Noel Paul Stookey

Noel Paul Stookey was "Paul" in Peter, Paul & Mary. Listen to Noel tell stories of Greenwich Village in the early sixties, the folk scene, turning Albert Grossman on to Bob Dylan, having hits, being on the road, embracing Christianity and keepin' on keepin' on, writing and performing to this day. Noel is erudite and articulate and it's a thrill to hear him opine on what once was, he was there, and soon this era will be lost to the sands of time. This is a treat.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Left Sets podcast.
My guest today is Lowell Paul S Yes, Paul of
Peter Paul and Mary No. How you doing good? Pool?
I heard Pool so like, you must be an East
Coast kind of guy. You know, it's funny. I'm from Connecticut,

(00:29):
and people from Connecticut think that they don't have an accent.
But you've just proven that that's untrue. Well, I used
to be, uh mid East Coast. I was born in Maryland,
lived born in Baltimore, lived in Maryland for quite a
few years before moving to the Midwest. But when you
moved to the Midwest, they say, most uh disc jockeys

(00:51):
and radio people come from the Midwest because they lose
their accent. And to a large extent, I think that's true.
I don't. I don't hear that I have an accent,
except if I have to pronounce the word M I
l K. Peter used to rag me all the time.
Let's say, I'll take a glass of milk. He said, exactly,

(01:13):
there's a knee in there that we don't have on
the East Coast. Yeah, that's right. I spent a summer
in Chicago in sixty nine, which makes me an antique.
But they called soda pop, which was a new thing
for Uh. Yeah, okay, you're in. Egg creams were a

(01:33):
new thing to me when I moved to New York.
That's very much a New York thing. I mean I
had heard about them, but I grew up in Connecticut,
fifty miles from New York, and you certainly just couldn't
run around get an egg cream in Fairfield, Connecticut or
Bridgeport right next to it. But right now you're in Maine.
I am. I'm on the coast, beautiful little town that

(01:55):
I am reluctant to give you the title of because
many people will to move here, uh and obscure the
quaintness of the village. But yeah, I live in Blue Hill, Maine.
I have for the past forty seven years with my wife,
Betty of fifty seven years, and we brought our three

(02:16):
children up here. Uh. Followed it back to the Earth
movement really in the late sixties early seventies. Absolutely, Yeah,
which on top of we're licking our wounds after the
Vietnam War protests. Yeah, yes, Well, the desire I think
of every human heart is to get to the essence
of what life is all about. And it's hard to

(02:38):
do that when you're being shaken around in New York City.
So we were very happy to move here. Life was simpler.
We had to abandon some of the niceties, but then
we found, you know, deeper niceties. And it's been and
of course, you know, pandemic notwithstanding, Uh, it's been very

(02:58):
easy to travel. Most of my work was on a stage.
If it wasn't in Ohio, it was in San Francisco
or Utah or Chicago. So it didn't really make any
difference where my home base was. Okay, how far from
Boston are you? Uh, five hour drive? Okay, so what's
the nearest main city, Bangor? That's where the airport. Oh

(03:21):
you're way up there, Bangor. Oh you have w I
went on a canoe trip on the Alagash once again.
That was but we flew to Bangor and then he
had to take like a four four hour bus ride.
People have no idea how large Maine really is. That's true,
that's true. You get to go far north is but boy,

(03:42):
it is beautiful. Uh. You know, there are what a
million people in the whole state. Uh, and I would say,
fully a quarter of them living in the Portland area.
So uh, I think that accounts for the reason that
people are so friendly to one another because there's a
few of us. We're so happy to see each other.

(04:02):
Oh my gosh, another human being. Uh, it's it's great
and I'm yes, you're right. We are really up here.
It's almost in down what you've considered down east. Okay,
So the water never gets warm where you are, not
really okay? And how many people are in the town

(04:23):
of Blue Hill about in the summertime it swells to
maybet Okay, so at least a decent number. You're not
there twiddling your fingers alone. So you say you've been
married for fifty seven years, and that's also you've lived
your life to a great degree on the road. The
combination doesn't always work. So what is the secret to success? Well,

(04:48):
it's a combination of friendship. Now that that may sound
lightweight when you're trying to describe a marriage relationship, but
the fact is Benny and I went to high school
together in Michigan, and though we never dated then, we
knew of each other for various reasons. She was a
knockout dream queen cheerleader and a year behind me and

(05:12):
I was the local rock and roll kid with my
own rhythm and blues band in high school. And we met.
Get this bob in the distance, We'll hear a drum roll?
We met. We met by chance coming out of a
subway in New York City some eight years later, and

(05:33):
I said, Betty bannered and she said, no, old stookey,
and her date said, you know, we really got to
get moving along. And I said, that's all right, I'll
walk with you to the wherever you're going. So that
beginner relationship, but the challenges of being on the road
and maintaining a relationship were many, and I wasn't always

(05:56):
equal to the task. The first ten years. We're filled
with so much success and so much work. I mean, honestly,
we did three hundred shows a year, three hundred shows
in one year, and that's you know. We're tried to
shoehorn in record albums, television appearances, publicity, travel itself. You know,

(06:19):
a half day to get there, in a half day
to get back. So a remarkable wife who has raised
now three daughters with me, Uh, you can understand why
we would want to get out of the city and
simplify our life. And frankly, if it hadn't been for
a deep longing to know who I was and what

(06:41):
this thing called living was all about, I wouldn't have
taken the spiritual turn that I took in the late sixties,
which really changed my life. Gave me a whole perspective
on what really has value, you know, other human beings,

(07:02):
and also a desire to be authentic. I grew up
as an only child, so I could be authentic to myself.
But what did it mean to be authentic to the world? Uh?
Does that mean telling the truth all the time? Well,
passing through the gate of marijuana, one can be overly
authentic with people, and I tended to be a little

