it all together. And it was about the performance. It wasn’t about overdubbing. Because in the majority of what the Doors played on their records was played live.

Q: How about Jac Holzman?

A: I will tell you that Jac is the last of a long line of special people in the record business who did it their total reason their total reason for being in the music business was the music. The fact that they made money, the old fashion way, was because of their passion for the music.

It was music first and they knew it was right and people responded they would get the money. It wasn’t like the music today where the focus is on making the quarterly numbers.

Jac’s taste in music was eclectic. What he did can be done today. It just takes somebody with strong musical tastes and a belief and a passion to do it. And build this. I miss Ahmet, I miss even Clive Davis in his early years. Because he had a vision and really turned Columbia Records around into what it became. All these guys. That was the record business. Right now there is no record business and it’s because there aren’t people with vision and really a true passion for the music running it.

##

In July 2025 I received an email from poet, writer, and deejay, Dr. James Cushing touting the Elektra Records endeavors.

“(We all know about Love, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Tim Buckley, and the Doors — and the courage Holzman showed in signing them. Here are ten more.)

Koerner, Ray & Glover, Blues, Rags and Hollers (1963), Lots More Blues, Rags and Hollers (1964), Dave “Snaker” Ray, Snaker’s Here (1965) — Why do these albums retain their cool sixty-plus years later? The freshness of their discovery of these songs bristles out of the speakers.

The Blues Project (1964) — an acoustic compilation LP by white bluesmen like “Spider” John Koerner, Dave Ray, Danny Kalb, and Eric Von Schmidt (not forgetting a guest shot by “Bob Landy” on piano). Liner notes by Paul Nelson. No other company would have taken a chance on a record like this.

Fred Neil, Tear Down the Walls (1964), Bleecker & MacDougal (1965) — the first moves in the great folk-rock chess game that Dylan would win by checkmate with “Like a Rolling Stone.”

Joshua Rifkin, The Baroque Beatles Book (1965) — Jac Holzman himself suggested this idea of giving Beatles tunes Baroque arrangements, and Rifkin cooperated with a unique album that reached #83 on the Billboard charts.

What’s Shakin’ — an electric compilation album with the Lovin’ Spoonful, Paul Butterfield, Eric Clapton, Al Kooper, and others. Holzman insisted this 1966 LP had “no organic reason for being,” but it holds up every bit as well as Fresh Cream.

The Zodiac, Cosmic Sounds (1967) — Right up there with “If You’re Goin’ to San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair)” for providing an immediate descent into one of the guilty pleasures of the Summer of Love. Twelve astrological poems recited over generic rock adds up to a very silly album. Wittgenstein: “If people did not sometimes do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done” (Culture & Value, p. 50e).

The Incredible String Band, The 5000 Spirits or Layers of the Onion (1967) — the silliness continues, right along with the guilty pleasure.

MC5, Kick Out the Jams (1969), The Stooges (1969), The Stooges, Fun House (1970) — the punk attitude first pokes its head above the wasteland. Nobody gets it. Yet.

Television, Marquee Moon (1977), Adventure (1978) — the attitude stands up straight and tall, and has a vision to tell.

X, Under the Big Black Sun (1982) — the attitude has spread all across America, and we live in its aftermath.”

##

In 2025, there are independent record labels that are individual and family owned who carry on the music and record mission that people like Jac Holzman forged.

Neil Norman’s GNP Crescendo Records in Southern California is currently celebrating a 71^st birthday. If you dig surf music, sci-fi, TV and movie soundtracks, cajun, folk, country, fifties and sixties jazz, blues, comedy, the Seeds’ catalog, and 5 STRING BANJO! Don Parmley with 12 String Guitar Billy Strange, 1964 original mono bluegrass recording, visit www.gnpcrescendo.com

Also investigate George Wallace’s High Moon Records label based in New York. This decade Wallace and his dedicated team have released albums by Love, Arthur Lee, the Ace of Cups, Gene Clark, Jeannie Piersol, the Sons of Adam, Curt Boettcher, and out in summer 2025, Sly and the Family Stone’s The First Family: Live at the Winchester Cathedral 1967.

© Harvey Kubernik, 2025

Harvey Kubernik is the author of 20 books, including 2009’s Canyon Of Dreams: The Magic And The Music Of Laurel Canyon, 2014’s Turn Up The Radio! Rock, Pop and Roll In Los Angeles 1956-1972, 2015′s Every Body Knows: Leonard Cohen, 2016′s Heart of Gold Neil Young and 2017′s 1967: A Complete Rock Music History of the Summer of Love. Sterling/Barnes and Noble in 2018 published Harvey and Kenneth Kubernik’s The Story Of The Band: From Big Pink To The Last Waltz. In 2021 the duo wrote Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child for Sterling/Barnes and Noble.

Otherworld Cottage Industries in 2020 published Harvey’s Docs That Rock, Music That Matters. His Screen Gems: (Pop Music Documentaries and Rock ‘n’ Roll TV Scenes) is scheduled for 2025.

Harvey wrote the liner notes to CD re-releases of Carole King’s Tapestry, The Essential Carole King, Allen Ginsberg’s Kaddish, Elvis Presley The ’68 Comeback Special, The Ramones’ End of the Century and Big Brother & the Holding Company Captured Live at The Monterey International Pop Festival.

During 2006 Kubernik spoke at the special hearings by The Library of Congress in Hollywood, California, discussing archiving practices and audiotape preservation. In 2017 he appeared at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, in their Distinguished Speakers Series. Amidst 2023, Harvey spoke at The Grammy Museum in Los Angeles discussing The Last Waltz music documentary. The New York City Department of Education is developing the social studies textbook Hidden Voices: Jewish Americans in United States History. Kubernik’s 1976 profile/interview with music promoter Bill Graham on the Best Classic Bands website Bill Graham Interview on the Rock ’n’ Roll Revolution, 1976, is included).

Memphis-based director Robert Gordon’s newest film Newport & The Great Folk Dream will be featured in the Venice International Film Festival as part of the Venice Biennale 2025 on Friday, September 5th. The Venice International Film Festival is the oldest film festival in the world — and is viewed as one of the “Big Five” influential festivals, along with Cannes, Berlin, Sundance, and Toronto.

Gordon produced the film along with Historic Films Archive owner Joe Lauro and Memphis filmmaker Laura Jean Hocking, who also edited the film. The team has working on and off on Newport & The Great Folk Dream for eight years. The recent critical and box office success of the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown surely had an impact to get this long-awaited documentary across the finish line.

Gordon and company sifted through pristine 4K transfers culled from 80+ hours of mostly never-seen 16mm negative footage they had access to, initially shot by award winning filmmaker Murray Lerner and his crew at the Newport Folk Festivals between 1963 and 1966.

Portions of those footage performances became the foundation for Lerner’s acclaimed documentary Festival! (1967), now titled Festival, available via The Criterion Collection. Lerner visited the annual Newport Folk Festival to document a thriving, idealistic musical movement as it reached its peak as a popular phenomenon.

For decades Lerner’s cinematic study had influence on the booking policies at blues, folk, and bluegrass venues nationally, and especially in Southern California at The Ash Grove and McCabe’s Guitar Shop. Festival! developed a cult following on college campuses and the midnight movie circuit of the late sixties and seventies.

Newport & The Great Folk Dream features musical performances by Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Joan Baez, Howlin’ Wolf, Mississippi John Hurt, the Lovin’ Spoonful, Judy Collins, the Freedom Singers with Bernice Reagon, John Lee Hooker, Pete Seeger, and Richard & Mimi Fariña.

In August 2025, Robert Gordon emailed his director’s statement.

“I admit to a misunderstanding about folk music before I began this film. I was attracted to the element of protest, to the way the songs seem to live in and travel through humanity—an intergenerational connectedness, but I mostly associated the sound of folk music with the sappy side of singer songwriters, complemented by spirited versions of ‘She’ll Be Coming ‘Round the Mountain.’

“This is a documentary that is made entirely from footage shot in the early 1960s and it could not be more relevant to this 21st century moment. Making Newport & The Great Folk Dream, we were captivated by the emotional depth that this music plumbs, much of which comes from the most unexpected places. And we were determined to convey that feeling on the screen.

“The Newport Folk Festival stage presented a global cultural horizon for the mostly-white college kids and townies that made up this northeastern audience. The diversity of expression at Newport created an event that echoed the music’s history: the sharing of songs handed down through time, songs that rouse curiosity, that make listeners uncomfortable, that accompany work or that simply sound great when sung together with others.

“At the Newport Folk Festival, the new protest songs and the ancient work songs begin to blend, the gap between the concerned youth and the wise elder diminishes, people who would not ordinarily encounter each other have the chance to develop bonds.

“The footage over these three years, 1963-1965, documents how fast youth culture changed, how fast music changed, how fast the nation changed in that short time. The cumulative effect of the casual performances is nearly overwhelming, the timeliness is astonishing. In this movie, we see a movement grow and take hold. We see a philosophical break and the disruption that change brings—and that we know, from our perspective, will be soon mended.

Phil Ochs at Newport.
(Newport & The Great Folk Dream/Murray Lerner)

“Also, the music! Bob Dylan goes electric, Phil Ochs leaps to the present, Mississippi John Hurt removes himself from time, and Pete Seeger and Peter, Paul & Mary evolve before our eyes. It was an honor to curate the artists included—and a very difficult task.

“A thrilling musical experience, Newport & The Great Folk Dream is a paean to activism, it embraces the big tent and like the music, this film does not shy from a powerful message: Democracy thrives on diversity.”

In a subsequent email, Gordon reflected on his team’s endeavor.

“Working with Murray Lerner’s Newport archive was a constant reminder of the force of will it took to capture these hours of great footage. When Murray shows up in 1963 for his first year of filming, he’s working by the seat of his pants. He’s got different film stocks, he’s training camera operators on the spot, he’s surrounded by an incredible range of thrilling American music — and he’s busting ass to capture all he can. The result of Murray’s hard work between 1963 and 1966 at Newport is a treasure trove of American diversity and history and beautiful music. We had endless respect for Murray’s vision and drive.

