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Jefferson Airplane Marty Balin

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Jefferson Airplane Marty Balin

Remembering Marty Balin
January 30, 1942 – September 27, 2018
Jefferson Airplane Marty Balin
Marty Balin (photo from http://imgbuddy.com/marty-balin.asp)

Born Martyn Jerel Buchwald in Cincinnati, Ohio, on January 30, 1942, parents Joe and Jean Buchwald raised Marty in in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Jefferson Airplane Marty Balin

In 1962 Marty renamed himself Marty Balin and began recording with Challenge Records, releasing the singles “Nobody But You” and “I Specialize in Love.”

Balin was the lead for the folk music quartet called The Town Criers, followed by a brief stint with the Gateway Singers in 1965.

On July 25, 1965, Dylan famously “went electric” at the Newport Folk Festival.  Deciding to do the same but getting refusals from the folk clubs, Balin opened the San Francisco Matrix night club on August 13, 1965 featuring his new band Jefferson Airplane. The Grateful Dead, The Doors, Big Brother and the holding Company, and Steve Miller all performed there. The Airplane and the Matrix helped create the San Francisco scene.

In August 1969, the Airplane famously played their sunrise set at Woodstock.

Jefferson Airplane Marty Balin

For personal, personnel, and musical reasons, Marty left the Airplane in April 1971. In a 1993 interview with Jeff Tamarkin of Relix Balid said “I don’t know, just Janis’s death. That struck me. It was dark times. Everybody was doing so much drugs and I couldn’t even talk to the band. I was into yoga at the time. I’d given up drinking and I was into totally different area, health foods and getting back to the streets, working with the American Indians. It was getting strange for me. Cocaine was a big deal in those days and I wasn’t a cokie and I couldn’t talk with everybody who had an answer for every goddamn thing, rationalizing everything that happened. I thought it made the music really tight and constrictive and ruined it. So after Janis died, I thought, I’m not gonna go onstage and play that kind of music; I don’t like cocaine.” (click >>> Relix interview)

Balin joined Airplane’s reconstructed Jefferson Starship in 1975 and remained with them until 1978. Afterward, he returned to his solo career, though he did join the band for reunions in 1989 and 1996

He released 12 solo albums.

In 1996, Jefferson Airplane was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (Grace Slick was absent due to medical reasons). Most in jackets and ties, they performed “Volunteers” with Balin on lead vocals.

Marty died on September 27, 2018. [Rolling Stone story]

References: Marty Balin site
Jefferson Airplane Marty Balin
Music et al, Today in history

Dylan Visits Woody Guthrie

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Dylan Visits Woody Guthrie

Dylan Visits Woody Guthrie

In the land of opportunity, young Americans look for a model. A parent, a sibling, a cousin, or a best friend may serve, but one’s world often pivots on an unanticipated choice.

Bob Dylan borrowed a friend’s copy of Woody Guthrie’s autobiographical Bound for Glory.  In it Dylan found inspiration in the portrait Guthrie painted of himself in the book. Guthrie and folk music became a star to follow.

Later, Dylan would say, “The thing about rock’n’roll is that for me anyway it wasn’t enough… There were great catch-phrases and driving pulse rhythms… but the songs weren’t serious or didn’t reflect life in a realistic way. I knew that when I got into folk music, it was more of a serious type of thing. The songs are filled with more despair, more sadness, more triumph, more faith in the supernatural, much deeper feelings.”  (from liner notes by Cameron Crowe to Dylan’s Biograph 5-record set)

Dylan Visits Woody Guthrie

29 January 1961

Bob Dylan visits Woody Guthrie
Woody Guthrie in hospital with Huntington’s disease with wife Majorie and son Arlo

Dylan had arrived in New York City on January 24, 1961 (see Talkin’ New York) and on January 29 met Guthrie. Guthrie was in his fourth year at the Greystone Park Psychiatric hospital in New Jersey, suffering from Huntington’s disease, which finally led to his death in 1967. Guthrie apparently gave Dylan a card after their first meeting saying: “I ain’t dead yet.”

Dylan had written a song simply called “Song to Woody.”

