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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Eddie had a great trick, it had probably been used in America for years, but we didn’t know about it over here. He used to put a second string instead of a third string on his guitar, so that he had an unwound string and he could bend it and get those bluesy sounds that you never heard in England.”
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Marshall Berle started his career at the William Morris Agency in 1960, signing the Beach Boys to an agency contract representing the band from the beginning of their career through 1965. As a booking agent, he repped Little Richard, Spirit, Canned Heat, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Ike and Tina Turner Revue, Marvin Gaye, Taj Mahal, Rufus, and Bachman-Turner Overdrive.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Gary “Pig” Gold Archives)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Harvey Kubernik 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

##

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was a signal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

##

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Courtesy of Gary Strobl)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

##

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

Jac Holzman, 2020.
(Courtesy of Rhino)

HK: The 1967 Summer of Love.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jim Morrison, 1967.
(Photo by Heather Harris)

HK: Can you comment on the Doors.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

##

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Courtesy of Harvey Kubernik Archives)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Courtesy of Gary Strobl)

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

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

##

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

##

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Indeed I am.”

##

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

In 2010 I interviewed Bruce.

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

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

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

Q: How about Jac Holzman?

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

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

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

##

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

##

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

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

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

© Harvey Kubernik, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“From the start, there were a couple ways I wanted to distinguish this film from Festival. For one, I wanted to move chronologically through the 4 years, where Murray’s film makes a montage of time. His film was made in the moment for the moment, and one of our movie’s fascinating charms is the changes that reveal themselves over the four years of filming.

“Today’s audience is quite distant from those times, so moving chronologically let us show the changes—in fashion, in music, in attitude—without making a big deal of them. Some of the changes were happening organically and some were the result of organized or semi-organized groups—whether that was SNCC’s push for voting rights or the traditionalists’ ethos of only acoustic instruments. But in our rapidly changing present times, this movie reminds us that people can create their own changes. The movie makes plain the connection that folk music has long had with activism.

“Another difference between us and the original is our use of 21^st century voices who reflect on their experiences at Newport. Everyone we spoke with was there, and with nearly 60 years of reflection, their perspective, their memories, their comments help us today get more out of what we’re seeing—and help us understand what went on behind the scenes to make the festival occur.

“In many ways, this is a movie about change and about resistance to change. Folk music adheres to traditions, but any study of folk would reveal that even traditions change. Not all change is good, but not all change is bad either. In the moment, as we see in the footage, change can be very difficult to accept, but as the epilogue makes clear, even difficult changes become accepted.

“There’s a difference, of course, between changes in art and changes in politics. When Dylan goes electric, other acoustic artists can do what they want. When fascism takes away democratic freedoms, that’s terminating choices and not expanding them.

“This is a film rooted in the past, but it’s very much about the present.”

Newport jam with Taj Mahal.
(Newport & The Great Folk Dream/Murray Lerner)

##

Oscar-winning filmmaker Murray Lerner died of kidney failure on September 2, 2017 in New York City at age 90.

Lerner was born in Philadelphia Pennsylvania on May 8, 1927, raised in New York City, a 1948 graduate of Harvard University and an English major. Murray taught at Yale and also helped establish a film studies program.

After Festival! was released in December 1967, it garnered honors at every major international film festival, including Manheim, San Francisco, Mar del Plata, and Venice.

I screened Festival! at San Diego State University in 1972. Lerner’s office sent a video copy to my dormitory room at Zura Hall. I had started with Dr. James L. Wheeler in the school’s Literature Department, the first History of Rock Music class, and the first-ever accredited course in regular curriculum upper division academia. A story in the April 14, 1973 issue of Billboard magazine hailed the department’s academic aim as “the world’s first university level rock studies program.”

Decades later I cited Festival! in my 2017 book, 1967 A Complete Rock Music History of the Summer of Love. Lerner is interviewed in my 2014 book on Leonard Cohen, Everybody Knows.

Lerner was a Harvard Man who loved folk music and literature. Lerner’s hydra-headed distribution and poetic trek was a blend of Oscar Micheaux and Homer, four-walled by Samuel Z. Arkoff, James Nicholson and Roger Corman.

His sound and vision work informed the efforts of all rock ‘n’ reel documentarians who followed him like Andrew Solt and Malcolm Leo who would produce and direct This Is Elvis and Imagine: John Lennon.

“Murray Lerner,” remarked filmmaker Solt, “was a very interesting and important figure in visual music history!”

My brother Kenneth and I hosted a Q & A session with Lerner in Hollywood at the American Cinematheque Egyptian Theater in August 2010 during the Martin Lewis-produced Mods and Rockers film series.

Lerner’s filmmaking career began from “industrial cinema.” In 1980 he produced and directed the Academy-Award winning From Mao To Mozart: Isaac Stern In China about violin virtuoso Isaac Stern’s 1979 goodwill tour of Red China.

Lerner’s long-form trend-setting musical documentaries include Isaac Stern, Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, the Moody Blues, Jimi Hendrix, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, the Doors, Jethro Tull, the Who and Leonard Cohen.

Bob Dylan’s 1963-1965 Newport appearances were documented by Lerner in 2007’s The Other Side Of The Mirror-Bob Dylan Live At The Newport Festival 1963-1965 DVD released by Columbia Records and Legacy Recordings.

Johnny Cash at Newport.
(Newport & The Great Folk Dream/Murray Lerner)

On August 16, 1975 in Orange County, California, I interviewed Johnny Cash for the now defunct UK music weekly Melody Maker at the Royal Inn Hotel in Anaheim.

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

“We finally met at Newport in 1964. It was like we were two old friends. There was none of this standing back, trying to figure each other out. He’s unique and original.

“I keep lookin’ around as we pass the middle of the 70s and I don’t see anybody come close to Bob Dylan. I respect him. Dylan is a few years younger than I am but we share a bond that hasn’t diminished. I get inspiration from him,” volunteered Johnny.

On November 19, 1979, friend and drummer, Jim Keltner, invited Knack drummer Bruce Gary and I to the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium to Dylan’s Slow Train Coming concert.

I had a chat with Bob backstage. I mentioned interviewing Johnny Cash and Phil Spector for Melody Maker. I told Bob that Phil talked about R&B vocalists, and he cited “Dion, John, Paul, Elvis, Bobby Darin, and Johnny Cash as great singers.”

Bob removed his tinted sunglasses and smiled. Dylan has blue eyes like Eva Marie Saint, Charles Bukowski, and Kris Kristofferson. He offered a firm handshake, and replied, “Johnny Cash is a friend of mine…”

I interviewed Murray Lerner extensively in 2008, 2010 and 2014.

Harvey Kubernik and Murray Lerner interview

Q: Can you cite the influence of a documentary filmmaker on your work?

A: I wasn’t influenced by any filmmakers, maybe Bert Stern and Jazz On A Summer’s Day, also shot at Newport in the late 50s, largely because of his use of telephoto lenses, which I fell in love with.

Q: Is there any sort of general philosophy that guides you in preparation of a documentary film subject?

A: I tend to make documentary films after thinking about it and researching it and having a concept in mind and finding iconic images that resonate with that concept. That’s the way I work. When it came to Festival, when I started to go up there and look, I went up for the Newport festival, I was a folk music fanatic.

Before then, I did some industrial films, an underwater feature, Secrets Of The Reef. It actually played in theatres successfully, at least in one theater, the Baronet, and then Jacque Cousteau came along with The Silent World and that was the end of our distribution. (laughs). We didn’t have any people in our movie. Ours was anthropomorphism and it was a negative word. I had done a number of industrial films with sophisticated photography and editing before I did Festival!

For The Other Side Of The Mirror, we decided on no narration, no pundit interviews, no interviews with Dylan. Nothing except the experience of seeing him…That to me is exciting. Just the clear experience gives you everything you need. I felt that when I screened the music because he is touted metaphorically as the mirror of his generation, and I thought no, he’s beyond that. He always takes the generation beyond that, and he’s like on the other side of the mirror, but I also felt the wonderous quality of his imagination took us like Alice to a new world on the other side of the mirror. I felt to break that would be bad.

Dylan’s songs and his ideas were so powerful that my thesis, or premise, was that once I got you involved in him and you were also seeing a change in his imagination going in his music that you wouldn’t want to leave it. Either I pulled you into it or I didn’t. If you weren’t pulled into his music and took this journey with him then you’re not going to like the film. Nothing you say is gonna make you like it more.

Q: Was it by decision that you chose to shoot Festival! and The Other Side Of The Mirror – Bob Dylan Live At The Newport Folk Festival in black and white?

A: I had a choice for black and white over color, and it was a major decision in the face of a lot of negativity. First of all, I thought at that time you could really get good color in the original but you couldn’t get good color duplicates. That the prints, which is, after all, that was going to be what you were going to show, and also the contrasts were too great, and the blacks wouldn’t have any detail in it.

As a matter of fact, I was a fanatic about that, and I earlier had done an industrial film, which became a big hit in that industry, Unseen Journey, and I couldn’t stand the idea of Kodachrome prints, so I actually talked the people to pay to me to going to Technicolor, and doing three strip prints. And it worked. It was beautiful and I shot it in 35mm to begin with. But the 16 mm prints were also great, so I was really in to thinking about those things in a way.

Q: How did you get the initial Newport job that resulted in 1967′s theatrical release of Festival!

A: Through debt and through cajoling people to help. (laughs). There weren’t a lot of obstacles to shoot Festival! Once it got rolling then the obstacles were different people associated with the festival who had their own favorites to make a film. I had to overcome that. Anyway, I was determined to get it initially released theatrically. I knew there where the workshops and live performances that were interesting and cinematic. And, music was always my passion for the soundtrack of a film. For the form of a film, when I did Festival! it was the form of the film should also be musical and it should be like experiencing a piece of music in addition to being about music. It seemed to work.

At the Venice Film Festival people in a 1,000 seat theater really got up and applauded. I was alone. I was brought up to think that things should be well exposed, in focus, and you can hear the sound. I had no encounters with Dylan except through Howard Alk. He was great, a marvelous human being. You had to stand up to him with a powerful personality. So, every time I told him to change something, a storm would come over the room that we were in. But I stuck to my ground and that’s why he needed a director like me. If you look at the editing of Festival! you will see how sophisticated it is. He’d carry over the tiny sound from one thing to another. It was a three picture two sound movieola and we spent most of our time repairing the film.

Howard called me up and said ‘why don’t we edit this in Woodstock?’ and I said, ‘No!’ Because I would have a lot of powerful voices around me. ‘How ’bout Martha’s Vineyard?’ It was edited for two summers at Martha’s Vineyard, then he saw a film I did about Yale, finish that. I had to deal with Albert Grossman for clearances. It took a while to convince Al who was not a control freak. Not the slightest influence in the editing. As time went on each artist was different. Dylan was a buddy of Howard Alk. Howard had their ear and was a friend of Dylan, and had known Grossman from Chicago.

The concept was that, going beyond the entertainment value of the music that was the music being used was a crucible for creation of a counter-culture and a message. The prize I got at Venice was not only for a form of entertainment but a means of an expression of youth. That’s what I wanted to do and look for stuff like that helped me do that. So, when I did an interview, I had that in mind.

Like in the Dylan Newport DVD, and in Festival! I interview Joan Baez in the car. She did a good one because she discusses what the kids ask. Joan could make fun of Bob on stage because they were close. I think they thought of themselves, and the crowd did as well as the king and queen of Newport. The movie I really wanted to make was about all the tension backstage from the other performers and managers. (laughs).

Q: Festival! was always well received when it played at universities and the midnight movie screenings.

A: It had more festival showings than any. San Francisco, Argentina, In Italy, Federico Fellini the director gave me his phone number…but I never called him. I always admired him. I was rather shy at the time. At Venice, it sounds crazy, but there were a lot of big wigs there, Pasolini, Antonioni, my film was the most popular of the festival. It was a hit.

Festival! was not just about Dylan. They loved Baez and the rest of it. The whole crowd at Venice got up and danced in the aisles, it was amazing. It was thrilling. It’s always been available for schools and screenings and before a Festival! DVD it was on videotape. I was determined not to let it die through mail order and schools. We never made any money. I was a terrible self-promoter and this was before DVD and cable TV.

Q: In Festival! and once again in the Dylan Newport DVD, the live footage of “Maggie’s Farm” was powerful and jolting to see in a theater originally, and now on DVD. Plus, Dylan with some members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band for this effort is always being confrontational. With the camera, daring it to love him, he is being confrontational with the audience.

A: I knew the Butterfield band and had done some industrial film with some of their music. On stage Paul came alive. He’s not performing with Dylan together in the 1965 set because Paul mentioned something like it wasn’t right to have two stars on stage at the same time. I interviewed Mike Bloomfield in Festival! talking about (Paul) Butterfield. I wanted to show in the movie that this was a movement for white kids and white people to get into the blues. Bloomfield and Butterfield were iconic figures in my mind.

