Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry

by Gareth Murphy

  Andrew Loog Oldham was so impressed, he was moved to write a review in Disc and Music Week, saying, “Whether he likes it or not, this man is so commercial and has his finger on the pulse just that little bit ahead of everybody else, which makes him unique. ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ is the most fantastic thing he’s done, a Dylan version of ‘Twist and Shout’ with a little Tamla-Motown thrown in.” Although Dylan wasn’t in the same sales league as the Beatles or the Stones, he knew he was ahead of his contemporaries in that other contest for artistic resonance. He would repeat to his journalist friend Al Aronowitz, “You’ve got to be psychically armed,” taunting him, “Why don’t you ask Mick Jagger if he thinks he’s psychically armed?”

  Just five days after the release of “Like a Rolling Stone,” Dylan performed his now-legendary electric set at the Newport Folk Festival of 1965. The first to understand the significance of this little event were, not surprisingly, the professional record men watching backstage.

  A case in point is Jac Holzman, owner of Elektra, which had become a leading force in folk music thanks to Theo Bikel, Judy Collins, and Tom Paxton. Holzman had spent the day hanging out backstage with Pete Seeger, Bikel, and the Solomon brothers, who headed Vanguard. He was particularly excited as evening neared because members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, one of Elektra’s newest signatures, were providing the backbone of Dylan’s band. Holzman recalled, “I had attended the rehearsal, so I knew what to expect. But what I did not expect was the negative reaction from the folk fans.”

  As Holzman took photos from the crowd of Dylan performing “Maggie’s Farm,” “the hair on the back of my neck stood up and it was real clear to me you had to go here. That was the point at which I got it as religion … It was of such intensity that it almost lifted me off the ground. I started tingling all over … A thing clicked in my head because his lyrics were so mature—you can think and you can boogie at the same time … So, I just made up my mind. I was gonna go more aggressively after rock. I saw the future for Elektra.”

  Interestingly, the man who provided Holzman with an inside track was Elektra’s new producer Paul Rothchild, the concert’s sound man. “That night at Newport was as clear as crystal,” said Rothchild. “It’s the end of one era and the beginning of another.” Having been poached by Holzman from a folk label called Prestige, Rothchild not only spotted the Butterfield Blues Band in Chicago but added its fiery electric guitarist, Mike Bloomfield. “Paul Rothchild was on the street more than me,” admitted Holzman. “Paul came from the Boston area, had broad and deep music smarts, smoked dope, and was exactly the right guy at the right time … He carried himself well—the Borsalino hat, the leather coat … He was the perfect choice to attract artists—he was one of them.”

  Tension between the traditionalists and the modernists had begun brewing earlier that day when festival organizer Alan Lomax walked onstage and introduced the Butterfield Blues Band. “Today you’ve been hearing great music from the great blues players. Now you’re going to hear a group of young boys from Chicago with electric instruments. Let’s see if they can play this hardware at all.” As Lomax left the stage, Butterfield and Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman, snapped back, “That was a real chicken-shit introduction, Alan.” Lomax pushed Grossman, provoking an ugly altercation that Jac Holzman described as “two overweight and out-of-shape growlers rolling in the dirt.”

  Enraged, Alan Lomax tried to ban Grossman from the festival, claiming he was the source of drugs in the artists’ lodge. However, the supreme boss, George Wein, halted Lomax’s efforts, wisely arguing that the supermanager could plunge the festival into chaos. When Bob Dylan launched into “Maggie’s Farm,” Paul Rothchild’s stagehand, Joe Boyd, found himself running messages between both camps. Backstage, Alan Lomax, Pete Seeger, and Theo Bikel ordered Boyd to “tell them the sound has got to be turned down. That’s an order from the board.” Boyd jumped over the fence to the mixing desk, where Rothchild, Grossman, and folk star Peter Yarrow were guarding the volume control.

  “Tell Alan the board is adequately represented at the sound controls and the board member here thinks the sound level is just right,” responded Yarrow, raising his index finger. Grossman and Rothchild erupted into laughter as Dylan launched into “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry.”

