“Turn! Turn! Turn! The Sixties Folk Rock Revolution”

A Musical Interview

By Michelle E. Malik and Music Archivist Jim Davison

In late July I had the pleasure of meeting two very influential storytellers of the 1960s, beloved folk balladeer Donovan and music historian Richie Unterberger, the author of the brand new publication, “Turn! Turn! Turn! The Sixties Folk Rock Revolution” published by Back Beat Books. During a two hour event at the appropriately-located Book Soup along Sunset Strip droves of 60s music enthusiasts and reformed groupies listened as Unterberger enlightened with many musical back stories and sidebars while Scotland native Donovan entranced with amusing anecdotes and a rare live performance. Some cosmically swayed to the music while others just ogled at their living legend. Everyone had a groovy time.

Music archivist, Jim Davison and I conducted an e-interview with the friendly and rather articulate Unterberger about his book. Below are his answers.

1. So much of your book reflects influences from one artist to another. What do you think are the lasting impressions made by early folk singers such as Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and Leadbelly?

If we're talking about the impressions made specifically by those kind of singers on the 1960s folk-rockers, I think the most important ones were:

A) providing an example of how music could be made that valued personal expression more than commercial success.

B) making music that was grounded in American folk traditions, yet also left much room for innovation through original compositions. Performers like Guthrie and Seeger often did play old folk songs that they didn't write, and many of the songs they did write took huge chunks of melodic and lyrical inspiration from traditional folk songs. But they also devised a large body of original material that was specifically pertinent to their own time and place.

C) providing models of how stories, not all of them to do with romance (always the most frequently traveled topic of popular music), could be put into song and effectively communicated to audiences.

D) In the case of Seeger specifically and some others in his mold, illustrating how music could advocate social justice and progressive causes, and topical concerns be injected into lyrics.

If we're talking about the most lasting impressions on the singers of today, they're somewhat more faded since many contemporary artists are a generation or two further removed from the primes of Guthrie, Seeger, Leadbelly, et al. than the '60s folk-rockers were. But such early folk singers can still have a similar effect on contemporary artists who make the effort to dig quite deeply into pre-rock roots music, as Billy Bragg did, for example, when he set Guthrie lyrics to music on his Mermaid Avenue albums.

2. Do you think that pre-folk rock acoustic performers such as the Kingston Trio, Joan Baez, and Peter, Paul, and Mary influenced the 60s counter-culture revolution?

Yes, these performers definitely did influence the '60s counterculture, though their contributions have tended to be somewhat undervalued with the passing of the decades. To many contemporary listeners, and certainly to today's critics, much of their music sounds dated, naive, and sterile. On pure musical grounds, I think there's actually a lot of validity to those criticisms. They aren't as exciting, earthy, or innovative as the folk-rock artists that followed a few years later. To my ears they aren't even as exciting, earthy, or innovative as the best music from the early 1960s folk revival by performers like Bob Dylan, Ian & Sylvia, and Judy Collins.

But they were *vastly* influential in introducing millions of listeners to folk music, and also to commitment to social causes, non-violence, and the questioning of authority. As many have pointed out, it was through artists like the Kingston Trio, Joan Baez, and Peter, Paul & Mary that many listeners were led to recordings and performers that were somewhat closer to the roots of American folk music, whether they were Delta blues guitarists, Appalachian bluegrass bands, or even Bob Dylan's original recordings of the songs covered for hits by Peter, Paul & Mary (and on hit albums and widely attended concerts for Joan Baez). Baez and Peter, Paul & Mary also did much offstage to pioneer involvement in social causes, with (for example) Baez founding an institute for the study of nonviolence and PP&M marching in and playing on behalf of civil rights and antiwar demonstrations. The Kingston Trio are sometimes thought of as an unbearably clean-cut group, yet they too took some stances that placed their ideals ahead of their careers. As their manager Frank Werber noted in my book, they contributed to desegregation by stipulating in contracts that there be no racial restrictions on their concert audiences.