(07:25):
excessive the first uh oh say, ten twelve years of
my life. But ultimately I have been very blessed to
discover the language of metaphor, which is what songwriting is
all about, and realized that everybody has a spiritual sense.
They just need to be acquainted with it. You know,

(07:46):
the atheist who denies God really is very hard pressed
to deny love. And yet if you read the Bible,
you see that Paul says that God is loved, and
if you interact normally in your life. You begin to
recognize the value of love in your own life, whether
it's interpersonal or whether it's kind of faith that tomorrow

(08:07):
will be a better time. So all of those things
factored into how I've been able to enjoy this marriage
with this beautiful woman that I married, still enjoy a
companionship with my children. Uh. There's a lot of humor,
a lot of laughter. Um. Some of it, uh, you

(08:27):
know is hard pressed. Some of it particularly in these
contested times in which we live, where we're taught by
our leaders to mistrust that which we read, and we
end up um carrying that over into a mistrust of
each other or a cynicism. That's more of a challenge

(08:49):
than it used to be. But at the core of it, Bob,
I swear, if you can retain your compassion for your
fellow human beings, for your fellow citizens, Um, you can
make a go of it. You can turn lemons into lemonade,
and you can create hope where there has been fear

(09:11):
and distrusted. Okay, let's talk about this spiritual You can't
see the air quotes on the podcast conversion. Uh. This
is not uncommon with musical artists traveling people were almost
you know, they're in partaking of substances and all of
a sudden they find themselves on the floor and they

(09:32):
have a transformative moment. Was that how it happened to you?
Or was an evolution? How did the light go on? Um?
You know, I think once again, if I can refer
to being an only child, there's an inner dialogue going
on all the time because I didn't have brothers and
sisters to have that dialogue with. So there's a refutation,

(09:54):
a kind of distrust that's built into the character of
only child because he doesn't really know what's dependable. And
so this whole barrel of fame and fortune that landed
on me in nineteen sixty was increasingly more difficult to

(10:17):
figure out personal worth from. Uh. If I was standing
in line with Betty waiting to go into a movie
and the manager saw and recognize me, say, oh, Mr Stukey,
come out, come out you You don't you don't have
to wait? You start to take these or Mr Stucky,
we we have a table. I don't have a reservation. Wait,
it's okay, we have a we have a table for you.

(10:39):
Oh Mr Stukey, here could come here? You begin to
believe your own press clipics, and that becomes a very empty,
hollow existence because you have to make a choice. You
are either going to start believing it and buying into it,

(11:00):
or if you're trying to be real, you're going to
stick with people who are truth tellers, like my wife
or that little piece of conscience that you hung onto
since you were a little kid that told you it
was bad to take that piece of candy from the
five in time and you say, okay, well it's bad
to borrow on other people's awarenesses. Uh, I just want

(11:25):
to be a citizen. So it wasn't really a drug
problem that brought me to my knees. It was more
of a soul problem. Um. I just really needed to
know if there was some direction in life that was
valuable with a capital V. And you know, I don't

(11:46):
know if you want to hear the whole story, but
I was backstage in Austin, um in Abilene, Texas and
a kid, and I'm going through these changes. You know,
I'm asking myself, what's life all out? My god? You know,
I want to be on the on the right side.
I want me on the good side. Now. Parenthetically, I
have to insert here something that you already know. When

(12:08):
you're out in the world and there's a chance to
do good, whether it's feeding or housing the homeless, or
whether it's protesting the war in Vietnam, or whether it's
marching for human rights, there is a sense of participation
in something that's bigger than yourself and something that's good. So,
notwithstanding those kind of uh encouragements, one asks oneself, well, okay,

(12:37):
but these are just actions. I want to be connected
with these actions. I want to have a sense of
familial participation in the betterment of the world. Where do
I find that? So flat? And parentheses flash flash back
to uh Adelene, Texas. Kid comes up to me backstage.

(13:00):
There's nobody around, you know. Um, security is pretty good
at concerts and usually people don't you know, are not
allowed backstage. So I'm back there tuning the guitar and
there's his kids standing there and he says, can I
talk to you? I say, well, yeah, I'll look for

(13:20):
you after. Okay, I'm a little busy right now. But
as those things go, and one tries to be true
to one's word. When the show was over, I've tried
to look for him, and sure enough, there he was,
so in the midst of a bunch of people, maybe
a half dozen of them, handing me albums to sign
and pictures and telling me about the last time that
they saw the trio. I turned to the kid and say,

(13:44):
what was it you wanted to talk to me about?
And he says, I want to talk to you about
the Lord. And I don't know the The bottom dropped
out of reality and I go, oh, okay, well hang
on just a second. But my heart is going chapboom,

(14:06):
chiboom chi boom, because it's like an answer to prayer.
You know, where did this guy come from and what
gives him the audacious right to say that he wants
to talk to me about the Lord? So we get
so the crowd clears out, and he says, I think
we should go someplace where we can talk. I say, well, sure, well,
let's go back to my hotel room. Hearts still going

(14:26):
bum bum bum bump. But now I'm beginning to think, Hey,
I'm a star here. Okay, I got I got a reputation,
I've got I've got knowledge of the world. I've I've
I've smoked dope, I've I've read Edgar Casey I I
understand the complexity of things. So as we climb into
the back of his pickup truck this friends are driving,
I turned to when they say, so, what do you

(14:48):
think about reincarnation, you know, trying to level out the
balance of our spiritual experiences, And he says, well, it
may or may not be true, but I think we
have more important things to talk about tonight, don't you.
So we go back to the hotel room and I'm
fussing all around. I'm you know, would you like a coke?
The want me to open the window, anything but confront

(15:10):
what it is this kid's possibly gonna say, and he says,
I think we should pray, And at that moment he
hits the floor on his knees. His friends hit the
floor on their knees, and so I do too. And
all he said, Bob was, I think no one wants
to say thank you Lord for getting me backstage without

(15:33):
into the concert, without a ticket, backstage without to pass,
And I think no one wants to talk to you.
And I just started to cry because in that moment
I realized how disenfranchised I was from the core of belief.
And that was the transformative moment for me. Uh. After that,

(15:58):
I can't say that, you know, I moved as beatifically
as Saint Francis. I was really kind of a bore
and and I was antagonistic. I was aggressive, I was
I was a Jesus freak. Uh for about two years

(16:22):
before I learned the language or readopted the language of
metaphor and could speak about my faith and what had
happened to me in terms that other people could understand,
maybe even sympathize with, maybe even emulate. But when you
use labels to describe your situation, you're adopting somebody else's descriptions. Uh.

