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Gary Green's Musical Adventures After Folkways

With the suicide (or murder, according to some) of Gary's friend folksinger Phil Ochs and the death of his mentor, Folkways Records owner Moe Asch, Gary Green left the music world. However before his departure there were several Gary-esque adventures that shaped his music.

While still recording and touring for Folkways Records and acting as associate editor for three issues of Broadside Magazine, Gary also co-produced three albums for Folkways and Broadside (including Phil Ochs Sings For Broadside Volume 2, a compilation of New York street musicians called Streetsounds, and the now-infamous album Bob Dylan vs. A.J. Weberman

The Infamously Notorious  Bob Dylan Album

As a fundraising prelude to a proposed Madison Square Garden concert, Gary called on old friends of Broadside (Pete Seeger, Janis Ian, Bob Dylan, Fred Kirpatrick, Sammy Walker, and others) to help save and revitalize the magzine and its founders, Sis Cunningham and Gordon Friesen. To raise the funds to rent the Garden, Friesen contacted Bob Dylan and obtained permission to release an "interview" album based on recordings of telephone conversations with Dylan from January 6 and January 9, 1971. The men agreed that the interview album would be great insite for Dylan fans.

Gary Green took control of the project producing and editing "Broadside, Vol. 12" (Catalog #FB 5322) for Folkways Records. He also wrote the liner notes, and an eight-page booklet inserted into the LP jacket.

Edited from a telephone interview between Bob Dyland and notoriously obsessed “Dylanologist” AJ Weberman, the album was released with Dylan's permission as the fundraiser for Broadside. But the negative publicity for Dyland (at the time he was going through a divorce) brought about a $636-million lawsuit against Friesen, Folkways, Broadside, Weberman, and Gary Green.

The toublesome album is best described in this excerpt from the Swan Fungus website:

Folkways originally pressed the album, but it was very, very quickly taken off the market. I don’t know how many were sold, but the number must be very small considering how much dealers charge for it. We’ve asked between $400-$600 for the copies that have passed through the store.

The “interviews” took place a few weeks after demonstration outside of Dylan’s apartment that was organized by Weberman. Weberman was a self-proclaimed Dylanologist who was just a tiny bit obsessed with the guy. He thought some of Dylan’s songs were written for him. He used to rummage through trash to gather evidence that could support his zany theories. Even after Dylan and his wife started putting dog shit in their garbage, he kept digging. He apparently used a lot of acid, too.

Anyway, after this radical demonstration spearheaded by Weberman — the purpose of which was to rally against early ’70s rock musicians for not being political enough anymore — the two had some phone conversations. Weberman taped them, and Dylan found out about halfway through the recording process, and he wasn’t too happy about it. Both guys sound like morons at times. Dylan expresses his dislike for Roger McGuinn, telling Weberman, “Fuck him” multiple times. He calls Creedence Clearwater Revival “faggot shit,” and dares Weberman to name a better songwriter than him. John Lennon? “Never”.

Whether it was the timing of the release (Dylan's divorce came about around the same time and during the interview he said some pretty bad things about his then-wife) or second thoughts about the rant against other performers, or the on-going feud between Dyland and Weberman...whatever the reason, despite the verbal "okay" that the star gave Broadside's Gordon Friesen, the lawsuit was filed. One of the contentions of the suit was that Green's liner notes were offensive and implied that Dylan was schizophrenic, splot between the "star", a poet, and a man. The suit also claimed that the list of album tracks implied that the recording was of performances (songs) rather than interviews. Below is the original one-paragraph liner note as well as the track list from the album.

To settle the lawsuit out of court, Moe Asch agreed to pull the record from circulation and destroy the mastertape. A few days later Asch Fedexed the 12-inch master tape to Gary Green, who still has it today. Meanwhile, thousands of bootleg pressings of the lp, internet downloads, and even a feature film about the interviews have surfaced over the years. Dylan and Green made peace in the 1970s after Gary filed a much-publicized countersuit against Dylan and without the benefit of lawyers the two men settled. Weberman and Green never met, though they had several somewhat heated phone conversations.

