Hearts of Darkness by Dave Thompson

Author:Dave Thompson [Thompson, Dave]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO00400 BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY/Composers & Musicians
ISBN: 9781458471390
Publisher: Backbeat Books
Published: 2012-04-08T16:00:00+00:00

12

Night Owl

The music that Doug Weston envisaged, the songs that spoke of “what was on the inside too,” was not a new invention, of course. And neither was it exclusive to the Troubadour. Over the past two or three years an increasing number of “performer-composers,” as the press then termed them, had arisen; some, like Tim Buckley and Elektra labelmates David Ackles, Tom Rapp, David Blue, Fred Neil, Tim Hardin, and Eric Andersen, destined for little more than cult greatness in their prime; others, like Young’s fellow Canadians Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell, already bound for glory.

What separated James Taylor from these others, in a musical sense, was the sheer insularity of his muse. But that alone was not enough. He would also require marketing, which was something that the majority of those other names had never truly experienced. A full-page ad in the folk magazine Sing Out! was nice. But a full-page spread in Rolling Stone was a lot better. That was one of the pledges that Asher was searching for. Another was the guarantee that Taylor would not be regarded or referred to as one more in the long line of troubadours, and that was simply a matter of language.

He was not a composer-performer. He was a singer-songwriter.

With Taylor safely headquartered in the rental adobe they shared at 956 Longwood Avenue, and exploring Hollywood to his heart’s content, Asher hit the record labels.

For a time, it looked like Vanguard might be his first choice, and there was considerable logic to that decision—logic and integrity. Even more than Elektra, label head Maynard Solomon had refused to allow blatant commercial considerations to shape Vanguard’s destiny. From the outset, the label took as its motto “Music for connoisseurs”—and that’s what it released.

The Vanguard label was launched in June 1950 by Solomon and his brother Seymour, built with a $10,000 advance from their father, Benjamin. The brothers’ forte was jazz and classical music, and they established two labels to cater their tastes—Vanguard and the Bach Guild, an ambitious project intended to release recordings of all of its classical composer namesake’s choral work. With such a modus operandi, it would take a decade, and the advent of Joan Baez, before Vanguard even sniffed a gold record.

Between 1953 and 1955, Vanguard released some twenty different jazz albums, including well-received and respected titles by Vic Dickenson, Sir Charles Thompson, Joe Newman, Buck Clayton, Don Elliott, and Ruby Braff—many produced by the legendary John Hammond Jr. However, a glimmer of the label’s future came in the form of Brother John Sellers’s Sings Blues and Folk Songs collection, released in 1954; and, two years later, in the release of the first album by Pete Seeger and the Weavers—a courageous move at a time when the group’s political stance saw them all but boycotted by the rest of the industry. (Paul Robeson, another blacklisted performer, joined the Weavers at the label.)

Releases by Martha Schlamme and Cisco Houston followed, and by the end of the 1950s, Vanguard was essentially the biggest folk game in town.

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