Bob Dylan, the Freedom Singers, Peter Yarrow, Pete Seeger.
(Newport & The Great Folk Dream/Murray Lerner)

Q: You understood Dylan moving into electric rock ‘n’ roll from an acoustic setting.

A: I felt that electricity was needed to distribute the music in a wide basis, radio and television. Then, once it happened, the hunger for the feeling that electricity gave people listening to it was more than volume. I think electric music gets into your body, and enters into your nerves quite deeply, and almost puts you into a trance. It’s hypnotic. I’ve always felt this and this was the feeling I had when I watched Bob. And I was excited by it. I not only appreciated the changes, I loved it! I really was mesmerized and hypnotized by “Maggie’s Farm” on many levels.

As I was filming it I knew it was a gateway to a new culture in the form of based on the older culture, and I thought this was it. I was mesmerized by electric music, by Paul Butterfield earlier in the thing, and Howlin’ Wolf played with a band. But what Dylan did the electricity got into your bones. I was both in the pit and on the stage.

In the DVD we didn’t use “Phantom Engineer (It Takes A Lot To Laugh A Train To Cry)” because I didn’t think it was up to the standard of “Maggie’s Farm” and “Like a Rolling Stone.” To be honest with you. “Stone” is too big a climax to extend it with something not as good.

I knew it was going to be a major breakthrough. It was a mixture of booing, applause and bewilderment. I was intensely involved in the filming so I didn’t pay much attention to what the audience was doing. I was hypnotized in a way by the electric music and had to get the shot. And, the interesting thing about “Maggie’s Farm” which was a breakthrough musically, but the lyrics were expressing the same kind of idea that he wasn’t gonna be a conformist. And in a way, “Maggie’ Farm” was a symbol for America working. We’re all working on “Maggie’s Farm.”

Q: What impressed you the most about Dylan as a poet?

A: The words just fell on his music. I knew that when I saw him walk in a room at a party around 1962 for Cynthia Gooding. He came in and pulled out his guitar, played a few songs about New York, packed it up and split. He intrigued me. At Harvard University I majored in English and my main interest was modern American poetry. T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound and their technique of two opposite symbols creating a third idea. Two different images, the unexpected juxtaposition of two different images for the third idea. Which guided me into filmmaking.

I always use very very long lenses as an adjunct to my photography. I believe in the long shot because I would like the thing to feel musical and not jumpy. I think film is visual music. And it should be, and I believe in editing that way. You can have moments where you are doing quick montage. Most of the time you need to relax.

I like really long shots and before anyone ever did it, I used 2,000 millimeter lenses and for crowd shots, moving in slow motion on Broadway, a lot of unusual stuff. I love people coming towards the camera and coming into close up. And then I got a 600 millimeter lens for my 16 millimeter camera, playing around with it during Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee at Newport. Real close ups.

Q: What was the one thing you learned from your Newport films applied to future movies?

A: First of all, on the technical side, I learned and made sure everyone examines and perfects their equipment so that they were sharp to be on a very literal level. Sharp when they were close in and wide angle. Very often when you go to a wide angle it can lose focus. So, I had them check their cameras for that problem and fix it. And, going from there, I had to call them all together and explain what I don’t like. I don’t like, and some of them did it anyway, I don’t like fast pans, fast zooms.

I said, “If you are panning over to a musician that is playing but you don’t see because he comes in after the musician is on go slow.” You’ll hear the person and it will be more dramatic than if you swish the camera or zoom in. That is one of the big things. And, I said “Close Up! Close Up!” I don’t mind looking into the lights for effect. A bunch of stuff I directed them to do. I took special shots, positions. I took the shots from behind looking into the lights. The idea is to be musical in the movements and try and move with the music.

I personally have a technique where I practice the choreography of the camera. Every day for about an hour before I shot, having an assistant stand by and I would focus, zoom and figure out how big the moves had to be to get the result I wanted so I could do it myself. And I practiced all of that. And I kind of instilled that sense that of the choreography of the camera being part of the concert. For the most part, in the planning stages, I picked positions to shoot. And I told people, “You concentrate on the close up and you concentrate on something else.”

Q: You and D.A. Pennebaker have witnessed and participated in the rock and music documentary world for well nearly 60 years. You’ve done these panel discussions with Pennebaker in front of university film students. I’ve been attending some of these events. Unlike the sixties and seventies, most of the students and hustling filmmakers now in the audience at the Q. and A. sessions want to know about royalty points on the back end of film deal and nothing about film stock, lenses or concepts to creating a story.

A: The best one of those was at the Santa Fe New Mexico Film Festival, a documentary panel. Pennebaker was there. (Ricky) Leacock was there. I was there. It was a seminar type thing where people would question us afterwards, you know. It was all about “how do you get the money?” Not about creative stuff but financial.

One kid said to Pennebaker, “How do you get the money to finance a film?” And without missing a beat he said, “Marry a rich woman.”

##

Murray Lerner and Martin Lewis.

In 2025 I asked film producer, humorist, record producer and writer Martin Lewis about Murray Lerner.

“I had the honor of friendship and working as film festival curator/moderator with all the greats of NY-based music documentary-makers: D.A. Pennebaker (known as ‘Penny’), the Maysles Brothers – both David & Albert – and Murray Lerner. All of them legitimately described as geniuses. All of them delightful impish characters.

“All three documented our 1960s present – and all of them have had a profound influence on how we understand our 1960s past. In my life I’ve loved them all. But I loved Murray Lerner that little bit more…

“What he captured in his Message To Love film of the 1970 Isle of Wight festival was the End of the Dream.

“Pennebaker showed the dream erupting at Monterey. The Maysles documented the nightmare of Altamont. But Lerner summarized the Alpha-to-Omega of the era in his 26-years-in-the-making indictment of how bread-heads and free-loaders combined to destroy the Utopia of the Sixties.

“Many people recall Lerner for the brilliance of his film Festival documenting four crucial years of the Newport Folk Festival – 1963-1965. And especially comment on his capture of Dylan going electric in 1965 and breaking the hearts of a few be-sandaled snowflakes of the tie-dyed-in-the-woolly-sweater brigade. That was indeed notable. However, it’s even more instructive to see Dylan in Lerner’s 2007 Dylan compendium The Other Side of the Mirror. It telescopes Dylan’s three consecutive Newport appearances (63-64-65) into one time-lapse revelation.

“In ’63 Dylan is scrawny-thin, purposeful yet still tentative… a larva with a guitar. In ’64 he has matured to self-assurance and strength… a chrysalis biding his time. By ’65 he has become a full-blown rock star exuding charismatic control of the audience. The leather-clad, Ray-Banned butterfly is ready to fly away from Newport and share his music with the wider world beyond the folk music village. Lerner’s film captures that entire metamorphosis. A crucially important rite-of-passage for the world as much as for Dylan.

“But Lerner also documented an equally important though less-remarked on paradigm shift in his Newport film.

“He captured blues-rock pioneers Mike Bloomfield and Paul Butterfield studying at the feet of blues legends such as Son House and Mississippi John Hurt. The very young Bloomfield and Butterfield had both been earnest blues devotees in the hard-scrabble blues clubs in their native Chicago for a few years preceding Newport 1965 – savoring such encounters with older musicians as they could engineer. But Lerner capturing them on crisp 16mm black & white celluloid in the presence of these grizzled blues masters forty and fifty years their senior in the Newport fields allows us to witness the passing of the candle that led to the electric blues-rock that took over our era.

“My friendship with Murray spanned 32 rich years. And included my presenting him and his films many times at my Mods & Rockers Film Festivals at the American Cinematheque in Los Angeles.”

© Harvey Kubernik 2025

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

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

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

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

Singer, actress, author and performer Marianne Faithfull’s complete UK Decca catalog has been reissued on LP, CD and streaming.

Before her passing on January 30 this year, Marianne completed work on two projects that were to commemorate her 60th anniversary in music; the first was her final EP Burning Moonlight, a collection of four songs inspired by her Decca recordings, the second was her contribution to this series of reissues where she talked in-depth about her Decca recording career for the first time.

All four of Marianne’s original Decca albums, Marianne Faithfull, Come My Way, North Country Maid and Loveinamist have been reissued on vinyl alongside Cast Your Fate to the Wind: a new double LP of the collected singles, B-sides and rarities. Simultaneously a 6-CD box set will be released called Cast Your Fate To The Wind: The Complete UK Decca Recordings, which features all the albums reproduced on miniature facsimile LPs, a new double album of the singles, B-sides and rarities, five art cards and a 76-page book featuring many rare and unpublished photographs.

Three of the original albums are appearing on vinyl for the first time since they were released, and the artwork on all four original LPs has been recreated where possible from the original images giving a high-quality finish to this set of reissues. The music has been remastered from the original tapes by Grammy nominated producer Andrew Batt who was the Executive Producer of Burning Moonlight. He also contributes a full-scale reassessment of the Decca recordings in his in-depth sleeve notes included in each LP and the CD box set. In these, Marianne comments on the source of the songs and her role in the recordings, conclusively debunking the received wisdom that in this phase of her career she was little more than a record label puppet.

In 1964, Marianne Faithfull was spotted by the impresario Andrew Loog Oldham, and her recording career began in June of that year with the release of her debut single “As Tears Go By,” a song penned by Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Andrew Loog Oldham. It reached a Top Ten position in the UK singles chart. The Stones then recorded their own version, included on the American pressing of December’s Children (And Everybody’s) in 1965. Their American record label London issued “As Tears Go By” as a single that landed in the number six spot on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart. The Rolling Stones subsequently performed the tune on an episode of The Ed Sullivan Show.

(Courtesy Gary Pig Gold)

##

In 2000 I discussed Faithfull with Andrew Loog Oldham, the 1963-1967 record producer and manager of the Rolling Stones, for Discoveries magazine.

“The fact is forgotten that Marianne had, between August of ‘64 and the summer of ‘65 four Top Ten hits in the UK. ‘As Tears Go By’ and ‘Come and Stay With Me’ held up.

“For one it was obvious that ‘this thing of ours’ was not going to disappear. We had come in following the twist, Davy Crockett, skiffle, and trad jazz. Skiffle and trad jazz had been very important; they had been the BBC and the establishment’s last chance to control the key to what music we got to hear. You had during 1957-1958 like The Six-Five Special; hosted by Pete Murray (God bless him!) and Jo Douglas which invited us all to deck up in jeans and sweaters and be really daring with our shirt collars turned up.

“There were villains, there was mayhem, action and if we had not had pirate radio I might not have had a hit with Marianne Faithfull’s ‘As Tears Go By.’ The BBC would not touch it, they said Marianne could not sing. Mind you, that’s what they’d said about Mick Jagger a year earlier when the Rolling Stones failed their BBC live audition. They said ‘The singer cannot sing.’ The BBC was the enemy, a limp wristed arm of the government trying to keep kids on a rationed musical diet of trad jazz and skiffle.”

A news announcement from ABKCO provides an overview of Faithfull’s Decca catalog reissues, and observes that: “Marianne’s furious resurfacing in the late ‘70s with Broken English completely superseded her earlier artistic achievements, and for a time she felt the need to distance herself both personally and artistically from her earlier incarnation.

“Inadvertently, this led to one of the biggest misconceptions about the early stage of Marianne’s career, namely that she was not creatively involved in her ‘60s releases, or that these recordings did not have the same artistic consideration behind them as her later music. She was at pains to correct that impression on these reissues; ‘I think I did express a lot in my early work, what people hear with the jump between these recordings and Broken English is just experience; life happened, but for me it’s all been connected. The music changed, my voice changed, but my approach to making records has always been the same: I’ve always known what I was doing.’

“2025 marks the 60th anniversary of the release of Marianne’s two debut albums and in the months before her passing, she reflected on this early part of her career with renewed appreciation: ‘I don’t think people realize how much care and real consideration we put into this early material. It took a long time for me to appreciate it, but now I do and I’m really proud of what we did, and I hope you all like it as much as I do.’”

##

During 1995 I interviewed Marianne Faithfull when Faithfull: An Autobiography, written with David Dalton, was published. Portions of our conversation were published in my first book This Is Rebel Music: The Harvey Kubernik InnerViews.

It was Faithfull’s friend, poet Allen Ginsberg, who encouraged me to look Marianne Faithfull up the next time she was in Hollywood. Faithfull had just done a show at The Henry Fonda Theater on Hollywood Blvd, and in the city. “Go talk to her and let her talk to you,” suggested Allen.

Her publicist at Island Records arranged for me to visit her on Sunset Blvd at the famed Chateau Marmont. I nervously knocked on the door to her hotel room, ironically, right next to the suite where years earlier I had interviewed and had lunch with Leonard Cohen.