(16:49):
And they don't always sit well, they're not personalized. Uh So,
over these past what forty years or so, forty to
fifty years, I've learned the language of an inclusiveness in
terms of expressing my faith. Um So, the transformation didn't stop, uh,

(17:16):
you know in nineteen nineteen seventy. It began in nineteen
seventy and I'm still I'm still going through a matter
of fact, this do you want to? Can I do
a little song for you? Well, the only issue is
the rights issue. Who wrote the song? Okay, Well we'recovered.
There's this guy named Stooky that used to sing with

(17:38):
Peter Paul Mary. He wrote this song, okay, and you
own the song and I owned the song out Okay,
then you can say just say you're giving us permission. Okay,
I'm giving you permission, but I'm wondering if maybe uh yeah,
so I'll just do a little bit of it. But
you'll get the idea. So let's talk about love with

(18:13):
the capital L When was the last time you've heard it?
Spell with the emphasis in the proper place. Well, let's
talk about love in the upper case. Some might call

(18:33):
it amazing grace or the author of time and space.
Let's talk about love, love, love, love love. You may
recall this situation change your heart you hadn't seen were

(19:00):
Love's the only explanation for a miracle that sets somebody free?
Who is? Let's talk about love with capital litt. Not
talking about witchcraft or a magic spell or hain't keep

(19:20):
painkre in a cheap motel. No talk love, love, love love.
I'm not saying that I love you anymore or any less.

(19:42):
I'm just saying that there's more here then we are
usually willing to confessis it. Let's talk about love where
it all begin Yeah, love love love like I'm master plan.
If you believe, then raise you and let's talk about love.

(20:09):
Love love, love love love with the capitol hel WHOA,
So how were you? That's for a couple of things. Hey,
how old is that song? Six months? Maybe? Wow? You
still got it? Secondly, you still have your voice when
many people, you know, they get older in their voice. Subsides,

(20:33):
any special trick or just you know, God helped you out. Uh,
that's a nice way to put the question. Doubtless there's
some assistance from h you know, having faith. Uh, but
uh no, I don't. I haven't smoked since August fourteen.
And you may ask why I remember that date so specifically.

(20:56):
I was driving with a friend, Jim Mason, who produced
a couple of Poco albums, and there was a cigarette.
There was a cigarette lighter whole but no cigarette lighter
in the run rental car that he was driving, and
we both had cigarettes, and I took that as a sign,
so I reached over, took the cigarette out of his mouth,
out of my mouth, through it out the window, and
I said August fourteenth, nineteen seventy, the day Noel Stookey

(21:19):
and Jim Mason stopped smoking. Well, unfortunately it was true
for me, but you know, you can't make truth for
somebody else. He went back to it eventually quit. But
so I think not smoking has helped a lot. I
still drink a fair amount. I mean, you'd like to
have margarita in the evening and maybe a glass of
wine with dinner. Um, my wife certainly keeps me on

(21:41):
the straight and narrow in terms of nutrition. You know,
lots of veggies and and I'm living in the country, Bob.
I mean, it's laid back here, and you have the pandemic.
Didn't lay me. Didn't lay me back any further. I'd
be lying in bed. But uh, it's very comfortable and
very inspiring to be here. Okay, speaking of inspiration, we

(22:06):
live in an era very different from the one you
came up in. Well, if you came up, it was
a monoculture. If you were successful, everybody knew your name,
whereas today it's really a cornucopy of stuff. So how
do you keep your inspiration to create? Mm hmm, Well,
I've I've always been you know, I have to confess

(22:28):
that I'm not a writer who writes for remuneration. That's
why folk music was so great for me, because it's
an institution that uh, that depends on people articulating concerns
of the day. Um. They don't write for money. They

(22:52):
write because it had to be said. So I really
am a cathartic writer. That is to say, I don't
sit down like a backrack and generate music every day
because it's a discipline that I feel I have to obey.
I really respond to the particular moment or the particular concern.
I mean when I did when I did impeachable to

(23:15):
the tune of Unforgettable that went viral on YouTube and Facebook,
I was responding to what I felt were flagrant UH
offenses by Donald Trump, and I thought that they would
be traceable to UH to Russia. That that investigation went

(23:36):
by the bye when Mueller was removed from the opportunity
to take it to its finality along with Comey, and
and then I wrote, Uh. I wrote a song called
I Will stand Uh. You know that open the election
is over. Some say what's done, it's done. Well, that's

(23:58):
easier if your side is one. Um, so why don't
we just work together? And I said, well, there are
a list of things that I'm not going to work
together on and I sang a song with about nine
of them. And there's also reinforcement, you know. Uh. For instance,
if I was creating totally in a vacuum, UM, I'd

(24:19):
probably have a more difficult time sustaining it. But when
you go in front of anywhere from fifteen to people
and you make a statement musically, you're going to find
out pretty quickly if the audience agrees with it. Now
they may one think it's entertaining h, in which case

(24:41):
the applause will be light and smattering, or they may
think that it's moving, in which case you will get
a very pronounced, heavy applause at the end of it,
like I sometimes do for the two new verses I
wrote to America they're beautiful. Or sometimes you will get
and a response that you just hadn't planned on, like

(25:05):
people standing up in the middle of what you're singing about,
or cheering uh in the middle of a verse because
they agree so strongly with what's being said and the
manner in which it's being said. So those encouragements keep
me going. But to return to your original question, I

(25:25):
basically write in response to that which I see needs articulation. Okay,
what I have to ask, because you're talking about politics,
you're talking about today's world, I must ask, as a
resident of Maine, why did Susan Collins get reelected? Well,
I mean, aside from all the impressive moneys that were
spent to degrade her opponent, because actually there's two sides

(25:51):
to that street. There was a lot of impressive moneies
that were spent to degrade Susan Collins. Essentially, the reasoning
behind the deposition of Susan Collins was that she was
Trump's lapdog. Um that anything Trump wanted she voted for.
Well that's you know, Maine is not a totally liberal state.

