Frank Beacham's Journal

A Night of Two Kings

On Sept. 6, guitarist Jimmy Vivino, with producer Greg Williamson, created an exceptional Blues Revue for the Blues Foundation at B. B. Kings Club in New York City.

The event featured a who’s who of blues musicians, ranging from legends like Dion, Sam Moore, William Bell and John Sebastian to break-out young stars that won the hearts and souls of the audience.

One could call it the night of two Kings.

“King” Solomon Hicks is only 20 years old, but has been lead guitarist and performer for nine years at the Cotton Club. He already has four albums. Hicks proved he has the right stuff on the stage last night. Vivino discovered him next door at Lucille’s, the small room in B.B. Kings Club.

Remember the name Solomon Hicks. He’s a rare performing talent, as well as a composer, and he burned up the stage last night. He left a major impression of this hard-core New York audience, who talked about him long after his performance.

The other star of the night was Marcus King, a fellow South Carolinian. He grew up in Greenville, 35 miles from my hometown of Honea Path. He played shows as a pre-teen sideman with his father, bluesman Marvin King. He now leads his own Marcus King Band

The Marcus King Band’s current self-named album, released last year, was produced by musician Warren Haynes and written entirely on the road and recorded during a series of sessions at Carriage House Studios in Stamford, Connecticut.

The album also includes a number of the band’s mentors and collaborators, including Derek Trucks (who plays guitar on "Self-Hatred") and Warren Haynes, who in addition to producing the album, added his slide guitar work on "Virginia." The album reached #2 on the Billboard Blues Albums Chart.

Both of these young men are the future of the blues and both proved it’s in good hands last night to an audience they won over big time.

In addition to the new comers, the legends were in full force with names like Dion, Sam Moore and William Bell providing the headliner acts.

Dion has been performing long before most of the audience members were born. He was on the bill at the Winter Dance Party tour when Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson died in 1959. He has just recorded an album with Vivino.

Sam Moore, a legend with Sam and Dave, sang a new version of John Lennon’s “Imagine” last night. It’s on his new album and the man brought a level of soul to the song that made it new again.

William Bell, who won a Grammy last year, is one of the last living soul legends. You knew it clearly when he performed the blues classic he wrote with Booker T. Jones, “Born Under a Bad Sign.” They had done the song for Albert King and it was later recorded by dozens of blues musicians.

Notable on the bill was Catherine Russell, the jazz and blues vocalist. Russell was essentially born into the blues. Her father, the late Luis Russell, was Louis Armstrong's long-time musical director, and her mother, the late Carline Ray, held degrees from both Juilliard and the Manhattan School of Music and performed with the International Sweethearts of Rhythm during World War II.

Also performing in the revue was Shemekia Copeland, Ruthie Foster, Bob Margolin, Joe Louis Walker, Bill Sims, Eric Krasno, Scott Sharrard and an all-star house band. It was a great night of the blues.

John Sebastian

Jimmy Vivino, Bob Margolin, Dion DiMucci and John Sebastian

Graham Nash: Photographer

Graham Nash has been a photographer longer than a musician. At the recent PhotoExpo in New York City, Nash wore his photographer hat — showing his best images and telling stories about his lifetime of creative pursuits.

Nash was born in Blackpool, Lancashire, England in 1942 and grew up in a poor family in Salford. At the time, most of the employment in his town was either in mines or textile mills, but his parents encouraged him to ignore tradition and follow his heart when it came to his future.

When Nash was 10 years old, his father took him to a nearby zoo to demonstrate photography. After taking a picture and going home, Nash’s father covered a window with a blanket, put a blank sheet of paper into a colorless liquid and then held up the paper for his son to watch.

“He said, ‘wait, wait, wait’ as I stared at the blank paper,” Nash recalled. “Then, all of a sudden, the image my father had taken at the zoo appeared on the paper. It was magic! My life changed dramatically that day. It was then I began taking photographs.”

In the time just after World War II, Nash said most young men in his hometown followed in their fathers’ footsteps and worked for a lifetime for a local company. “But my parents never let me fall for that,” he said. “They recognized my creative passions in music and photography and encouraged me to pursue them rather than saying things like ‘get a real job’ or ‘this is not going to last.’”

In the early 1960s, Nash co-founded The Hollies, one of the UK's most successful pop groups, with a school friend, Allan Clarke. From there, he became a professional musician, while continuing to take photographs along the way.

“I’m driven to create,” Nash said. “My girlfriend and I create every day. I'm waiting for Elvis to come back and I'll be waiting with my camera at my side.”

Because he works as a musician and performs in front of thousands of fans, Nash is no stranger to having his image taken by others. But it’s not his personal approach to the medium of photography.

“I’ve had millions of photographs taken of me,” he said. “But every time I sense a camera is on me, I try to act like James Dean or Elvis. I try to put my best side forward, whatever the fuck that is. I don't like those moments. They are totally fake to me. I like to be invisible. I like to take photos of people who have no idea I'm there.”

Those stealthy photos are what drives Nash’s best photographic work. “I'm into surreal moments that happen in life. You have to be bold enough to have your camera and bold enough to press the trigger when the moment happens.”

One example is a 1969 candid shot of Joni Mitchell, then Nash’s live-in girlfriend in Laurel Canyon, while listening her new album, Clouds, which she had just finished recording. Mitchell was concentrating on the recording, while Nash sneaked the image through the back of a hole in a kitchen chair. He took a single shot that helped define Mitchell as an artist.