“From the start, there were a couple ways I wanted to distinguish this film from Festival. For one, I wanted to move chronologically through the 4 years, where Murray’s film makes a montage of time. His film was made in the moment for the moment, and one of our movie’s fascinating charms is the changes that reveal themselves over the four years of filming.

“Today’s audience is quite distant from those times, so moving chronologically let us show the changes—in fashion, in music, in attitude—without making a big deal of them. Some of the changes were happening organically and some were the result of organized or semi-organized groups—whether that was SNCC’s push for voting rights or the traditionalists’ ethos of only acoustic instruments. But in our rapidly changing present times, this movie reminds us that people can create their own changes. The movie makes plain the connection that folk music has long had with activism.

“Another difference between us and the original is our use of 21^st century voices who reflect on their experiences at Newport. Everyone we spoke with was there, and with nearly 60 years of reflection, their perspective, their memories, their comments help us today get more out of what we’re seeing—and help us understand what went on behind the scenes to make the festival occur.

“In many ways, this is a movie about change and about resistance to change. Folk music adheres to traditions, but any study of folk would reveal that even traditions change. Not all change is good, but not all change is bad either. In the moment, as we see in the footage, change can be very difficult to accept, but as the epilogue makes clear, even difficult changes become accepted.

“There’s a difference, of course, between changes in art and changes in politics. When Dylan goes electric, other acoustic artists can do what they want. When fascism takes away democratic freedoms, that’s terminating choices and not expanding them.

“This is a film rooted in the past, but it’s very much about the present.”

Newport jam with Taj Mahal.
(Newport & The Great Folk Dream/Murray Lerner)

##

Oscar-winning filmmaker Murray Lerner died of kidney failure on September 2, 2017 in New York City at age 90.

Lerner was born in Philadelphia Pennsylvania on May 8, 1927, raised in New York City, a 1948 graduate of Harvard University and an English major. Murray taught at Yale and also helped establish a film studies program.

After Festival! was released in December 1967, it garnered honors at every major international film festival, including Manheim, San Francisco, Mar del Plata, and Venice.

I screened Festival! at San Diego State University in 1972. Lerner’s office sent a video copy to my dormitory room at Zura Hall. I had started with Dr. James L. Wheeler in the school’s Literature Department, the first History of Rock Music class, and the first-ever accredited course in regular curriculum upper division academia. A story in the April 14, 1973 issue of Billboard magazine hailed the department’s academic aim as “the world’s first university level rock studies program.”

Decades later I cited Festival! in my 2017 book, 1967 A Complete Rock Music History of the Summer of Love. Lerner is interviewed in my 2014 book on Leonard Cohen, Everybody Knows.

Lerner was a Harvard Man who loved folk music and literature. Lerner’s hydra-headed distribution and poetic trek was a blend of Oscar Micheaux and Homer, four-walled by Samuel Z. Arkoff, James Nicholson and Roger Corman.

His sound and vision work informed the efforts of all rock ‘n’ reel documentarians who followed him like Andrew Solt and Malcolm Leo who would produce and direct This Is Elvis and Imagine: John Lennon.

“Murray Lerner,” remarked filmmaker Solt, “was a very interesting and important figure in visual music history!”

My brother Kenneth and I hosted a Q & A session with Lerner in Hollywood at the American Cinematheque Egyptian Theater in August 2010 during the Martin Lewis-produced Mods and Rockers film series.

Lerner’s filmmaking career began from “industrial cinema.” In 1980 he produced and directed the Academy-Award winning From Mao To Mozart: Isaac Stern In China about violin virtuoso Isaac Stern’s 1979 goodwill tour of Red China.

Lerner’s long-form trend-setting musical documentaries include Isaac Stern, Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, the Moody Blues, Jimi Hendrix, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, the Doors, Jethro Tull, the Who and Leonard Cohen.

Bob Dylan’s 1963-1965 Newport appearances were documented by Lerner in 2007’s The Other Side Of The Mirror-Bob Dylan Live At The Newport Festival 1963-1965 DVD released by Columbia Records and Legacy Recordings.

Johnny Cash at Newport.
(Newport & The Great Folk Dream/Murray Lerner)

On August 16, 1975 in Orange County, California, I interviewed Johnny Cash for the now defunct UK music weekly Melody Maker at the Royal Inn Hotel in Anaheim.

I asked Cash about Dylan. “I became aware of Bob Dylan when the Freewheelin’ album came out in 1963,” Johnny emphasized.
“I thought he was one of the best country singers I had ever heard. I always felt a lot in common with him. I knew a lot about him before we had ever met. I knew he had heard and listened to country music. I heard a lot of inflections from country artists I was familiar with. I was in Las Vegas in ’63 and ’64 and wrote him a letter telling him how much I liked his work. I got a letter back and we developed a correspondence.

“We finally met at Newport in 1964. It was like we were two old friends. There was none of this standing back, trying to figure each other out. He’s unique and original.

“I keep lookin’ around as we pass the middle of the 70s and I don’t see anybody come close to Bob Dylan. I respect him. Dylan is a few years younger than I am but we share a bond that hasn’t diminished. I get inspiration from him,” volunteered Johnny.

On November 19, 1979, friend and drummer, Jim Keltner, invited Knack drummer Bruce Gary and I to the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium to Dylan’s Slow Train Coming concert.

I had a chat with Bob backstage. I mentioned interviewing Johnny Cash and Phil Spector for Melody Maker. I told Bob that Phil talked about R&B vocalists, and he cited “Dion, John, Paul, Elvis, Bobby Darin, and Johnny Cash as great singers.”

Bob removed his tinted sunglasses and smiled. Dylan has blue eyes like Eva Marie Saint, Charles Bukowski, and Kris Kristofferson. He offered a firm handshake, and replied, “Johnny Cash is a friend of mine…”

I interviewed Murray Lerner extensively in 2008, 2010 and 2014.

Harvey Kubernik and Murray Lerner interview

Q: Can you cite the influence of a documentary filmmaker on your work?

A: I wasn’t influenced by any filmmakers, maybe Bert Stern and Jazz On A Summer’s Day, also shot at Newport in the late 50s, largely because of his use of telephoto lenses, which I fell in love with.

Q: Is there any sort of general philosophy that guides you in preparation of a documentary film subject?

A: I tend to make documentary films after thinking about it and researching it and having a concept in mind and finding iconic images that resonate with that concept. That’s the way I work. When it came to Festival, when I started to go up there and look, I went up for the Newport festival, I was a folk music fanatic.

Before then, I did some industrial films, an underwater feature, Secrets Of The Reef. It actually played in theatres successfully, at least in one theater, the Baronet, and then Jacque Cousteau came along with The Silent World and that was the end of our distribution. (laughs). We didn’t have any people in our movie. Ours was anthropomorphism and it was a negative word. I had done a number of industrial films with sophisticated photography and editing before I did Festival!

For The Other Side Of The Mirror, we decided on no narration, no pundit interviews, no interviews with Dylan. Nothing except the experience of seeing him…That to me is exciting. Just the clear experience gives you everything you need. I felt that when I screened the music because he is touted metaphorically as the mirror of his generation, and I thought no, he’s beyond that. He always takes the generation beyond that, and he’s like on the other side of the mirror, but I also felt the wonderous quality of his imagination took us like Alice to a new world on the other side of the mirror. I felt to break that would be bad.

Dylan’s songs and his ideas were so powerful that my thesis, or premise, was that once I got you involved in him and you were also seeing a change in his imagination going in his music that you wouldn’t want to leave it. Either I pulled you into it or I didn’t. If you weren’t pulled into his music and took this journey with him then you’re not going to like the film. Nothing you say is gonna make you like it more.

Q: Was it by decision that you chose to shoot Festival! and The Other Side Of The Mirror – Bob Dylan Live At The Newport Folk Festival in black and white?

A: I had a choice for black and white over color, and it was a major decision in the face of a lot of negativity. First of all, I thought at that time you could really get good color in the original but you couldn’t get good color duplicates. That the prints, which is, after all, that was going to be what you were going to show, and also the contrasts were too great, and the blacks wouldn’t have any detail in it.

As a matter of fact, I was a fanatic about that, and I earlier had done an industrial film, which became a big hit in that industry, Unseen Journey, and I couldn’t stand the idea of Kodachrome prints, so I actually talked the people to pay to me to going to Technicolor, and doing three strip prints. And it worked. It was beautiful and I shot it in 35mm to begin with. But the 16 mm prints were also great, so I was really in to thinking about those things in a way.

Q: How did you get the initial Newport job that resulted in 1967′s theatrical release of Festival!

A: Through debt and through cajoling people to help. (laughs). There weren’t a lot of obstacles to shoot Festival! Once it got rolling then the obstacles were different people associated with the festival who had their own favorites to make a film. I had to overcome that. Anyway, I was determined to get it initially released theatrically. I knew there where the workshops and live performances that were interesting and cinematic. And, music was always my passion for the soundtrack of a film. For the form of a film, when I did Festival! it was the form of the film should also be musical and it should be like experiencing a piece of music in addition to being about music. It seemed to work.

At the Venice Film Festival people in a 1,000 seat theater really got up and applauded. I was alone. I was brought up to think that things should be well exposed, in focus, and you can hear the sound. I had no encounters with Dylan except through Howard Alk. He was great, a marvelous human being. You had to stand up to him with a powerful personality. So, every time I told him to change something, a storm would come over the room that we were in. But I stuck to my ground and that’s why he needed a director like me. If you look at the editing of Festival! you will see how sophisticated it is. He’d carry over the tiny sound from one thing to another. It was a three picture two sound movieola and we spent most of our time repairing the film.

Howard called me up and said ‘why don’t we edit this in Woodstock?’ and I said, ‘No!’ Because I would have a lot of powerful voices around me. ‘How ’bout Martha’s Vineyard?’ It was edited for two summers at Martha’s Vineyard, then he saw a film I did about Yale, finish that. I had to deal with Albert Grossman for clearances. It took a while to convince Al who was not a control freak. Not the slightest influence in the editing. As time went on each artist was different. Dylan was a buddy of Howard Alk. Howard had their ear and was a friend of Dylan, and had known Grossman from Chicago.