(26:14):
I mean, I were very I can't speak for the Natives,
but they're all straight shooters as far as I'm concerned.
You know, they're really honest, god fearing if you work hard.
I mean, they're the American ethic underlined. And Susan Collins
has been there for most of them, most of the time.

(26:36):
And like I was telling your engineer before, a lot
of Trump's success is not because of who he is,
but the fact that people who voted for him are
single issue voters, and the people that voted for Susan
Collins were single issue, you know. They they wanted to

(26:57):
support somebody who is more anti abortion than she is
pro life uh she uh or pro choice. They wanted
to support somebody that they knew, uh, particularly in this
cacophony of political um chaos that was echoing all around us.

(27:20):
And like I said, the issues were pretty angrily ignored
so that character assassination could take place. And she had
more bucks, and I think she made her point about

(27:40):
Gideon's family to the point where, you know, people bought
into it. Well, and then I don't want to go
someplace that I don't knew about. I'm going to stick
with Susan. But I had a bumper. I had a
bumper sticker on the back of my truck that said
bye bye Susan. That was a big popular side. Okay,

(28:02):
let's go back to the beginning. So what did your
parents do for a living? You were an only child. Yeah,
my dad was a really a mechanical engineer with a
very clever uh. He is very clever, hands on kind
of guy. Uh. He worked for the Gates Rubber Company
during the war years and then had a couple of
promotions that took us to Michigan one and then to Pennsylvania,

(28:25):
where living ninety miles from New York City just made
me thirsty to move to the city. Eventually, in in
nineteen sixty nine, my mom was ah. She was a
cashier at a restaurant where my dad used to go
and play the pinball machine and he would come up
to her. He would come up to her and ask

(28:45):
her for a change, and she would hand him a
bunch of nickels, and he became known as Nick. That
was his nickname. She came from the St. Aubrey family,
had actually an uncle I think who designed Juliet Prison uh,
the architecture for Juliet Prison. Um. She was a very gracious, lovely,

(29:08):
lovely woman, UM, spiritual in her own way. Former Catholic.
Dad was a former Mormon UM, but they both had
to leave their religions to get married. For dad it
was the second marriage UM. And they brought me up
in the country in a little town called Dorsey, Maryland,
about halfway between Baltimore and Washington, and that that was

(29:32):
a great experience for me. I mean we've you know,
farmed with a horse pulling a plow. I had woods
out behind and a lake up on top of a
mountain and um and a handful of friends. And I
say that in in a positive way. I had five
of the closest buddies you could ever want. We did
everything together and explored together, played games together, imagined together.

(29:57):
I even had a circus uh in my garage where
I put the cat under an orange crate and dragged
her around in a wagon. And uh, my friends were,
you know, the strong man. My friends were selling lemonade.
My friends were, uh the ringmaster. Um. And then I

(30:17):
had and once again returning to the theme of being
an only child, I had all of the imagination in
the world available to me. Um. My parents were really
really supportive all the time. And my dad had a
four string tenor guitar, uh, which I thought it was

(30:40):
just a big uku lele as I grew up, but
then discovered that it could be tuned like a yuku lele.
And that's really where I began loving making music. Yeah,
and did you take any lessons? How did you ultimately
become a performer and more of a rock and roll performer. Uh? Well,
you know, I'm I'm fourteen, fifteen years old. How can

(31:03):
you not be a rock and roll performer. That's what
you're hearing, you know. Well, my mom, I mean you
want to be kind of hip. So but I'll tell
you hip was not Elvis Presley to me, who I
just tried to imitate. Their hip was the Pontiac African
American record store because it was rhythm and blues, it

(31:26):
was the doo wop. It was the street music that
really got to me. And we had a group in
high school called the Birds of Paradise Um. We wrote
our own theme song, the Birds of pit Rudize do
wah are here to say Hello? Do doo wah? The

(31:53):
only way they know do do wah is with song.
There were five of us drummer, bass player and three
singers and uh and my guitar and we we were

(32:15):
busy and we put out an album. I mean that
was unheard of for a high school group. In ninet.
We pressed our own album and sold it in the
high school with some original songs that are still embarrassing
to me when I hear them. Yeah, so you graduate
from high school, what's the next step? Well, I always

(32:38):
I had a job, part time job in a camera
shop in Birmingham, Michigan, and I made movies UM with
my friends in Birmingham. UM. This was after the move
to Michigan, and took that knowledge with me to New York.
But I'll tell you, I don't know how many times
in your life, Bob, you have walked in through the

(33:01):
door expecting one kind of response, received another, and then
recognized it was Hey, that's a heck of a lot
better the response than the one I was expecting. I
answered an ad in the New York Times for what
I thought would be a camera shop job, and it
turned out the guy, uh said, I'm sorry. He said,

(33:23):
you're applying for your experience is all on a camera shop.
This is for a photo copier job, selling photo cop
her machines. And went, oh, he said, but wait just
a minute, and he walked into the back room. And
it turns out that this was the beginning of a
Uni bath, which was a single chemical process for the

(33:44):
three stages that are usually required to process negatives from
photographic film. And we worked with the jet propulsion lab.
Only way I got the job worked with the jet
propulsion lab and went down to the village to play
chess one day and or one night with some friends
in the business, and the table was gone where we

(34:05):
usually played chess, and they were constructing a stage. I said,
what's going on and he said, oh, we're we're gonna
have entertainment here in the village, which was pretty new
in nineteen sixty nine. I mean there were poets that
stood up, but there were no stages. Uh. And I said, well,
what do you have to do to entertain here? Remembering
that I was, hey, a nascent rock and roll star.

