by Joe Boyd
I had a reunion with Muddy Waters on Thursday night; George had booked the whole band this time. Muddy was up for my suggestions now, so Gillespie’s saxophonist James Moody joined them for the finale and battled James Cotton’s harmonica for chorus after chorus.
Friday afternoon was the avant-garde show, with Archie Shepp, Cecil Taylor and the newly divorced leaders of the white contingent – Paul and Carla Bley. Paul was there with his girlfriend, Annette Peacock, later a cult figure in underground music circles. They seemed like the kind of people I had hung out with in Harvard Square a few years before – smart, hip, middle-class kids, a bit more adventurous and talented than their suburban neighbours. The innovative end of the jazz world had good energy in the summer of 1965. I had been to hear Cecil Taylor in New York in January and the club was packed. The Newport show was intense, exciting and provocative. You had the feeling that out of their collective talents would emerge something central to our culture. But the growing anger of the black militants made audiences wary of ‘free jazz’ and the outrage it expressed. The jazz avant-garde would soon be shunted to a siding to languish and shrink.
On Friday evening, a long, perfect summer dusk was beginning as the musicians gathered backstage. George was standing near the artists’ entrance talking with Senator Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island and Elaine Lorillard, tobacco heiress and long-time backer of the Jazz Festival. They looked up as Elvin Jones, Coltrane’s drummer, arrived. The Jones brothers – Hank (the pianist), Thad (George Russell’s trumpet player) and Elvin – constituted one of the most talented families in jazz, and also the most striking looking. Elvin’s head was shaped like a Benin bronze, with sculpted cheekbones and the darkest of skin tones. He was wearing a black suit with a bright orange shirt and restraining a huge Dobermann on a leash. On his other arm was a tall redhead with pale white skin, a low-cut sheath dress and an expensive coat draped casually over her shoulders as she stepped delicately across the grass in stilettos. The VIPs stopped and stared, providing George’s cue to bridge the gap between the worlds of politics and money and the mysterious domain of musicians. ‘Hey, Elvin, baby, how’s it going?’
Elvin looked over at George and grinned, then leaned down and put his arm around the neck of the dog. Like a coach having a last word with a substitute before sending him into the game, he pointed towards George. ‘Ajax, go on over there and suck George Wein’s cock.’ The trio gaped, then quickly turned back to their chat.
The evening began with the Art Blakey Quintet with Lee Morgan on trumpet. This was not the Jazz Messengers, but I had grown up listening to those ‘Orgy in Rhythm’ records and loved the unique propulsion Blakey gave his bands. The group was tight and powerful, a fitting opening for a great evening.
I may have been alone in viewing Carmen McRae as filler, but I never liked her supper-club style. It seemed out of place as a preface to Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane. To define what modern jazz was in 1965, you could just sit back and listen to that concert. Miles was with his legendary Quintet – Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter and Tony Williams – yet they were eclipsed first by Monk with Charlie Rouse, Larry Gales and Ben Riley, and then by the unforgettable closing set by Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison and Jones. These were arguably the greatest line-ups the three giants would ever have. I lay on the grass and contemplated my good fortune as chorus after chorus of ‘My Favourite Things’ washed over me, the stars came out and a breeze blew in off Narragansett Bay.
The next night we had limos and a military helicopter for Sinatra and Quincy Jones. The festival was a huge success. Most of the shows were sold out, but the changes that were undermining jazz would soon be felt. The smart, rebellious students who in years past had donned black turtlenecks and headed for the local hipster hang-outs would soon be strumming electric guitars and listening to Beatles, Stones, Who, Byrds and Dylan LPs. Some jazz clubs had already started programming folk singers and comedians while others would soon be taken over by rock entrepreneurs. Jazz had comfortably coexisted with R&B and rock’n’roll, but the Birth of Rock elbowed it out of the way.
