Elektra Records 75th Anniversary

By Harvey Kubernik

 

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’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.

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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.”

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.”

 

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

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.

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.”

 

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“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.

 

“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.

“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.

“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.”

 

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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.

 

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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.

“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.”

 

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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.

 

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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.”

 

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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).

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