David Crosby is talking about a reunion. I began this post a month ago. He got his start at the New Balladeer that was a tea house Marilyn and I discovered when we were fifteen. I did a drawing of her by the fire. Morgan Cavett was the manager and partner of Bruce Langhorne who Dylan titled ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’.
John Presco
Rock legend David Crosby reached out to his estranged bandmates Stephen Stills, Graham Nash and Neil Young and said he’d love to make music with them again.
“I want to work with all four of us. That’s what I want to do,” the singer said Sunday during an interview at TheWrap studio following the Sundance premiere of the new documentary “David Crosby: Remember My Name.”
In the early 1960s, Morgan made inroads into the music business by managing the New Balladeer coffeehouse. Here he met John Kay of Steppenwolf and other singers, songwriters and musicians who become lifetime friends and professional colleagues. He went on to produce records with Johnny Mercer and became a successful producer in his own right discovering the 1970s duo sensation The Captain and Tennille. From 1977-1988 Morgan and his partner, Bruce Langhorne, owned Blue Dolphin Recording Studios where they wrote the soundtracks for “Melvin and Howard,” “Swing Shift” and other feature films.
In September 1973, Toni and Daryl were performing at The Smokehouse Restaurant in Encino, California and two men from a small F.M. station were in the audience one night. They asked Toni and Daryl if they had any records, and at the time, they hadn’t. This inspired the duo to record two songs, “The Way I Want To Touch You” and “Disney Girls” at a small recording studio (the size of a garage) located in the San Fernando Valley. A man by the name of Morgan Cavett, a songwriter and producer who gained his first major success by writing for the musical group Steppenwolf assisted Daryl and Toni with producing these recordings. On the liner notes of the “Love Will Keep Us Together” album a special thanks was given to Morgan Cavett for introducing the Captain to Tennille.[citation needed]
Daryl and Toni initially pressed a few copies and gave them to several small F.M. stations in the Los Angeles area. Soon the stations were calling the duo saying that were getting strong feedback. Daryl and Toni decided to go ahead and spend $250 to have 500 vinyl copies pressed. They sent samples to radio stations and then drove off in a camper truck to visit 130 stations in 22 states to promote the single. The original vinyl pressings were issued on Butterscotch Castle Records, a label name created by Captain and Tennille. Soon afterwards, additional copies were released and distributed by Joyce Records.[citation needed]
http://www.richieunterberger.com/langhorne2.html
The Black Doll
Above is a photo of Marilyn Reed with her half-sister, Shauna, who gave Marilyn the black doll she is holding. Shauna would live with Carlos Moore and help him write ‘Fela – The Bitch of a Life’. Fela was a charismatic African performer who was befriended by the Black Panthers. My daughter’s half-brother was fathered by a Black Panther. He named his son after Malcolm X.
On our third date, Marilyn took me to see the movie ‘Black Orpheus’. My first girlfriend was introducing to me the black culture she was exposed to. This culture would change music in America, forever! The first album I ever bought was a Bo Diddly album. I danced before I went to school, and when I came home. I shop-lifted an album called ‘African Drums’. I choreographed my own moves. I watched the black dancers in High School. I invented dancing without a partner. When I did the Pony, my peers formed a circle around me to watch. One day I put on Balero and danced for Marilyn.
Here is a video of Arthur Lee. Bryan was Christine Rosamond’s lover. Arthur was an Orpheus. So was Bryan. Consider Orpheus’ head, and the death mask of me, and the bust Marilyn carved. I am a poet who went down to Hades.
Jon Presco
Copyrighted 2011
African superstar, composer, singer, and musician, as well as mystic and political activist, Nigerian Fela Kuti, born in 1938, was controversy personified. He was swept to international celebrity on a wave of scandal and flamboyance, and when he died of AIDS in 1997, more than a million people attended his funeral. But what was he really like, this man who could as easily arouse violent hostility as he could unswerving loyalty?