(34:28):
He said, we'll come down an audition. So in my
three piece Brooks Brothers suit, I went down to Greenwich
Village and did the Mickey Mouse Song as a rock
and roll tune and like m I c kuy you
got it? Who's the leader? Do do wah of the bay?
And anyway, they thought I was weird enough that they

(34:52):
hired me. And one thing that to another. I always
loved Jonathan Winners, you know the sound effects. I was
doing sound effects in high school. The moment I realized
I could abuse a microphone for fun and profit, I
went for it. So I was doing traffic noises and
the probably the most famous sound effect that I did

(35:13):
in the village was the American Standard, which I would
introduce as a song and then do the flush of
an of a toilet. Can you still do that? Yes?
I can, but I don't know if this Mike will
let me. It was, I did get the handle, I went,
and then sure, very good, very good. Okay, So you're

(35:49):
a jack of all trades down there in the village.
I was. I was, and I was a good I
think I was a good choice for that. I was
a everything from a major d to a comedian, to
a songwriter to the master of ceremonies. Because no, really,
no serious artist actually wanted to get up and introduce
another artist. I mean, they might do it as a

(36:09):
tale and to their performance, but they didn't want to
do it as a constant. But I was. I was
fine with that, um because of my uh, I don't know,
my predilection for wanting to make nice. So when Albert
Grossman came in and said, uh, have you ever thought

(36:32):
of being in a group Albert Grossman going on to
become the manager of Dylan Jimmy of in Genesee and
Uh the band, Uh, I said, well, no, I got
a few things I want to do my myself. Evidently,
at the result of that uh meeting, he went back
to Peter and said, well, he said no, but I

(36:53):
think he will. I guess that's what made Albert what
Albert was, and he was right. The turning point came
in Mary's apartment after about five months of rehearsal, where
we had taken come up with about six tunes on
the subposition that maybe if Albert liked them, he'd we

(37:17):
could be in a group. And the words out of
Albert were, will have you thought about a name for
the group? And yeah? And we said yeah, I'm even
thinking about the Willows. And he said, well, how about
if Nold changes his name, we could we could call
the group Peter, Paul and Mary. Well, I don't know
if you're familiar with a song called the ten th

(37:39):
year Old Man. I know you talk about the comedy routine. No, no, no,
I'm talking about the song of the folk song I
was born about ten thousand years ago. Actually I don't
know it. Okay, Well, I'll give you a little verse.
And there's nothing in this world that I don't know.
Get Ready, here comes the alliteration. I saw Peter Paul
and os is playing ring around the roses, and I'll

(38:02):
look at the guy that says it isn't. So it's
a cute song talks about the development of world history.
But the Peter Paul and was already there on our lips.
But I recognized, oh my gosh, I am I'm not
going to be a carry Wizanowski. You know, no one
is Carrie Grant later or whatever. I'm I want to

(38:23):
hang onto my name. But then it occurred to me,
I never did like my middle name of Carol. So
I'll tell you what, Albert, I'll take it on as
a middle name, not knowing that my middle name is
gonna take me on and take me out because from
there on there's a funny thing that happens when you
get interviewed. You know, somebody sits down and says, so
tell me, Paul. Now they've already assumed something about you,

(38:48):
which for most people would not be a handicap, but
for me, I wanted to defend the fact that Noel
was my first name. But it became immediately obvious that
the question they were asking me it was more important
then straightening them out as to what my first name was.
So Paul took me over for about ten or twelve years,

(39:10):
and then after the spiritual change and having my own
life one Peter Paulmary took seven years off for good
behavior between nineteen seventy and nineteen seventy eight. When I
came back to the group, I said, okay, let's use
my full name now, I'm no old Paul Stucky. However
you want to couch that that's who That's who I am.

(39:31):
That's that's fine, but I need to have my first
name happening. So okay, So okay, we jumped through a
few things. There, you're you're there, You change the name.
Tell us about the agreement for Albert to actually manage you,
how you selected the initial songs, how you got a
record deal? In what happened there? Wow? Okay, well down

(39:55):
down in the weeds a little bit more. Um. Albert
was handling Peter as a solo artist and felt that
Peter's voice deserved a better setting. Uh, So he wanted
to create a group. The first member of the group
that he thought of was Mary Travers, whose picture was

(40:16):
hanging up on the wall. Peter said, who's that? Uh in? Uh?
Is he Young's Folklore Center in Greenwich Village? And Albert
looked up and knew who she was because she had
sung with the with Harry Bell Foddi singers and Uh
and Pete Seeger of the song Swappers, And he said,

(40:37):
that's Mary Travers. He said she'd be good if you
could get her to work, and we to this day.
Mary passed away in two thousand nine. But to this day,
Peter and I still don't know if what Albert meant
was if you can get her to focus, or if
he meant if you could because she has a small child,
she'd she would consider going into, you know, a career,

(40:59):
but none the us. She was already on board. I
had already declined working in a group because I had
some things I wanted to do by myself. And I
was commuting to Boston to sing up at Club forty
seven in between Joan Baez and Tom Rush appearances up there. Uh,
and Betty, my wife, had moved to Boston, so we

(41:20):
saw each other up there. Uh. That was another reason
for me to find a job up there. But anyway,
I'm I'm back in the apartment in New York. It's uh,
it's midweek. The phone rings. Then it's Mary on the phone,
and she says, I've got this guy over here who's
visiting and we're wondering if we can come over and
sing some songs. Well, you know, you put it like that. Oh,

(41:45):
so I had worked up a solo tune for Mary
to sing a Single Girl, which eventually made it on
a record. Actually, and a Single Girl is sort of
symbolic of the way that the tunes came to the trio.
In the beginning. I'd say at least half of our
repertoire was drawn on, uh, folk music's history. Whether they

(42:07):
were gospel tunes, whether they were tunes by Pete Seeger
or Woody Guthrie, or whether they were songs like the
Golden Vanity, you know that had been in the in
the folk ballads lexicon for you know, a hundred years. Uh,
but we could not agree. This is a wonderful moment.