Marianne answered my knuckles, “Welcome to the poet’s corner,” she beamed.

I looked at her for about 20 seconds.

She was clad in black. Not punk black, but black blouse, black pants and black nylons. She was an image out of Hollywood’s Jazz City music club circa 1958. Musician/activist Buddy Collette once described the venue to me, “where a lot of hip and talented musicians went. Lady Day… And the girls… The hair, in black, smiling… And the music in that place…”

My junior high school pinup girl was now in front of me. She is wearing no makeup, blond, long hair, shorter in person that I expected, kind of a Juliette Greco meets later-day Gloria Grahame visual. Marianne has big green eyes.

She turned out to be a fascinating interview subject. A real yenta. She’s a lot of fun and never avoided a question during our time together.

Decca promo postcard, ca. 1964.
(Courtesy Gary Pig Gold)

Marianne Evelyn Gabriel Faithfull was born in Hampstead on December 29, 1946. The left-handed Capricorn has a dancer’s body. In fact, twice during the two-hour chat, Marianne leaped off the couch onto the rug and sort of did a move, an interpretation of “the sideways pony” dance that Tina Turner once taught Mick Jagger in the hall way in front of her in 1965 at Colston Hall in Bristol, England.

She explained that her mother Eva, a ballet dancer, taught her to dance as a child. I then mentioned that I briefly danced on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand as a teenager, and many years after that, I had interviewed Tina Turner for the UK music periodical Melody Maker, and Tina gave me a very brief lesson on how to do “The Popcorn” dance.

“Whew…Remind me to give you a kiss and a hug when you leave today and don’t worry if my boobs get in the way,” she cautioned.

“No problem,” I assured her.

Room service delivered Marlboro Lights. She also ordered a vodka martini for our smoky conversation. I had a mineral water. The label paid. In our conversation, Marianne was confident and elegant.

Q. Throughout all your recording career, you’ve included speech or narrative aspects to your vocal singing style. You never had a ‘Motown’ voice.

A. (laughs). It’s something I’ve done all my life. Listen to ‘Jabberwock.’ I’ve always included the spoken word. The talk. To their credit, really, the music business let me do it.

Q. In your Decca period, you covered Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ In the Wind.” I noticed you were in one of the hotel room scenes in Bob Dylan’s Dont Look Back film that chronicled his 1965 British tour. In your book in the Dylan Redux chapter, you provide a real cool glimpse of Dylan in action in the mid-‘60s. He wrote a poem for you and then tore it up. In your autobiography I thought it was one of the sections where you and David Dalton worked really hard in bringing the moment to the reader.

A. I think that was the bit that David did best. I didn’t work the hardest on that, David did. But it was wonderful. I wish he’d written the whole book like that. And all the Bobby Neuwirth stuff was so beautiful.

Q. Had you never seen a person like Dylan or an American like him in 1965?

A. Never. Never seen. Never in my wildest dreams could have imagined anyone like Bob in 1965. His brain, but I was frightened. I didn’t know they were probably more scared of me. I don’t know. They were all on methedrine. He played me the album Bringing It All Back Home himself on his own. It was just amazing. And I worshipped him anyway. That was where I got very close to Allen (Ginsberg) ‘cause Allen was the only sort of person I could recognize as being somewhat like me.

(Courtesy Gary Pig Gold)

Q. I really enjoyed the passage when Allen came to London with the Italian poet Giuseppe Ungaretti. They read at Queen Elizabeth Hall. You had spent some time with Ginsberg.

A. (smiles) I find them very sexy all those guys. Wonderful. I teased Allen in my book. I adore him. The first time I went to Naropa, Allen was literally by my side like he is. There was a lot of criticism and ‘Who is the woman?’ ‘Why do you (Allen) think she can do this?’ And he didn’t say anything. ‘I just do.’ And then I came back again. We are very good friends. He also represents a lot of things for me that aren’t part of our friendship or our relationship. He is the greatest living American poet. I hooked Allen up with Hal Willner.

Q. On the Decca label you recorded a version of the Phil Spector-produced Ronettes’ “Is This Is What I Get For Loving You.” A song written by Spector, Carole King and Gerry Goffin.

A. I can tell you that while Andrew Loog Oldham turned me on to Phil Spector and Jack Nitzsche, Bob Crewe and the Four Seasons, the Mamas & the Papas, and a lot of things, the person who really educated me on the Motown level was Mick. I would have never gone that deeply into Motown without Mick. We just played the songs at home constantly. It must have been great fun for him…

There I am at age nineteen and I’ve never listened to the Miracles before. ‘The Tracks of My Tears…’ Mick would run down the bass lines, song constructions on the label, and actually act out the songs in front of me! [Chuckles]. It was really an amazing education. And, of course, when I wanted another type of thing, I’d go and see Keith and then it was all blues. It all kind of fitted in somehow.

Mick and I wore out the grooves on the records so much we’d have to buy them again. For a long time, it was Vivaldi and Marvin Gaye in the morning. That’s how we lived. Which is so wonderful. And I had Mick telling me everything. He knew everything. He knew the names of the session musicians at a snap. So did Jack Nitzsche. Brilliant man. We never could quite get it together to do an album, but at least we have “Sister Morphine.”

Q. May I proudly announce that I recently did a series of interviews with the Funk Brothers, the surviving Motown session men who are spotlighted in the documentary film, Standing in the Shadows of Motown.

A. Oh God…I’m dying to see that movie. Oh man…Oh man… Nice to see the players get some attention. I like the idea that Berry Gordy still cares that much. He cares about the Motown legacy and we’re not just talking about money. There’s something he did there that he cares very much about. It’s incredible. Obviously, he knows what he did, but for me, it changed my life. I found the Stax records myself. I was lucky.

Mick knew the Motown records already, but they knocked me for a six. That’s why I know about the Four Tops doing ‘Walk Away Renee.’ I spent years listening to Motown. Smokey Robinson…His voice…The Love I Saw In You Was Just a Mirage.’ [Sings the first two lines]. The most beautiful stuff I’ve ever heard…And to this day I’m sure some Motown songs are in the Stones’ live repertoire.”

Q. How has meditation impacted your life and work?

A. Oh yes. Philip Whalen taught me to meditate. That was a great help. It cleans. It is sort of brain washing I suppose. (laughs). Not a real brain washing. When I’m home, I meditate twice a day. Shell Cottage is…The whole point of it is one great long meditation and the long walks. On my third trip to Naropa I also learned how to do a walking meditation.

Q. So Professor Faithfull. Tell me about your work and teaching functions at The Naropa Institute?

A. I was teaching lyric writing and Allen Ginsberg eventually showed me a book of one of his great treasures of Japanese haiku. He explained all that to me and said ‘Don’t you understand this is the same thing.’ I was a teacher dealing with process and content. And my other thing, was that I took to meditation like a duck to water that I was always somebody so when students said, ‘We find meditation very boring and very hard,’ Allen could depend on me to say, ‘Well, you’re all wrong.’ ‘Meditation is a very good thing and if you really want to write something interesting, I suggest you go off and meditate.’ So that’s another thing. Allen knew that base was covered. Not that I’m a Buddhist exactly, and I’m not joining. I’m part of Naropa but not as close as Allen is. I don’t have a guru. Allen is my guru. (grins).

(Courtesy Gary Pig Gold)

Q. There has been some books on Brian Jones and kind of a musical re-evaluation of his many instrumental talents?

A. I use Brian. I have a whole lot of friends on the other side that I call up when I need them. I use Brian, Janis and now I’ve got Tony Secunda and Denny Cordell. Well Brian was a genius but he was a very irritating person. Keith really loved Brian. They were all very much in love with me at that time. Not only me, but I was one of the many women they were in love with. Keith and I are still very close. I’m under his wing and I know I will always be under his wing.

Q. In the autobiography, you write some of the Rolling Stones characters in their songs came out of LSD.

A. Of course they did. I don’t think acid is relative or relevant anymore. I wouldn’t do it again. But I think that it was important then, and I think it taught us a lot. I mean, I pushed them away so much. It’s my fault. The door is open completely. I had to push them away I suppose to find my own spot. Much too much. Mick, too. ‘Cause I couldn’t stay in that position. Don’t be too harsh on Mick. (smiles). You’d really like him and he’d support you. He’s a good guy.

Q: Anita Pallenberg is in your autobiography.

A: Like most of the time I don’t remember what people were wearing. And I remember one thing, I think is the White Ball and the black dress. Sometimes it’s only on very clear demarcations like clothed, unclothed, black, white that I really know exactly.

Like most of the time I don’t remember what people were wearing. I remember what Allen was wearing, because often, Allen would take his clothes off. So, I would know that and understand that. And that’s a very simple situation.

Now Anita actually remembers things only through what we were wearing, ‘cause that’s what she’s interested in. I don’t mean that as a put down. But that’s how she remembers things. When I say, ‘Do you remember such and such a day…?’ The way back for Anita is ‘Oh yeah… You were wearing a red velvet …and I was wearing…’ You’d dig her, man. [In 1994, Pallenberg graduated from Central Saint Martin’s in London with a fashion and textile degree].

Q. Marianne, I read decades ago you were raised Catholic. Mutual friends told me you have Jewish ancestors. I know in England you went to a Roman Catholic Boarding School, St Joseph’s.

.

A. My dear little Piscean. My mother and my grandmother were Jewish. My mother came from a line of Austro-Hungarian aristocrats. My mother was a doctor’s daughter. She was a Jewess, those great Jews who went out and did it from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Doctors, writers, sort of like going into Oklahoma. Allen Ginsberg now is my Jewish Mother.

Q. Can we talk about your mother, Eva? She was with you the whole way.

A. She was the great love of my life.

Q. Eva seemed a very generous woman. She saw it all.

A: She certainly did. My mother died as I was performing Kurt Weill and Bertholt Brecht. I was performing The Seven Deadly Sins. And during the performance she died in England. I was in Australia.

On the flight back from Brisbane, Australia, I had a copy of The White Goddess. John Dunbar had called me when I got back from my concert in Australia. Of course it was John, there’s no one else who could call me to tell me Eva was dead. I was at my hotel, sitting about, having a cup of tea and John called and said, ‘Your mother died.’ And got on the plane to go back to England for the funeral and started to read The White Goddess. It’s a 24 hour trip.

There were two people who understood immediately what Broken English was and one was Chris Blackwell and the other was Eva. Immediately. And lots of people did not understand. I would play Broken English for people. My mother got it and Blackwell got it. The movies she would see with her father were Tom Mix movies. She was born in 1911.

Q. Tell me about 93 year old Glynn Faithfull?

A. My dad. He’s also a Pisces. My father is a scholar of Dante. My father has always known I would do it. And my mother, too. I grew up with total confidence from both of them. They’ve never wavered. My father not for a second. He’s had complete faith in me all of my life.”

##

When I interviewed Marianne in 1995, she autographed copies of her autobiography to my brother Kenneth, and to photographer/journalist Heather Harris.

I later asked Heather, about Marianne Faithfull and the sixties world of London.

“Here in the States the number of incontestably hip young women in the 1960s seemed attenuated for such a huge populace of an equally gigantic nation, but vestigial Puritan forces seemed to limit our own Swinging Sixties to a select few female musicians, groupies, actresses, models and activists. Otherwise, ratted bouffants and stiff, ultra-conservative wear were all one encountered.

“Across the pond offered far better hunting grounds for new, iconoclastic young female souls carrying the banner of modernity in attitudes, fashion, creative output, nascent feminism and the sea change looks of wild straight hairstyles and clothes no one would ever mistake for that of any older generation.

“So even we American teens of the ’60s thrilled to the ‘one of ours’ recognition of British and European new icons like Jean and Chrissie Shrimpton, Pattie and Jenny Boyd, Julie Christie, Jane Asher, Donyale Luna, Twiggy, Talitha Getty, Jane Birkin, Alice, Jane and Victoria Ormsby-Gore, all of David Bailey’s favorite fashion models and the hundred plus young XX chromosome professionals and scenesters in 1967′s iconic compendium by John D Green Birds of Britain (haha).

“Out of these hordes emerged seemingly impossible superlative stand outs, and the leading rock stars of the day snapped them up. Back in the day you were never going to see a better-looking young blonde than Marianne Faithfull, she was born with the je ne c’est quoi beauty genes. (And even later. During the punk era, she stood out like a beacon in a darkened club watching her then boyfriend play. All eyes were on her. You couldn’t miss her even with no light to speak of in a crowded audience of 200. And she was wearing the metallic pink boots I had coveted on the King’s Road but couldn’t afford. She could.)”

##

In 2025, the novelist and writer Daniel Weizmann sent me a Facebook post from music journalist Bill Holdship when Marianne Faithfull left the physical world.

