Monthly Archives: April 2016

Birthdays, Music of the 60s

Bernard Alfred Jack Nitzsche

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Bernard Alfred Jack Nitzsche

Arranger/composer/producer
April 22, 1937 — August 25, 2000

Jack Nitzsche

Jack Nitzsche – “One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest (Opening Theme)” 
Bernard Alfred Jack Nitzsche

Jack Nitzsche

Jack Nitzsche. Where have we heard that name? Album cover readers know that they saw the name regularly on the album credits. As my father sometimes joked, “He’s like horseshit. He’s everywhere.”

What I gradually realized was that Jack Nitzsche was associated with many of my favorite albums.

Born Bernard Alfred Nitzsche in Chicago, he grew up in Michigan, and moved to California as a teenager. Like many people who have moved to California, Nietzsche hoped to become an entertainer. A saxophonist specifically.

Needles and Pins

Bernard Alfred Jack Nitzsche

His story is familiar. When the saxophone school didn’t worked out, he found a job at Specialty Records copying music scores. While doing that he met Sonny Bono who was chief of A & R there. Their friendship led to songwriting. You’ll likely recognize an early hit:

Bernard Alfred Jack Nitzsche

The Lonely Surfer

He had a minor hit on his own with “The Lonely Surfer” in 1963. It’s a pretty good song!

Bernard Alfred Jack Nitzsche

Phil Spector

In the meantime, Nitzsche met and started working with Phil Spector and eventually helped create the Wall of Sound while working with session musicians famously known as the Wrecking Crew.

If you’ve ever heard  “River Deep, Mountain High” by Ike and Tina Turner you’ve heard Nitzshe. Bob Lind’s “Elusive Butterfly“? Nitzshe.  Darlene Love? May have been Nitzsche.

Rolling Stones and more

In 1964, he met the Rolling Stones. When you hear “Paint It, Black” and “Let’s Spend the Night Together” or “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”? Nitzsche.

Buffalo Springfield’s “Expecting to Fly”? Nitzsche.

Do you like Lesley Gore? Jackie DeShannon? The Righteous Brothers? Beach Boys? Searchers? Rip Cords? Bobby Vee?  Tim Buckley? Gary Lewis and the Playboys? The Monkeys? The Ventures? James Gang? Graham Parker? Willy DeVille?

It may have been Jack Nitzsche’s handiwork. Sometimes producing. Sometimes keyboards.

You say you want more?

Neil Young and Crazy Horse, solo or together.

Performance

Bernard Alfred Jack Nitzsche

And that’s just some of the music. He also worked on movie music. Here is a partial list:

  • He won an Oscar for Best Song with “Up Where We Belong” co-written with his wife Buffy St Marie and Will Jennings from Officer and a Gentleman.
  • Performance which stared Mick Jagger
  • One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
  • Hardcore
  • The Razor’s Edge
  • Starman
  • The Exorcist
  • Breathless
  • 9 1/2 Weeks

Poor Health

His health deteriorated in the mid-90s and his career followed.  He died on August 25, 2000.

REM wrote “2JN” in his memory.

Bernard Alfred Jack Nitzsche
Arts

Bob Liikala Group 212

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Bob Liikala Group 212

Bob Liikala Group 212 Inter-Media Project

The Town of Woodstock was established in 1787. By the late 1800s it had begun to attract artistic groups such as the Hudson River School painters. In 1902, the Arts and Crafts Movement arrived and in 1906, L. Birge Harrison and others founded the Summer School of the Art Students League of New York.

Bob Liikala Group 212 Inter-Media Project

Maverick Festival

Michael Lang wrote in his The Road to Woodstock that in 1915 the town was the site of  “the first annual Maverick Festival. A flyer promised ‘wild sports going on‘ and the dancer Lada, who “illumes beautiful music like poems, and makes you feel its religion…you cry, it is so exquisite to see….All this in the wild stone-quarry theatre, in the moonlight, with the orchestra wailing in rapture, and the jealous torches flaring in the wind! In the afternoon, there is also a concert, with a pageant, and strange doings on the stage….There will be a village that will stand but for a day, which mad artists have hung with glorious banners and blazoned in the entrance through the woods.’ ”

Sounds a bit like that 1969 event, yes?

Bob Liikala Group 212 Inter-Media Project

 Sound-Outs

In the late 1960s there was a series of shows known as Sound-Outs. Local musicians and the friends of local musicians such as like the Blues Magoos, Tim Hardin, Kenny Rankin, Richie Havens, Paul Butterfield, Dave van Ronk, and Van Morrison  performed. 

The local success of these shows likely were partly inspired Michael Lang and Artie Kornfeld‘s idea to construct a recording studio in Woodstock and to finance that construction with a festival.

