`Sing-Out' Magazine Editor Irwin Silber's Take on Bob Shelton/Dylan Revisited

`NY Times' Establishment Folk Music Critic Bob Shelton with Bob Dylan in 1964.

In an interview, that was published in Richie Unterberger's 2002 Turn! Turn! Turn! book, former 1960s Sing Out! magazine editor Irwin Silber recalled why he was concerned about the artistic and political direction Bob Dylan was moving after 1964 and characterized the U.S. Establishment's New York Times's then-folk music critic, Bob Shelton, in the following way:

"My biggest concern was not with electricity...but with what Dylan was saying and doing about moving away from his political songs. In fact, even saying, well, he just used that for a while in order to get a break and all that kind of...and that's what distressed me more than anything else.

"...He combined a great artistic feel with a political sense that was poetic, that moved people. And now, to find him turning his back on it, at a time when...the civil rights movement is at its height, the beginning of the protest against the Vietnam War, and so on...And the left--the new left...was developing a whole new sense of politics. And to have Dylan deliberately, consciously, moving away from it at that time.--Well, I reall felt bad about that..."

"Bob Shelton was a funny figure in all this...The folk boom unfolded, and he was already in place at the New York Times...There was an arrogance to the way in which he appointed himself, and which everybody had to relate to because after all it's the New York Times, as sort of the definitive judge when it came to what was good, what was bad, and all those kinds of things.

"And his judgments weren't always very sound. I think he had a tendency to follow the crowd, to look for things that would make him stand out. I know for sure that he was not above working hand in glove with record producers and promoters in relation to their material, their acts and so on...

"...He then began to operate as a political judge, too...He was critical of people like me and the activists and so on, who were taking what he considered a far-left position in our militant opposition to the war...He used his position in terms of succumbing to influence, not being particularly well qualified to write what he was writing about, and to the political side of it...."

1960s `Sing Out!' Magazine Editor Irwin Silber with U.S. Movement Folksinger Barbara Dane

 

U.S. Music Industry Tried To Stop Production Of Paredon Records' `Palestine Lives!' Album

 

In the 1970's, some executives of the commercially-motivated U.S. corporate music industry apparently attempted to stop the production and distribution of the Paredon Records label's vinyl album Palestine Lives!. As [the now-deceased] former Sing-Out! magazine editor and Paredon Records co-founder Irwin Silber recalled in a 1991 interview:

"...We really came under incredible attack... The music industry, especially in New York, is very heavily...pro-Israel. So, when word got around that we were doing this record, a campaign began to try to stop it. Literally to stop it.

"And the important figures in the music industry called our various suppliers, the people who made the masters, the plates, the pressing: `Listen!  We’re going to withdraw a whole lot of business from you if you cooperate with these people in putting out this record.'

"There really was such a campaign. And I don’t remember exactly how we solved it. But I know, in a couple of cases, we had to go to some outfits other than our usual supply...

"...It really was an insight into the depth of the emotions stirred by the Palestinian question...I mean I knew it. I mean I’m Jewish and you know I know...the community. But it really got brought home. Really got brought home. And it was, in a way, a provocation to the music industry, because of its particular character.

"But I have always felt that the Palestinian issue is sort of one these cutting edge issues, which it’s sort of like crucial litmus test. Because there’s nothing to be gained by supporting the Palestinians. Career-wise or anything else. Just nothing at all...to stick your neck out and get down in the line with them in the United States."

U.S. corporate music industry tried to stop production of this album in 1970's

And in a 1991 interview, 20th-century and 21st-century U.S. jazz, blues and folk singer and Paredon Records co-founder Barbara Dane also observed that "somebody made a deliberate campaign calling all of our suppliers and the pressing plant and everybody," in an attempt to stop production and distribution of the Paredon Records label's Palestine Lives! vinyl album.'