“The first week of March 2005, in the lobby of Hollywood’s Pantages Theater, immediately following a great Bob Dylan show with the equally-great-that-night Merle Haggard opening, I was with my friend Harvey Kubernik, who has known her and Andrew Loog Oldham a long time.

“Harvey suddenly stopped in his tracks and exclaimed: ‘Marianne!’

“She was purchasing a Bob Dylan poster at the time, which was kind of endearing in and of itself.

“‘Hello, Harvey!’ She warmly said. She recognized him immediately, giving him a hug and a kiss. ‘Wasn’t that just a fantastic show?’

“Harvey introduced me to her as ‘my friend Bill.’ She was incredibly nice. And absolutely lovely and charming.

“When we were leaving following a brief conversation during which she told us what she’d been up to recently, she made a point of making eye contact with me, smiling, and saying: ‘Very nice to meet you, Bill!’

“It was short but so sweet and enjoyable and unexpected that it has stuck with me as a cherished memory all these years. I was rarely starstruck after all those years in Los Angeles and what I did for a living. But I’m grateful that my memory of Marianne Faithfull will always be a good and pleasant one.

“I don’t think she probably ever fully recovered after she almost died a few years ago from Covid. But I will sure miss her presence on this planet on many different levels.”

© 2025 Harvey Kubernik

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

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

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

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

Elvis Presley will be the subject of a comprehensive collection, Sunset Boulevard, chronicling his 1970-1975 recording sessions and rehearsals at RCA’s landmark Los Angeles studios. The facility was located in Hollywood on 6363 Sunset Boulevard at Ivar Street. It is now the home of The Los Angeles Film School.

The 5-CD set spans 89 rarities – over half of which have never been released in the United States. It will be issued August 1, 2025, via RCA Records and Legacy Recordings, the catalog division of Sony Music Entertainment,

The June 13 Sony Music announcement describes Sunset Boulevard as “delivering illuminating perspective onto Elvis’ 1970s recording output.”

The all-studio set includes recordings of such Presley favorites as “Always On My Mind,” “Burning Love,” the 40th and final Top Ten single of his career, and such choice covers of “Green, Green Grass of Home,” “For the Good Times,” “I Got a Woman,” “The Wonder of You,” “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’,” “Something, “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” “Johnny B. Goode,” “Proud Mary, and more.

The collection also features rare alternate studio versions of late-period gems like “Separate Ways”—widely seen as the most autobiographical song Elvis ever recorded— and the rollicking “T-R-O-U-B-L-E,” which channeled the groundbreaking signature vocal style from his earlier years.

The record label announcement further details the compilation. “The first two discs feature new and never-heard mixes from four-time GRAMMY winner Matt Ross-Spang – stripping all overdubs and delivering fresh insights in the process. Opening with seventeen classics from throughout Elvis’ time in RCA Studio C, these mixes provide an intimate glimpse into the ways his riveting voice interacts with material from the era’s greatest songwriters: Kris Kristofferson’s “For The Good Times” (a 1972 b-side first released in 1995), Paul Williams’ “Where Do I Go From Here” (from 1973’s Elvis), Billy Swan’s “I Can Help” (from 1975’s Today) and Don McLean’s “And I Love You So” (also from Today), among them. Ross-Spang’s stripped-down mixes equally bolster the seventeen studio outtakes that comprise the set’s second piece.”

Sunset Boulevard implements rare archival photographs and new liner notes from music historian Colin Escott, plus an introduction by longtime friend Jerry Schilling. As Escott writes: “Elvis and his wife, Priscilla, had separated at the beginning of [1972] and he was drawn to songs heavy with regret. The first was a keynote address. Red West had known Elvis since high school. He was Elvis’s friend, bodyguard, movie stuntman, and—occasionally—songwriter. Elvis never asked him for songs, but Red would pitch one anyway if he thought it might work. ‘Separate Ways’ came from my own situation,” West said later. “I was writing about my son, Brent. Then Elvis had his own situation with Priscilla, so [Richard Mainegra and I] changed the song to relate to Lisa Marie.”

Once it was recorded, Escott adds, “Elvis’s friend Jerry Schilling remembered that ‘Separate Ways’ resonated so deeply with Elvis that he played the tape incessantly after the session. “We listened to it for three hours in the studio. He’d just look up and shake his head. ‘You guys wanna hear it again?’ And we’d play it and play it. It was a real sad time.”

During the final three discs of Sunset Boulevard, listeners get a behind-the-scenes look at Elvis’ history-making Las Vegas residency — featuring Los Angeles rehearsals from July 1970 and August 1974 with his iconic TCB Band.

Notable among the 1974 recordings are two featured tracks that Elvis never made studio versions of: “Twelfth of Never,” originally a hit for Johnny Mathis in 1957 and “Softly As I Leave You” which finds him narrating a prologue about the song’s purported origins (inspired by his love of Charles Boyer’s narrated album Where Does Love Go). Elvis’ instinctive chemistry with the TCB Band is palpable throughout the rehearsals, perhaps owing to his decision to record with a road band for the first time during this era. See the complete track listing below.

Sunset Boulevard will also be celebrated at Elvis Week 2025 in Memphis – a special edition of the annual festivities, in honor of what would have been Presley’s 90th birthday year. Sony Music will host a Sunset Boulevard listening event at Graceland’s Guest House Theater on August 13 – featuring a Q&A with special guests and much more. For more information and tickets visit ElvisWeek.com.

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Charlie Watts, Keith Richards, Andrew Loog Oldham and Jack Nitzsche at RCA in Hollywood 1965 (Photograph by Gered Mankowitz/Iconic Images Ltd. Courtesy of Gered Mankowitz.)

The legendary RCA studios, a Hollywood temple of sound, had been home to Presley, Sam Cooke, Bobby Womack, Ann Margaret, Shorty Rogers, Gogi Grant, Jesse Belvin, Jack Nitzsche, the Walker Brothers, Charlie Greene and Brian Stone, Merry Clayton, Keith Richards, the Monkees, Darlene Love, Henry Mancini, Elmer Bernstein, Grateful Dead, Cal Tjader, Rosemary Clooney, Jascha Heifetz, the Astronauts, Harry Nilsson, Jefferson Airplane, Electric Prunes, and Arthur Rubinstein.

In 2003 I interviewed award-winning engineer/producer Al Schmitt. He discussed the sonic achievements inside the RCA studios in his 1960-1966 staff position. In April of 1960, Schmitt engineered Presley’s first post-army film soundtrack for Paramount Pictures, G.I. Blues.

“Studio A and B were both the same size,” explained Al. “They were big rooms, and then there was also Studio C, a smaller room. You could mix in either room. The studios had very high ceilings and a nice parkay floor. Very nice. One of the things that made them so unique was that we had all those great live echo chambers. I think there were seven of them.

“There was very little overdubbing then. The nice thing about doing everything at one time was that you knew exactly what it was going to sound like. When you started layering things you were never sure. Then a lot of experimenting came in and it took longer and longer to make records and the expenses went up, ya know.

“RCA had a great microphone collection. Just fabulous. Great Neumann and Telefunken microphones. Great RCA microphones. Plus, they had the great, original Neve console. And they were just spectacular. They were so punchy. There was a punch and a warmth and still one of the best consoles ever made. They were using a lot of Scotch tap then. Dave Hassinger learned microphone technique and how to use them, the most important thing.

“There were no isolation booths. None whatsoever. But we had gobos, we would move around. Like a separator where you could isolate things. We did have some small rugs that we would put down sometimes under the drums and things, but no too much.”

Brian Wilson produced the Beach Boys’ “Help Me, Rhonda” at RCA, and the Byrds recorded a version of “Eight Miles High,” straying from the confines of the Columbia Records studio also located on Sunset Boulevard.

Andrew Loog Oldham who produced and managed the Rolling Stones during 1963-1967, recorded their monumental 1964-1966 albums at RCA with staff engineer Dave Hassinger.

“I was looking for a home to produce the Rolling Stones,” Andrew told me in a 2004 interview.

“When we walked into RCA and we were actually visiting studio B where the Brian Stone and Charlie Greene 45rpm for Atlantic was being cut in the best Bobby B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans fashion, including Bobby Sheen. And there was Jack Nitzsche, Gracia Nitzsche, Merry Clayton, Darlene Love, Charlie Greene and Brian Stone, and Cher. I have a total recollection of Cher. Not unlike the Vashti Bunyan vibe. The waif. Total ‘young girls are coming to the canyon.’ And there it is: Jack Nitzsche and the backing vocalists.

“When you walk into a situation like RCA, suddenly you have the physicality of it. And the physicality of it is so overwhelming that I can actually see it in front of me now. I can see the corridor, the control room on the right and the studio in front of us. And I’m watching that Nitzsche and Greene and Stone session and you know they’re doing ‘Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah’ but they’re doing it to ‘Yes Sir, That’s My Baby.’ (laughs). Which is great because it is something I am equally capable myself. It’s very Sidney Falco.

“Then I got taken into Studio A. Which was huge. I went, ‘this is it. We have our home.’ I met engineer Dave Hassinger in there, Of course, he was doing a session. Dave Hassinger looked like Los Angeles. When I produced the band at RCA, to make them feel comfortable, I shrunk and lit the room for them. I was doing set design even then. [Laughs.] There you are. I do dreams, not business. I think there are two tambourines on ‘Satisfaction.’ There’s a regular one that easily could have been Jack Nitzsche. But in the middle, it was too American for that part and that’s Brian Jones. And Jack plays piano. He was brilliant, man. Come on. The piano on ‘Satisfaction’ and ‘Let’s Spend the Night Together’ was just turnaround Charlie. The harpsichord on ‘Play with Fire’ is Jack.

“In 1964, Jack was the musical director of The T.A.M.I. Show. Why it works for me is the fear and loathing in Santa Monica. There you go. Come on man, it’s a magic moment. The Stones were successful and getting good, and -wait a minute-we gotta follow James Brown? Seeing Jack Nitzsche and Dave Hassinger. It was the film within the film. Steve Binder directed it and Bill Sargent produced. It was done in Electronovision like Harlow, with actress Carol Linley.”

“I met the Stones in 1964. Andrew Loog Oldham called me up,” volunteered Jack Nitzsche in a 2000 interview I published in New Times.

“He and the group had met Phil Spector and he and the Stones wanted to meet me. Brian Jones was in a three-piece suit and tie. It was at RCA studios and I was working with Edna Wright, Darlene Love’s sister. A little later, the Stones started working at RCA and it had a big impact on me. A whole new way of approaching records. I was used to a three-hour record date, and they were block booking 24 hours a day for two weeks, and doing what they wanted.

“I got them into The T.A.M.I. Show. I put the stage band together and did all the arrangements. I was the musical director. I had told the producer, Bill Sargent, the Stones were going to be big. I felt the Stones could close the show (following the Beach Boys and James Brown) . . . Bill said ‘James Brown is going to close the show.’ We all stood at the side of the stage watching James Brown do his act. People were standing and screaming for James. (Legend has it that James told the Stones, ‘You’ll never be able to follow this.’). Then the Stones came out and all the girls started crying. It was a whole new emotion!”

“If I were to try and define Jack’s overall contribution, I’d say he provided the melodic bond, the undercurrent to Keith and Brian’s layers of guitar brainwash,” stressed Andrew Loog Oldham.

“Jack was always the consummate pro. Jack gave us an understanding of tone. Which tone fits the universe? Jack understood microphone placement, where band members sat and instrument leakage. One other thing. Jack had a grasp of, and interest in sex. How to inject sex into the sound. That is a gift of understanding between you and your third ear.”

In 2002, I interviewed bass player Bill Wyman, a co-founder of the Rolling Stones.

“We had recorded at the Chess studio for a couple of dates, a few times. When we came into L.A. we went to RCA. We walked into the studio and it was too big. We were really worried. We were intimidated. We were used to recording in little places like Regent Sound. The studio was like this hotel room. And Chess wasn’t very big either. Suddenly we’re at RCA and it’s enormous. It was like Olympic (studio in England) later. But we solved that same problem. We thought, ‘God, we can’t record in here. We’re gonna get the wrong sound.’

“But Andrew had this brain wave and he put us all in the corner of one room, turned all the lights down, and just tucked us all around in a little small circle. And we forgot about the rest of the room and the height of the ceiling. And we just did it in this little corner. Dave Hassinger the engineer got all the sounds we wanted. Brian picked up all the instruments in the studio. The dulcimers, the glockenspiel, the marimbas. And I played some of that stuff as well. The RCA was our first studio that had four tracks. We were on two and three tracks before that. Jack Nitzsche was a sweet man.”

“I remember the sessions for Aftermath where “I Am Waiting” sprang from,” recalled Andrew in a 2006 interview with me.

