“We went up to Motown and we auditioned, and at the end Berry Gordy said to us, “You girls really sound good, but come back when you have graduated from high school.”
MARY WILSON, THE SUPREMES
Americans had enjoyed a decade of unparalleled economic growth when John F. Kennedy was elected in 1960. And the baby boom had fueled a twenty percent growth in population during the 1950s. On East Coast campuses and in Greenwich Village coffee bars, white, middle-class college kids sang songs inspired by traditional British, Irish, and Scottish folk laments in their quest for social reform. In the housing projects, song had always been integral to the African American struggle for equality, but now a new kind of music helped define blacks’ increasingly assertive crusade for civil rights.
Mary Wilson [vocalist and founding member, the Supremes]: From the time when I was born my mother says I was always singing. I was always humming and listening to all the musicals. I was always involved in music, but never did anything about it. Then, just barely thirteen, I signed up for this talent show. I borrowed my brother’s boots and black leather jacket. I did it because I was into Frankie Lymon & the Teenagers, who were the Jackson 5 of the day. I fell in love with their song “I’m Not a Juvenile Delinquent.” I was gyrating to “Juvenile Delinquent” and the crowd went crazy.
Me, Florence Ballard, and Diana Ross, we all lived in the Brewster-Douglass projects in Detroit. Florence sang “Ave Maria” in the talent contest. We migrated towards each other. I said, “Your voice is so big and beautiful,” and she said, “You had everyone in the gymnasium saying ‘Go Mary! Go Mary!’ ” This was ’56 or ’57. And we walked home from school and we became friends right there.
Al Kooper [American musician and producer]: I was born in Brooklyn in 1944, and I was fascinated by Manhattan. I started going there as soon as I could. I was very into music at an early age. At six I could play the piano and I was just hooked. Fortunately, my mom played music on the radio and there was always music in the house.
I discovered rock and roll from my babysitter—she lived down the hall. And I was ten or about that and she was fourteen or fifteen. So about ten minutes after my parents left, her friends came over to play music and dance. She listened to the Channels and the Penguins—all this doo-wop stuff. I went nuts. [I thought], “I really like this.”
Some days my father would take me to the diner and I would start playing this music on the jukebox. Then he knew I was listening to the “voodoo music.” Elvis came along and it was more fashionable to play the guitar in the midfifties, so I started playing, and I was a quick starter. God put music in me but it took a little while to realize it.
Carolyn Hester [American folksinger]: Many of us were seventeen and eighteen years old [and] coming up for the draft in ’54, ’55— it just radicalized us. My father was a lawyer—he graduated from Texas State University with LBJ at the same time—and he got accepted to Georgetown Law School, and we went East. We lived in Washington, DC.
When I got to New York having graduated from high school, I aimed to be part of the folk scene. My mother wanted me to go see this man she knew called Norman Petty [Buddy Holly’s producer], so she wrote him a penny postcard and he called her.
He said, “I don’t know much about folk, but she can audition.” Norman Petty said, “Do you have enough for an album?’ I was twenty. I recorded my first album and it came out in 1958. My dad played harmonica on it. He wanted me to be a folk musician.
Buddy Holly was in the studio when I was recording. He came to see me and he asked if I would go to see Chuck Berry and Fats Domino with him. In the meantime I found out that he was singing one of my songs.
Henry Diltz [American musician and photographer]: My mother was a stewardess for TWA. We lived a nomadic life, stationed different places. My father died in WW2. He was in the air corps. Then my mother remarried—he was in the state department—and we moved to Tokyo in 1947. I grew up there for five years. Then my stepfather was stationed in Germany in 1958 or 1957. I got into classical music and jazz. My family were very musical. I had played piano, my father played the cello, and my mother played the piano. I liked music. And then I had a friend who played the guitar and I got into country music.
Al Kooper: It was a great period for jazz. Jazz just reached me. That was what I liked. It touched me in some way. The doo-wop music you could dance to and it was the sort of punk music of its time. It was a distillation of blues and gospel music. Originally it was all black acts, then white people embraced this music and then slowly participated in it.