Chapter 12
ON MONDAY MORNING, WE BEGAN preparing for the complex logistics of the Folk Festival coming up in three weeks. Jazz musicians appeared on stage every week but many folk artists had never even used a microphone. I decided that all performers would make an advance trip to the site to be sound-checked. My self-appointed mission was to ensure that the fuzzy balances I remembered from my visit to the 1963 festival would not diminish the music this time.
In years since, I have been known to climb over fellow concert-goers and run to the sound controls when an artist of mine is performing. ‘It sounded just fine before!’ say my friends. Perhaps. But I know that if, for example, you bring the backing voices up just a little to create a tension between the lead voice and the sonic cushion of the chorus, or add some low frequencies so the richness of the harmonies can be felt as well as heard, the mood in the hall changes. The excitement grows, the intensity builds, performers and audience feel it, though no one can tell you why. Only when the sonic image is right can I relax and enjoy the music, and I was determined to enjoy Newport that summer. With free lodging and a few ‘kin passes’, I lured Paul Rothchild up to mix the sound. He owed me: the Butterfield Band hadn’t even finished recording their first album and already they were hot.
The mix of festival performers – urban folkies with record contracts, Appalachian hillbillies who had barely been out of their valleys, an advance guard of ‘world music’ groups twenty years ahead of their time and professional blues, gospel and country artists who rarely performed in front of middle-class audiences – were all paid the same: room and board plus $25 a day. Invitations represented an opportunity to appear before thousands of the most aware and influential kids in America, to say nothing of the worldwide media. Like knighthoods, they were seldom turned down.
The festival was run by a non-profit foundation advised by George but headed by a board of veteran New York folkies: Pete Seeger, Alan Lomax, actor/singer Theo Bikel, singer Jeanne Ritchie, musician/folklorist Ralph Rinzler and Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul & Mary. Rules governing invitations were strict, deliberations were tortured and the April deadlines supposed to be absolute. When Yarrow tabled a motion in June that the Butterfield Band be extended a late invitation, the rest of the board were shocked.
Yarrow was the joker in the board’s deck, a young man trying to live down his role in that squarest of groups. Peter, Paul & Mary were managed by Albert Grossman, a former Chicago club owner who had become folk’s answer to Brian Epstein. Early photos show a pudgy crew-cut man with narrow eyes behind rimless glasses: a single-minded accountant in a seersucker suit and carefully knotted tie. Now he sported a shaggy grey mane and blue jeans. His wife Sally, whose photo graced the cover of Bringing It All Back Home, was young and beautiful. In a milieu with no tradition of aggressive management, Grossman had masterminded PP&M’s rise and was now engineering Dylan’s. To a stable of older artists such as Odetta, he had recently added the Kweskin Jug Band, as well as Butterfield. His compound in Woodstock, NY, was rumoured to contain a connoisseur’s cellar of the strongest marijuana from every corner of the globe. The board of the Newport Folk Foundation, with the exception of the loyal Yarrow, loathed him.
Yarrow’s request seemed like just an errand for his sinister manager, but it was undeniable that everyone was suddenly talking about Butterfield. His band was unlike any other revivalist group and multiracial besides. There may have been a feeling that it was important to invite new and exciting artists, not just the well-established ones from the coffee house and concert circuit. I was summoned to testify that it would be possible to move the group’s amplifiers quickly on to the small stage at the end of the blues workshop on Saturday afternoon. (All performers had one ‘workshop’ performance and one set on the main stage.) In the end the well-respected Rinzler came out in favour and the racial aspect probably swayed the rest of the Board.
Grossman had flexed his muscles and pulled it off for his new clients. One key element of the Newport drama was in place.
The festival extended over a four-day weekend, with concerts every evening, workshops all day Friday and Saturday and a ‘New Folks’ concert on Sunday afternoon. This year the crowds began arriving days in advance. A field set aside for camping was quickly full and the concerts sold out. This unique event, conceived in idealism and full of the most obscure performers from the ethnic byways of America, had become the centre of American popular culture that summer.