Paredon Records Co-Founders Irwin Silber and Barbara Dane

 

 

Why Paredon Records Was Created

 

In a 1991 interview, the [now-deceased] former Sing-Out! magazine editor, Irwin Silber, indicated why the Paredon Records protest folk music recording label was created:

"...Well I guess where we were...talking about why Paredon Records and so on....I tried to look at these things both from the point of view of what our intentions were but also what I think it reflected objectively, independently of what we thought we were all about. When you’re lucky, the two coincide.

"But, and this isn’t just true of an enterprise like a record company. I think this is true of all events in history. People make revolutions thinking they’re going to turn out a certain way. It turns out the significance of that revolution was something that they didn’t have in mind, but what they did was still historically important.

"So that may sound kind of flamboyant. Never the less, that’s the way I try to look at it. And in that sense, Paredon was a reflection of a period in which ideas of revolutionary upheaval were extremely prominent in the world--especially acute in the third world, because I think what the world was experiencing, in Sixties and the Seventies, was the final stages of the overthrow of colonialism. And it’s more like where the bitterest holdouts who would not adapt to the changes, that’s where those struggles were taking place.

"Some of them happened a little bit before we went into business, but for instance the French in Algeria, which also produced an incredible cultural explosion. There was this incredible film that was made, Battle of Algiers. Which, in a sense, was in film the kind of thing that we were doing with Paredon Records.

"That is, it was produced by people who were trying to make a statement about that revolution. They weren’t just trying to document it. And it was propaganda in a sense. But it was propaganda reflecting a real struggle by a liberation movement.

"There was also the whole counter cultural thing and the New Left phenomenon in the United States which began to take an ideological turn toward revolutionary solutions. And that spirit of revolution, whether you wanted to call it the cultural revolution, the counter cultural revolution and so on, that was very much in the air.

"And the rhetoric of...the time, whether it was the Women’s Movement, the Black Movement, the Student Movement, was `Revolution.'

"And this was something that was happening in other Western countries as well, like what happened in France. And then you had the rumblings in the communist societies with the Prague Spree and so on.

"So that was the world cultural climate out of which Paredon came. It had particular, for us, and again I think it was reflective of the movement in the United states, its sort of the touchstones were Vietnam and Cuba.

"Vietnam for, obviously because of the war in Vietnam and the feeling on the part of so many young Americans that this was sort of the absolute damning evidence of the corruption of the system, and gave rise to a whole revolutionary outlook.

"And Cuba because of the particular antagonism toward the Cuban revolution by the United States government and the way in which Cuba had become a symbol of incredible defiance of the American monolith. So there was great identification with Cuba for those reasons.

"And especially among people who couldn’t identify with the Soviet Union. And with the eastern European counties, they’re sort of like, either they thought these weren’t really revolutions, so they were tired revolutions, or, you know, all of the different things that for different reasons turned people off.

"But they could identify with the Vietnamese and with the Cubans. And for a period with the Chinese revolution also.

"But Cuba and Vietnam were very much the touchstones of that movement’s international outlook, and of Paredon Records’ as well.

"And the seeming anomaly is that what we were doing was documenting these movements and at the same time our approach was quite partisan, and very often the two were looked at as mutually exclusive categories. `Well, if it’s propaganda it can’t be documentary' and vice versa.

"But our view was that so long as the movements were real, their propaganda was also real. And documenting what you might (and I don’t use the word `propaganda' in a pejorative sense) documenting what was their genuine cultural, ideological expression was a way of undemonizing the so-called enemies of the United States (the Vietnamese, the Cubans, and anybody else). Because that occurs every time we have to use our armed forces, the enemy has to be demonized and made less than human.

"So partially it was that, and that’s a part of propaganda. Saying `No these are real human beings, with a real culture and genuine expression,' and in the most simplest terms `They’re just like you and me,' one could say, or whatever.

"But that they were the bearers of traditions and of national heritages that were worthy of respect. And that those who would destroy the national cultures were guilty of a kind of cultural genocide.

"At the same time, these records were partisan in that they usually were made in cooperation with a particular political force in these revolutions.