The concept was that, going beyond the entertainment value of the music that was the music being used was a crucible for creation of a counter-culture and a message. The prize I got at Venice was not only for a form of entertainment but a means of an expression of youth. That’s what I wanted to do and look for stuff like that helped me do that. So, when I did an interview, I had that in mind.

Like in the Dylan Newport DVD, and in Festival! I interview Joan Baez in the car. She did a good one because she discusses what the kids ask. Joan could make fun of Bob on stage because they were close. I think they thought of themselves, and the crowd did as well as the king and queen of Newport. The movie I really wanted to make was about all the tension backstage from the other performers and managers. (laughs).

Q: Festival! was always well received when it played at universities and the midnight movie screenings.

A: It had more festival showings than any. San Francisco, Argentina, In Italy, Federico Fellini the director gave me his phone number…but I never called him. I always admired him. I was rather shy at the time. At Venice, it sounds crazy, but there were a lot of big wigs there, Pasolini, Antonioni, my film was the most popular of the festival. It was a hit.

Festival! was not just about Dylan. They loved Baez and the rest of it. The whole crowd at Venice got up and danced in the aisles, it was amazing. It was thrilling. It’s always been available for schools and screenings and before a Festival! DVD it was on videotape. I was determined not to let it die through mail order and schools. We never made any money. I was a terrible self-promoter and this was before DVD and cable TV.

Q: In Festival! and once again in the Dylan Newport DVD, the live footage of “Maggie’s Farm” was powerful and jolting to see in a theater originally, and now on DVD. Plus, Dylan with some members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band for this effort is always being confrontational. With the camera, daring it to love him, he is being confrontational with the audience.

A: I knew the Butterfield band and had done some industrial film with some of their music. On stage Paul came alive. He’s not performing with Dylan together in the 1965 set because Paul mentioned something like it wasn’t right to have two stars on stage at the same time. I interviewed Mike Bloomfield in Festival! talking about (Paul) Butterfield. I wanted to show in the movie that this was a movement for white kids and white people to get into the blues. Bloomfield and Butterfield were iconic figures in my mind.

Bob Dylan, the Freedom Singers, Peter Yarrow, Pete Seeger.
(Newport & The Great Folk Dream/Murray Lerner)

Q: You understood Dylan moving into electric rock ‘n’ roll from an acoustic setting.

A: I felt that electricity was needed to distribute the music in a wide basis, radio and television. Then, once it happened, the hunger for the feeling that electricity gave people listening to it was more than volume. I think electric music gets into your body, and enters into your nerves quite deeply, and almost puts you into a trance. It’s hypnotic. I’ve always felt this and this was the feeling I had when I watched Bob. And I was excited by it. I not only appreciated the changes, I loved it! I really was mesmerized and hypnotized by “Maggie’s Farm” on many levels.

As I was filming it I knew it was a gateway to a new culture in the form of based on the older culture, and I thought this was it. I was mesmerized by electric music, by Paul Butterfield earlier in the thing, and Howlin’ Wolf played with a band. But what Dylan did the electricity got into your bones. I was both in the pit and on the stage.

In the DVD we didn’t use “Phantom Engineer (It Takes A Lot To Laugh A Train To Cry)” because I didn’t think it was up to the standard of “Maggie’s Farm” and “Like a Rolling Stone.” To be honest with you. “Stone” is too big a climax to extend it with something not as good.

I knew it was going to be a major breakthrough. It was a mixture of booing, applause and bewilderment. I was intensely involved in the filming so I didn’t pay much attention to what the audience was doing. I was hypnotized in a way by the electric music and had to get the shot. And, the interesting thing about “Maggie’s Farm” which was a breakthrough musically, but the lyrics were expressing the same kind of idea that he wasn’t gonna be a conformist. And in a way, “Maggie’ Farm” was a symbol for America working. We’re all working on “Maggie’s Farm.”

Q: What impressed you the most about Dylan as a poet?

A: The words just fell on his music. I knew that when I saw him walk in a room at a party around 1962 for Cynthia Gooding. He came in and pulled out his guitar, played a few songs about New York, packed it up and split. He intrigued me. At Harvard University I majored in English and my main interest was modern American poetry. T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound and their technique of two opposite symbols creating a third idea. Two different images, the unexpected juxtaposition of two different images for the third idea. Which guided me into filmmaking.

I always use very very long lenses as an adjunct to my photography. I believe in the long shot because I would like the thing to feel musical and not jumpy. I think film is visual music. And it should be, and I believe in editing that way. You can have moments where you are doing quick montage. Most of the time you need to relax.

I like really long shots and before anyone ever did it, I used 2,000 millimeter lenses and for crowd shots, moving in slow motion on Broadway, a lot of unusual stuff. I love people coming towards the camera and coming into close up. And then I got a 600 millimeter lens for my 16 millimeter camera, playing around with it during Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee at Newport. Real close ups.

Q: What was the one thing you learned from your Newport films applied to future movies?

A: First of all, on the technical side, I learned and made sure everyone examines and perfects their equipment so that they were sharp to be on a very literal level. Sharp when they were close in and wide angle. Very often when you go to a wide angle it can lose focus. So, I had them check their cameras for that problem and fix it. And, going from there, I had to call them all together and explain what I don’t like. I don’t like, and some of them did it anyway, I don’t like fast pans, fast zooms.

I said, “If you are panning over to a musician that is playing but you don’t see because he comes in after the musician is on go slow.” You’ll hear the person and it will be more dramatic than if you swish the camera or zoom in. That is one of the big things. And, I said “Close Up! Close Up!” I don’t mind looking into the lights for effect. A bunch of stuff I directed them to do. I took special shots, positions. I took the shots from behind looking into the lights. The idea is to be musical in the movements and try and move with the music.

I personally have a technique where I practice the choreography of the camera. Every day for about an hour before I shot, having an assistant stand by and I would focus, zoom and figure out how big the moves had to be to get the result I wanted so I could do it myself. And I practiced all of that. And I kind of instilled that sense that of the choreography of the camera being part of the concert. For the most part, in the planning stages, I picked positions to shoot. And I told people, “You concentrate on the close up and you concentrate on something else.”

Q: You and D.A. Pennebaker have witnessed and participated in the rock and music documentary world for well nearly 60 years. You’ve done these panel discussions with Pennebaker in front of university film students. I’ve been attending some of these events. Unlike the sixties and seventies, most of the students and hustling filmmakers now in the audience at the Q. and A. sessions want to know about royalty points on the back end of film deal and nothing about film stock, lenses or concepts to creating a story.

A: The best one of those was at the Santa Fe New Mexico Film Festival, a documentary panel. Pennebaker was there. (Ricky) Leacock was there. I was there. It was a seminar type thing where people would question us afterwards, you know. It was all about “how do you get the money?” Not about creative stuff but financial.

One kid said to Pennebaker, “How do you get the money to finance a film?” And without missing a beat he said, “Marry a rich woman.”

##

Murray Lerner and Martin Lewis.

In 2025 I asked film producer, humorist, record producer and writer Martin Lewis about Murray Lerner.

“I had the honor of friendship and working as film festival curator/moderator with all the greats of NY-based music documentary-makers: D.A. Pennebaker (known as ‘Penny’), the Maysles Brothers – both David & Albert – and Murray Lerner. All of them legitimately described as geniuses. All of them delightful impish characters.

“All three documented our 1960s present – and all of them have had a profound influence on how we understand our 1960s past. In my life I’ve loved them all. But I loved Murray Lerner that little bit more…

“What he captured in his Message To Love film of the 1970 Isle of Wight festival was the End of the Dream.

“Pennebaker showed the dream erupting at Monterey. The Maysles documented the nightmare of Altamont. But Lerner summarized the Alpha-to-Omega of the era in his 26-years-in-the-making indictment of how bread-heads and free-loaders combined to destroy the Utopia of the Sixties.

“Many people recall Lerner for the brilliance of his film Festival documenting four crucial years of the Newport Folk Festival – 1963-1965. And especially comment on his capture of Dylan going electric in 1965 and breaking the hearts of a few be-sandaled snowflakes of the tie-dyed-in-the-woolly-sweater brigade. That was indeed notable. However, it’s even more instructive to see Dylan in Lerner’s 2007 Dylan compendium The Other Side of the Mirror. It telescopes Dylan’s three consecutive Newport appearances (63-64-65) into one time-lapse revelation.

“In ’63 Dylan is scrawny-thin, purposeful yet still tentative… a larva with a guitar. In ’64 he has matured to self-assurance and strength… a chrysalis biding his time. By ’65 he has become a full-blown rock star exuding charismatic control of the audience. The leather-clad, Ray-Banned butterfly is ready to fly away from Newport and share his music with the wider world beyond the folk music village. Lerner’s film captures that entire metamorphosis. A crucially important rite-of-passage for the world as much as for Dylan.

“But Lerner also documented an equally important though less-remarked on paradigm shift in his Newport film.

“He captured blues-rock pioneers Mike Bloomfield and Paul Butterfield studying at the feet of blues legends such as Son House and Mississippi John Hurt. The very young Bloomfield and Butterfield had both been earnest blues devotees in the hard-scrabble blues clubs in their native Chicago for a few years preceding Newport 1965 – savoring such encounters with older musicians as they could engineer. But Lerner capturing them on crisp 16mm black & white celluloid in the presence of these grizzled blues masters forty and fifty years their senior in the Newport fields allows us to witness the passing of the candle that led to the electric blues-rock that took over our era.

“My friendship with Murray spanned 32 rich years. And included my presenting him and his films many times at my Mods & Rockers Film Festivals at the American Cinematheque in Los Angeles.”

© Harvey Kubernik 2025

Harvey Kubernik is the author of 20 books, including 2009’s Canyon Of Dreams: The Magic And The Music Of Laurel Canyon, 2014’s Turn Up The Radio! Rock, Pop and Roll In Los Angeles 1956-1972, 2015′s Every Body Knows: Leonard Cohen, 2016′s Heart of Gold Neil Young and 2017′s 1967: A Complete Rock Music History of the Summer of Love. Sterling/Barnes and Noble in 2018 published Harvey and Kenneth Kubernik’s The Story Of The Band: From Big Pink To The Last Waltz. In 2021 the duo wrote Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child for Sterling/Barnes and Noble.

