White Bicycles (13 page)
Grossman, meanwhile, was upset at Butterfield not getting his spot, and anxious about Dylan’s sound check. But as we called time on the Fariñas, a rosy light bathed the western sky. Within ten minutes of the end of the concert, the downpour had ceased, a rainbow appeared following the clouds eastwards and the site glowed in soft evening colours. A car pulled up and Dylan, Maimudes and Kooper got out. The amps were dried off, the audience area cleared of stragglers, mics were positioned to Maimudes’ instructions and Dylan’s band took their places: Kooper and Barry Goldberg on electric keyboards, Bloomfield on guitar, Jerome Arnold on bass and Sam Lay on drums.
I joined Paul at the control board as they started the sound check. Grossman sat with us as they played through the three numbers they had rehearsed: ‘Maggie’s Farm’, ‘It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry’ and ‘Like A Rolling Stone’. Nothing was said; we knew this was momentous. I handed Paul a fluorescent pink pen which he used to mark the levels of each channel and the equalization dials above the faders. Other artists’ details were noted down on Paul’s clipboard but Dylan’s were in ink you could read in the dark.
Back onstage, I asked each of the musicians if they were happy with the positions and levels of their amplifiers. There were no stage monitors in those days and no direct feed of electric instruments into the sound system; a mic had to be placed in front of each amp to pick up the signal. I outlined the position of amps and microphones and the settings of the dials with the pink marker. The sound we rehearsed had to be there from the first note. When the stage was cleared and the gates opened to the public, none of us left in search of food: we were too charged up with adrenalin to be hungry.
It turned into a beautiful clear evening with delicate pastel light. As consolation for the rain-out, Butterfield was allowed to play for half an hour at seven while the crowd was still arriving. Dylan was scheduled for forty-five minutes near the end of the first half, but we knew he had only three songs prepared. Easing the anticipatory tension was a wonderful set by the Moving Star Hall Singers, whom I had heard on Johns Island a year before. The instant they finished, we rushed onstage in the dark. I went from amp to amp, checking the pink marks. When the musicians were ready, I signalled with my flashlight. The introduction was made, the lights came up and ‘Maggie’s Farm’ blasted out into the night.
I ran straight out to the press enclosure. By today’s standards, the volume wasn’t particularly high, but in 1965 it was probably the loudest thing anyone in the audience had ever heard. A buzz of shock and amazement ran through the crowd. When the song finished, there was a roar that contained many sounds. Certainly boos were included, but they weren’t in a majority. There were shouts of delight and triumph and also of derision and outrage. The musicians didn’t wait around to interpret it, they just plunged straight into the second song.
Someone tapped me on the shoulder. ‘They’re looking for you backstage.’ Alan Lomax, Pete Seeger and Theo Bikel were standing by the stairs, furious. ‘You’ve got to turn the sound down. It’s far too loud.’ I told them I couldn’t control the sound levels from backstage and there was no walkie-talkie system.
‘Where are the controls? How do you get there?’ Bikel demanded. I told him to walk out to the parking lot, turn left, follow the fence to the main entrance, come back down the centre aisle and he would see it there around Row G – a journey of almost a quarter-mile. They looked daggers at me. ‘I know you can get there quicker than that,’ said Lomax. I admitted that I usually climbed the fence. For a brief moment we all contemplated the notion of one of these dignified and, barring Seeger, portly men doing the same. Then Lomax snarled, ‘You go out there right now and you tell them the sound has got to be turned down. That’s an order from the board.’ OK, I said, and ran to the pile of milk crates by the lighting trailer. In a few seconds I was standing beside the sound board.
It was like being in the eye of a hurricane. All around us, people were standing up, waving their arms. Some were cheering, some booing, some arguing, some grinning like madmen. A Bloomfield guitar solo screamed over our heads. Dylan’s voice took up the last verse, hurling the words into the night air:
Now the wintertime is coming
The windows are filled with frost
Grossman, Yarrow and Rothchild were sitting behind the board, grinning like cats. I leaned over to convey the message from Lomax.
‘Tell Alan the board is adequately represented at the sound controls and the board member here thinks the sound level is just right,’ said Yarrow. Then he looked up at me, smiled and said, ‘And tell him…’ and he raised the middle finger of his left hand. Grossman and Rothchild laughed as I ran back to the fence.
