Alan Rifkin is a veteran journalist who has written for Details and LA Weekly, among others. With his new book, Wounds to Bind: A Memoir of the Folk-Rock Revolution
Music Tomes: In Wounds To Bind you help Jerry Burgan, who had a front row seat at the beginning of the folk revival, tell his story. Why do you think it is important to remember this part of music history?
Alan Rifkin: I guess I’d had a ten-year-old’s notion ever since the mid-‘60s that something incredibly auspicious was being born, or rhymed, or revealed, in the 12-string jangle and epic harmony that The Byrds and We Five both hit on in the summer of 1965. Probably I was projecting my secret hopes and sorrows onto the world at large. I’m no scholar, but I don’t think there could have been a better marriage of lyric and sound fusing sorrow into triumph than “You Were On My Mind” –for God’s sake, having lyrics like “I’ve got troubles, I’ve got worries, I’ve got wounds to bind” transform into these freaky, joyful, paradoxical treasures. A lot of that was due to Beverly Bivens’ lead vocal, but it was also peculiar to the moment. You could hear the same kind of world-uniting effervescence in, say, the Seekers’ “Georgy Girl”—which led, as we relate in the book, to all kinds of commercial fiascos as Madison Avenue tried to make Coke commercials out of the sound.
The fact that We Five’s creative genius, who did the arrangement of YWOMM, was Mike Stewart, the younger brother of the Kingston Trio’s John Stewart, is also interesting to me, because it showed the torch of folk music being passed to a next generation. The size of the baby boom was something Jerry and I tried all along to keep in readers’ minds, but the other day I heard it framed in better terms than I think I ever achieved in the book: More than half the world, midpoint in the 1960s, was under the age of 25.
So I liked to think that all the Utopian (forgive me if that’s corny) promise of the ‘60s somehow converged in the vortex of the moment we were writing about. In retrospect, I think you can hear some of the tenuousness as well. Somewhere in the manuscript, we talk about how AM Radio then represented a “probably lost-forever, suspended note of musical coexistence”—a missing-link time when you’d hear everyone from Henry Mancini to the Rolling Stones in the course of half an hour. It was the last, tenuous convergence before all those strains of culture stopped speaking to one another. So when I met Jerry and began to hear We Five’s story, it seemed to us that his Everyman journey—from sudden preeminence, to the center not holding, to fragmentation and philosophy–could be fashioned as a whole generation’s story at the cultural pivot point of the 1960s.
In fact, our first working subtitle (not very commercial, I’m afraid) was “How a pop anthem briefly harmonized Everything in the dawn of folk rock—and what came after.”
MT: While working with Burgan, what was the most interesting thing you learned?
AR: I learned that collaboration can be greater than the sum of the parts. Some of my early efforts to write as Jerry sounded less like him than me, and he had to gently, patiently (thank God) rein me in. But as I developed more of a sense of his flow and inflection and how to coax out his natural figures of speech, I found that you can shape and trim them according to your own trained ear without getting in the way. . . much the way that a novelist learns to do when a character comes to life with a voice of his or her own. I’m biased, coming from a kind of double-major in journalism and fiction, but I’ve always thought writing nonfiction can only improve you as a writer of fiction. When Jerry began to recognize himself in the prose, I felt I’d accomplished something I’d never been confident I could, being someone who’s hugely protective of my own style. Even though my friends tell me they’re glad I can go get back to writing my own stuff, I don’t think the lessons of collaboration make me any less proud, or feel any less my own.
By way of music history, I was doing nothing but learning. I’d attached all this mystique to We Five’s hit song, but the actual players and forces at work behind the screen had never been fleshed out to me—especially the saga of Frank Werber, the former Kingston Trio manager who tried to control the folk-rock tsunami, and may even have told himself he’d created it, only to wind up being wiped out. He’s a character you might have had to make up out of the times if you hadn’t been sat down and told about him. I came to see something sacrificial, or Darwinistic, about the whole We Five story. I knew they had that magical hit that bridged the folk and rock eras, and then vanished fairly quickly, but until I met Jerry, I could not have connected the dots or articulated how that band’s short happy life made the latter half of the sixties possible, even while they themselves couldn’t survive the upheavals. I don’t think anybody knew that story except Jerry. Certainly no one had written it.
MT: What was the most difficult part of writing the book for you?
AR: How sad the odds against publication were. When we started sending around chapters, we encountered people of two types: those who, like me, were transformed by “You Were On My Mind,” and those who’d either never heard of it or considered the subject hopelessly long ago and minor. I’m fatally attracted to subjects that are hopelessly minor. The first type kept running into a buzz saw trying to pitch it to the second type. Early on, we landed an agent (from the first type) who promptly sent it to the ten most obvious publishers, none of whom saw any commercial potential at all. Just like that, we were damaged goods, because every subsequent agent required a list of our earlier rejections. At one point we considered making the manuscript into a souvenir program to sell at We Five concerts; at another point Jerry offered to bow out and gave me his blessing (unasked) to refashion it as fiction. I used to spend an hour every morning, the way you’d rise and do your stretches, reading Publishers Lunch and sending the manuscript out to whoever had just bought or sold a music memoir of any type that week. That was how we found our editor, Bennett Graff at Rowman & Littlefield.
MT: What are you currently work on?
AR: Now that I’m in flow as a collaborator, I’ve begun some kind of co-written memoir or auto-fiction, in two voices, with a grown son who has battled mental illness, juxtaposing my young adulthood in LA in the 1980s with his own harrowing attempt to have one, forty years later. (The centerpiece is a week he spent on the run from hospitalization.) I’m also shopping a collection of spiritually tinged personal adventures, a pretty difficult sell as well. If someone would help me make co-written music memoirs more of a specialty or (dare I hope) a partial livelihood, I’d have no objections at all.
MT: Can you recommend some of your favorite music tomes?
AR: I’ve liked reading the interviews on MusicTomes partly because I’m embarrassingly illiterate within this genre. Either the writers you interview tend to be deeper into craft than the rest, or I’ve simply never paid enough attention. In any case, I love to read books after I’ve read the back matter, so to speak. But the music memoirs that have stayed with me so far have been those that would have reached me even had I never heard the music. Myra Friedman’s Buried Alive had a voice and felt like it was onto some kind of inner syllogism the author was trying to round off. So did David Crosby’s Long Time Gone, maybe because of his unselfconsciousness about plumbing his own ego and his obsessiveness, whether the substance is harmonies or drugs. I know I read parts of Eric Clapton’s, but I didn’t feel his integrity in every utterance the way I do his music. I love generalists who light upon a musical subject the same way they would any other, so I’m afraid I remember magazine pieces by generalists as much as books, things like Steve Erickson on the meaning of Neil Young, Norman Mailer on the meaning of Madonna. I don’t care as much as I should how badly Mailer captured Madonna or how shamelessly he eclipsed her. Just so long as I feel he’s after a larger purpose.
Keep up with Alan at his Web site: alanrifkin.com