“There’s incredible clarity to what they were doing. It was like a linear thing. Filmic. They were vivid, and the key to that vividness was Brian Jones. The organ on ‘She Smiled Sweetly’ by Brian is just amazing. I like ‘She Smiled Sweetly’ more than ‘Lady Jane’ and ‘Ruby Tuesday.’ ‘Sweetly’ was boy/girl, living on the same floor. Whereas, both those other songs have a ‘To the Manner Born’ quality to them. Trying to write and evoke. And Mick’s vocals…Remember: He’s an actor. He can’t sing. He acts the words. There you go. Between the Buttons and Aftermath, without a doubt quite a few harried moments. And we did it in Hollywood at RCA.

“Aftermath works. They wrote every song on the record. It’s like when you go see a stage show or see a movie that works, one of the keys is ‘besides the fact that’s it’s not me on stage, that’s me.’ So, there is a sense of humour with the songs and the records. But not a lot of the other stuff. My life would never be that grungy.

Keith Richards, Andrew Loog Oldham, Charlie Watts and Ian Stewart at RCA in Hollywood 1965 (Photo by Gered Mankowitz/Iconic Images Ltd. Courtesy of Gered Mankowitz.)

“The session for “Paint It Black” was not nearly done! Bill (Wyman) started futzing around with the pedals of the Hammond B-3 organ, basically imitating Eric Easton, (the Rolling Stones co-manager) who used to play organ on the pier at Black Pool. And Brian Jones’ sitar on the song. It was a visual instrument. The fun times were the work. We’re in Hollywood. Some of Hollywood came through the door and I’m one of the conduits draggng it in.”

“It’s hard to imagine Rubber Soul and Revolver coming to fruition in a Byrds-free world, just as it’s hard to imagine Arthur Lee and Love without Aftermath on the turntable,” suggested writer and novelist Daniel Weizmann in my 2014 book Turn Up The Radio! Rock, Pop, and Roll in Los Angeles 1956-1972.

“To dig the Beatles or the Stones in ’65 is to dig that they were arrivistes, class-conscious Euros with work visas, thrown into this New World of spinning neon and Dodge Dart Swingers, Boss Radio, and go-go dancers. In a very real sense, they are American groups, as in immigrant Americans, and the rock ’n’ roll melting pot was their Ellis Island.”

Further evidence can be found on “What to Do,” a selection on the Stones’ Aftermath. An homage to the Beach Boys, particularly their vocal harmonies. Mick Jagger initially remarked during that recording session to his producer, “What do you want me to do? Brian Wilson?”

“No place came to represent that kindred spirit more than Los Angeles,” concluded author and musician Kenneth Kubernik.

“Wheelman Sonny Bono met them at the airport on an early visit (one hopes in a splashy convertible) and chauffer’s them to where the action is. There’s the Whisky A Go Go on the Sunset Strip; De Voss for the latest in glen-plaid tailoring; supping at Martoni’s Trattoria in Hollywood, where Sinatra holds court with his fellow rat packers. More important, however, is their introduction to the fabled RCA Studios. It is here, in the capacious main room, under the watchful eyes (and ears) of engineer Dave Hassinger and arranger/orchestrator/sideman Jack Nitzsche, where that crude amalgam of Southside blues, youthful angst and an unerring instinct for seizing the moment in three giddy minutes, reaches its apogee.”

In his absorbing autobiography, 2Stoned, Andrew Loog Oldham wrote, “The confidence of the Rolling Stones grew in this time of recording in America, an experience that was then unique in and of itself for a British band. The Beatles took over America, but the Stones belonged to it. The Stones records could not have been done in New York in that particular time,” recounted Oldham, “because, like London, New York has seasons. That’s why we went to LA to record. LA placed a tone on the records we made there. Walking outside a studio anytime of the year into the LA sunshine was a trip.”

“The Rolling Stones also started a situation at our RCA studio where songs weren’t done in a standard four-hour session,” underscored engineer Al Schmitt. “They had the studio for weeks to do albums. That was new.”

Andrew Loog Oldham and Dave Hassinger at RCA in Hollywood 1965 (Photo by Gered Mankowitz/Iconic Images Ltd. Courtesy of Gered Mankowitz.)

In July 2025, photographer Gered Mankowitz emailed me about RCA. He was also very generous sending over photos he took of the Stones in his 1965 visit to my town.

“Being able to spend a few days in the legendary RCA studios in Hollywood with Andrew Loog Oldham and the Rolling Stones was an exciting and appropriate ending to my first ever trip to the USA, and one I will never forget!”

During a 2007 interview Andrew Loog Oldham and I conducted for MOJO magazine, he reflected on his 1966 bio-regional link to RCA studio endeavors with his band.

“Well, Aftermath and Between the Buttons, and in the U.S. Flowers were some of my finest hours as Mick and Keith reached the ability to compose whole albums for the Stones. The songs were just brilliant, only eclipsed by the idea that the Beatles, Ray Davies and, coming up through the ranks, Pete Townshend, wrote better. The media and the BBC would just not accept what damn fine writers Mick & Keith had turned into. Wonderful social commentaries that had their roots somewhere between vaudeville and the BBC World Service. I’m not just talking about the obvious, ‘Satisfaction,’ ‘Paint it, Black’ etc. I’m talking ‘She Smiled Sweetly,’ ‘Connection,’ ‘All Sold Out,’ ‘Back Street Girl. The laconic comments, the posed rancour, Mick and Keith’s songs at that time cut right through the picket fence and into the very life of then.

“I’d better stop now or Keith if he reads this might be reaching for the vomit bag.”

Can you imagine how different all those Rolling Stones sessions cut in Hollywood would be if they had booked their studio time back then in New York?

I shudder at the thought…

I went to RCA studios for a couple of recording sessions by the Monkees. My mother Hilda worked on Sunset Blvd. at the Columbia studios in Gower Gulch as a secretary and stenographer from 1962-1972. In 1966-1968 she typed scripts for Raybert Productions on the lot, producers of The Monkees.

I once delivered sheet music of a tune on my skateboard to engineer Hank Cicalo when the office messenger boy wasn’t around, and again for Colgems music supervisor Don Kirshner or Lester Sill, executives at Screen Gems Music Publishing.

The Monkees, May 1967. (Photo by Henry Diltz, Courtesy of Gary Strobl at the Diltz Studio.)

In 2008 recording engineer Hank Cicalo reminisced to me about RCA.

“I had done some projects with arranger Shorty Rogers for Lester Sill. They were looking for an engineer to work with the Monkees, and my name came up. That’s how I fell into the project. I had a meeting with Lester and songwriters Bobby Hart, and Tommy Boyce. We went out and had lunch or dinner. They discussed what the project was about, and they were just about doing the pilot. Nobody knew what was going on. It was a TV show with a lot of music, and that’s all I knew about it.

“The one song I didn’t engineer at RCA was ‘Last Train to Clarksville,’ which was done by Dave Hassinger. I’d be booked for a month at a time, doing just the Monkees’ things. It was a lot of work. There was always this endless pressure of trying to do three or four musical numbers for each show while they were still shooting. We were working long hours at night, and whoever wasn’t shooting the next day could stay longer and do a vocal or this kind of thing or that kind of thing, working Saturdays and Sundays.

“For that period, because of the hours we were working at night, and also mixing, and also going through a very interesting change at that time, we would do a track on three-track or four-track, and then go from one machine to another machine, adding a vocal. We also went from four–track, to eight-track, to sixteen-track in that two-year period. It was the very beginning of multi-track, and we all progressed in a new medium as well. We were able to stack voices and double up voices without losing quality. It was a very interesting period.”

Chris Hillman of the Byrds told me his favorite record in 1965 was by the Rolling Stones’ “Get Off My Cloud.”

“You know why I like it? Brian Jones is on it,” praised Hillman in 2017. “The unknown factor of what made the Stones great was Brian Jones and nobody gives him credit. Yes, he was the pretty boy, however, as a musician, he was an unbelievably good musician. There is something about ‘Get Off My Cloud’ where they went from doing a Bobby Womack song ‘It’s All Over Now,’ straight R&B, to within six months to a year they are doing ‘Get Off My Cloud.’

“The record was recorded at RCA studios in Hollywood produced by Andrew Loog Oldham and engineered by Dave Hassinger, who engineered the Byrds when we cut a version of ‘Eight Miles High’ there.

“Hassinger did ‘Eight Miles High’ and got a little more of an edgy feel. The fact that this was the first time the Byrds had stepped away from the Columbia building. It’s very hard to tell the difference of the ‘Eight Miles High’ versions, but the one we did at RCA had a little bit more edge because we felt a little freer, and we hit a homer with it.

Chris Hillman and Roger McGuinn, June 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival (Photo by Henry Diltz, Courtesy of Gary Strobl at the Diltz studio.)

“Then Columbia said, ‘We will not accept this because it was not recorded at our studio.’ In those days that was the law. Recording in Hollywood then, and at our age at the time, and not being aware personally, I didn’t think about the environment being an influence. A studio was good anywhere and I didn’t care about the technical part if it was a comfortable place to work, and the engineer was quick and got sounds that were good. But it was in Hollywood at RCA where the Stones did their albums 1964-1966.

“So, when you came to record in those days, you didn’t go to Santa Monica or the San Fernando Valley, you went to Hollywood. That’s where the studios were. Back then, it was RCA, Gold Star, and Wally Heider. All those rooms made all these great records. Remember it was all analog. No digital. And Andrew Loog Oldham cut the Stones on four-track.”

In 2014 I spoke with Marty Balin from Jefferson Airplane. The band recorded Jefferson Airplane Takes Off, Surrealistic Pillow, After Bathing at Baxter’s, Crown of Creation, and Volunteers at RCA.

Marty commented about “Comin’ Back to Me” from Surrealistic Pillow.

“It just happened,” exclaimed Marty.” I left the RCA studios in Hollywood and went back to the motel I ran into Paul Butterfield and they had this joint and gave it to me. ‘Smoke this Marty. It’s the best stuff you’ll ever smoke!’ (laughs). So, I did. And I was in my room and I tell you I couldn’t find my legs. I got up and went to the guitar. Bam! In five minutes that song came out. So, I ran back to the studio, the session pretty much ended, they were cleaning up. Jerry Garcia was there, Grace and Jack Cassidy. And I said, ‘Hey guys. Play this with me.’ And I told the second engineer to turn on the tape and we did one take and that was it. And I didn’t think any more of it. Because you couldn’t play it live because it was so soft. I didn’t have any idea about that song lasting that long. It’s ended up in a movie and I’ve done it on my new album.

“I loved that RCA studio in Hollywood. We had a lot of studio time. The label would pull us off the road and say, ‘we need a new album.’ One time when I wrote ‘Today,’ Studio A had the Rolling Stones, Studio B was the Airplane and Studio C was Tony Bennett. The Stones and us wanted to meet Tony Bennett. So, I thought the best way I could meet him was write him a song. So, I wrote today and took it to the drummer who was working on that session. I gave him a tape of it. The engineers were great. Al Schmitt was top dog. He was great. He and his brother Ritchie were great people.”

##

From 1973-1980 I was at RCA on occasion, visiting the record division or inside the studios. I recall a 1973 college seminar at one RCA room with composer Henry Mancini. Hank invited a class of college students to a mixing session, coordinated by Grelun Landon, the well-respected head of public affairs at RCA Records.

I viewed the first live broadcast of Elvis’ Aloha from Hawaii Via Satellite in January 1973, along with several RCA Records employees. Hearing Elvis Presley’s voice and that TCB band through those Altec 604E Super Duplex monitors inside RCA Studios!

I saw Elvis Presley in 1970 at the Inglewood Forum as a paying college student. Between 1972 and 1976, Landon arranged for me to attend or review five Elvis concerts, and meet Presley’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker. I was also introduced to several of the TCB band members.

I had a previous Elvis Presley sighting on a Saturday afternoon during summer of 1967, when I was a teenager, in Dr. Morris Feldman’s Picwood dental office in West Los Angeles near the M-G-M studios in Culver City. Presley arrived in a Rolls Royce, flanked by two big guys. Dr. Feldman told me Elvis had broken a tooth during the filming of his 1968 movie Speedway.

I’ve always felt the reflective aspect of Elvis Presley’s 1970-1975 recording endeavors were influenced by Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh, (January 5, 1893-March 7, 1952), who was an Indian Hindu monk, yogi and guru whose teachings of meditation and Kiya Yoga reached millions of people through his organization Self-Realization Fellowship. His teachings of yoga provided unity between Eastern and Western religions. During 1925 in Los Angeles, he established an international center for SRF.

Yogananda’s life story, Autobiography of a Yogi, was initially published in 1946, and expanded by him in subsequent editions. It’s been a perennial best seller having sold millions of copies, and translated into many languages. George Harrison and photographer Henry Diltz would gift the book to friends and musicians.