Another image, made in 1988, was taken at Neil Young’s Broken Arrow Ranch in Redwood City, California. Young is driving his Jensen sports car on a lonely road toward his house on the ranch grounds. Behind the car is a limousine carrying David Crosby, Steven Stills and Nash, who is standing and shooting from the roof of the limo. It is a solitary image that defined Young’s life at the time.

Though Nash uses his camera to catch life’s unposed moments, he is adamant in his disdain for selfies. “I hate selfies and all this selfie shit that's going on,” Nash said. “It drives me crazy. I don't use my camera as my memory.”

Nash collected more than 2,000 prints and they toured the world in museums for years as the Graham Nash Collection. He sold them in a Sotheby’s auction in 1990, setting an auction record at the time for the highest grossing sale of a single private collection of photography. He also was an early pioneer experimenting with digital images and inkjet printing.

Currently, Nash continues to experiment with a range of creative projects in additional to his musical activity performing and writing with Crosby, Stills and Nash.

“I have to get this stuff out of myself so it doesn't drive me crazy,” Nash said. “I’m so pleased to live in a country where I can express myself without fear of retribution. You can't do that in some other countries. Nobody has to listen to you, but at least you can speak your mind.”

Photos of Graham Nash by Frank Beacham

Forest Hills and the Hollywood Bowl: The Days After Bob Dylan Went Electric

 

By Harvey Brooks

After recording Highway 61 Revisited, I got a call from Bob Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman, asking that I come by his Manhattan office to sign some papers and talk. When I got there, Albert wanted to know what I thought of Dylan and was I available for more work. I told him I was available and had become a real Dylan fan since the recording session.

Albert said Bob likes your playing and wants you to play some concerts with him — one at the Forest Hills Tennis Stadium in Queens on August 28th and the other at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles in early September. I quickly signed on and our conversation was over. He said thanks for coming by and ushered me out the door.

Michael Bloomfield, who had played on the album wanted to keep his gig playing the blues with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and passed, as did drummer Bobby Gregg, who was over-committed with studio sessions. Just after the Highway 61 Revisited session, Dylan had heard Robbie Robertson, a guitarist, and Levon Helm, a drummer, in a band called The Hawks at a small club. He was so impressed, he hired them on the spot as the guitar and drum replacements.

About a week later, I got a call from Dylan’s management office to be at the Carroll Music rehearsal studio at 625 West 55th Street to begin preparation for the two concerts.

It was here that I met Robertson and Helm for the first time. They had a Fender Bassman for me at the rehearsal and it was also my amp on stage for the concerts. We began what would be two weeks of intensive rehearsals for the Forest Hills concert.

The new guys totally changed the workings of the band from what we had in the studio. Robbie Robertson and Mike Bloomfield are both very energetic guitar players, but totally different in style. Bloomfield was spontaneous with his parts, while Robertson was stiffer and far more precise.

Where Bobby Gregg was a solid drummer right in the pocket, Levon was always on the edge. It’s always ‘oh, oh, are we gonna make it? Yeah!’ You always made it. But there was always a natural tension with everything Levon did. It’s a style that helped to create the sound of The Band later on. Dylan really related to it.

Because the songs were so strong in their identity, the addition of Robbie and Levon added to what Al and I had originally worked out in the studio. The truth is I never really thought about what the other guys were playing because I was locked into Dylan.

After some rehearsal, we began to relax. But it was tense until we got familiar with each other. Levon and I spent some time hanging out together in the village after rehearsal just talking about what was going on in our lives at that time — the women, the complications, the opportunities, getting high and Dylan’s music, which neither of us knew much about except that we both liked it.

Levon and I were at The Dugout on Bleecker Street eating some steak tidbits and taking it all in. Later, we walked by the Kettle of Fish on MacDougal St. and saw Dylan, Al Kooper and Bobby Neuwirth hanging out. But we opted to continue our conversation and new friendship over a cup of coffee downstairs at the nearby Gaslight Café.

With two weeks of rehearsals behind us, we were ready for the Forest Hills concert. Originally built in 1923 as the home of the U.S. Open Tennis Tournament, Forest Hills Stadium had hosted the Beatles and Barbara Streisand the year before. The Rolling Stones, Simon & Garfunkel, Jimi Hendrix, The Who and Frank Sinatra would play there around the time of our concert.

                                                                     Rehearsal photo by Gloria Stavers

August 28 was a typically hot and humid time of the summer, but on this evening the temperature began to drop. It soon became cold and windy. The stage where we were to perform was set back some distance from the stadium itself, which held about 15,000 fans.

Due to the stage lighting, we couldn’t see the audience — only the deep green lawn in front of us. Since Dylan had gone electric a few weeks earlier at Newport, uncertainty about what would happen here — his first live performance since Newport — was running high. The audience was self-righteously hostile and they didn’t hide it.

                                                                                 Photo by Gloria Stavers

The show got off to a surreal start when the crowd learned that the master of ceremonies was “Murray the K” Kaufman, a rock impresario and Top 40 disc jockey. This didn’t sit well with the purist folk music audience there to see Bob Dylan. The audience instantly greeted Kaufman with loud boos and jeers.

Al Kooper and I were standing next to Albert Grossman, who had this Cheshire cat expression on his face like he was enjoying the spectacle surrounding his artist. This moment was the first time I sensed Albert’s sense of humor and his take on the music business. He knew that all audience reaction — good or bad — boosted Bob’s notoriety and uniqueness.