3. There's no question that in 1963 and 1964 Bob Dylan was the most influential poet of his time. Do you think that his change from all acoustic music to electric purely out of musical boredom?

There's a quote in my book from filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker that sees boredom as a big factor in Dylan's switch to electric music, and although it *was* a factor, I think it was just one. There were several forces at work. One was that he, like many and perhaps most of the first folk musicians to plug in, really did love rock'n'roll from an early age. That love had kind of gone underground when they want into folk music, but I think Dylan was generally eager to get back into it when the climate made it possible for him to do that without causing serious damage to his career. Don't forget, also, that he *had* actually done some tentative rock sessions for Columbia in 1962 so the concept of recording electric rock wasn't alien, even if those '62 tracks were unreleased or barely released at the time.

In addition, I think Dylan felt and/or realized that he probably *needed* to electrify to keep in the vanguard of contemporary popular music. There may have even been some mercenary or at least careerist motives at work, in that he might have feared that he would start to be considered passé when so much great electric music -- by the Beatles, of course, but also by many British Invasion groups and soon-to-record American ones like the Byrds and the Lovin' Spoonful -- was hogging the spotlight and making the most important advances in pop music. I also believe producer Tom Wilson's role in Dylan's electrification has been somewhat underestimated. It seems that Wilson pushed, if gently, or at the very least encouraged Dylan's move into electric rock recordings at the very beginning of 1965, where a more conservative producer would not have brought it up or might have resisted it had Dylan brought it up solely on his own. Once electric rock had occupied one entire LP side of Bringing It All Back Home and his popularity had if anything grown, it was inevitable that he would make it part of his live show as well, though it took about half a year for that to happen.

4. I'm amazed to find how much British invasion groups were influenced by folk music. Two folk influenced hits by British bands were House of the Rising Sun by the Animals and I'm a Loser by the Beatles. But I was very surprised to find that you uncovered folk material in albums by The

Searchers and Peter and Gordon. Can you elaborate on that?

The Searchers and Peter & Gordon are not thought of as heavyweights by most rock critics, and are remembered almost exclusively for their hits. So their non-greatest-hits compilations have been virtually ignored, but evidence of their folk leanings is there to hear on their albums (and sometimes on their singles, particularly in the Searchers' case).

Something I generally find in the research for all my books is that the cut-and-dried critical party lines that have solidified to classify rock artists over the decades are not as set in stone as they are often made out to be. While the Beatles and the Animals were undeniably better and more significant artists than the Searchers and Peter & Gordon, there wasn't as much separating their musical tastes and interests as is often supposed.

Many British Invasion bands had an appreciation and awareness of folk music, in part because of their roots in skiffle music, but also because generally the British Invasion bands played and collected an extremely wide variety of music.

In the case of the Searchers, folk was more a color in their palette than a main concentration; they also did covers of American rock'n'roll, soul, R&B, and girl-group tunes. But I think the nature of their vocal harmonies and guitar styles were quite well-suited toward a folk-rock combination, though it wasn't called folk-rock when they first started to do that. You can hear it in "Needles and Pins," to take the most famous example. But it's also in "What Have They Done to the Rain?," which was a hit single (though you rarely hear it played on oldies radio these days), and was a cover of a topical song by a noted American folk performer, Malvina Reynolds. It's also on their cover of P.F. Sloan's "Take Me For What I'm Worth," and more obscurely on some album cuts, like their cover of Pete Seeger's "Where Have All the Flowers Gone." The Searchers never did folk-rock more than par of the time, however, and it's understandable that few think of them as a folk-rock band, though their influence on the guitar sound of groups like the Byrds is undeniable.

Peter & Gordon actually devoted more of their repertoire to folk or folksy material than the Searchers did, though as Gordon Waller notes in the book, the most traditional songs they did are not represented on their singles. It's also interesting to find out that Peter Asher had gone to hootenannies with Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger, the staunchest pillars of the British folk scene, and also performed with folk singer Andy Irvine before Peter & Gordon. Again: the barriers between performers whom some would dismiss as coming from totally different worlds are often slimmer than they appear.