"Now, in the case of Vietnam and Cuba,...there were no rival political forces. But in some of the other situations there were different political groups in different countries, and judgments get made at a certain point as to which groups have a genuinely popular social base and represent the interests of the people.

"And frankly, one of the measuring sticks was the degree to which the United States was antagonistic to these groups. And to the extent the United States would be promoting some groups, like `This was the real liberation... movement,' we, like many other people, would say `Now that’s a contradiction in terms. If the U.S. is promoting it, then there’s something wrong with that group because the interests of the U,S. government and these movements are too much in contradiction.'

"While a lot of this stuff was third world and heavily Latin America, it wasn’t exclusively that. We felt we should do stuff reflecting the different social movements in the United States, and I think a lot of the emphasis there was on Black Movement (we had the interview with Huey Newton, Bernice Reagan, things like that),and women singers, singers like the Red Star Singers and others who were very much in tune with the counter culture but expressed it politically, not just in counter cultural terms. And then we had other material coming from Western Europe and so on.

"So this is, that’s what Paredon represented, and we felt that it was important to do it, that this was part of our political agenda..." 

Paredon Records' Co-founders Irwin Silber and Barbara Dane in 1980's

How Barbara Dane and Irwin Silber Created Paredon Records

 

In a 1991 interview, 20th-century and 21st-century U.S. jazz, blues and folk singer Barbara Dane recalled how she and former Sing-Out! magazine editor Irwin Silber were able to create the non-commercially-motivated Paredon Records protest folk music recording label:

"Paredon Records, you know, basically came out of the fact that we saw the need, we saw the fact all these singers existed and nobody knew about each other...So I got the idea we gotta have a record label. And I talked to Irwin about it, and Irwin had had a lot of experience with Folkways...And we were actually perfectly suited team of people...

"...So then the question is how do you get the money to do it. So I was just bending everybody’s ear...A couple years go by. I’m telling everybody this great vision I have...

"And finally a friend of ours, who was also someone who had lived in Cuba for a while and was very sympathetic to the politics of it and everything, brought a millionaire friend of hers over to meet us. And he wants to be anonymous so we’re still not gonna give out his name.

"But he thought this was a great idea and decided he would give us, you know, one stock dividend to play around with....Actually, it was supposed to be an interest free loan, but he never came around to formalize any agreement or collect anything on the loan. And he said don’t contact me; I’ll contact you. And he never contacted us again. And so that’s the end of that.

"So we were actually capitalized. I’ll tell you what we were capitalized at. He gave us 17,000 dollars. Which is about enough to put out half of one record, you know, really. And so we just socked it in the bank and started doing it.

"And the concept we had was that we won’t take any salaries or any overhead. We did it out of the living room or the backroom. I had an extra bedroom just then. I did it out of that room or the kitchen table and Irwin did it out of his little home office.

"And...you know, you go rent studios. Nobody buys a studio. Record labels don’t own studios. That’s a different business. And all the other services could be contracted out...that needed to be done to manufacture something.

"So we didn’t have any overhead. It was no overhead involved except maybe some telephone calls and stationary and, you know, the cost of renting a studio or whatever. And all of the things that were involved with producing it....

"I got to be very good at convincing people to write me an essay....You know, `Okay, you’re expert on this. On what’s going on Ecuador. So write me brief little history of Ecuador today.'

"And getting things like that out of people on a volunteer basis. And when we had to pay, we paid.

"But the thing is the object was to not pay out anymore of this budget. So then whatever income came in, and whatever the budget had to use some combination, you go ahead and make more. So you keep reinvesting it. Each record pays for the next one. Basically that’s the way it is…."

U.S. Jazz, Blues, Protest Folk Singer and Paredon Records Co-Founder Barbara Dane

And in a 1991 interview, [the now-deceased] former Sing-Out! magazine editor Irwin Silber also noted:

"I felt that doing this record label was an opportunity to use skills that I had developed over the years in a way that probably, at that time, were not going to be utilized by anybody else...