In 1950, Yogananda held the first Self-Realization Fellowship World Convocation at the international headquarters in Los Angeles. He also dedicated the beautiful SRF Lake Shrine in Pacific Palisades, that has since become one of California’s most prominent spiritual landmarks.

It survived the January 2025 fires that engulfed and demolished Pacific Palisades. A barge and a gas-powered water pump were key to the sanctuary’s survival and everyone was evacuated from the premises.

By the late sixties, Elvis Presley was looking for a new spiritual and musical road map just before his memorable Elvis…’68 Comeback Special done at NBC studios. Presley had visited Self-Realization Fellowship center on Sunset Blvd. near the Pacific Coast Highway in Southern California and devoured Autobiography of a Yogi from the movement’s founder, Paramahansa Yogananda. Presley and his wife Priscilla also had a friendship with Daya Mata of the SRF retreat in the Mt. Washington area in East Hollywood. Sir Daya Mata, born Rachel Faye Wright, was President and spiritual head of SRF from 1955 to 2010.

In Elvis and Me: The True Story of the Love Between Priscilla Presley and the King of Rock N’ Roll, by Priscilla, with contributions from Sandra Harmon, Priscilla mentioned her husband’s fascination with spirituality. Elvis made several trips to the Mount Washington retreat for sessions with Daya Mata hoping to attain the highest form of meditation.

“As Elvis’ fascination with occult and metaphysical phenomena intensified, [his friend] Larry introduced him to the Self-Realization Fellowship Center on Mount Washington, where he met Daya Mata, the head of the center,” Priscilla wrote. “She epitomized everything he was striving to be.” According to Priscilla, “Mata resembled Elvis’ mother, Gladys Presley.” Elvis would call her ‘Ma.’”

Jerry Schilling is the author (with Chuck Crisafulli) of Me and a Guy Named Elvis. Jerry was a longtime insider/adviser and trusted Presley friend. In 2007 I interviewed Schilling, one of the executive producers on HBO’s Elvis Presley: The Searcher. Until recently, he managed the Beach Boys.

“Elvis was a seeker,” reinforced Schilling. “He did go to the Bodhi Tree (a spiritual book store in West Hollywood that opened in July, 1970). There was a part of our group that did not like that. I was in the minority with [Presley’s hair stylist and spiritual adviser] Larry Geller. Elvis was open to show a spiritual and vulnerable side. He was into that. What I loved about it was that through his spiritual quest I got to know the man even deeper. We would go to SRF in Pacific Palisades and Mt. Washington in East Hollywood many times.”

© Harvey Kubernik 2025

Harvey Kubernik was an on-camera interview subject in 2007 for the M-G-M/Sony Pictures New Wave Productions Deluxe Edition DVD of Jailhouse Rock starring Elvis Presley. In 2008, Harvey penned the 5,000 word liner notes for the 40^th anniversary edition of Elvis! The ’68 Comeback Special.

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

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

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

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

“Horses was like the first cannon blast in a war – frightening and disorienting. I mean, she was so unlike the FM radio terrain in every way. She was literate, aggressive, intense. From that point forward you couldn’t comfort yourself with the old, safe sixties myths. The revolution was on.” – author and novelist Daniel Weizmann.

2025 marks the 50th anniversary of Patti Smith’s groundbreaking debut album, Horses. Widely regarded as a seminal work in punk rock and recorded at Electric Lady Studios, Horses has left an enduring legacy, inspiring generations of artists and fans.

Smith’s upcoming Horses 50th anniversary tour is expansive, with the European leg kicking off on July 1^st. The United States leg starts November 10th in Seattle and concluding November 29th in Philadelphia. She will be joined by Horses musicians Lenny Kaye and Jay Dee Daugherty, on guitar and drums, respectively. Lenny Kaye and Jay Dee Daugherty, both of whom recorded with Smith on the 1975 LP. Smith’s live band will also feature bassist and keyboardist Tony Shanahan, and guitarist Jackson Smith, Patti’s son. Each 2025 show will include all eight tracks from the 1975 album.

I first encountered Patti Smith in 1975 at a Blue Oyster Cult concert after-party Epic Records had in 1975 at the Forum in Inglewood, California. Patti introduced me to her boyfriend at the time, Alan Lanier who was in BOC. Smith co-wrote tunes with BOC members on Tyranny and Mutation in 1973, and their 1974 Secret Treaties. Lanier helped write and played guitar on “Elegie” from Smith’s Horses. It’s Lanier’s horse pin gift to her on the cover of the LP.

I liked the album cover of Horses. In 2015 at the Roxy Theater in West Hollywood, I sat with Nancy Sinatra at a Patti Smith Group concert. Nancy, like Patti, has roots in New Jersey. Patti told us the Horses cover was inspired by Frank Sinatra and the way he held his jacket.

In 1976 and 1995, I watched two Smith bookings with photographer and journalist Heather Harris.

The Patti Smith Group with John Cale. (Photo by Heather Harris)

“It was must-see, must-photograph music performance: the Patti Smith Group at the Roxy, 1976,” reminisced Harris in 2025. “Her incredible band (she had surrounded herself with pretty damn good songwriters to match her unique lyrics sense) also included her debut album Horses producer John Cale sitting in on bass, as in my shot. A total vindication of punk rock as timeless art as well as timely rebellion. Plus, literary to boot.

“My next shot documented her appearance at When Words Collide festival of spoken word and music in Long Beach, California, 1995. It was a major coup booking one of her first returns to the music world after the tragedy of her youngish husband’s (Sonic Smith of the MC5) death at age 46. She was joined. to cross the stage threshold and then reviewed its personal trek, and secondly her band and she actually played 16 or so bars of Deep Purple’s metal anthem ‘Smoke on The Water’ at the request of her son Jackson.

“Flash forward to her memoir Just Kids, her most successful book for truly blending her feelings, her lyrical language and fascinating documentation of her own youth among the soon to be famous in New York City’s 1970s zeitgeist.”

“Just Kids is authentic belated beat literature in the same sense as Dylan’s Chronicles” or Ginsberg’s Death and Fame,” suggested poet, writer, painter and deejay, Dr. James Cushing.

“Belated in the sense that these books do not document the beginning of a sensibility as On the Road or Howl did, but authentic in the sense that the values these later works assume are Beat values, articulated in ways most associated with Beats: resistance to middle-class conformity, trust of the spontaneous, pursuit of altered states of consciousness, preference for termite-art over elephant-art, and above all the spirit of Whitman and his urban embodiment of Transcendentalism.

“Unlike Diane DiPrima’s Memoirs of a Beatnik, which is high-quality feminist porn, Smith’s memoir celebrates collaboration and the secular religion of art. Kerouac hits the road and finds glimpses of nirvana; Smith stays in NYC and finds her own public voice and private integrity,” summarized Cushing.

I’ve followed Patti Smith’s “career” for over half a century.

In 2004 and 2008 I telephoned Patti in New York and conducted interviews with Smith when her albums Trampin’ and Gung Ho were released. We discussed the recordings and other topics, including rock radio, writing, Clive Davis, the internet, Detroit Pistons basketball, and the Behind The Music documentary series.

During 2008, Smith, one of the Arista Records founding singer/songwriters, had just released her eighth album for the label, Gung Ho, produced by Gil Norton (The Pixies). Gung Ho was recorded at Sear Sound in New York City. Subjects chronicled in this audio classroom include Viet Nam, Mother Teresa, Jerry Garcia, General Custer’s widow, The WTO, and other tunes about the economy and consumerism.

Hey Patti…

Harvey. Thanks for the Bob Dylan tape you sent me.

This December 2004 marks the 25th anniversary of your debut Arista Records album Horses. Can you talk a bit about your quarter of a century friendship and relationship with label head Clive Davis, who signed you to the label?

The thing about Clive is that he believed in me when I was a total fledgling, you know, really knew very little about music, knew nothing about the music business, didn’t care, I just wanted to do work. And in the last 25 years he has allowed me to do my work. I’ve done eight albums. It’s taken me 25 years. I don’t have much of a sales record. Yet he never dropped me.

Although we’ve had words and not always agreed on things, he never tampered with my work, never insisted that I change anything and I can look at this time in my life and a body of work that I’m proud of you know, and I didn’t compromise and I’m grateful for that. I had forgotten that one of the titles I was going to call this record early on was Grateful. Just because I felt, well it’s my last record on Arista, you know, I’ve fulfilled my contract and sort of wanted to say that. That I was grateful. We have very little in common in some ways. We don’t always see eye to eye. But he’s really been sort of a patron which is unique in the music business.

Tell me about your cover version of Marian Anderson’s “Trampin’,” which is also the title of your 2008 album.

I listened to Marian Anderson a lot in my own little studio when I have my own little studio and I do a little painting and writing there. On my Marian Anderson record was “Trampin’.” That was in her repertoire and it always makes me happy when it comes on. I just love the little piano introduction.

When I got the idea and it became my own personal soundtrack. My own personal little song going through certain things, the death of my mother (Beverly), working on my record because it was the last thing we recorded. It was just a little song I held in my heart. And I asked my daughter if she would like to play it with me. So, Jessie and I did a benefit for the Philadelphia Freedom Library, because Marian Anderson is from Philadelphia, and they have a lot of her archives. So, they let Jessie get a copy of the original sheet music and she learned the exact piano arrangement that the accompanist played originally for Marian Anderson. Then Jessie and I went in, after the album was finished, and we went into Phillip Glass’ studio where we mixed the record and we just did it a couple of times.

There is connection with another song on Trampin’, “Mother Rose.”

Yes. While also “Mother Rose” is about Jessie too. The chorus says “Now is the time to turn the view now that I have you.” It’s me as a mother talking about my daughter. So, Jessie is within ‘Mother Rose.’ So, you are exactly right. They do connect. (laughs).

Tell me about Gung Ho? The song and as an album title?

Well, I knew that the song “Gung Ho” was gonna be a long one. The title was between One Voice and Gung Ho. And I usually traditionally, or I will often take the last song on the record to be the title song, or the long improvisation like “Horses” or “Radio Ethiopia.” So, when “Gung Ho” shaped up to be such a monumental song on the record, that’s the one I decided to use.

Listening to Gung Ho, Ho Chi Minh and Viet Nam are examined.

Oh yeah… I’ve really struggled for years trying to understand the whole Viet Nam experience. You know, I was a teenager and a lot of my classmates in high school were from low economic situations. They all got drafted, and a lot of them got killed in Viet Nam and I didn’t understand Viet Nam. My artist friends, my friends in New York City were protesting Viet Nam and it took me all this time to comprehend. I always knew the war was wrong, but I didn’t know a lot of the facts or really comprehend, you know, what kind of person he was. And really, what he just wanted was freedom for his people.

I mean, Oliver Ray and I just went to Viet Nam in November after the record was done, and we went there to really see Viet Nam ourselves. When you are in Viet Nam and you meet these people and you see their country and listen to their language and it’s absurd to think why would the French, or why would we even be in Viet Nam? It’s a real country. I mean it’s a people with their own heritage, their own history, and philosophies, their own body language. You know, the absurdity of it is beyond comprehension. And they’re all such a proud, sturdy, friendly people.

Gung Ho was the result of like a year and a half study. I’ve got a whole notebook filled with notes about Ho Chi Minh, about his life, from his writings to his biography, my own observations. I would have pages of clusters, and when we went in the studio to do the piece, it was a field. An obviously long field that was gonna tell this story. So, I had various sheets of paper taped to the music stand, the walls, whatever that I could look at as the music was goin’ by and just grab at whatever. But I had no end of the song even when we went in to do it. I didn’t know how I was going to end it.

So, as the band played, I kept grabbing and emotionally was carried into the end of the song. I wrote all the words, but in terms of the music, it was really a perfect organic situation. And it’s perfectly named because I found out afterwards that the word gung-ho means in its purest form, a Chinese phrase, “working together.” Which I didn’t know. I thought it meant like my mom always said about my dad, you know, “Your dad was really gung-ho in the war. “You’re gung-ho if you’re full of heart or enthusiasm.”

But the actual, real meaning is “working together.” We were supposed to have practice. I walked in and they were jamming. Oliver started this guitar phrase, and then Lenny introduced another guitar phrase and then Tony and Jay fell in, and I was mesmerized by this music.

There was no plan. They were jamming and I sat there listening to it and couldn’t take it anymore. I just went up to my microphone, because they set me up a mike, and started rapping some of the stuff that was in my notebooks and in my head about Ho Chi Minh. And I just stopped this after a while and said “this is gonna be the ‘Ho Chi Minh’ song” and let’s not work on it anymore. Let’s remember it and when we go in the studio we’ll improvise it.” ‘Cause I didn’t want us to keep going. I wanted it to be really fresh. So, I wanted it to be really birthed in the studio and it was. We’ve done it three times live and each time it’s totally different. A little scary ‘cause it’s long.

