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.

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).

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).

May 24 is Bob Dylan’s birthday.

Bob Dylan’s ongoing influence is evident on the Bear Family Records’ 2024 compilation He Took us by Storm: 25 lost classics from the Bob Dylan folk-rock revolution era. Dion, P.F. Sloan, Len Chandler, Donovan, Leon Russell, Dino Valenti, Lou Reed, Johnny Winter, David Crosby, Jackie Washington, Tom Rush, and Bobby Darin are heard.

Dylan’s 2025 tour concludes September 19 in East Troy, Wisconsin.

From 1975-2025 I’ve conducted interviews with people about Dylan:

Martin Lewis: The sixties actually began in Britain in January 1963. Just as the Beatles were starting to please, please us we drew our first breath of Bob Dylan. He appeared as the Greek chorus in an adventurous British TV play Madhouse on Castle Street. He sang “Blowin’ In the Wind.” It’s first broadcast anywhere in the world.

For this young English lad this was a heady time. “Please Please Me” made my head explode with the fizz of its joyously ascending climaxes. While Dylan’s anthemic “The Times They Are A-Changin’” lifted my soul. (As the late Ian Whitcomb remarked: Dylan was the world’s foremost “g-clipper”)

The sixties also ended in Britain. Six decade-long years later in August 1969 (Altamont that December was merely the burial). And just like its dawn, the twilight also featured Dylan and the Beatles. (Well, all except Paul). They all congregated on our Isle of Wight. Like Woodstock (two weeks earlier) but less hype and mud—more music. Dylan performed as the grand finale. It was his concert comeback after three years as the jester in a cast on the sidelines. The Marching Band’s John, George and Ringo communed backstage and in the VIP enclosure in front of the stage. (And, yes, this teenage Artful Dodger managed to bullshit his way briefly into that cloistered sanctum to bear witness. And to scoff some free nosh…)

Dylan flouted all the festival rules. Most people that season were wearing denim or tie-dye. Dylan wore a suit. A white one. Just like Lennon’s Abbey Road clobber. Some sets—The Who, Joe Cocker, Moody Blues—ran expansive lengths. Dylan’s set on the final night at 11pm was a tight, trim hour. But he crammed in hits and deep cuts. Mainly fresh interpretations.

It was the prelude to the Never-Ending-Tour and the Always-a-Changin’ arrangements. Fifteen songs. From “She Belongs to Me” through “The Mighty Quinn” (then a recent UK hit for Manfred Mann) in a brisk 60 minutes. Among the many highlights I recall a sublime “Lay Lady Lay.”

Some contemporary press reviews claimed the crowd of 150,000 felt short-changed by Dylan’s set. I don’t recall that as the collective mood. It felt like a benediction on the decade.

Incidentally, fourteen weeks later I was also witness to the exorcism of the decade – Lennon’s historic Plastic Ono Band concert at London’s Lyceum Ballroom. He played a searing “Cold Turkey” and then it was all over now baby blue… The sixties… the whole caboodle… The Dream Was Over.

Dylan’s sensibility left a huge mark on me. And when I eventually graduated from Artful Dodger to Artful Producer, I kept dipping into his songbook. I’m still dipping…

To paraphrase from the Dylan song, I produced with Pete Seeger (his last recording)—Dylan has kept my heart always joyful.

Bob: May you stay forever young…

Johnny Cash: 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 1965. 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.

We’ve gone fishin’ on my boat dock for hours and haven’t said a word.

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.

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.

Brian Wilson: I was a fan of Bob Dylan in 1965. I like him. We did a song of his on the Beach Boys’ Party! I thought Dylan’s voice was an interesting voice.

Bob Dylan and the Byrds at Ciro’s. (Photo by Jim Dickson, courtesy of Henry Diltz, and Gary Strobl at the Diltz Archive)

Kim Fowley: Dylan was pioneering everything. So of course, he would be at the forefront because that’s his job to be first.

Dylan played the UCLA Folk Festival in 1963.

In 1965, Billy James invited me to a reception in Hollywood for Bob Dylan at Columbia Records. I said to Dylan, “What’s your gimmick? What’s your schtick?” And he replied, “Asking questions and telling stories.”

Then the following night, Bryan MacLean, a Byrds roadie before he was in Love, and I, were standing in front of Ciro’s. We knew there was a party in Hollywood at Ben Shapiro’s house who was Dylan’s booking agent. It was behind the Continental Hyatt House. We decided to crash it.

So, we jumped over a fence and climbed in through the kitchen window. I had a problem getting over the stove, and a pair of hands grabbed me across the stove-and it was Bob Dylan! And he grabbed Bryan and helped him through the window. He then asked if we wanted something to eat. “Sure, man!”

He wasn’t happy with the other people in the room at his party. “You guys wanna come? Hey, you’re that guy from yesterday! Have some chicken.” And he went and got us plates in the kitchen and fed both of us. He was very kind.

Then there was another party across the street. I was with Danny Hutton, later to form Three Dog Night. We followed Dylan’s entourage and ended up in a room at a hotel apartment. People then started harassing him. “Sing for us or we’ll kick your ass!” They were being mean. I felt bad for Bob Dylan.

So, I immediately jumped up and said, “Fuck all of you. I’m better than he is and I also sing better in his voice! So, you, Bob Dylan, play me Bob Dylan chords!”

On some level I got him off the hook. He said, “What do you wanna sing?” And I asked, “I dunno, what have you got?” Dylan said, “Sing something about walls.” Dylan picked up an acoustic guitar and I made up a song on the spot. The audience was shocked. They had no idea what to do. They didn’t want to applaud or fight. They were really confused.

Dylan encouraged me to be a solo recording artist. As Dylan was being whisked away by handlers, he offered some wine and said, “You’re as good as I am.”

Roy Silver was my manager in 1966, who in 1962 was the original co-manager of Bob Dylan with Albert Grossman.

I like Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. The Dylan songs and the atmosphere. I like Bob on-screen. He has this charisma in the sense that he holds something back, and you want him to put out, and you anticipate, and he lets you see a little more. He teases you. The Charlie Chaplin mannerisms. You hear him and he stops singing, and you go ‘Wow.”

Bob Dylan and Rodney Bingenheimer (Courtesy of the Rodney Bingenheimer Archives)

Rodney Bingenheimer: I met Bob Dylan in 1965 at The Trip nightclub on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood. At the club I was with Billy Hinsche of Dino, Desi & Billy, who took a photo of Dylan and I holding my camera.

I went to the amazing December 1965 Bob Dylan concert at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. Marlon Brando sat in front of me. After the show, which was on my birthday, we all got up from our seats and went backstage. It was all happening! I love Cher singing Dylan’s “All I Really Want to Do.”

Andrew Solt: 1965 was the year my life changed. I graduated from Hollywood High School, started college at UCLA in February ‘65, and I discovered the Byrds at Ciro’s on the Sunset Strip. Ciro’s was two blocks from where I lived. Mecca! Dancing to the Byrds’ jet-powered rock at Ciro’s on Sunset Strip had me feeling like I was present at America’s version of the Cavern in Liverpool.

One day late that fall I heard on the AM radio, probably KFWB or KRLA, that Bob Dylan would be appearing one weekend at three L.A. area venues. My brother John and I bought tickets his concerts at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, the Long Beach Municipal Auditorium and the Pasadena Civic Auditorium.

The first set was acoustic. But when Dylan strutted out after intermission with the Hawks, the world seemed to stop spinning for a couple of hours. I was even more transfixed by Dylan live on stage with his electric guitar.

I was thrilled by his every move, his delivery and the way he cocked his head and sidled up to the microphone. His confidence and charisma were undeniable. He may have been an unlikely rock icon, but he definitely was one. It couldn’t have been any better. It was transformative. I was immersed in something groundbreaking that felt raw as vibrant as Dylan and his group were taking the audience and rock ‘n’ roll on a magic carpet ride to a whole new level. I didn’t want those nights to ever end. It was undoubtedly one of the most exciting weekends of my early life.

In May 1967 when Dont Look Back the D.A. Pennebaker documentary on Dylan’s UK tour in 1965 premiered in Los Angeles at an art house in Los Angeles, the Los Feliz Theater, I was there. Transfixed. Dylan on screen. Not stage. Docu verite window into a magical world-spellbinding moments, musical gems, beyond comprehension. Next day. Same place. Back in line for another shot.

Carlos Santana: FM radio in 1967 and ‘68. KMPX, KSAN. It blew my mind when I found it. Here’s the word: Consciousness revolution. It did not come from Liverpool or New York. I think it came from San Francisco. The psychedelic shock. Haight-Ashbury. When I first heard “Desolation Row,” it was like, “Man, this is like being inside one of Bob Dylan’s songs or something.”

For me, being right out of high school, and listening, really listening, it gave me a vast awareness of “where do I belong it all this?” And I looked at B.B. King on my left and Tito Puente on my right. The first time I saw Michael [Bloomfield] play guitar…it literally changed my life enough for me to say, “this is what I want to do for the rest of my life.”

December 1965. Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. Drummer Sandy Konikoff, Bob Dylan, Robbie Robertson (Photo by Rodney Bingenheimer.)

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. I learned a long time ago, that with Ol’ Bob that the only answer to shrug. Go figure.

Greil Marcus: The first thing a friend said when we first heard the album John Wesley Harding on the radio, late one night on KSAN-FM, “I think we’ll be listening to this for a long time.”

Michael Simmons: I adored John Wesley Harding when it came out at the end of ’67. Still do. It’s one of my favorites among many Dylan favorites. There’s an account that I read years after the album was released that Dylan had a huge, well-thumbed Bible on a stand at his home in Woodstock. I remember thinking that’s where John Wesley Harding came from to some degree. It’s full of morality tales and parables and Book Of Revelations dread. One could argue that JWH is Dylan’s first biblical album. Also, Bob obviously knew that the album would be pored over by fans looking for ‘the truth’ and the liner notes are hysterically funny – a dig at First Decade Dylanologists. The country seduction tunes “Down Along the Cove” and “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” end the album and seamlessly lead into his next – Nashville Skyline.

Chrissie Hynde: Bob Dylan’s “Forever Young” has got such a beautiful lyric. I just love it. He’s the pride of our generation. The song is genius. 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.”

Time Out of Mind. It’s one of his best albums. He just sings magnificently, for a start. They’re just great songs. Bob always writes impeccable songs, but my suspicion is that he’s a little impatient in the studio. On this one, he really stuck it out and got gorgeous vocals. The singing is fantastic. The songs are so well crafted and they just got the great sound for each song. You don’t feel like he just got a band in, wheeled them in and played all the songs and left. Each song is very carefully thought out.

Obviously, that’s a lot in the production and I’m sure that’s Danny Lanois who masterminded that. Jim Keltner is the perfect drummer for any band if you ask me. He’s great with Bob Dylan. Keltner is a genius drummer. I love that guy.

Clem Burke: Dylan was just being himself in Dont Look Back. The whole cinema verite concept. You got the feeling you were a fly on the wall and Pennebaker had access.

The Last Waltz was great. I went to see a screening of it at The New School when it first came out and Martin Scorsese and Robbie Robertson spoke at it.

That is getting back to what I thought music videos should be. There you have great performances captured for prosperity. You have a moment in time that should have been captured. All those artists together in one place. Levon Helm blew my mind.

I liked The Concert for Bangladesh, but no behind the scenes stuff at all just about performance.

Steven Van Zandt: I’ve gone through different phases with Bob Dylan. I had an older friend who first played me the folk music stuff of Bob the first three albums. I liked it but didn’t understand the whole poetry thing. I was age 12 and didn’t quite get it. He was interesting, even then.

As a guitar player, I’ve played Dylan’s songs with Bruce [Springsteen] 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.

The Byrds introducing him 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, Harvey. 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.

On my Little Steven’s Underground Garage and Outlaw Country [SiriusXM satellite radio] channels I program things from Johnston’s Cash albums all the time, especially the live San Quentin. I like to spotlight producers, whether it be Andrew Loog Oldham with the Rolling Stones, or Bob Johnston’s work with Dylan. These are people who need to be talked about.

I play a lot of Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde. I talk a lot about [Michael] Bloomfield. Oh my God… One of the greats. The single most unsung guitar hero. Really, right there alongside the holy trinity of (Eric) Clapton, (Jeff) Beck and (Jimmy) Page. Probably next in line as far as influence and importance would be Mike Bloomfield in our early youth growing up. Extremely important.

We usually don’t play a lot of Bob’s things that classic rock stations are playing, like “Tangled Up In Blue.” I’ve programmed Rod Stewart and the Faces covering “The Wicked Messenger” from John Wesley Harding and Jimi Hendrix doing “All Along the Watchtower” from the same album.

Dylan pretty much walked away from rock ‘n’ roll for a minute, and started getting back to his roots and taking them to some other place, more the country and folk world where he came from. People didn’t know what to make of it at the time. It was a strange sort of new Bob Dylan that emerged after his July 1966 motorcycle accident.

Jimi Hendrix did more to promote John Wesley Harding than anybody. It was one of the most remarkable records ever made of course. And the fact that Jimi picked up on that from that unusual and not very popular Bob Dylan album and made everybody go back to it. And, I’m telling you Harvey, that’s how powerful that record was.

Everybody went back to John Wesley Harding after hearing Hendrix, thinking, “you know, maybe I missed something? Look what Jimi Hendrix did with it. Look what the Faces did with it.” It worked. It’s a terrific album but sort of subtle, compared to Blonde On Blonde that most people consider Bob’s peak.

Kenneth Kubernik: There is another American original, a musician whose body of work, scope of influence, and inscrutable personality mirrors so many of Bob Dylan’s most singular attributes. Pianist Keith Jarrett is not a name that leaps to mind when talkin’ ’bout Bob’s imperishable impact, that litany of artists long identified with his idiosyncratic approach to song craft, interpretive wanderlust, and rousing conviction.

There is nary a one that reeks of jazz. But Jarrett — revered by players and serious students of improvisation, reviled by the jazz constabulary for his irascible nature – has, since the ’60s, spun closely within Dylan’s musical orbit. When jazz was moving uncomfortably towards rock and funk, Jarrett had his trio perform “My Back Pages,” and “Lay Lady Lay,” coping a Floyd Cramer groove more redolent of Nashville’s skyline than Manhattan’s hot house revelries.

In an interview with England’s Melody Maker, Jarrett cited Dylan’s insight that artists “walk a razor’s edge,” when asked to describe the opaque process behind his mesmeric solo piano recitals. More than Monk and Miles, Trane and Bird, Jarrett found common cause with Dylan’s redoubtable independence of thought and action. It is amusingly apt that Dylan, in recent years, has turned to performing the American songbook – “standards” – that provide the beating heart of every educated jazz musician. He’s on Jarrett’s turf here and one can only imagine that aching croak nestled inside the pianist’s ineffable accompaniment. Wonder boys…”

Outside of maybe Bob Marley and Jimi Hendrix, no popular musician commands a more robust, enthusiastic international following than Dylan. His “voice” is heard in every language that speaks through music to celebrate the resiliency of the soul against the tides of a world gone wrong.