  The young messenger, Joe Boyd, would move to London later that year, working for a while at Elektra’s British office and bringing the Incredible String Band to Jac Holzman’s attention. From there, as an independent producer, he began the seminal UFO psychedelic concerts in London’s Blarney Club, which, in 1966–67, launched Pink Floyd, Procol Harum, and Soft Machine. Writing his memoirs, the well-traveled Joe Boyd asserted “the Birth of Rock” was that night at Newport. “Anyone wishing to portray the history of the sixties as a journey from idealism to hedonism could place the hinge at around 9:30 on the night of 25 July, 1965.”

  Inside Columbia, Bob Dylan’s producer at the time was Bob Johnston, a Texas-born musician who had grown up bathed in hillbilly and country music. Recognizing that Dylan’s output was bordering on the superhuman, “I heard him, and I wanted to work with him,” said Johnston of that milestone summer. “He was a prophet, and in another few hundred years, they’ll realize he stopped the [Vietnam] War.”

  “Why do you want to work with him?” Columbia executive Bob Mercy asked Johnston. “He’s got dirty fingernails and he breaks all the strings on his guitar.”

  Determined to ensure Byrds producer Terry Melcher wasn’t assigned to Dylan, Johnston petitioned John Hammond and Bill Gallagher, the head of sales, until everyone agreed.

  On the morning of Johnston’s first session on Highway 61 Revisited, a German sound engineer was waiting in the control room.

  “Vot are ve vorking on today?” asked the technician.

  “Bob Dylan.”

  “Do ve haff to?”

  “Hell no,” replied Johnston, who found a more enthusiastic engineer.

  Johnston quickly figured out that the best service he could provide Dylan was getting absolutely everything on tape. Perhaps a sign of total self-confidence, it never seemed to bother Dylan that some takes were plain terrible. He tried out songs in different grooves, and if something didn’t work, he moved on swiftly and without any self-flagellation. “Dylan was fast, and you never knew what he was going to do next,” said Johnston. “I figured Dylan knew something none of us knew, and I wanted to let him get it out.”

  The logistical problem was that Columbia’s tape machines “were way down the hall. We had union engineers, so one would be in the control room at the console with me, and I’d say, ‘Roll tape,’ and he’d tell his assistant near the door, ‘Roll tape,’ and he’d yell down the hall to a guy at the other end, ‘Roll tape,’ and then they’d start all over again yelling, ‘Is tape rolling?’ God, it took twenty minutes to get those damned machines going. It was like a Three Stooges short.” After an impromptu jam was lost because the machines weren’t turned on in time, Johnston installed two tape machines in the studio and kept them rolling.

  That August, Dylan’s former producer, Tom Wilson, sensing the folk-rock wave, attempted an unusual stunt. Back in March 1964, he had supervised an acoustic record by one of Columbia’s folk duos called Simon & Garfunkel. The album, Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M., was a commercial flop that resulted in the duo breaking up and Paul Simon emigrating to England. However, on that album was one promising song, “The Sound of Silence,” which had aroused some interest among radio disc jockeys. Wilson found the tapes, overdubbed drums, bass, and electric guitar, and released the song in September 1965 without even the artists’ knowledge. It grew into a smash hit, eventually reaching No. 1 on the Hot 100. Utterly delighted, Simon & Garfunkel re-formed while another Columbia folk-rock smash hit, “Turn! Turn! Turn!” by the Byrds, hit No. 1 for three weeks just before Christmas 1965.

  Columbia’s lucky run, like Motown’s five No. 1s that year, was a rare American success in a general pattern of British
influence. In total, half of America’s No. 1 singles in 1965 were by English acts. The Beatles alone clocked up four No. 1 albums for a cumulative stretch of thirty weeks. Getting rawer and edgier, the British Invasion’s second year carried in the Rolling Stones, who scored two No. 1s in America with “Satisfaction” and “Get Off of My Cloud.” In their wake were the Who, the Yardbirds, and Them.

  Back in England, EMI’s tight-fisted culture was provoking a mutiny. In August 1965, George Martin resigned and set up his own production company, AIR. No fewer than seven other disgruntled colleagues followed him, effectively all of EMI’s youngest talent scouts. Embarrassingly for EMI, AIR had secured production contracts with several hot acts: the Beatles, Cilla Black, Manfred Mann, Adam Faith, the Hollies, Gerry & the Pacemakers, and Billy J. Kramer.