Otherworld Cottage Industries in 2020 published Harvey’s Docs That Rock, Music That Matters. His Screen Gems: (Pop Music Documentaries and Rock ‘n’ Roll TV Scenes) is scheduled for 2025.

Harvey wrote the liner notes to CD re-releases of Carole King’s Tapestry, The Essential Carole King, Allen Ginsberg’s Kaddish, Elvis Presley The ’68 Comeback Special, The Ramones’ End of the Century and Big Brother & the Holding Company Captured Live at The Monterey International Pop Festival.

During 2006 Kubernik spoke at the special hearings by The Library of Congress in Hollywood, California, discussing archiving practices and audiotape preservation. In 2017 he appeared at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, in their Distinguished Speakers Series. Amidst 2023, Harvey spoke at The Grammy Museum in Los Angeles discussing The Last Waltz music documentary. The New York City Department of Education is developing the social studies textbook Hidden Voices: Jewish Americans in United States History. Kubernik’s 1976 profile/interview with music promoter Bill Graham on the Best Classic Bands website Bill Graham Interview on the Rock ’n’ Roll Revolution, 1976, is included).

Singer, actress, author and performer Marianne Faithfull’s complete UK Decca catalog has been reissued on LP, CD and streaming.

Before her passing on January 30 this year, Marianne completed work on two projects that were to commemorate her 60th anniversary in music; the first was her final EP Burning Moonlight, a collection of four songs inspired by her Decca recordings, the second was her contribution to this series of reissues where she talked in-depth about her Decca recording career for the first time.

All four of Marianne’s original Decca albums, Marianne Faithfull, Come My Way, North Country Maid and Loveinamist have been reissued on vinyl alongside Cast Your Fate to the Wind: a new double LP of the collected singles, B-sides and rarities. Simultaneously a 6-CD box set will be released called Cast Your Fate To The Wind: The Complete UK Decca Recordings, which features all the albums reproduced on miniature facsimile LPs, a new double album of the singles, B-sides and rarities, five art cards and a 76-page book featuring many rare and unpublished photographs.

Three of the original albums are appearing on vinyl for the first time since they were released, and the artwork on all four original LPs has been recreated where possible from the original images giving a high-quality finish to this set of reissues. The music has been remastered from the original tapes by Grammy nominated producer Andrew Batt who was the Executive Producer of Burning Moonlight. He also contributes a full-scale reassessment of the Decca recordings in his in-depth sleeve notes included in each LP and the CD box set. In these, Marianne comments on the source of the songs and her role in the recordings, conclusively debunking the received wisdom that in this phase of her career she was little more than a record label puppet.

In 1964, Marianne Faithfull was spotted by the impresario Andrew Loog Oldham, and her recording career began in June of that year with the release of her debut single “As Tears Go By,” a song penned by Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Andrew Loog Oldham. It reached a Top Ten position in the UK singles chart. The Stones then recorded their own version, included on the American pressing of December’s Children (And Everybody’s) in 1965. Their American record label London issued “As Tears Go By” as a single that landed in the number six spot on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart. The Rolling Stones subsequently performed the tune on an episode of The Ed Sullivan Show.

(Courtesy Gary Pig Gold)

##

In 2000 I discussed Faithfull with Andrew Loog Oldham, the 1963-1967 record producer and manager of the Rolling Stones, for Discoveries magazine.

“The fact is forgotten that Marianne had, between August of ‘64 and the summer of ‘65 four Top Ten hits in the UK. ‘As Tears Go By’ and ‘Come and Stay With Me’ held up.

“For one it was obvious that ‘this thing of ours’ was not going to disappear. We had come in following the twist, Davy Crockett, skiffle, and trad jazz. Skiffle and trad jazz had been very important; they had been the BBC and the establishment’s last chance to control the key to what music we got to hear. You had during 1957-1958 like The Six-Five Special; hosted by Pete Murray (God bless him!) and Jo Douglas which invited us all to deck up in jeans and sweaters and be really daring with our shirt collars turned up.

“There were villains, there was mayhem, action and if we had not had pirate radio I might not have had a hit with Marianne Faithfull’s ‘As Tears Go By.’ The BBC would not touch it, they said Marianne could not sing. Mind you, that’s what they’d said about Mick Jagger a year earlier when the Rolling Stones failed their BBC live audition. They said ‘The singer cannot sing.’ The BBC was the enemy, a limp wristed arm of the government trying to keep kids on a rationed musical diet of trad jazz and skiffle.”

A news announcement from ABKCO provides an overview of Faithfull’s Decca catalog reissues, and observes that: “Marianne’s furious resurfacing in the late ‘70s with Broken English completely superseded her earlier artistic achievements, and for a time she felt the need to distance herself both personally and artistically from her earlier incarnation.

“Inadvertently, this led to one of the biggest misconceptions about the early stage of Marianne’s career, namely that she was not creatively involved in her ‘60s releases, or that these recordings did not have the same artistic consideration behind them as her later music. She was at pains to correct that impression on these reissues; ‘I think I did express a lot in my early work, what people hear with the jump between these recordings and Broken English is just experience; life happened, but for me it’s all been connected. The music changed, my voice changed, but my approach to making records has always been the same: I’ve always known what I was doing.’

“2025 marks the 60th anniversary of the release of Marianne’s two debut albums and in the months before her passing, she reflected on this early part of her career with renewed appreciation: ‘I don’t think people realize how much care and real consideration we put into this early material. It took a long time for me to appreciate it, but now I do and I’m really proud of what we did, and I hope you all like it as much as I do.’”

##

During 1995 I interviewed Marianne Faithfull when Faithfull: An Autobiography, written with David Dalton, was published. Portions of our conversation were published in my first book This Is Rebel Music: The Harvey Kubernik InnerViews.

It was Faithfull’s friend, poet Allen Ginsberg, who encouraged me to look Marianne Faithfull up the next time she was in Hollywood. Faithfull had just done a show at The Henry Fonda Theater on Hollywood Blvd, and in the city. “Go talk to her and let her talk to you,” suggested Allen.

Her publicist at Island Records arranged for me to visit her on Sunset Blvd at the famed Chateau Marmont. I nervously knocked on the door to her hotel room, ironically, right next to the suite where years earlier I had interviewed and had lunch with Leonard Cohen.

Marianne answered my knuckles, “Welcome to the poet’s corner,” she beamed.

I looked at her for about 20 seconds.

She was clad in black. Not punk black, but black blouse, black pants and black nylons. She was an image out of Hollywood’s Jazz City music club circa 1958. Musician/activist Buddy Collette once described the venue to me, “where a lot of hip and talented musicians went. Lady Day… And the girls… The hair, in black, smiling… And the music in that place…”

My junior high school pinup girl was now in front of me. She is wearing no makeup, blond, long hair, shorter in person that I expected, kind of a Juliette Greco meets later-day Gloria Grahame visual. Marianne has big green eyes.

She turned out to be a fascinating interview subject. A real yenta. She’s a lot of fun and never avoided a question during our time together.

Decca promo postcard, ca. 1964.
(Courtesy Gary Pig Gold)

Marianne Evelyn Gabriel Faithfull was born in Hampstead on December 29, 1946. The left-handed Capricorn has a dancer’s body. In fact, twice during the two-hour chat, Marianne leaped off the couch onto the rug and sort of did a move, an interpretation of “the sideways pony” dance that Tina Turner once taught Mick Jagger in the hall way in front of her in 1965 at Colston Hall in Bristol, England.

She explained that her mother Eva, a ballet dancer, taught her to dance as a child. I then mentioned that I briefly danced on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand as a teenager, and many years after that, I had interviewed Tina Turner for the UK music periodical Melody Maker, and Tina gave me a very brief lesson on how to do “The Popcorn” dance.

“Whew…Remind me to give you a kiss and a hug when you leave today and don’t worry if my boobs get in the way,” she cautioned.

“No problem,” I assured her.

Room service delivered Marlboro Lights. She also ordered a vodka martini for our smoky conversation. I had a mineral water. The label paid. In our conversation, Marianne was confident and elegant.

Q. Throughout all your recording career, you’ve included speech or narrative aspects to your vocal singing style. You never had a ‘Motown’ voice.

A. (laughs). It’s something I’ve done all my life. Listen to ‘Jabberwock.’ I’ve always included the spoken word. The talk. To their credit, really, the music business let me do it.

Q. In your Decca period, you covered Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ In the Wind.” I noticed you were in one of the hotel room scenes in Bob Dylan’s Dont Look Back film that chronicled his 1965 British tour. In your book in the Dylan Redux chapter, you provide a real cool glimpse of Dylan in action in the mid-‘60s. He wrote a poem for you and then tore it up. In your autobiography I thought it was one of the sections where you and David Dalton worked really hard in bringing the moment to the reader.

A. I think that was the bit that David did best. I didn’t work the hardest on that, David did. But it was wonderful. I wish he’d written the whole book like that. And all the Bobby Neuwirth stuff was so beautiful.

Q. Had you never seen a person like Dylan or an American like him in 1965?

A. Never. Never seen. Never in my wildest dreams could have imagined anyone like Bob in 1965. His brain, but I was frightened. I didn’t know they were probably more scared of me. I don’t know. They were all on methedrine. He played me the album Bringing It All Back Home himself on his own. It was just amazing. And I worshipped him anyway. That was where I got very close to Allen (Ginsberg) ‘cause Allen was the only sort of person I could recognize as being somewhat like me.

(Courtesy Gary Pig Gold)

Q. I really enjoyed the passage when Allen came to London with the Italian poet Giuseppe Ungaretti. They read at Queen Elizabeth Hall. You had spent some time with Ginsberg.

A. (smiles) I find them very sexy all those guys. Wonderful. I teased Allen in my book. I adore him. The first time I went to Naropa, Allen was literally by my side like he is. There was a lot of criticism and ‘Who is the woman?’ ‘Why do you (Allen) think she can do this?’ And he didn’t say anything. ‘I just do.’ And then I came back again. We are very good friends. He also represents a lot of things for me that aren’t part of our friendship or our relationship. He is the greatest living American poet. I hooked Allen up with Hal Willner.

Q. On the Decca label you recorded a version of the Phil Spector-produced Ronettes’ “Is This Is What I Get For Loving You.” A song written by Spector, Carole King and Gerry Goffin.