(42:31):
We're in my apartment, Peter, Mary and I and we
know I know by this time that Peter's represented by
Peter represented by Albert, and we want to see if
we could sing together. And we're not related. We ain't
no everly brothers, so we don't have that familial vibe

(42:51):
that occurs when people are the same family and genetic
background make harmonies. So we're kind of fishing around. But
every song we come up with, everybody's got a different
version of Such was the way of folk music in
the late fifties early sixties until we landed on Mary

(43:11):
had a little lamb, Little lamb. So first Mary took
the melody, Peter and I sang harmony. Then Peter took
the melody, Mary and I sang harmony. Then I took
the melody Peter and Mary sang harmony. And no matter
which way we sliced or diced it, it sounded like
a group. Uh. There was a and I was just looking,

(43:36):
you know, it's funny. Uh. Timing is everything, And I
was just watching an old video of Mary singing. Uh.
The other day was a light one candle that Peter
had written. Uh, and we sat. We didn't have to
modulate for the woman to sing, you know, we didn't
have to change to another key as sometimes it's often

(43:56):
done for choruses. Mary's vocal range was quite white, as
was mine, as was Peters, so we were able to
make a sound that. Uh. We would trade leads all
the time. We I think that was and and isn't
it curious in retrospect talking about walking in through the
door expecting one thing and leaving with another. That we

(44:19):
were named Peter, Paul and Mary, which meant the three
individuals who lent their voices to each other for performances
also had these moments in the sun where they would
come out and do solo performances. Peter would sing two songs,
bring me out. I would do some comedy, sing a song.

(44:40):
I'd bring Mary out. She douced two songs. Then the
group would reassemble to finish the concert. So there was
a kind of continuity, and it showed up not only
in as the group went on, not only in song selection,
but the way that our harmonies came together. They were
not additional harmonies, that is to say, we could sing uh,

(45:05):
pronouncing the words at the same time. But we more
and more began to fall into the gospel kind of
shout and answer, you know, where one would sing a
lead and we Mary and I might answer Peter or
Peter was beautiful at creating alternative counterabilodies. Sometimes it got

(45:27):
to the point where we would write a whole other
song and then lay that in against a traditional song.
So are we We kept each other interested in what
we were doing by virtue of bringing our individual choices
and surprising each other with our songs selections. And then

(45:47):
Peter and I as the mid sixties came, began to
create more and more original material. So that's okay. Yeah.
Would would the group have been as successful if Albert
was not the manager? Probably not. Uh. Albert had a
philosophy that it was quite righteous in nature. Uh. It

(46:10):
was a little bit of concealment because Albert was a
great Uh. Albert had great taste, and so he knew
the value of things before other people could see the
value of things. So when he went to Warner Brothers,
for instance, uh, who were at that point there own

(46:32):
Warner Brothers Records was housed in a closet hut on
the Burbank lots, the film lots, and I think they
had maybe Bill Cosby and uh uh Bob Newhart. That
was about it. Oh, and they had the ever least
I think. But they were looking for new material. But

(46:53):
they weren't willing to go Uh. They weren't willing to
let the artist control their own material. They wanted to
dictate what the songs were. They wanted to assign a producer.
Albert said, no, no no, no, no, I'm gonna do that.
I'll tell you what, though, you give us a single
record deal, just one record. We don't need three records.
You know, we're not going to sign a long deal.

(47:15):
Just give us one record and the right to do
whatever we want and the budget for that, and then
we'll see where it goes from there. Help needless to say,
the first album went through the roof. Peter, Paul and
Mary were established. We had Lemon Tree, we had if
I had a hammer the end. The music suited the times.

(47:37):
But to put a caper on the description of Albert,
his capacity to recognize the value of what he had
to bargain with was kind of an invisible leverage. That
is to say, he would go to a promoter, uh
and say we would like to do the London Palladium,

(47:58):
or we would like to do Constitution Hall in Washington,
d C. And the promoters say, well, uh, you know
I can't I can't give you ten dollar guarantee. And
I would say, oh, we don't want to guarantee, we
just want of the ticket sales. So he was always

(48:19):
on the comp not on the take. So he got
a reputation for being a hard nosed businessman, but actually
he just had great faith in what he thought was
a coming attraction. So you know, an eight percent turned
out to be twenty four tho dollars who needed the
guarantee and that you know, I'm just making those numbers up,

(48:41):
but relatively you understand what I'm saying. He was able
to negotiate great terms for us no matter where we went,
and he was our manager for the first ten eleven
years of our lives. And probably the greatest coup that
he pulled off was when the trio recorded their individual
solo albums in the early evanies. He negotiated that those records,

(49:03):
the those tapes, those master tapes, would revert to the
artists as their property, that Warner Brothers was only leasing them,
and so both Peter, Mary and myself had those records
as our own property. They came back to us. Um. Yeah,

(49:24):
Albert was pretty pretty amazing guy. And what it's it's
very ironic being the cuisine, being the culinary artiste. Uh,
you know, he was really he really understood good food,
had a restaurant and would's not called the Bear. And

