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The Freewheelin’ Ed Sullivan

Another splendid Record Store Day is in the books, and I am still reeling with the giddy high of the music.

Bob Dylan and Suze Rotolo during the Freewheelin’ photo session.

Being a geezer, I confess that most of my selections are rooted in the music of my generation.

For example, I got Joni Mitchell’s  Rolling Thunder Revue, culled from her performances on Bob Dylan’s gypsy carnival road show of 1975.

I also got The Warfield by The Grateful Dead, taken from two 1980 shows at San Francisco’s Warfield Theater.

But the real prize came later. My favorite record store sold out of it by the time I got there — and I was there by 8:45 am.

Eventually, I tracked down a copy of it.

It was the reproduction of the original version of one of the greatest and most significant albums of my lifetime, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.

That album was recorded and sent out to stores in early 1963, but was recalled by Columbia Records. This was done in part because of a controversial song, but it worked out well for Dylan: He took the controversial song off the album, along with three others. He replaced them with brand-new compositions: “Girl From the North Country,” “Masters of War,” “Talkin’ World War III Blues” and “Bob Dylan’s Dream.” That last is one of my favorites from his early albums. It still gives me chicken skin.

If I had one of those original Freewheelin’s from 1963, one that had been recalled by the record company … why, I could afford to pick up your tab for dinner. Some copies of the original Freewheelin’ have sold for $35,000.

So, with my life enriched by two Freewheelin’s, I’ve jumped down the rabbit hole of Bob Dylan research and I’ve noticed an error that has been fruitful and multiplied.

I must call bullshit.

Even Goldmine, that wonderful magazine about music and records, makes the occasional mistake. In its piece on the Freewheelin’ / Record Store Day hoopla, the magazine says  “ ‘Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues,’ [is] the song that prompted Dylan to walk off The Ed Sullivan Show when Ed wouldn’t let him play it.”

Ed Sullivan

In another story, actor Steve Buscemi makes a comment aimed at the deceased Ed Sullivan after reciting the lyrics to “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues” at a Dylan tribute concert. “With all due respect, you blew it, man!”

I admire Buscemi as an actor, firefighter and humanitarian. But I hope he will understand when I say, “You’re out of your element, Donny.”

Sullivan supported Dylan and wanted him to do the John Birch song. A representative from CBS’ standards and practices office — in short, a censor — said Dylan could not do it. The censor overruled.

Every trusted source in my Dylan library affirms this story.

Ed was a good guy. OK, he was so wooden that redwoods withered in his wake. Speaking did not come naturally to him and watching him try to engage in post-performance smalltalk with his guests was excruciating. He might’ve invented cringe television.

But this man with no discernible talent hosted for a couple of decades the epitome of a television variety show.

And despite the protests of CBS’s affiliate stations in the Deep South, he booked whatever entertainer he wanted.

In the early and mid-Sixties, some stations down south put a sign onscreen when a black entertainer appeared: “Due to circumstances beyond our control, we have lost our programming.”

Sometimes, the stations put up test patterns of stand-by signs. When the black entertainer finished his or her set, the feed from New York would be magically restored.

Ed Sullivan didn’t give a shit. If he wanted James Brown on his show (his “really big show”), then he’d book him. (Ed was especially fond of Brown.)

Ed Sullivan and James Brown

Here are some of the artists Ed booked, southern affiliates be damned:

Louis Armstrong, Harry Belafonte, James Brown, Cab Calloway, Diahann Carroll, Ray Charles, Chubby Checker, Nat “King” Cole, Sammy Davis Jr, Bo Diddley, Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, The Jackson Five, Mahalia Jackson Gladys Knight, Sidney Poitier, Billy Preston, Smokey Robinson, Nina Simone, The Supremes, Tina Turner, Dionne Warwick, Ethel Waters, Flip Wilson and Stevie Wonder.

Eventually the walls came tumbling down. Down south, viewers began to hunger to see these great entertainers and the affiliates eventually caved.

Don’t believe me? Navigate your television to a Netflix documentary called Sunday Best, which tells the whole story.

