Epilogue
Apple Records
The Apple dream did not last, although it survived for longer than a lot of people remember. The label was still issuing non-Beatle-related material into 1972, four years after its inception, and it is for the Beatles (individually and collectively) that it is remembered, both musically and commercially. Between them, the four band members were responsible for some of the most memorable 45s of the period, and one forgets how effortlessly their ideas dovetailed with one another, even in isolation.
It’s one of Beatledom’s favorite hobbies, compiling solo tracks into some approximation of a postsplit “Beatles” album…well, you can stop now. They did it themselves on single, long ago, while individual cuts like McCartney’s “Another Day,” Ringo Starr’s “Back Off Boogaloo,” Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord,” and the Lennons’ “Happy Christmas” might even shade the best of the big band’s output.
Such memories do it a disservice. Any catalog that could find room for David Peel, the Black Dyke Mills Band and the Radha Krishna Temple (not to mention Yoko Ono) certainly wasn’t chasing platinum records. Not all the time, anyway.
The label’s big wheels—actual (Badfinger, Billy Preston, Ravi Shankar) and proposed (Doris Troy, Ronnie Spector, James Taylor)—remain ear-catching today, but it’s the minor-league attractions that raise the most temperatures, thanks to a major and much-anticipated reissue campaign in early 2011 that restored much of Apple’s catalogs to the shelves for the first time in decades.
Lon and Derrek Van Eaton’s low-fi Spectorisms have a lilting appeal that is as thrilling now as it was out to lunch back then, while the signing of Chris Hodge suggests that Apple knew the way the winds were blowing in Britain, long before the Brits themselves had figured it out; “Contact Love” is the best early T. Rex single that Elton John never made. Plus, five years before the world and its mother were raving about Hot Chocolate’s smooth blending of pop, funk, and politics, John Lennon was encouraging them to reggae-fy “Give Peace a Chance” and change his own sainted lyrics as well!
Peter Asher
It may or may not be considered a compliment, but Mike Myers once claimed to have modeled Austin Powers on Peter Asher’s mid-1960s appearance. More lasting, however, is the track record that attends Asher’s musical career, as the producer who learned on the job through the first James Taylor LP became one of the primary sculptors of the West Coast sound that swept America in the early to midseventies’ post-Taylor fallout.
His work with Linda Ronstadt, beginning with the landmark Heart Like a Wheel album in 1973, and further recordings with J. D. Souther, Andrew Gold, and Bonnie Raitt stand among the genre’s most timeless creations. Asher also helped rebrand Hollywood itself, when he teamed with Lou Adler, David Geffen, Elliot Roberts, and Elmer Valentine to open the Troubadour’s first viable rival in a decade, the Roxy.
Other Asher productions include albums by 10,000 Maniacs, Cher, Neil Diamond, and Randy Newman, while he continued to work on and off with Taylor through the 1970s and early 1980s, before reuniting with him in 2007 for the Live at the Troubadour album. He has also enjoyed several stints in the boardroom, as senior vice president at Sony Music Entertainment between 1995 and 2002, president of Sanctuary Artist Management until 2006, and, subsequently, one half of Strategic Artist Management.
Asher also reformed Peter and Gordon with bandmate Gordon Waller, conducting several well-received tours before Waller’s death in 2009.
Asylum Records
To the fan and collector of early 1970s West Coast rock, Asylum Records represents the mother lode. From Jackson Browne and Linda Ronstadt to Eagles and Andrew Gold, Asylum dominated the genre, both sonically and via the type of quality control that few other labels of the era could dream of matching.
Browne was the first artist signed to Asylum; he was followed by J. D. Souther, Judee Sill (her debut LP was Asylum’s first release—SD 5050), David Blue, and Eagles. Jo Jo Gunne, featuring ex-Spirit member Jay Ferguson, brought Asylum its first major hit 45 that summer, when “Run Run Run” reached #27. Before the end of 1972, Jackson Browne’s “Doctor My Eyes” and “Rock Me on the Water,” and Eagles’ “Take It Easy” and “Witchy Woman” had all marched into the Top 100, and the label was printing LPs like other institutions print banknotes.
The arrival of Linda Ronstadt (from Capitol) and Joni Mitchell (from Reprise) added further weight to Asylum’s already hefty cachet, with Mitchell’s For the Roses and Ronstadt’s Don’t Cry Now opening their label accounts with major hits. Contrarily, albums by Batdorf and Rodney and Mick Jagger’s brother, Chris, were seldom seen even at the time, but rewarded the dutiful sleuth.
