THE BEAT GOES ON

THE BEAT GOES ON

Cruisin’ With Klein (Again)

The shadow trailing Allen Klein seems to lengthen every time we turn around. As if altercations with Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger and the United States Government weren’t enough, it appears that he’s now at odds with the Douglas Communications Corporation over the handling of Alexandro Jodorowsky’s film El Topo.

November of 1970 found Jodoroswky in New York with a film on his hands which nobody seemed to want. All the major studios had turned El Topo down, not knowing what to make of the Mexican-made film and apparently not displaying enough interest to even try. A last-ditch screening was arranged for Alan Douglas and Ken Schaffer of the Douglas Corporation, and their response was one of unqualified enthusiasm. Douglas, you see, is a multi-media (books, records and films) company which is more than willing to tackle supposedly “uncommercial” enterprises if the product is artistically justified and the karma is good. To reinforce their honorable intentions, they work on a straight 50/50 profit sharing arrangement with their artists.

Having made the decision to become involved with El Topo, Douglas set about devising a marketing strategy for the film. Not wishing to subject it to the immediate butchery of the straight film community — the response of the major studios had been ample warning — they decided upon a more organic mode of presentation. Inspired by the Grateful Dead’s midnight concerts, Douglas engineered a deal with the Elgin Theatre’s Ben Barenholtz whereby the film would be shown for three free weekend nights following a John & Yoko film festival. The response was so favorable that they decided to hold it over for a week, a week which didn’t end for nine months.

With no advertising save word-ofmouth, El Topo was playing to regularly packed houses. The minimal admission price of $2 made it possible for people to come back, in some cases, as many as five and six times. The major distributors returned with words of praise when it became evident that the movie was happening, but they were politely refused. Douglas has a rather strong notion about the proper consideration due art, and they were determined that El Topo should receive special attention. They were considering an independent distribution network when John Lennon saw the film and expressed an interest. Enter, quite naturally, Allen Klein.

The contract verbally worked out by Klein and Douglas on El Topo called for a 50/50 split of responsibility Klein to handle the merchandising, Douglas the creative end. According to Douglas, however, the situation has not exactly progressed according to that arrangement.

As a Douglas rep ran down the situation to us, Klein has now commandeered all areas of El Topo concern, and is expecting Douglas to foot 50% of a bill which they are never consulted on. (Douglas’ name, incidentally, is nowhere to be found in the credits or advertising.) They cite Klein’s rental of the “Grand Funk” billboard in Times Square (at a cost of $100,000 for three months), and his policy of renting theatres for six months at a time, neither of which they helped to formulate. They maintain that El Topo is being given a slick promotional going-over by people who have never even bothered to see the film, and that Klein is spending an unwarranted fortune to sell a film whose initial impact had been of an organic nature.

A second matter of contention revolves around the film’s soundtrack. Douglas deemed the mariachi score unmarketable, and commissioned Martine Fierro and the Shades of Joy to record their impressions . . . Klein subsequently released an almost note-perfect rendition of the insubstantial mariachi score, and all advertising carries a tag plugging the Apple record. His version (which pales beside the fine Shades of Joy album) is being sold in the lobbies of theatres where El Topo is shown.

An almost comical note (were it not so tragically telling) is the contention of Douglas that they can’t even get in to see a film which they supposedly hold half of. Douglas promo wizard Ken Schaffer cites as example the fact that he had to pay out of his own pocket to get 100 San Francisco press people in to see the film, and this while Apple and even Capitol Records (?) have allegedly been issuing free tickets.

We called Abkco Industries in the hopes of putting this matter into a more balanced perspective, and were shuffled from one office to another with nobody wanting to take responsibility for our questions. We finally reached a man who promised to check into the situation and call us back. As we go to press, the telephone has remained silent.

What it may finally boil down to is a clash between marketplace ideologies the hard sell of Klein and the relaxed sensitivity favored by Douglas. That the latter has apparently been eliminated in the name of business is certainly bad enough; that El Topo remains trapped in the middle is worse. Everything which has transpired is accepted as legal on paper, but that, perhaps, can only define the limitations of the law.