On Wednesday, Paul and I started shuttling artists out to the site. He made careful notes as each played a few songs, keeping a chart of mic positions, levels and equaliza- tions. There would be no screaming feedback, no inaudible harmony parts, no booming basses; everything would be under control. Board members seemed puzzled when they stumbled across our obsessive project. Their New York wisdom held that any group worth its salt could gather around a single mic and get its music across. They revered the authentic representatives of indigenous music but were sceptical of the middle-class kids who emulated them. They sensed, correctly, that the excitement generated by the Beatles and the fascination with ‘sounds’ that young audiences were developing did not bode well for their approach. Bostonians, on the other hand, were conscious of wanting the right balance and the best microphones in all situations.
The day before the first concert, I met a bus arriving at the Greyhound terminal. Off it stepped a small, shy man with a tiny suitcase. He was Spokes Mashyane, the king of township kwela, a penny-whistle virtuoso and the best-selling artist in apartheid South Africa, who seemed dazed by the distance he had travelled. Soon he was sitting in one of the dorms amid Appalachian fiddlers and blues guitarists, amazing everyone with his joyous style on the whistle. In a nearby room, a ballad singer from North Carolina swapped verses with a Gaelic speaker from the Hebrides. Many of the Southern musicians had never shared a table, much less a dormitory, with people of a different colour.
One of the performances I was most looking forward to was by the Texas Prison Worksong group. They were life prisoners discovered by musicologist Bruce Jackson, who obtained permission to bring six of them to Newport. One of their key numbers was a cross-cutting song, where four men would stand around a tree trunk, chopping and singing in rhythm, trading verses – and axe strokes – as they brought down the tree. The sound of the chops and the rhythm of the work were integral to the song, but you could hardly plant a tree in the middle of the stage. Pete Seeger asked for a flatbed truck, chains and a chainsaw, drove off with them and their guard into the bogs of southern Rhode Island and returned with a gigantic tree stump. They could stand around it onstage, chopping and singing as if they were felling a tree in the East Texas hills.
On Friday, the workshops were packed, with crowds from one overflowing into the backstage area of another. I ran from one sound control to another, adjusting levels so as not to drown out a ballad singer from Nova Scotia with a gospel group from Carolina. In the crowds, you could hear people asking, ‘Where’s Dylan? Is he here yet?’
I remembered watching the close of the 1963 festival from the audience. Dylan stood arm in arm onstage with Peter, Paul & Mary, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, the Freedom Singers and Theodore Bikel as they sang ‘We Shall Overcome’ while the fog rolled in off the bay. It was moving and inspiring. Young students like those in the audience had been in the Deep South that summer taking lethal risks registering voters and integrating lunch counters. When Baez invited Dylan to join her on a nationwide concert tour, his popularity surged. Then ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’, in the facile hands of Peter, Paul & Mary, got to number one in the charts. The old guard of the folk left couldn’t believe their luck: they finally had an heir to Woody Guthrie writing powerful songs against injustice, racism and war. Their dreams flowered in the idealism of the Kennedy years. The Newport Folk Festivals of ’63 and ’64 represented redemption, the pinnacle of the journey back from the wilderness of the 1950s.
But Dylan’s new songs were not about politics. His former mentors could barely understand what they were about. Like the Acmeist poets in Russia in the ’20s, he confused and frightened the commissars with his opacity. He was no longer outer-directed. They sensed he was slipping away from them and their New York rigidities. Already close to Von Schmidt and involved with Baez, Dylan had a new sidekick, a friend of mine from Boston named Bob Neuwirth.
The radio that month was playing ‘I Got You Babe’ by Sonny & Cher, ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ by the Byrds and ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ by the man himself. The first shamelessly pilfered his vocal style, thereby acknowledging what an important figure he had become. The second was a more sophisticated homage that fascinated Dylan by the way it opened for him a new vision of his own music. The third was his own challenge to the way the folk world saw him. The presence of drums, electric guitars and Al Kooper’s Hammond organ on his new LP alarmed the purists who thought that once they had crowned him he would stay on their throne. He wasn’t the first singer-songwriter to record with a rhythm section, but Bringing It All Back Home’s predecessors had been different, more… polite.