The show began with Bob doing his all acoustic solo set. He opened with She Belongs to Me and did Gates of Eden, Love Minus Zero/No Limit, Desolation Row and It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue. The closing solo was Mr. Tambourine Man. The opening set seemed to calm the crowd.

For me it was like being a Roman Coliseum gladiator waiting in the wings while the crowd held its collective thumb in a middle neutral position. The thumb was pointing up after Bob finished his acoustic set, but as the amps and drums begin to make their appearance on the stage the thumb started to drop.

During the intermission, Dylan cleared the backstage area and called the band into a huddle. “I don’t know what it will be like out there,” he told us. “It’s going to be some kind of carnival and I want you to all know that up front. So go out there and keep playing no matter how weird it gets!”

As the band walked onto the stage, the temperature dropped further and the wind blew harder. We could hear the ominous grumbling of fans waiting to sit in judgment. Though we couldn’t see them, we could feel the tension in the cold night air.

We kicked off with Tombstone Blues to loud jeers and boos, which faded into mixed approval and applause by the end of the song. It was during the fifth song, Maggie’s Farm, that some of the fans jumped out of the seating area and ran across the green grass toward the stage. I only noticed it when I saw numerous security guards tackling folks as they came onto the stage. Bob never missed a beat and the band played on!

I watched Al fall to the stage, as his organ stool was pulled out from under him. Levon held his own as the crowd rushed at him. Bob, Robbie and I were towards the front of the stage. Robbie and I moved closer to Bob, who had a maniacal grin on his face.

When we got to Ballad of A Thin Man, Bob played the intro over and over again until the audience quieted down. I added that move into my book of  “do’s and don’t’s” of on-stage tactics. The concert finally closed with the classic Like a Rolling Stone — drawing cheers from the same audience that had booed us earlier.

The moment the show ended, Bob disappeared. He had left the stadium immediately in his limo leaving us sidemen to fend for ourselves. I left with Kooper, after weaving our way through the crowd, experiencing hot and cold crowd recognition for the first time.

After locating my car, we made our way back to Albert Grossman’s apartment on Manhattan’s lower west side for the after-show party. There we found a smiling Bob Dylan and a very satisfied Grossman.

Soon, we headed to Los Angeles, where our second concert would be held on Sept. 3, 1965 at the Hollywood Bowl. Robbie, Levon and I were told we were flying across the country on a private plane. At first, we were very pleased.

What we weren’t told, however, was the flight was aboard Albert Grossman’s Lockheed Lodestar, a World War II puddle jumper that would take 12 hours and would make three or four stops for fuel. Essentially, we would be keeping the band’s equipment company.

This was my first trip to Los Angeles. I exhaled on landing and took the tour of the LA freeway system as we weaved our way to the Hollywood Sunset Hotel on Sunset Blvd. Al and I were roommates. We stayed just down the hall from Dylan’s suite — arriving two days before the concert.

P.F. Sloan had called Bob to set up a meeting. Sloan had written a tune called the Eve of Destruction, which was a big hit for Barry Maguire. The song was obviously a Dylan imitation. Bob — playing the role of the spider drawing a fly into his complex web — was prepared for a “slice and dice” meeting. I had seen him use the same cutting down-to-size device in tandem with Grossman many times before. Both Bob and Albert enjoyed the edge of a mutual sarcastic banter.  

When I was with Bob, I mostly listened to his conversation since most of what he was saying was dramatically different than what I was used to hearing from others. I was in awe of Bob’s intellectual prowess. For me, playing chess with him years later in Woodstock, was a reminder that life is always a game and we are all still playing.

As we drove up the long driveway to the entrance and then the backstage area of the Hollywood Bowl, I could see the Dylan fans entering the venue. I couldn’t help but notice how different their attire and attitude was than those fans at Forest Hills. The California audience was laid back. They got what we were doing right off the bat.

I was standing next to Bob about to play for a mix of movie stars, folkies and hippies. It was thrilling. I kept my cool and casually took in the surreal view from the stage. At the Hollywood Bowl, there is a moat that separates the audience from the stage area. But I could make out the faces of the first two or three rows, spotting the likes of Gregory Peck, Mel Brooks, Peter Fonda and Johnny Cash watching from below.

We started off with Tombstone Blues, the same as Forest Hills. Except, this time there were smiles and people dancing in the audience. The set was loose, but we all followed Bob and met all the endings together.

Bob started blowing on his C harp — I forget which tune it was — but he couldn’t get the harp to play. Bob asked “Anyone out there got a C harp?” Within seconds, someone in the audience threw a harmonica across the moat that separated the fans from the stage. It landed right at Dylan’s feet. He picked it up and began to play. It was sublime intervention if I ever saw it.

The Hollywood Bowl concert was a major success. Kooper had sped off in the limo with Dylan while I was backstage talking to a young lady named Bobbie who was an actress in LA beach bunny movies and some of her friends. She offered to give me a ride to the hotel, but somehow we took a slight detour and I ended up at the beach in Malibu swimming with her in the moonlight. When I got back to the hotel, the after-concert party had ended.

I had to get to the airport the next day to fly back to New York City to rehearse for a three-week gig in Detroit with vocalist Chico Holiday that I had booked before I met Bob. It was not the best time to leave town for three weeks, but the gig was booked and I was committed.

Later, when I checked in from the Cadillac Square Hotel in Detroit as to when the next rehearsals would start, I was notified by Grossman’s office that the rest of Levon and Robbie’s band, “The Hawks,” would be replacing Al and myself on future shows. That is showbiz.