(49:45):
how ironic that he should die die on an airplane
headed for London. Uh. And the first question that most
people had was before or after the meal. He was
a delightful man. Uh, with a great giggle. That's what
I remember most about how he used to go. He

(50:05):
would never laugh out loud, he would go yeah, okay. Now,
Dylan ultimately fell out with him over money. Uh do
you I would ask a what percentage did he take in? Uh?
Do you feel comfortable with the deal? And how things
the financial accountings? Well? For us? Mind you, Albert put

(50:29):
us together. So the fact that he, in his office
took it was absolutely proper as far as we were concerned.
Not only that the success was of the group was
so large and so immediate that uh, you know, I
think we would have had to develop some kind of

(50:51):
animosity much much later, you know, maybe when the money
was running out, or or our career tends turned south,
which it never did. Um. We did leave Albert after
the time off for good behavior, but but he had
so many other irons in the fire by that time,
he really didn't need us anymore. And I think Bobby's
falling out with Albert was more question of the publishing

(51:15):
than it was how Albert was handling his career. Uh yeah, okay,
So how did you decide to do The first hit
was if I Had a Hammer? So, how did you
decide to do that? No? No, No, first hit was
Lemon Try. Lemon Try was on. It was just on

(51:35):
the Peter Polymery album and Buck Herron Young DJ out
of Oakland. Um, I can't remember the KF e W
k B E GO. I don't know what the radio
station was. Anyway, he pulled it off, made it the
single of the week or something. A couple of other

(51:56):
radio stations picked up on it, and you know, the
charts were into meant then, I mean Billboard and cash
Box they were the only charts around maybe Bill Gavin's Report. Uh.
And so people would see what Lemon Try? What is that?
Who are these people? Give me? Give me that album,
let me hear that. And so we went up to
we were top thirty with Lemon Try. Well, you know,

(52:19):
fame acceptance is quite often built on a previous record,
and certainly it was in this case. And though Lemonry
was not a political statement, it's certainly set up the
visibility of the group, so that in nineteen sixty two
sixty three, when the foment about civil rights was happening, Uh,

(52:45):
if I Had a Hammer was uh, you know, became
a calling card. Uh. It's timing was expressive of a
lot of the sentiment that was felt across the country.
And you know, we were we were the right people
at the right time, with the right message and following

(53:07):
that to be able to because of Albert's handling of
Dylan and the opportunity to hear Dylan's tunes before anybody
else heard them. When we heard Don't Think Twice and
Blowing in the Wind one night backstage at the Gate
of Horne in Chicago, we wanted to do both the
tune and as you well know, Blowing in the Wind

(53:30):
not only became number two hit, uh, following If I
Had a Hammer, but also has gone on to become
a classic done by you know, tons of performers and
always has a certain residence among uh those people who
still fight for human rights world around. Okay, so when

(53:51):
you say you heard it backstage on an ascetator, was
what was going on? Hunt? No on an estate? Yeah. Now,
for those people don't know what an ascetate is, you
know that's like a vinyl gone early. Uh. It requires
a needle on cutting a groove. Uh. And as the

(54:12):
sound comes out the groove move sideways and up and down,
lateral and vertical. And then when you put a needle
on that play back through an amplified process, you get
you get what was recorded. So, yes, it was an
ascetate played on a turntable at the bar and at
the gate of Horn. But Albert was managing Dylan. So

(54:36):
was it just a matter of him, uh feeding you
these songs or was it a whole cabal with Albert
and his acts that you were in it together and
you had a relationship with Dylan, you were the same
scene or were you really in different verticals? That's interesting.
You probably believe a lot of other conspiracy theories to write.

(54:58):
Believe me on the opposite of a conspiracy. Okay, well, no,
there was no conspiracy involved. There was just a you know,
a parallel of themes, you know, I mean, like I said,
these are the times in which we lived. And uh,
you know, my first contact with Bobby as a passing
artist was when I was master of ceremonies in Greenwich

(55:22):
Village and Bobby came in to do a set and
he at that time the first time through the gaslight. Uh,
he sang mostly, Uh, what do he got three tunes
and he had a voice very much that suited what
he got three tunes, and then he went away to
go on tour I think I think it was in
New Jersey, and he came back maybe a couple of

(55:43):
months later and asked if he could do a set,
and I, kind of being in charge of the entertainment,
I said yeah, sure of course, and he got up
on stage and he did a song about, uh, Buffalo,
I can't remember what not Buffalo writers Buffalo, I don't know.
There's a song about a guy that gets a job

(56:05):
out in the west, uh, skinning buffalo, buffalo skinner. That's
what it was. Uh. But these were totally different lyrics.
The original lyric was about how the buffalo skinner goes
to get paid and they give him skins and he says, well,
I can't do anything with this. I gotta eat. And
the guy says, take it to the general store and

(56:26):
trade in the skins and he'll give you the food. Oh.
So that's this is told to a plaintive three chord
folk melody, right, that's the traditional tune. Dylan comes back
from two months in New Jersey singing at a folk
club and he starts playing the chords behind Buffalo Skinner,

(56:47):
only he's talking about a guy that's gone to work
at this chess folk club in New Jersey. That's what
the lyric is about, and the fact that when he
comes to get his payroll, the the owner of the
of the chess club, gives him a chess set instead
of money. And he says, what am I supposed to
do with this? And he says, take it to the bartender.