Carlos Moore’s unique biography, based on hours of conversation and told in Fela’s first-person vernacular, reveals the icon’s complex personality and tumultuous existence. Moore includes interviews with fifteen of his queens (wives); photos; and an updated discography.
In 1976 Langhorne did the Stay Hungry soundtrack with fiddle player Byron Berline for director Bob Rafelson. Starting in 1977 he partnered with Morgan Cavett in a recording studio called Blue Dolphin. Cavett had worked with Steppenwolf, produced records, and discovered The Captain & Tennille. It was in this studio that some of Langhorne’s soundtracks were realized.
By the early ’70s his session work was becoming less frequent, though he continued over the next few decades to work in movie soundtracks. Langhorne composed the music for the Peter Fonda western film The Hired Hand (1971), which combined sitar, fiddle, and banjo. He also provided the scores for Fonda’s 1973 science fiction film Idaho Transfer and his 1976 vigilante movie Fighting Mad. Other films featuring Langhorne’s scores include Stay Hungry (1976), Melvin and Howard (1980) and Night Warning (1982). Besides composing he also worked as a live accompanist, and co-running a recording studio with Morgan Cavett.
On those albums, especially at the time of the first album, it was real new for musicians like that from a folk background to use electric instruments. You were key in that process, not just with them, but on Dylan’s “Bringing It All Back Home” album. Was that something you guys were pretty self-conscious of doing, or was it more of an organic process?
It was just something that evolved organically. You know, because…when you look at what folk music is? Folk music is the music of the people. And if you look at folk music in any country in the world from any era, the instruments that are used are the instruments are available to the people, you know, to the indigenous people. And for us in America at that time, it happened to be the electric guitar. It was like everyone had electric guitars, and there were electric guitars everywhere. And all the records that you heard featured electric guitar. So it was a perfectly natural evolution, and young, forward-thinking people like Dick and Mimi, and like Bob Dylan, had no choice but to move forward, because it was right there in their face, and they were contemporary artists. They were not traditional artists. It was sort of inevitable, and of course the resistance was also inevitable, because people don’t like their icons to change.Bruce Langhorne, an intuitive guitarist who played a crucial role in the transition from folk music to folk-rock, notably through his work with Bob Dylan, died on Friday at his home in Venice, Calif. He was 78.
A close friend, Cynthia Riddle, said the cause was kidney failure.
From his pealing lead guitar on “Maggie’s Farm” to his liquid electric guitar lines on “Love Minus Zero/No Limit” and “She Belongs to Me,” Mr. Langhorne was best known for his playing on Mr. Dylan’s landmark 1965 album, “Bringing It All Back Home.” He also contributed hypnotic countermelodies to tracks like “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.”
“Bringing It All Back Home” proved a harbinger of ’60s folk-rock. Mr. Langhorne’s empathetic accompaniment, always stressing feeling over flash, animated all 11 of the album’s tracks.
In his 2004 memoir, “Chronicles,” Mr. Dylan said of Mr. Langhorne, “If you had Bruce playing with you, that’s all you would need to do just about anything.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8UfrC3HnmA
Langhorne accompanied singer Odetta at Martin Luther King’s March on Washington on August 28th, 1963.
Fariña then travelled to Europe, where he met Mimi Baez, the teenage sister of Joan Baez, in the spring of 1962. Hester divorced Fariña soon thereafter, and Fariña married 17-year-old Mimi in April 1963. Thomas Pynchon was the best man. They moved to a small cabin in Carmel, California, where they composed songs with a guitar and Appalachian dulcimer. They debuted their act as “Richard & Mimi Fariña” at the Big Sur Folk Festival in 1964 and signed a contract with Vanguard Records.[9] They recorded their first album, Celebrations for a Grey Day (released under the name Mimi & Richard Fariña),[10] in 1965, with the help of Bruce Langhorne, who had previously played for Dylan. During the brief life of Richard Fariña, the couple released only one other album, Reflections in a Crystal Wind, also in 1965. A third album, Memories, was issued in 1968, after his death.