It turned out that the Hawks, who would soon change their name to The Band, were the perfect fit for Bob Dylan. The rest of the story is rock and roll history.

                                                                            Photo by Daniel Kramer

Possibility Junkie, a New Musical That Targets the Artistic Process

We live in an era of magnified perceptions. For many Americans not in the glorified, hyper-wealthy one percent, this is a time of diminished possibilities and loss of hope. David Ippolito and Gretchen Cryer precisely target those perceptions in a magnificent new play, Possibility Junkie. They hit a slam dunk home run!

Possibility Junkie is a timely look at how we frame our lives and our definition of success in a culture where corporate media and propaganda portrayed as “news” is bombarding us from every direction with constant lies—usually based on fear. It’s tough to create a fulfilling life in an environment where everyone around you worships money and judges every endeavor by how much of a profit it generates.

Yet, that’s what artists do, creating their work while at the same time reflecting a mirror on the foibles of the cultural condition around them. David Ippolito, the central character in this play, is an independent singer-songwriter who has gained a huge following as a troubadour in Central Park for the past 20 years. David is the real deal and this is his inspiring story. I have known David for a decade, watched his work develop and witnessed his struggles in trying to live an honest, artistic life.

There are two key lines in the play. The first is “Keep Hope Alive” and the second is the title, “Possibility Junkie.” Both came from the late Sid Bernstein, the man who brought the Beatles and many other bands to America in the 1960s. Bernstein found David singing in Central Park 15 years ago and they became friends. Sid died at age 95 last August 21. 

In the play, Bernstein’s character is “Burn,” an elderly wise man played beautifully by Rob Barnes, a veteran Broadway actor and singer. Barnes was in the original Broadway casts of Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar. Having known Sid as well, I can attest that Barnes carries much of Bernstein in his character.

 

Rob Barnes and David Ippolito

The plot of Possibility Junkie centers around a right wing commentator on FAX News (loosely based on FOX, though it’s hard me to even call it “news.”) David does a song about him in Central Park and a fan records it on video. The video is put on YouTube and goes viral. The FAX commentator, Sean Kilroy (played by Joel H. Jones), gets angry and tries to do David in.

He uses his stunningly attractive assistant, Ainsley Louis (played by Jillian Louis), to spy on David and secretly video tape him, trying to get any kind dirt possible. David falls for Ainsley, a walking, singing bombshell, only to find himself and his friend, Burn, betrayed by her ambitions to get her own TV show.

Jillian Louis and Joel H. Jones

Possibility Junkie is an inspiring musical with songs not just written for this play, but written for over 20 years from the heart by David Ippolito. It all melds together in what I don’t lightly call Ippolito’s masterpiece. His “The Last Protest Song” toward the end brought tears to my eyes. With this play, David has now transitioned from being a talented singer and songwriter to being a creator of musical theatre. This is an ideal new format for him.

The expert hand of Gretchen Cryer is also evident in this production. An earlier theatrical presentation by David was too loose and talky, with David ad-libbing each night. That’s gone in this production, no doubt the work of Cryer in co-writing the book and directing the production. Cryer, the mother of television actor Jon Cryer, co-wrote the classic, I’m Getting My Act Together and Taking It On The Road. She has David acting loose, but he’s far more precise in his presentation this time.

In fact, there wasn’t a weak player in this excellent cast of actors and singers—featuring in addition to Ippolito and Barnes—J.C. Hall (a terrific hip-hop artist), Joel H. Jones, Jillian Louis, Teresa Reynolds and Vanessa Theus. Music direction was by Mike Murray, with some musicians—especially mandolin player Chris Tedesco—joining the cast dancing on the main stage while playing.

Heather Wolensky’s set design was also unique, featuring actual moving image backdrops of where David plays in Central Park. The various video segments plugged into the play seamlessly. It was “virtual set” technology well used in the story. The choreography by David Eggers is also excellent.

A story that Sid Bernstein once told me came ringing back as I watched Possibility Junkie in a packed house on its opening night. Noting that he had found the Beatles in Liverpool in the 1960s, Sid said he hoped one day he could give Liverpool a gift from America. That gift, he told me, would be David Ippolito. “David’s got it,” Sid said, “and they would love him over there.”

Sid never got the chance to promote David in Liverpool, but the man—who also brought The Rolling Stones, Herman's Hermits, The Moody Blues and The Kinks to the United States—had an insanely good eye for talent.

Possibility Junkie runs through Oct. 20 at the Theatre for the New City at 155 First Ave in New York City.

 

David Ippolito with the real Sid Bernstein

Photo by Frank Beacham

"The Designated Mourner" Changes Meaning After 13 Years

When I first saw Wallace Shawn’s “The Designated Mourner” in an old dilapidated building on South William Street in New York City in 2000, I was mesmerized on many levels. First, the audience was limited to about 20 people and the whole building was the set. During the intermission, Shawn and the director, Andre Gregory, ate and talked with the audience. In pure Shawn-Gregory fashion, the traditional walls of theatre were broken down. It was one of the great theatrical experiences I ever had in New York.

In 2000, the world was a different place. It was before 9/11 and before the U.S. had become a total, locked down security state. At the time, I felt the play was set in an unidentified third world country somewhere in Latin America.

I carried a lot of personal baggage into the play back then. Perhaps, that was because in my network news days in the late 1970s, I was in a lot of trouble spots in Latin America, including El Salvador during the fighting and Nicaragua when it Gen. Anastasio Somoza was overthrown. I was even arrested by Gen. Manuel Noriega in Panama, so I knew the fear of looking into an Uzi. The Designated Mourner had special meaning for me.