A. I can tell you that while Andrew Loog Oldham turned me on to Phil Spector and Jack Nitzsche, Bob Crewe and the Four Seasons, the Mamas & the Papas, and a lot of things, the person who really educated me on the Motown level was Mick. I would have never gone that deeply into Motown without Mick. We just played the songs at home constantly. It must have been great fun for him…

There I am at age nineteen and I’ve never listened to the Miracles before. ‘The Tracks of My Tears…’ Mick would run down the bass lines, song constructions on the label, and actually act out the songs in front of me! [Chuckles]. It was really an amazing education. And, of course, when I wanted another type of thing, I’d go and see Keith and then it was all blues. It all kind of fitted in somehow.

Mick and I wore out the grooves on the records so much we’d have to buy them again. For a long time, it was Vivaldi and Marvin Gaye in the morning. That’s how we lived. Which is so wonderful. And I had Mick telling me everything. He knew everything. He knew the names of the session musicians at a snap. So did Jack Nitzsche. Brilliant man. We never could quite get it together to do an album, but at least we have “Sister Morphine.”

Q. May I proudly announce that I recently did a series of interviews with the Funk Brothers, the surviving Motown session men who are spotlighted in the documentary film, Standing in the Shadows of Motown.

A. Oh God…I’m dying to see that movie. Oh man…Oh man… Nice to see the players get some attention. I like the idea that Berry Gordy still cares that much. He cares about the Motown legacy and we’re not just talking about money. There’s something he did there that he cares very much about. It’s incredible. Obviously, he knows what he did, but for me, it changed my life. I found the Stax records myself. I was lucky.

Mick knew the Motown records already, but they knocked me for a six. That’s why I know about the Four Tops doing ‘Walk Away Renee.’ I spent years listening to Motown. Smokey Robinson…His voice…The Love I Saw In You Was Just a Mirage.’ [Sings the first two lines]. The most beautiful stuff I’ve ever heard…And to this day I’m sure some Motown songs are in the Stones’ live repertoire.”

Q. How has meditation impacted your life and work?

A. Oh yes. Philip Whalen taught me to meditate. That was a great help. It cleans. It is sort of brain washing I suppose. (laughs). Not a real brain washing. When I’m home, I meditate twice a day. Shell Cottage is…The whole point of it is one great long meditation and the long walks. On my third trip to Naropa I also learned how to do a walking meditation.

Q. So Professor Faithfull. Tell me about your work and teaching functions at The Naropa Institute?

A. I was teaching lyric writing and Allen Ginsberg eventually showed me a book of one of his great treasures of Japanese haiku. He explained all that to me and said ‘Don’t you understand this is the same thing.’ I was a teacher dealing with process and content. And my other thing, was that I took to meditation like a duck to water that I was always somebody so when students said, ‘We find meditation very boring and very hard,’ Allen could depend on me to say, ‘Well, you’re all wrong.’ ‘Meditation is a very good thing and if you really want to write something interesting, I suggest you go off and meditate.’ So that’s another thing. Allen knew that base was covered. Not that I’m a Buddhist exactly, and I’m not joining. I’m part of Naropa but not as close as Allen is. I don’t have a guru. Allen is my guru. (grins).

(Courtesy Gary Pig Gold)

Q. There has been some books on Brian Jones and kind of a musical re-evaluation of his many instrumental talents?

A. I use Brian. I have a whole lot of friends on the other side that I call up when I need them. I use Brian, Janis and now I’ve got Tony Secunda and Denny Cordell. Well Brian was a genius but he was a very irritating person. Keith really loved Brian. They were all very much in love with me at that time. Not only me, but I was one of the many women they were in love with. Keith and I are still very close. I’m under his wing and I know I will always be under his wing.

Q. In the autobiography, you write some of the Rolling Stones characters in their songs came out of LSD.

A. Of course they did. I don’t think acid is relative or relevant anymore. I wouldn’t do it again. But I think that it was important then, and I think it taught us a lot. I mean, I pushed them away so much. It’s my fault. The door is open completely. I had to push them away I suppose to find my own spot. Much too much. Mick, too. ‘Cause I couldn’t stay in that position. Don’t be too harsh on Mick. (smiles). You’d really like him and he’d support you. He’s a good guy.

Q: Anita Pallenberg is in your autobiography.

A: Like most of the time I don’t remember what people were wearing. And I remember one thing, I think is the White Ball and the black dress. Sometimes it’s only on very clear demarcations like clothed, unclothed, black, white that I really know exactly.

Like most of the time I don’t remember what people were wearing. I remember what Allen was wearing, because often, Allen would take his clothes off. So, I would know that and understand that. And that’s a very simple situation.

Now Anita actually remembers things only through what we were wearing, ‘cause that’s what she’s interested in. I don’t mean that as a put down. But that’s how she remembers things. When I say, ‘Do you remember such and such a day…?’ The way back for Anita is ‘Oh yeah… You were wearing a red velvet …and I was wearing…’ You’d dig her, man. [In 1994, Pallenberg graduated from Central Saint Martin’s in London with a fashion and textile degree].

Q. Marianne, I read decades ago you were raised Catholic. Mutual friends told me you have Jewish ancestors. I know in England you went to a Roman Catholic Boarding School, St Joseph’s.

.

A. My dear little Piscean. My mother and my grandmother were Jewish. My mother came from a line of Austro-Hungarian aristocrats. My mother was a doctor’s daughter. She was a Jewess, those great Jews who went out and did it from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Doctors, writers, sort of like going into Oklahoma. Allen Ginsberg now is my Jewish Mother.

Q. Can we talk about your mother, Eva? She was with you the whole way.

A. She was the great love of my life.

Q. Eva seemed a very generous woman. She saw it all.

A: She certainly did. My mother died as I was performing Kurt Weill and Bertholt Brecht. I was performing The Seven Deadly Sins. And during the performance she died in England. I was in Australia.

On the flight back from Brisbane, Australia, I had a copy of The White Goddess. John Dunbar had called me when I got back from my concert in Australia. Of course it was John, there’s no one else who could call me to tell me Eva was dead. I was at my hotel, sitting about, having a cup of tea and John called and said, ‘Your mother died.’ And got on the plane to go back to England for the funeral and started to read The White Goddess. It’s a 24 hour trip.

There were two people who understood immediately what Broken English was and one was Chris Blackwell and the other was Eva. Immediately. And lots of people did not understand. I would play Broken English for people. My mother got it and Blackwell got it. The movies she would see with her father were Tom Mix movies. She was born in 1911.

Q. Tell me about 93 year old Glynn Faithfull?

A. My dad. He’s also a Pisces. My father is a scholar of Dante. My father has always known I would do it. And my mother, too. I grew up with total confidence from both of them. They’ve never wavered. My father not for a second. He’s had complete faith in me all of my life.”

##

When I interviewed Marianne in 1995, she autographed copies of her autobiography to my brother Kenneth, and to photographer/journalist Heather Harris.

I later asked Heather, about Marianne Faithfull and the sixties world of London.

“Here in the States the number of incontestably hip young women in the 1960s seemed attenuated for such a huge populace of an equally gigantic nation, but vestigial Puritan forces seemed to limit our own Swinging Sixties to a select few female musicians, groupies, actresses, models and activists. Otherwise, ratted bouffants and stiff, ultra-conservative wear were all one encountered.

“Across the pond offered far better hunting grounds for new, iconoclastic young female souls carrying the banner of modernity in attitudes, fashion, creative output, nascent feminism and the sea change looks of wild straight hairstyles and clothes no one would ever mistake for that of any older generation.

“So even we American teens of the ’60s thrilled to the ‘one of ours’ recognition of British and European new icons like Jean and Chrissie Shrimpton, Pattie and Jenny Boyd, Julie Christie, Jane Asher, Donyale Luna, Twiggy, Talitha Getty, Jane Birkin, Alice, Jane and Victoria Ormsby-Gore, all of David Bailey’s favorite fashion models and the hundred plus young XX chromosome professionals and scenesters in 1967′s iconic compendium by John D Green Birds of Britain (haha).

“Out of these hordes emerged seemingly impossible superlative stand outs, and the leading rock stars of the day snapped them up. Back in the day you were never going to see a better-looking young blonde than Marianne Faithfull, she was born with the je ne c’est quoi beauty genes. (And even later. During the punk era, she stood out like a beacon in a darkened club watching her then boyfriend play. All eyes were on her. You couldn’t miss her even with no light to speak of in a crowded audience of 200. And she was wearing the metallic pink boots I had coveted on the King’s Road but couldn’t afford. She could.)”

##

In 2025, the novelist and writer Daniel Weizmann sent me a Facebook post from music journalist Bill Holdship when Marianne Faithfull left the physical world.

“The first week of March 2005, in the lobby of Hollywood’s Pantages Theater, immediately following a great Bob Dylan show with the equally-great-that-night Merle Haggard opening, I was with my friend Harvey Kubernik, who has known her and Andrew Loog Oldham a long time.

“Harvey suddenly stopped in his tracks and exclaimed: ‘Marianne!’

“She was purchasing a Bob Dylan poster at the time, which was kind of endearing in and of itself.

“‘Hello, Harvey!’ She warmly said. She recognized him immediately, giving him a hug and a kiss. ‘Wasn’t that just a fantastic show?’

“Harvey introduced me to her as ‘my friend Bill.’ She was incredibly nice. And absolutely lovely and charming.

“When we were leaving following a brief conversation during which she told us what she’d been up to recently, she made a point of making eye contact with me, smiling, and saying: ‘Very nice to meet you, Bill!’

“It was short but so sweet and enjoyable and unexpected that it has stuck with me as a cherished memory all these years. I was rarely starstruck after all those years in Los Angeles and what I did for a living. But I’m grateful that my memory of Marianne Faithfull will always be a good and pleasant one.

“I don’t think she probably ever fully recovered after she almost died a few years ago from Covid. But I will sure miss her presence on this planet on many different levels.”