Dylan’s whereabouts were the subject of rumours and conflicting information: he was at the Viking Hotel in a suite; he was at a private house on an island in the bay; he was still in New York; he had brought Al Kooper with him; no, Kooper wasn’t here. Kooper had an aura of his own, with the cachet of coming from the world of rock’n’roll. He had played on Brill Building records! (He had been a member of the Royal Teens!)
By Friday night, there were confirmed sightings. Dylan, Kooper and road manager Victor Maimudes were at the Viking Hotel with Grossman and Neuwirth. There had been late-night rehearsals – but with whom? Among the young urban folkies, there was a ripple of excitement; speculations hung over the festival like a cloud of amphetamine gas. By Saturday, we knew that Dylan had rehearsed with his new stable-mates, the Butterfield Band. The gauntlet would be thrown.
Other rumours started circulating – this time among the board and the older performers – that the pot smoke wafting around the grounds and in the dorms was coming from a particular source: Grossman! The older leftists could not accept that marijuana might be just, well, popular. In an eerie echo of their right-wing tormentors’ view of communism, they felt pot had to have an evil and corrupting wellspring. Grossman was the perfect demon for the left, the moneychanger at the gates of the temple, the commer-cializer of folk music. Now they wanted to add drug dealer to his list of crimes.
Dylan surfaced on Saturday for the Songwriting Workshop in his familiar guise of troubadour with acoustic guitar. In years past he would have worn a denim work shirt and jeans but he and Kooper turned up in bizarre puff-sleeved polka-dot ‘duelling shirts’, a momentary fashion fad from a Bleeker Street boutique. In hindsight the shirts look ridiculous, but Dylan’s endorsement made them mock-proof and they served as advance notice of provocation. He played his allotted half-hour and left to roars from a gigantic crowd in front of the tiny stage. This was the Folk Festival: no encores, the timetable had to be kept, and the Appalachian Fiddlers had to start on time.
The first skirmish in the battle of Newport took place later that afternoon at the Blues Workshop. Alan Lomax was introducing a strong programme of country blues, including Robert Pete Williams and Son House, to a crowd almost as large as the earlier one for Dylan. At the end it was announced that there would also be a performance by the Butterfield Band. Even without an LP on the market (Rothchild was still re-recording and remixing) people wanted to see what the fuss was about. Newport was becoming more and more a part of the world of show business and that, too, upset many on the board. The Weavers may have gone on Make-Believe Ballroom in 1950 to plug ‘Irene’, but Newport was supposed to be a world apart. Events were starting to spin out of their control.
When Son House finished, I started resetting the stage. Lomax scowled as we lugged amplifiers on to the platform and ran wires from the extr
a mics to the sound board. He told the audience that having heard real blues played on acoustic instruments, they would now hear some kids from Chicago try and play the blues with the help of all this equipment. As he walked offstage he passed Grossman, who muttered, ‘That was a real chicken-shit introduction, Alan.’ Lomax pushed Grossman out of the way. Suddenly, round one of the kulturkampf began, with two large grey-haired men rolling around in the dust. Sam Lay, Butterfield’s burly drummer, helped pull them apart.
Word of the fight spread through the crowd and added to the charged atmosphere. The set was loud – other stages complained of the volume – but a triumph. Lomax called an emergency board meeting which convened without Yarrow (who supposedly couldn’t be found) and voted to ban Grossman from the grounds. His crimes included not just the ‘assault’ on Lomax but being a source of drugs.
When the verdict was delivered to Wein for implementation, he reconvened the board and explained the facts of life to them. If they banned Grossman, Dylan, Peter, Paul &Mary, Kweskin, Odetta and Butterfield would leave with him. George was not sure the festival could survive the alienation of its biggest stars and the demands for ticket refunds. There was, moreover, a documentary film crew onsite (Murray Lerner’s Festival) recording everything for posterity. With heavy hearts, the board withdrew the order. Grossman was spared, but the old guard seethed.