Thirteen years had passed when I saw the new production of The Designated Mourner at the Public Theatre in New York City. Ironically, it was the same cast and same director as in 2000. Wallace Shawn, Deborah Eisenberg and Larry Pine were all in fine form, but Andre Gregory, who directed this version, was not in sight at that performance.

Though the lavish use of words—which still flow over me like a gentle mountain stream—were the same as before, much has changed from 13 years ago. This time, the play seemed to be to more about the United States today rather than a Latin American country. Where before I never thought about the play reflecting our current life at home, this time I was obsessed with it throughout the production.

Since 9/11, so much is different. The cruel acts of third world governments in the last production easily translate to those who hold power in the U.S. today, regardless of political party. Political prisoners, government-sanctioned assassinations, domestic spying and killing those who write objectionable material no longer seems so far fetched here at home.

The audience also has changed. Many didn’t “get” the play and left at intermission. A man next to me said “the words are too dense.” Wallace Shawn has always been an acquired taste, but his language is rich, thoughtful and flows with a magical quality. He is one of the best playwrights working today. Yet, in today’s video-centric culture, his brand of playwriting may be beyond the range of many younger people in the audience. It’s sad, but the evidence was everywhere last night.

Shawn, as the narrator and husband of one of a group of intellectuals who are eventually all killed by the state, searches for a reason for the cruelty that man inflicts on his perceived enemies. He finally gives up, saying:

“After a while I just concluded there wasn’t any hope—an important insight. Was there anything, then, that I could expect to achieve in the coming years. Well, perhaps I could somehow train my mind to focus less compulsively on terrifying images of death and disease. Perhaps I could learn how to pass more easily from one moment to the next, the way the monkey, our ancestor, shifts so easily along from branch to branch as he follows the high road through the forest at night.

“Let me learn how to repose in the quiet shade of a nice square of chocolate, a nice slice of cake. A delicious cup of tea isn’t, perhaps, that hard to come by; the trick to be learned is just not to think of other things when you drink it.”

Going to the theatre in a taxi last night, I noticed a video camera aimed square in my face. It brought home the fact that we are now being recorded everywhere. The government reads our e-mails and even our snail mail. We no longer have any privacy and our freedoms are being eroded at a rapid rate.

So how do those of us who grew up in a more open time handle this vast intrusion of privacy by an all-powerful state? Shawn offers one piece of advice in the last line of the play. Perhaps he’s right—at least it’s a way to preserve our sanity in a losing situation.

“I sat on the beach for a very long time, lost—sunk deep—in the experience of unbelievable physical pleasure, maybe the greatest pleasure we can know on this earth—the sweet, ever-changing caress of an early evening breeze.”

I highly recommend The Designated Mourner. It’s a compelling theatrical event. It demands the total attention of the audience. Don’t expect light entertainment or you’ll be disappointed.

Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Bob Dylan's Freewheelin' Alburm

Fifty years ago, Bob Dylan began his rapid emergence as a songwriter. His ascent was so fast and his songs so good that many believe Dylan ranks among the best songwriters who has ever lived.

It was May, 1963, when Dylan’s second album—"The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan"—was released by Columbia Records. Unlike his first album, named "Bob Dylan," the emerging artist wrote eleven of the songs, rather than just two.

Freewheelin’ opens with "Blowin' in the Wind," which would become one of the anthems of the 1960s, and an international hit for the folk trio, Peter, Paul & Mary. Then the album added other classics, including "Girl from the North Country," "Masters of War," "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall" and "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right."

This is the period, as told in Chronicles, that Dylan read 100-year-old newspapers at the New York Public Library. He did this to get a sense of timelessness in his writing as he told stories from newspaper headlines. Dylan's lyrics about civil rights and anxieties about the fear of nuclear warfare have stood the test of time, towering above other material written in that era.

Balancing the topical subjects were love songs, often bitter and accusatory, and songs that contain surreal humor. This was the time when Dylan’s talent broke into the open and flowered for all to see.

The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan eventually went platinum. In 2003, the album was ranked number 97 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. In 2002, Freewheelin' was one of the first 50 recordings chosen by the Library of Congress to be added to the National Recording Registry.

The recording of Freewheelin' took place over the course of a year, from April 1962 to April 1963, and the album was assembled from eight recording sessions in the Columbia Records Studio A, 799 Seventh Avenue in New York City.

Clinton Heylin, a Dylan biographer, has connected the blossoming of Dylan’s lyrics along topical and political lines to the fact that he had moved into an apartment on West 4th Street with his girlfriend, the late Suze Rotolo, in January 1962.

Suze Rotolo, 2009 - Photo by Frank Beacham

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Rotolo's family had strong left-wing political commitments; both of her parents were members of the American Communist Party. Dylan acknowledged her influence when he told an interviewer: "Suze was into this equality-freedom thing long before I was. I checked out the songs with her."

Dylan's relationship with Rotolo also provided an important emotional dynamic in the composition of the Freewheelin' album. After six months of living with Dylan, Rotolo agreed to her mother's proposal that she travel to Italy to study art. Dylan missed her and wrote long letters to her conveying his hope that she would return soon to New York.

She postponed her return several times, finally coming back in January 1963. Critics have connected the intense love songs expressing longing and loss on Freewheelin' to Dylan’s fraught relationship with Rotolo. In her autobiography, Rotolo explains that musicians' girlfriends were routinely described as "chicks," and she resented being regarded as "a possession of Bob, who was the center of attention.”