© 2025 Harvey Kubernik

Harvey Kubernik is the author of 20 books, including 2009’s Canyon Of Dreams: The Magic And The Music Of Laurel Canyon, 2014’s Turn Up The Radio! Rock, Pop and Roll In Los Angeles 1956-1972, 2015′s Every Body Knows: Leonard Cohen, 2016′s Heart of Gold: Neil Young and 2017′s 1967: A Complete Rock Music History of the Summer of Love. Sterling/Barnes and Noble in 2018 published Harvey and Kenneth Kubernik’s The Story Of The Band: From Big Pink To The Last Waltz. In 2021 the duo wrote Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child for Sterling/Barnes and Noble.

Otherworld Cottage Industries in 2020 published Harvey’s Docs That Rock, Music That Matters. His Screen Gems: (Pop Music Documentaries and Rock ‘n’ Roll TV Scenes) is scheduled for 2025.

Harvey wrote the liner notes to CD re-releases of Carole King’s Tapestry, The Essential Carole King, Allen Ginsberg’s Kaddish, Elvis Presley The ’68 Comeback Special, The Ramones’ End of the Century and Big Brother & the Holding Company Captured Live at The Monterey International Pop Festival.

During 2006 Kubernik spoke at the special hearings by The Library of Congress in Hollywood, California, discussing archiving practices and audiotape preservation. In 2017 he appeared at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, in their Distinguished Speakers Series. Amidst 2023, Harvey spoke at The Grammy Museum in Los Angeles discussing The Last Waltz music documentary. The New York City Department of Education is developing the social studies textbook Hidden Voices: Jewish Americans in United States History. Kubernik’s 1976 profile/interview with music promoter Bill Graham on the Best Classic Bands website Bill Graham Interview on the Rock ’n’ Roll Revolution, 1976, is included.

Elvis Presley will be the subject of a comprehensive collection, Sunset Boulevard, chronicling his 1970-1975 recording sessions and rehearsals at RCA’s landmark Los Angeles studios. The facility was located in Hollywood on 6363 Sunset Boulevard at Ivar Street. It is now the home of The Los Angeles Film School.

The 5-CD set spans 89 rarities – over half of which have never been released in the United States. It will be issued August 1, 2025, via RCA Records and Legacy Recordings, the catalog division of Sony Music Entertainment,

The June 13 Sony Music announcement describes Sunset Boulevard as “delivering illuminating perspective onto Elvis’ 1970s recording output.”

The all-studio set includes recordings of such Presley favorites as “Always On My Mind,” “Burning Love,” the 40th and final Top Ten single of his career, and such choice covers of “Green, Green Grass of Home,” “For the Good Times,” “I Got a Woman,” “The Wonder of You,” “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’,” “Something, “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” “Johnny B. Goode,” “Proud Mary, and more.

The collection also features rare alternate studio versions of late-period gems like “Separate Ways”—widely seen as the most autobiographical song Elvis ever recorded— and the rollicking “T-R-O-U-B-L-E,” which channeled the groundbreaking signature vocal style from his earlier years.

The record label announcement further details the compilation. “The first two discs feature new and never-heard mixes from four-time GRAMMY winner Matt Ross-Spang – stripping all overdubs and delivering fresh insights in the process. Opening with seventeen classics from throughout Elvis’ time in RCA Studio C, these mixes provide an intimate glimpse into the ways his riveting voice interacts with material from the era’s greatest songwriters: Kris Kristofferson’s “For The Good Times” (a 1972 b-side first released in 1995), Paul Williams’ “Where Do I Go From Here” (from 1973’s Elvis), Billy Swan’s “I Can Help” (from 1975’s Today) and Don McLean’s “And I Love You So” (also from Today), among them. Ross-Spang’s stripped-down mixes equally bolster the seventeen studio outtakes that comprise the set’s second piece.”

Sunset Boulevard implements rare archival photographs and new liner notes from music historian Colin Escott, plus an introduction by longtime friend Jerry Schilling. As Escott writes: “Elvis and his wife, Priscilla, had separated at the beginning of [1972] and he was drawn to songs heavy with regret. The first was a keynote address. Red West had known Elvis since high school. He was Elvis’s friend, bodyguard, movie stuntman, and—occasionally—songwriter. Elvis never asked him for songs, but Red would pitch one anyway if he thought it might work. ‘Separate Ways’ came from my own situation,” West said later. “I was writing about my son, Brent. Then Elvis had his own situation with Priscilla, so [Richard Mainegra and I] changed the song to relate to Lisa Marie.”

Once it was recorded, Escott adds, “Elvis’s friend Jerry Schilling remembered that ‘Separate Ways’ resonated so deeply with Elvis that he played the tape incessantly after the session. “We listened to it for three hours in the studio. He’d just look up and shake his head. ‘You guys wanna hear it again?’ And we’d play it and play it. It was a real sad time.”

During the final three discs of Sunset Boulevard, listeners get a behind-the-scenes look at Elvis’ history-making Las Vegas residency — featuring Los Angeles rehearsals from July 1970 and August 1974 with his iconic TCB Band.

Notable among the 1974 recordings are two featured tracks that Elvis never made studio versions of: “Twelfth of Never,” originally a hit for Johnny Mathis in 1957 and “Softly As I Leave You” which finds him narrating a prologue about the song’s purported origins (inspired by his love of Charles Boyer’s narrated album Where Does Love Go). Elvis’ instinctive chemistry with the TCB Band is palpable throughout the rehearsals, perhaps owing to his decision to record with a road band for the first time during this era. See the complete track listing below.

Sunset Boulevard will also be celebrated at Elvis Week 2025 in Memphis – a special edition of the annual festivities, in honor of what would have been Presley’s 90th birthday year. Sony Music will host a Sunset Boulevard listening event at Graceland’s Guest House Theater on August 13 – featuring a Q&A with special guests and much more. For more information and tickets visit ElvisWeek.com.

##

Charlie Watts, Keith Richards, Andrew Loog Oldham and Jack Nitzsche at RCA in Hollywood 1965 (Photograph by Gered Mankowitz/Iconic Images Ltd. Courtesy of Gered Mankowitz.)

The legendary RCA studios, a Hollywood temple of sound, had been home to Presley, Sam Cooke, Bobby Womack, Ann Margaret, Shorty Rogers, Gogi Grant, Jesse Belvin, Jack Nitzsche, the Walker Brothers, Charlie Greene and Brian Stone, Merry Clayton, Keith Richards, the Monkees, Darlene Love, Henry Mancini, Elmer Bernstein, Grateful Dead, Cal Tjader, Rosemary Clooney, Jascha Heifetz, the Astronauts, Harry Nilsson, Jefferson Airplane, Electric Prunes, and Arthur Rubinstein.

In 2003 I interviewed award-winning engineer/producer Al Schmitt. He discussed the sonic achievements inside the RCA studios in his 1960-1966 staff position. In April of 1960, Schmitt engineered Presley’s first post-army film soundtrack for Paramount Pictures, G.I. Blues.

“Studio A and B were both the same size,” explained Al. “They were big rooms, and then there was also Studio C, a smaller room. You could mix in either room. The studios had very high ceilings and a nice parkay floor. Very nice. One of the things that made them so unique was that we had all those great live echo chambers. I think there were seven of them.

“There was very little overdubbing then. The nice thing about doing everything at one time was that you knew exactly what it was going to sound like. When you started layering things you were never sure. Then a lot of experimenting came in and it took longer and longer to make records and the expenses went up, ya know.

“RCA had a great microphone collection. Just fabulous. Great Neumann and Telefunken microphones. Great RCA microphones. Plus, they had the great, original Neve console. And they were just spectacular. They were so punchy. There was a punch and a warmth and still one of the best consoles ever made. They were using a lot of Scotch tap then. Dave Hassinger learned microphone technique and how to use them, the most important thing.

“There were no isolation booths. None whatsoever. But we had gobos, we would move around. Like a separator where you could isolate things. We did have some small rugs that we would put down sometimes under the drums and things, but no too much.”

Brian Wilson produced the Beach Boys’ “Help Me, Rhonda” at RCA, and the Byrds recorded a version of “Eight Miles High,” straying from the confines of the Columbia Records studio also located on Sunset Boulevard.

Andrew Loog Oldham who produced and managed the Rolling Stones during 1963-1967, recorded their monumental 1964-1966 albums at RCA with staff engineer Dave Hassinger.

“I was looking for a home to produce the Rolling Stones,” Andrew told me in a 2004 interview.

“When we walked into RCA and we were actually visiting studio B where the Brian Stone and Charlie Greene 45rpm for Atlantic was being cut in the best Bobby B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans fashion, including Bobby Sheen. And there was Jack Nitzsche, Gracia Nitzsche, Merry Clayton, Darlene Love, Charlie Greene and Brian Stone, and Cher. I have a total recollection of Cher. Not unlike the Vashti Bunyan vibe. The waif. Total ‘young girls are coming to the canyon.’ And there it is: Jack Nitzsche and the backing vocalists.

“When you walk into a situation like RCA, suddenly you have the physicality of it. And the physicality of it is so overwhelming that I can actually see it in front of me now. I can see the corridor, the control room on the right and the studio in front of us. And I’m watching that Nitzsche and Greene and Stone session and you know they’re doing ‘Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah’ but they’re doing it to ‘Yes Sir, That’s My Baby.’ (laughs). Which is great because it is something I am equally capable myself. It’s very Sidney Falco.

“Then I got taken into Studio A. Which was huge. I went, ‘this is it. We have our home.’ I met engineer Dave Hassinger in there, Of course, he was doing a session. Dave Hassinger looked like Los Angeles. When I produced the band at RCA, to make them feel comfortable, I shrunk and lit the room for them. I was doing set design even then. [Laughs.] There you are. I do dreams, not business. I think there are two tambourines on ‘Satisfaction.’ There’s a regular one that easily could have been Jack Nitzsche. But in the middle, it was too American for that part and that’s Brian Jones. And Jack plays piano. He was brilliant, man. Come on. The piano on ‘Satisfaction’ and ‘Let’s Spend the Night Together’ was just turnaround Charlie. The harpsichord on ‘Play with Fire’ is Jack.

