Wounds to Bind: A Memoir of the Folk-Rock Revolution

334 Pages·2014·14.11 MB·English

by  Jerry Burgan

Wounds to Bind
Wounds to Bind
A Memoir of the Folk-Rock Revolution
Jerry Burgan with Alan Rifkin
Foreword by Sylvia Tyson
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD
Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK
Published by Rowman & Littlefield
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham,
Maryland 20706
www.rowman.com
10 Thornbury Road, Plymouth PL6 7PP,
United Kingdom
Copyright © 2014 by Jerry Burgan and Alan Rifkin All rights reserved. No part of this book may be
reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and
retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote
passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-
Publication Data Burgan, Jerry, author.
Wounds to bind : a memoir of the folk-rock revolution / Jerry Burgan with Alan Rifkin ; foreword by Sylvia
Tyson.
pages cm
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-8108-8861-6 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8108-8862-3 (ebook) 1. Burgan, Jerry. 2. Folk
musicians—United States—Biography. 3. Rock musicians—United States—Biography. 4. Folk-rock music
—History and criticism. I. Rifkin, Alan. II. Title.
ML420.B8835A3 2014
782.42166092—dc23
[B] 2013043825
™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard
for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
When I woke up this morning You were on my mind
And—you were on my mind I’ve got troubles
I’ve got worries
I’ve got wounds to bind So I went to the corner Just to ease my pain
Said, just to ease my pain I’ve got troubles
I’ve got worries
I came home again
But I woke up this morning You were on my mind
And—you were on my mind I’ve got troubles I’ve got worries
I’ve got wounds to bind And I’ve got a feeling Down in my shoes
Said, way down in my shoes That I’ve got to ramble I’ve got to move on
I’ve got to walk away my blues When I woke up this morning You were on my mind
And—you were on my mind I’ve got troubles I’ve got worries
I’ve got wounds to bind “You Were On My Mind,” words and music by Sylvia Fricker, adapted by We Five
Contents
Contents
Foreword
Permissions
Part One
Chapter 1: Foreshocks
Chapter 2: 1965
Chapter 3: 1956
Chapter 4: The First Time Ever
Chapter 5: If You’re Going to San Francisco
Chapter 6: Convergence
Chapter 7: When I Woke Up This Morning
Part Two
Chapter 8: Awe and Shock
Chapter 9: Trouble Every Day
Chapter 10: Appalachian Thanksgiving
Chapter 11: The Lonely Crowd
Chapter 12: Ad after Ad after Ad
Chapter 13: C’mon People Now
Part Three
Chapter 14: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
Chapter 15: Jackpot, Nevada
Chapter 16: Long Time Gone
Chapter 17: Wounds Not Bound
Chapter 18: Funeral for a Friend
Chapter 19: Folk Songs and Stories
Notes
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
Foreword
Sylvia Tyson
I
n the second week of August 1965, Ian and I had just finished playing four
nights at the Golden Bear in Huntington Beach, California, and a night at the
Hollywood Bowl with Judy Collins, and were driving north to Portland, Oregon,
on Highway 101. We were cruising through Big Sur and had the car radio tuned
to a pop station but weren’t paying much attention. Suddenly we realized we
were hearing my song “You Were On My Mind,” but definitely not our version
of it, and the DJ was predicting this was going to be a huge hit for a group called
We Five. If I’d been driving, we’d have gone off the road.
Those were the bad old days when publishers took 100 percent of publishing
royalties and often didn’t bother to tell songwriters when a song had been
covered. I believe someone in the office of our manager, Albert Grossman, had
mentioned to me that the song had been recorded, but not who by, and I had no
idea it was going to be a single, let alone a hit. What followed was one of those
happy situations that songwriters pray for, but that seldom materialize.
A little background here. In 1962, the two of us were hanging out in
Greenwich Village with a bunch of folkies including this kid from Minnesota
called Bob Dylan, who’d impressed everyone by starting to write his own songs.
I guess we all figured if he could do it, we could do it, and so we did. Ian started
writing his first song, “Four Strong Winds,” in Albert’s apartment sometime
early in 1962. Not to be outdone, I wrote my first song, “You Were On My
Mind,” a few months later. We immediately sent demos to Witmark and Sons,
our publisher, but apparently they didn’t see any urgency, because the songs
weren’t officially registered until the spring of ’64 when our second Vanguard
album came out with Ian’s composition as the title song. In September of ’64, we
then recorded “You Were On My Mind” for our third album, Northern Journey.
How We Five came to do the song is described in Jerry’s book, so I’ll leave the
rest of the story to him.
Many songs remain very personal to the writer, but certain ones take on a life
of their own. That was definitely the case with “You Were On My Mind.” From
the moment the We Five single took off, I felt as if the song had totally left my
hands. The singer/songwriter phenomenon was just beginning back in the early
’60s, and unlike the Cole Porters and George Gershwins of the ’30s and ’40s, the
writers of hit songs in the ’50s and ’60s were seldom if ever recognized by the
public. When I perform the song, I consistently meet people who are surprised to
learn that I wrote it. In fact, at times it’s been a drawback. When Ian and I toured
England in ’66 with Gordon Lightfoot and the Ian Campbell folk group, we were
opening our segment of the show with “You Were On My Mind” and getting
hisses and boos from the audience, because it had been a big copycat pop hit
there for the singer Crispian St. Peters. The hardcore British folkies, having no
idea I’d written it, weren’t shy about letting us know what they thought of a folk
group doing a pop song. To add insult to injury, St. Peters had naively put his
name on it as writer, a misstep that Witmark and Sons swiftly rectified. This was
only one of many covers by artists as diverse as Barry McGuire and Paul Anka,
the most recent by Canadian singer/songwriter Serena Rider. There were
successful French and Italian versions, and Italy is still one of the major royalty
sources to this day (I get occasional plaintive calls from my accountant asking if
I could write another one of those). It’s been used several times as a theme for
commercials.
As strange as it may seem, I don’t recall ever meeting any of the members of
We Five. For some reason, our paths never crossed, although it might have had
something to do with the great east/west divide in the musical approach at the
time. When Jerry initially contacted me a couple of years ago, he seemed a bit
nervous. He had heard, way back when, that I was unhappy with the changes the
group had made to the lyrics. It’s true that I wasn’t pleased with the changes, but
I was well aware of the cold, hard facts of AM radio at the time and that the
words “drunk and sick” wouldn’t pass muster. In retrospect, I can hardly say I
regret it. In the twenty-first-century world of Google and Twitter, I’ve read many
comments from fans of the song saying how much it meant to them, including a
lengthy analysis by some college professor who claimed (in the absence of the
fatal words “drunk and sick”) that the line “Went to the corner just to ease my
pain” pertained to shooting heroin, and that the “whoa, whoa” parts were
actually “woe, oh woe.” I would suggest to him that the song was written in the
very early ’60s and that, other than a little grass, booze was the drug of choice
for most of us. Heroin and coke didn’t rear their ugly heads until a lot more
money was being earned.
And it’s the moment when big dollars entered the equation that this book
deals with: the beginnings of a lucrative merger between folk and pop/rock,
when that east/west divide started to narrow and the rough-edged lyrics and
melodies of the hardcore folkies gained broader appeal (and even some