In late 1973, with Asylum’s success still speeding ahead, Geffen sold Asylum to Warners, although he would remain head of the company. At the same time, Elektra Records head Jac Holzman was keen to step down from the day-to-day running of that company, whose own distribution was through Warners. In a surprising but nevertheless logical move (stylistically there were numerous similarities between the two catalogs), the labels were merged under Geffen’s control, consolidating their catalogs.
Immediately, the union hit headlines, with the arrival of Bob Dylan from Columbia. Unhappy with the label he’d spent the past decade with, and infuriated by the its clumsy efforts (including raiding the outtakes bin for the Dylan album) to blackmail him into renewing his contract, Dylan joined Asylum in 1973, linking with the Band to cut 1974’s Planet Waves and Before the Flood live album. Point made, he then returned to Columbia in 1975.
Asylum and Elektra retained their label identities (and therefore their own artists and A&R departments) within the merger. Asylum releases continued from both established and new artists—aside from Dylan, these latter included Jack the Lad, a spin-off from the successful British act Lindisfarne, Tim Moore, Traffic, Essra Mohawk, Orleans, Albert Brooks, and John Fogerty.
As the late 1970s progressed, however, Asylum releases became scarcer within the catalog, all the more so following David Geffen’s departure in 1980 to launch his own Geffen label. Of almost 300 LPs released on Elektra-Asylum between 1977 and 1981, fewer than sixty bore the Asylum identity. The label is still issuing today, but remains a mere shadow of its former self.
Kathy Dorritie
… is better known today as Cherry Vanilla. Having starred in the off-Broadway theatrical production Island and the London presentation of Andy Warhol’s Pork, she moved into PR, working for David Bowie’s MainMan management company until 1974. Briefly relaunching herself as a published poet and a rock ’n’ roll star, she cut two albums for RCA in the late 1970s, but she has spent much of the time since then working for keyboard wizard Vangelis.
She never forgot James Taylor, however, and with their respective careers allowing a few more meetings over the years that followed, a nodding acquaintance developed. In the mid-1980s, however, the pair reconnected at Thea Korek’s aerobic studio up over the Fairway Market at Seventy-Fourth and Broadway. “It’s not a big story,” Vanilla smiled. “But I finally got a kiss from him. Not a big romantic one…more like a sister-brother one, but on the lips.
“We saw each other almost every day there. He was the only male taking those classes…smart guy. He always took his place at the back of the room, and all of the girls in their little workout outfits were all in his view. And we all knew that when we bent over, our bums were right in his line of vision. We all loved it, and him, of course. He was so friendly, spent time talking with all of us almost every day.…”
Elektra Records
The Doors’ “Light My Fire” gave Elektra its first chart-topping single; fresh signings in its aftermath included Tim Buckley, Ars Nova, David Ackles, and Eclection, while the sale of the label to Warner Brothers in 1967 (with Jac Holzman remaining on board, of course) only amplified Elektra’s visibility.
At the same time, however, the label’s traditional penchant for the extraordinary and the eccentric continued to bear strange fruit. The UK’s Incredible String Band, Nico, the Holy Modal Rounders, and David Peel were as bizarre as any Elektra-watcher could hope for, while the arrival of Detroit hard rock bands the MC5 and the Stooges saw Elektra pursue its vision to the extremes of rock iconography.
But if Elektra ended the 1960s as a haven for some of the most unique freak shows in the American mainstream, it entered the 1970s as a repository for another musical force entirely.
The mature ruminations of David Gates’s Bread debuted on the label in 1969 with the single “Any Way You Want Me” and a self-titled album; by 1971, when singer-songwriters Harry Chapin and Carly Simon were added to the roster, Bread ranked among Elektra’s biggest-selling acts ever. Carly Simon would swiftly join them, and by the time Holzman retired in 1973 and the label merged with Asylum, Elektra was poised to dominate the middle of the soft-rock road.
Of course, the label’s historical love for the oddball continued to shine through. Queen, the British hard rock band whose appeal embraces everyone from dyed-in-the-wool headbangers to students of absurdly tongue-in-cheek satire, are rightly ranked among the most popular bands in the world, more than twenty years after front man Freddie Mercury’s death.
Sparks, a California band whose career probably touches more record labels than Link Wray’s, issued one album through Elektra, 1979’s massively influential 1 in Heaven; and Boston New Wave band the Cars opened their Elektra career in 1978 with the quirky “Just What I Needed”; they closed it a decade later as one of the entire genre’s most reliable novelty hit machines, at least in America.
In 1982, Elektra founded its own jazz-rock-oriented subsidiary, Elektra Musician, while maintaining its presence in the rock mainstream as skillfully as before. Artists recruited during the 1980s and beyond include the Cure and Depeche Mode (via licensing deals with the British Fiction and Mute labels, respectively), the Sugarcubes, and, following their demise, Björk, Metallica, Third Eye Blind, and rap star Ol’ Dirty Bastard.