The tremendous speed and facility with which Dylan wrote topical songs attracted the attention of other musicians in the New York folk scene. In a radio interview on WBAI in June 1962, Pete Seeger described Dylan as "the most prolific songwriter on the scene" and then asked Dylan how many songs he had written recently.

Dylan replied, "I might go for two weeks without writing these songs. I write a lot of stuff. In fact, I wrote five songs last night but I gave all the papers away in some place called the Bitter End."

Dylan also expressed the impersonal idea that the songs were not his own creation. In an interview with Sing Out! magazine, Dylan said, "The songs are there. They exist all by themselves just waiting for someone to write them down. I just put them down on paper. If I didn't do it, somebody else would."

Last night, Bob Porco, grandson of Gerde’s Folk City owner Mike Porco, presented a 50th anniversary tribute to Dylan and his work on Freewheelin’. It was in the last building to house a Gerde’s Folk City, now called the Village Underground.

Terre Roche

Terre Roche opened the show with a powerful "Blowin' in the Wind," followed by Randy Burns with “Girl from the North Country.” Willie Nininger did a crowd pleasing version of “Hard Rain,” while Judy Gorman performed Dylan’s “Masters of War.”

Randy Burns

Other highlights were Samoa Wilson and Ernie Vega’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” Rick Illowite’s “Corrina, Corrina” and an updated and often funny “Talkin’ World War III Blues” by Poez.

Samoa Wilson and Ernie Vega

To hear this package of excellent songs and to learn the entire album was recorded over the course of a single year is a bit hard to grasp. Even Dylan himself has said in recent interviews that he doesn’t know how he did it and most certainly couldn’t do it again. It has to be chalked up to a creative miracle.

When Freewheelin' was chosen one of 50 recordings to be added to the National Recording Registry in 2002, the citation read: "This album is considered by some to be the most important collection of original songs issued in the 1960s.” That statement is as true as ever on this 50th anniversary.

This outstanding group of folk singers did Dylan’s work justice in what was an fine tribute to the master’s work.

The Man Who Took the Great Pictures from Outer Space

After a talk by astronaut Don Pettit at a photography conference in New York City this week, someone in the audience tweeted: “For someone who spent a year in space, Dr. Pettit is a down to earth guy.”

When the message was read, the audience burst into applaud. Many had already had one-on-one talks with Pettit at lunch at the Luminance conference and found him an incredibly accessible, ready to answer any question, and well—as said—a genuinely “down to earth guy.”


Pettit is a chemical engineer and astronaut who, in three stays over the past decade, spent more than a year on the International Space Station. He worked as a scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory until 1996, when he was selected as an astronaut candidate. In addition to all his other skills and adventures, Pettit is a passionate amateur photographer.

Yes, NASA trains all astronauts in photography, but doesn’t assign photography duties in space. “It’s more of a hobby thing,” Pettit said. “There are some astronauts who—if the camera wasn't set to "P"—would never be able to take a picture. It's a personal thing for me. I enjoyed photography before becoming an astronaut and continued to grow and learn the photo equipment."


At NASA, Pettit said, the photo trainers badger the trainees by showing all of these hundreds of awful pictures that previous astronauts have taken. “They say don't take a picture like that,” he said. “Up the nose shots, where you can see how many hairs are there, are frowned upon.”


The problem with the above shot, Pettit said, is it's not reality. In a weightless environment, the members of the station crew are everywhere—attached to walls, on the ceiling and in coffin-sized beds in the floor. “You get used to seeing a humbo jumbo of crewmates in all these positions. So you might be looking into somebody's nose. As creatures on Earth, we are not used to seeing this. The pictures you take of your crewmates look perfectly normal to you, but when a normal picture gets to Earth, you get instructed to take pictures like this.

“Of course, you’d be hard pressed looking at that picture to know whether the group is in space or not. We only have some fancy backdrop.”


Pettit likes to shoot inside the cramped spacecraft with a Nikkor 8mm fisheye lens. “We have six people living in space and an Android which we are working the bugs out of. We refer to it as him or possibly her. I've been back on earth for about two months from a 192-day space mission. We started the mission referring to the Robonaut as him and somewhere in the mission we began referring to it as her.” (Big laugh from the audience.)


Among his favorite photo subjects are the approaching unmanned supply vehicles that bring food and other necessities on a periodic basic. “These are fire breathing creatures,” Pettit said. “They will belch fire and I try to record these images.

“These supply vehicles dock automatically unless the automatics break down and then we have to manually dock it. They are filled full of goodies—a chamber about two and half meters in diameter. We unload all the stuff and then fill the chamber with all of our garbage, which are mostly buckets filled with poop. You gotta do something with that stuff, right? You just don't flush it. We put it in the spacecraft and undock it and it blows up in the atmosphere. So at least it’s a sanitary way of getting rid of this stuff.”


To take pictures outside, Pettit uses the station’s Cupola, a seven window observatory module in the station that looks at Earth. It was launched aboard a Space Shuttle mission on Feb. 8, 2010 and attached to the Tranquility Node 3. The Cupola's 31-inch window is the largest ever used in space.


“We fill it with as many as eight different cameras,” Pettit said.“Earth goes by really fast. You go 24,000 miles in 90 minutes. If you want to take a picture of your hometown or whatever, you have three to five seconds to get that shot. Or you'll have to wait another 11 days before you're over your hometown again. We have all these cameras set-up because there is no time to change lenses or settings. They are never turned off.