I had a friend in a band with a record deal and I’d spend the weekend at his house. One time we went into Manhattan and I auditioned for the record company—I was fourteen and I actually passed.
This band at the time, 1958, had the number one record in U.S.—“Short Shorts.” They were called the Royal Teens. I would sneak away—my parents would have killed me if I quit school. The other guys were sixteen or more. I would go allegedly to my friend’s in Brooklyn for the weekend, but I would be in Pennsylvania or Chicago or Boston and playing rock-and-roll shows with them—it went on for about two-and-a-half years. And then I was writing songs by this time and I got hooked up with a publisher, with these two guys who wrote lyrics, and we became a writing team. I was finishing high school now and had to go to college. This was now 1959.
I wanted to study music but there was no rock and roll, and the music they taught was music I wasn’t interested in. After a year I told my parents I was quitting, and that was a bad thing. If you didn’t go to college you were considered a bum. But I just didn’t fit in and I couldn’t do it. So I said, “Give me a couple of years, and if I can’t make a living I’ll go back to school.”
Mary Wilson: Florence [Ballard] and I became really close, and someone came up to me in the playground—“There’s someone who wants to put together a girl group.” We go home and we meet with Diane [Diana Ross]—we were living in the same complex. We walked down to these guys’ apartment—there’s Paul Williams, Eddie Kendricks, and another guy, their manager. They were a group called the Primes and would later form the Temptations.
“Oh my god, I’m in this apartment with these guys and they are all older than we are and my mother is going to kill me,” I thought.
One of the guys said, “Can you guys sing?” and we had never sung together before but Diane started singing Ray Charles and we chimed in on the harmony, and it really sounded beautiful. She was a very easy singer. This is before we had any ideas about what we were doing: we were only thirteen. It was just a natural thing that we did.
The guy says, “Fine. Okay. You are the Primettes and I am going to manage you girls.” We went by their apartment every day. Diane sang one of the Drifters’ songs, “There Goes My Baby,” and we jumped in and did the harmonies, and then I sang a ballad—it was one of those things that felt natural and it fit so naturally. We had a girl group, and I realized I was happier than I had ever been. It made me feel complete. We would meet after school, we would rehearse, we were the three of us. We directed our own songs.
Henry Diltz: I took another left turn. All my friends in this American College in Munich—there were a hundred girls and boys—were all studying for West Point and Annapolis. And then I read that sons of deceased veterans can automatically take the exam. So I wrote a letter and they said yes. I had to fly to London in 1958 to take the medical. I stayed in a little hotel in Hyde Park, and I went into a club one night. And they were playing skiffle music. I had no freaking idea what it was, but it hooked me.
I got accepted to the Military Academy at West Point—the dean of the school was saying, “Congratulations, my boy. What a rare opportunity.” The first three months were physical training and exercises that put me in great shape. So while I was out there I joined the Columbia Record club. And I would get these mail-order records. I heard these banjos. A banjo has a fifth string. I had to play that. I contrived to leave West Point. It was the army. Oh, man! Four years in there. It’s an engineering school. Math six days a week. Analysis and calculus. I bought a banjo and went to Hawaii.
Al Kooper: When I was in the Royal Teens they had record hops—they were things radio stations sponsored. They had them at schools and gyms primarily, and they had the artists who made the record come to the schools and lip-sync their songs for the school kids, and this helped sell records, and it helped the radio station.
The Royal Teens did a record hop somewhere in Queens and I met this group Tom & Jerry, who had a hit record called “Hey Schoolgirl” in the top ten. This had to be 1959. We realized that the three of us all lived in Queens, and we became friends. They were my age.
I didn’t know they were destined to be anything. They were Simon & Garfunkel! Paul [Simon’s] father was a bandleader, but a bandleader that played events—weddings and bar mitzvahs and debutante balls. Paul called me once and said, “Every forty minutes I stand up and sing a Twist song and I wonder if you would play lead guitar behind me. It’s good money: fifty dollars.” And so we would both sit onstage with electric guitars. Paul switched to folk music, but when he started he was playing rock and roll. We were friends, and we played together.