There’s a song on Gung Ho called “Grateful,” which I’m sure has some link to the Grateful Dead or Jerry Garcia.

I can tell you exactly where “Grateful” came from. I wrote it all by myself. I was in Michigan. It’s the oldest song on the record. Jerry had died and I was in Michigan. I was feeling a bit blue and somebody was teasing me about my gray hair. My hair is graying. It’s not totally gray but getting grayer. I don’t care if my hair is getting gray. But for that particular day I was feeling sensitive or something and I was feeling blue generally. And I went off by myself and like, burst into tears. And I was just standing there trying to compose myself and just shut my eyes and I saw a vision of Jerry Garcia smiling at me.

It really happened. I saw him, he smiled at me and he tugged at his hair. His hair of course was long, silvery and wiry. And I don’t know Jerry. I met him. I just stood there and felt better and all of a sudden, this little song came in my head, and I don’t write many songs by myself. I don’t write much music or don’t hear much music. But I heard the whole thing and went and got my acoustic guitar and wrote the little song down. That was one of the easier songs I ever wrote. I didn’t struggle or edit. I wrote it and called it “Grateful,” as a salute to Jerry.

“Libby’s Song” is inspired by General Custer’s widow.

I wanted to write a song about the Ballad of Wounded Knee to the music that became “Strange Messengers.” Lenny brought this music in and I loved it. And I said “I’m gonna write this song about Wounded Knee.” But when we improvised, these other words kept coming and it became a song that addresses slavery in America and the Abolitionist movement and modern slavery. That’s not what I was gonna write at all, but the music sort of dictated.

So meanwhile, I had done all this research on Wounded Knee and in my research, I read a lot about General Custer. And although I found him slightly, well, fairly despicable, he had this lovely wife Libby who was 27 when he died. And she stayed a widow for the next 50 years and spent a lot of her life trying to better his name. And I just found her devotion touching. I read some of her little diaries and found her touching. So, I wrote the little song.

What about your work in different mediums. Writing and then recording.

Well, I think they inform each other. Sometimes I find it really hard to write when I’m performing, or working on records. I just put myself in whatever form I’m using. When I’m working on a record, every record reflects a lot of study. This record reflects Viet Nam, Ho Chi Minh, Mother Teresa, all kinds of things.

I know you write by longhand. Do you utilize a typewriter?

I’m a longhand…I don’t really type lyrics. The only time, for instance, “One Voice,” I wrote longhand as a poem and I might have typed working on it ‘cause I wanted the lyrics for “One Voice” to be very economic but yet dense in a certain language. I struggle a lot writing lyrics.

What are your feelings about the internet? It is text driven and a chance for cross pollination.

I think there’s obviously a lot of possibilities of cross pollination as you say and global communication. I’m seeing the websites basically taking you on a ride for some marketing things. Arista gave me and my band a web site, gungho2000.com. All it is unpublished poetry, manifestos, photographs, suggestions, helpful and environmental alerts. Fun stuff, but the idea is that it’s a world that extends from the work from the albums. It doesn’t like lead people into the world of T-shirt sales. It’s going to be a place to get information or to give ideas, like learning about Ho Chi Minh, giving you places you can go. Or checking out the Declaration of Independence. Or giving people some cool stuff to see.

Patti Smith
(Photo by Heather Harris)

You’ve had a long relationship with radio. As a kid listening to it and over the last 25 years being interviewed or involved in the broadcasting of your songs. Do you remember the first impact radio had on you? If you had a shift today, what would you be doing on the airwaves?

What I remember with radio was that radio used to be a cultural base. It was a base where people would like… A deejay would talk about how fucked up Viet Nam was and then play Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones, but then maybe play some Billie Holliday. I mean there’s so much great stuff within music and I would have like radio all day long, stuff you’d love to hear. You’d hear a (John) Coltrane song, and then maybe a Rolling Stones song, then you’d hear Nirvana, My Bloody Valentine, you might hear Robert Johnson. All of our music. Rap songs. Not just one thing. And even the best pop. Songs that make you feel good.

You could hear “Good Vibrations,” “Manic Depression,” and whatever. I think there’s so much good work out there but a constant source of replenishment. I used to listen to the radio and it made me feel better about myself. It made me feel ready for the revolution. Or it made me feel that someone was speaking for me. And I’m not being nostalgic. Because I feel there’s always stuff and things being done.

For HITS magazine last year, I asked in the year-end issue for you to list some of the records you were listening to. You mentioned Neil Young’s Decade, Bob Dylan Live 1966, Royal Albert Hall, and Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland were some of the recordings. Are you still listening to these artists, and what do some of the albums trigger upon repeat listening?

The Bob Dylan Live 1966 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 jumpsuit, 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.

One thing that drew me to Neil Young was that we opened him up a few times when he was with Crazy Horse again. I thought they were great. Seeing Neil Young do a song like “Natural Beauty.” I thought they were great and revisited him on Decade.

I listened to Electric Ladyland the other day. When people ask me about current records, they might shift, like what might be my favorite records now would be different from the ones I told you, but Electric Ladyland would always be on it. There’s always going to be Coltrane on it. There’s always going to be Electric Lady Land on it. Without a doubt.

Does Electric Ladyland sound different to you these days and do you hear different things you hadn’t heard before?

Well yeah. Because Oliver has a really good stereo system. I used to listen to it on a hi-fi player on vinyl. But it’s always great. I sometimes have to get used to the levels of things I hear, but it’s always great.

Most people, especially in the music media, assume that you were in retirement for over a decade and did no work. I know and realize things you were checking out and studying 10, 12, 16 years ago have coalesced in some of the very subjects on Gung Ho. Research from years ago is involved in this new album.

Also, I have like filing cabinets of work no one has ever seen. I have like five books worth of work. I did all kinds of study in the eighties. Of course, I raised two children. I was really hard at work in the eighties doing all kinds of things. For instance, learning about sports. I never even knew how a baseball game went.

I had heard you were a big Detroit Pistons basketball fan.

I knew nothing about sports and I learned all about how the sport was done because I wanted to understand why sports are important to the American people. The Pistons championship teams were great. They were gung-ho. They were working together.

Could you see the relationship between sports, a great team, and a band who works together?

Yeah! Yeah! The only thing that made me sad was that I didn’t understand that they traded players and stuff. I was so shocked to see… Like, I would get into a player like Buddha (James Edwards) and they traded him. “What is this?” They’re like human baseball cards. You can’t trade people. What if the Rolling Stones… “Here, I’ll give you one Keith Richards for one…” I couldn’t believe it. That like actually so demoralized me that I had to exit the sports world.

Do you follow sports or basketball now?

Truthfully, I don’t for two reasons. One because the fact that they kept trading people was too rough and all the expansion teams. I couldn’t keep up with it. But also, my brother (Todd) and Fred were so deeply into sports, and that was where I had to learn the language of the sports to communicate with those two about what the hell they were talking about. Michael Jordan was like a genius. I’ve never been to a basketball game in person. TV was the only way I knew. Sports makes me too sad now.

Music documentaries are more available these days. I just interviewed Ian Hunter the bandleader of Mott the Hoople. I asked him about documentaries on MTV and VH-1. He replied, “Legends is all right, and Behind The Music, sometimes if there is someone who interests me. Too many fuckin’ people, ‘I dunno, I was coked out of me fuckin’ brain.’ This is really clever. This is telling all these kids, ‘well, I can look as good as him and do coke all my life.’ Conveniently forgetting this bloke has had three facelifts. It’s pathetic. Shut it.”

Patti, I agree with him. I’m sure you’ve been asked to be on Behind The Music.

The worst. Man, you and I are on the same page! I tell them I got no story. I tell them I have no story for them because you know, I didn’t have a dependency problem, I didn’t make a whole lot of money and I didn’t blow it, you know. I’m happy, you know. I’ve done good work and proud of who I am and what I’m doing. I got no sob story for them. I got nothin’ for them.

Is there something that informs the improvisational impulse when a poem or song arrives?

I really don’t know. For me it is very mysterious and different. Sometimes it’s a matter of what is already within us. I mean, I’m a mother. I studied Baghdad, I’ve studied the Bible, I’ve studied the Koran, so I know how I feel about it. So, one can say well the lyrics there though improvised are synthesis of what I know. But I’ve also had experiences where I really felt and was accessing or channeling someone else. So, it’s always different. And I don’t really know where it all comes from. But it is a very exhausting experience and not something you can do over and over again.

What is the difference in making a record, and then doing those songs in person? Are they two different endeavors?

They are different responsibilities. Doing a record, one is doing something that hopefully will endure. And one is doing it in a very intimate situation. Just with one’s band members and a few technicians, and so it is very intimate, but one is mentally projecting toward the future and the people who’ll listen to it. Playing live you are right there with the people. I don’t think of live performance as enduring. It’s for the moment, somebody might bootleg it or tape it for themselves, but basically, I think of performance for the moment and it’s often more raucous, flawed, and you know, totally done for the people that are there.

© 2025 Harvey Kubernik

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

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

Harvey wrote the liner notes to CD re-releases of Carole King’s Tapestry, The Essential Carole King, Allen Ginsberg’s Kaddish, 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.

Singer, songwriter, actress and author Marianne Faithfull passed away on January 30, 2025.

In 2000 I discussed Faithfull with her first record producer Andrew Loog Oldham, the 1963-1967 record producer and manager of the Rolling Stones, for Discoveries magazine. “The fact is forgotten that Marianne had, between August of ‘64 and the summer of ‘65 four Top Ten hits in the UK. ‘As Tears Go By’ and ‘Come And Stay With Me’ held up.”

“As Tears Go By” is a song penned by Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Andrew Loog Oldham. It reached a top ten position in the UK singles chart. The Stones then recorded their own version, included on the American pressing of December’s Children (And Everybody’s) in 1965. Their American record label London issued “As Tears Go By” as a single that landed in the number six spot on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart.

It was Marianne who gave Mick the book which inspired the song “Sympathy for the Devil.” In the 2012 Rolling Stones documentary, Crossfire Hurricane, Jagger acknowledged his influence for the composition was informed from French poet Pierre Baudelaire and the Russian author Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita. An English translation was made available in 1967. The song is heard on Beggars Banquet, produced by Jimmy Miller and engineered by Glyn Johns and Eddie Kramer in London at Olympic Sound Studios. Marianne is one of the backing vocalists on the recording.

Marianne went on to record more than twenty solo records, including the acclaimed 1979 album Broken English, and 2018’s Negative Capability, which included collaborations with Keith Richards and Nick Cave.

In the early ’90s Marianne was made a professor by Allen Ginsberg at the Naropa Poetry Institute in Colorado, where she has taught lyric writing. Her certificate reads: Marianne Faithfull, Professor Of Poetics, Jack Kerouac School Of Disembodied Poets.

During 1994, Marianne Faithfull had a new album out, A Secret Life, a collaboration with producer/arranger /co-writer Angelo Badalamenti (best known for his working relationship with filmmaker David Lynch, including orchestrating the music for Twin Peaks). Island Records at the time also released Faithfull: A Collection Of Her Best Recordings, and in 1994, Little Brown published her candid terrific memoir, with David Dalton, Faithfull: An Autobiography.

It was Allen Ginsberg, who encouraged me to look Marianne Faithfull up the next time she was in Hollywood. I was given an interview assignment for HITS magazine. Marianne’s publicist at Island Records arranged for me to visit her on Sunset Boulevard at the Chateau Marmont.

So in 1995 I knocked on the door to Marianne’s hotel room at the Chateau Marmont, ironically, right next to the suite where years earlier I had interviewed and had lunch with Leonard Cohen.

Marianne answered my knuckles, “Welcome to the poet’s corner,” she beamed.

I looked at her for about thirty seconds. She had big green eyes. Clad in black. Not punk black, but black blouse, black pants and black nylons. Marianne was an image out of Hollywood’s Jazz City music club circa 1958, a cinema noir sister of Susan Oliver and Gloria Grahame. She wore no makeup, blonde, long hair, a little shorter in person that I expected. She had a dancer’s body. In fact, twice during the two-hour chat, she leaped off the couch onto the rug and sort of did a move, an interpretation of “the sideways pony” dance that Tina Turner once taught Mick Jagger in the hall way in front of her in 1965 at Colston Hall in Bristol, England. She told me her mother Eva taught her to dance as a child.

I then mentioned that I briefly danced on American Bandstand as a teenager in May of 1966.

She was rather impressed.

“Whew…Remind me to give you a kiss and a hug when you leave today and don’t worry if my boobs get in the way,” she comically warned. “No problem,” I assured her.

