Jac Holzman Then and Now

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

Jac Holzman Then and Now

If ever I've identified with a record company, the nearest thing in my mind to an ideal would be Elektra Records, for many reasons, not least the fact that Jac Holzman, the president of the company, considers Zigzag to be the best magazine of its kind in the world. Also, it's my impression that the acts which appear on Elektra (past and present) have a certain charisma about them which makes for a good deal of interest in their activities. When Jac was here in April, I took the opportunity to talk to him on a number of subjects, the most interesting of which you will find below.
LOVE
"I met John Echols in Max's Kansas City about six months ago, where I had been to see one of those frequent group reincarnations, this time the remains of Rhinoceros, who are calling themselves Blackstone. While there that evening, up popped John Echols with a lovely bossomy new wife, and he said that he was going to call me. In typical laid-back L.A. fashion, John called me six months later. He came by the office and we talked awhile, and he wants to get back to recording. We're going to make some tapes with him to see if there is anything there. During his visit, I asked him about all the rumours that he had been found guilty of manslaughter, had murdered the roadie and had been in jail. He said that was nonsense, and that several of the people had been in custody for a matter of an hour or so while the police sorted it out, but then he had been immediately released, and that the rumour had been sped on its way by another member of the group, who shall, for the purposes of libel, remain nameless. He didn't hear anything about Ken Forssi or any of the other guys, and I never hear anything of Michael Stuart. I don't know where Snoopy is either, but Bryan MacLean has been up to Elektra several times, trying to get together a solo album, but there wasn't enough submission of good material. From what we could tell, listening to tapes, the best things he had written were the old things like 'Orange Skies', 'Alone Again Or' and 'Old Man'. I do know that Arthur is putting together a new band which will be recording, not necessarily with Paul Rothchild producing, but under Rothchild's A&R supervision for the Buffalo label, financed by the guy who financed Hair and was the producer of it... Michael something or other. There are several ex-Elektrons working at that label, including Billy James, who is Director of Publicity. I wish them luck.
NUGGETS
Volume II is being prepared, but preparing a Nuggets album takes an incredible amount of time. After you make an idealised list of the selections you would like to have, you then have to proceed through the incredibly cumbersome and quite tedious process of getting the various legal permissions, all of which are slightly different and require slightly different negotiations and paper work. Usually what happens is that you call the company up and speak to somebody and they say, "Yeah, sure". Then you send them an agreement, and then you don't hear from them. Then you send them their second notice and their third notice, and their fourth notice and eventually you go and stand with a sabre to their throats and you might get a document. It took us about two months to assemble the list of what we wanted for Nuggets Vol. 1, and close to a year and a half to get the permissions and the tapes. You can get the contract, and then nobody can find the tape. In terms of man hours spent, we will break even on Nuggets on about a quarter of a million sets. It's a slight hyperbole, but a tremendous amount of work is spent on Nuggets, out of all proportion to the number of albums sold, but I think that it is a very important series, and both Lenny Kaye and I get a kick out of doing it. We will keep doing them as long as we meet with some kind of positive reaction from the public – we sold a fair number, and the press have been great. The thing that is particularly appealing to me about Nuggets is that a lot of the material is the kind of thing which is actually contrary to what Elektra has been known for over the years. So to be able to incorporate them as part of our catalogue by proxy is kind of appealing to me. I've started a list for the second volume, but I don't have it with me and I can't remember half the tracks.
DELIVERANCE
'Deliverance' is one of those typical record stories that will be told around the camp fires. I guess those who have seen the movie know that there is a sequence between one of the men who is going to go down the river in a canoe with a very strange eerie-looking youth, I guess, and he can't make contact with him with words, so he tries to do it with his musical instrument. The song was scheduled by the studio, and they wanted someone to release the single, but Warner Bros. turned it down. It was sent over to me because I was supposed to know about such folk things, and I listened to it and said that I didn't think it was a single, and Atlantic turned it down. So everyone in the WEA group turned it down. Then the picture was doing very well, and I thought that just having the single out would be useful, so Mo Ostin, who is chairman of Warner/ Reprise, agreed to release it as a single. In one area, Minnesota, the record got a lot of airplay and a lot of calls from the public and started to sell. When Warner/ Reprise found that they had a selling single, but no album, they contacted Elektra, the folk experts, and we dug out of our archives an album called New Dimensions in Banjo and Bluegrass (EK 7238), and we gave the tapes to our brother label – "Here, you can add this to the Deliverance track, and you will have a Deliverance-type album". It was like freezedried bluegrass, to fill a need, and the album has sold over a million copies. There are a million more people listening to banjo music than I ever expected, but I haven't heard the LP recently, and I don't think I want to listen to it.