Gem Goes Under

Whenever we visited New York, an essential item on everybody’s itinerary was a stop at the Gem Spa, located at the corner of St. Mark’s Place and second Avenue, to have an egg cream and mingle with the local color and the ghosts seven city generations are bound to accumulate.

On our most recent expedition to the Big Apple, we escaped the clutches of over-zealous promo men and business demands to seek a few moments of welcome sanctuary at the Gem. We arrived, however, to find the windows blocked up with cardboard and yesterday’s papers, and a pretty final-looking padlock on the door. The Gem Spa was closed and given over to its ghosts.

While the closing of the Gem Spa may not make much of a dent in your historical overview, it means more than a little to anyone who ever passed through its doors. The Gem was one of those wonderfully human institutions, the kind of place which, in its small way, helped to make city life a little more livable. As a focus for neighborhood energy, as a source of staples in food, drink, tobacco and literature, as someplace to just hang out; as any number of things to as many people. The little store on the corner has always been integral to our American heritage, and the passing of such areas of tradition must be felt by us all.

“Like vodka’d up carpenters driving all their nails at the same time..."

Dashin’ & Flashin’

January 19, 1972. Uriah Heep is on stage. The overall musical sound is hard, driving and, best of all, repetious. But the sound is only half the show. The five members of Uriah Heep are bopping like epileptics on a rotgut binge. Lead vocalist Dave Byron minces, teases and generally prances, dancing through all the Jagger/Townshend moves you’ve ever seen. Organist Ken Hensley looks like a Bugs Bunny cartoon I once saw where Bugs was dressed like, a concert pianist with long hair and doing all the Van Cliburn moves in a kind of grotesque drag. He attacks his keyboard like they all do, but he does it harder and more often and with less control of his whole upper torso. Guitarist Mick Box has all the rock “star tricks down also, and uses as many as he can pack into one short moment. Lee Kerslake is the drummer, and he moves like a maniac, flailing and mooning like a whole houseful of vodka’d-up Ukranian carpenters driving all their nails at the same time. And if bass players are allowed to have jive moves, Mark Clarke, sure has them. Altogether they are a visual orgasm, and totality of semi-controlled motion.

The temptation is to call Uriah Heep a flash band. But you can’t, because they have a penetrating and full sound that overlays the whole act and makes it credible. The music transcends the antics and brings them to its level. And so Uriah Heep aren’t a flash band at all. They’re a flashy rock and roll band. And if you don’t see the difference, you’re reading the wrong magazine.

What we’re doing, Hensley earlier told us, “is just, uh, getting on stage and, uh. I can’t really describe it. It’s high energy. It’s heavy and it’s, uh, rock and roll. It’s just happy sounds, and it makes us feel good to play it. We really hope it gets the audience off, too. We’ve always been aware that it’s the audiences that are important. We know it’s only personal appearances that sell albums for us. We’re playing out there for the people who might wanna go out and buy the album, and we want to show them a good thing. We want to play before as many people as we can.”

The band has travelled quite a long road already. They were formed from the remnants of a lesser known English thru-ways to hunt out the Holiday Inn and Hensley, Byron and company for all these professional sounding quotes.

Both Byron and Hensley were prepared to talk about the past to great lengths, but it was the future that really aroused their exuberance. The next album and the single that they have just finished were very much in their minds.

“The next album will be like a natural progression from Look At Yourself,” Hensley stated. With Look At Yourself we went back a little past Salisbury, back more to the rock roots, and we overlooked some of the sophistication which Salisbury contained. We just included all the natural things that were happening. We’re all very excited about the next album because the new band sounds so good in the studio. After we heard how good the single sounded, we all thought how good it was going to be to get back in the studio for the next album.”