Elektra folded in 2004 when parent Warner Brothers merged it with Atlantic records. A five-CD boxed set of hits, classics, and rarities, Forever Changing: The Golden Age of Elektra Records 1963–1973 appeared in 2006; the Elektra label itself resurfaced in 2009.
David Geffen
Departing Asylum in 1980, David Geffen founded Geffen Records with $25 million from Warner Brothers, and found immediate success with the arrival of Donna Summer and John Lennon, whose debut for the label, Double Fantasy, was still fresh in the stores when the former Beatle was murdered.
The label would go on to release hits by artists as disparate as Olivia Newton-John, Asia, XTC, Peter Gabriel, Guns N’ Roses, Sonic Youth, and Elton John, while courting controversy with Geffen’s well-publicized decision to sue Neil Young. Signed for $1 million per record and guaranteed complete creative freedom, Young took his contract at face value and released some of the most challenging music of his career so far. Geffen responded by suing Young, in November 1983, for $3.3 million, for deliberately making records that were “not commercial” and “uncharacteristic of Young’s previous recordings.” Young countersued for $21 million, before the two cases were dropped in 1985.
Young remained at Geffen until 1988; Geffen remained there until 1995 (having already sold the company to MCA in 1990), when he absorbed his decade-old Geffen Film Company into the DreamWorks SKG studio, founded with Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg. Geffen left DreamWorks in 2008.
Mike Hurst
Cat Stevens was only the start. The late 1960s also saw Hurst produce the likes of the Cymbaline, the Alan Bown, Nirvana, and Manfred Mann (the megasmash “Mighty Quinn”), together with a clutch of classics for Andrew Oldham’s Immediate label. Over the next decade, then, Mike Hurst would emerge as the architect behind some of the most distinctive sounds and hit makers in UK rock history.
Early 1970s work with Mickie Most’s RAK label saw him notch up a string of lightweight hits with the folky trio New World, while 1974 saw him create a major U.S. hit with Fancy’s supersexed re-creation of Chip Taylor’s “Wild Thing.” (The band’s vocalist, Helen Caunt, was a former Penthouse pet.)
But it was Hurst’s abiding passion for 1950s rock ’n’ roll that paid dividends, with the discoveries first of Showaddywaddy (1974), whom he kept at the top of the UK chart for the remainder of the decade; and then Shakin’ Stevens, who likewise dominated the first half of the 1980s. During this same period, he also produced Summer Wine, the Four Tops, Cilla Black, Hello, and more.
In 1979, Hurst oversaw the original recording of “Video Killed the Radio Star” by Bruce Woolley and the Camera Club (Woolley’s cowriters Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes, aka Buggles, scored the hit version); and in 1984, he headed up Lamborghini Records and foisted the singing talents of model Samantha Fox upon the world.
Still active today as the operator of a theater group (a passion he inherited from his mother), Hurst is currently preparing for a revival of the Springfields, timed to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of “Silver Threads and Golden Needles” in 1962. Much of his output as a producer, meanwhile, is available across three volumes of the Producers Archives CDs (Angel Air).
Carole King
King’s Tapestry album would remain America’s all-time biggest-selling album by a solo artist for the next decade, until it was finally displaced by Michael Jackson’s Thriller; it would also be one half of a remarkable double act through 1972, as King’s next studio LP, Carole King: Music, joined it in the Top 10 at the end of the year, and itself proceeded to the top.
Subsequent albums Rhymes and Reasons (1972), Fantasy (1973), Wrap Around Joy (1974), and the soundtrack to the TV production of Maurice Sendak’s Really Rosie (1975) were less successful, but only by the standards of King’s preceding albums; all were sizeable hits. Her final gold disc arrived with 1977’s Simple Things, written with her new husband, Rick Evers. tragically, it was to be their only full LP together; Evers died from a heroin overdose a year after their marriage.
Later King albums were sporadic and patchy: Welcome Home (1978), Touch the Sky (1979), One to One (1982), and Speeding Time (1983) did little, while an attempt to update her 1960s catalog via 1980’s Pearls—The Songs of Goffin and King scarcely bothered the chart either, although it did unleash a hit single, “One Fine Day.” King continued writing and contributing to soundtracks through the 1980s, and also moved into acting, starring in 1988’s off-Broadway production if A Minor Incident. The following year she teamed up with the likes of Eric Clapton and Branford Marsalis for a new album, City Streets, and she was nominated for a Grammy in 1992 for “Now and Forever,” featured in the movie A League of Their Own. A new album, Color of Your Dreams, followed in 1993, while 1997 saw her score a massive worldwide hit when she wrote “The Reason” for Celine Dion.