Life appeared to be looking up even further in the spring of 1966. Farina’s husband had just had his first novel, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me , published, and book signings were the order of the day. But the couple’s optimism and joy was rudely cut short on April 30, when Richard was killed in a motorcycle accident. It was Farina’s 21st birthday.
Explored and Reinvented
Understandably devastated by her loss, Farina moved to San Francisco to attempt to regroup. She took up dancing once again and tried to keep her hand in music. The ever-mercurial music business, however, was then in the process of exchanging the folk phenomenon for that of rock ‘n roll. Gamely, she dove into the new waters with an acid-rock band called “The Only Alternative and His Other Possibilities,” but it was a short-lived fling. In 1967 she toured Japan with Judy Collins, Bruce Langhorne, and Arlo Guthrie, but as a dancer, not a singer. Later that year, Farina took a turn as a comedienne, joining the San Francisco improvisational group The Committee. Her year with the troupe proved a more productive venture, as she made lifelong friends and honed her stage skills in the process. A compilation of the Farina’s work called Memories was released in 1968, but Farina had gone through sufficient professional reincarnations by that time to hazard one more on a personal level.
On September 7, 1968, Farina married record producer and radio personality Milan Melvin at the Big Sur Folk Festival. For the next two years, she appeared content to stay close to home, although she did record one song with Baez on the latter’s David’s Album . The second marriage ended in divorce in 1970, however, and Farina headed back into music.
Bruce Langhorne 4/2017
April 14, 2017 – Bruce Langhorne was born on May 14, 1938 in Tallahassee, Florida.
At age 4 he moved with his mother to Spanish Harlem, New York. When he was a 12-year old violin prodigy living in Harlem in the fifties, he accidentally blew several of his finger tips off with a cherry bomb that he held onto for too long. In the ambulance on the way to the hospital, Bruce looked up at his distraught mom and said, “At least I don’t have to play violin anymore.” In a gang fight, he got involved in a stabbing and left the country for Mexico for 2 years. By age 17 he started to pick the guitar.
As a result of his childhood finger misfortune, which obviously limited the range of techniques he could master, Langhorne developed a distinctive economic playing style that acted as the response half of a call-and-response with singer/songwriters’ vocals, often using rapid triplets of notes.
He began accompanying folk singer Brother John Sellers, who worked as an MC at Gerde’s Folk City club, as well as at other clubs in Greenwich Village. As a result of his constant exposure at these clubs, he began sitting in with numerous Greenwich Village musicians and finding work as an accompanist both live and in the studio.
As a result he first recorded in 1961, with Carolyn Hester, a session which also included a then-unsigned Bob Dylan on harmonica.. He later said of Dylan: “I thought he was a terrible singer and a complete fake, and I thought he didn’t play harmonica that well….I didn’t really start to appreciate Bobby as something unique until he started writing.” From then on they were tight. In 1963 he accompanied Dylan on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, and in 1965 was one of several guitarists on the album Bringing It All Back Home.
The title character of Bob Dylan’s song “Mr. Tambourine Man” was inspired by Langhorne, who used to play a large Turkish frame drum in performances and recordings. The drum, which Langhorne purchased in a music store in Greenwich Village, had small bells attached around its interior, giving it a jingling sound much like a tambourine. Langhorne used the instrument most prominently on recordings by Richard and Mimi Fariña. The drum is now in the collection of the Experience Music Project, in Seattle, Washington.
When folk music morphed into folk-rock, Langhorne used an acoustic guitar with a pickup, running it through a Fender Twin Reverb amp that he borrowed from guitarist (and fellow multi-instrumentalist) Sandy Bull. Influenced by Roebuck Staples of the Staple Singers, he would set up a tremolo effect in time with the song. The result was a sound, both acoustic and electric in color, well-suited to the period in which rock and folk music were crossing.