“There’s an interesting story about the single. It’s called “The Wizard,” and on it we’ve got a completely new instrument that nobody has ever used before. It’s a kettle. You see, when I had written the song, I was making a rough tape of it at home, and I was sitting in my front room with the tapes going and my acoustic guitar to record it. Chip, (Ken’s bee-yoo-tiful lady), went into the kitchen and put the kettle on. I was just playing through the song, and all of a sudden I could hear what sounded like violins, you see? I knew I wasn’t mad, yet it sounded really strange. So I took the headphones off and found that it was the kettle in the kitchen. It was perfectly in pitch with the key that the song was in. So I took the thing to the studio, and I said to Gerry, can we try to record the thing to see what happens. Of course, he just laughed. But he had to go out for an hour, and he said, go on then, record the kettle and see what happens. So we set up the kettle in the kitchen and put a mike on it, and recorded it eight times. We put some echo on it, and it completely blew everyone’s mind because it sounds like a very weird string section. It’s weird because the note is never constant for more than a fraction of a second. When you have it eight time, you have a very wavery string section. The technicians couldn’t believe it. Next you know, we’ll have a vaccuum cleaner in there or something.”

The show that night was killer. It was bold and bizarre and brash, like the opening of this article says. The crowd band called Spice, who changed their name with the addition of Hensley. They originally planned to keep the group name, but changed it to Uriah Heep on the premise that this was an entirely new project. They teamed up with producer Gerry Bron, and cut a quick first album.

Hensley calls the first album a “tactical error.” He notes that “We recorded the album and released it before we went on the road. As it turned out, that wasn’t the right thing to do. We’ve proved since that our best selling point has been live appearances. What we should really have done was given people some idea of the product before we released the record. It went out in a mass of publicity, and the public didn’t really know what they were supposed to be buying. The product was a totally unknown quantity at the time. The press labelled us a hype and we were faced with an obvious uphill task. It became obvious to everyone that the only way we were going to get anywhere was by really working hard. So that was what we proceeded to do.”

Although the first album didn’t sell too well, they hit the road and started to become a top-draw act in Europe. They did so many tours in Germany, Italy, Scandanavia, etc., that they can honestly say they are one of the most travelled bands in existance. They built up loyal followings bn the continent, and meanwhile released their second album, Salisbury. This effort, they frankly admit, sold about as much as the first, which wasn’t an overpowering success. After more touring and a change of drummers, they cut their third, latest, and most devastating album, Look At Yourself. Look At Yourself was probably the best party album released in 1971. It was incredibly loud, blaring, blatantly repetitious, and all around wonderful. It was almost painful in spots, but never annoying. Finally, after two more personel changes, they toured Italy once more, and then started on this massive American tour with Deep Purple.

— It was on the second stop on the tour that we ventured into the heart of Crazed Detroit with its asshole madness ate up every moment of the colour and dazzle. Detroit audiences are highly susceptible to the kind of moves that Uriah Heep display. The band ended its set, the crowd screamed encore, and the band came back and gave them one. Then everyone went back to the dressing room and grumbled. Evidently the sound hadn’t been right. There was no bite in the music, insufficient volume from the guitar amps. Furthermore, the band supposedly hadn’t had that real spark, they hadn’t been “up each other’s ass,” as Hensley so quaintly put it. So he looked somewhat angry, and somewhat bewildered. When he got around to talking to us again, he was out and out apologetic. Which was really a bitch, because it had never occurred to us that anything was even wrong.

But the scene in the dressing room had brought back once more something that Hensley had said earlier that day, “We’re not fucking around out there, we’re really serious about what we’re doing.”

Down Home Blues

Down home: the Brazos Valley region of Texas where blues songster Mance Lipscomb was ‘discovered’ in 1960 working as a field hand. Or Como, Mississippi, where Fred McDowell played every Sunday night on radio station WSAO.

Down home: Fairfax, Virginia, where John Jackson still digs graves ^supplement the meager income he makes as a performer. Or the Levee camps near Crawford, Mississippi where Big Joe Williams learned to play on rebuilt guitars.

Down home: for 40-year-old Chris Strachwitz, and his company Arhoolie Records, down home is fertile land where good, often great music is found. And he has spent the past 11 years searching out and recording unknown, esoteric or simply forgotten musicians, ignoring such nuisances as race barriers and “lack of commercial potential.”