Launching her own Rockingale label in 2001, King released her first new album in almost a decade, Love Makes the World, and in 2004 she undertook her first tour in even longer, the so-called Living Room tour, which spun off a Top 20 live album of the same name in 2005.
Two years later, King was back with James Taylor, and back at the Troubadour, too, as part of the club’s fiftieth-anniversary celebrations. In 2010 this spawned a world tour, together with a live album (Live at the Troubadour) and an acclaimed PBS documentary, Troubadours.
Danny Kortchmar
Three successive James Taylor chart busters (Sweet Baby James, Mudslide Slim and One Man Dog, plus the pre-fame Original Flying Machine), three more by Carole King (Writer, Tapestry, and Rhymes and Reasons), and another album (Now That Everything’s Been Said) with pre-stardom combo the City had established Danny Kortchmar among the elite of American sidemen, while his membership in the Fugs and the fondly remembered Jo Mama confirmed both his versatility and his abilities.
But even those works could not prepare people for the tastefully raw R&B that hollers from the grooves of Kootch—an album that even Rolling Stone, which had done more than most to push Kortchmar’s other employees in the public eye, ignored. But Kortchmar laughed (and still laughs) the album’s failure away. He made it because he was asked if he wanted to, and he had a lot of fun while he did so. So what if hardly anyone heard it? He’d never even expected to make it in the first place.
Kootch was not its maker’s first flight outside of the Taylor/King orbit, however. The previous year the band that he, Russ Kunkel, Lee Sklar, and Craig Doerge formed to accompany Taylor on tour had cut its own debut album, the eponymous The Section; and so highly rated was the band that two further LPs would appear over the years, Forward Motion (1973) and Fork It Over (1977).
November 1973 saw Kootch join Cat Stevens’s band for Moon and Star, the ABC network’s televised premiere of the Englishman’s most ambitious album yet, The Foreigner (Linda Ronstadt and Dr. John also appeared), while the following year his new band, Attitudes, signed with George Harrison’s Dark Horse label and cut two albums, Attitudes (1975) and Good News (1977). Kootch’s second solo album, Innuendo, was released in 1980.
Throughout the 1970s, Kootch ranked among the most in-demand session guitarists on the Los Angeles scene, recording with Bill Wyman, Keith Moon, Crosby and Nash, Jackson Browne, and Linda Ronstadt, among others. Moving into production at the end of the decade, he oversaw the first album by Carole King’s daughter Louise Goffin, before becoming Don Henley’s coproducer and cowriter through the Eagles drummer’s 1980s solo career. He has also produced Neil Young, Bon Jovi, and Billy Joel; played alongside Bob Dylan; and cowritten some of Jackson Browne’s best-loved 1980s compositions, including “Shaky Town” (1977), “Somebody’s Baby,” “Tender Is the Night,” and “Knock On Any Door” (all 1982). The pair also toured Europe together in 1982.
The 1990s and beyond saw Kootch remain an in-demand producer (Venice, Freedy Johnston, Spin Doctors, Dada). He reignited his own career as a musician with the bands Slo Leak and the Midnight Eleven. Occasional reunions with James Taylor, meanwhile, saw him produce one song on Taylor’s most recent hits collection and, of course, rejoin him and King for the Troubadours tour in 2010.
Nico
Nico continued recording and gigging, albeit sporadically, until the end of her life. Rarely less than controversial (her mid-1970s label Island dropped her for perceived racist comments about labelmate Bob Marley), she followed Chelsea Girl, her Jackson Browne–fired debut, with a succession of never-less-than fascinating and ferociously independent solo LPs: Marble Index (1968), Desert Shore (1971), The End (1974), Drama of Exile (1981), and Camera Obscura (1985), the hiatus between each release indicating just how far removed from the commercial norm she was then considered.
It was only toward the end of her life that Nico was seen as any kind of musical pioneer, as she toured relentlessly (a string of semi-official live albums dates from this period).
Nico died in Spain on July 18, 1988.
Steve Noonan
Jackson Browne’s closest teenage friend effectively retired from performance following the debacle of his Elektra debut album. A band he formed in the early 1970s made pioneering use of a Moog synthesizer, opened for Emmylou Harris, and came close to signing to Columbia; according to Noonan, the deal fell through when he admitted that he had no songs that sounded like Boz Scaggs, and that if that was what the label wanted, they’d be better off asking Scaggs to provide them.