Mary Wilson: There were weekend dances in Detroit and we would do union dances. We wouldn’t do nightclubs or that sort of thing because we were too young. I don’t think we were paid. We had this manager; he would buy us clothes and his girlfriend would take us shopping. Our beginning was different from others who were singing on the streets.
Our parents were happy because they knew where we were at all times and they knew we were doing something that we enjoyed and it was keeping us out of trouble. We did that till 1961, until we decided we wanted to go further.
We sang the popular music. We loved harmony. We rehearsed a lot, always. In school they had special classes like home economics for girls and shop for boys. So we used those special classes to do our own thing, to sing. It was a different age then.
We entered a contest, an international contest—it was in Canada—and we won. We were singing the Drifters, Ray Charles.
Al Kooper: What was the first record I ever bought? There was a big white record at the time in 1955/’56—“Autumn Leaves” by Roger Williams on Kapp Records. And then there was this doo-wop song, “The Closer You Are,” by the Channels. I wanted both records, but I only had a dollar. I was probably thirteen or fourteen, or even younger. I went to the store and I had to make a decision, so I bought the black record. That was my first record—a 45. The black music was getting to me and changing me. And I still love that record.
Neil Sedaka [American singer/songwriter]: I had a scholarship, and I had the intention of becoming a classical pianist. I won a competition when I was sixteen as one of the top high school pianists. I was at Lincoln High School in Brooklyn. Songwriting was natural—my heroes were Gershwin and Irving Berlin, Rogers & Hammerstein, Rogers & Hart.
Then at Lincoln High School I heard rock and roll, and I was fascinated. I was not a star in high school. I was the nerd, not a jock. I played Chopin and Bach and wasn’t invited to the parties. I wanted from a very early age to be recognized and famous. I was teased and I wanted to show I was somebody special. I started a group called the Tokens that went on to do “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” I became, from the little pipsqueak to a big shot in high school because I had a group and we did rock and roll.
I was thirteen, started studying at Juilliard on Saturdays to be a concert pianist, and [lyricist and Grammy-nominated songwriter] Howard Greenfield’s mother heard me play Chopin. Howard lived just across the hall and he asked me if I wanted to write songs, and I said I didn’t know how to write songs. We wound up writing more than three hundred songs together.
Robert Christgau [American rock critic]: By June of 1962 I was twenty. I wanted to be a writer and lived in Manhattan. I joined a brokerage house—it overreached and went bankrupt, but not while I was there. My boss, by complete luck, was a painter. Bob was ten years older than me and became my best friend till the day he died. He was an extremely smart and aesthetically open person.
I had no money. Sometimes I would sit by the Village Gate [a nightclub on the corner of Thompson and Bleecker streets in Greenwich Village, New York] and listen to Coltrane and Monk—it was a jazz thing and I was a jazz fan. But at the same time I was very into art. The radio was playing top 40, and it was always on in my apartment. I had a little record player and about a dozen albums—mostly jazz, Ray Charles—[but] basically my music was through the radio. The biggest thing that happened to me from ’62 was all pop art. In the course of that period there was Lichtenstein and then Warhol.
In October/November ’62 I walked into the Green Gallery on Fifty-Seventh Street—it was something I did frequently; it didn’t cost anything. In this gallery I heard Connie Francis sing “Vacation.” “Where is this coming from? I can’t figure it out—it’s an art gallery!”
I saw that one of these paintings had a radio in it and it was plugged in and it was playing. This was an epiphany. I went to see John Coltrane—Aretha Franklin was opening and she was terrible—but Coltrane did an encore, and it was one of these moments that happens in jazz and if you are in the right mood they really come off. I was ecstatic. I had these two epiphanies close by each other about music and art. A musical epiphany and the epiphany in the art gallery; it changed the way my boss Bob and I thought about music and art.