CARLY SIMON
Carly [Simon] is working on her next album. She writes as any good writer will, I guess – you see things, you get ideas, you jot them down right away. She told me the other day on the phone that she'd got fifteen first verses that were great, but no complete songs. Carly works well when you give her a deadline – say, we're going to go into the studio in June, suddenly, the stuff gets written. The No Secrets album is a platinum record in the States alone, which is a million units. The biggest Elektra seller up to now has been the Doors' first album, but Carly's catching up.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

JUDY COLLINS
Judy Collins has decided that she wishes to take more control over her career and its direction, and that she has insulated herself far too long from people who she should be close to in terms of making her own decisions. She decided that she would just do it herself, and I think it's a very good decision, because she has had the energy to follow it through. She's getting out and performing a lot more, and she has been directing a film which has to do with her music teacher in Denver when she was growing up, and this is her first film directorial experience, about which she is very excited. She is in very good spirit, very positive, energies all focussed in a very good way. She took more control over the production of the True Stories and Other Dreams album herself, but she's been in the studio for thirteen years now, and she's bound to have learned enough. I trust that you can expect her in England before too long, but don't ask me for a date. Incidentally, I don't know about Carly in that respect, but I'd be happy to see her performing anywhere.
VERONIQUE SANSON
As regards Veronique Sanson, the people who listened to her album, and were not put off by the fact that much of it was in French, like it very much, but some people, I think, didn't bother to listen to it at all, simply because it was a French album. Maybe now that she is married to Stephen Stills, more people will pay attention to it, but certainly she deserves to be an artist in her own right. I don't know whether she intends to record in French or English the next time, because I don't put too much pressure on an artist in terms of finding out everything they're going to do. I usually get the chance to talk to the artist and the producer before the album is made, but I don't try to draw them out too much before they're ready to talk to me on the subject. Too much record company pressure is not a good thing;
EX-ELEKTRONS
Crabby Appleton broke up, so they won't be making any more records with us. It's very difficult for an American group to get sufficient work to financially keep them together. It's a losing proposition from the standpoint of the record company to give them an allowance which will enable them to keep going. You have to figure that you can't keep an act going for less than five hundred dollars a week minimum support money, which doesn't include getting them to and from dates. So you've got to figure that it's a fifty to seventy-five thousand dollars a year proposition, and you just can't afford to do that if they don't sell any records. We supported a lot of the dates in terms of getting them from point A to point B, not only from the standpoint of transport, but also the kind of aggressive promotional things that have to be done to assist the marketing at that date. You just can't keep them going forever, and at some point, you have to say, "I quit". In this case, the group said it for us. I understand that Michael Fennelly is now signed as a solo artist with Columbia, where he was, of course, before, as part of the Millennium.
Turning to David Ackles, I think that he's a splendid person. We made three David Ackles albums, and tried real hard on two of them. One had incredible press and everything going for it, including a major effort on Elektra's part, but nothing happened. There is a limit, even when you believe in an artist, and when you have three shots and you don't get some kind of solid positive reaction from people, then it's time to let him try with a different chemistry, and put that time and effort into a new artist. I wish him well on CBS, where I understand he is going.
PLAINSONG, IAN MATTHEWS, ANDY ROBERTS AND MIKE NESMITH
I guess that Ian Matthews will never be satisfied being in a group that he doesn't totally control. As you may know, he is in the States now, planning to work as a solo, and is working on an album which is half done, being produced by himself and Michael Nesmith. I think Ian has always had the desire to be a cowboy, and I would say that the record will have some strong country influences, as there always have been in Ian's music. Andy Roberts has also done an album, which is being released by us in England, although I don't know whether it will be released in the States. The Matthews album is being recorded at the Countryside label studios, which is Nesmith's label. There is nobody that you’ll have heard of on the label, because it's straight shit kickin' country music. The only success we've had so far is with Garland Fratey, whose album was what is euphemistically referred to as a turntable hit – it sold a few records. Country records to establish country artists are notoriously slow to get going, but conversely, when they're established, they last a lot longer. The music on the label is strictly country or country and western, which are two different categories of music – it's not country rock or Poco-ish, and I think Nesmith intends to keep it pretty pure.