Dylan Visits Woody Guthrie

Song to Woody

I’m out here a thousand miles from my home
   Walkin’ a road other men have gone down
   I’m seein’ your world of people and things
   Your paupers and peasants and princes and kings
Hey, hey, Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song
  ’Bout a funny ol’ world that’s a-comin’ along
  Seems sick an’ it’s hungry, it’s tired an’ it’s torn
  It looks like it’s a-dyin’ an’ it’s hardly been born
Hey, Woody Guthrie, but I know that you know
  All the things that I’m a-sayin’ an’ a-many times more
  I’m a-singin’ you the song, but I can’t sing enough
  ’Cause there’s not many men that done the things that you’ve done
Here’s to Cisco an’ Sonny an’ Leadbelly too
  An’ to all the good people that traveled with you
  Here’s to the hearts and the hands of the men
  That come with the dust and are gone with the wind
I’m a-leavin’ tomorrow, but I could leave today
   Somewhere down the road someday
   The very last thing that I’d want to do
   Is to say I’ve been hittin’ some hard travelin’ too
(Complete lyrics Song to Woody)
Dylan Visits Woody Guthrie

Town Hall

Dylan Visits Woody Guthrie

On  April 12 1963, Bob Dylan played the Town Hall in New York City. To close the performance, he recited  another Guthrie-related piece he’d written called “Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie.”  It’s a long poem so I won’t put the lyrics right here, but will provide the link below the video if you would like to listen and follow along. Listening to Dylan recite reminds me of the Beat style of poetry, but that’s another blog for another day.

“If you can roll along with this here…”

Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie lyrics

Dylan Visits Woody Guthrie

Guthrie dies

Woody Guthrie died on October 3, 1967 while at Creedmoor State Hospital in Queens, New York. His ashes were sprinkled into the waters off of Coney Island’s shore.

A month later, on Thanksgiving 1967, Woody’s son Arlo Guthrie released his first commercial recording of “Alice’s Restaurant.”

Dylan Visits Woody Guthrie
Music et al

Jac Holzman Nonesuch Records

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Jac Holzman Nonesuch Records

Jac Holzman Nonesuch Records
cover of Morton Subotnick’s Silver Apples of the Moon

I have already done piece on Jac Holzman, the founder of Elektra Records.

In it, I briefly referred to the part the Nonesuch label played in relation to Holzman’s Elektra label.

In today’s post I will concentrate on Nonesuch Records.

Paquito D’Rivera recorded this piece with his group for the album Funk-Tango on 2006, featuring Fernando Otero on piano. The album won the Grammy for Best Latin Jazz Also David Harrington, from the Kronos Quartet , showed interest for this piece.Fernando wrote the String Quartet named *The Cherry Tree* for Kronos, which was premiere at Carnegie Hall on February 22nd, 2008.

Jac Holzman Nonesuch Records

Paperback records

The quick history of Nonesuch is that Holzman founded the label n 1964  to produce “fine records at the same price as a trade paperback” (Holzman in Gavan Daws’s Follow the Music (1998).

At first the label concentrated on chamber and baroque music. In 1970, Holzman sold Elektra and Nonesuch to Kinney National Company, which became Warner Communications and later part of Time Warner’s Warner Music Group.

Teresa Sterne was the director of Nonesuch from 1965 – 1979 and expanded the labels musical horizons. According to a NYT article, “…she brought attention to areas of music neglected by the major labels, particularly contemporary music and American vernacular music. She championed American composers like George Crumb, Elliott Carter, Morton Subotnick, Charles Wuorinen and Donald Martino, not just recording their works but commissioning them, an unusual move for the leader of a record company. She also issued important recordings of lesser-known works by Schoenberg, Busoni, Stravinsky and other major figures. 

Jac Holzman Nonesuch Records

Warner Bros actions

When Warner terminated Stern’s contract in 1979, twenty-two artists signed a letter sent to the New York Times expressing their sadness of her forced departure and also stated that they felt she had “had the courage and foresight to build a catelogue of unparalleled interest, importance and beauty.” 

Jac’s brother Keith Holzman operated the label from Los Angeles until 1984 when Bob Hurwitz became the Nonesuch President. In 2014, the Well-Tempered Ear blog interviewed Bob Hurwitz, the president of Nonesuch Records. and David Bither, its senior Vice-President. 

Within the first two years under Hurwitz’s leadership, Nonesuch released albums by such “new music” pioneers as Steve Reich (The Desert Music, 1985), John Adams (Harmonielehre, 1986), Philip Glass (Mishima, 1985), John Zorn (The Big Gundown, 1985), and Kronos Quartet (Kronos Quartet, 1986).

For a great introduction to the broad range of Nonesuch music today, see their radio station at its site.

Jac Holzman Nonesuch Records