Neil Sedaka: I’d moved into the Brill Building [America’s “song factory,” it housed many songwriters and publishers] on Broadway. Everyone was there writing every day for the record companies and artists: “You Lost That Loving Feeling” [by the Righteous Brothers], “One Fine Day” [by the Chiffons], and the Dixie Cups got “Going to the Chapel.” “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” was Carole King’s for the Shirelles. It was the time of the small publishing firms. Basically across the street from the original Brill Building, which was 1619 [Broadway] was 1650, and it catered to younger listeners and writers.
In the Brill Building each one of us had a room with a piano and a desk. And at the end of the day we would all come into the big office to play our songs, and we were all in competition with each other. But good competition. The best song won out and someone like the Chiffons would record it. We were there ten to five, five days a week. At the end of the day sometimes your song was unfinished and you’d finish it the following day.
I was the first to sing and record my own songs. That was in ’58. I was auditioned for RCA Records. They had just signed Elvis with “Heartbreak Hotel.”
Carole King and I dated at the time but we didn’t write together. I did write “Oh! Carol,” which was dedicated to her. And she wrote an answer called “Oh! Neil.” That wasn’t a hit but it was a very nice gesture. Her mother didn’t like me because I took her away from school and her academic work.
Sir Frank Lowe: New York wasn’t paved with gold or anything like that. It was dirty and grubby, but I can remember walking by a music shop, and coming out of it [was] something that made me feel quite at home—I could hear them playing Acker Bilk [an English clarinetist] with “Stranger on the Shore” [a song for solo clarinet that reached number one in the United States and the UK].
I couldn’t get a job and went to see a bloke who my mother had known, Jock Elliott. He was running the Shell account at Ogilvy & Mather. Big businessman. Big guy. I got an appointment, and I was so impressed by him. He said, “Come back to the house and have a drink.” I remember his license plate on the car in the garage—it was just J—and his phone number was BUtterfield 8, which was the film that had come out with Liz Taylor—a fabulous film with Laurence Harvey.
I got a job selling carpets at a shop on Fifth Avenue. I was very successful. The English were rather curious to the New Yorkers. Then I got a flat on Eighty-fifth Street—a basement flat in a brownstone. I shared that with several thousand cockroaches. Curiously, Jock Elliott called me and asked me, “How are you getting on with a job?’ And I said, “I am selling carpets.”
“Well,” he said, “There is a job going at Benton & Bowles.” So I went to the ad agency—big agency founded by an American congressman. I got a job as a very junior executive. I was twenty-one or twenty-two. This is ’61. I worked there and I was quite enjoying my life in New York. I made ten thousand dollars a year. I could afford to do what I wanted and I could afford to go to a steakhouse, and you could get a good meal for $1.99. It was fun. You’d go out to the Hamptons and sleep on the beach on weekends.
Carolyn Hester: I was moving into the New York scene, playing in the Village. The Village was very much like a lot of places: kids hung out in coffee bars where music was played [if they couldn’t get into clubs where liquor was served]. We attracted a fantastic audience, such a variety, and there was no generation gap. There were people from uptown and downtown. Suddenly I was playing the Ivy League colleges. The Greenwich Village scene was transferring to the Eastern Seaboard and, as in the Village, you would have musicians and comics touring together. (I was twenty-three going into the 1960s.)
There were a cast of characters that were part of this renaissance. Tom Paxton, Eric Anderson, Buffy Sainte-Marie. Through gigs I’d bump into Carly, her and her sister, the Simon Sisters. So I knew them from when they started out together. She was fun to be around. A real New Yorker. Fun was being able to talk about the music business and hang out, and we’d go to the coffee shop just like you do now. We’d somewhat talk about politics but we all knew we were on the same wavelength [politically], so we shared notes and stories about being on the road.
I had met Bob Dylan in the Village in 1961 because he came to the club and I was playing one night and he heard me sing a song—Buddy had taught me to sing this song. And Bob was all over that. He loved Buddy Holly, and that is how it started. I crossed paths a lot with Dylan in clubs and on the street. Dylan wanted to get to know me. I didn’t know that at the time. I told him, “I’ve got a guitar player, but if you want to play harmonica [on my next album] would you mind?” He said, “Here’s my phone number, and don’t lose it.”