“You have this amazing perspective of Earth—you can see it on the length-scale of half a continent. It's definitely a wide angle view. If you are over central Australia, you can see the east coast and west coast at the same time. The truly unique thing through my eyes is to capture the wide angle nature of what your views are.

“We have all kinds of telephoto lenses, but if you're not careful, you get images not as good as Google Earth. In my view, you want to capture something different from what a satellite can capture.”

Infrared

“I was able to talk NASA into taking a perfectly fine Nikon D3F body and pulling the IR blocking filter out. The reason is we stopped shooting film in my first flight in 2002. With that, we lost the ability to do color infrared photography. It was all film based. Now we can do infrared digitally with this modified Nikon camera.


"This is the Ganges river delta (a trans-boundary river of India and Bangladesh). The deep red is the mangrove wilderness. You can see on the left side where agriculture is starting to infringe into the wilderness area. 


"This is in the Bahamas. Coral reef and turquoise water and sediments give these amazing colors in the near infrared.


“If you want to go for a jaunt outside, and we all do, you'd be better be wearing a set of clothes that look like this.

"Shadows in space are really stark.


"You are either in full blown sunlight or pitch black. There is almost nothing in between. Even when you bring the camera outside, you have these shadows you have to deal with. I sent a picture home to my boy and said we had found Godzilla in space.


"One of my favorites are star trail pictures. Nighttime doesn't really look like this, but it has all of these elements in it. These are multiple 30 second exposures stacked to show the orbital motion as well as the star trail motion. The circle is made by the pitch access of the spacecraft. These are fun pictures primarily for data."

Cities at Night

“Cities at night are fascinating. You look at how human beings sprinkle their light bulbs at night. It's amazing from an orbital perspective. Nobody on earth designs their cities by how they look to space. They just happen to turn out that way. Until 2002, all these pictures were soft focused due to orbital motion.


“I was unhappy about that. So I cobbled this piece of equipment up with spare parts that were on the space station. The big black thing is an IMAX movie camera mount. It wasn't being used because we no longer had film on the station. So I figured no one would mind if I used it. I got out our drill driver. I needed a long bolt. I found one in the progress vehicle. I figured no one will miss just one bolt.” (More laughter.)

“So you drive that bolt and it pushes against the platform and you can move one axis of a gimbel in a controlled manner depending on how much you squeeze the trigger. I took a Hasselblad camera with a 70 mm film back, though we had no film anymore. I put the 350mm lens on it. It became a fancy spotting telescope. You look through that camera and squeeze the trigger on the drill driver until the images are stationary and then you take a picture with the other camera mounted on the mount.

“If you're an amateur astronomer, you realize this is nothing more than a barn door tracker. Barn door trackers are used to take pictures of space to counter Earth motion. I was in space countering orbital motion so I could take a picture of Earth.

"Times have changed. The space agency has built a computer controlled tracker. This is New Orleans taken from the mission I just got back from. Taken with a Nikon D3F we can now get down to 10 meter resolution. You can see the Mississippi River and the French Quarter and see it's a pretty hopping place at this time of night."

Pettit said it turns out there is a triangle between culture, technology and geography that dictates how humans move lighting around. One can see different types of lighting by region, he said. “Embedded in this data about our cities is something about who we are as a species. Cities at night may be one of the most beautiful unintentional consequences of human activity.”

Pettit was asked if he had ever used Photoshop on his images while in space. “Most images are downloaded from space. During my mission, we had six hard drives fail. Hard drives somehow fail when they get into weightlessness. They don't last like they do on Earth. Nobody understands why, but they just do.

So the quicker you can get your images off of a hard drive and downloaded, the better. NASA does a good just of ferreting out all the RAW files, which are stored as NEF files. I do hold some of my favorites and I do have a copy of Photoshop and I work with some of them in my spare time just because I can.

But I'd rather spend my time taking the pictures while in orbit than doing image processing. You have plenty of time to do that when you're back on Earth.”

Finally, with all the usage of his images being manipulated on YouTube, Vimeo and Facebook over the past year, Pettit was asked if had ever seen them online and what is his opinion.

“I have seen many of these time lapse movies and it does me good that people are actually using the pictures that I take,” he said. “I think whatever art form you enjoy creating the best compliment is to see somebody take it and enjoy it themselves. At NASA, I can't use copyright music unless we can arrange with the musician. But people on YouTube do that. So they make these marvelous film clips that I can't do. Some of these are so beautiful, it brings a tear to my eye.”

Don Pettit with Frank Beacham at the Luminance Conference sponsored by Photoshelter in New York City

Bob Dylan and Joan Baez at the Rolling Thunder Review

I took this picture at Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Review in Gainesville, Florida on April 25, 1976. Dylan is pictured with Joan Baez. I had no camera at the time and paid a fellow sitting next to me $10 to borrow his camera and to purchase one roll of film. Well worth it, I think! 

The Operative Word Is "Grace" in Christina Haag's "Come to the Edge"

The dictionary defines the word “grace” as elegance or beauty of form, manner, motion or action. After reading Christina Haag’s magnificent book, “Come to the Edge,” that definition has expanded for me to two very public members of the Kennedy family: John Jr. and Jackie.

One of John F. Kennedy Jr.’s college roommates perhaps put it best at his funeral, after he died in an airplane crash in 1999 at the age of 38: “He was an ordinary boy in extraordinary circumstances. And he lived his life with grace.”