“In 1964, Jack was the musical director of The T.A.M.I. Show. Why it works for me is the fear and loathing in Santa Monica. There you go. Come on man, it’s a magic moment. The Stones were successful and getting good, and -wait a minute-we gotta follow James Brown? Seeing Jack Nitzsche and Dave Hassinger. It was the film within the film. Steve Binder directed it and Bill Sargent produced. It was done in Electronovision like Harlow, with actress Carol Linley.”

“I met the Stones in 1964. Andrew Loog Oldham called me up,” volunteered Jack Nitzsche in a 2000 interview I published in New Times.

“He and the group had met Phil Spector and he and the Stones wanted to meet me. Brian Jones was in a three-piece suit and tie. It was at RCA studios and I was working with Edna Wright, Darlene Love’s sister. A little later, the Stones started working at RCA and it had a big impact on me. A whole new way of approaching records. I was used to a three-hour record date, and they were block booking 24 hours a day for two weeks, and doing what they wanted.

“I got them into The T.A.M.I. Show. I put the stage band together and did all the arrangements. I was the musical director. I had told the producer, Bill Sargent, the Stones were going to be big. I felt the Stones could close the show (following the Beach Boys and James Brown) . . . Bill said ‘James Brown is going to close the show.’ We all stood at the side of the stage watching James Brown do his act. People were standing and screaming for James. (Legend has it that James told the Stones, ‘You’ll never be able to follow this.’). Then the Stones came out and all the girls started crying. It was a whole new emotion!”

“If I were to try and define Jack’s overall contribution, I’d say he provided the melodic bond, the undercurrent to Keith and Brian’s layers of guitar brainwash,” stressed Andrew Loog Oldham.

“Jack was always the consummate pro. Jack gave us an understanding of tone. Which tone fits the universe? Jack understood microphone placement, where band members sat and instrument leakage. One other thing. Jack had a grasp of, and interest in sex. How to inject sex into the sound. That is a gift of understanding between you and your third ear.”

In 2002, I interviewed bass player Bill Wyman, a co-founder of the Rolling Stones.

“We had recorded at the Chess studio for a couple of dates, a few times. When we came into L.A. we went to RCA. We walked into the studio and it was too big. We were really worried. We were intimidated. We were used to recording in little places like Regent Sound. The studio was like this hotel room. And Chess wasn’t very big either. Suddenly we’re at RCA and it’s enormous. It was like Olympic (studio in England) later. But we solved that same problem. We thought, ‘God, we can’t record in here. We’re gonna get the wrong sound.’

“But Andrew had this brain wave and he put us all in the corner of one room, turned all the lights down, and just tucked us all around in a little small circle. And we forgot about the rest of the room and the height of the ceiling. And we just did it in this little corner. Dave Hassinger the engineer got all the sounds we wanted. Brian picked up all the instruments in the studio. The dulcimers, the glockenspiel, the marimbas. And I played some of that stuff as well. The RCA was our first studio that had four tracks. We were on two and three tracks before that. Jack Nitzsche was a sweet man.”

“I remember the sessions for Aftermath where “I Am Waiting” sprang from,” recalled Andrew in a 2006 interview with me.

“There’s incredible clarity to what they were doing. It was like a linear thing. Filmic. They were vivid, and the key to that vividness was Brian Jones. The organ on ‘She Smiled Sweetly’ by Brian is just amazing. I like ‘She Smiled Sweetly’ more than ‘Lady Jane’ and ‘Ruby Tuesday.’ ‘Sweetly’ was boy/girl, living on the same floor. Whereas, both those other songs have a ‘To the Manner Born’ quality to them. Trying to write and evoke. And Mick’s vocals…Remember: He’s an actor. He can’t sing. He acts the words. There you go. Between the Buttons and Aftermath, without a doubt quite a few harried moments. And we did it in Hollywood at RCA.

“Aftermath works. They wrote every song on the record. It’s like when you go see a stage show or see a movie that works, one of the keys is ‘besides the fact that’s it’s not me on stage, that’s me.’ So, there is a sense of humour with the songs and the records. But not a lot of the other stuff. My life would never be that grungy.

Keith Richards, Andrew Loog Oldham, Charlie Watts and Ian Stewart at RCA in Hollywood 1965 (Photo by Gered Mankowitz/Iconic Images Ltd. Courtesy of Gered Mankowitz.)

“The session for “Paint It Black” was not nearly done! Bill (Wyman) started futzing around with the pedals of the Hammond B-3 organ, basically imitating Eric Easton, (the Rolling Stones co-manager) who used to play organ on the pier at Black Pool. And Brian Jones’ sitar on the song. It was a visual instrument. The fun times were the work. We’re in Hollywood. Some of Hollywood came through the door and I’m one of the conduits draggng it in.”

“It’s hard to imagine Rubber Soul and Revolver coming to fruition in a Byrds-free world, just as it’s hard to imagine Arthur Lee and Love without Aftermath on the turntable,” suggested writer and novelist Daniel Weizmann in my 2014 book Turn Up The Radio! Rock, Pop, and Roll in Los Angeles 1956-1972.

“To dig the Beatles or the Stones in ’65 is to dig that they were arrivistes, class-conscious Euros with work visas, thrown into this New World of spinning neon and Dodge Dart Swingers, Boss Radio, and go-go dancers. In a very real sense, they are American groups, as in immigrant Americans, and the rock ’n’ roll melting pot was their Ellis Island.”

Further evidence can be found on “What to Do,” a selection on the Stones’ Aftermath. An homage to the Beach Boys, particularly their vocal harmonies. Mick Jagger initially remarked during that recording session to his producer, “What do you want me to do? Brian Wilson?”

“No place came to represent that kindred spirit more than Los Angeles,” concluded author and musician Kenneth Kubernik.

“Wheelman Sonny Bono met them at the airport on an early visit (one hopes in a splashy convertible) and chauffer’s them to where the action is. There’s the Whisky A Go Go on the Sunset Strip; De Voss for the latest in glen-plaid tailoring; supping at Martoni’s Trattoria in Hollywood, where Sinatra holds court with his fellow rat packers. More important, however, is their introduction to the fabled RCA Studios. It is here, in the capacious main room, under the watchful eyes (and ears) of engineer Dave Hassinger and arranger/orchestrator/sideman Jack Nitzsche, where that crude amalgam of Southside blues, youthful angst and an unerring instinct for seizing the moment in three giddy minutes, reaches its apogee.”

In his absorbing autobiography, 2Stoned, Andrew Loog Oldham wrote, “The confidence of the Rolling Stones grew in this time of recording in America, an experience that was then unique in and of itself for a British band. The Beatles took over America, but the Stones belonged to it. The Stones records could not have been done in New York in that particular time,” recounted Oldham, “because, like London, New York has seasons. That’s why we went to LA to record. LA placed a tone on the records we made there. Walking outside a studio anytime of the year into the LA sunshine was a trip.”

“The Rolling Stones also started a situation at our RCA studio where songs weren’t done in a standard four-hour session,” underscored engineer Al Schmitt. “They had the studio for weeks to do albums. That was new.”

Andrew Loog Oldham and Dave Hassinger at RCA in Hollywood 1965 (Photo by Gered Mankowitz/Iconic Images Ltd. Courtesy of Gered Mankowitz.)

In July 2025, photographer Gered Mankowitz emailed me about RCA. He was also very generous sending over photos he took of the Stones in his 1965 visit to my town.

“Being able to spend a few days in the legendary RCA studios in Hollywood with Andrew Loog Oldham and the Rolling Stones was an exciting and appropriate ending to my first ever trip to the USA, and one I will never forget!”

During a 2007 interview Andrew Loog Oldham and I conducted for MOJO magazine, he reflected on his 1966 bio-regional link to RCA studio endeavors with his band.

“Well, Aftermath and Between the Buttons, and in the U.S. Flowers were some of my finest hours as Mick and Keith reached the ability to compose whole albums for the Stones. The songs were just brilliant, only eclipsed by the idea that the Beatles, Ray Davies and, coming up through the ranks, Pete Townshend, wrote better. The media and the BBC would just not accept what damn fine writers Mick & Keith had turned into. Wonderful social commentaries that had their roots somewhere between vaudeville and the BBC World Service. I’m not just talking about the obvious, ‘Satisfaction,’ ‘Paint it, Black’ etc. I’m talking ‘She Smiled Sweetly,’ ‘Connection,’ ‘All Sold Out,’ ‘Back Street Girl. The laconic comments, the posed rancour, Mick and Keith’s songs at that time cut right through the picket fence and into the very life of then.

“I’d better stop now or Keith if he reads this might be reaching for the vomit bag.”

Can you imagine how different all those Rolling Stones sessions cut in Hollywood would be if they had booked their studio time back then in New York?

I shudder at the thought…

I went to RCA studios for a couple of recording sessions by the Monkees. My mother Hilda worked on Sunset Blvd. at the Columbia studios in Gower Gulch as a secretary and stenographer from 1962-1972. In 1966-1968 she typed scripts for Raybert Productions on the lot, producers of The Monkees.

I once delivered sheet music of a tune on my skateboard to engineer Hank Cicalo when the office messenger boy wasn’t around, and again for Colgems music supervisor Don Kirshner or Lester Sill, executives at Screen Gems Music Publishing.

The Monkees, May 1967. (Photo by Henry Diltz, Courtesy of Gary Strobl at the Diltz Studio.)

In 2008 recording engineer Hank Cicalo reminisced to me about RCA.

“I had done some projects with arranger Shorty Rogers for Lester Sill. They were looking for an engineer to work with the Monkees, and my name came up. That’s how I fell into the project. I had a meeting with Lester and songwriters Bobby Hart, and Tommy Boyce. We went out and had lunch or dinner. They discussed what the project was about, and they were just about doing the pilot. Nobody knew what was going on. It was a TV show with a lot of music, and that’s all I knew about it.

“The one song I didn’t engineer at RCA was ‘Last Train to Clarksville,’ which was done by Dave Hassinger. I’d be booked for a month at a time, doing just the Monkees’ things. It was a lot of work. There was always this endless pressure of trying to do three or four musical numbers for each show while they were still shooting. We were working long hours at night, and whoever wasn’t shooting the next day could stay longer and do a vocal or this kind of thing or that kind of thing, working Saturdays and Sundays.

