political debates that would last all evening. Al had a character in his strip called ‘Phonie Joanie’, after Joan Baez, and I formed a group for his TV show called ‘Peter Paul & Joanie’. We performed absurdly pro-establishment songs that I wrote. An ardent protester of The Vietnam War, I wrote bellicose, jingoistic stuff like we were saving humanity from WWIII by killing ‘the rice-growing man’. Kind of ‘Okie from Muskogee’-like. Redneck. Completely over the top.


“One day Al, the straightest classicist you’d ever meet in terms of musical taste, wanted to hear my electronic music. So I played some tapes for him. He loved them. He introduced me to his friend Andy Warhol. Andy loved the weird stuff too. I started visiting Andy at The Factory when I went to NYC. But for this Al Capp connection to me and Andy Warhol, my involvement with Elektra would probably never have happened.


“I had decided that I wanted to put a group together, and that we would call ourselves The Cambridge Electric Opera Company. I had written a lot of songs at that point, and had studied how to write for instruments I didn’t play – like the flute, the trumpet, the piccolo, the flugelhorn. I found out who the best jazz drummer was in Boston – a guy named Joe Livolsi – and I knocked on his door with my Gibson guitar in hand and played him a few songs I’d written. Mal MacKenzie, whom I’d known since we were freshmen at Harvard, was one of most talented stringed-instrument players in the area. If it had frets, Mal played it like a virtuoso. So I approached him to join as our bass player. Then came Devi Klate, who ended up singing two songs (three if you count ‘Anecdote Of Horatio And Julie’) on the Transformer album. Devi introduced me to the classically trained countertenor John Nicholls, who sings ‘The Sun Comes Up Each Day’. Steve Tanzer was an ace flautist in Boston. He joined up. We also added a trumpet player and a flugelhorn player from the Harvard orchestra.


“The Cambridge Electronic Opera Company came to the attention of Newsweek magazine. They mentioned us in an article as exemplifying the cutting edge of where modern pop music might be going. With that Newsweek article in hand and a basement recorded demo tape, I fired up my rusted-out 49 Chevy jalopy and took off for New York to get a record deal.


2My technique was awesomely naïve. I would walk in the door with Newsweek and tape in hand, tell whoever was there that I wanted to play something for the head of the company, and insist that the phones be turned off while the tape was playing. The first place I tried this was at Columbia, which was my first choice. Incredibly, three minutes after I walked in the door I was sitting in Clive Davis’s office with his phones turned off and playing my demo tape (which included the outrageous ‘Anecdote Of Horatio And Julie’). Clive immediately offered me a deal and buzzed in a staff producer there. Clive played my demo for him and the guy said, ‘I’m creative, too. I was the first person to put


bongos in a hillbilly tune.’ I’m sure I thought, ‘Hmmmmm, and maybe the last person, too.’


“Anyway, a few days later I had offers from not only Columbia, but Warner-Reprise, Capitol, and lesser companies, too. Nobody turned me down. That’s not a comment on the quality of my demo tape, only on the times. The Beatles were putting out things like ‘I Am The Walrus’. Nobody in the music business had a clue where things were headed. They didn’t dare turn anybody down who had something really weird to offer. And what I had to offer was, indeed, really weird.


“Andy Warhol used to play some of my electronic music tapes at The Factory. One time when I was visiting there, he played the demo I was taking around. A guy named Danny Fields was there and he came up and wondered what the hell all that noise was. I told him it was my noise, and it was the demo tape I was taking around looking for a record deal. ‘That’s great noise,’ Danny said.


all the phones were turned off. There would be no interruptions. I thought Jac was terrific. A truly great personality. Up for anything new. The first song on my demo tape was ‘The Anecdote Of Horatio And Julie’. Jac sat through it. Expressionless. Then came ‘The Sun Comes Up Each Day’. Jac heard about four bars and stopped the tape. I thought he was going to tell me I was history. ‘You’ve got a deal,’ he said. ‘What do you want, money or freedom?’


‘Freedom,’ I said. ‘Total control over all aspects of content and production.’ ‘Did Clive offer you that?’ Jac asked. ‘No,’ I said. ‘He offered me a producer who put bongos in a hillbilly tune.’


“By the time the master tracks were cut in Boston, I felt the name Cambridge Electric Opera Company had become somewhat derivative. Also, Peter Rowan (a close friend, who also lived in Cambridge) had the Earth Opera album out with Elektra. I told Jac I’d like to call the album Transformer. Jac said


“Nobody in the music business had a clue where things were headed. They didn’t dare turn anybody down who had


something really weird to offer.And what I had to offer was, indeed, really weird.”


‘You should take it to Elektra.’ It turned out he worked there. (Fields was ostensibly Elektra’s publicity man and East Coast company freak: in ’68, he was responsible for signing The Stooges and The MC5 to the label as well as David Peel and Nico). I hadn’t thought of approaching Elektra. Though I was aware of The Doors, of course, most of the Elektra records in my own collection were folk. Danny said I should let Jac Holzman hear my demo.


“So, unannounced, I appeared at Elektra’s office with Newsweek and tape in hand, and told the girl there that I had something I wanted to play for Jac Holzman and that he had to listen to the entire tape and turn off his phones. She looked at me as if I were crazy, which I probably was. I could see I wasn’t going to get anywhere and was about to leave when Danny Fields happened to walk into the room. He greeted me warmly, and completely changed the ambience in the room. ‘You’ve got to hear this demo,’ Danny told her. ‘It’s amazing.’


“The girl went off to see Jac, came back and said that Jac couldn’t turn off the phones in his office. I said, ‘Clive Davis did. And he offered me a deal.’ The girl went away, came back, and said, ‘Jac wants to know if you played the tape for Clive in his office or at home.’ ‘In his office,’ I said. So she goes away, comes back and says, ‘Would you be able to play the tape for Jac at his home on Saturday afternoon with the phones off ?’


“Indeed I was able to. I appeared at 37 W 12 Street #6J (the address is still scrawled on the box of my demo tape), and Jac assured me that


that was fine. The ‘produced and created by David Stoughton’ credit was Jac’s idea. I never even knew about it until they sent me copies of the finished album.


“Most reviewers were taken aback by the experimental tracks, which are now sometimes called ‘avant-progressive’, because they expected something more traditional from Elektra. Rolling Stone thought that ‘The Anecdote Of Horatio And Julie’ was too far out for anybody that wasn’t on an acid trip. Not surprisingly, people with conservative tastes disliked the extreme tracks, and people with extreme tastes were puzzled by the inclusion of conservative tracks.


“In the real world, music people I met after I moved to California generally liked the traditional parts of the album, though for most ‘The Anecdote Of Horatio And Julie’ was too much. Frank Zappa, on the other hand, liked only ‘The Anecdote Of Horatio And Julie’ and told me I should have had the balls to do a whole album like that. I told him if that’s the way he felt, he should have the balls to release an album of my musique concrète on his record label, Bizarre. He gave me the number of somebody to call there, but I never did, and Zappa and I never crossed paths again. We are now linked on an internet site as both having done albums you shouldn’t play at your office party.”


That’s recommendation enough for me, though Transformer remains unreleased on CD.


Becoming Elektra: The True Story of Jac Holzman’s Visionary Record Label is published by Jawbone Press in September.


15


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