Bruce Langhorne became one of the most important New York based session guitarists of the 1960s, particularly in the early years of folk-rock. He is most famous for playing on some of Bob Dylan’s records, particularly 1965′s Bringing It All Back Home. However, more than that, he actually played with numerous musicians who were making the change from folk to folk-rock in the second half of the 1960s, including Tom Rush, Richard & Mimi Fariña, Richie Havens, Gordon Lightfoot, Eric Andersen, Fred Neil, Joan Baez, and Buffy Sainte-Marie.
His mastership on all guitar, bass, violin, mandolin, piano and percussion made him for many years Dylan’s first choice for concerts and important guitar parts on his albums, including “Bringing It All Back Home.” Bruce played all these instruments, working the strings with mostly nubs instead of his missing fingertips.* His playing earned him a devoted following and Dylan’s nickname “Mr. Tambourine Man.”
Obviously Langhorne’s biggest fame came from just a few days of sessions in early 1965, for Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home album. Langhorne is heard throughout that LP, coming especially to the fore on “She Belongs to Me,” “Love Minus Zero/No Limit,” and “Mr. Tambourine Man.”
As spelled out in the liner notes to Dylan’s box set Biograph, Langhorne is Mr. Tambourine Man. In the track commentary, Dylan is quoted as follows: “Mr. Tambourine Man,” I think, was inspired by Bruce Langhorne. Bruce was playing guitar with me on a bunch of the early records. On one session, (producer) Tom Wilson had asked him to play tambourine. And he had this gigantic tambourine. It was like, really big. It was as big as a wagon-wheel. He was playing, and this vision of him playing this tambourine just stuck in my mind. He was one of those characters…he was like that. I don’t know if I’ve ever told him that.”
For all the impression Langhorne apparently made on Dylan, he didn’t record with him again (other than on the soundtrack of Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid in 1973), though he did play live with him at least once, for a 1965 appearance on Les Crane’s television show.
Langhorne was much more than an interesting footnote in Dylan’s career, though.
In the mid- to late ’60s he was in the studio all of the time, adding particularly important contributions to the two Vanguard albums by Richard & Mimi Fariña. He made other notable appearances on Tom Rush’s first electric album, Take a Little Walk With Me; John Sebastian’s first album; Joan Baez’s Farewell, Angelina; and numerous other LPs. He also produced Ramblin’ Jack Elliott’s first major-label album, 1968′s Young Brigham.was a folk musician who was very active in the Greenwich Village folk movement of the 1960s, primarily as a session guitarist. He also worked with the Chad Mitchell Trio, Joan Baez, Richie Havens, Peter LaFarge, Gordon Lightfoot, Hugh Masekela, Odetta, Babatunde Olatunji, Peter, Paul and Mary, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Steve Gillette, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, Lisa Kindred, Eric Andersen, Hoyt Axton, David Ackles, Mike Bloomfield, John B. Sebastian and Bobby Neuwirth. and Tom Rush, among others.
By the early ’70s his session work was becoming less frequent, though he continued over the next few decades to work in movie soundtracks. Langhorne composed the music for the Peter Fonda western film The Hired Hand (1971), which combined sitar, fiddle, and banjo. He also provided the scores for Fonda’s 1973 science fiction film Idaho Transfer and his 1976 vigilante movie Fighting Mad. Other films featuring Langhorne’s scores include Stay Hungry (1976), Melvin and Howard (1980) and Night Warning (1982). Besides composing he also worked as a live accompanist, and co-running a recording studio with Morgan Cavett.
He lived some time in Hawaii with his wife Janet, where they adopted dozens of stray and orphaned dogs. In 1992 he became a business man, introducing a hot-sauce company, Brother Bru-Bru’s African Hot Sauce. The hot sauce is unique for containing “African spices” and all-natural or organic, no-sodium or low-sodium ingredients.