“For that period, because of the hours we were working at night, and also mixing, and also going through a very interesting change at that time, we would do a track on three-track or four-track, and then go from one machine to another machine, adding a vocal. We also went from four–track, to eight-track, to sixteen-track in that two-year period. It was the very beginning of multi-track, and we all progressed in a new medium as well. We were able to stack voices and double up voices without losing quality. It was a very interesting period.”

Chris Hillman of the Byrds told me his favorite record in 1965 was by the Rolling Stones’ “Get Off My Cloud.”

“You know why I like it? Brian Jones is on it,” praised Hillman in 2017. “The unknown factor of what made the Stones great was Brian Jones and nobody gives him credit. Yes, he was the pretty boy, however, as a musician, he was an unbelievably good musician. There is something about ‘Get Off My Cloud’ where they went from doing a Bobby Womack song ‘It’s All Over Now,’ straight R&B, to within six months to a year they are doing ‘Get Off My Cloud.’

“The record was recorded at RCA studios in Hollywood produced by Andrew Loog Oldham and engineered by Dave Hassinger, who engineered the Byrds when we cut a version of ‘Eight Miles High’ there.

“Hassinger did ‘Eight Miles High’ and got a little more of an edgy feel. The fact that this was the first time the Byrds had stepped away from the Columbia building. It’s very hard to tell the difference of the ‘Eight Miles High’ versions, but the one we did at RCA had a little bit more edge because we felt a little freer, and we hit a homer with it.

Chris Hillman and Roger McGuinn, June 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival (Photo by Henry Diltz, Courtesy of Gary Strobl at the Diltz studio.)

“Then Columbia said, ‘We will not accept this because it was not recorded at our studio.’ In those days that was the law. Recording in Hollywood then, and at our age at the time, and not being aware personally, I didn’t think about the environment being an influence. A studio was good anywhere and I didn’t care about the technical part if it was a comfortable place to work, and the engineer was quick and got sounds that were good. But it was in Hollywood at RCA where the Stones did their albums 1964-1966.

“So, when you came to record in those days, you didn’t go to Santa Monica or the San Fernando Valley, you went to Hollywood. That’s where the studios were. Back then, it was RCA, Gold Star, and Wally Heider. All those rooms made all these great records. Remember it was all analog. No digital. And Andrew Loog Oldham cut the Stones on four-track.”

In 2014 I spoke with Marty Balin from Jefferson Airplane. The band recorded Jefferson Airplane Takes Off, Surrealistic Pillow, After Bathing at Baxter’s, Crown of Creation, and Volunteers at RCA.

Marty commented about “Comin’ Back to Me” from Surrealistic Pillow.

“It just happened,” exclaimed Marty.” I left the RCA studios in Hollywood and went back to the motel I ran into Paul Butterfield and they had this joint and gave it to me. ‘Smoke this Marty. It’s the best stuff you’ll ever smoke!’ (laughs). So, I did. And I was in my room and I tell you I couldn’t find my legs. I got up and went to the guitar. Bam! In five minutes that song came out. So, I ran back to the studio, the session pretty much ended, they were cleaning up. Jerry Garcia was there, Grace and Jack Cassidy. And I said, ‘Hey guys. Play this with me.’ And I told the second engineer to turn on the tape and we did one take and that was it. And I didn’t think any more of it. Because you couldn’t play it live because it was so soft. I didn’t have any idea about that song lasting that long. It’s ended up in a movie and I’ve done it on my new album.

“I loved that RCA studio in Hollywood. We had a lot of studio time. The label would pull us off the road and say, ‘we need a new album.’ One time when I wrote ‘Today,’ Studio A had the Rolling Stones, Studio B was the Airplane and Studio C was Tony Bennett. The Stones and us wanted to meet Tony Bennett. So, I thought the best way I could meet him was write him a song. So, I wrote today and took it to the drummer who was working on that session. I gave him a tape of it. The engineers were great. Al Schmitt was top dog. He was great. He and his brother Ritchie were great people.”

##

From 1973-1980 I was at RCA on occasion, visiting the record division or inside the studios. I recall a 1973 college seminar at one RCA room with composer Henry Mancini. Hank invited a class of college students to a mixing session, coordinated by Grelun Landon, the well-respected head of public affairs at RCA Records.

I viewed the first live broadcast of Elvis’ Aloha from Hawaii Via Satellite in January 1973, along with several RCA Records employees. Hearing Elvis Presley’s voice and that TCB band through those Altec 604E Super Duplex monitors inside RCA Studios!

I saw Elvis Presley in 1970 at the Inglewood Forum as a paying college student. Between 1972 and 1976, Landon arranged for me to attend or review five Elvis concerts, and meet Presley’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker. I was also introduced to several of the TCB band members.

I had a previous Elvis Presley sighting on a Saturday afternoon during summer of 1967, when I was a teenager, in Dr. Morris Feldman’s Picwood dental office in West Los Angeles near the M-G-M studios in Culver City. Presley arrived in a Rolls Royce, flanked by two big guys. Dr. Feldman told me Elvis had broken a tooth during the filming of his 1968 movie Speedway.

I’ve always felt the reflective aspect of Elvis Presley’s 1970-1975 recording endeavors were influenced by Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh, (January 5, 1893-March 7, 1952), who was an Indian Hindu monk, yogi and guru whose teachings of meditation and Kiya Yoga reached millions of people through his organization Self-Realization Fellowship. His teachings of yoga provided unity between Eastern and Western religions. During 1925 in Los Angeles, he established an international center for SRF.

Yogananda’s life story, Autobiography of a Yogi, was initially published in 1946, and expanded by him in subsequent editions. It’s been a perennial best seller having sold millions of copies, and translated into many languages. George Harrison and photographer Henry Diltz would gift the book to friends and musicians.

In 1950, Yogananda held the first Self-Realization Fellowship World Convocation at the international headquarters in Los Angeles. He also dedicated the beautiful SRF Lake Shrine in Pacific Palisades, that has since become one of California’s most prominent spiritual landmarks.

It survived the January 2025 fires that engulfed and demolished Pacific Palisades. A barge and a gas-powered water pump were key to the sanctuary’s survival and everyone was evacuated from the premises.

By the late sixties, Elvis Presley was looking for a new spiritual and musical road map just before his memorable Elvis…’68 Comeback Special done at NBC studios. Presley had visited Self-Realization Fellowship center on Sunset Blvd. near the Pacific Coast Highway in Southern California and devoured Autobiography of a Yogi from the movement’s founder, Paramahansa Yogananda. Presley and his wife Priscilla also had a friendship with Daya Mata of the SRF retreat in the Mt. Washington area in East Hollywood. Sir Daya Mata, born Rachel Faye Wright, was President and spiritual head of SRF from 1955 to 2010.

In Elvis and Me: The True Story of the Love Between Priscilla Presley and the King of Rock N’ Roll, by Priscilla, with contributions from Sandra Harmon, Priscilla mentioned her husband’s fascination with spirituality. Elvis made several trips to the Mount Washington retreat for sessions with Daya Mata hoping to attain the highest form of meditation.

“As Elvis’ fascination with occult and metaphysical phenomena intensified, [his friend] Larry introduced him to the Self-Realization Fellowship Center on Mount Washington, where he met Daya Mata, the head of the center,” Priscilla wrote. “She epitomized everything he was striving to be.” According to Priscilla, “Mata resembled Elvis’ mother, Gladys Presley.” Elvis would call her ‘Ma.’”

Jerry Schilling is the author (with Chuck Crisafulli) of Me and a Guy Named Elvis. Jerry was a longtime insider/adviser and trusted Presley friend. In 2007 I interviewed Schilling, one of the executive producers on HBO’s Elvis Presley: The Searcher. Until recently, he managed the Beach Boys.

“Elvis was a seeker,” reinforced Schilling. “He did go to the Bodhi Tree (a spiritual book store in West Hollywood that opened in July, 1970). There was a part of our group that did not like that. I was in the minority with [Presley’s hair stylist and spiritual adviser] Larry Geller. Elvis was open to show a spiritual and vulnerable side. He was into that. What I loved about it was that through his spiritual quest I got to know the man even deeper. We would go to SRF in Pacific Palisades and Mt. Washington in East Hollywood many times.”

© Harvey Kubernik 2025

Harvey Kubernik was an on-camera interview subject in 2007 for the M-G-M/Sony Pictures New Wave Productions Deluxe Edition DVD of Jailhouse Rock starring Elvis Presley. In 2008, Harvey penned the 5,000 word liner notes for the 40^th anniversary edition of Elvis! The ’68 Comeback Special.

Kubernik is the author of 20 books, including 2009’s Canyon Of Dreams: The Magic And The Music Of Laurel Canyon, 2014’s Turn Up The Radio! Rock, Pop and Roll In Los Angeles 1956-1972, 2015′s Every Body Knows: Leonard Cohen, 2016′s Heart of Gold Neil Young and 2017′s 1967: A Complete Rock Music History of the Summer of Love. Sterling/Barnes and Noble in 2018 published Harvey and Kenneth Kubernik’s The Story Of The Band: From Big Pink To The Last Waltz. In 2021 the duo wrote Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child for Sterling/Barnes and Noble.

Otherworld Cottage Industries in 2020 published Harvey’s Docs That Rock, Music That Matters. His Screen Gems: (Pop Music Documentaries and Rock ‘n’ Roll TV Scenes) is due for 2025 publication.

Harvey wrote the liner notes to CD re-releases of Carole King’s Tapestry, The Essential Carole King, Allen Ginsberg’s Kaddish, The Ramones’ End of the Century and Big Brother & the Holding Company Captured Live at The Monterey International Pop Festival.

During 2006 Kubernik spoke at the special hearings by The Library of Congress in Hollywood, California, discussing archiving practices and audiotape preservation. In 2017 he appeared at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, in their Distinguished Speakers Series. Amidst 2023, Harvey spoke at The Grammy Museum in Los Angeles discussing The Last Waltz music documentary. The New York City Department of Education is developing the social studies textbook Hidden Voices: Jewish Americans in United States History. Kubernik’s 1976 profile/interview with music promoter Bill Graham on the Best Classic Bands website “Bill Graham Interview on the Rock ’n’ Roll Revolution,” 1976, Best Classic Bands is included.