"Early in the fifties, I actually started a little record label on behalf of People’s Artists called Hoot-N-Anny Records....They were just 78’s at the time. But I think the Weavers' very first recording was done on a Hoot-N-Anny record. I did the “Hammer Song” and the “Banks of Marble. This is before they were recording for Decca.

"And I don’t know, we only did about a half a dozen such records. And then, in the mid-Fifties, we did the first LP of a live folk music concert. It’s called “Hoot-N-Anny Tonight,” subsequently reissued on Folkways under that title. So I’d always been scrambling for that kind of stuff.

"And then in 1958 I went to work for Moe Asch in Folkways, and over the next number of years worked with Moe...I had very little to do with the actual recording. That’s not my thing at all. So Moe was always engineer, the one who dealt with the performers and so on.

"But I became responsible, ultimately, for everything else relating to the production of a record. In effect, Moe would finish a tape master and turn it over to me.

"And I would deal [with]...the metal master, the stampers, the record pressing company, the printers who did the booklet, the people who pasted up the booklet. I’d edited, one way or another most of the booklets, deal with the typesetting, deal with the artists who designed the covers. Coordinate all of the production, and deal with a lot of the distribution also, and a lot of sales promotion stuff.

"So I learned a lot of different aspects of the record business, which put me in a position to know how to get Paredon off the ground and skip over a bunch of stages that somebody with less experience would’ve had to go through in a very painful way. And, you know, took advantage of that experience.

"We started out using the very producers that Folkways use, some of whom I had brought around to Folkways. But the printers, the pressing plants, the artists, the people who made stampers and so on, we used the same ones. They already knew me from the Folkways days. So that helped us establish some credit. And we knew what we were talking about.

"So we were able to move into production in a relatively smooth way, fairly quick. And then, once we had the records, we were able to utilize the contacts I’d made in terms of distribution--in some cases. I mean a lot of Folkways distributors didn’t--you know-- didn’t know what to do with this type of material."

Paredon Records Coo-Founders Irwin Silber and Barbara Dane 

 

How Barbara Dane Organized 1965 Anti-Vietnam War `Sing-In For Peace' Concert

U.S. Jazz, Blues and Protest Folk Singer Barbara Dane in 1970's

In a 1991 interview, 20th-century and 21st-century U.S. jazz, blues and folk singer Barbara Dane recalled how she organized the first large New York City antiwar movement concert that protested against the Vietnam War, a "Sing-In For Peace," which took place at Carnegie Hall on September 24, 1965:

"...I was in New York and I was living there and I had produced together with [then-Sing-Out magazine editor] Irwin [Silber] something called the `Sing-In For Peace', which was at Carnegie Hall.

"It was the first big, it was actually the first big anti-war demonstration because it was conceived of as a demonstration of singers and their public against the war. And nobody really had mounted a, you know, a big street demonstration or anything.

"So this, we, being the kind of plotters we are, we figured this thing out that.

"And it’s funny. It was right at the time of the newspaper strikes. Lot of newspaper strikes were going on. Two or three papers. I don’t know. It was very hard to get anything in the newspaper. And we had to do it all by quarter-sheets pasted on walls....

"I got some leaflets together and, you know, we got different organizations to leaflet their people and mail it out or whatever we did.

"But anyway, very quickly we saw that, well, sixty some odd performers wanted to be on the thing...I sent a letter to everybody. I coordinated the whole thing out of the Sing-Out magazine office basically (and home) and invited everybody, including a lot of traditional singers…" 

U.S. Jazz, Blues and Protest Folk Singer Barbara Dane in 20th-century

 

`Sing-Out!' Editor Irwin Silber's 1964 `Open Letter To Bob Dylan' Revisited

In November 1964, the then-editor of Sing-Out! magazine, Irwin Silber, wrote and published `An Open Letter To Bob Dylan," in which the historically developing artistic, political and philosophical  shift in Dylan's songwriting was criticized in the following way:

"Dear Bob:

"It seems as though lots of people are thinking and talking about you these days. I read about you in Life and Newsweek and Time and The Saturday Evening Post and Mademoiselle and Cavalier and all such, and I realize that, all of a sudden, you have become a pheenom, a VIP, a celebrity. A lot has happened to you in these past two years, Bob -- a lot more than most of us thought possible.