With the Broadside fundraiser on the rocks, Gary, fellow folksingers Pete Seeger, Phil Ochs,  Reverend Frederick Kirkpatrick, and Friesen founded the I Hear America Singing topical music project as a "next generation" of Broadside. With Ochs at the helm of the board and Green as Executive Director, that project too crashed when weeks into it Phil Ochs was found dead, hanging from a light fixture in his sister Sonny's Far Rockaway New York home. Ruled a suicide, the death created a cult mystery and Friesen always maintained that Ochs was murdered in a follow-up on an attack in Afghanistan that had crushed his vocal chords two years earlier. Friesen conspiratorially maintained that it was a CIA attempt to silence the grammy-award winning protest singer much the way they had silenced Ochs' friend and counterpart during the Chilean coup, Victor Jara.

Devistated by the death of his friend Phil Ochs, Gary Green left New York  to return to the South as a newspaper journalist and only an occasional musical gig until the 1980s.

Shortly after the release of his third album, Gary became the sole owner of Baltimore's landmark Bread & Roses Coffeehouse and re-instituted the 1960s Hootenanny tradition there. The Smithsonian Folkways achieves hold two unreleased live albums from that era: Hootenanny 1980s Style and Gary Green Live From Bread & Roses. Both were pending release when Moe Asch died. With the death of Asch, Green walked away from the folkmusic world.

 

Beyond Folkways

In 1993, before leaving Baltimore for the last time, Gary appeared at a Bread & Roses Reunion Concert that marked not only the end of an era in music but what was to have been Gary Green's last performance of the 20th century, if not forever. An early digital video was made of that show.

In early 1995, at the urging of old friend Justin Tubb (son of the legendary country and western star Ernest Tubb) Gary finally made an acutal last 20th Century performance: on live radio during the Ernest Tubb Midnight Jamboree following the Grand Ole Opry on WSM radio in Nashville, Tennessee.

A longtime backstage regular at the Grand Ole Opry, Gary Green's friendship and ties to 1960s and 1970s country music artists was more than 20-years-in-making by the time Justin Tubb called. Gary gave the show's followers a Hank Williams like voice-cracking version of "The Wreck of Old 97" in the hyper-speed rhythm that Moe Asch has asked him to leave behind.
 

Early in the 21st century Gary had been flirting with a musical return to his fusion traditional country/folk/rockabilly roots with digital technology, but hesitated to explore that route because of the almost-bitter resistance to his music 30 years earlier from both the New York folk community and the Nashville country world.

In December of 2000 legendary sideman guitarist James Burton introduced Gary to rock and roll icon Jerry Lee Lewis at an airport lounge in San Jose California. The two men convinced Green to accompany them to Las Vegas where backstage at the Silverton Casino they encouraged Gary Green to return to his life as a musican.

Meanwhile Gary successfully waged a long lobby with the board of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to lift their ban on inducting sidemen and in 2001 pushed for James Burton to become the first sideman inducted. Still Gary did not return to music full time.

In January of 2006, Cowboy Jack Clement (best known for his work for Sam Phillips at Sun Records and with Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, and Roy Orbison as well as later work with Waylon Jennings), agreed to produce a new album for Gary Green. However by the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century, as Gary approached 60 years old, he still had not returned to a studio despite the famous producer's urging.

Meanwhile, in 2007, post-punk alternative rocker Frank Black (first famed as the front man for the 1980s band "The Pixies") released a live version of a song from Gary Green's third album, "That Burnt Out Rock and Roll." On the European version of his "93-03" album, track 28 (of the two-CD set) Black belts a powerful version of the song that further served to spur Gary Green toward a return to music. CLICK HERE TO SEE VIDEOS OF FRANK BLACK PERFORMANCES OF THE SONG>>>

In 2009 Amazon.com and the iTunes Store began offering individual downloads of the original three Folkways Records recorded by Gary Green and the royalty checks started back for Gary. People were listening again. To see the albums on Amazon.com click here>>>

Currently The Smithsonian, Amazon, iTunes, occasionally an eBay auction of vintage LPs, and Frank Black keep the Gary Green music alive.
 

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