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 The transition from analog to digital playback forms (that is, from records to compact disks), in the late 1980s was a boon to devotees of music from earlier periods, as recording companies started cashing in on the contents of their vaults by re-releasing long out of print material on CD. For example, fans of 1960s folk were able to replace well worn, much loved LPs with shiny new disks when Vanguard Records, the label 35 years ago of Joan Baez, Mimi and Richard Farina, and other folk luminaries, began an extensive reissue effort.
The era’s other major folk specialty label, Elektra Records, now swallowed up in the AOL/Time Warner communications empire, hasn’t been nearly as devoted to re-releasing its considerable back catalogue of folk performers. For years, devotees of one Elektra artist, rumble-voiced, reclusive Fred Neil, waited in vain for compact disk versions of Neil’s two great Elektra releases from the mid-60s, Tear Down the Walls, his duet album with singer Vince Martin, and Bleecker & MacDougal, Neil’s first solo effort and a work critical to the development of the folk/rock genre. When Amazon.com started in business a few years back, I would do a search every month or so to see what “Fred Neil” turned up, finding only the spotty reissues of his later work on Capitol Records. So I was shocked and pleased when, I early 1999, the two Elektra releases suddenly appeared, marked “import.” Now, I thought that was a little odd, but the prices were reasonable, so I ordered, sat back, and waited for what I was certain would be imports from, say, a small British company that had hacked its way through to some sort of licensing agreement with the current bigwigs at Elektra. But no. What the mailman brought a few days later were compact disks from Japan! They had the original Elektra photography, artwork, and English liner notes, with the added touch of Japanese liner notes and lyrics. And they bore the Elektra label. I find it well nigh impossible to think that the Japanese are rabid fans of Fred Neil, so why the company has reissued Neil’s work in Asia, forcing his American fans to buy them as imports, is an absolute mystery. It’s no mystery however why Neil has kept a hold on the minds and heart of folk fans, even though he hasn’t recorded or performed in nearly 30 years, is now 63 years old, and lives in parts unknown. Fred Neil had, without doubt, the single most spectacular male voice in folk music--a liquid bass baritone that inspired hyperbole then and still does today. In his liner notes for Bleecker & MacDougal, Skip Weshner urged, “Listen to the patented,wrap around voice on ‘Little Bit of Rain.’...I imagine it’s much the same feeling that a girl gets the first time she snuggles down into a sable coat.” Neil, who earlier in his career had written songs recorded by Buddy Holly and Roy Orbison, also worked outside of the folk conventions of the day as a writer. Schooled first in the necessity of crafting tight songs within the two and a half minute limitations of Top 40 music, Neil’s compositions are tightly written, musically sophisticated, deeply personal, and not a little depressing. His song “Other Side To This Life,” covered by many artists over the years, reveals the ambivalence in so much of Neil’s writing with its first verse: “Would you like to know a secret, just between you and me, I don’t know where I’m goin’ next, don’t know where I’m gonna be. But there’s another side to this life I been leadin’, and there’s another side to this life.” Before Bleecker & MacDougal, Neil had partnered with a Miami-based singer named Vince Martin, whose angelic, soaring tenor was the perfect counterpoint to Neil’s baritone thunder. Their one release, Tear Down the Walls, is far more mainstream folk than the solo work Neil would shortly do. On the CD booklet, which reproduced the original album cover art, they’re even dressed identically in blue sweaters and chinos. And the contents veer into protest music, but with a difference as “Dade County Jail” indicates. While other folk writers were tackling big, abstract political themes, Fred Neil wrote a bluesy attack on the government of Dade County, Florida for building a lavish, air-conditioned jail while not having enough beds for its juvenile hall--aka reform school. There are signs on Tear Down the Walls of what was coming in Neil’s music. His song “Wild Child In a World of Trouble,” speaks of its narrator’s hopeless certainty that, “It’s a world of trouble they’ll bury me in.” And Martin and Neil’s two acoustic guitars are supplemented by the guitarron (Mexican acoustic bass guitar) of Felix Pappalardi and the mouth harp of John Sebastian, both of whom would also play on Bleecker & MacDougal, then go on to hugely successful careers in rock music--the late Pappalardi with Mountain and Sebastian with The Lovin’ Spoonful. Others who worked with Fred Neil would enjoy greater commercial-and even artistic--success than their mentor. Around 1961, Neil’s harmonica player on his gigs in Greenwich Village coffeehouses was a young kid from Minnesota named Bob Dylan. But even Bob Dylan never wrote the theme song for an Academy Award winning movie, which Fred Neil did when his tune “Everybody’s Talkin’ “ (unfortunately sung by Harry Nillson, not Neil) graced the soundtrack of Midnight Cowboy in 1970. Right after that, Fred Neil walked away from the music industry for good. Why someone would quit at that point is puzzling, but no greater puzzlement than why the Japanese are reissuing Neil’s music. It’s one more contradiction in one of music’s most contradictory careers. |
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