Heather Harris: You could be reading of personal discovery of the music of Bob Dylan contemporary to its creation so epiphanic to my preteen ears that I was left gasping for air like a fish out of water. Yes, he was that different from all others at the time and yes, he was that good. This was instantly perceptible even to naive prepubescent music fans like yours truly, gifted with new record albums by a caring older sibling already in college (shout out to my late brother Randall, who eventually owned and helmed a recording studio in Nashville.)

But this here article will contain far more efficient and far more lyrical treatments of the revelation that was the 1962 and beyond Bob Dylan by insightful oracles in our business that is music. My task is to remind you or even to introduce you to the rare visual talent behind him that was deemed worthy of portraying this spankin’ new icon to not only his new generation of peers, but to be sufficiently universal enough to stand the test of history right along with this music’s maker.

Fortunately, his visual legacy boasts some the last century’s best still photography artists ever to grace the medium. Dylan immediately attracted the best of the best, even beyond the promotional efforts of his hard workin’ manager Albert Grossman.

We are lucky to have the portraiture and live stage photography works of Dylan by: (debatably the entire 20th century’s very best photographer) Richard Avedon; 1960s’ white hot chronicler, future film director Jerry Schatzberg; Jim Marshall (of way too many instantly recognizable iconic shots to list; Bob Gruen who documented Dylan from his uproarious 1965 Newport Festival electric revolution and continued to do so into our 21st Century so he is happily still here to shoot and recount the tales; Daniel Kramer (album covers of both Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited plus some engaging Dylan books of same); Don Hunstein (the immortal, oh so evocative The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan cover with the Village’s cutest activist couple Bob and close personal friend Suze Rotolo); and David Gahr (my only personal photography hero along with Kurt Ingham) alongside Milton Glaser (my only personal graphic art hero along with John Van Hamersveld) who designed that amazing polychrome psychedelic drawing of Dylan along the way to his I Heart NY sloganeering, in the graphics included inside the first great compilation of Dylan songs from Columbia, a poster which resided in probably three quarters of all college dormitories of the era.

Most media-savvy music enthusiasts will recognize the names in this list, with the possible exception of Rolling Stone and Creem magazine covers’ photographer (and later punk singer known as Mr. Twister who covered Highway 61 Revisited with particular elan in the gory bits) Kurt Ingham and David Gahr.

To write of the former, my late husband, might be inexcusable nepotism here so I will concern us with the often feloniously overlooked David Gahr. Peruse the book The Face of Folk Music, photographs by David Gahr, text by Robert Shelton, 1968. It contains the best/greatest/most exciting/most flattering black and white pics ever taken of each of the performers. Granted, Gahr’s own definition of “folk music” remained sufficiently elastic to have included Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, Janis Joplin & Big Brother and the Holding Company, or any number of rockers Gahr was hired to document live, on location or in the studio.

His C.V. was whomever represented the pinnacle in modern music or soon would be. The US postage stamp featuring Miles Davis arched in an extreme but naturalistic pose wailing on horn was David Gahr’s portrait. And of course, gobs of timeless pics of a then young Bob Dylan. Because of his body of work in this very book I am a self-taught photographer. It instantaneously taught me, (not his words) the following: Flatter the subject even while extracting all the excitement possible in action gestures. Shooting natural light onstage is always superior to flash (when possible.) Make sure your timing is impeccable, no microphones covering most of the face. Document what’s there without editorializing: your own P.O.V. can be deceptively candid, as will be the subject’s. Trust your fine art background (which I had) to get unusual but perfect composition. Make sure your photos are the right value/balance/contrast to reproduce exactly as you expect. (I’ve seen Gahr’s photos in person: they look precisely as they appeared printed in books or other media.)

“If your memory serves you well…” None of us or any other recording artist or any human for that matter has ever equaled the torrential talent of Bob Dylan’s wordsmithery.

As someone who came of age in the 1960s, I was inexplicably proud when he wrote and released his Murder Most Foul in recent-ish 2020, proving to generations subsequent to his own that there still was stainless steel strength to his observations about modern history, with not a whit of loss of superconductor creativity even in an eleven- minute epic song.

Furthermore, the accomplishment of James Mangold, Jay Cocks and Timothee Chalamet in A Complete Unknown, underscores and presents context to current and future generations about why this artist was and is so revered. It’s a smart, well-cast, high caliber biofilm that not only doesn’t insult its subjects but also is worthy of them. Their memory does serve them all well.

© 2025 Harvey Kubernik

Johnny Cash Show TV Guide ad, Dylan ad with LP covers, Isle of Wight ad courtesy of Gary Pig Gold. 

Bob Dylan concert ticket courtesy of Kenneth Kubernik 

Fifty years ago, Lou Reed released Transformer. In among “Walk on the Wild Side,” “Make Up” and “Vicious,” cuts that would launch a cartoon Rock N Roll Animal persona which would typecast Lou for years, was “I’m So Free.” A weedy platform-hopping rocker, it’s always sounded to me like filler with slapdash lyrics. But, not so long ago, I started to wonder about the “Saint Germaine” Lou references in the song. Up until that point, I’d always assumed he was just one of the real-life Warhol superstars or invented characters with whom Lou peopled the songs on the album:

Oh please, Saint Germaine
I have come this way

Do you remember the shape I was in

I had horns and fins

I’m so free

I’m so free

Do you remember the silver walks

You used to shiver and I used to talk

Then we went down to Tim

es Square

And ever since I’ve been hangin’ round there

It turns out that Saint Germain—as the name is commonly spelled—was an 18^th century composer and musician revered by Theosophists as also an alchemist and great spiritual master. Theosophists follow Theosophy, the religious, occultist group co-founded by mystic, author, and trickster Madame Blavatsky in New York in 1875. So, what’s Saint Germain doing on an album that has defined a certain kind of sexually fluid, narcotically informed and ham-fistedly decadent rock and roll for decades? And why does it read like Lou is sending up a prayer to him?

The answer, I believe, lies in the fact that, although, as it’s commonly understood, alchemy refers to the transmutation of metals and the fabrication of gold, for Theosophists there’s a spiritual dimension to the practice. Saint Germain was a spiritual alchemist. Spiritual Alchemy is the transmutation of man’s animal nature into the Higher Self. In “I’m So Free,” Lou, who had “horns and fins,” animal attributes, sounds like he’s begging to be transformed. To the accepted meanings of Transformer, spanning transforming underground cult hero Lou into a pop star and blurring sexual identity —“shaved her legs and then he was a she”—among others, I would say we can add spiritual transformation. But that still doesn’t explain how Lou even knew about Saint Germain.

Before we go on, I should mention that, in an earlier version of the song recorded in 1970 in Lou’s bedroom at his parents’ house on Long Island after he’d left the Velvet Underground, he sings “Do you remember the shape I was in/I was covered in sin,” making the lyric feel more about redemption. But by October 27, 1971, when the sessions gathered on I’m So Free: The 1971 RCA Demos were recorded, the line had become “I had horns and fins.” Lou already had transformation on his mind.

Billy was a good friend of mine

A clue to as to why Lou mentions Saint Germain is buried in the verse that begins “Do you remember the silver walks.” My gut feeling is that this refers to Billy Linich AKA Billy Name. Name was part of the group of avant-garde musicians that gathered around drone-meister La Monte Young in the late 1950s—in Billy’s own words, he was a “human drone”—before becoming court photographer to Andy Warhol’s Factory. Lou and Name were great friends, occasional lovers, and, for a time, fellow methamphetamine devotees. Lou adored Name. Speaking on radio WBCN-FM in Boston in early March 1969, the month the Velvets’ third album was released, he describes Name as “divinity in action on earth” and, as the photographer of the cover of the third album, taking pictures that are “unspeakably beautiful…pure space, for people who have one foot on earth and another foot on Venus.” When Lou liked someone, he gushed.

Name was responsible for silverizing Warhol’s Factory with the tinfoil he slapped on nearly every surface. Talking and shivering suggest speeding. More significantly for our quest to explain the appearance of Saint Germain in the song, Lou also claimed to have introduced Name to the work of Theosophical writer and teacher Alice Bailey:

“A friend of mine got so far into it he locked himself in a closet for two years and never came out and I know exactly what he was doing because I was one of the few people he let in, visited him periodically, checked he was alive and he explained to me what he was doing and I know what…because I was the one who started him on the books [of Alice Bailey] and he went through all fifteen volumes and when you follow that book, it teaches you, you know the seven centers of the body and moving the energy. It can be dangerous. Meditation can be dangerous if it’s not done correctly…You can do things that aren’t right, but he was literally going off his body cell by cell. It was really something to see.”

According to an interview Name gave to UK newspaper The Guardian in 2015, he shut himself away for about a year, but the reason was rather more prosaic. “I didn’t really relate to the Factory any more…I’d have visitors like Lou Reed, but I really wanted to get my negatives in order and that took a lot of time.”

Name finally left the Factory in 1970 because, as he told author of the piece Sean O’Hagan, he was “saturated by silver.” But, all those years later, looking back on his time in the New York avant-garde from a hospital bed in Poughkeepsie, Name said, “I miss the times when I was really free.”

Alice Bailey – the New Age, Aquarius, and astrology

Outside of esoteric circles, Alice Bailey is little known today. But we have her to thank for popularizing the expression “New Age,” which has come to define the grab bag of religious and spiritual practices—from astrology to Zen, if you will—that began to spread through Western society in the 1960s. British-born Bailey (1880-1949), who spent time in India before arriving in Hollywood, was initially a Theosophist with either a truly cosmic imagination or astonishing supernatural experiences. Like Blavatsky, she claimed to receive “ageless wisdom” from a Tibetan Master of Wisdom. Hers was named “DK.” Bailey insisted that this wisdom was telepathically dictated to her, which is why Lou, at once elevating and denigrating her, referred to her as a “Telepathic Secretary.” Bailey, or DK, was impressively prolific. She would go on to write two dozen 1,000 or so page long, abstruse books, including A Treatise on White Magic and A Treatise on Cosmic Fire. Along with many members of the counterculture, Lou read several of her books, and Billy Name all of them.

(Having attempted to read Bailey and bounced off White Magic and Cosmic Fire, I can only suggest that one of the reasons Lou and Name managed to get through them was because they were speeding their tits off.)

To simplify drastically, Bailey’s work is fundamentally concerned with the relationship between the soul and the body, between the spiritual and material. For her, the way to heal all disease is to release the soul from any blockages, congestion, or obstruction by establishing the right relationship between it and the personality. Once that happens, the personality expresses the soul in the correct relationship. All healing is directed by the mind.

Bailey’s writing covers meditation, healing, spiritual psychology, the solar system, and spirituality itself. It synthesizes an unorthodox take on Christianity with adaptations of Hindu concepts such as chakras—energy points aligned down the center of the body—and the notion of seven rays which appears in several religions. For Bailey, they are the basic creative forces of the Divine universe and relate to human psychology, the destiny of nations, the planets, and the stars. Combining Christianity and Hinduism was part of Bailey’s vision of a unified society and a global spirit of religion. Not one for the ivory tower, she was a great believer in the United Nations, saying “The new world religion must be based upon those truths which have stood the test of the ages…they are steadily taking shape in human thinking, and for them the United Nations fights.”

Bailey also popularized the notion of an Age of Aquarius that took hold in pop culture, most notably with the 1960s musical Hair. In Bailey’s belief system, Saint Germain was the figure responsible for bringing the Age of Aquarius into being. As well as popularizing the New Age and the Age of Aquarius, she was indirectly responsible for esoteric astrology, broadly defined as the astrology of the soul, permeating the 1960s counterculture until it occupies the position it does today. She based her concept of the New Age, the change from the Age of Pisces to the Age of Aquarius, on astrological cycles. An astrological cycle lasts 25,772 years and some astrologers believe it’s connected to major changes in humanity’s development, relating especially to culture, society, and politics.

“Sun sign astrology,” which links personality types to the position of the 12 zodiac constellations at birth, was formulated in the early 20^th century by Theosophist Alan Leo. As Susannah Crockford writes in her essay “A Mercury Retrograde Kind of Day: Exploring Astrology in Contemporary New Age Spirituality and American Social Life”, “This focus on the self is what makes astrology such a prevalent practice in spirituality, where the individual is central…the self is synonymous with the universe; each individual is a divine spiritual being.” Building on this, Dane Rudhyar, a friend of Bailey’s and an avant-garde composer influenced by Indian classical music, popularized the connection of personality traits with zodiac signs in his 1936 The Astrology of Personality, a book that could have well been in Lou’s library. As Rob Norris writes in “I Was A Velveteen,” his revelatory memoir of meeting Lou and the Velvets in the 1960s published in Kicks magazine in 1979: “I learned that Lou and Doug (and John Cale before him) were Pisces, and Maureen and Sterling were Virgos (All the songs on the second LP are published by Three Prong Music which is the trident of Neptune, who is the ruler of Pisces. In astrology the Virgo-Pisces configuration is an opposition filled with Christian symbolism. Lou also contained this opposition in his own chart. On the third album, this duality found expression in the photo on the back cover photo and the songs were published by Virpi Inc.”

After being dismissed from Theosophy when LW Rogers became its president, Bailey formed the Lucis Trust with her husband Foster in 1922. This still exists, physically in New York at UN Plaza, London, in Geneva, and online. The Arcane School, where Lou claimed to have studied Bailey’s work from the early 1960s onwards, is an actual school and the arm of the Lucis Trust that gives instruction and guidance in Bailey’s belief system. On its website, the school describes its mission as “training people in meditation and service to develop their spiritual potential. The purpose of such training is to help students understand and accept discipleship responsibility and to recognize the part that they can play in the evolution of consciousness by serving humanity.”

Bailey and the people around her were clearly no slouches at marketing to potential acolytes. Arcane means known or knowable only to a few people, secret. For Lou, obsessed with divining the secrets of anything from doo-wop to beat literature to drugs to the New York avant-garde, this surely must have been catnip. But what did the part about serving humanity mean to him? This is what Velvet Underground scholars and Lou’s biographers don’t seem to have considered and, in relation to his music, it’s arguably the most important part of the equation.

Practicing Bailey’s teaching

Growing up in the 1960s in California, writer Tom Lane was precisely the right age to begin following the spiritual path he’s still on today. His reasons for becoming interested in a process called Actualism and what were, in effect, Bailey’s ideas, are worth recounting because, in interviews, Lou only ever described the work and what it gave him in Bailey’s terms. Not in relation to his own psychology.