Nesmith has a contractual commitment to RCA, which both he and I are anxious he continue to honour, Besides which, Nesmith, unless he were doing straight country, would not appear on the Countryside label, but probably on Elektra.
The arrangement came about when I was talking to him about a concept I had. I was wondering out loud one day as to where tomorrow's record company presidents were going to come from, the ones who had learned how to do it all by themselves, who were not specialists like lawyers or accountants taking over record companies and then trying to learn other areas, but people who were experienced by virtue of having had to put it together themselves, and Michael just happened to be around. He said that he had always wanted to put together a country label, and I said that sounded interesting and certainly the kind of thing that Elektra would want to do, and we hammered together a deal over a reasonably short period of time. The label is distributed by the WEA group throughout the world. Because it needed a separate identity, he found a ranch out in the San Fernando Valley, just north of Hollywood, and built a studio on the premises, and it's an entirely self-contained scene. They do a lot of their own marketing, their own cover work, and they come to Elektra when they need help. They're reasonably self-reliant, and it's what we call a satellite label, the first that we have. There may be more in the future, but his is the test crucible.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

NEW ARTISTS
Curt Boettcher, being a solo artist, doesn't require the same sort of support as a group to keep him going. There's just him and his partner Web, and it's a different kind of situation. Curt, fortunately, eats very carefully, a lot of brown rice, and we send bags of brown rice to his door. Obviously, it's a less expensive proposition. As you may know, he used to be a producer, but he's so busy doing his own things, that he isn't doing any outside work in the production line that I know of.
Billy Mernit is still at college, at Antioch. Antioch is an unusual school, in that it has a combination academic and work program, and his involvement with the record is part of the work program. Also, from the financial standpoint, he wrote one of the songs on Carly's album, so he's got college paid for. Shortly, he'll be putting a band together to do live performances, although I don't know who it will comprise. I think he's marvellous. Another new name is Don Agrati. His was one of the tapes that came in through one of our staff producers, Marlin Greene. Don Agrati is the real name for Don Grady, a very famous young American actor who was in a hit TV series that ran for years, called My Three Sons, with Fred MacMurray. The album is called Home Grown, and most of it was done in Don's basement, with himself playing a lot of the instruments. Sailcat made a hit single and a hit album, but the group split up, and John Wyker left, but Courtland Pickett remains, still produced by Pete Carr, and it looks as if he has a hit single in the United States now. We'll have to see what happens, but it's a nice tight clean single.
BREAD
At the moment, all I can tell you is that the group are in a state of flux, to use an official term, which either means that they will continue to make records or they won't. In the latter case, we will make records with David Gates and probably Jimmy Griffin separately. Larry Knechtel is not an Elektra artist – he is involved in the group for recording and live performances, but is not a signatory to the original Bread contract. The original three signatories were David Gates, Jimmy Griffin and Robb Royer. Robb left, leaving Jimmy and David as the original two signatories, and our claim is to those two artists only. In fact, we have asked Larry to make an album for us, indicating what we think he might find it interesting to do. Larry feels very close to Elektra, and he is a great musician and craftsman, one of the rare ones.
He is the guitar man on the 'Guitar Man' track. We couldn't get that thing right, and he just picked up the guitar and played it. Also he is a great bass player, as well as a formidable keyboard player and the arranger of 'Bridge Over Troubled Water', which is not a bad claim to fame. He's a much in-demand session musician in Los Angeles.
THE DELETION PROCESS
At this time, we are not thinking of cheap label repackaging of any old material which has been deleted. When an Elektra record is deleted, space is reserved in the warehouse to store four or five hundred copies. We keep this number or less, depending on the nature of the record and its popularity, on reserve for anybody who is sufficiently interested to write in, and then we send the record out. We then sell up our deletions at a low price, and these end up in the bargain bins, which is in effect a new low-price record line, with the original version, the original sleeve, but at a price probably less than half the original cost. So we don't think about putting them on a budget line, and when we have spoken to people who are specialists in budget, they continually advise us, and I think they are correct, that there aren't that many people interested in an old Love album to support a budget release, but making it available via deletion to low cost record bins is our way of providing the public with a budget line.