His efforts have yielded only 120 albums. The common thread is that it’s down home music, local sounds which might be heard at festivals and picnics, churches or the neighborhood bar.

Arhoolie is one of dozens of small record companies to whom money is a necessary, but secondary, reason for being in the business. The music itself is the primary reason. Except for the designing of record jackets, which is handled by a friend (Wayne Pope), Arhoolie is a one man operation. Strachwitz takes care of contracts, producing, publicity, bookkeeping and a large chunk of the distribution.

Strachwitz’s first love is the blues. He’s recorded a few name musicians such as Big Mama Thornton, Lightning Hopkins Mance Lipscomb and Fred McDowell, but most of his artists could be categorized as unknowns: bluesrocker Bee Houston, pianist Merci Dee, guitarist Juke Boy Bonner, blues accordianist Clifton Chenier, Earl Hooker, and the Rev. Louis Overstreet with his guitar, his sons and the congregation of the St. Luke Powerhouse Church of God in Christ of Phoenix, Arizona. Unknowns.

In addition to the blues, the Arhoolie library also contains recordings of Louisiana cajun bands, hillbilly and cowboy songs, traditional and modern jazz, gospel music and folk songs. Most recently, Strachwitz has added “corridos,” Mexican-American border music which employs a ballad form reminiscent of English tradition.

Supplementing his own recordings, Strachwitz has two other sources of music. He buys the rights to other small labels, such as Folk Lyric, Old Timey, Blues Classics and Ragline records, keeping in circulation Blind Boy Fuller, Memphis Minnie and others. And he bootlegs (although with one important qualification), a practice about which he is exceedingly frank.

“Maybe I’ve become a little hardened myself,” he explained one morning. “When I first started bootlegging I was a little leary. Should I really steal Victor’s and Columbia’s things?

“But now I have no qualms whatsoever. I think if the bootlegger pays the artist, he’s much better than the legitimate company reissuing the old stuff because the companies do not, I believe, ever pay a dime to these performers. I don’t think Bukka White has gotten one cent for that reissue on Columbia. Specialty is reissuing those Sensation masters by John Lee Hooker, well John Lee Hooker isn’t getting a penny out of it.

“So I feel much better about stealing the masters and clearing them with the artists. I feel yery happy especially if I can still pay the people who are alive. I recently paid Blind Boy Fuller’s widow some money. She was really happy. She said ‘This was God sent.’ It wasn’t 'much, but money is so relative— something like four or five hundred dollars that had built up over the past several years.”

Strachwitz is a native Pole who Unigrated to the United States shortly after World War II. He attended the University of California in the early 50’s trying math, engineering and physics in an effort to get a degree. He took two years off to do a hitch in the Army, then returned to earn a Bachelor’s degree in political science.

“All my friends in school were listening to shit like Patti Page and the Four Freshmen. Oh God, I hated that stuff! I saw nothing in it. I like hillbilly and, later, blues. Like Roy Akin, the Light Crust Dough Boys, and the Armstrong Twins... God I loved them.

“I used to skip out of school during the break and run to my room at 10 o’clock in the morning because the Armstrong Twins had a fifteen minute radio program over XERB (now Wolfman Jack’s home), at that time a hillbilly station. It played 15 minute segments. Fifteen minutes of T. Texas Tyler, fifteen minutes of the Maddox brothers. It had something I’d never heard.”

Strachwitz began a history of Arhoolie Records: “I never really thought of starting a label until ’59, when I went to Texas for the first time to see my idol: ol’ Lightning Hopkins. As I remember it really started then, because I felt he should be recorded live. Because he was unbelievable that man. I’d see him in these juke joints in Houston, and he was the most spontaneous person I’d ever encountered. He would make up songs about whoever was standing in front of him in this little joint.

“When I first walked in that place, the number he was into was this song about ‘I’m aching all over/ I believe I got pneumonia this time.’ Then he started singing about ‘My man come all the WAY/ from California just to hear ol’ Lightning PLAY.’ And he just went on and on, everything that was in his head, what he was thinking about that day. I’d never heard anything like that.”