While Lane, a Velvet Underground admirer, was practicing Actualism, the only two books he was ever asked to read were Bailey’s Pillars of Hercules and the wonderfully titled, though baffling Glamor: A World Problem. Actualism describes itself as “the process of learning to relate to the actual self within each person, and the radiant Actuality within the countless realities of life.” It began as something called Agni Yoga which trained practitioners in visualizing a ball of light, or sun of a different color, in each chakra, expanding and intensifying it so it became a healing fire. This practice was rooted in Bailey’s thinking. Russell Schofield, the Actualist leader who claimed he’d once been secretary to Scientology founder L Ron Hubbard, also created, Lane explained, “a system of meditation which was highly Theosophical, involving inner bodies, planes of existence and a planetary hierarchy of overseers of humanity” that he and his fellow practitioners would tune into.

“For us in the 1960s and 70s, esotericism became cool and groovy,” Lane told me, “and it was almost a case of the more obscure the teaching the better. We already felt special because we were using acid and we liked having access to a secret truth most people aren’t aware of, being part of a confraternity of people who knew about inner bodies and moving up planes of existence.”

I wondered what it felt like to do the practice. Did Lane feel he was going into a particular state? He laughed, “I thought I did. Whether that was purely subjective or not, I don’t know. So much spiritual work is subjective.”

What about the white light Lou references in “White Light White Heat” and which is an acknowledged part of Bailey’s teaching? “I first experienced the white light when I had a Christian conversion experience aged 15,” Lane said. “But, in the school of Actualism, there’s a chakra located six inches above your head. The sun in this chakra is white. The idea is to intensify the white light of the sun into heat and open up the sun until the white light becomes white heat. It’s healing but it’s also, in Buddhism, an important aid to realization.”

The Arcane School, the Quest for White Light, Spiritual Wasps

Velvet Underground and Lou Reed obsessives, critics, scholars, and his biographers have long known about his interest in Bailey and the esoteric, but none have been especially curious about that aspect of his life, and this has shaped their research and writing on him. For instance, his biographer Victor Bockris told me, “In all the time I knew Lou in the 1970s, in all the research I did, and in conversation with every single person I talked to, including the main people and many, many others, nobody really got into this aspect of his spirituality.” But that could simply be because Bockris didn’t ask. I am interested in Lou’s spirituality in relation to Bailey and what it might have meant for him and his art. And I believe that the reference to Saint Germain in “I’m So Free,” a song that has only been dated as far back as the demos Lou recorded in his bedroom at his parents’ house in late 1970, indicates his devotion to Bailey’s teaching continued for longer, ran deeper and was more influential on his work than has been assumed.

Before we go on, we should establish a useful definition of spirituality. One that works for me, and can be broadly applied to Lou’s belief system, is that of Susannah Crockford: “Through my fieldwork I came to understand spirituality as a constellation of beliefs and practices clustered around the central concept of ‘energy’ as an all-pervasive force; ‘the universe’ as a pantheistic conception of divinity; progressive stages of enlightenment described as a ‘spiritual path’; and a millenarian belief in a ‘new paradigm’ replacing the ‘old paradigm.’”

According to Lou, in conversation with John Tobler, his interest in the esoteric was sparked when Angus MacLise, avant-garde composer, musician, poet, occultist and the Velvet Underground’s first drummer gave him a copy of the book The Morning of the Magicians in the early 1960s. From then on, Lou dived headlong into what he described as “astrology, the occult, mysticism, Transcendentalism, the third eye, the whole bit.”

The Morning of the Magicians was first published in France in 1960 and was one of the supposedly weighty tomes that shaped the ideology of the counterculture. Written by journalist Louis Pauwels and practicing alchemist Jacques Bergier, the book, as scholar of the counterculture Gary Lachman writes in his book Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius, “would show how forgotten disciplines like alchemy had parallels with developments in modern physics, and how this suggested that the science of the future might be altogether like magic.” It was a bestseller in France and, after translation into English and publication as a paperback, went on to sell over a million copies, its publishers Mayflower claimed. Speaking to French journalist Dorothée Lalanne for Paris Vogue in 1979, Lou described The Morning of the Magicians as “a book that’s very fascinating on all sorts of things: magic, alchemy, war…”. He was also keen to stress that he read the book before it came out in paperback, establishing his credentials as an early adopter of arcane knowledge.

When Lalanne asks Lou about The Arcane School, his response is “Pardon? THE Arcane Society. Tell me—how do you know this name? Who spoke to you about that?” suggesting that she’s stumbled across an earth-shattering secret. In fact, although the connection never fails to surprise those of us who haven’t recovered from swallowing the Rock N Roll Animal schtick, Lou had been speaking openly about Bailey and The Arcane School since the late 1960s, around the time he was promoting the Velvet Underground’s third album.

It seems that the overwhelming benefit for Lou of studying at The Arcane School was to gain access to the white light. In the 1972 interview with John Tobler, he talks about attending “moon meditations with ceremonies,” where he and the other devotees would sit and chant and see white light, which, he says drily, “is kind of something.” At some point in the 1960s, Lou, according to Rob Norris writing in Kicks magazine, was also a member of the Church of Light in New York. This is something different from The Arcane School. Based on the writings of CC Zain, its mission is “to teach, practice, and disseminate The Religion of The Stars, a way of life for the Aquarian Age.” Zain was another astrologer, channeler and occult author. He was also the prime mover behind building a bird sanctuary in Los Angeles. Later in the interview with Tobler, Lou also talks about experiencing the white light remotely. “I was sick once and they put my name in this special part of a Japanese church they have in California. Sure enough, I got better. I might have gotten better anyway. I got sick again so it’s apparently not lasting.”

The church Lou mentions was the Johrei church, founded in Japan in the 1930s. Johrei, which means “purification of the spirit,” is a kind of paranormal healing. As with Bailey’s teaching, Johrei practitioners believe that illness originates in the soul, making it necessary to purify the soul to heal the body. This they do by channeling light into patients by holding their hands over the affected area, something Lou experienced. He tells Tobler that “my friend who can channel white light, like, held his hand, like, this far away to burn the toxins in my body out and the heat was so intense it was just unbelievable.”

Part of why Lou practiced what he did could well have been because he, like Tom Lane and maybe all of us, relished being in possession of secret knowledge. He also appears to have savored the more colorful aspects of the esoteric. To Tobler he describes going to a “woman in California who removed demons from my head”. This may be the woman Lou describes in more detail to an unidentified interviewer on KVAN-FM Oregon in November 1969:

“[She] reads your aura and tells you previous incarnations and all these entities. I had a number. They told Doug [Yule], for instance, that if you have long hair you should always get it trimmed a little bit, get the ends cut off because you pick up spiritual wasps. I really felt it. She was playing around with my ajna center, third eye, and she was applying a lot of pressure there as she was removing entities and as soon as she would remove it, she’d go [screams] and start shaking and she’d say, ‘I can’t see’ and she’d run into the other room, wash her hands, and come right back and I felt it …If it was an act, it’s great.”

The interview continues:

KVAN: What color did they say your aura was?

Lou: White and there was some blue, some green.

KVAN: Those are the colors of the spirit world. Green is the color of learning and growth.

Lou: She said I could be a prophet if I wanted to.

KVAN: Well, you are.

Lou: Then she asked me for money [laughs]. It was fabulous. If you’re into it at all, you can tell how good these people are, the effects on your ajna center. Mine got noticeably better while I was sitting there, while she was removing these entities. It was just fantastic, and I felt just incredible since. She removed all kinds of lower body entities.

KVAN: How many lower body entities?

Lou: She said pockets of them. In other words, what a lot of us are trying to do is move the energy from the sacral centers up to the throat center and if you get it to the throat center, move it up to the pineal gland but we still have confusions of energy which is all meditation is about, moving energy from the lower body to the higher body and she just saw some pockets of sin [laughs] and meanwhile she pulled out, she drew them from me, she’s telling me my previous incarnations which are really out of this world. I’ve got a lot of karmic responsibility.

KVAN: In this life?

Lou: You know, that’s what she said. Entertaining. One answer to a previous life of cavorting [cackles]. She’d tell you how many lives you’ve been here.

KVAN: How many lives have you had?

Lou: I have 1,143.

KVAN: That’s a lot of lives. Did she tell you how many incarnations you had?

Lou: She said, you always have that because you want to, because it’s so fantastic here. Because life here is so great. My point of view is she’s really right because I’m enjoying myself, I’m having so much fun that I think it’s fantastic. Obviously, last time around is to work a lot of the problems out but I’m having a lot of fun this time.

KVAN: You’re getting rewards this time.

Lou: I’m not getting any rewards.

KVAN: Things like talent, things like insight.

What’s worth pointing out here is that, listening to the audio of the radio interview, it sounds like Lou is being utterly sincere. He may have been infinitely hipper—“my week beats your year”—than a high school kid smoking banana skins in Podunk but he was far more a product of his time than those of us that mythologize the man would sometimes like to believe. Back in 1967, Rob Norris writes, Lou was as happy to sit around talking about “angels, saints, the universe, diet, yoga, meditation, Jesus, healing with music, cosmic rays, and astrology” as any caricature hippy.

The interview with KVAN also contains clues as to why Lou might have looked to Alice Bailey and other forms of esoteric practice, other than pure curiosity and the desire to possess arcane knowledge and material for his writing. Susannah Crockford suggests that spiritual astrology is so popular in the US because it fits with the notion of American individualism: “Americans have to make individual choices about jobs, romantic partners, childbearing, and so on. Understanding the self and seeking assistance on how to interpret when to make choices is of vital importance in this social context. The idea of a unique personality, the true nature of which is often obscured, speaks to the reification of the individual.”

For the profoundly driven Lou, who nonetheless had seen his band spiral slowly downwards from the heights of their association with Warhol back in 1966/67, it would have been entirely natural to grab onto something that reinforced his sense of himself as reified, real. He doesn’t sound like he’s joking when he says, “She told me I could be a prophet if I wanted to.” Although, ever the dualistic smartass, he swiftly undercuts this with “Then she asked me for money.”

Incidentally, there has been more than one KVAN. This includes a station in Tuscon, Arizona beaming out “The New Sound of CosmoPop and Global Change Music! Broadcasting from Tucson, Arizona on 91.7 FM and streaming across the universe on kvan.fm.”

Hooked on White Light

I have another theory as to why Lou may have been chasing the white light, and this is entirely speculative. In his Transformer: The Complete Lou Reed Story, Victor Bockris describes the electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) Lou underwent aged 17:

“He was wheeled into the small, bare operating room, furnished with a table next to a hunk of metal from which two thick wires dangled. He was strapped onto the table. Lou stared at the overhead fluorescent light bars as the sedative started to take effect. The nurse applied a salve to his temples and stuck a clamp into his mouth so that he would not swallow his tongue. Seconds later, conductors at the end of the thick wires were attached to his head. The last thing that filled his vision before he lapsed into unconsciousness was a blinding white light.”

If that’s how it happened, wouldn’t that experience, at the very least, leave you as fascinated by the white light as you were scared? Maybe it might make you want to experience the white light again in the same way your tongue probes for a wobbly or rotten tooth. Perhaps it could cause you to search for a benign white light to heal the damage that had been done to you.

I freely admit this is just pure speculation, although in a 1975 interview with Bockris for The Drummer magazine, Lou does say of the shock treatments, “That’s when I started getting interested in electricity.” What does appear to be verifiable is that Lou’s interest in Bailey didn’t end when the Aquarian dream appeared to fade away as the 1960s drew to a close.

In 1974, he gave a lengthy interview to Charlie Frick of The Aquarian Weekly, a New Jersey newspaper described as promoting “hippy culture and healthy lifestyles…sociopolitical views…drug culture coverage…new music features.” The interview is among those collected in the superb My Week Beats Your Year: Encounters with Lou Reed (2019). For me, the content of this interview in relation to its purported date is so startling that I immediately wondered two things. Had Lou done his homework on the mag and was he simply giving Frick what he deduced the journalist wanted? Then, was the interview dated correctly? After all, this was supposedly the year an emaciated Lou, wrapped up in leather, hair blonde and cropped, bloodstream awash in booze and impure drugs, released the less than profound Sally Can’t Dance, an album that made the Billboard Top 10 but which even he dismissed, quipping, “It seems like the less I’m involved with a record, the bigger a hit it becomes. If I weren’t on the record at all next time around, it might go to Number One.” At the time of the supposed date of the interview, he may well have been working on or have completed his hugely divisive feedback driven feedback drone piece Metal Machine Music, released in July 1975.

I became obsessed with trying to establish precisely when the interview took place.

Debra Kate Schafer, current Managing Editor of The Aquarian told me in an email that if it was published in 1974 it was “surely conducted the same year.” Pat Thomas, who edited My Week Beats Your Year: Encounters with Lou Reed along with compiler Michael Heath, insisted that the date of the interview given is accurate as far as publication goes because “we typed it in ourselves from the original newspaper.”

This suggests that Lou’s interest in Bailey didn’t abate when he became the Phantom of Rock and then the Rock N Roll Animal. But, in the interview, Frick only asks Lou about his first solo album, released in 1971 and not, as you’d have thought, subsequent albums up until 1974. Lou talks about the album in the past tense but when Frick asks if he’s working on new material, Lou says “I have two love songs. I always wanted to write a song called ‘I Love You.’ And there’s a song called ‘Love Makes You Feel 10 Feet Tall.’” These songs were on Lou’s first solo album, Lou Reed.

Simpler and more confused. Still, if we take the 1974 date as correct, the content of the interview does suggest that Lou’s interest in Bailey was going strong into the 1970s. Midway through the interview, Frick asks, “Hey Lou, you got any hobbies?”

Lou replies, “The thing I really like is…this shit, the Tarot, the I-Ching, Alice Bailey books,” the Rock N Roll Animal replies, before going on to say that walking into the offices of the Lucis Trust, who publish Bailey’s books, was like “walking into God’s library.” Lou and Frick talk about the meetings held every month on the full moon where Bailey’s disciples meditate and chant. When Frick says he used to go to those meetings, Lou says, “Oh shit, man, I’ve been up there chanting like a maniac.”

Lou raves about Bailey’s books as “such poetry, man, they’re so beautiful.” It appears the interview is taking place face to face because Lou offers to show Frick his copy of Bailey’s A Treatise on Cosmic Fire. Picture Lou, leathers creaking, joints popping, hauling himself up, brimming glass of whisky in one hand, and staggering off to find the broken-spined, manically annotated volume on one of the shelves of a groaning floor to ceiling bookcase. Or maybe not. Anyway, suggesting he does know his Bailey, Lou says: “These books explain to you everything: how the solar system forms a gigantic being, just the way our body is made out of cells, his body is made out of planets and it all links together. And there are solar systems like people, that the Earth is alive and just like the way the body can get sick, the earth can get sick if we don’t take care of things and that’s the way things happen.”