He finally returned in 2008 with the acclaimed Bringin’ It Back Home
Paul Rothchild
While Jac Holzman was indisputably the heart of Elektra Records, Paul A. Rothchild was its musical soul, the producer of many of the label’s best-loved albums. The Doors remain his best-known work, with Rothchild a constant presence in the Oliver Stone’s notorious biopic, but it can also be said that if a mid- to late-1960s Elektra album sounded good, Rothchild was probably behind the board.
He also stepped outside the company to work with the likes of Joni Mitchell (1969’s Clouds), Janis Joplin (1970’s Pearl), the Everly Brothers (1972’s Stories We Could Tell), the Outlaws, Elliott Murphy, and many more.
Rothchild died in 1995, at fifty-nine, from lung cancer.
Tom Rush
With The Circle Game having been completely rediscovered in the wake of James Taylor’s and Joni Mitchell’s breakthroughs, Tom Rush signed with Columbia in early 1970 and promptly turned in two new albums, Tom Rush and Wrong End of the Rainbow. Both featured further Taylor compositions, including those spellbinding takes on “Sweet Baby James” and “Riding on a Railroad,” and over the next four years, Rush would maintain the relationships fired by The Circle Game via two further albums, Merrimack County (1972) and Ladies Love Outlaws (1974).
Disillusioned with the music industry, however, and frustrated in his attempts to break from Columbia and find a new home, Rush retired from recording in 1975, a year before the reformed Walker Brothers scored a massive hit with The Circle Game’s “No Regrets.”
He worked in promotions and management for a time, before relaunching himself as a performer in 1981, with a sold-out show at the Boston Symphony Hall. (The gig was recorded for 1982’s New Year live album). He returned to that venue in 1982 to play a Club 47 date. The show was so popular that it became an annual event, recapturing the spirit of the old Cambridge folk club through a combination of established (Bonnie Raitt, Emmylou Harris) and (at the time) unknown artists (Alison Krauss, Mark O’Connor). Club 47 has since toured the U.S. and been featured on a number of PBS and NPR specials.
Nineteen eighty-four brought a new album in the form of a collection of songs recorded for NPR, Late Night Radio, but it would be the end of the century before Rush recorded and released a new song, when “River Song” (featuring Marc Cohn and Shawn Colvin) was included as a bonus track on the compilation The Very Best of Tom Rush: No Regrets.
Four years later another live album, Trolling for Owls, again captured the magnificence of his live show, and in 2009, Rush traveled to Nashville with one of his old Club 47–era friends, Jim Rooney, to record his first studio album in thirty-five years, What I Know.
Paul Samwell-Smith
Cat Stevens’s producer is probably still best remembered for his membership in the Yardbirds earlier in the 1960s. But he was also the overseer of all of Stevens’s key albums, including 1974’s Buddha and the Chocolate Box and 1978’s Back to Earth. In addition, he followed up Carly Simon’s 1971 Anticipation with a string of albums beginning with Spoiled Girl (1983) and continuing on to 1995’s Letters Never Sent. Other Samwell-Smith productions include albums by Illusion, Chris de Burgh, All About Eve, and Jethro Tull.
Judee Sill
Although she hailed from the same West Coast stable of talent that gave the world the likes of Jackson Browne, Andrew Gold, Karla Bonoff, Eagles, and more, Judee Sill has been more or less ignored by modern musical history—a brutal oversight that belies the fact that, of them all, she was probably the most gifted songwriter.
Certainly labelmate J. D. Souther thought as much, while UK fans flocked to Sill’s side long before they picked up on any of her colleagues. Yet two albums for Asylum in the early 1970s mark the sum of her output—by 1974, less than a year after the release of the second, her career was at an end. Five years later, she was dead. Maybe it was something she said?
Well, yes, it apparently was. Infuriated by David Geffen’s refusal to promote her in the same manner that he pushed his other artists (a state of affairs brought on by Sill’s crippling drug dependency), she is reputed to have camped out on his front lawn for a period of time to try and remind him of her existence. He remembered and dropped her from the label.
But J. D. Souther told author Barney Hoskyns, “She was light-years ahead of most of us. I thought Jackson Browne was the furthest along at having learnt songwriting, but then I met Judee and thought, ‘Fuck, man, she’s school for all of us.’”
Chip Taylor
Chip Taylor never stopped writing songs. He did, however, stop having hits with any new ones following his retirement from the music industry in the mid-1970s to become, in his own words, a professional gambler.
It was the early 1990s before he resolved to return, self-financing an album’s worth of material that became his The Hit Man album in 1996. Since that time, Taylor has maintained an almost annual CD output, embracing the Americana that was his first musical love, back in White Plains, New York.