And it's certain that Peter & Gordon were an influence on the formation of the Byrds, particularly when Gene Clark suggested forming a Peter & Gordon-styled duo with Roger McGuinn to start that whole saga.

Understandably critics and listeners usually characterize what finally came out as the sound of the Byrds as a mix of the Beatles and Bob Dylan, but less canonized influences like Peter & Gordon and the Searchers were at work too.

5. The focus of your book appears to be the recording of The Byrds' first album, Mr. Tambourine Man, as the birth of folk rock, but you state that Bob Dylan beat them to the punch by electrifying half of his album, Bringing It All Back Home after discovering what The Byrds were doing.

Well, I wouldn't say that Dylan beat them to the punch. I think both the Byrds and Dylan were arriving at their brands of folk-rock synthesis pretty simultaneously. To break it down, Dylan actually recorded Bringing It All Back Home, including the electric half, a few days before the Byrds recorded the "Mr. Tambourine Man" single, though the Byrds had been recording electric rehearsals (including at least one electric version of "Mr. Tambourine Man") for some time before they did the single. The Byrds didn't start recording the rest of the Mr. Tambourine Man album until about a couple of months after they did the "Mr. Tambourine" single and Dylan had cut Bringing It All Back Home.

Although Roger McGuinn speculated that Dylan got his inspiration for doing rock from the Byrds and "Mr. Tambourine Man," I think he was talking about more general inspiration for Dylan to pursue rock all-out, rather than specifically giving Dylan the idea to go rock after discovering what the Byrds were doing.

Dylan, I think, would certainly have gone rock even if the Byrds hadn't formed. The Byrds having a folk-rock hit with one of his songs certainly helped pave the way for wide acceptance of his transition, though. It is certain that the Byrds were playing electric folk-rock *live,* for about half a year, before Bob Dylan started playing electric live.

To briefly state a more general observation, I'm sometimes asked questions along the lines of "who was the first to go folk-rock" or "what was the first folk-rock record." Part of what the book illustrates is that *no one* was "first." There were dozens or perhaps hundreds of musicians making the move to go folk-rock, in varying degrees, at the same time in the 18 months or so before "Mr. Tambourine Man" became a hit. The Byrds and Dylan were the most important pioneers in this process, and the Byrds' single "Mr. Tambourine Man" and their first album were the most important recordings in popularizing folk-rock on a mass scale. But there were plenty of other folk-rock moves afoot by other artists at the same time.

6. With the success of The Byrds' first hit, it seemed that everyone in the top 40 jumped on the folk rock band wagon, including Sonny and Cher, Dion, etc. What are your comments on this?

Not everyone in the Top 40 jumped on the folk-rock bandwagon; there were plenty of soul singers, pop vocalists, and straight-ahead rock groups that didn't. But yes, quite a few people did. Whenever there's a significant new trend in pop music, there will immediately be singers, groups, producers, and record labels eager to exploit the trend. That's what happened with folk- rock in the second half of 1965. Actually I don't view this as a totally bad thing; some very good records came out of this, and the top 40 itself opened up to more genuinely artistic folk-rockers like Simon & Garfunkel and the Lovin' Spoonful who would have had a much harder time getting a foot in the door if folk-rock hadn't been an industry trend.

Sonny & Cher are perhaps the easiest target to pick when citing bandwagon jumpers, since they had no roots to speak of in folk music, beat the Byrds' way-superior version of "All I Really Want to Do" on the charts (with Cher's solo single of the tune) by rushing it out before the Byrds' interpretation came out on a single, and pretty quickly abandoned pretenses of being folk-rock for more all-around mainstream pop stardom. But as I note in the book, Sonny Bono wasn't really doing anything he hadn't been doing as a scuffler on the margins of pop-rock for about a decade. For a long while, he'd been trying to get a hit, or status in the industry, by plugging into the sounds of whatever was going on at the time. Folk-rock was the gate that happened to open for him. Also Bono did make a genuine contribution to proto-folk-rock by co-writing "Needles and Pins," well before folk-rock became a fad.