Room service delivered Marlboro Lights. Marianne also ordered a vodka martini for our smoky conversation. I had a mineral water. The record label paid.

Marianne was very supportive to me when I complained about not getting a book deal. A decade later she had a chapter in my first book This is Rebel Music, published in 2004.

This still alluring Marianne Faithfull turned out to be a fascinating interview subject and a real yenta. She was a lot of fun and never avoided a question during our time together.

I got from your autobiography you were a poetry head.

Always. That’s one of the reasons I love Allen so much and William Burroughs.

Needless to say, one of the things that drew you to the music and word work of Bob Dylan. I noticed you were in one of the hotel room scenes in Dylan’s Dont Look Back film that chronicled his 1965 British tour. In your book in the Dylan Redux chapter, you provide a real cool glimpse of Dylan in action in the mid-60’s and then years later. I thought it was one of the sections where you and David Dalton worked really hard in bringing the moment to the reader.

I think that was the bit that David did best. I didn’t work the hardest on that, David did. But it was wonderful. I wish he’d written the whole book like that. And all the Bobby Newirth stuff was so beautiful.

Had you never seen a rock person like Dylan or an American like him in 1965?

Never. Never in my wildest dreams could have imagined anyone like Bob in 1965. His brain. But I was frightened. I didn’t know they were probably more scared of me. I don’t know. They were all on methedrine. He played me the album Bringing It All Back Home himself on his own. It was just amazing. And I worshipped him anyway. That was where I got very close to Allen Ginsberg ‘cause Allen was the only sort of person I could recognize as being somewhat like me.

I really enjoyed the passage in your book when Allen came to London with the Italian poet Giuseppe Ungaretti. They read at Queen Elizabeth Hall. You had spent some time with Ginsberg during Dylan’s Dont Look Back tour and I laughed out loud as you described inviting Allen to the house you shared with Mick Jagger. Great image and a very fortunate position for you as Ginsberg sat on your bed with you and Mick naked under a fur cover.

As you put it, “Allen, as usual, was on a mission. Allen was trying to get Mick to put William Blake’s ‘The Grey Monk’ to music.” Again, until this book, I never knew you had such a jones for poetry, and beat generation poets.

(Smiles. I find them very sexy all those guys. Wonderful. I teased Allen in my book. I adore him. The first time I went to Naropa, Allen was literally by my side like he is. There was a lot of criticism and “Who is the woman?” “Why do you (Allen) think she can do this?” And he didn’t say anything. “I just do.” And then I came back again. We are very good friends. He also represents a lot of things for me that aren’t part of our friendship or our relationship. He is the greatest living American poet. I hooked Allen up with [producer] Hal Willner.

How did your autobiography come together? I know you’ve been approached over the years and obviously film adaptations are being offered on this book and your life.

It took a long time. I have great recall.

Why did you do the book?

I did it for you. (laughs). I did. I felt there was something in the story that was very common to everybody. I do believe that the details and the individuals are different, but the emotions and the sort of core thing are very, very connected to all human experience. Therefore, I felt it was a valid story to tell. And then again, I felt I was very close to some of the greatest people of my time. And I had a lot of help.

David Dalton came to Ireland for two weeks. He’s a very shy person. He selected me. Such a strange story. Tony Secunda – who recently died, I dedicated my paperback English edition to him – he had become a literary agent, and he was working with Dalton and he came to Ireland. I didn’t want to do this book, really. Much as I care for humanity…

And he picked David Dalton who was a big Rolling Stones fan.

That was peculiar for me. And my great tease. I would tell David at first, that what I saw in him as a writer was that he was basically a necrophilliac. “You have only written books about dead people. (James Dean, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison). How are you going to cope with someone who is not dead and not likely to be dead?”

And being a woman with opinions.

But David liked that.

But I’m sure you also gave a view and observations of your life and art process that were different than the myth and history events captured so far in the Rolling Stones documentation.

It took him a long time to believe me. I have to stand up for David because it wasn’t as simple as that. Yes, he was a Rolling Stones fan, but that in itself shouldn’t be a problem.

The interviews went on for hours.

And for once, you had the opportunity and forum to tell your side of the story. The truth you saw and experienced. You were in control.

Well I didn’t realize that, ya know. That’s what made it so hard for Dalton. He kept saying to me, “This is your book! This is your thing! I will only do what you want.” But I didn’t believe him.

Was it your intent in the book, and specifically this Dylan chapter to be so detail oriented about the environment? Obviously, you were doing a memoir. I know for a fact there are some scenes that went down that you could not invent unless you were there. And, I even feel it on the printed page.

Of course, I was there! I ended up adoring David. He’s one of my best friends now.

Did photos trigger recall of events?

No. I’ve been carrying this around for a long time. And I had remembered the things that were important to me which were always the same. It was always very, very clear that what I was really interested in and always had been interested in was motive and psychic position and why. There were a million things I could not remember, which are not interesting to me.

What was it like seeing the galleys? The first typeset manuscript?

That was heavy. (sighs). That was when I also saw the pictures. My editor came over with the pictures. That was one of the harder bits.

Did you take things out at that point?

Yes. It wasn’t legalities. There were some mistakes and I could not have them.

Was it hard during the interviews and the collaboration with David Dalton to tell your point of view? I would imagine you had to at times be combative.

Yes. I thought it was really good for me and about fuckin’ time I learned to do that. I didn’t want to. I resisted it but I had to. I had to. David is married to a very intelligent woman Coco and she really worked very closely with him and I think it had some impact. It was much harder work than David had ever done before. A living person.

In your book you mention some of the Rolling Stones characters in their songs came to life partially owing to acid.

Of course they did. I don’t think acid is relative or relevant anymore. I wouldn’t do it again. But I think that it was important then, and I think it taught us a lot.

They were all very much in love with me at that time. Not only me, but I was one of the many women they were in love with. Keith and I are still very close. I’m under his wing and I know I will always be under his wing.

Brian wasn’t as bad as everybody thinks. Well, Brian was a genius, but he was a very irritating person. Keith really loved Brian. I use Brian. I have a whole lot of friends on the other side that I call up when I need them. I use Brian, Janis and now I’ve got Tony Secunda and Denny Cordell.

I cut out some things about Brian Jones. He went on and on and made him much more of a worse person than he was. He could only do that really because he was dead. He couldn’t go on and on about Keith and Anita or even me because I did the classic Buddhist thing: I just did a drive all blames into one. I made that decision. That is something I learned from Allen. I’ve had good Naropa training. The galleys were hard to read.

What is it like looking and reading the book?

I’ve read it and re-read it and it’s still hard…It’s hard to believe I’ve done it and that it’s really me and a part of me now. David did a good job, man. I have to say this.

Your book is now out in paperback. I just got a copy. Do you have any more feelings on it since publication?

I’m terribly pleased with it and proud of it. It’s like a child of mine that has gone out and done well. It’s a good read.

As a teenager in England you went to a Catholic School St. Joseph’s in Reading. And devoured a lot of books and studied poetry. But in your autobiography, I learned you’re Jewish.

My dear little Piscean, my mother and my grandmother were Jewish. My mother came from a line of Austro-Hungarian aristocrats. My mother was a doctor’s daughter. She was a Jewess, those great Jews who went out and did it from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Doctors, writers, sort of like going into Oklahoma. Allen Ginsberg now is my Jewish Mother.

© 2025 Harvey Kubernik

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

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

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

During 2006 Harvey spoke at the special hearings by The Library of Congress held in Hollywood, California, discussing archiving practices and audiotape preservation. In 2017 Kubernik appeared at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, in their Distinguished Speakers Series).

The first time I saw Bruce Hampton, he was standing on the tiny stage at a suburban Atlanta “teen scene” venue reading the contents off the side of can of spray paint. This was in 1968. A sweaty, short-haired guy in a button-down-collared shirt with the build of a middle linebacker, Hampton looked out of place accompanied by two guitarists, a bassist and drummer all with hair so long you could not see their faces and all of whom were playing as loud as fire engine sirens. Needless to add, I had never seen anything like it in my 15 years on this planet. Nor had the handful of other brave teens whose parents had dropped them off at the alcohol-free club in the shopping mall. A much larger crowd of teenyboppers were milling about in the parking lot outside, having been driven from the room by the psychedelic noise created by the Hampton Grease Band. Years later I learned this was just one of the many ill-advised gigs the band’s manager had secured for them prior to their signing a record deal with Columbia, which released their one and only album, the epic double-LP package Music to Eat.  (On which was a cut called “Spray Paint”).

Not too long after that, the band—Hampton on vocals and dada vibes, guitarists Harold Kelling and Glenn Phillips, bassist Mike Holbrook and drummer Jerry Fields—began appearing at free shows in Piedmont Park, the downtown Atlanta hangout for hippies, druggies, bikers and most of the runaways in the southeastern US. Soon enough, on the strength of these monumental free gigs, the Hampton Grease Band would wow hundreds of thousands of “freaks” at the two Atlanta Pop Festivals and regularly share bills with Jimi Hendrix, the Allman Brothers Band, Grateful Dead and even Captain Beefheart & his Magic Band. Bruce was, in fact, a Southern-fried version of Don Van Vliet, with a warming touch of Sun Ra. To my fragile eggshell mind, Hampton, and his band, provided an epiphany of sorts—showing me that music could go beyond mere recitation of clichéd boogie lyrics and shoddy playing and take you to places you never expected to go.

The Hampton Grease Band carried on for a few years, then members drifted off to pursue their own musical muses. Phillips and Kelling went on to form their own bands (a live recording by Phillips’ band was favorably reviewed in UT #44). Over the next four decades, Hampton added the honorific “Colonel” to his name and recorded a few solo albums (including the unsurpassably strange One Ruined Life of a Bronze Tourist) and became a major force in the jam band subculture that flourished under the banner of H.O.R.D.E. He fronted several bands of his own, including the Aquarium Rescue Unit, Fiji Mariners and Codetalkers, and served as a mentor to many young, gifted players who’ve since gone on to productive musical careers.

In the 1990s, during one of his passes through Washington DC, where I then lived, Hampton contacted me through a mutual friend and I spent a day museum-hopping with Bruce and members of his band, one of the highlights of my 17 years in the nation’s capital. He was generous, funny, kind and subject to conversational turns on a dime. No wonder Billy Bob Thornton called Hampton (who appeared in his film Sling Blade) “the eighth wonder of the world.” Listening to Hampton on album (other than the indispensable Music to Eat) was not quite the same as seeing him live. I once saw him play a gig with a golf club in his hands, practicing his swing while his band jammed, and every so often going to the microphone to pronounce the word “hose.” Every concert was different, unpredictable, strange and beautiful.

Early in May, a veritable who’s who of Southern rock gathered for a sold-out 70th birthday celebration for Col. Bruce Hampton at Atlanta’s historic Fox Theater. At the end of the show, during the final encore (of “Turn on Your Lovelight”), Hampton collapsed on stage and died minutes later at a nearby hospital. The mourning could be heard all the way to New England, where I live now. Both of my sisters, who live in Atlanta, called to bring me the news, then high school friends I hadn’t heard from in years began contacting me. Eventually, the strangeness of Col. Hampton’s demise gave the story “legs” in print and on the Internet, propelling it even into the staid pages of the Wall Street Journal—providing Hampton more notoriety in death than he ever had in life. The consensus seems to be that he could not have had a more fitting exit, dying on stage like that.

For me, though, it’s just sad. Part of it is, no doubt, tied up with losing that personal connection to my youth, but so many musicians I admired have died before this and the sadness didn’t linger like this. With Hampton’s death, it’s as if a musical force were shut off, like a faucet or a hose. I had no delusions that he still had some musical masterpieces locked inside his fertile cranium. No, it’s clear now that HE was the masterpiece.

Craig Smith was a 1960s golden boy – good looking, charismatic, outgoing; a preternaturally gifted musician and songwriter whose songs were recorded by some of the biggest names in entertainment – Andy Williams, Glen Campbell, the Monkees. Starting out his career on the Andy Williams Show as a member of the Good Time Singers, Smith next teamed up with Chris Ducey in the duo Chris & Craig, then the Penny Arkade, a talented group mentored and produced by Mike Nesmith of the Monkees. Smith’s future success seemed assured, until an unexpected turn of events plunged him into a terrifying darkness. Clean-cut Craig Smith became Maitreya Kali, the self-proclaimed psychedelic Messiah. He laid out his poignant, disturbing schizophrenic vision on a sprawling self-released double-album before disappearing completely. Author Mike Stax spent fifteen years piecing together the mystery of Maitreya Kali, uncovering one of the strangest and most tragic untold stories of the 1960s and ‘70s.

Available now from Feral House, Amazon, Ugly Things Webstore and at all good book sellers.