Somewhat amusingly, as 1974 was the height and last gasp of glam rock, Lou talks specifically about the book Glamor: A World Problem: “and glamor is like a world problem, like the incredible thing about clothes, being so concerned with your own ego trips, what you own. All these types of things, and you learn from these things how to non-attach and you start understanding. But the thing is that if you go too far with these kinds of books, you’ve got to kind of drop everything…”

My spiritual teacher and friend Zulma Reyo, whose work is partly derived from Bailey’s own, describes a glamor as a “Generic term used to refer to the veils or deceptions that prevail on the physical, emotional and mental levels (the so-called real world) that the individual who is learning to discriminate on the spiritual path will encounter.”

For Lou, dropping everything meant the possibility of using “rock and roll as the medium to spread the message of Alice Bailey, right. And then I realized…I would have to get to a certain point to do that.” But, and I presume he’s talking about the period towards the end of his time in the Velvets when he was becoming disenchanted with music biz machinations, he felt unable to get there. He “couldn’t sit around in the lotus position all day, trying to open my third eye and drinking my herbal tea…I had to deal with subways and buses, taxicabs, nightclubs, and a music business that was built on second rate rock and roll.”

By the time I spoke to Charlie Frick in July 2022, he was able to give me some background on how he came to mention the full moon meetings at Lucis Trust but couldn’t help me nail down the date of the interview.

Frick began his career as a journalist and photographer at New York countercultural newspaper the East Village Other in the late 1960s. He was 17. Walter Bowart, the editor and Frick’s mentor was “a kind of mystic,” as Frick put it. Bowart and some of the other, older journalists would go down to the full moon meetings at the Lucis Trust at 866 UN Plaza often after having smoked a joint. The meetings finished around nine so there was still time to hit the clubs afterwards. Frick was invited along. “I knew there was something there,” he told me, “and it was consistent with hippy values but it was way above the level of my intellectual and spiritual understanding.” He would continue to go to the meetings after he left the East Village Other.

By the time Frick sat down to interview Lou for The Aquarian at the Gramercy Park Hotel in New York he was 23. Lou’s hair was cropped, but it wasn’t dyed blond. Frick thinks the date might have been 1973, the year he joined The Aquarian, not ‘74. But he also recalls Lou “castigating his record company for the way they put out Metal Machine Music as if it was just another Lou Reed album. Lou felt his fans had been hoodwinked.” This would date the piece to after July 1975. In a subsequent conversation with Frick, he told me that he’d conducted a second interview with Lou published on November 19, 1975 after the release of MMM, which clears up that piece of confusion. But the correct date of the interview in which Lou talks about Bailey remains, for me, as much a mystery as ever.

“At the time I sat with Lou for that interview I was still quite green as a writer and reporter,” Frick told me. “I was sure of myself when it came to talking about music, but I was in way, way over my head when Lou got into esoteric matters. It’s not like I could carry on a long conversation with Lou about the underpinnings of Alice Bailey’s work and the teaching, but I could say I’d been to the meetings. To be honest, everything that came out of Lou’s mouth I was impressed with. He started quoting TS Eliot’s ‘Prufrock’ from memory at one point. I was just happy to be there.”

But, in this case, Frick’s humility was to his advantage.

Inspired to a degree by George Harrison, Frick had also been to India and spent time in an ashram. He’d hung out with Native Americans in Arizona, grazed at the smorgasbord of “hippy spirituality.” He continued, “Lou maybe took a look at this kid from Jersey and saw something in me besides my enthusiasm and manners and realized I was genuinely interested in what he had to say. He may have decided to drop his guard a little and speak to that thing he saw in me.”

Lou recognizing “that thing” made an impression on Frick that remains strong to this day. A year after the interview Frick met him backstage at a show in New Jersey where he described Frick as “an honest journalist.” Frick acknowledged that this was “very important to me.”

After this, Frick would bump into Lou from time to time, including at the sessions for Genya Ravan’s Urban Desire album on which Lou sings on the track “Aye Co’lorado.” “I wouldn’t say he was my friend, but he was always very cordial and nice to me,” he said. “But there was eye contact and it felt like there was someone actually talking to me. There wasn’t a hint of pretense or phoniness.”

Despite the confusion over the date of Frick’s interview, there’s no doubt Lou remained interested in Alice Bailey and the white light throughout the 1970s. Interviewed by John Tobler again in 1978, Tobler says “When I last talked to you, you told me a lot of stuff about how you were into the concept of white light.”

“Yeah, I’m still interested in that,” Lou replies. “I was talking about The Arcane School, which has to do with channeling white light and burning poisons out of bodies. But it’s nothing…I’m not a member of a blood cult…[laughs]. That’s because they don’t have any.”

In the Paris Vogue interview with Dorothée Lalanne in 1979, Lou speaks about his practice at The Arcane School in the present tense, but also dismisses it as “a mixture of trash and metaphysics.”

And that, it seems, was it in terms of overt, public references to Alice Bailey and her work.

Bailey’s influence on Lou’s work

It’s fascinating to uncover another Lou who was hiding in plain sight—In the studded shadow, if you like, cast by the Rock N Roll Animal. But for this to be of interest to us, Bailey’s influence needs to be discernible in the music. Leaving aside the question of whether Lou’s lyrics were significantly shaped by her work, which can only be established by a close reading of her oeuvre – something I would prefer not to do – he certainly alludes to her. On the surface, the most obvious example of this is the song “White Light/White Heat.” As Velvet Underground historian Richie Unterberger writes:

“Specifically, ‘White Light/White Heat’ is often assumed to be about the exhilarating effects of crystal methedrine amphetamines, and Reed does say the song ‘is about amphetamines’ in his 1971 interview with Metropolitan Review. But an equally likely, and perhaps more interesting, inspiration is Alice Bailey’s occult book A Treatise on White Magic. It advises control of the astral body by a ‘direct method of relaxation, concentration, stillness and flushing the entire personality with pure White Light, with instructions on how to ‘call down a stream of pure White Light.’”

As Tom Lane explained, the goal of Actualism, derived from Bailey’s teaching, was to turn the white light into the white heat.

In “A Was A Velveteen,” Rob Norris adds another dimension to Unterberger’s comment, relating “White Light/White Heat” also to the astrology that he argues reflects Lou’s duality. It was “an obvious drug song showing the Piscean, suffering and self-indulgent side of things. But it was also about enlightenment, expressing the Christian purity, self-control, ‘palace of wisdom’ aspects of Virgo.” Norris mentions two other Velvets songs that reflect Bailey’s teaching. Along with “Here She Comes Now,” “I Heard Her Call My Name,” for him, expresses enlightenment in the feminine.

I discovered a more direct reference to Bailey in the ferocious “I Heard Her Call My Name.” I deduced that the “Mad Mary Williams” in the song with whom Lou raps for hours was Bailey. I think it might have been from starting to read Bailey’s Unfinished Biography but, when I went back to this book, I couldn’t find the reference anywhere. Perhaps it was knowledge I channeled. When Victor Bockris read an early version of this article, he told me he’s “as sure I can be” that Mad Mary Williams is Mary Woronov, a friend of Lou’s at the time and a member of the speed scene around the Factory. Woronov apparently was a “good talker who loved conversation.”

As to whether Lou’s duality was simply the result of his Piscean nature, I ain’t so sure. I think it could also have something to do with him having become accustomed to compartmentalizing his personality from an early age. For example. I’ve always been struck by the ambiguity in the title of the song “Leave Her For Me,” written by Lou when he was 16 and, according to several accounts, experimenting with his sexuality in different, dangerous times. One of his biographers, Aidan Levy, quotes Lou’s teenage friend Richard Sigal as saying, “He had this interest in boys that none of us knew about.” Which potentially makes “Leave Her For Me,” already an arresting and discombobulating title, even more significant because it implies that Lou is, in code, imploring a boy to leave a girl for him. I think it could also have something to do with Lou’s relentless need to disrupt people’s ideas of who he was. Remember him saying that Bailey was both metaphysical and trash?

Lou’s poem “We Are The People” alludes to Bailey. The people in question are “the insects of someone else’s thought,” a very Baileyesque notion. As Lou told an interviewer in a 1986 Spin magazine interview, apropos of turning his then acolyte Jonathan Richman onto Bailey, “I said, ‘Do you know, Jonathan, that insects are a manifestation of negative ego thoughts.” Lou believed, or pretended to, that he was indirectly responsible for Jonathan’s “Hey There Little Insect.” Jonathan, who also wrote a song called “Astral Plane,” declined to be interviewed for this piece.

Another poem, “He Thought of Insects in The Lazy Darkness” published in literary mag The Transatlantic Review in 1975, might also reference Bailey although the reference to

Crushing you…

Like a ladybug

is admittedly equally likely to be a convenient metaphor.

The version of “Ocean” on the Velvet Underground Live at the End of Cole Ave, 1969, the Second Night, a live compilation, has a first verse that’s radically different to the one on Loaded:

Here comes the ocean and the waves
Down by the sea
Here comes the ocean and the waves
Crashing in
Earth is a hollow hair, part of a bigger head
It nearly drives me crazy
In the Himalayas they have small rubber dolls
Recording all our actions

Those last four lines appear to allude to Bailey’s claim that she received “ageless wisdom” from “DK,” Tibetan Master of Wisdom — the Himalayas separate Tibet from India — as well as her conception of the nature of the solar system as a giant being, its body made out of planets. Unfortunately, they’re mighty clunky and read as nonsensical. It’s not hard to guess why Lou excised them from the lyrics of the song.

While all of this strongly suggests Lou referenced Bailey in his work, it doesn’t exactly prove she was a profound influence. And I have to admit the question of whether Lou genuinely followed Bailey’s teachings did become a little more moot for me when I spoke with Bettye Kronstad. Kronstad first met Lou in 1968. Their relationship lasted for five years. They were married for one of these. During that period, Lou gave several interviews where he talked about Bailey with what appears to be real conviction. But when I asked what Kronstad knew about Lou’s interest in Bailey, she had no recollection of them ever talking about it. “We didn’t sit around and talk about that stuff,” she told me, “because our time was completely oriented to Lou’s career.” I find it hard to believe that Lou would have been able to slope off to moon meetings down at The Arcane School without Kronstad knowing. But, while she couldn’t substantiate my theory about Bailey, Kronstad did confirm that Lou was certainly deeply into astrology. He could well have found his way to Bailey via the work of her esoteric astrologer associate Dane Rudhyar.

And then there’s the fact that Lou referred to Bailey and other white light practices throughout the 1960s and 1970s, coming across as pretty knowledgeable. If he was making it all up, he had a magnificently fertile imagination. Like Bailey.

But what if we step away from words, from searching for clues in the lyric content of Lou’s songs and try this on for a thesis?

In one sense, Metal Machine Music—feedback as drone—embodies Lou’s duality. It’s a challenging piece of work packaged in a trashy cover, whether that was Lou’s doing or that of his record company, and shrink-wrapped in put-on. But Lou absolutely intended it to be taken seriously. When I interviewed Reinhold Friedl of Zeitkratzer, the German avant-garde group that famously transcribed and performed MMM on instruments, he agreed, scoffing at the idea that Lou was anything other than serious. Friedl told me, “It came out in the rehearsal that he was completely well-informed about what was in the piece, what kind of sounds at what point and what’s the relation between background melodies and the feedback pulse, so it was really a musical approach.” Before placing them up against his amp so they could feed back, Lou tuned the two guitars to open fifths, “a kind of pure tuning, the religious tuning of La Monte Young.”

If further evidence of Lou’s serious intent was needed, a New York Times article of June 7 entitled “You Don’t Become Lou Reed Overnight” revealed that a tape on display at the New York Public Library Caught Between The Twisted Stars exhibition of material from Lou’s archive labeled “Electric Rock Symphony,” initially thought to be a 1970s demo for MMM featuring guitar and piano, actually dates from 1965 or possibly 1966. As the Times put it, this was “a sign of how long the ‘Metal Machine’ technique—feedback-driven guitar drones adapted from composer La Monte Young—had gestated.”

There is substantial evidence, then, that Lou wasn’t kidding around with MMM. So, what if it was Lou’s, admittedly speed-addled, attempt to bring Bailey’s message to the masses? If that sounds preposterous, think about it. Lou was no dilettante when it came to drone and La Monte Young’s music and could easily have been aware that drone was partly informed by Indian religious music. Bailey’s philosophy was rooted in Hindu belief systems. For Hindus, the sound Om is the first sound from the beginning of time and also encompasses the present and future. Quite simply, as David Frawley writes in his book Mantra Yoga and Primal Sound, Om is “the sound of God.” When chanted, Om is human drone.

In an interview with Lenny Kaye published in Hit Parader, April 1976, Lou references the Om sound in relation to MMM, saying, “That’s what I’m doing with the sound frequencies [of MMM]. Like certain combinations…there’s bound to be a combination that’ll hit you. And it makes things happen, like when people go OM to set a vibration in their body.”

As Lou once said, “My god is rock ’n’ roll. It’s an obscure power that can change your life… The most important part of my religion is to play guitar.” What if he wasn’t just talking about three chords? What if, by tuning the guitars to open fifths before leaving them to be played by electricity—which, of course, comes from other planets—not him, Lou was making fundamentally religious art that fulfilled his self-identified mission to bring Bailey’s teaching to the masses: in this case, the legions of new fans he’d gained through chart-topping albums like Transformer, Sally Can’t Dance and Rock N Roll Animal?

I’m profoundly indebted to Phil Milstein, founder of The Velvet Underground Appreciation Society, who graciously shared material with me and acted as a sounding board for my theorizing. I had a terrific conversation with Bettye Kronstad, who was in a relationship with Lou for five years and is the author of the excellent memoir Perfect Day published by Jawbone Press. Kronstad has just completed a screenplay based on her memoir. Lou’s biographers Victor Bockris and Aidan Levy allowed me to interview them, as did Charlie Frick, Lou’s bass player Fernando Saunders and Lou’s collaborator on the organic manifestation of Metal Machine Music Reinhold Friedl. Richie Unterberger kindly offered background on “I’m So Free.” I consulted all the major biographies of Lou and various Velvets reference books but the one that was most illuminating to me was My Week Beats Your Year: Encounters with Lou Reed which I highly recommend. Pat Thomas, the book’s editor (compiler was Michael Heath) put me in touch with Charlie Frick. Ezra Furman’s wonderful book on Transformer in the 33 1/3 series was also helpful. I didn’t get far with Alice Bailey’s writing, apart from her The Unfinished Autobiography: mercifully short and well worth reading if you can get your hands on it. Zulma Reyo’s exegetical writing on Bailey’s work was extremely helpful.