Dion was actually a different case than someone like Sonny Bono, or even the Turtles. He'd been recording some little-noticed rock records with heavy folk and blues influences at Columbia for about a year-and-a-half before folk-rock had its national breakthrough. His appreciation for folk and roots music was genuine. Although most listeners think of him as a pop-rock singer or teen idol, I wouldn't say he was a bandwagon jumper. He was doing something he had an authentic artistic affinity for, but didn't happen to get much success with it in 1965 and 1966. And it wasn't a temporary phase for him, as he did have a major folk-rock hit in 1968 with "Abraham, Martin and John," and did some other interesting folk-rock-singer-songwriter recordings in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Those will be covered in my sequel to Turn! Turn! Turn!, Eight Miles High. Ultimately, the bandwagon jumpers and most commercial exploitation of folk-rock in 1965 didn't have a lasting effect. When the bandwagon jumpers disappeared or moved on to something other than folk-rock, folk-rock not only remained intact, but grew and thrived. The music was too strong to be diluted. Although "folk-rock" as a catchphrase and fad never got as much attention in the media as a trend as it did in 1965, folk-rock as a musical form remained a huge artistic, social, and commercial force for the rest of the 1960s, both on the Top 40 charts and elsewhere.

7. There were many early incarnations that are fascinating reading about in your book such as the Mugwumps that included two members of The Mamas and Papas and a later member of The Lovin' Spoonful. Are there any other unique, unknown lineups that later became folk rocks icon ensembles?

Not trying to be too brief here, but I covered all the notable ones in the book; there weren't too many. As examples, there were the Au-Go-Go Singers with Stephen Stills and Richie Furay, but they were a pretty commercial folk ensemble, only sneaking in proto-folk-rock once on their album (with their cover of "High Flying Bird," featuring Stephen Stills on lead vocals). There was the Big Three with Cass Elliot and Tim Rose; the Journeymen with John Phillips, Michelle Phillips, and Denny Doherty; and the Even Dozen Jug Band with John Sebastian, Steve Katz, Maria Muldaur, Stefan Grossman, and David Grisman. David Lindley and Chris Darrow, both later of Kaleidoscope, played traditional folk in the Mad Mountain Ramblers and the Dry City Scat Band. But really, all of these were folk groups that barely or never touched on rock influences before they broke up.

John Sebastian made interesting pre-Lovin' Spoonful recordings as a session musician on solo records by Fred Neil and Jesse Colin Young, but the lineups of personnel on those records couldn't be considered proper groups. Some interesting combinations never recorded, like Jackie DeShannon and Ry Cooder, who played together in clubs. The Rising Sons almost count here because they featured both Cooder and Taj Mahal and only did one barely-heard single, although a relative wealth of recordings by the group became available on a 1992 CD.

8. It' seems the folk rock boom saved the careers of a few then has-been fifties teen idols such as Tom and Jerry that later became Simon and Garfunkel. Can you tell us briefly about their story?

The Tom & Jerry/Simon & Garfunkel story is a bit of an anomaly in folk-rock, and not too typical of the artists that became major folk-rock players. Simon & Garfunkel started playing together as high school friends in the duo Tom & Jerry, who had a minor hit in 1957 with "Hey, Schoolgirl."

