When the Music's Over: Jac Holzman Tells the Elektra Records Story
Read as a classic tale of either rock 'n' roll profligacy or rock 'n' roll idiocy, that's the sort of insider's anecdote that makes Holzman's autobiography (written with Gavan Daws) fitfully interesting, if you like rock history. First published in '98 to very little notice?I missed it as well?Follow the Music has been reissued as a large-format softcover, packaged with a CD of 26 non-rock Elektra tracks (FirstMedia, 441 pages, $18.95), to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Holzman's founding Elektra.
Every autobiography has to be read with an eye to the frailties of memory and the temptations of ego. That goes double for autobiographies that are the vanity projects of rich and successful businesspeople. You have to read between a lot of lines when reading a memoir like Follow the Music or Trump's The Art of the Deal or Richard Branson's Losing My Virginity (even though Holzman never played in their billionaires' league). You also have to skim a lot of pages; rich and successful people are often under the impression that every picayune detail of their private lives and business dealings makes for a gripping read. There are chapters in Follow the Music devoted to the decor and furniture in Elektra's offices. Skimming is not only suggested, but pretty much required.
I like the unusual structure Holzman and Daws chose for the narrative, intersplicing chunks of Holzman's first-person memories with Please Kill Me-style oral history in the form of interviews with performers (Eric Burdon, former Doors, Jackson Browne, Judy Collins, many others), colleagues, employees (like the always-entertaining Danny Fields), and even a few not very sympathetic rivals (like the always-dickheadly David Geffen). Although Holzman's perspective definitely dominates, the presence of all those other voices keeps things livelier than they would have been otherwise.
Born in 1931, Holzman grew up comfortably on the Upper East Side, a wealthy doctor's son. As a kid he developed a geek's fascination with hi-fi and radio, which in some ways he never outgrew. He was still a student at St. John's College in Annapolis when he put out the first Elektra LP in 1951. It was "longhair" music, but not in the sense that the word would later have: 500 copies of New Songs by the modern composer John Gruen.
A certain reputation for the highbrow stuck with the label for the rest of its existence under Holzman. Throughout the 50s and well into the 60s, Elektra was mostly a folk label: lots of stuff like Theodore Bikel and the Irish Rovers at first, getting a little hipper later with stars like Judy Collins, Phil Ochs and Tim Buckley. Holzman spun off the great Nonesuch label to house his continuing interest in highbrow and classical music. But his heart was in the folk music world. He lived and worked in the Village, always surrounded by the whole Dylan-Ochs-Collins crowd. His immersion in that scene provides some nice anecdotes, even if some of them?Dylan at Newport '65, for example?didn't exactly need retelling at this late date.
It wasn't until the mid-60s that Holzman developed a simultaneous infatuation with L.A. and hankering to jump on the exploding rock market. There are some fine little vignettes here about the burgeoning L.A. rock scene?the Byrds, the go-go girls, the instant hippies, the scenes in clubs like the Sea Witch and Bido Lito's and the Trip. L.A. hipsters Love were the first rock band Holzman signed, after unsuccessfully wooing the Lovin' Spoonful back in New York. Next to Jim Morrison, Arthur Lee would remain about the most colorful character the somewhat formal Holzman ever got next to. Lee's refusal to travel far from his dope dealer ruined the band for touring, which arguably had a lot to do with limiting its success. Almost 40 years later, Lee continues to be a wild-ass; last I read of him, he was in jail for some sort of firearms violation.
The Doors came next, and proved to be Elektra's biggest and longest-lived success in the rock market. A large middle section of Follow the Music retails Jim Morrison stories, many of them rather shopworn by now. If I never read Ray Manzarek spouting self-serving, epic gibberish about the Lizard King again I'll be happy. Eric Burdon can stop retelling his Morrison stories, too, though I like the one where he claims to have fired a .44 Magnum at the ceiling of his rented Hollywood villa to get a lolling Morrison and his gaggle of adoring groupies to clear the premises after one of those nonstop drug parties. There's also an anecdote about Morrison invading Elektra's L.A. offices and smashing a secretary's typewriter, wherein the outrage felt by Holzman and staff is a pointed reminder of what geeks and nerds the music industry's behind-the-scenes people tend to be.