I’m also grateful to cultural historian Erik Davis for connecting me with Tom Lane and Tai Chi practitioner JP Harpignies. Author and professor Jeffrey Kripal introduced me to Steven Sutcliffe, specialist in new and alternative forms of religion and spirituality in late modernity. As is my wont, I gathered way too much material, but I hope I’ll be able to use that in a longer piece on Lou’s spirituality.

Images: Splendid photos of Lou in the 1970s kindly provided by Gordon Lyon, long-time collector of Lou Reed artyfacts. Photo of Alice Bailey from www.alicebaileyarchives.com. Photo of the cover of Morning of the Magicians supplied by Patricia Martinak of Alkahest Books.

The musical, cultural and societal waves that Chuck Berry made by pioneering rock ’n’ roll could fill a book. And of course, there are so many great songs—brilliantly executed, simple yet evocative vignettes that in turn provided inspiration and cover fodder for countless bands down the road. As we mark his passing, the time is right to revisit the best Berry covers.

Lists like this tend to be a few obvious choices coupled with an avant-garde rendition and/or an unexpected version by an artist (usually a pop crooner) to prove how great the song is. I’m sure there’s a stunning Chinese Sanskrit version of “Johnny B Goode” played on exotic instruments and probably even a reggae remake of “Jo Jo Gunne,” but I don’t care. To me, it’s all about the rock ’n’ roll. Rather than researching, I listed the first 12 that popped into my head; after all, if a song isn’t memorable, then how good is it?

As the list emerged, so did a theme: The greatest Berry covers tend to be spontaneous, or at least remade in the spirit of fun—much like Chuck’s originals. Maybe I missed something. Maybe I didn’t. Is this list definitive? At least in your mind if you want it to be.

1) THE MC5: “Back in the USA” (1970)

The trebly highs, lack of bass and neutered guitars of Jon Landau’s botch-job production nearly ruined Back in the USA, but it’s a great album nonetheless—and the Berry cover seems to make the perfect title track. With the Five having fought the law, the record company, Hudson’s and society in general, one can’t help but note the irony when Rob Tyner sings “I’m so glad I’m living in the USA” followed by the more emphatic “I’m so glad I’m living in the USA.” Sarcastic or not, the insistent background vocals, wind-chime piano and ripping guitar solos imply a good time. “Detroit, Chicago, Chattanooga, Baton Rouge” indeed.

2) THE CHOCOLATE WATCHBAND: “Come On” (1967)

The Chocolate Watchband had a way with covers, besting the Tongues of Truth on “Let’s Talk About Girls” and the Brogues with “I Ain’t No Miracle Worker,” possibly even the Kinks with “I’m Not Like Everybody Else.” Another fine moment was “Come On,” likely inspired by the Rolling Stones’ version from four years earlier. But whereas the Stones’ take moves like an English sports car, buzzing adroitly like an Aston Martin, the Watchband remake ups the tempo and speeds smoothly like a ’66 Corvette, pulsed by Gary Andrijasevich’s drumming and the deadly harp/vocal whammy of Dave Aguilar.

3) LONNIE MACK: “Memphis” (1963)

From Cincinnati by way of rural Indiana, Lonnie Mack turned “Memphis, Tennessee” into a melodic marvel on this instrumental remake that landed him his first hit in 1963. Mack’s fluidity on the Flying V is infectious and, even more remarkably, this was recorded as an afterthought when he had 20 minutes of studio time remaining from a session he’d played on.

4) JOHNNY WINTER: “Thirty Days” (alternate version) (1974)

Don’t you hate it when lists have some obscure demo version of a song available only on an obscure album? So do I, but there’s no way around it in this case. The Johnny Winter version of “Thirty Days” that ended up on Saints & Sinners is good, but it can’t compare to this alternate. This version, which appeared on Legacy’s A Rock ’n’ Roll Collection in 1994, rips with Johnny’s badass vocals, trademark white-lightning guitar solos and a rough rhythm section. Sounds like an on-the-spot first take, which may be why it initially didn’t come out.

5) DAVE EDMUNDS: “Promised Land” (1971)

Dave Edmunds took one look at the emergent studio sophistication of the ’70s and responded with Rockpile, an album flaunting simplicity in sound and production—including this killer Berry cover drenched in reverb and Dave’s verve for primal rock ’n’ roll.

6) THE ROLLING STONES: “Around and Around” (1964)

The Stones’ love of Berry is well-known, from the faithful remake of “You Can’t Catch Me” on Now! to the Altamont-era live renderings of “Carol” and “Little Queenie.” But the pinnacle of their Chuck fetish was this killer romp from Five By Five and 12X5. In hindsight, one can hear how they were on the verge of parlaying their Berry and Chess blues fandom into something entirely their own.

7) THE YARDBIRDS: “Jeff’s Boogie” (1966)

Credited to Jeff Beck as an “original,” but we all know that this was “Guitar Boogie” retitled, right? Jeff’s licks are at the forefront, but don’t underestimate drummer Jim McCarty’s swinging beat, which makes the engine purr.

8) MOUNTAIN: “Roll Over Beethoven” (Flowers of Evil live version) (1971)

Sidelong tracks rarely work, but “Dream Sequence”—side two of 1971’s Flowers of Evil—is one of them, mainly because it’s several songs strung together rather than a long jam. As Corky Laing and Felix Pappalardi drive harder than a Mack truck on the Long Island Expressway, Leslie West piles up guitar riffage and fireworks, including a heavier than heavy “Roll Over Beethoven” that shreds ELO’s version like a lawnmower over grass. (Legacy later isolated “Roll Over Beethoven” as a single track for 1995’s Over the Top double-CD compilation.)

9) THE BEATLES: “I’m Talking About You” (1963)

While some are partial to studio creations like “Rock and Roll Music” and “Roll Over Beethoven,” to me the Fab Four’s best stab at Berry was a 1963 BBC Saturday Club rendition of “I’m Talking About You.” With one foot in their raw Hamburg past and the other in their British invading future, this R&B-soaked stomper (found on On Air — Live at the BBC Volume 2) should put to rest any notions that the Beatles were tame.

10) THE FLAMIN’ GROOVIES: “Carol” (1970)

The flame of rock ’n’ roll may have flickered and dimmed in the early 1970s, but its spirit lived in the Flamin’ Groovies, who did a bang-up job on Berry with this Matrix rehearsal. “Carol” represents everything that made the early Groovies great: Roy Loney’s rockabilly-esque vocals, piston-popping rapid-fire guitars by Cyril Jordan and Tim Lynch and the tribal pound of Danny Mihm and George Alexander.

11) THE WALKING FLOUR: “I Want to Be Your Driver” (1967)

Hundreds if not thousands of American teens covered Chuck in the garage band era, but none were as forthright as this short-lived Sacramento, California quintet. “I Want to Be Your Driver” stands out not only because it’s a lesser-known Berry side, but with red-on-the meter fuzz, organ and spasmodic Ringo-like drumming by a guy who would later play with Les Dudek. Initially unreleased but unearthed on Ace/Big Beat’s The Sound of Young Sacramento in 2000.

12) PAUL REVERE & THE RAIDERS: “Maybellene” (1964)

Also initially unreleased but far from obscure, this live rendition illustrates the flair that so many early ’60s Northwest bands (the Sonics’ version of “Roll Over Beethoven” also comes to mind) had for cover material. After an irreverent joke about Chuck’s brushes with the law, the Raiders kick in to a rearranged version of “Maybellene” that sets it to a “Memphis”-like swinging beat in lieu of the original’s two-step rhythm.

By Doug Sheppard

We all want it so badly.

That Rolling Stones album that recalls the bluesy affirmation of their earliest work, when they reworked an American form into a new rocking blues hybrid that equaled and even surpassed their idols. One that reflects the turbulence of the times via indirect symbolism like “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” or Let It Bleed, or that takes that approach and slathers it in swagger and Southern hot sauce like Sticky Fingers. Or even one with the cold existentialism of “Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo (Heartbreaker),” a melodic marvel as hard as the pavement the boy chased right through the park hit after the bullet went through his heart.

That’s the Stones we think of—and how we want to remember them. Not by the glitzy celebrity of the past 30 years or so. Not by the umpteenth performance of “Start Me Up” with about as much emotional depth as their corporate tour sponsors. And certainly not by most of their post-1980 output (though this author has a soft spot for Steel Wheels).

So when there’s a new Stones album billed as a return to roots, covering some of their favorite lesser-known blues sides, naturally we stand up and take notice. And maybe, given our longing (see above), we cut ’em a little slack, concluding that they’ve succeeded.

But have they? Not really. Sure, Blue & Lonesome is their best album in years, and the sound alone — not quite raw yet recorded live and spontaneously—is enough to garner excitement. The times when it hits are definitely worthy of the lips logo—such as the spunky versions of Howlin’ Wolf’s “Just Like I Treat You” and Lightnin’ Slim’s “Hoo Doo Blues,” if not the forthright opening salvo of “Just Your Fool,” one of four Little Walter covers. But more often than not, it’s the type of thing that would probably be great to witness live in the studio, but that one files away after a couple listens. Good but not great. As Hill Country DC talent buyer John O’Neill put it, “It’s a solid old man blues album that sounds like a thousand other releases from Alligator Records. So yeah, automatically the best Stones album in forever.”

The (over)reaction to the new Rolling Stones album typifies the response to many reunions. When legends come back and record new albums, many shower them in accolades. But while it’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of the here and now, the payoff is how it sounds years later. Curious to test this hypothesis, I went back and listened to 20 reunion albums to see how they hold up. I’ve divided them into four categories: “Reputation Upheld” to signify the ones that live up to the artist’s reputation; “Good” to denote ones that aren’t quite up to past standards, but are worth owning nonetheless; “Neither Here Nor There” for the ones that are OK but one would rarely play after a listen or two; and “Avoid” — which is self-explanatory. Expecting most to fall into “Neither Here Nor There,” I was pleasantly surprised in some cases.

Reputation Upheld

THE PRETTY THINGS – Rage Before Beauty (Snapper) 1999

Rage Before Beauty was the best Pretty Things album since Parachute because the band returned to their R&B roots—as reinventors, not as replicators. Rather than carbon copying their early sound, the Pretties updated it, channeling their old drummer on the Diddleybeat of “Vivian Prince” and adding a new element on the slower, impassioned tracks like “Pure Cold Stone,” “Goodbye, Goodbye” and “Fly Away.” The dramatic uptempo “Everlasting Flame” is one of the best tracks the Pretty Things ever cut, period. Not as enthusiastic about the covers of “Eve of Destruction” and “Mony Mony,” but playing this in sequence on the Bouquets from a Cloudy Sky box set illustrated what a dramatic return to form it was.

ROCKET FROM THE TOMBS – Rocket Redux (Smog Veil) 2004

Remakes albums are usually pointless, but this was different because Rocket from the Tombs had never recorded their songs properly in the first place. The late Peter Laughner is missed, but Richard Lloyd is a more than worthy replacement, and core members David Thomas, Cheetah Chrome and Craig Bell are in top form. And in Steve Mehlman, they found a drummer who was actually better than any from their original run. “Amphetamine” is superior to the original, and Chrome’s impassioned vocals on “Ain’t It Fun” are no slouch, either. When I’m in the mood for RFTT, I’m as likely to put this one on as I am the vintage recordings. Both followups, 2011’s Barfly and 2015’s Black Record, are worth owning as well.

THE DICTATORS – DFFD (Dictators Multimedia/Norton) 2001

Not just a great comeback—but the best Dictators album, period. (Unless Manitoba’s Wild Kingdom, a Dics album in all but name, counts.) Whereas the first three albums had varying levels of inconsistency, there’s not a loser in the bunch here: from the full-on rockers like “I Am Right” and “Avenue A” to the melodic movers like “Pussy and Money” and “Who Will Save Rock and Roll?” Combine that with lyrics as sarcastic and Bronx bold as ever — and what’s not to love?

THE RUBBER CITY REBELS – Pierce My Brain (Smog Veil) 2003

Pierce My Brain was the album the Rubber City Rebels always wanted to make — or at least should have made: 35 minutes of no-holds-barred Raw Power-cum-Status Quo punk crunch and roll that goes all the way back to their King Cobra roots in execution. Longtime live favorite “Born Dead” finally got its first proper recording, and the title track, “I Don’t Wanna Be a Punk No More,” “Punk Daddy” and “Dead Boy” romp with the autobiographical hedonism of old. This came a quarter-century after it should have, but who’s complaining?

Good

THE NEW YORK DOLLS – One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This (Roadrunner) 2006

Lacking three key members from the classic lineup (whose time on earth had tragically expired), David Johansen and Sylvain Sylvain were at a decided disadvantage when they conscripted new hires to cut this album. It’s obviously not as good as the original Dolls, but it’s also not the embarrassment some portrayed it as—even offering a few solid songs like the biting “I Ain’t Got Nothin’,” a ballad called “Plenty of Music” and two in the glam rock mold, “Fishnets & Cigarettes” and “Gotta Get Away from Tommy.” Much better than I remembered. (Or maybe that’s why I kept it?)

RADIO BIRDMAN – Zeno Beach (Yep Roc) 2006

Their goal was an album that would stand on its own rather than replicate past glories, and Zeno Beach did the job with a new rhythm section and a sound owing as much to Radio Birdman as it did to parallel bands like the New Christs and the Visitors. While this doesn’t quite have the impact it did when it landed with a killer (and first-ever) U.S. tour, it’s still a solid comeback sporting a few tracks—“You Just Make It Worse,” the title track and (in the tradition of “Man With Golden Helmet”) “The Brotherhood of Al Wazah”—as worthy as any in the Birdman canon.

THE REAL KIDS – Shake … Outta Control (Ace of Hearts) 2014

Like Rocket From the Tombs, this second stab at a Real Kids reunion (the ’90s incarnation only managed an EP) succeeds in part because it comprises songs that were never recorded properly back in the day. The songs were worthy then and they’re worthy now—and I’m just as likely to put this one on as any other Real Kids album.

THE SONICS – This Is the Sonics (Revox) 2015

The Sonics knew what their fans wanted and gave it to them: the same type of raunchy, R&B-fueled Northwest rock that made ’em legends in the first place, all served up in mono. It’s the best record they could have made at this late juncture, and it’s all good fun, from the snarling covers of “Look at Little Sister” and “I Don’t Need No Doctor” to a small handful of new originals like “Bad Betty.” But no matter how many “picks up where they left off” reviews it gets, they’ll never replicate the feeling of their ’60s recordings, which relied as much on youthful energy as strong performances. It’s a nice gift to fans that’ll give the Sonics more to work with in their live shows than just their greatest hits, and maybe that’s enough.

