Becoming Elektra , livre ebook

Jawbone Press - Mick Houghton

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256 pages

English

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Becoming Elektra tells the incredible true story of the pioneering Elektra Records label and its farsighted founder, Jac Holzman, who built a small folk imprint into a home for some of the most groundbreaking, important, and enduring music of the rock era.

Placing the Elektra label in a broader context, the book presents a gripping narrative of musical and cultural history that reads like an inventory of all that is exciting and innovative about the 60s and 70s: The Doors, Love's Forever Changes, Tim Buckley's Goodbye & Hello, The Stooges, The MC5's Kick Out The Jams, Queen and Queen II, The Incredible String Band, Carly Simon's No Secrets, and many, many more.

First published in 2010, Becoming Elektra was praised as 'eyeopening' (Q) and a 'dazzling narrative' (The Sun), and for 'perfectly encapsulating the enigmatic, unpredictable spirit' of the label (Record Collector). This fully revised and expanded edition includes a brand new foreword by John Densmore of The Doors and draws on extensive new interviews with a wide range of Elektra alumni, including Tom Paley, Judy Henske, Johnny Echols, Jean Ritchie, and Bernie Krause, as well as further conversations with Holzman himself. It also adds two new chapters: a look at Elektra in Britain in the 60s and a reappraisal of the label's 70s output.

Sujets

Musique

Culture musicale

Histoire de la musique

Criticism

History

Music

Informations

Publié par	Jawbone Press
Date de parution	01 janvier 2017
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781911036043
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

A Jawbone ebook
Second edition 2016
Published in the UK and the USA by Jawbone Press
3.1D Union Court
20–22 Union Road
London SW4 6JP
England
www.jawbonepress.com

ISBN 978-1-911036-04-3

Volume copyright © 2016 Outline Press Ltd. Text copyright © Mick Houghton. Foreword text © John Densmore. All rights reserved. No part of this book covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or copied in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles or reviews where the source should be made clear. For more information contact the publishers.

EDITOR Tony Bacon
COVER DESIGN Mark Case
EBOOK DESIGN Tom Seabrook
Contents

Foreword by John Densmore
Introduction by Mick Houghton
1 Da Capo
2 New Songs
3 O Love Is Teasin’
4 Folk Song & Ballad
5 Dueling Banjos
6 When Maidens Lost Their Heads
7 Spirituals & Blues
8 Those Were The Days
9 Folk Songs From Just About Everywhere
10 Where I’m Bound
11 High Flying Bird
12 All The News That’s Fit To Sing
13 Blues, Rags & Hollers
14 Quality Recordings At The Price Of A Quality Paperback
15 East-West
16 Maybe The People Should Be The Times
17 Extracts From A Continuous Performance
18 Take A Journey To The Bright Midnight
19 Happy Sad
20 Accept No Substitute
21 Down On The Street
22 Anticipation
23 Goodbye & Hello
Afterword by Jac Holzman

Appendix 1 A 70s Miscellany
Appendix 2 Elektra 1973–2016
Appendix 3 Discography by Andy Finney
Illustrations
Bibliography & Sources
About The Author
Foreword
by John Densmore