"I'm writing this letter now because some of what has happened is troubling me. And not me alone. Many other good friends of yours as well.

"I don't have to tell you how we at SING OUT! feel about you -- about your work as a writer and an artist -- or how we feel about you as a person. SING OUT! was among the first to respond to the new ideas, new images, and new sounds that you were creating. By last count, thirteen of your songs had appeared in these pages. Maybe more of Woody's songs were printed here over the years, but, if so, he's the only one. Not that we were doing you any favors, Bob. Far from it. We believed -- and still believe -- that these have been among some of the best new songs to appear in America in more than a decade. "Blowin' in the Wind," "Don't Think Twice," "Hattie Carroll," "Restless Farewell," "Masters of War" -- these have been inspired contributions which have already had a significant impact on American consciousness and style.

"As with anyone who ventures down uncharted paths, you've aroused a growing number of petty critics. Some don't like the way you wear your hair or your clothes. Some don't like the way you sing. Some don't like the fact that you've chosen your name and recast your past. But all of that, in the long run, is trivial. We both know that may of these criticisms are simply cover-ups for embarrassment at hearing songs that speak directly, personally, and urgently about where it's all really at.

"But -- and this is the reason for this letter, Bob -- I think that the times there are a-changing. You seem to be in a different kind of bag now, Bob -- and I'm worried about it. I saw at Newport how you had somehow lost contact with people. It seemed to me that some of the paraphernalia of fame were getting in your way. You travel with an entourage now -- with good buddies who are going to laugh when you need laughing and drink wine with you and insure your privacy -- and never challenge you to face everyone else's reality again.

"I thought (and so did you) of Jimmy Dean when I saw you last -- and I cried a little inside me for that awful potential for self-destruction which lies hidden in all of us and which can emerge so easily and so uninvited.

"I think it begins to show up in your songs, now, Bob. You said you weren't a writer of `protest' songs -- or any other category, for that matter -- but you just wrote songs. Well, okay, call it anything you want. But any songwriter who tries to deal honestly with reality in this world is bound to write `protest' songs. How can he help himself?

"Your new songs seem to be all inner-directed now, inner-probing, self- conscious -- maybe even a little maudlin or a little cruel on occasion. And it's happening on stage, too. You seem to be relating to a handful of cronies behind the scenes now -- rather than to the rest of us out front.

"Now, that's all okay -- if that's the way you want it, Bob. But then you're a different Bob Dylan from the one we knew. The old one never wasted our precious time.

"Perhaps this letter has been long overdue. I think, in a sense, that we are all responsible for what's been happening to you -- and to many other fine young artists. The American Success Machinery chews up geniuses at a rate of one a day and still hungers for more. Unable to produce real art on its own, the Establishment breeds creativity in protest against and nonconformity to the System. And then, through notoriety, fast money, and status, it makes it almost impossible for the artist to function and grow.

"It is a process that must be constantly guarded against and fought.

"Give it some thought, Bob. Believe me when I say that this letter is written out of love and deep concern. I wouldn't be sticking my neck out like this otherwise.

"Irwin Silber"

Irwin Silber's 1965 Newport Folk Festival Program Booklet `Topical Song Revolution at Midpoint' Excerpt

1965 Newport Folk Festival Program Booklet

In an article that first appeared in the 1965 program booklet of the Newport Folk Festival, titled "The Topical Song Revolution at Midpoint," then-Sing Out! magazine editor Irwin Silber wrote the following:

"The profit-motivated formula songs that have been spoonfed to the American people by both Tin Pan Alley and Nashville for the last half a century make up, as a body of expression, one of the most flagrant insults to human intelligence in recorded history...