Strachwitz initially bankrolled himself by teaching, and by purchasing old 78’s for a dime and selling them to British collectors. He’s since dropped teaching. He ^learned how to record from an incredibly obscure collector who lives in the Oakland ghetto.

“Mr. Jaxyson,” he said, “has a funny little TV repair shop right down on Seventh street next to the Lincoln Theater. He put out 78’s. I have some of them and they’re the most primitive t mgs you’ve ever heard. He’d record these guys during the war who would come off the street singing with guitars, beating a bucket, really downhome stuff.

“Jaxyson did the first records with King Narcisse: Louis H. Narcisse, the Mount Zion spiritual temple man. You can’t miss him. He’s called His Grace The Highness Louis H. Narcisse and his Mount Zion Spiritual Temple at 14th and Peralta. He came from New Orleans and he made his first record for Jaxyson.”

Initially, Lightning Hopkins was too expensive for him but his first release wasn’t a bad second: Mance Lipscomb. “I guess it was appropriate,” Chris mused. “Since it really is a pre-blues style of music that Mance plays. He’s really of the older tradition of the songster. I don’t think blues really came about until the 20’s when guys became such specialists that they only sang blues. Mance is really of that older generation like John Hurt or Pink Anderson from the Carolinas.”

Since his first release in 1960, Strachwitz has recorded more than 50 artists and groups. The production job has settled into something of a routine. Artists’ fees of $200 to $2000 (being an advance against royalties of 20 to 30 per cent per lp), and studio time begins at $500 with another grand invested in tapes, acetates and other technical facilities. 1000 discs with labels and jackets runs another $500.

The first 1000 albums cost a total of $1100 to $4000. With $2.25 per disc going to a distributor, an album has to sell upwards of 2000 copies for Strachwitz to make money. For Arhoolie that’s no mean feat. In the company’s best year (1969) the catalog’s best seller topped the 1700 mark, while the worst sold 69. This year a Charlie Musslewhite album looks to be an all time best seller with 1500 discs purchased in the first three months of release.

Still, even $4000 is relatively cheap for an album nowadays. Strachwitz attributes the low cost to two factors:

“The blues are relatively cheap to record,” he said. “I think there is a longtime precedent that most artists of that kind have no idea what their talent is worth. A lot of them are willing to record for nothing, which is really how most blues singers get started. So the price of your artist is low.

“And they have their stuff ready. You go into a studio. Boom, you cut it right off. In two minutes you got a song. Just like that, one after the other. All the people I ever talk to who recorded blues always said they hardly ever did a second take on anything.

“Until all this multiple tracking, people would have to have their thing ready. This thing of taking six months to make an album is just lunacy. Absolutely ridiculous in my opinion. It just spoils these people who think they can start with nothing and work for six months and come up with something.

“Lightning refuses to do anything twice. He has two reasons for that. He doesn’t like it, and he says they take the second take, put a different title on it and issue it without paying him.”

Strachwitz contracts for a single album at a time; he is dead set against exclusive contracts because they limit the performers’ opportunity for a better deal. As he said, “Nothing was ever more important to Fred McDowell than that one album on Capitol, I Do Not Play No Rock and Roll.

His biggest problem is distribution: “I’ve built up, over the past 10 years, distributors who will fool with esoteric labels, but they’re always underfinanced. They pay you when they’ve sold all the records, if you’re lucky. When they sell them, if they need more, then they pay you. The world’s main problem is distribution,” he added. In the past ten years, however, he has built up a workable international distribution system (he has big sales, in Sweden, minor sales in England and France) which supplements his mail-order service.

His address is Arhoolie Records, Box 9195, Berkeley, California, 94709. Fifty cents buys a complete catalog and a copy of the “Arhoolie Occasional,” a newspaper consisting primarily of reprints of reviews and articles about performers.

If Strachwitz had one wish, it would be for students to actively promote blues artists. It’s really up to students, he feels, because they have the access to funds and facilities. Aside from that, it’s a near perfect life for him of simply doing what he likes to do.

It’s just ol’ Chris being down home.