Without Jac Holzman, there would be no Jim Morrison. Without Jac Holzman, The Doors would never have opened. Without Jac Holzman there would be no Judy Collins, Arthur Lee and Love, Paul Butterfield, The Stooges, MC5, Queen, Tim Buckley, Harry Chapin, or Carly Simon, to name but a few.
As a teenager, if Jac hadn’t tied his Nagra tape recorder to the back of his moped and ridden all over Manhattan looking for music acts, we wouldn’t have all those great folk singers from Greenwich Village. He fed the scene that launched a thousand songwriters.
Long before Jac ventured out to the Whisky A Go Go on the West Coast to hear our band, we were well aware of the Greek demigoddess who presided over the muses: Elektra. She had a wonderful classical- and ethnic-music wing, Nonesuch, which really was the first world-music label. We adored Judy Collins, who was covering (doing other songwriters’ material) then-unknown folks like Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen. We idolised The Paul Butterfield Blues Band from Chicago, which was so earthy you could smell the dirt.
The Doors became the house band at the Whisky. Arthur Lee, lead singer of Love, graciously tipped his hat in our direction by telling the president of his record company (Jac) to check us out. Love was a racially mixed folk-rock band that broke the mold. Black musicians were playing funk at the time, and here comes Arthur Lee with his guitar player, Johnny Echols, making music like The Byrds. The last album by Love’s original line-up, Forever Changes , is a friggin’ masterpiece! It’s up there with Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band .
At the time, we were signed to Columbia, a behemoth who ignored us, and eventually dropped our little quartet (a year doesn’t go by when the recording giant doesn’t call and ask if we actually recorded anything, hoping there is something, anything, in their vaults). But we never met the head of the Columbia, and I don’t even know who dumped us. That was the difference between a boutique and a giant corporation. Suddenly we had a relationship with the president of the label to which we were signed. Trying to talk to anyone at Columbia was like trying to call the IRS, but at Elektra we could call up Jac and he would listen.
What did Jac see in us? He was attracted to the same thing I was with The Doors. He heard a band that was not only playing rock, but rock infused with jazz and flamenco and the blues. The late, great Ray had the blues from Chicago. I had the jazz, Robby had the flamenco, and then on top of that, you had the word man with Jim Morrison. His lyrics were so poetic, and Jac recognised we were intellectuals playing rock’n’roll.
And there was something even more important for us than accessibility to the record company. Jac had ears. Good ears. Ears that built his very respected boutique label into one of those giants (which eventually brought on its own problems). Don’t want to get ahead of myself … we’ll talk about the poisoned chalice a little later. Jac’s ears liked what they heard; he signed us and assigned Paul Rothchild to produce. Paul Butterfield’s producer!
Our relationship with the prez never changed much over the years. He hovered and helped orchestrate our career, choosing singles, sequencing album cuts, and hiring the most sophisticated sound people in the biz, i.e. Bruce Botnick. Jac also endured excessive personalities such as Iggy Pop, Tim Buckley, the MC5, etc … let alone our lead singer.
When we were working on the first album, Jim got inebriated after recording ‘Light My Fire’, broke into the studio at two in the morning that same night, and hosed the place down with fire extinguishers, ’cos he thought the song was going to burn up the building. Jac graciously paid for the damages and kept the whole thing under wraps, even though we hadn’t hit it big yet. That’s true commitment for you.
But nothing could douse the rocket-like ascension of LMF, which quickly landed at Number One on the Billboard charts. A Robby Krieger-penned 60s anthem that would change Jac’s life, the band’s life, and even the culture. I remember driving in my car when the song came on the radio, and I rolled down the window and shouted out to whoever could hear, “That’s me!”
Recently, Jac said that the hardest thing he had to deal with in terms of the label was coping with success on a level that largely came about through The Doors. Success meant that almost overnight, Elektra was no longer a ‘boutique’ label and had to compete with more corporate labels. For the band, the pressure to play the ‘hits’ took away our incubation period for nurturing a song. Jim wanted to go away to an island to re-inspire our band, but by then the spirit in the bottle had seduced him. There were already too many rummies on islands, so that idea didn’t, and wouldn’t, come to fruition.
So the pressures and repercussions of ’suckcess’ had their Achilles’ heel, but we all drank the poisoned chalice and don’t regret it! Maybe, besides paying the rent, we helped compose a part of the soundtrack for people’s lives, and music is one of the great elixirs that make life much more than bearable. As Jim’s hero Nietzsche said, “Without music, life would be a mistake.” Jac brokered that sound for millions and millions of eager listeners, and for that we are extremely grateful.

John Densmore, Spring 2016
Introduction
by Mick Houghton
“You can never learn less.” – Buckminster Fuller
I bought my first Elektra LP in 1966. I was 16 years old and still at school in London. That record was the self-titled debut by The Incredible String Band, and its sound of scratchy fiddles, whistle tunes, and ragtime banjo was just a little too strange for me. My taste was more for The Kinks, The Pretty Things, The Searchers, and The Rolling Stones. I was drawn to that Incredible String Band album by the weird photo on the front – three beatnik-looking folkies holding strange instruments – and the intriguing liner notes that I’d read in the shop. It was a typically seductive marketing triumph for Elektra’s eye-catching jackets.
I stuck with The Incredible String Band , not least because I’d invested five times the price of a single, but it only made sense to me several years later. Singles were the main currency at the time, and I made no connection between artist and label. My collection divided equally between Decca, EMI (Parlophone and Columbia), Pye, and Fontana, although I had no idea that they were the four major labels who dominated the UK music industry. That meant nothing to me.
Albums were gradually replacing singles in my life, guided by John Peel’s essential Radio London programme The Perfumed Garden and his subsequent BBC Radio 1 shows Night Ride and Top Gear . Within a couple of years I had a dozen or so albums, virtually all American. I was snotty enough to dismiss acknowledged must-haves like Sgt Pepper . At least half my meagre collection were Elektra albums: Love’s Da Capo , Strange Days by The Doors, another Incredible String Band, The 5000 Spirits Or The Layers Of The Onion , The Paul Butterfield Band’s East-West , and Tim Buckley’s debut and his Goodbye And Hello . By now, I’d discovered essential shops in central London like One Stop Records and Musicland, which sold these as imports. My local shops no longer catered for my needs, aside from the odd Doors or Love single – even though, mysteriously, classics such as ‘Light My Fire’, ‘7 And 7 Is’, and ‘Alone Again Or’ never troubled the British charts.
Peel’s influence aside, the fact that I owned so many Elektra albums was more by luck than judgement. I was hooked on Elektra without realising, and only gradually over the next few years did I join the dots. I would notice the distinctive, perfectly-positioned Elektra logo and the imaginative and colourful jackets, and I would recognise almost subliminally the names on the back of those jackets – Jac Holzman, Paul Rothchild, Bruce Botnick – and that the jacket design or art direction was by William S. Harvey. No other pop label told you who designed the jackets.
As the years went by, I met more Elektra fanatics. The trainspotting aspect never attracted me. I was only drawn to the music, and I soon picked up albums by Clear Light, David Ackles, Tom Rush, and Zodiac Cosmic Sounds, with its mad astrological narrative and pulsating electronic score. It was an extraordinary