The first time I heard him play I just remember him and his guitar. Not a band. I was in the audience. The crowd was young, happy, and a very mixed crowd like all our crowds. The political mind was the same. Some older people brought their children. I called him the next day. He played harmonica on my album and it was his first recording, and then he did a session for Harry Belafonte.
He was confident. He wasn’t nervous. He was like an old soloist. He said I was his link to Buddy Holly. We’d talk about Buddy. I didn’t see him for quite a while, and then one day he came to my apartment and stayed and wrote songs all night while I did a gig. When I got back he’d left me a message, “Thanks Carol. Me, Bob.”
I was playing England, too. Tons of folk clubs. Folk music was more of a way of life in England at that time. All the pubs had folk music. There was a huge following for it. Five hundred people came to hear me play in Surbiton. Donovan would come—he was a kid. There were so many English artists. There was a national folk festival at Cambridge, and I had my own half hour on the BBC.
Mary Wilson: We won [a] competition in Canada [when] we were sixteen. That was when we started. We did so many shows in Detroit with the local DJs—there were loads of radio stations, and we said, “Wow, we can do this, and they need to find us a place to record. Let’s look around and find a record company.”
Motown was the company, and it had Smokey Robinson & the Miracles and we knew these people. We get the audition with Smokey & the Miracles through Claudette, who was Smokey’s wife—she was one of the Miracles. And we let them listen to us and we said, “What do you think of us? Because we want to go to Motown.” He said, “I can get you an audition.”
So we went up to Motown and we auditioned and at the end Berry Gordy said to us, “You girls really sound good, but come back when you have graduated from high school.” This was ’61. We wore our own uniforms. We were making our own clothes. We had skirts and tennis shoes and socks. We got so disappointed that he didn’t take us—he just didn’t want young girls running around the company with all these guys and he’d be responsible. That’s why he turned us down. But we thought he didn’t like us.
Al Kooper: I wanted to do music for [the rest of] my life. I just didn’t know what was going to keep me going. So I attempted to educate myself in every aspect I could. And in retrospect I am really glad I did that. As time went by I thought, “So, this is a good thing I am doing—if they didn’t want to hire me as a songwriter, I can work as a studio guitarist, and if they don’t want to hire me as a studio guitarist, I could play in a band.” I just wanted to stay in the music business and earn a living.
Mary Wilson: You had all these people at Motown. Marvin Gaye had just come in. It was the atmosphere—and so much creativity going. We hitchhiked every day after school and hung around Motown and pretty soon we were inside: “Hey, Smokey!” “Hey, Mary!” We got to know everyone. It was a big house with a receptionist. And we’d just sit there. One day someone said, “Our background vocals aren’t here,” and we said, “We’ll do it.” That was our way into Motown.
Then Berry Gordy said, “You’ve got to change your name.” He didn’t like “the Primettes.” We wanted it so much we said okay. We asked everyone for ideas. We didn’t really want to change our name. We thought no one would know who were are, but then no one knew who we were anyway. And pretty soon we had a contract and a name. Names were scribbled on little bits of paper and one was “the Supremes.” Me and Diana, we didn’t like the name, but they wouldn’t sign us without a new name. We didn’t know why, then. It was only much later that we realized that it was so the name would belong to Motown. We didn’t read the fine print, and at the bottom it said any name you come up will be owned by Motown Records. We didn’t even realize that till years later. It was a brand. It belongs to who? Hey, that’s our name!
Henry Diltz: When I got to Hawaii I had a name to look up whom I knew from New York, called Cyrus, so I asked around. “Yes, he is in the drama class and he’s opened up this beatnik coffeehouse.”
I put my banjo on my Vespa, drove down there, and they said, “Oh, a banjo!” He became my very best friend of my whole life. He got up on a big stepladder with a guitar, I’d sit at the bottom, and we would sing. Then we worked up songs together and built a stage in the corner, and so I began going down there every night and singing. It was great. It was all bare feet and shorts and T-shirts and lots of girls. Hundreds of them—wonderful college girls.
