Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry (23 page)

As he came through the doorway, the Beatles were first struck by Dylan’s small stature and hooked nose. Trying to break a palpable tension, Epstein invited his guests into the living room, asking them what they’d like to drink.

“Cheap wine,” replied Dylan.

Unsure if Dylan was joking, Epstein dispatched his assistant Mal Evans to procure some cheap wine. During the wait, it was suggested that amphetamine pills were available. The guests declined, but Dylan seized the cue to suggest they all smoke some fantastic grass he had brought down from Woodstock.

Stuck for words, Epstein and the Beatles looked at each other. “We’ve never smoked marijuana before,” admitted Epstein with embarrassment.

“But what about your song?” Dylan asked. “The one about getting high?”

“Which song?” asked Lennon.

“You know … ‘and when I touch you I get high, I get high,’” sang Dylan in reference to “I Wanna Hold Your Hand.”

“Those aren’t the words,” explained Lennon. “The words are ‘I can’t hide.’”

Epstein spent half an hour securing the hotel suite before Dylan was even allowed to produce the grass from his pocket. The doors were locked; then towels from the bathroom were stuffed into every crevice around the door frame. The blinds were shut tight and the curtains drawn, obscuring the majestic views of Park Avenue. Once Epstein felt they were securely airtight, a bemused Dylan was allowed to roll a joint.

Dylan lit up, passing it first to John Lennon. Too apprehensive to take a puff, Lennon passed it on, joking that Ringo was his royal taster. Unaware of joint etiquette, Ringo proceeded to smoke the entire joint himself. So Dylan and Aronowitz rolled half a dozen joints and passed them around. As the other Beatles began smoking the strong-smelling herb, they thought, “This isn’t doing anything,” until Ringo started laughing uncontrollably.

Within minutes, the hotel suite was a madhouse. Epstein was clutching his seat repeating, “I’m so high I’m on the ceiling. I’m up on the ceiling…” At the center of this bedlam, Dylan kept his hosts in convulsions by pretending to answer the telephone, “Hello, Beatlemania here!”

The Beatles’ weapon against stress was humor, and on this historical night, everyone had a sore belly from so much laughter. When Dylan and his friends eventually left, they all promised each other to meet up at the end of their tour. For the Beatles, and especially John Lennon, the encounter marked the beginning of a bizarre relationship with the musician every interesting songwriter in the business was starting to notice. These little events, hidden from the public eye, sowed the seeds of what in time would grow into a brand-new musical genre,
psychedelia
.

Something was in the air. Just a month later, a British group from Newcastle called the Animals scored a smash-hit No. 1 in America with “House of the Rising Sun,” a traditional air that Dylan had recorded for his debut album, cleverly reworked with electric guitar, bass, ride cymbals, and some stirring organ playing by Alan Price. Then
Beatles for Sale,
released in December 1964, contained the first of many audibly Dylan-inspired songs by John Lennon—“I’m a Loser,” complete with a harmonica solo. By the time the Beatles started filming
Help!
in the new year, John Lennon had become such an unashamed Dylan freak that he wore a Greek fisherman’s hat and a suede jacket and even traded in his Rickenbacker for an acoustic guitar.

Always one step ahead of the posse, Dylan himself was exceptionally prolific in this period. As the brilliant
Bringing It All Back Home
hit the streets in the spring of 1965, a cover of “Mr. Tambourine Man” by a young Californian group called the Byrds was climbing the charts, eventually reaching No. 1 in June. Signed to Columbia at the end of 1964, the Byrds were originally billed as an American answer to the Beatles but quickly cultivated their own image. David Crosby crafted distinctive harmonies; Roger McGuinn contributed the bright sound of a twelve-string electric guitar.

Dylan’s own breakthrough came with “Like a Rolling Stone,” a six-and-a-half-minute sledgehammer describing a Greenwich Village hipster’s decline. Columbia’s sales and marketing staff had been cautious about releasing it as a single due to its length and raucous sound. Fortunately, before condemning the recording to a lesser fate as an album track, release coordinator Shaun Considine took an acetate to a happening club, Arthur, whose in-crowd of deejays and journalists duly wore it out. Lo and behold, the next morning, a programming director from a Top 40 station telephoned Columbia for copies. So, on July 20, 1965, Columbia released all six-plus minutes of “Like a Rolling Stone”—a precedent in pop music.

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.