As I arrived at the foot of the stairway, Bikel and Lomax were watching Seeger’s back as he strode off towards the parking lot. He couldn’t stand to listen any longer. His wife Toshi was weeping and being comforted by George. I gave Lomax and Bikel the message from Yarrow, minus the finger. They cursed and turned away. I went back to the press enclosure to hear the last song.
There are many accounts of what happened next. Dylan left the stage with a shrug as the crowd roared. Having heard only three songs, they wanted ‘mooooooooore’, and some, certainly, were booing. They had been taken by surprise by the volume and aggression of the music. Some loved it, some hated it, most were amazed, astonished and energized by it. It was something we take for granted now, but utterly novel then: non-linear lyrics, an attitude of total contempt for expectation and established values, accompanied by screaming blues guitar and a powerful rhythm section, played at ear-splitting volume by young kids. The Beatles were still singing love songs in 1965 while the Stones played a sexy brand of blues-rooted pop. This was different. This was the Birth of Rock. So many taste crimes have been committed in rock’s name since then that it might be questionable to count this moment as a triumph, but it certainly felt like one in July 1965.
Yarrow appeared onstage, an inane imitation of a showbiz MC. ‘Do you want to hear more?’ I watched backstage as Neuwirth and Grossman ran relays to the artists’ tent, trying to persuade Dylan to go back on. Finally, Yarrow announced that he would come back ‘with just his guitar’ (huge roar). Dylan strolled up to the mic and strapped on his harmonica neck-rig. ‘Anyone got an E harp?’ Only at Newport would this request be followed by a shower of half a dozen harmonicas on to the stage.
He sang ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ brilliantly, reclaiming the song from the shiny but shallow Byrds version and sending a signal to anyone who might be gratified by his return to acoustic moderation: there would be no ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’ tonight. Dylan had left the didactic world of political song behind. He was singing now about his decadent, self-absorbed, brilliant internal life. He finished with ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’, spitting the lyrics out contemptuously in the direction of the old guard.
After the intermission, fate and poor scheduling conspired to ensure that a sequence of tired, hackneyed representatives of the ‘New York school’ was paraded before the exhausted audience: Oscar Brand, Ronnie Gilbert, Len Chandler, and finally Peter, Paul & Mary. Even PP&M’s fans seemed to sense they were watching something whose time had passed.
Backstage the atmosphere was sombre and silent, older performers in one area, younger ones in another. The significance of many watershed events is apparent only in retrospect; this was clear at the time. The old guard hung their heads in defeat while the young, far from being triumphant, were chastened. They realized that in their victory lay the death of something wonderful. The rebels were like children who had been looking for something to break and realized, as they looked at the pieces, what a beautiful thing it had been. The festival would never be the same, nor would popular music and nor would ‘youth culture’. 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.
The two camps could not even bear to discuss an alternative finale to ‘We Shall Overcome’, so George had to come up with something. He played piano while an odd mixture of singers tackled ‘When The Saints Go Marching In’. Spokes Mashyane took a penny-whistle solo. Backstage security had dissolved: on one side of the stage was a fat Providence disc jockey doing the jerk with Joan Baez. It looked horrible, a parody of the moving finales of previous years. I spotted Pete Seeger in unlikely conversation with Mel Lyman, the first real contact between the factions. Seeger asked me to ensure that the stage lights would be turned off at the end and one mic left live on stage.
The lights went down, work lights came on at the exits and people started to file out. Mel came out and sat on the edge of the stage in the dark, pulled out a harmonica and started to play ‘Rock Of Ages’. It echoed out over the emptying arena without anyone being able to see where it was coming from.
Mel was many things, not least a skilful manipulator of people. He had told the Jug Band that day he was leaving, reportedly to live in Woodstock as the Grossman compound’s marijuana curator. Soon he would start his sinister ‘Avatar’ cult at Fort Hill in Roxbury, near Boston. But he was always a wonderful harmonica player: not a blues man like Butterfield, but an Appalachian mountain player, translating the ‘high lonesome’ sound of old-time vocal styles into the mouth harp. By the time he finished the first chorus of the old hymn, people backstage and in the audience had stopped wherever they were to listen. He kept playing, the melody becoming more moving with each repetition. People on both sides of the divide were crying quietly. After about ten minutes, he brought it to a close, put the mic down on the edge of the stage, got up and walked off. No one clapped. People embraced, comforting one another, then slowly gathered their belongings and went off into the night.