And also part of that stew that encouraged the arts was the…

Bob Liikala Group 212 Inter-Media Project

Bob Liikala

Bob Liikala Group 212 Inter-Media Proj
House occupied by Group 212 during the late sixties

From the Roots of Woodstock site: The 212 project ran summer retreats from 1967 to 1969 in the old Holiday Country Inn midway between Saugerties and Woodstock on Route 212. It was briefly home to professionals in the visual arts, music, performing arts, film-making and sciences. The collective fostered a collaborative meeting point and simplified time and space constraints for the participating artists. It encouraged them to experiment with the diverse new media and helped them to explore and synthesize the exploding potentials then being articulated through happenings, expanded cinema, environmental music and multimedia theater, dance and sculpture. Some of the projects that emerged in 1967 included Meredith Monk’s Blueprint, which was presented at Montreal’s Expo 67; Horse Play, a happening incorporating animals and audience members by Yayoi Kusama; and Dump Tour, a multimedia event directed by Franklin “Bud” Drake that featured a “deluxe” buffet, champagne, an art auction/burning, an airplane assault involving paper airplanes and White Mass choreographed by Norma Lusk. 

Group 212 was a manifestation of the exploding Woodstock artistic scene—as were the Sound-Outs. Bud Drake’s mother, Pan Copeland, presided over the latter on her farm just up the road. According to Roots of the 1969 Woodstock Festival: The Backstory to “Woodstock,” Pan hoped to craft these concerts into a Newport festivals of rock. 

Nina Yankowitz, a Group 212 artist remembers that she “loved Group 212’s fearless collaborative spirit, and remembers that she first installed her draped paintings on the trees in the surrounding Group 212 landscape. She says that Group 212’s propulsive and adventurous style of mixing music, painting, sculpture, photography, electronic sounds, poetry, and performance art opened her up to embrace new technologies and emerging artistic disciplines. For example, she met Ken Werner, a musician, at 212 in the summer of 1968, and she recalls their collaboration. Werner made an audio rendition to realize Nina’s desire to include sound that would mimic the musical score,Oh Say Can You See, on her draped canvas. This embodied the concept of hearing and seeing sounds as they unfolded from her draped paintings. The installation was exhibited later that year at Kornblee Gallery in New York City.” [my emphasis]

 In other words the artistic freedom that the Woodstock area demonstrated in the late 60s allowed people like Lang and Kornfeld to think a music festival that included art…a fair…a Woodstock Music and Art Fair…was possible.

The following video (by Letitia Smith)  shows many of the projects that Group 212 helped sponsor.

Bob Liikala Group 212 Inter-Media Project
Black history, Mohammad Ali, Vietnam

Passion of Muhammad Ali

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Passion of Muhammad Ali

George Lois, Esquire magazine, and Muhammad Ali
Passion of Muhammad Ali
Passion of Muhammad Ali cover by George Lois

On January 24, 1964 Clay took an Army evaluation test for the draft. On March 3, after having defeating Sonny Liston on February 25 and winning the world heavyweight championship,  The Louisville Courier‐Journal published a story that Clay had failed by a slight margin to pass the psychological portions of that evaluation test.

Clay, commenting on the report, said, “Do they think I’m crazy?”

On March 13, Clay, now Muhammad Ali, took a second test and on March 20, the Department issued the following statement about Ali’s draft status: “The Department of the Army has completed a review of Cassius Clay’s second pre-induction examination and has determined he is not qualified for induction into the Army under applicable standards.”

Ali’s response was, “I just said I’m the greatest. I never said I was the smartest.”

Passion of Muhammad Ali

Joe Namath

On September 15, 1965 Joe Namath took his Army physical and on December 9 that year the Army classified Namath 4-F, ineligible to be drafted. It was determined that Namath’s knees were in too poor condition for the Army to take care of, though the National Football League and Namath found that Namath’s knees were fine to play.

Passion of Muhammad Ali

Reclassified

On February 12, 1966,the Louisville, KY draft board re-classified Muhammad Ali as 1-A. Ali challenged the reclassification as politically motivated and questioned why other athletes, such as Namath, quarterback for the NY Jets, weren’t being drafted as well.

On April 17, 1967 the U.S. Supreme Court barred Muhammad Ali’s request to be blocked from induction into the U.S. Army and on April 28, the US Justice Department denied Ali’s claim. The Department found that his objections were political, not religious. Ali reported for induction ceremony, but refused to step forward when called.

Passion of Muhammad Ali

Guilty

On June 20, 1967 Ali was found guilty of refusing induction into the armed forces. He was sentenced to five years in prison and fined $10,000—the maximum penalties. He was stripped of his title by the boxing association and effectively banned from boxing.

Passion of Muhammad Ali

Esquire cover

Nine months later, George Lois’s cover picture of Ali on Esquire magazine’s April 1968 edition portrayed him as a martyr akin to St Sebastian. Kurt Andersen, host of NPR’s Studio 360, stated that “George Lois’s covers for Esquire in the 60s are classic. His April 1968 image of Muhammad Ali to dramatize the boxer’s persecution for his personal beliefs, is the greatest magazine cover ever created, making a political statement without being grim or stupid or predicable.”

Ali’s legal fight continued until June 28, 1971 when the Supreme Court reversed Muhammad Ali’s conviction for refusing induction by unanimous decision in Clay v. United States.

Passion of Muhammad Ali

Reclaims title

MORE THAN THREE years later, on October 30, 1974 Ali fought the reigning champion George Foreman in an outdoor arena in Kinshasa, Zaire, The fight is known as the “Rumble in the Jungle.”  Using his novel “rope-a-dope” strategy, Ali defeated Foreman and after seven years, reclaimed the title of Heavyweight Champion of the World.

Passion of Muhammad Ali