  Martin’s first project as an independent producer was the Beatles’ most ambitious body of recordings to date. Although predominantly folk-rock in spirit, Rubber Soul also signaled the beginnings of a second musical subplot that would alter the course of pop music. At the time, Paul McCartney, by far the most technically capable Beatle, was living in the family home of his girlfriend, Jane Asher—a large, beautiful town house where classical musicians and interesting characters from London’s cultural world regularly stopped by. He had begun writing increasingly complex compositions like “Yesterday” and “Michelle” in a room that Asher’s mother used for classical lessons.

  As coincidence would have it, George Martin knew Jane Asher’s mother, who was a professor of oboe at the Guildhall, where he had studied. In recording sessions, McCartney first began taking an interest in George Martin’s hidden talents. As his muse reached toward higher-brow inspirations, McCartney was wondering if he should study classical music. George Martin wisely dissuaded him, arguing that his unorthodox melodies benefited from his self-taught naïveté.

  Still, the race for a new brand of classically infused pop music was in the air. It was while stoned, listening to Rubber Soul on headphones, that the Beach Boys’ creative force, Brian Wilson, vowed to outwit the Beatles—as such, declaring a creative war against Paul McCartney and George Martin. Like Andrew Loog Oldham, Brian Wilson was a disciple of the Phil Spector school of independent production, except that it was his father and manager, Murray Wilson, who had negotiated the contract by which the Beach Boys’ production company would lease finished masters to Capitol.

  Drawing from Phil Spector’s pool of session musicians, Wilson began mixing honky-tonk pianos, organs, harpsichords, French horns, giant-sized bass harmonicas, anything with an unusual texture. Like Spector, Wilson relied on drummer Hal Blaine for happy-feeling rhythms—chimes, bells, and childlike percussive sounds, with occasionally some snare and timpani rolls for dramatic punctuation. However, where Phil Spector had a rather sloppy method of cumulative layering, Wilson, despite the handicap of a deaf right ear, sought a sonic clarity that conjured up images of California sunshine through a psychedelic lens. Above all, Wilson was a highly inventive composer who, like his other guiding reference, Burt Bacharach, had a gift for unusual chord changes held together by catchy melodies.

  On this logistically complex project that became Pet Sounds, Wilson also began using Columbia’s eight-track facilities for recording vocal harmonies. Byrds front man Roger McGuinn remembered how, at the time, “the eight track was in Columbia’s L.A. studio [but] the engineers were afraid of it—they had a handwritten sign taped on to it that said BIG BASTARD.” The fiercest skeptic of Wilson’s experimentation, both sonic and chemical, was fellow Beach Boy Mike Love. “Don’t fuck with the formula” were his fateful words.

  Due to Wilson’s laborious perfectionism, Pet Sounds was not released until May 1966, and by then, unashamedly trippy sounds were popping up with increasing frequency. In January 1966, the Byrds recorded their unambiguously titled “Eight Miles High,” featuring drones and a dissonant guitar solo inspired by John Coltrane’s free jazz saxophone on “India.” In spring, Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde lurched into town with its now-famous opening gambit, “Everybody must get stoned!”

  In the first of several clues that Dylan’s effortless roll was coming to an end, at the end of 1965, five recording sessions backed by his touring band had yielded only brash, nervous material. Watching from the control room, Bob Johnston suggested Dylan start anew in the quieter surroundings of Nashville. Dylan got curious and took down just two trusted band members, Al Kooper and Robbie Robertson. Rounding up local session musicians, Johnston put everyone in a tight space without baffles, though according to Kooper, “Johnston pretty much stayed out of the way and let the magic happen.”

  Whether it was the friendliness of the local musicians or just a change of scenery, the Hammond organ came out silkier, the guitar parts were sweeter and not always electric, the drums had better shuffle and tone, and Dylan’s voice was grainier and sitting more confidently in the center of the mix. Long criticized for his grating sound, Bob Dylan found a resonant timbre in Nashville. One key factor may have been the piano in his hotel suite. As Kooper explained, “I acted as Bob’s live cassette player and played the song over and over for him on the piano in his hotel room so he could work on the lyrics. It also helped me, as music director of the album, to know the songs and teach them to the band before Bob would arrive each day.”

