Becoming Elektra by Mick Houghton;

Author:Mick Houghton;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 1)
Published: 2016-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Peter K. Siegel was introduced to folk music at a very young age; his parents had 78s by Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly, and they knew the Almanac Singers. He witnessed Guthrie and Leadbelly live and was playing guitar and banjo by the time he was in his teens. As a musician, he recorded for Elektra with The Even Dozen Jug Band, and is featured on both the String Band Project and the Old Time Banjo Project. Siegel’s final album for Elektra as a staff producer was 1969’s Woodsmoke And Oranges by Paul Siebel, after which he took up a job at Polydor. In more recent years he produced, compiled, and annotated the Friends Of Old Time Music boxed set in 2009, having personally recorded many of the 14 concerts between 1961 and 1965 that brought dozens of legendary traditional musicians to New York for the first time, including Doc Watson, Roscoe Holcomb, Clarence Ashley, and Joseph Spence. As a musician, he has recorded two albums with Eli Smith since 2009, Twleve Tunes For Two Banjos and The Union Makes Us Strong.

Remembering Elektra

Bernie Krause

“After I graduated from the University of Michigan in 1960, I went to grad school in Boston, at MIT. As a musician I was more interested in jazz but capable in folk music playing guitar and banjo; I got a job working for Manny Greenhill [a promoter-manager whose Folklore Productions operated in the Boston area for decades]. He was a terrific boss; I spent most of 1961 and ’62 setting up an annual folk concert series around Boston, booking a lot of major folk acts. That’s when I first met Jac; everybody knew Jac and Jac knew everybody because he was hanging out at the clubs looking for talent.

We booked The Weavers in October 1962. I thought they weren’t progressive enough so I was doing a satirical take on Weavers songs at Club 47, where Lee Hays caught the end of my set. He said, “If you’re such a wiseass, why don’t you audition for the Pete Seeger chair?” They needed somebody to play banjo and sing tenor for a reunion tour that was coming up. So I went along; I was one of 300 who did the audition, and I got the job.

I never contributed much to The Weavers. It was a time when folk music was in transition, and The Weavers were old hat. They officially broke up at the end of 1963, but the last concerts spilled into 1964.*

Soon after that I went home to Detroit and worked as a contract musician at Motown for a while before heading to California in 1965. I attended a series of lectures by Stockhausen, and I began working with some of the newly developed modular instruments at the Tape Music Centre at Mills College in San Francisco.

My mind was made up that I wanted to study electronic music; there were only two analogue synthesizers on the market: Mills College had the Buchla, but

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