THE ALARM CLOCKS – The Time Has Come (Norton) 2006

Who would have thought that a band with only one single to their credit would reconvene 40 years later? Certainly not drummer Bill Schwark, who was stunned to learn there was still an audience for the Alarm Clocks when he gave his first interview on the subject to this author in 1997. But it was there, and the Clocks enjoyed every minute of it as original members Schwark, Mike Pierce and Bruce Boehm were augmented by guitarist Tom Fallon on this mostly original outing. “More Money” is better than 90 percent of the garage revivalists, “It’s About Time” rocks like the old single — and the entire affair was enough for the Clocks (with a new drummer) to continue with two more albums to date.

BLIND IDIOT GOD – Before Ever After (Indivisible Music) 2015

These avant-garde instrumentalists didn’t lose anything in the 20-plus years since their last album: Before Ever After stirs the pot with the same blend of prog, metal, postpunk and reggae that fired up their first three albums. But unlike bands who make the mistake of mixing all their influences together at once, Blind Idiot God knows how to use discretion: “Earthmover” would be at home on a modern doom metal album, the angularity of “Twenty Four Hour Dawn” would make Robert Fripp smile, the riff and melody of the reggae-fied “Ramshackle” invalidates the entire career of UB40 in one song, and the frenzied metallic cataclysms of “Antiquity” and “Under the Weight” recall the Blind Idiot God of old. Being housed in the coolest psychedelic album cover in recent memory is a nice touch.

Neither Here Nor There

THE STOOGES – The Weirdness (Virgin) 2007

Iggy’s reunion with the Asheton brothers and replacement Mike Watt on bass was absolutely transcendent live—at last giving the Stooges a chance to bask in overdue glory. They had fun in the studio, too, but unfortunately no songs. Tolerable enough, but the closest this overproduced outing comes to a decent song is “My Idea of Fun”—not coincidentally one of the few to make the live set.

IGGY & THE STOOGES – Ready to Die (Fat Possum) 2013

Ready to Die accomplishes what The Weirdness couldn’t: the first truly good song of the Stooges’ reunion, a bluesy acoustic ballad called “Unfriendly World.” But that’s it for this near-reunion of the Raw Power lineup (sadly, Ron Asheton had passed before its recording), which mostly sounds about like The Weirdness. That is, not bad but nothing special.

BLACK SABBATH – 13 (Vertigo/Republic) 2013

Bill Ward said he heard his style on this almost-reunion of the original lineup, but he’s wrong: ex-Rage Against the Machine drummer Brad Wilk isn’t in his league at all—playing in-the-pocket, almost basic beats with none of the fire of Ward’s slyly unpredictable, tempo-shifting patterns on classic Sabbath albums. It’s almost enough to derail the entire proceedings, but Rick Rubin did get a good sound — and jams between Tony Iommi and Geezer Butler are always worth hearing. The songs, however, don’t quite click—making 13 the equivalent of a fireworks display: exciting for a few moments, but not a lasting memory. By the time Black Sabbath toured, they had Tommy Clufetos on the traps—a major improvement that one hopes will carry over to any further reunion efforts. That is, unless there’s an even better development: bringing back Bill.

THE YARDBIRDS – Birdland (Favored Nations) 2003

Heavy on remakes and celebrity guest slots, which were undoubtedly a selling point for this one, Birdland nonetheless does have a few decent new originals in “Please Don’t Tell Me ’Bout the News,” “Mr. Saboteur” and “My Blind Life,” which has a cameo by their old guitarist, Jeff Beck. Like the live performances by the reborn ’Birds, it’s not extraordinary the way their ’60s records were, but it’s worthy of the Yardbirds name.

CACTUS – V (Escapi) 2006

To their credit, three-fourths of the original Cactus (Rusty Day having passed away in 1982) didn’t try to make another heavy rock record on this comeback—favoring a bluesy approach more befitting their advanced age. It’s not the most imaginative album, but they’re clearly having fun, the live shows to support it were great (saw two myself), and there is one bonafide great song: the boogie-rocking “Cactus Music.”

LEAF HOUND – Unleashed (Repertoire) 2007

Leaf Hound had less to live up to than anyone else in this column; contrary to record collector myth, Growers of Mushroom is not a “great” album, nor is it in any way on the level of Led Zeppelin. Heck, even comparing it to Budgie would be a stretch. But the best Leaf Hound holds up reasonably well, and this is a reasonably decent comeback by original lead singer Peter French (whose pipes are intact) and three new sidemen. Essentially standard-issue barband hard rock, “Barricades” and “Too Many Rock ’n’ Roll Times” might have made a nice single—though one need not hear an entire album’s worth of the reborn Hound.

CRIME – Exalted Masters (Crime Music) 2007

Cutting old songs that hadn’t been properly recorded, Crime did get a good sound in the studio on this comeback. But its most memorable moment is a spoken-word vignette set to music, “Ports of Hell,” and it’s probably only memorable for that reason. As the saying goes, for completists only.

Avoid

THE BOYS – Punk Rock Menopause (Wolverine) 2014

The Boys’ produced some of the best (and sadly, often overlooked) UK punk of the class of 1977, but the excitement in their first album in 34 years ended with its release. In spite of three original members and some snappy artwork, there’s nothing here other than languid tempos and ordinary songs. “Organ Grinder” is about the closest it comes to recapturing the Boys at their peak—but even that might be generous. Oh well.

NERVOUS EATERS – Eat This! (No Tomorrow) 2003

“Just Head” is one of the greatest rock ’n’ roll records ever to come out of Boston—or heck, just about any city. Which is why it’s so painful to note that there’s nary a hint of what was on this utterly unremarkable comeback album. Better to hear their other (now forgotten) comeback, 1986’s Hot Steel and Acid.

THE REZILLOS – Zero (Metropolis) 2015

This classic UK punk band’s live show is still great, but the studio product of their ongoing reunion is not. As Jack Rabid observed in issue #77 of The Big Takeover: “Sadly, this album is well-named. … The band riffs it up, but listening to Zero is a chore, where once this band brought unmitigated joy.”

When David Sutch took his own life in June 1999 the world of rock ’n’ roll lost one of its wildest and most unforgettable characters. As Screaming Lord Sutch, his colorful, larger than life personality was a fixture of the British political landscape, but for rock’n’roll fans he will be remembered for his amazing recorded legacy: the mad rock and horror sides he cut with Joe Meek, the demented mid-‘60s gems like “Train Kept A-Rollin’” and “All Black and Hairy,” the proto-psychedelic “The Cheat,” the hard rockin’ Heavy Friends… For someone with no discernible music talent he sure made a lot of great records. And if you make great records you live forever.

In April 1993 I interviewed Lord Sutch by telephone for a two-part feature in the Union Jack newspaper. It was a memorable chat. Sutch was a charming, down-to-earth man, with an in-built, infectious sense of humor. Within a few minutes it was obvious my carefully prepared list of questions was out the window. Sutch talked a mile a minute, determined to cover all the highlights of his career, specifically: precise election results and of course the name of every single one of the famous players who’d passed through the ranks of the Savages (“my musicians,” as he called them). Between our chuckling, I made intermittent attempts to direct the flow of conversation, but there was little point, Sutch was on a roll, dashing down tangential side alleys and free-associating memories as the whim took him. Who was I to stop him in his tracks to clarify the smaller facts? It was all entertaining stuff – just let the tape roll.

Caveat emptor: As anyone who has read his autobiography, Life as Sutch, can tell you, historical accuracy wasn’t Sutch’s strong suit, entertaining people was. Some of Sutch’s tales involve a certain degree of exaggeration or misconception. All quite innocent, but bear it in mind as you read.

• • •

Lord Sutch: I like the name of your paper: Union Jack. I had an album in America with that car on it. I used to have a trailer as well in England, which we’d use at gigs. I used to go up and down the country with a big Union Jack trailer and inside it was all British goods: jackets and shirts and records, merchandise. I went to Denmark with that, Sweden, Germany, France, all over the place, and then ended up in America.

How did that come about?

It was during our “Backing Britain” campaign. That was to teach the people to be proud of Britain, and to be “Backing Britain” was to buy stuff that was made in Great Britain. So we had all these stickers made of the Union Jack. That was how I launched that tour when I came over there, with the car with the trailer with all these English goods, which they wanted me to represent for them. There was suits, those psychedelic kind of suits – it was at the time of Hendrix and the Who with their Union Jack jackets, shirts, and all that kind of stuff. So I brought a lot of that with me and it was like a tour of America, playing gigs. In the afternoon I would do big shops – Macy’s and them kind of shops – and display all this Union Jack stuff, and all the British stuff, y’know? We even had Sherlock Holmes cloaks and a hat to match, in tweed.

Did you get a good reaction?

Yeah, I sold all the stuff that I had, and then they re-ordered again. I sold all of the surplus I had and I just kept my one model and showed everyone and they could take their orders from the model. It was the time of button-down shirts with the great, big, long, pointed collars and the trousers with the flares, which have come back now. Fashion goes in circles.

To start off, why don’t you tell us a bit about your political platform?

I’m celebrating 30 years now standing for Parliament. The first time was in 1963 at Stratford-upon-Avon during the Profumo Scandal, caused by Mandy Rice-Davies and Christine Keeler. The War Minister was having an affair with those two and they were also having an affair with Russian spies. So he had to resign because of the scandal, which caused the by-election. I was a rock ‘n’ roll singer at the time. I got discovered in the 2-I’s Coffee Bar where Tommy Steele started and Cliff Richard, Marty Wilde, Billy Fury and people like that. I was among that lot. Even David Bowie was down there years ago, along with Gary Glitter – who was Paul Raven back then. And the top guy there was a guy called Vince Taylor, who never made it in America, but he did make it big in France. He used to have the all black leather, and the black leather gloves with rings over the top, and chains and all that – he was good! Many years later, loads of people copied him, like Dave Berry copied his style and Alvin Stardust did a whole rip off of it – Shane Fenton.

Sutch campaign flyer for 1964 election.

Anyway, at the time, I was standing with some kids and I said, “I’m standing for Parliament. Will you vote for me?” These people had two kids running about and one in a pram – three kids. They were both around 20, this man and woman, and they said they’d love to vote for me but they can’t – it’s the law that you can’t vote ’til you’re 21. And I thought that was ridiculous. You have a whole family and you bring kids into the world, and you can’t even vote! So I stood for votes at 18 and also for commercial radio and commercial television – like they’d had in America for years and years – we’d never had that in England, we had the BBC, and the nearest we ever got to rock ‘n’ roll was the Billy Cotton Band Show. If we wanted to listen to rock ‘n’ roll, we had to listen to Radio Luxembourg, which was the only station that was playing it. Then along came the pop pirates – Radio Caroline, Radio London – so I set one up as well called Radio Sutch. That started on a boat and then transferred to the gun towers at the coastline round England. I stood for that – commercial radio; for votes at 18, and I stood also to abolish the 11-plus, for kids not to be judged on one day but to do it over a period of time. It’s only fair, ’cause if you got the jitters because of the examination you failed it. So that’s become law now. I also stood for all day pub opening, and that’s become law now – the pubs can open all day now at the landlord’s discretion. And a memorial college to rock ‘n’ roll – the giants of rock’n'roll, i.e. the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and people like that who came out of Great Britain. It would be a memorial college to train other musicians. And I think that’s a good idea, and that’s been picked up by the government. A lot of my original ideas that they laughed at—the papers made a fool of me, laughed at me, but years later it becomes law, after I stood twice against Harold Wilson in ’63 and then ’66.

Political candidate Screaming Lord Sutch meets Prime Minister Harold Wilson, 1963.

How’d you do at that very first by-election at Stratford-upon-Avon?

Very, very well. I got 208 votes, which is very good for a first time. Over the years now I’ve stood against every Prime Minister that’s come along since then, including Harold Wilson, Ted Heath, and also the one and only Margaret Thatcher – the dragon herself. And I had the pleasure of Maggie talking down to me. I’ve met Maggie a few times since then. She’s alright. She’s a very strong person. I think she’s got Union Jack knickers.

I also stood in this last election against her successor, John Major, the guy who looks like Buddy Holly, and I suggested he get a Stratocaster guitar and sing his things – get a Buddy Holly-cum-Elvis Costello bit and actually get a bit more popular. He hasn’t got a very good image at the moment.

Yeah, he’s got kind of a square image.

But if he turns it into Elvis Costello or Buddy Holly he could come out on top. All he needs is a guitar and a loud amp and away he goes! He can sing his stuff to the less fortunate.

What was his reaction to your suggestion?

Well, he’s thinking about it, you know. There’s this by-election that’s coming up now in Newbury, the one I’m about to enter. It’s the sixth of May and I’m just entering that tomorrow, paying the deposit and everything. They’re frightened that I’ll get more votes than the Tory man. I’m doing some victory parties, as it happens, at our headquarters in Newbury on London Road. The place is called, believe it or not – and I haven’t made this up – the White House. It’s a restaurant-cum-pub. So if I win I can invite John Major for tea and cucumber sandwiches on the lawn at the White House!

In the last General Election I stood against John Major in Huntington, and I got quite a good reaction. I got the most votes I ever had ever against John Major at Huntington; I actually received 728 votes. And then (against) Neil Kinnock in Wales, the chief opposition, I got 547 there against him. I stood against all three main leaders. I stood against Paddy Ashdown in Yeovil – 338 I got there.

Before the General Election I got a tremendous result of 540 votes in a place called Bootle in Liverpool. I got three times as many votes as Dr David Owen and his SDP party. It was after the Bootle by-election he decided that he couldn’t continue any more after being beaten by a Raving Loony. So Dr David Owen decided to call a meeting to call it a day and say he couldn’t continue. So because he didn’t run in the General Election ‘caues his party had folded up, he got this important job as a world statesman and he’s become a Lord. So now he’s Lord Owen and he’s not even sent me a postcard thanking me for beating him and setting him up in that job! I’m still waiting for his thank you letter. Now he’s known all across America because of Bosnia and all this problem, and he’s handling it all. If it wasn’t for me, he wouldn’t be in the position he’s in now; he’d still be running his little teeny party – it took me and my party to polish it off.  So history’s in the making, even with a funny party like mine.

What are some you policies right now with the Raving Monster Loony Party?

We want to link of Guernsey and Jersey – which is a tax haven off Britain – with the Channel Tunnel, we want to link it all up and become a tax haven in Great Britain, and then undercut Switzerland. Whatever the rate is they give you in Switzerland for your money, give ‘em a better rate in Britain and become the tax haven of the world – because we are an island we can do that. I don’t know why we can’t challenge Switzerland so all that money and treasure can be buried in Great Britain. I’m gonna fund this by digging the Channel Tunnel, extending it right through to Switzerland from France and getting all that money that’s been stashed there and hidden there: your money, my money; American money that’s been hidden there for years. If we can get into the vaults we can get all that gold and silver and all that money comes into Great Britain – I’ll have it and you’ll have it.