For five years Kennedy was Christina Haag’s lover. In dream-like prose—with details like the color of the leaves and the name of every plant in sight—Haag takes us on a detailed journey of his privileged and adventurous life. At its core, this book is a tale of unresolved love between two lifelong friends in their mid 20’s.

It’s a great read on this level alone. Unfortunately, as with so many such relationships, the affair doesn’t last. It was perhaps for the best. Haag becomes an actress and a best-selling author, and Kennedy, sadly at age 38, crashes his small plane off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, killing his wife, Carolyn Bessette, and his sister-in-law, Lauren Bessette.

As a child, I remember the Kennedy family well. I watched on television the day John F. Kennedy was shot and viewed every moment of the funeral live. Who could forget the image of young John saluting his father’s coffin? Or of Jackie Kennedy’s classy charm every inch of this extraordinary journey.

In later years, adverse to the constant lies in our celebrity culture, I turned off the hundreds of contradictory television shows, movies and books about the Kennedy family. It was because of the recommendation of a mutual friend of myself and Christina Haag, Rebecca Boyd, that I read this one. I am so glad I did. It is incredibly well written, amazingly detailed and a loving portrait of a remarkable family.

Though I found the core love story of Christina and John fascinating, it was Haag’s side story of her relationship with Jackie Kennedy I found to be extraordinary. This is another place where the word “grace” comes into play.

About the time this romance was going on in the mid 1980s, I was working in Los Angeles with Orson Welles, the film director. I’d become the middle man between Orson and his old producer, John Houseman, who were no longer speaking with each other. I endured many petty fights and disputes between these giants, but one day Houseman told me something I never forgot.

“Frank, it’s very rare in our lifetime to meet a real genius—not the fake kind the press conjures up—but a real one,” Houseman said. “Orson is a real genius. And when a real genius touches you, he changes your life forever. Don’t forget that.”

It took years for those Wellesian words to prove true for me and I suspect they have proven true for Christina Haag about her time with Jackie Kennedy Onassis. Haag gives Jackie credit for the creation of elegance. An example, written after Haag visited Red Gate Farm, Jackie’s 464-acre retreat on the southwestern end of Martha’s Vineyard:

“I remember looking in the kitchen for a glass one morning. Instead, I found vases and, attached to the inside of the white cabinet door, an unlined index card in her hand—which flowers in which vase in which room. It surprised me. When I saw a small carafe of sweet peas or a clutch of dahlias in a room, it seemed unplanned—as though they had just happened there, as though they belonged. Or there’d be a path that appeared to go nowhere, but when you reached a meandering end, you felt its purpose. What seemed happenstance was crafted, chosen by her unerring artist’s eye.”

That paragraph, and so many more like it in this book, convinced me of Jackie’s artistic genius. She did it for the nation, from her incredible taste in music to her restoration of the White House. I knew it instinctively from when I watched her famous televised tour of the White House as a kid in 1962, but Haag’s comments nailed it for me. 

“Come to the Edge” will come out in paperback on Jan. 10. Don’t be like me and wait too long to read it. It is one of the best books of 2011 and I highly recommend it.

Reuniting with the Urb Brothers

It was the late 1980s and I was living in Los Angeles. From time to time, I worked on projects with the late Paul Rothchild, producer of The Doors, Janis Joplin, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and many others. He introduced me to the Urb Brothers, a duo who had won notoriety in Estonia during the Soviet era there and had defected to the United States.

The Urbs had an amazing story. Tarmo Urb once spent five years in and out of Soviet jails in an effort by the government to silence his voice. It was only when younger brother Thomas (who, during Tarmo's incarceration, had made his mark as an actor in the Soviet film industry) wrote a pleading letter to then President Gorbachev that Tarmo was finally released...only to face an assassination attempt by the KGB, an attempt that failed when the operation's chief officer became a fan of the Urb's music and message, allowing the brothers to defect by the skin of their teeth. 

Urbs in 1971

I visited with the Urbs on Venice Beach and actually pitched one of them to act in a movie I was then trying to get made at the time, “Cradle Will Rock.” I remember them as being really nice guys and sounding a bit like Simon and Garfunkel. But I was soon to move to New York City and—for whatever reason—Paul passed on producing the Urbs. Stuff and life happened and I’m sorry to say I forgot about the Urbs.

That is until the Sunday before Christmas. I was invited to a Ann Ruckert’s home to hear an “amazing” duo from Estonia produced by Geoff Gillette, an LA producer who has moved to New York City. At first I didn’t recognize the brothers or really get the name “Urb.” But as I listened to their story, a got a strange sense of deja vu. Finally, I blurted out “do I know you guys from LA?” “Yes, I think you do,” answered Thomas Urb, who had the same slow recognition.

Then, the pieces fell together. What are the odds we’d meet again after more than 21 years in a city on the other coast of the country?  I can only say it happened. The brothers now have six albums and have recorded a lot of music since I first met them. I’ve got a lot of catching up to do.

Tarmo Urb told me the story of meeting his “personal” KGB agent and being warned of his pending death.  Here’s Tarmo on video with the story...

Here the Urbs sing “Nightingale,” a song they wrote after seeing a small nightingale in some tattered bushes near where they lived. Tarmo said I kept asking myself why is this little bird singing in such an ugly place—it has wings, it could fly anywhere. “Then it dawned on me, you could be a nightingale wherever you find yourself,” Tarmo said. “We musicians are what we are, wherever we find ourselves.”