So give Ed his due. In your memory, you think of him as comical, talentless man. But the evidence points to the mark he made on our culture. Among his many accomplishments, he stood up for Bob Dylan. He was overruled by the censor, but he was a man of principle. He may have had the personality of a tennis shoe, but he stood for something.

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The Heroes of Woodstock

This was written for Curiosity Stream.

The Woodstock Music and Arts Fair wasn’t even in Woodstock when it planted its cultural flag 55 years ago. Woodstock didn’t want  the festival. Neither did neighboring towns in upstate New York. An industrial park downstate even passed on the opportunity.

Woodstock Ventures logo (PRNewsFoto/Woodstock Ventures)

So when we look back on that momentous weekend of music, the first hero we see is a dairy farmer named Max Yasgur, who offered his fields near White Lake, New York, to the high and hirsute concertgoers.

The festival’s four investors saw the horde descending on the concert site and decided to forego profit and turn it into a free-for-all. Though it took years to repay the debt, it was the right decision.

For the record, the business half of the mangement team was John Rosenman and John Roberts, self-described as “young men with unlimited capital.” The music-and-artists half of the team was promoter Michael Lang — the ever-smiling explosion of curls who became the face of Woodstock — and Artie Kornfeld.

(Kornfeld had an interesting career trajectory. He was just a few years down the road from the time he wrote car songs with Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys and Jan Berry of Jan and Dean. After that, he became the producer for the Cowsills, the family band he had brought to prominence. The Cowsills became the model for the television show “The Partridge Family.”)

Certain impending apocalyptic disaster was avoided due to the soothing and soporific voice of emcee Chip Monck, cautioning the crowd about poor-quality acid, and Hugh Romney (aka “Wavy Gravy”), the commune leader who helped feed the masses and care for those overcome by the event and / or drugs.

Romney deserves enormous credit, not only for helping Monck keep a calming and placid lid on the weekend, but for solving the too-real problem of feeding many more guests than were expected. (Apropos of nothing, it’s interesting to note that Romney was married to Jahanara Romney, who — as Bonnie Beecher — had inspired the song “Girl from the North Country,” written by her college-era boyfriend, Bob Dylan.)

That weekend also gave us indelible images of a generation of musicians:

Jimi Hendrix played to the departing crowds on the festival’s last day,  delivering a pre-elegiac performance. (He was dead 13 months later.) His version of the national anthem became iconic.

Janis Joplin sang with grit and fervor, lost and fragile and unbearably intimate in front of a half-million listeners.

Sly Stone was his revolutionary self, bringing together the sacred and profrance with a beat you could dance to.

Rain-soaked Joe Cocker passed on a message from the absent Beatles: we get by with a little help from our friends.

Of course, not everyone as at their best. Members of the Grateful Dead still shake their heads over how bad they were at Woodstock. Jerry Garcia once said the Dead always seemed to be at their worst when they had the largest audiences.

Maybe you were among the half million that wallowed in Max Yasgur’s mud. The odds are against it, so what you know of Woodstock comes from the three-hour documentary film — oddly, called Woodstock — released in 1970.

The film crew that worked for director Michael Wadleigh included a diminutive cameraman scrambling around the front of the stage.

That young filmmaker, Martin Scorsese, trained his camera on the ecstatic faces and the skilled-and-sure fingers of the performers. He offered the film audience an intimate view of musicians at work. (Let’s tip our hat to Scorcese’s long-time collaborator, Thelma Schoonmaker, whose innovative editing talents conveyed the weekend’s magic.)

Woodstock was the career-making performance by a new group from San Francisco called Santana. Michael Shrieve, the group’s drummer, had turned 20 just the month before. The closeup images of Shrieve that appeared a year later in the Woodstock documentary showed a creative mind at work — you can admire Shrieve’s ability during his solo, but the camera’s focus on his eyes as he challenges and surprises himself is revelatory.

It’s a rare and wonderful look at an artist at work. More than a half-century after that weekend, we still have that. All those involved in telling the story are heroes of a sort.

Woodstock set a standard still in need of an equal.