The old guard, I think, mostly went to bed. The rest of us gathered at a bar where Butterfield’s rhythm section set up to play. As people began to dance, the sombre atmosphere evaporated. The beer flowed, the party got wilder, the dancing more frenetic, and Sam and Jerome never flagged as different singers and musicians came and went. When I left near dawn, it was still going strong. I drove back to my mansion maid’s room, thinking sadly about Pete Seeger. I doubted he would ever come to sympathize with what had happened. There was no point wondering whether it was for the better. All we could do was to ride its ramifications into the future.
PAUL REPAID ME IN FULL for the Butterfield tip by getting me a job. I thought I had blown my chances with Elektra when I got drunk at a party and told Jac Holzman what I thought of his European set-up, but in September Paul summoned me to the office. Holzman had decided it was time to open a London office and called my bluff by offering me the job of running it.
I gave George my notice and started spending afternoons at Elektra discussing budgets, tours, distribution deals and promotion. What excited me most was a project Paul was working on, a typically Rothchild combination of creativity and pragmatism. Our abortive folk-rock group had spawned the songwriting team of Sebastian and Yanovsky, which had evolved into the Lovin’ Spoonful. Before signing with the Brill Building sharks at Kama Sutra Records they threw Paul a consolation bone of four tracks. Adding out-takes from the first pass at a Butterfield album and some tracks by other Elektra artists gave Paul almost enough for an electric sequel to his successful acoustic
Blues Project
album of the year before. I volunteered to finish it off for him with the British blues band I would sign as soon as I landed in London. Holzman was worried I was treating it as a scouting job, when he wanted me to focus on promoting Judy Collins, Phil Ochs, Tom Rush and Butterfield in England. But Rothchild loved the idea so he couldn’t object.
I was sitting in Holzman’s office the evening before I left for London when the lights started to flicker. Jac punched the intercom: ‘What are you clowns in mastering doing fucking with the power supply?’ Just then I glanced out of the twenty-second-floor window towards the East River and saw an invisible hand turn off all the lights in Queens. The giant footsteps marched down the East River switching off Yorkville, Murray Hill and the Lower East Side in turn, then Brooklyn, leaving just the Pan Am building lit. It flickered, then went dark: the great New York blackout of 1965.
I spent the evening walking the crowded streets and drinking in candlelit East Village bars with a friend who had just bought a loft in the unpromising Cast Iron district – soon to be known as SoHo. Kids with flashlights directed traffic while the city partied in the most neighbourly atmosphere. When the next blackout came along a dozen years later, there was looting all over the city and people hid behind locked doors.
Once in London, I set out to find my blues band. A month of scouring West End clubs and the pages of
Melody
Maker
brought me to the conclusion that the good bands were all taken. No one wanted to be Dick Rowe – the Decca A&R man who turned down the Beatles. If a band was halfway decent, they quickly got signed. In this ‘tight little island’, there were no American-style wide-open spaces filled with yearning unknowns avidly honing their chops.
I was beginning to regret my hubris when rescue arrived in the form of Paul Jones, lead singer with Manfred Mann. I had seen him singing ‘Do Wah Diddy’ on
Top of the
Pops
, but beneath the matinee-idol looks was a serious music fan, with a relentless energy and charm that reminded me of fellow harmonica player John Sebastian. He had spent his own money recording a Guyanan gospel singer named Ram John Holder and wanted me to sign him to Elektra. I glossed over the fact that Ram John didn’t do that much for me and changed the subject to my quest for a blues band. ‘What are you wasting your time for?’ he said. ‘Let’s put together an all-star group! Everyone would love to be on a record with Butterfield and the Spoonful!’ On the back of an envelope we made up a wish list: Clapton on guitar, that was obvious; I insisted on Steve Winwood for one vocalist; Jones would play harmonica and sing a track; we agreed on a rhythm section of Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker; and Paul threw in Ben Palmer on piano to round it off.