In 2015 he suffered a debilitating stroke that forced him into hospice from where Bruce Langhorne made the move to the other dimension on April 14, 2017. He was 79
There is an interview with Bruce Langhorne done by Richie Unterberger that lays out a fascinating background of the early 1960s when folk slowly turned into electric folk-rock in the New York and the San Francisco Bay Area. Well worth a visit to understand that there was a lot more than only Bob Dylan that stood at the crib of rock and roll’s expansion into a generational culture change.
Read more: https://www.notablebiographies.com/supp/Supplement-Ca-Fi/Farina-Mimi.html#ixzz5bdeVPcGQ
Another soundtrack for a little-known Fonda movie, Idaho Transfer, followed, but it was acclaim for The Hired Hand that brought Jonathan Demme calling. It was the beginning of a working relationship that would include such Demme movies as Fighting Mad and Melvin and Howard.
In 1976 Langhorne did the Stay Hungry soundtrack with fiddle player Byron Berline for director Bob Rafelson. Starting in 1977 he partnered with Morgan Cavett in a recording studio called Blue Dolphin. Cavett had worked with Steppenwolf, produced records, and discovered The Captain & Tennille. It was in this studio that some of Langhorne’s soundtracks were realized.
Mini Bio (1)
Born Mary Katherine Anderson, she grew up in San Antonio, Texas. Graduated from Alamo Heights High. Had a brief marriage to a man with the last name of Oakes (which she later used as her professional modeling name). In 1932 she met a dashing West Point Cadet named William Beard. 2nd Lieut. Beard and Mary married in 1933 while he was finishing his training as an Air Force Bombadier. They moved to Honolulu in late 1934 and Mary gave birth to their daughter, Mary Susan in 1935. One year later Lieut. Beard was tragically killed in a mid-air collision while bombing volcanoes.
Mary and little Susie moved state-side and Mary Beard became Mary Oakes and began her modeling career which spanned 1936-1943.
She was truly “One of the most photographed girls in the world”, as quoted beneath her photo of the movie still from “Vogues of 1938”. She was photographed by Cecil Beaton, Horst, appeared in Vogue, Harpers, and Glamour. She modeled in ads for Saks Fifth Avenue, Hattie Carnegie and numerous others, As well as modeling in two films from 1937, released in 1938: “Mannequin” and “Vogues of 1938”
She finally settled down, when she married Frank Cavett, the Playwright, Writer, and Screenwriter. He adopted little Susie, and they went on to have two sons, Jon & Morgan.
In 1944, Frank Cavett won the Academy Award for Co-writing the Best Screenplay for “Going My Way”. In 1947, he and co-writer Dorothy Parker were nominated for Best Screenplay for “Smash-up: The Story Of A Woman”. In 1952, Frank Cavett won his last Academy Award for co-writing the Best Screenplay for “The Greatest Show On Earth”.
Mary Anderson Oakes Beard Cavett divorced Frank Cavett and just went by the name Mary Oakes for the rest of her life. She passed away in her late 80s.
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IMDb Mini Biography By: Valerie Cavett Cantone
April 1, 1997 11:00PM PT
Mary Oakes, 88, a former Vogue model who later appeared in several films, died March 6 of natural causes at a convalescent home in Lancaster.
A native of San Antonio, she arrived in New York City at age 19 and quickly became a favorite model of several important fashion photographers.
Known as one of the most photographed women in the world, she was brought to Hollywood by Samuel Goldwyn in the mid-1930s and subsequently appeared as one of the Goldwyn Girls in a musical and also in Walter Wanger’s “Vogues” (1937).
In 1939, she married screenwriter Frank Cavett who later won two Academy Awards. He died in 1973.