They actually made a number of pop-rock records, often together but sometimes solo, over the next five years or so that didn't go anywhere commercially, and weren't very good. Then they changed their style to commercial folk, and released their first album as Simon & Garfunkel, Wednesday Morning 3 A.M., in 1964. The album flopped, the duo split, and Simon went to England, where he had some success (though not massive by any means) as a solo folk singer. Producer Tom Wilson overdubbed electric instruments on one of the songs from Wednesday Morning 3 A.M., "The Sound of Silence," and Columbia released it as a single. It went to #1, Simon returned from England to reunite with Garfunkel, and the duo went on to record many other folk-rock hit albums and singles over the next five years. In all likelihood, they would have never even reunited had Wilson not overdubbed "The Sound of Silence" and it had not become a hit.

That's the standard history, but a couple of less celebrated points should be made. First, I believe that Paul Simon would have become a major force in contemporary music, and probably a star, whether or not "The Sound of Silence" had been electrified and he had reunited with Garfunkel. He was making some definite progress in England, and as his rare UK-only solo acoustic folk album from 1965 (The Paul Simon Songbook) demonstrates, he was already an excellent writer. Most of those songs were subsequently re-recorded by Simon & Garfunkel; two, "The Sound of Silence" and "I Am a Rock," would become big hits for Simon & Garfunkel. So the talent and even the writing style that made Paul Simon a star was already there. The folk-rock boom didn't so much save his career as hugely expedite it.

If "The Sound of Silence" electric single hadn't come out, it's hard to say with hindsight, but I think most likely Simon would have stayed in England quite a bit longer and started to make some serious commercial headway. His songs were just too good to remain in obscurity, and Simon was and is an extraordinarily dedicated man to furthering his own career. I also think he would have gone into rock within a year or two even if "The Sound of Silence" hadn't been electrified. Just about every folk singer-songwriter of note did so within a year or two after mid-1965, and Simon was not only already comfortable with making pop-rock records in Tom & Jerry et al., but most likely wouldn't have had purist objections to expanding into full arrangements. On the other hand, it's probably fair to say that if "The Sound of Silence" hadn't become an overdubbed hit, Art Garfunkel probably never would have become a major recording artist. Most likely would have entered a different profession than music, as he was already on the way to a master's degree at Columbia when "The Sound of Silence" took off.

Also, while the electrified "The Sound of Silence" was a fluke circumstance that jump-started Simon & Garfunkel's career, I think hardly any others could have capitalized on it as well as they did. They had a big backlog of high-grade Paul Simon compositions, they had much more experience in recording rock music than most early folk-rockers did, and they immediately followed up the single with good albums and singles that didn't milk a formula, but diversified and expanded. They got a big break, but they had the skills to take advantage of it to the maximum, and the willingness to put in a lot of hard work on building and sustaining their new career where others might have coasted on the hit.

There weren't really any other one-shot or has-been teen idols whose careers were saved by the folk-rock boom. Barry McGuire, John Phillips, and Sonny Bono had all just entered their thirties and likely would have never made a splash if folk-rock hadn't arrived. But McGuire and Phillips were really from the commercial folk world, not the teen idol rock one, and had never had a great deal of success even as folk stars, though they had some.

Sonny Bono was from a rock background, but had never had even a moderate degree of success as a rock star or teen idol.

9. One of the most fascinating transformations from folk to rock was Donovan. His first folk recordings from 1965 hardly resemble his hits a year later such as Sunshine Superman and Mellow Yellow. Explain.

Often an artist will find his or her own voice in a very short space of time. There is an enormous difference, for instance, between Bob Dylan's first and second record, the biggest being the second record is mostly original songs whereas the first is mostly folk covers. There's not a huge difference between the Beatles' Please Please Me and With the Beatles (though it's substantial), but there's a *massive* difference in quality and vocal/instrumental competence between their January 1, 1962 demo tape for Decca Records and Please Please Me. Such leaps can't be easily

explained. There might be things going on privately, away from the records and shows, in which they're listening to, absorbing, and experimenting with influences for a while before it shows up on a record, which makes the transition appear more sudden than it is. Donovan was undergoing such a rapid and major transformation between his 1965 folk recordings and the 1966 Sunshine Superman album. As he puts it in the book, Dylan sounded like Woody Guthrie for five minutes, and he sounded like Dylan for five minutes. As he also emphasizes in the book, he was almost alone among UK folkies in his eagerness to embrace electric instruments and expand his arrangements. This was openness not just to the basic combination of folk and rock, but also openness in general to all kinds of influences from jazz, classical, Indian music, beatnik poetry, and spiritual pursuits.