Every once in a while, somebody will write for a record that we just don't have a copy of anymore, in which case, for the same regular cost of the record, we will make a cassette copy from our tapes and supply them with that at cost. We also xerox the back liner, so at least everything is in print if you're willing to go out and buy a cassette machine:
As far as the material by Love and the Doors goes, Love Revisited is not deleted, but there are still copies of all their other records available. Absolutely Live by the Doors deleted itself, but most of the other material by the group is still available, and if anybody wants it, we can still get it. I consider an out of print record as one that you cannot get from the record company. I don't know what other companies do, but I have the feeling that if we spent the time making a record, we made it for a reason, and then if anybody is willing to be patient with us, we can get them a cassette copy at no extra cost, which will be custom made.
THE SCENE
There is a great deal of new material about, not much of it very good. As far as Elektra goes, well over half our roster are male singer/songwriters, and I would say that we're out of balance. However, the putting together of old bands does not strike me as a particularly good or successful idea. I'll give you two examples of it on the same label, one which works and one which doesn't work. I am not knocked out personally with the new Byrds album, which was David Geffen's effort, but what David did in terms of piecing together various people and putting together the Eagles was absolutely brilliant, and it worked astonishingly well. David happens to have a great deal of patience, an incredible amount of taste, and is an excellent father confessor to his artists. The credit for the Eagles has got to go 60% to David, who put that thing together exactly the way he saw it. By the way, there was an Eagles record, which David thought was terrible and threw out, which takes a lot of guts when you consider that he was in for seventy-five to eighty thousand dollars. There's another thing that I've said frequently of late, but I believe it quite definitely to be true, that there's a very high level of musical professionalism and confidence, but a very low level of magic in things that are fresh. It's almost exactly like it was ten years ago in 1963, when Dylan was just beginning to emerge, but I don't see anybody coming along yet. It's certainly not Bruce Springsteen, and the most exciting thing I see emerging now for a non-Elektra standpoint is the Mahavishnu Orchestra, which I think is very important, although it's not music that it's easy to get close to. I think that music in the '70s is going to demand more of the audience, who have been encouraged to be lazy and not as eclectic as they should be. I think if I can fault Elektra in any way, our music has been all too easy to listen to, and I intend to make it tougher on my audience as we go into the '70s. You can't do it with every release, but you can certainly do it with some.
MORE ARTISTS
Harry Chapin is doing so many things that some of his recording presence is probably diffused. Currently, he's completing a screenplay, preparing a story outline which is in first draft now, and is committed to do a soundtrack for a motion picture. He provides his brother Tom with 25/30 new songs a year for Tom's network TV show Make A Wish, and in between time, Harry plays a mean game of pool, tennis and softball, which he plays to win, and thus he has had very little time to write new songs, although he has produced a few recently, but nothing worthy of recording. History indicates that, of the artists who left Elektra because one side or the other didn't want to renew their option, none have done as well off the label as when they were on Elektra. Of them all, I still have a warm spot in my heart for Tom Rush, and he can come home anytime. Then there's Hamilton Camp, who made a record for Elektra and then was off the label, then made another one for Elektra, one for Wamer Bros., one for RCA, and then spent a lot of time as an actor. Now he's back with Elektra again, and he's getting ready to prepare another album shortly. He's a great singer, great writer, extremely intelligent man, and one of the best singers I've ever heard. I'm hoping for something from him by the end of the year.
As far as English acts go, we've signed Dennis Coulson, who used to be with McGuinness Flint and who made a very promising audition tape, and also Queen, who are being produced by John Anthony, who produced the first and best Lindisfarne album. The Queen deal comes through Trident Audio Productions, which is Trident Studios in London. Both Queen and Dennis have a very high level of positive energy, by which I don't necessarily mean sound level or sound intensity, but rather a kind of spirit, and that is one of the things I'm looking for in artists and all too rarely find.

John Tobler, ZigZag, May 1973