I smoked my first marijuana cigarette. Many folksingers were coming through. The Kingston Trio—they popularized folk music. And the Everly Brothers. Finally one guy says, “Let’s learn some songs together and form a trio. We were called the Lexington Three, and when Cyrus joined us we were the Lexington Four. We were earning a few bucks a week. But we’d play there every single night. If you have a place to play every night, you get better and better. We had some pretty damned good songs ready to go, and finally we made our way to California to make our fortune. I remember the first few nights we slept on the apartment floor of a hooker—late ’62. December ’62. Then we stayed in Hollywood in a little apartment near Capitol Records.
Al Kooper: I was working very hard in New York to make a living; I was being subsidized by my parents. I was trying to break out and figure out how I was going to make money in the music business. At the same time, I was playing guitar on recording sessions. Most of it was nothing, I mean, obscure records that no one ever heard.
My first studio gig! That was exciting—it’s bizarre I did so many things. I worked in a recording studio at 1615 Broadway doing odd jobs because the engineers would teach you stuff, and so I engineered a session.
The first session I engineered was Dionne Warwick doing radio spots. I engineered it and I was nineteen and it was only radio spots. I just did that. Then also I would cut acetates—when people would work in the studio they would have discs covered and personalized. And someone had to do the discs, so they taught me.
Nineteen sixty to sixty-four was a blur for me because I was working really hard and doing so many different things. I think it was 1963, I found this unbelievable nightclub run by the mafia. Forty-seventh Street between Eighth and Ninth—the Sweet Chariot—and they only had gospel music there. And I really like gospel music. So that became my hangout at night. It was so strange—one of the strangest places I have ever been in my life.
Mary Wilson: I don’t know how British houses are structured. In America, we usually have basements. At the Motown house you had the basement area that ended up being the recording studio. You walked in off the street onto the reception area and there were little rooms which were probably bedrooms, and they were offices, and you had the financial office, and Berry Gordy’s sisters—he had a couple of sisters—they all had positions. It was a family business. What was unique was the mother and father were working there. You could always see the father repairing something. He was a grand old guy.
It wasn’t a factory, but everything was in-house. They even had someone cook lunches, and everyone from the singers, musicians, and workmen would eat there. It was a real family business. Then they started purchasing other homes around the area, and then we’d have other buildings down the street or across the street.
We hung out, and you’d want to live there if you could. You’d want to be there because there were so many exciting people coming in. It was exciting. The guys were handsome, and we were just teenagers. You were right there, and you had the opportunity to grow there.
Motown was very progressive in artist development. And we’d go there and record a couple of songs, and then we’d work out the choreography, and then Mrs. Powell . . . did motivation [stage presence and movement]. It was probably the only place in the world which had this. You walk in the door and there are all these talented people to help you develop and grow.
Bob Gruen [American rock-and-roll photographer]: I was into the music on the radio. I had a few albums. I was shaped in the sense that I was drawn to it from the late fifties when rock and roll started and it was called “delinquent music” and “the music of the devil.” I didn’t feel like a criminal. I liked the music, and I was a teenager and it shaped me because it made me feel like an outcast.
Neil Sedaka: England, strangely enough, had a great respect for the original American rock and rollers, and I was one of them, like Roy Orbison, Buddy Holly, Gene Pitney—even though he was finished in America—and Little Richard.
Years later—1972, 1973—we were shopping in Savile Row, London, and I met Mick Jagger, and he said that mine was the first record he ever bought. I was very flattered. He’d bought the record as a kid.
Mary Wilson: The Supremes were always glamorous. We were showstoppers. We would buy plastic pearls from Woolworth’s. We were always elegant looking. Our parents were elegant. Diane had a beautiful, glorious mother. My mother was a tall and handsome woman. We had a presence onstage. We had attitude but we were refined.