Elektra's most notable forays into really hard rock?the MC5 and Stooges?were aberrations instigated by "house hippie" Danny Fields during his brief career there. (David Peel's Have a Marijuana was another one of Fields' ideas.) He relates some characteristically pithy and funny tales, like one about how Janis Joplin was always "screwing my assistant. I had to fire him for fucking her when I needed him to work for Judy [Collins]." By contrast, he says that Collins was "to me the essence of upper bohemia. She made pots and she was in all these movements and she slept with who she wanted to."
Soon enough, the MC5, the Stooges and Fields would all have been bounced from Elektra, which never knew how to deal with any of them. As the 60s bled into the 70s, the label settled down to the kinds of softer sounds Holzman and his minions always seemed more comfortable with. Elektra's last years under Holzman were, to me, esthetically its low point, as it did its best to make 70s music bland and phony through the likes of Carly Simon, Harry Chapin and the New Seekers ("I'd like to teach the world to sing...") and the abomination that was Bread. Only Queen slightly redeems the period musically. In terms of stories to tell, these people are as uninteresting as their music, with the possible exception that it's sort of perversely fascinating to see what a ditzy pain in the ass Simon seems to have been.
But Holzman was tired of it all by then anyway. In 1970 he sold Elektra to Warner (the negotiations are described here at numbing length), where it would be swallowed into the corporate WEA (Warner Elektra Atlantic) maw after nearly two decades run as one of the world's premier independent record labels. Geffen came in, fired Holzman's old loyalists and corporatized the show; Holzman collected his millions and almost literally sailed off into the sunset, moving to a just-built dream home in Hawaii in 1973. Ironically, one of his last acts at Elektra was in some ways his most authentically rock 'n' roll gesture: he and Lenny Kaye put together the great garage rock compilation Nuggets.
The CD that comes with this new edition spans from the label's totally folky and hootenanny 50s to some 60s tracks from the Butterfield Blues Band, Tim Buckley, the Incredible String Band and others. It's interesting that there's no rock on it, though I guess that'd be as much a function of licensing fees as Holzman's continuing musical predilections.
On Friday at 1 p.m., Pollack will conduct an "Author's Lunch" at Katz's Deli. Asked what this means, he explains that he and whoever shows up will "sit around, eat our lunches and talk about literature." Also, after mcsweeneys.net announced that a planned Saturday evening gig fell through, a number of local readers e-mailed offers to host a Pollack reading in their apartments. Check the website for the latest on that.
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Jeff Koyen is one of the sweetest, mildest lambs in the New York Press fold. The office wag who nicknamed him "Dolfy" must have been reading an issue of his zine Crank at the time. In the office Jeff is meek and quiet as a titmouse; Crank is where he lets his demons out to play. In a zine world rich with bitter, blackhearted misanthropes, Crank, which Koyen began in 1994, always stood out as a beacon of bleakness and rage.
Jeff has just published Crank #7 (150 pages, $10), after a roughly three-year hiatus filled with marriage, divorce, his father's stroke and other doleful distractions he describes in detail here. He swears it's the final issue, at least in print mode. It's jam-packed?besides the above, there's Japanese kiddie porn, a visit with a self-proclaimed messiah, lessons in self-trepanation, "Teenage Misfit Revisionism," serial killers, online Christians, the Potato City Motor Inn, a guy who drinks beer with his feet, numerous vicious rants about the state of zine culture, much more.
That's because, along with volume 7, Koyen has reprinted Crank's little-seen first three volumes. He sandwiched them all between handsome sheet-metal covers, duct-taped and hand-stitched. A fan made him a metal die of the Crank logo, which Koyen stamped into the cover, whanging it with a hammer. Happily for his neighbors, he only had to do that 265 times for this limited edition, exclusively for sale in New York at See Hear (59 E. 7th St., betw. 1st & 2nd Aves., 505-9781). Crank lives on as a website, the very funny and attractive crank.com.
Also, Fantagraphics has just released Evil Eye No. 6 (24 pages, $2.95) by comics artist Richard Sala, who illustrates "Taki's Top Drawer." Though drawing in that same neat, old-fashioned style he uses here, when telling his own stories Sala heads straight into Weird Tales mock-horror territory. ([www.fantagraphics.com](http://www.fantagraphics.com))