"But topical songs are not the invention of the twentieth century. The idea was not patented by Sing Out! or Broadside magazine. They are not the brain-children of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan or the civil-rights movement...

"The tradition of topical song is as old as human communication--for wherever art has been central to life and to the needs of society, artists have commented upon and attempted to affect the events of their time and the human condition...

"The tradition, no matter how dormant, had never died. Before World War I, the Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World) had fanned the flames of discontent with their insurrectionary propaganda songs and ballads. In the Depression years, textile workers in the South and garment workers in the North put their protest into songs. The line of continuity embraced Woody Guthrie and the Dust Bowl. The Almanac Singers and the C.I.O. organizing drives of the late 1930's, the topical Broadway stage and the meaningful music of Earl Robinson and Marc Blitzstein and Harold Rome.

"In the postwar years, People's Songs was the rallying point for the topical song. Even in the intellectually barren decade of the 1950's, dedicated partisans of unpopular causes sang out for civil liberties and peace. And through it all, over all the decades of this century, the blues developed as a magnificent creative expression so based on the reality of Negro life in America it needed no categorization to define its status...

"Topical song has proved its worth and strength many times over these last years. But perhaps the time is due...for some careful evaluation of where it's all at right now. There are some signs of danger blowing in the wind.

"Not the least of these has been the emergence of cults of deification around our most popular singers. The personality cult is the very antithesis of a meaningful and continuing expression--for it cuts the artist off from his roots and his strength, the contact with everyone else's reality. The idolization of the `artist as hero' has been the ruin of more good poets than one would comfortably choose to name--and the application of this circumstance to the topical song movement of our own time is not hard to find...

"Another danger in the current picture is the process whereby listening to `protest' songs replaces the act of protest...

"The most urgent danger sign, however, is the dollar sign. What with hit records, TV appearances, major concert halls and folk-festival spectaculars--the financial worth of protest is only one step removed from being measured in the Dow-Jones average. It must strike some observers as ironic and odd that the most earnest endorsers of the `new' protest are Columbia Records and Time magazine...

"Let there be no mistake...Our artists, our singers, our writers who try to sing of life...are our voice, our conscience...But we must constantly be demanding of them else their art will rot and be turned against them and us.

"Perhaps by way of conclusion, we should abandon the concept of Topical song. It is not enough that a song's subject matter be of topical concern. We should demand insight and partisanship and protest and affirmation from our songs--no matter whether we call them topical or not. For, in the final analysis, it is not art that is our ultimate goal--but life."

Sing Out! Magazine Editor Irwin Silber with Pete Seeger

Irwin Silber's 1966 Foreward To `Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People' Book: An Excerpt

In 1966 Sing-Out! folk music magazine editor Irwin Silber wrote the following about the Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People book, whose text Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Alan Lomax first put together in the early 1940's, that was finally published in book form by Moe Asch's Oak Publications in 1967:

"...This book is all about--the despair, the struggle, and the dreams of the working people of the United States...as expressed through the songs the people themselves made up and sang.

"There aren't many professional song-writers represented in these pages. Mostly, the writers and composers, where we know their names, are people like Aunt Molly Jackson, Jim Garland, Ella Mae Wiggins, Sara Ogan, John Handcox. Or blues singers like Blind Lemon Jefferson, Big Bill Broonzy, Tampa Red. For these and all the anonymous picket-line poets of the time, there was no intellectual problem of `commitment' or whether or not `protest' was `art.' When you sing because your life depends upon it, when you sing out of the very bowels of your being with a scream of anguish or when you sing out with a yell that demands and proclaims and asserts your rights as a man or a woman and as a human being--when you sing this way, where the song is an extension of your own life as it is inter-connected with the lives of others, there is no need to weigh the advisability or artistic worth of songs of protest..."