I also want to build some fun parks over here and call ‘em Loonyland, to get our own back on Disneyland. Disneyland snubbed Great Britain in favor of France, so I think we should have Loonyland set up as a theme park. The first one can be the Houses of Parliament with Big Ben. We’ll make that a restaurant and a proper hotel where the MPs are allowed to sleep. And we’re gonna put Parliament on wheels. Scotland wants its own Parliament, so we’ll let them have ours. We’ll put it on wheels and wheel it up to them. We’ll wheel it around the country and it can spend a year in each place. It’ll be fairer, really. The guy from the North of Scotland in Aberdeen that spends 12 hours getting to Westminster while the guy in Westminster rolls out of his bed and in five minutes is in there. It’s not fair, so we’re gonna equal it out a little bit. I suggested they get the White House and put that on wheels and wheel it around everywhere.

What’s your policy towards America?

We’re always keen on America ‘cause my son’s American, Tristan Sutch. I’ve got a son from my first wife and he’s there at college in Texas. I’m very, very proud of him, and he’s going to be Screaming Lord Sutch Junior one day, and maybe he can be president one day. He’s born in America so he can run. He’s 18 now.

So when did you start out playing rock ’n’ roll?

I started in 1958 at the 2-I’s Coffee Bar. Then I went on the 2-I’s Road Show and I’ve been years and years at it. Also I’ve been famous for all the musicians that’s been in my bands over the years. The Savages are very well known. There’s that album Lord Sutch & Heavy Friends where I had two members of Deep Purple on there, Richie Blackmore and Nick Simpler (Simper, his name is also misspelled on the album cover – Ed), and two members of Led Zeppelin, Jimmy Page and John Bonham, along with Jeff Beck and also Keith Moon. All these have been in my Savages all over the years. We’ve had Richie Blackmore, Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck, and even John Edwards, a member of Status Quo was with me.

I don’t know if you know, but they’re doing the Keith Moon story, and that’s being backed by Mel Gibson. He bought the book rights and he’s gonna do the same as what they did to the Doors; he’s gonna do a film like that. He got a top guy in Los Angeles that translates books to film scripts and he flew over here and was round my house for about two days getting the early stories of when Keith Moon was playing in the Savages.

Screaming Lord Sutch & the Savages in a pensive mood backstage in Grimsby, January 1962.

So Keith played with you in the Savages before he played in the Who?

That’s it, yeah. It was the High Numbers then; he was in a little band called the High Numbers. And then the guy went on to spend about three days with my drummer, Carlo Little, that’s on my early records, who actually taught Keith Moon how to play. ‘Cause you’d always see him in the wings at all our early gigs. This guy in a mac came up and asked Carlo if he would give him drum lessons at 10 bob a lesson, half a pound – two dollars a lesson. So he did it. He used to deliver Keith and his drum kit to Carlo’s house and Carlo would show him how to play two bass drums and all that. So he’s gonna be featured in this film heavily, ‘cause all the Who verified it that it was Carlo Little that taught him how to play drums and taught him how to play two bass drums later on.

So that’s Carlo on drums on your early records?

Yes, and Nicky Hopkins on piano, who was with the Rolling Stones, that’s the original guy that’s on my “’Til the Following Night” on HMV, the same label as Elvis, and also on London/Decca I had this record called “Jack the Ripper” and they’re all playing on that.

Those are all great records!

Yes, ‘cause I had the first line-up of good rock ’n’ roll musicians, and Mick Jagger and Brian Jones were trying to form a band and they kept borrowing all my guys. They borrowed all of them except the guitarist. They had Carlo Little on drums, they borrowed Nicky Hopkins on piano and Ricky Fenton on bass. And all this is gospel truth, ‘cause they’re all listed in Bill Wyman’s own life story. He references Carlo Little, and another keyboard player, Andy Wren, they used him as well. So literally they used four ex-Savages for the early line-up of the Stones. Carlo, who was known as the top drummer in London, did a lot of shows with Mick Jagger and Brian Jones. I used to see Mick Jagger carrying his drum kit and putting it in the back of his estate car and driving him around like a chauffeur – it was weird! I know how big Jagger is now, but back then he was just another snotty-nosed student trying to get on.

In the end, Carlo did a show with them at the Flamingo, which was a jazz club. They played down there and Georgie Fame was topping the bill with his Blue Flames, and they were all jazzers in there, and Mick Jagger and Brian Jones and my Savages with Carlo played that gig and the crowd really booed them and threw Coke cans and beer at them. They wanted jazz – it wasn’t that they were so bad, but Carlo was so embarrassed he said, “I can’t do you any more gigs whatsoever,” and leaned over and picked up a cigarette packet and ripped it open and he wrote in it “Charlie Watts” and his phone number. He said, “Give my mate a call. He’ll do some for you.” And that was the beginning of Charlie Watts.

Carlo regrets doing that now because he’s working like mad to pay for a big house he’s got now, a very nice house in Wembley. He said if he wouldn’t have made that gesture he could have bought the whole street! But that’s life. And then he said, “That little guy I taught, Keith Moon, is a bloody superstar. He’s another millionaire.” But then, a few years later, I said, “Look, who’s better off now: you or Keith Moon or John Bonham? They’re gone. You’re still enjoying the sunlight and still enjoying playing the drums.”

Those early singles you made were produced by Joe Meek.

That’s right. Joe Meek, who had the first – before the Beatles and the Stones – the first ever British Number One record in America, which was “Telstar” by the Tornados. He was a top producer over here and he had many hits: Cliff Bennett & the Rebel Rousers, the Outlaws, Mike Berry, Johnny Leyton, Heinz… Heinz borrowed my guitarist Richie Blackmore for his “Just Like Eddie” record.

So what have you been up to recently?

We’re doing very well. I’ve just got back from touring all over Germany, and I’m due to go to France next month for a big tour over there, and Belgium and Scandinavia. I’m keeping busy. I’d love to come back and do the States sometime.

Are there any plans to do that?

Well, we can’t get someone to bring the whole band over, but we’d love to. If not, I can come over and use a rock ‘n’ roll/R&B band in the States, but obviously I’d like to use my own guys. But if it come to a push I could use a pick-up band.

You could always use my band.

Yeah, well, there you go then. Oh, I also forgot to tell you, I had two members of Jimi Hendrix – Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell – they both played on the Lord Sutch & Heavy Friends, with Page, Bonham, Jeff Beck, Nicky Hopkins and Keith Moon. Then there was a second one called Hands of Jack the Ripper, that’s with Keith Moon, Richie Blackmore, Noel Redding and Matthew Fisher, who was the organist on “Whiter Shade of Pale” – and he made that record when he was still working for me. Also Victor and Annette Brox, Brian Keith – he was in Jesus Christ Superstar – and Jeff Beck again. We had these people who’d been in the band many years before and they came together for a reunion. I’m gonna work on another one. I made those albums in America, them ones, on Sunset Boulevard. In those days I was knocking around with Rodney Bingenheimer and Kim Fowley. Coming back to play America is definitely one of my ambitions, ’cause I did Australia in June of last year.

Lord Sutch in Denmark, 1970.

Did you take your own band over for that?

No, but there was a lot of my musicians that emigrated over there, so it was all guys that I’d worked with in England. So that’s how it went. I’m still keen on doing gigs. I still do ‘em all the time. That’s the way I make a living.

Over the years we played with Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, Little Richard at the Star Club in Hamburg. We were the headliners there and the Beatles were the support band – it’s hard to believe it now! – them and the Searchers and Gerry & the Pacemakers. They were playing like about four hours a night, and we would just do 45 minutes – and we made more money. I was playing alongside Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Ray Charles and Bill Haley… I did it with all of them. Actually, we played with all of them at the first ever show at Wembley Stadium, August 5, 1972 – 100,000 people. On that bill was Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Gene Vincent, Bo Diddley, the Coasters, the Platters, Billy Fury, myself, along with Gary Glitter – so that was quite a show.

And I’m known as the Grandfather of Punk now. I even had the Sex Pistols as a support band when they were just starting out. I’d known Malcolm McLaren for years because he used to make my Teddy Boy suits before he got into punk. He and Vivienne Westwood both made my stage clothes.

They had a Teddy Boy shop, right?

Right, called Let It Rock. They were very arty and very wild, so we suited each other. They had a stand at this ’72 show and Johnny Rotten told me that he was selling my t-shirts and my badges on that stall – “You buy ‘em or I’ll punch you in the face!” You know his attitude! – and I think Sid Vicious was there as well. They were just ordinary guys then, just a bit wild, and Malcolm put ‘em in all the t-shirts and slit ‘em all up and created the whole punk thing. When they first wanted to get round the college circuit they asked if they could be my support band. I did about five gigs with them as my support band and in the end they’d start smashing up the PA – putting the mics through the speakers ’cause the crowd was all booing ‘em and hissing ‘em – so they went berserk. And someone said to me, “I don’t know what you’re laughing at – that’s your PA!” They gone through half a PA that night and I slung ‘em off the tour. They didn’t have no money so I never got a penny from them.

What did you think of their music?

It was very wild and very back to street level. It was very different, the fact that they had a go — two fingers up to authority. It was very crude and very basic. There’s still bands from that era now, like the Stranglers and the Damned. The Damned are back now and I did a few concerts with them.

I always thought that their singer, Dave Vanian, got some his image from you.

Well, they asked if they could carry my coffin on the stage, and play in a big cage I have. I break out of a big cage, and I do a big fire routine where I set fire to the stage, and I have a hat that goes on fire and stuff like that. I’m pretty visual, as you know, with all my stuff. So we did these double bills with them, and they asked me if I could sing with them. So I did, my standard ones like “Jack the Ripper” and “All Black and Hairy” with them backing me. I played with the Stray Cats too; I did 12 gigs with them up and down the country. Also the other horror band that said they were all my fans and they bought all my early records and that was what influenced them – the Cramps. They said they were ardent fans of mine. They had all the albums of mine and I signed them for them. They were quite big at one stage in England so I was quite flattered.

Well, you definitely had an influence on them, I can see that.

Yeah, well if you keep going… I’m like an evergreen, you know. You keep going and going. Rock ‘n’ roll music and horror, I’ve been doing it all those years ago, and now it’s come in fashion with these films like Dracula and all that – and I’ve been doing it years and years – look how long ago I recorded “Dracula’s Daughter”! It’s right in vogue now. People are playing it in the clubs because it’s a Dracula song.

Well, that kind of basic rock ‘n’ roll you play, that never goes out of fashion.

No. There’s always a market for it, isn’t there? So now I’m 30 years in politics and about 35 years in rock ‘n’ roll. I had record deals when the Beatles were in nappies – and the Rolling Stones! I can’t imagine Mick Jagger in a nappy, but he was when I was first starting. I had records out before the Beatles, the Stones, Tom Jones, Elton John – all those people. I always say they’re not bad for newcomers.

Well, I think I’ve probably got everything I need…

Well, you got quite a good interview. If you want to publish it round any other papers or magazines, be my guest to do it. Anything to get over there and do some gigs, that’s the name of the game.

Well, thanks. It was great talking to you. I really enjoyed it.

OK. Speak to you later then. Best of luck to you. Keep the British flag flying and keep up with the rock ‘n’ roll. Long live rock ‘n’ roll – it’ll go on forever!

So, if you don’t mind, let’s go back right at the beginning… You are originally from the East Coast, is it true that you were born in the Bronx?

This is true! I’m from New York.

How was it like when you grew up?

When I lived in the Bronx, well… growing up there was kind of interesting. It is New York and it is one of the most interesting places on the planet. There’s so much to do and see and I was an avid sports fan so I could go to see the New York Yankees play. I played a lot of sports myself. There were a lot of outlets for that and also for music. I used to go downtown to Manhattan with friends and we’d go to Birdland and other jazz places and watch the really great musicians play. I think that people who come from New York, if they take advantage of it, are around some of the greatest situations in the world, best musicians and artists. Because people from other places, other states, other countries go to New York to act and play, to study music and study writing. So you have the advantage of people coming to your city, bringing their talent with them and you don’t have to travel very much. It’s a melting pot. So, I think that was really cool. I mean, you’ve got great stuff like museums, the Natural History, the New York Public Library on 2nd Avenue. You’ve got the zoo; the best zoo in the world is in the Bronx… the Bronx Zoo. You’ve got all kind of places that you can go and take advantage of for educational purposes and just to broaden your views of the world.

I feel that was the greatest part about growing up in New York… It had its disadvantages. In my neighborhood it started to get tough! There were a lot of gangs started to come up in the late ‘50s. That’s when it was starting to get downright dangerous. That was the disadvantage of being a teenager in a dangerous neighborhood, you really had to watch yourself. But you know, it makes you street smart!

Do you come from a musical background or are you the only artist in the family?

The only person in the family who had any musical ability was my dad, he could sing really well. And he could play the drums, same as me.

Well, actually my next question was about your discovery of the drums, where it came from, what attracted you to that particular instrument. So it came from your dad?

Yeah! I think if you have a talent, at least me at a very early age – I was maybe seven or eight years old – you just naturally gravitate towards it. I watched drummers on television. My uncle was a musicologist and a copyist for the army band at West Point. He bought me my first snare drum and sticks and brushes when I was nine. He was also a kind of saxophone player and even in our first little jam session in my house, my uncle pulled out his saxophone and we started playing old swing stuff. He noticed and said that I had an unusual gift for it. So even at an early age, it was just totally natural for me to be able to play the drums. I couldn’t understand why everybody couldn’t do it!

So, before you joined the Knickerbockers, you were in a New York band called the Castle Kings. What sort of music did you play?

Yeah! Well you know, the street doo-wop, rock ’n’ roll, Elvis, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, the Isley Brothers, Little Richard – the early rock ’n’ roll stuff. One late afternoon, we were standing outside in front of Atlantic Records. We just had a meeting with Dot Records, they were in the same building as Atlantic. So we’re standing outside, harmonizing, waiting for one of the guys’ dad to pick us up – this is a true story – harmonizing to some goofy song that one of the guys in the band wrote and Ahmet Ertegun, the president of Atlantic Records, heard us and told us to meet him the next day. So we did! He actually signed us to a contract and we recorded three or four records. I was recording with some of the legends of the business. People like Phil Spector, Ahmet Ertegun and his brother Nesuhi. These guys were legends and we were in the studio with them and I didn’t know who they were! So I mean, at a very early age, we were doing things with the heavyweights of the business and we didn’t even know it.

Apart from being an amazing drummer, you also sing… Is it true you that you joined the Knickerbockers because of that extra talent and why were they looking for a drummer who could sing?