  The final result was a dense double album, which shone thanks to its beautifully written moodier ballads scented with Southern air in the small hours. Dylan’s proudest creation was an eleven-minute epic, “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” recorded in just one take at 4:00 A.M. Specially written for Dylan’s biggest fan, there was even a poisoned arrow. “During the recording of ‘4th Time Around,’” said Al Kooper, “I asked Bob if he was worried about the melodic similarity to ‘Norwegian Wood.’ He said curtly, ‘I think they will be more worried about it than I am.’”

  Whether out of courtesy or mischief, Dylan played the song to John Lennon in person just before the album’s official release. As expected the perverse game of Dylan copying Lennon copying Dylan, almost like those black minstrels, proved to be too much for the adoring Beatle, who later admitted, “I was very paranoid … I remember he played it to me when he was in London. He said, ‘What do you think?’ I said, ‘I don’t like it’ … I thought it was an out-and-out skit.”

  At the time, the Beatles were finishing Revolver, another unashamedly druggy body of recordings whose daring finale, “Tomorrow Never Knows,” was a live performance of tape samples complete with Indian drone, tribal drumming, and Lennon singing surreal imagery through a Leslie amplifier. Released in August 1966, in an experimental sleeve mixing illustrations and photographs, Revolver was a resounding hit among British critics and fans. Curiously, in America, Capitol was proving to be unsupportive of all this psychedelia. Not only were the American versions of Beatles albums butchered into compilations, Capitol was so convinced Pet Sounds had been a mistake that within just eight weeks of its release, the company put out a Beach Boys greatest-hits album featuring all their older surfing anthems.

  Realizing that London had become the center of musical innovation, Brian Wilson hired Beatles publicist Derek Taylor to promote the U.K. release of Pet Sounds in the summer of 1966. Taylor’s tack was to deconstruct the public preconception of the Beach Boys as a surf band and instead communicate Brian Wilson’s genius as a writer and producer. Articles began appearing in the British press about this fascinating, seminal album, Brian Wilson’s personal masterpiece.

  The Beatles had first heard a test pressing of Pet Sounds at the Waldorf Astoria in May 1966 just before embarking on their last world tour, all summer long. Physically chased out of the Philippines and symbolically burned by Southern evangelists, in autumn 1966, they took a long-overdue sabbatical in which Paul McCartney got to know the album intimately. He was regularly brought to tears by his favorite song, “God Only Knows.” “It was Pet Sounds that blew me out of the water,” he confessed as an older man. “I’ve just bought my kids each a copy o
f it for their education in life … It’s the classic of the century.” George Martin shared his enthusiasm, declaring, “If there is one person that I have to select as a living genius of pop music, I would choose Brian Wilson.”

  The years between 1964 and 1966 had been a period of rapid transformation in which the world’s most powerful hit machine—John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Martin—had become obsessed with America’s prodigal sons, Bob Dylan and Brian Wilson. Respectively the lyrical and musical innovators of the day, like Icarus, they were venturing dangerously close to the sun.

  Although Brian Wilson would crash hardest, Bob Dylan was the first to catch fire. Due to impossible workloads maintained by amphetamines, Dylan’s relations with the shady Albert Grossman were souring. Gaunt and booed by audiences for his electric transformation, he withdrew into the bosom of his beautiful wife, Sara Lownds, who in January had given birth to their first baby, Jesse. Whether by accident or on purpose, Dylan jumped off the roller coaster on July 29, 1966. “I had been in a motorcycle accident and I’d been hurt, but I recovered,” admitted Dylan forty years later. There may have been a road accident resulting in a minor injury, but there was neither an ambulance called nor any hospitalization. “Truth was that I wanted to get out of the rat race.”

  15. TERRA NOVA

  Inside the American record industry, a quiet migration from East Coast to West Coast was gathering momentum. Los Angeles already had its own record industry, of course—in particular, Capitol, then getting fat on Beatles hits pouring in from its parent company, EMI. Since the fifties, various independents had sprouted up around Hollywood, notably Warner Bros. Records and its sister label, Reprise.