He also points out that you can hear this transformation in the most musically advanced of his 1965 recordings, "Sunny Goodge Street." And what happened to make such a leap with Sunshine Superman (the single and the album of the same name)? He found his own voice, as a songwriter and vocalist. He also found a great support team in fleshing out his songs into full and diverse arrangements, whom he credits in the book: producer Mickie Most, arranger John Cameron, and sideman Shawn Phillips (one of the few non-Indian musicians who could play sitar well in a rock setting at the time, as seen in his performance around that time as an accompanist to Donovan on Pete Seeger's TV show, a clip from which I showed at Book Soup).

Drugs perhaps had something to do with this expansion of melodic, lyrical, and instrumental ideas, as did the general vibe of 1966 toward colorful exploration in all areas of life. But I think it was mainly openness to incorporation of all kinds of sounds, while retaining a solid folk-rock base: a very difficult balancing act to maintain. He did this on the "Sunshine Superman" album, which has sitars, strings, organ, harpsichords, fierce hard blues-rock guitars, and lyrics ranging from psychedelic meditations and medieval-esque ballads to hard-hitting realistic narratives.

But the combinations always sound natural and organic, not forced, and the songs are sturdy and catchy. The Byrds did this with similar skill in 1966 when they drew in major Indian and jazz influences on "Eight Miles High” and their Fifth Dimension album.

Another small point to consider is that because of a complicated contractual dispute, Donovan was unable to release records during the first half of 1966, though he started the Sunshine Superman sessions in late 1965. If a single or two from those sessions had come out in the first half of 1966, the transition might have seemed less abrupt.

10. Do you think there could ever be another influx of blues, folk, R&B, and rock n' roll to create a unique musical force that could reflect and inspire a generation to such multi-cultural social commentary again?

One thing that becomes increasingly evident to me when studying and writing rock history (or indeed history in general) is that one can't predict major musical and cultural movements. They don't form methodically and consciously; they suddenly coalesce and gather unstoppable steam. No one would have predicted folk-rock in 1963; the very idea would have struck most as ludicrous. (Just as no one would have predicted a rock British Invasion in 1963.) Yet less than two years later, there it was, not just popular but unavoidable.

To answer your question more directly, my instinctive response would be --as much as I might hope otherwise -- no, there won't be another influx of blues, folk, R&B, and rock'n'roll that would create something of a similar impact. I hope to be proven wrong. But it's not just a matter of all the musical elements being in place -- there has to be a certain social climate, business/commercial milieu, and generational zeitgeist for everything to click on all cylinders. That's something which can't be predicted; if it *could* be predicted, that's almost a guarantee that it wouldn't be very exciting or monumental.

If something similar does happen in the future, I'd hazard a guess that it wouldn't come from exactly the same roots as 1960s folk-rock did. Perhaps music from the Third World would play a much larger role, or some technological innovation other than electric 12-string guitars would (and

no, I don't think synthesizers or such heavily electronically-programmed-based sounds would do it). Perhaps it would arise from the collapse of the current corporate-dominated means of music

production and distribution, with individuals able to get their music and messages out there on their own without relying on that system and the mass media; that's happening to some degree with the spread of music through the Internet. Perhaps there will be unforeseen social crises that will invest musicians and their audience with a new sense of urgency and commitment, though I would rather have the urgency and commitment without the crises.

As with the aftermaths of all major and great musical movements, some people have been latching onto any signs and unsuccessfully predicting a mass revival of folk-rock-based music for decades. If and when it does happen on the scale that it happened in the mid-1960s, we won't need to be told it's happening. It'll be in the air and impossible to miss.