She is survived by two sons and five grandchildren.
| Born | April 26, 1944 in Hollywood, California, USA |
| Died | December 9, 2004 in Pinon Hills, California, USA |
Trivia (4)
Morgan Cavett started writing songs and producing records at the age of 22. his first major success was writing for the musical group Steppenwolf. In 1967 he was hired by legendary songwriter Johnny Mercer. While at Mr. Mercer’s company he discovered and produced a duo which used as their name: a nickname and a last name. “The Captain & Tennille.”
His mother, Mary Oakes, was a fashion model for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar.
His godmother was Dorothy Parker.
Son of screenwriter ‘Frank Morgan Cavett’.
The title character of Bob Dylan’s song “Mr. Tambourine Man” was inspired by Langhorne, who used to play a large Turkish frame drum in performances and recordings.[3][4] The drum, which Langhorne purchased in a music store in Greenwich Village, had small bells attached around its interior, giving it a jingling sound much like a tambourine. Langhorne used the instrument most prominently on recordings by Richard and Mimi Fariña.[5] The drum is now in the collection of the Experience Music Project, in Seattle, Washington.
In addition to inspiring the title character of “Mr. Tambourine Man”, Langhorne played the electric guitar countermelody on the song.[6] His guitar is also prominent on several other songs on Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home album, particularly “Love Minus Zero/No Limit” and “She Belongs to Me“; he also played the lead guitar parts on “Subterranean Homesick Blues“, “Outlaw Blues“, “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” and “Maggie’s Farm“.[3][6] He also played the guitar for Dylan’s television performances of “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” and “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” on The Les Crane Show in February 1965, a month after the Bringing It All Back Home sessions.[3][6] Two years earlier, Langhorne performed on “Corrina, Corrina“, on the album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, and on the outtake “Mixed-Up Confusion“, which was eventually released on Biograph.[3][6] Years later, Langhorne played on tracks for Dylan’s album Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.[3][6]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Langhorne
Bob Dylan’s 1965 album Bringing It All Back Home was a magnificent staging post in the transition of the folk revival of the early Sixties into folk-rock. Probably its best-known track was “Mr Tambourine Man”, which was inspired by a man who played on every track of that seminal album – Bruce Langhorne, who has died of kidney failure at the age of 78.
Dylan was moved to write “Mr Tambourine Man” after Langhorne, who played on several early Dylan records, turned up for a recording session carrying a large Turkish drum with bells attached. But for Dylan it was “this gigantic tambourine. It was like, really big. It was as big as a wagon-wheel. He was playing, and this vision of him playing this tambourine just stuck in my mind.”
Langhorne was the unsung hero of Bringing It All Back Home, his liquid guitar lines especially notable on “Subterranean Homesick Blues”, “Maggie’s Farm” and “Mr Tambourine Man” itself. “If you had Bruce playing with you, that’s all you would need to do just about anything,” Dylan wrote – although their partnership had not started promisingly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcf6XaTimY8
https://www.allmusic.com/artist/bruce-langhorne-mn0000635087/biography
Langhorne was much more than an interesting footnote in Dylan‘s career, though. In the mid- to late ’60s he was in the studio all the time, adding particularly important contributions to the two Vanguard albums by Richard & Mimi Fariña. He made other notable appearances on Tom Rush‘s first electric album, Take a Little Walk with Me; John Sebastian‘s first album; Joan Baez‘s Farewell, Angelina; and numerous other LPs. He also produced Ramblin’ Jack Elliott‘s first major-label album, 1968’s Young Brigham. By the early ’70s his session work was becoming less frequent, though he continued over the next few decades to work in soundtracks, as a live accompanist, and co-running a recording studio with Morgan Cavett. He died in April 2017 at his home in Venice, California; Bruce Langhorne was 78 years old
https://www.allmusic.com/artist/morgan-cavett-mn0000598669
https://www.premierguitar.com/articles/20850-forgotten-heroes-bruce-langhorne?page=5
Rosamond Press 
Reblogged this on Rosamond Press and commented:
The other wave I was a part of.