They were looking for a drummer and the first time I saw the Knickerbockers was in a neighborhood venue. It was a supermarket that had been emptied, sold-out and it was reopened to do a little party on Memorial Day. I was walking down the street and I heard this music so I went back and they were set up playing as a trio. Buddy, the saxophone player was playing the drums, really well, and I thought, boy this is a band I’d love to play with! A couple of weeks or months later, they called me up because they’d heard I was a drummer and that I was looking for work. So I went and set up in John and Beau’s house and we played, but my drumming skills were a little bit on the amateur side because I was still young. Then they asked me to sing, I sang some rock ’n’ roll stuff and John and Beau’s mum heard me sing and she said “Hire that guy, he does sound good”! So my skills with drumming didn’t get me the work, it was the singing. Then I improved as a drummer because you get to play a lot. Also, Buddy taught me a lot of stuff on the drums that he got from other good drummers. But it was actually my voice that got me the job.

Actually my next question was about your first experience of the studio with the Knickerbockers. But it wasn’t in fact your first because you just said you recorded with your previous band. According to Beau, it was pretty intimidating to experience the studio for the first time. How did you feel about that?

Actually, I was really thrilled. I thought recording was really exciting, that was the next step to being a real musician. The next step after that was, I don’t know – money and fame, and the journey through the studio was the way to get there. I thought it was a great opportunity and I love listening to stuff that you played and then you listen to it back. I love doing that, I still love it, it’s just no different. Absolutely no different, I still love to record! Music as an art form is like a painter who paints a picture and can step back and look at it. But if you’re playing live in a nightclub, you can’t step back and listen to what you did. So I always thought that the neatest part of the music process was somebody recording what you did. I love to be recorded live too… I feel that it’s a real way to learn from your mistakes and learn from what you did well.

At the time, you met the producer Jerry Fuller…

We met Jerry Fuller on the East Coast, up in Albany, New York. We were playing in a place called, believe it or not, the University Twist Palace! He came through as an artist trying to…he was in Buffalo, NY, which is in the western side of the state. So he did a little tour, trying to sell himself as an artist and he was working his way down to Manhattan. He was going to open an East Coast publishing company for 4 Stars Music. So on the way there, he was playing with all these bands, singing and he was already a writer of four hit records himself. He did “Traveling Man”… When he ran into us, he really liked us a lot. I remember at one point, we were doing some rock ’n’ roll stuff and then he said, “You guys wouldn’t happen to know ‘Misty,’ the old Johnny Mathis tune?” And we just laughed. Buddy started playing the intro and, boom, we were into it! He was just flabbergasted that a rock ’n’ roll band could play “Misty” with such sophistication. Beau, the guitarist is a master of chord progression. He was really well schooled in that kind of genre. So Jerry was really impressed with the ability as a band to play a song like “Misty” with such flair. That blew him away. So he called the West Coast people at Challenge Records and he told them about us. We did some demo stuff in New York studios. Challenge Records was not really that big of a record company but, you know, we did that to, I don’t know, to show off our abilities to the record company.

So you found yourself playing the Red Velvet Club in Hollywood quite regularly…

Jerry wanted us to move to the West Coast so he got hold of the owner of the Red Velvet and he booked us there. It was a kind of a neat venue because a lot of people from television and the music industry would go there to hang out. It was like a local watering hole for the celebrities. So we got the gig there and, you know, the rest is history. We got a hit record a month later!

Is it there that you first met Bill Medley and especially Bobby Hatfield of the Righteous Brothers with whom you collaborated a few years later?

Yeah, they used to come in and listen to us and we got them to sit in with us a bunch of times. We got friendly with them. You see, the thing is the show Shindig was being shot at ABC Studios which was close to home for them. So they would do their Shindig show and drive up Sunset Boulevard out west to where they lived in Beverly Hills. They would drive by the Red Velvet and drop in. Everybody heard about this group (the Knickerbockers) in the business and how good we were so we just drew a lot of curiosity seekers to see what we were all about.

So after the release of “Lies,” the band wanted “Just One Girl” as the second single but your record company Challenge wanted “One Track Mind.” In retrospect, do you still think that was a mistake? I find both songs very exciting and bursting with energy…

I think “Just One Girl” was a more exciting record, but it’s all conjecture as to what would have been a hit. You never know, but the song was written by one of the members of the band and “One Track Mind” was written by Keith Colley and his wife Linda. The record was good and we liked it. It was a good song and I thought we did a good job on the record, but like I said, in this business you never know what’s gonna hit and what isn’t. With the original copy of “Lies,” the record company had assigned it to be the B-side. If it wasn’t for B. Mitchell Reed, one of the big DJs in Los Angeles at the time, who used to come in and see us at the Red Velvet… He asked our promotional guy when he brought the record up to him and said, “Where did you guys record that ‘Lies’ song that they play in the club?” He replied, “Yeah, that’s the B-side” and B. Mitchell Reed, without even hesitating went, “No, it ain’t now!” and put it on the air. He didn’t even listen to it; he just put it on the air, put the needle down and said, “Here’s the brand new record by the Knickerbockers!”

You also mentioned the lack of time in the studio when you were recording, which must have been very frustrating. Nevertheless, the band sounded very tight and that rhythm section between you and John was really happening!

Well, we’ve been together for a while and John and I always had a good groove together. We used to rehearse like crazy before we went in the studio so we knew up front that we won’t get the time to mess around in the studio. I’m kind of a proponent of that. I think that by going in the studio and spending a lot of time on a track, you lose the spontaneity and the electric energy that you can get in the first five or six takes. After that, it can get kind of stale. You know, on top of that, I’d have liked to have spent more time on overdubbing vocals and other instruments. But for the track itself, I like to have it well rehearsed and just play it. Try to get that energy right away.

But you were still trying things in the studio. For example, on that alternate instrumental track of “Lies” released by Sundazed, we can hear you talking and trying to get a certain drum beat.

Oh yeah! Sure. You can rehearse all you want, but when you hear what you rehearsed played back, then you have an objective view point of it. You can stand back and listen to it and discuss good and bad points. Maybe we should try to change this or that. On the first couple of cuts of “Lies,” I was playing too much stuff on the drums and it was pointed out to me by the producer/engineer Bruce Botnick. Bruce said, “You know, maybe you should cut down on some of those fills.” So I thought about it and the guys in the band agreed so I just kept it simple. You know, stuff like that would happen. I was so used to playing that song live that I was just playing too much stuff. And we were just young and still learning what works and what doesn’t.

The band apparently did all the Dick Clark tours. Do you remember playing with the Yardbirds?

I don’t think we ever played with the Yardbirds that I can remember…

Because they did one of those tours when Jeff Beck was in the band. That’s when he had a nervous breakdown and quit!

I don’t remember that! I didn’t meet the Yardbirds or Jeff Beck. They’re one of the greatest bands of all time. I love Jeff Beck. I played his material in different bands over the years and I always found his material really interesting.

Oh he’s a genius, he’s very unique…

Yeah, I agree… That’s it! He is unique. He stands totally different from most of the other guitar players. You can’t really tell his roots sometimes. You think, Where did he get that from?

So on those tours, did you feel at times like close to a nervous breakdown or did you actually had quite a bit of fun?

A lot of guys had nervous breakdowns on the road. The road is a killer. You know, when I first met the Rolling Stones, they looked totally beaten down! In the interview I read that Beverly Paterson did with Beau, he said they came in and they looked dark and scary. They looked like they were undertakers! He really couldn’t believe the way they looked and acted. They didn’t say hello to anybody, they just looked spent.

Yeah, it’s true that touring is very tiring…

It’s the hardest thing you’ll ever do in your life. Doing one-nighters, traveling and putting out all that energy every night. It’s very hard. I mean, look what happened to Clapton back in the ‘60s. He had to go in for rehab for a while because he was using drugs to get him up and down. That’s where drugs came in. The guys would be using the upper drugs to get up and then the downer drugs to go to sleep. First thing you know, you’re addicted.

The Knickerbockers onstage in Albany, NY, 1967.

Jerry Fuller once commented on the very separate personalities in the band, something that makes the nucleus of a good group. Judging from the pictures, you seem rather outgoing and from your playing, very energetic. How would you describe Beau, John and Buddy back then?

Well, we were all pretty young and we all had the same sort of East Coast sense of humor – self-deprecating, poking fun at one another a lot but knowing it was fun. I mean, we still make one another laugh. The last time we were together in 1990, we were just cracking up all the time!

It was that reunion, wasn’t it?

Yeah, and we still have that same look about things. Jerry loved being around us because we were constantly just cracking jokes about each other. Similar outlook on life! Yeah, we had a lot of energy. I talk to Beau regularly, he’s still playing. He’s doing a little jazz solo thing locally.

You co-wrote “Come and Get It” with Beau Charles and “Can You Help Me” with Jerry Fuller. Did you write the music or the lyrics?

The lyrics and the melody. That’s how I write and then I go to someone who plays an instrument and put chords to the melody that I wrote. Then we discuss that until we come up with something that we both like. I always write both the lyrics and the melody. I just walk in, sing the song and then they’ll figure out what I’m trying to say with the chords. You know, songs occur to me in the most mysterious ways. I find myself singing and saying “Hey, that’s a song!” It’s almost as if I’m not even listening to what my mind is doing until I had stepped back and go “Wait a minute, that’s a song!”

So you were the last to join the Knicks and the first to leave…

Unless you consider that Buddy kind of disappeared… After we had “Lies” and after we had toured a lot, we were kind of looking for another record company but we were stuck with Challenge. They would not let us go, it was a mess. Buddy got into using substances and one night he didn’t show up to work. We were playing a place out in the Valley called the Rag Doll. We played the first set without him and I called his home. His wife said, “Oh yeah, he left about an hour ago,” and we said, “Hmm… that’s weird!” He never showed up and I didn’t see Buddy again for years, until after I joined the Righteous Brothers. He just skipped out of town and left everybody. So he was the first one to leave… That was one of the reasons that I wanted to leave because it just wasn’t the same without him. He was a pivotal player in the band, he was a very powerful player and when he left I felt… You know when you get used to fuor guys and you think like one mind, when part of it is gone you kind of have a big gap in the energy and the process of making music. We really missed him. We tried to get other guys. We tried drummers and then we tried a keyboard player, he was a letdown. So the band at that time was kind of floundering.

So at the time, did you feel a bit bitter and felt the band could have achieved even more or was it pas de regrets and you were looking forward to the future?

Well, a little of both. I think that when Buddy left we were kind of lost. Buddy was one of those kind of guys… On one side of the coin, he was very brilliant and on the other side of the coin, he was a high maintenance kind of guy you had to babysit because he had some issues. It’s true of a lot of great players. When he left, we didn’t exactly know what to do. So when Bobby Hatfield hit on me to do the Righteous Brothers thing, I then thought, Yeah, let’s go there, because the band was not going into any direction. Also, you have to remember Beau had spoken to me in a coffee shop in Seattle while we were on the road, about seriously considering leaving the band. He wanted to just quit playing for a while. So he was not up and full of energy like he was anymore, he wasn’t happy. He wanted to spend more time at home with his family and he planted that seed in my head. So when I was approached by Bobby Hatfield to join the Righteous Brothers, I had nobody at all so it was time to make a change.

You recorded the album Rebirth in 1969 on Verve/MGM. How much did you write on it and did you play drums as well?

Yeah, I wrote a song called “Nobody’s Gonna Take Me” and I played drums on every cut. I didn’t really want to because my skills as a drummer had eroded a bit as I had not played much. I wanted a band sound and I wanted the same drummer on the whole album but couldn’t get anybody to be available for the whole project. I also produced the album with guitarist Barry Rillera and the engineer, mixing and arranging. Bobby would get bored and leave.

Where did you perform?

All the major universities in America and clubs like the Cocoanut Grove in Hollywood. We played in Japan and the Philippines and were regulars in Las Vegas. We had sell-out crowds. We were a very popular act at the Sands Hotel in Vegas. I was with the Righteous Brothers for over four years. I got really good by the time Bobby decided to take a break. I wanted to carry on but Bobby didn’t want to so he broke the act.

You also appeared on many TV shows.

Yeah, we did the Smothers Brothers and Glen Campbell’s Good Time Hour amongst others. (Note: both can be found on YouTube. They did a great Sam & Dave medley on the Smothers Brothers Show.)

The Righteous Brothers in Albany, circa 1969. L to R: Bobby Hatfield, Jimmy Walker.

Around the same time, you signed a record deal with Columbia Records as a solo artist.

Yeah, Jerry Fuller left Challenge Records and went to work for Columbia. I recorded three singles including “I Got The Best Of You.” I had a dual contract with both Columbia and Verve/MGM which is quite unusual. Jerry discovered Gary Puckett & the Union Gap, and he had the songs that became hits for Gary like “Young Girl” and “Woman, Woman.” I was supposed to record them before he did but my previous label Challenge would not let me go. I had to record an album to close the contract. It’s called How Can I Forget, and has recently resurfaced on iTunes and other digital downloads outlets. One single was released at the time called “Drown In My Broken Dreams” / “Always Leaving, Always Gone”.

To close the subject on the ‘60s, what do you miss the most and the least about that decade?

Well, to me that was one the most interesting eras of music because it was very experimental.

And very creative…

Yeah, a lot of creativity. The artistry was being allowed to happen. The record companies were more or less standing back and just taking what the artists gave them and then marketing it. Whereas later on, what they did was tell the artists what song to do to make it easier for them to sell it. Instead of the marketers saying, “Just give me your art and I’ll market it,” they say “We want this so we can make it easier for our marketing department to sell it.” That wasn’t happening in the ‘60s. I don’t think that Jimi Hendrix would have made it today. Or the Doors, or a lot of bands like Crosby, Still, Nash & Young. I don’t think they would have passed the front door. Even the Eagles. Because they were different, they were creating something entirely new. Even Otis Redding. I mean, who sounds like Otis Redding? Nobody. They would say, “Well you don’t sound enough like so and so therefore we’re not going to sign you”. But in those days, it was much more open policy and it was a great era of music. The ‘50s had some great moments too. Then in the ‘70s and ‘80s and even the ‘90s, the marketing took control because they could see the huge amount of money that was being made.

In the 70’s, Jimmy joined the hot Soul/Funk band Oasis and later on into the ‘80s, Hot Street, with ex-Tower of Power’s guitarist Bruce Conte. In 1990, the Knickerbockers reunited and performed in Florida to critical acclaim. Unfortunately, Buddy Randell passed away a few years later preventing further reunions.

Jimmy moved to Las Vegas where he formed the Jimmy Walker Band, playing all over town including at BB King’s Blues Club. He also recorded the album Playing To Win with his friend Jeff Palmer. It is available for downloads on CD Baby, iTunes and other digital outlets.

Recently, the solo album that he recorded for Challenge in 1968 resurfaced and is also available for downloads on iTunes. It’s called How Can I Forget.

Jimmy recently released a new album. Download a copy here: http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/jimmywalker2 or on iTunes.

Please visit his website: http://jimmywalkerinmysoul.wix.com/jimmywalker

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jimmy.walker.5817

© Katy Levy 2015