We had the choreography teacher, Mrs. Powell, she taught you how to turn your body, and poise, and moderation, and all that kind of stuff. She taught the guys as well. Those of us who learnt from her tell her all the time what she did for us. We had a certain amount of innate stuff. She was a woman probably in her thirties and she had a modeling school. We looked up to her. The guys, too. It was all about you as a human being and how you carried yourself, and that was what she taught us. Whenever a Motown artist came onstage you could immediately tell they were from Motown. Even some of the bad guys learnt to have carriage.
Mrs. Powell said at Motown, “One day you will be singing in front of kings and queens. You are diamonds in the rough, and we just need to polish it.”
Neil Sedaka: I had been listening to local radio in Los Angeles and heard something by an unknown group called the Showmen. It was a local hit. There was something about the recording—the tune, the production, and the lyrics—that inspired me to write “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do.” Howard [Greenfield] wasn’t sure about the song, but I persisted and he finished the lyrics. It was fictional. Most songs are fiction and I didn’t know how universal that was.
I spent a couple of weeks putting it down and picking it up. I came up with a line with a “doobie-doo down down” that went underneath the whole song, and I went in to sing it in unison with a guitar. I went to the session and I did it that way. This was 1962. It took off, and it was a hit again later as a slow ballad. That shows a good song is a good song.
“King of doobie-doo’s and tra-la-la.” That became my trademark. I kept it like a trademark and called them the sandwich songs. It starts with an intro—a piece of bread—then came the meat of the song, then it ended with another piece of bread. After I named it my colleagues found it amusing.
Mary Wilson: We went all over but mostly in the South. [The “Motortown Revue” was comprised of Martha Reeves, the Temptations, Smokey Robinson, Little Stevie Wonder, and others. It played what was known as the “Chitlin’ Circuit,” a string of venues throughout the segregated South where African Americans could perform safely.]
Tour buses. Raggedy tour buses. We were so bad. It was such fun. Real fun. They were like crazy guys, and they’d play cards and we’d harmonize all night—many of the guys were teachers of music and came from a jazz background.
I don’t remember my first pay packet. We never got a pay packet. We performed for nothing—for zilch. We didn’t even get a weekly allowance. Berry Gordy handled all of that—we were given just a little money for personal items. We were just happy to be out there. We never even thought about it. Looking back, they really exploited us, but we never had to pay for anything—it was like an old-fashioned apprenticeship. We were minors. My parents couldn’t read or write. We had no representation. I should have married a lawyer.
Carolyn Hester: John Hammond [Columbia Records’ executive producer and acclaimed A&R man], who’d signed me, came down to listen to Bob Dylan and I at an apartment in the Village. In the kitchen was a big picnic table and Hammond and Dylan sat next to each other, and he loved Dylan right away. [Hammond signed him to Columbia after Dylan played on Hester’s third album.] Dylan was just starting to write. I knew he was going to fit right in.
Henry Diltz: A couple of days after we got to Los Angeles in late ’62 we went to the Troubadour, and Mondays they had amateur evening. We got up to do three songs—driving chords. I remember the shock of it. What the fuck was happening? Oh, yeah, no one had ever heard anything like it.
Most of the folks played in little clubs to get ready for the Troubadour, but we were—bang—right in there. The result was [that] the very first night we got an agent, Benny Shapiro from International Talent Agency, and within a week we were signed to Warner Bros. Records.
Folk music was huge at that point. It was early ’63. And they want us to be in this movie, Palm Springs Weekend, with Connie Stevens and Troy Donahue. We had to go to Warner Bros. to meet the director, and we were late. “Well, boys, you are late. He’s already at lunch.”
So we march into the commissary, and there’s the director with some other executives, and we march up to the table. “Pick up, man, we are here for the meeting.” No, we weren’t smoking [dope] yet.
When we played the Troubadour, the buzz was out. Lots of managers were interested in us, including Bob Dylan’s manager. He flew out from the East Coast to meet with us, and we were with Herbie Cohen [who later managed Frank Zappa, Linda Ronstadt, and Tom Waits]. That was ’63. We did a show with Little Richard, and that was great. We were listening to all the music going on. We did two albums with Warner Bros. We did a single with Phil Spector and we had a couple of singles on jukeboxes. One was “Very Good Year.” Before Sinatra. Then we had “Road to Freedom.” We were kinda oblivious to what was going on in the real world, the civil rights marches, and this is long before Vietnam hit us.
Carolyn Hester: Even a famous artiste, if she was black, couldn’t get a hotel room in those days. I didn’t know that my real deep feelings about civil rights would take structure. It was such a surprise because I wasn’t a radical. I didn’t know I was going to be influencing people or be part of such a massive scene. Thank god for the Village and New York.
[In America] we were introducing to our generation what we thought and the light as we saw it. Our moral outrage was so overwhelming. Sometimes you couldn’t sleep at night because it was so exciting. But also scary because of the politics. The bombs had fallen on them already in England. In England they were politically already all there.
Neil Sedaka: Being a performer I had no prejudice whatsoever. My favorites were Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan. I lived in the North and had no idea [of the depth of that prejudice elsewhere].
Gay Talese [American journalist and author]: For a lot of people, Vietnam involvement wasn’t that much written about. It was the time of the bomb. The space age—very competitive between Russians and Americans. I was following the launches. There was the competition with the Soviets and since they were the first with the dog and then the human in space, they were number one, and both countries had bombs and were thinking about fallout shelters. There was anxiety about the atomic bomb. And that affected all age groups.
Sir Frank Lowe: I spent time in the Village, and I met a very pretty girl. A stewardess. She was English and delightful. And we stayed in touch. She came down one evening and we went to the Village Vanguard. On that night was Lenny Bruce. I had no idea who he was. It was the most acutely embarrassing evening I have ever spent. If you remember Lenny Bruce, he was using language and words which we had never heard.
Our friendship endured in spite of that evening. She was very embarrassed. A nice English girl from Surrey. And then I got a frightful shock—I got a letter from the government: would I please report for my medical to the local recruiting office in New York because I was eligible to be drafted into the American army.
I went along for my medical, which went very well. I was a fit young man. And they sent me a letter classifying myself as A1. I ran over to my friend Jock Elliott and said, “What should I do?”
He said, “Get out. If they serve the papers on you, you are drafted, and then you are AWOL if you don’t report. It could come tomorrow or the next day. Get out!” The Agency transferred me within forty-eight hours back to London, to the office in Knightsbridge.
Robert Christgau: There was a sense of rebelliousness in America, but one of the ways it was rebellious was it wanted to enjoy having more pleasure than it was told it could have. This was much more important than the political element, numerically speaking.
Bob Gruen: I had been to a rally with Kennedy, and I was so close . . . I got pictures as he was coming, and he stepped on my foot by accident and he stopped and said, “Excuse me.” A very human and polite exchange. I saw a rally where Martin Luther King spoke. I believed in Kennedy and his ideas, that things would be new and better and people would get along with each other and problems would be solved.
Gay Talese: Literature and the laws changed. Books formerly seen as smut and pornography like Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Tropic of Cancer—books that were published underground before were now openly available.
Linda Geiser [Swiss-born actress]: I was twenty-six when I came to New York. I came in October ’62. It didn’t bother me that I had to bare my breasts in front of a film crew, but they were very respectful. I knew it was the first time a woman’s breasts were seen in the cinema and it would be controversial.
The Pawnbroker was a film about a Holocaust survivor, not my breasts. We knew it was an important film because people wanted scenes cut—my scene. But Sidney Lumet was a very determined man, and he wasn’t going to let them cut his film.
Remember, I had come from Switzerland. I had been an actress for ten years and nudity was not something we were ashamed of. I knew a very good agent who got me to Sidney Lumet. I got my own apartment. I had a job in a little store in the West Village—Piñata Party. It was a Mexican imports business and the man was smuggling antiquities from Peru. And I made clothes out of the fabric he bought from Peru. We invented everything and anything, and it was wonderful. You could invent your life.