(57:09):
So he goes to the bar and he's orders a
beer and he pays him mcking and gets two ponds
on a rook and return. Now the moment I saw that,
you know, um, And that was a revelation to me.
Here was somebody who understood in a more significant level
the abstract of folk music, that it had the capacity

(57:31):
to inform tell a story, but that it was timeless,
that the that the arrangement was conceivably just an opportunity
to voice more contemporary concerns. So two days later, I
don't know if you remember, but a ferry runs a
ground in New York City, in New York Harbor in

(57:53):
the Hudson River. Because counterfeit tickets were printed for a
bare mountain picnic, and too many people got on board
the ship. They refused to believe that they were counterfeit,
and the ship sank. And the irony of that was
not lost on the person who wrote the news article.
And I handed the article to Dylan, who was there

(58:14):
for the weekend. The next night he came in and
does the talking Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre blues. So two
days later or thereabouts, I say to Albert, you gotta
come down and hear this guy. He is a genius.
So that was Albert's I think, first contact with Dylan,

(58:34):
our first awareness of Dylan. But they were a great couple.
I mean, Dylan moved right into Woodstock and what a
great synergy between him and Robbie and and uh, you
know the band. I mean, what a great, great group
of musicians and thinkers. And the Basement tapes are just
so lovely. Um and you know, an inspiration once again

(58:59):
for being authentic. You know, find find the best way
in your own voice to speak to that which concerns you,
and you'll include a lot of people, because I think
people can they just sense the truth. It's like what
Richard Nixon was not. Okay, let's go back to that era.

(59:24):
I'm old enough to be aware. Most people only read
about it in books. But prior to the Beatles, there
was a huge folk scene, even to the point there
was a TV show puting in You've You've referenced the
fact that there was a scene in Greenwich Village once
again legendary, but it was happening when most people were

(59:44):
not aware. Needless to say, with your success, you were
kings and queen of that scene. What was it like
in the folk world at that time, Well, don't forget
speaking of kings, the King has done trio who were
out the door early maybe two years prior to us,
uh with folk music. But it was kind of good

(01:00:06):
time folk music. It was, you know, let's all get
together and have a u a great time singing together.
Um to have a couple of years, let's have a party,
let's uh sing uh Waltz Matilda, let's sing you know
songs that we all know. Well that was that was good.
But this was a different kind of music, and so

(01:00:27):
the folks scenes sort of changed, bent in that direction
and augured uh for a a more concerned lyric in
general that in now the folks scene itself. Okay, I
mean there was the Kingston's. There was John Stewart, who
brought arguably to the Kingston's a kind of political conscience

(01:00:50):
that they hadn't had since Dave Guard left the group. Um,
there was the Brandywine Singers. There was you know, uh
the Brothers Four. There were uh, you know, Entrudy. And
then there were the soloists. I mean there was Joan An,
there was Judy Collins, there was um, you know, I

(01:01:14):
the mind cannot really I can't fully embrace the breadth. Uh.
It was just such a wide variety of artists who
little by little made there made their statements through the
medium of folk music, and folk music began to have

(01:01:37):
its effect on pop music because here were here were DJs.
You know, they were used to playing lush ballads by
Bert Backrack, and now they were playing a guitar and
harmonica and a guy singing what is this? But you know,
where is the Where's the luster? Where's the glamour? Where's
And eventually that desire for a more uh how shall

(01:02:03):
I say, a more arresting sound began to manifest itself
in rock and roll and the lyrics subsequently, we're uh
inspired in rock and roll? You know I can't get
no satisfaction in a sense was a far cry from
what the world needs now is love sweet love. Yeah. So,

(01:02:25):
folk music's impact on pop music in the mid sixties
triggered the release of a variety. To me, one of
the main uh, main changes occurred when James Taylor UH
came on the scene because his ability to blend a

(01:02:46):
beautifully played acoustic guitar with piano drums. UH kind of
was the middle ground, you know, once again we could
have pretty music that spoke to very personal relations, that
had a broader conscience to it. And then of course
the Beatles arrived with Please Please Me, and the Stones continued,

(01:03:08):
and then we were into the Loving Spoonful and even
to this day, as a matter of fact, I'm holding
up your people can't see it, but I'm holding up
an album that says, hope rises. This is a this
is a album that contains fifteen new artists because a

(01:03:28):
lot of people uh. And I'm sure it's something that
you will ask later in this interview. Where can we
hear music that pertains to the times and the crises
in which we live now? And that music is there,
but the niche for their for its expression as narrowed considerably.

(01:03:49):
I mean, there are many slices of opportunity now and
what Music to Life does has done is to sponsor
these artists in their separate communities and to encourage them
to record and to use music as part of the
everyday outreach to their communities. But we'll talk about that later.

(01:04:11):
Um anyway, mhm. The fact that I brought it up
is part of the awareness that styles of music have
less to do with the success of the lyric than
they used to. Uh. You know, there was a time
when country and Western was hillbilly. You know, there was

(01:04:32):
a time when hip hop and rap was nothing but anger.
There was a time, you know when bossa Nova was
a lush rather than pointed. Uh So, these changes I
think came about to a large part because they were
encouraged by folk musics encouragement to speak to those events

(01:04:55):
that we share as a world community. But you know,
from the outside, not being a maker of this music,
what do I know, everyone wherever you went there was
a guitar and you sang these songs. They were sung
at summer camps, etcetera. And in addition, there was a
lot of you know, even when Kennedy was there. There
were a lot of political issues, certainly starting with what

(01:05:18):
was going on in Cuba. It seemed from the outside
that the folk artists had their finger on the pulse
and we're singing to move sentiment in a certain direction.
Did it feel like that on the inside? Yeah, I
mean by nineteen sixty three for sure. Standing on the
steps of the Lincoln Memorial with the Dr. King, I've

(01:05:40):
referred to it many times. You know. Mary turned to
Peter and said, Hope is palpable. Okay, that begs the question.
I gotta say, although Obama ran on Hope you know
a number of years ago, two thousand and eight, as
someone who's seen it seen at all, Contract asked, I
don't want to sound like a college question. Contrast and

(01:06:02):
compare the vibe in the American mentality then as opposed
to today. I think there was some resistance to the
human rights movement, particularly as it UH presented itself in
the UH as a challenge to the white racists in

(01:06:23):
the South UH and that it wasn't. But the overall
effectiveness of that movement, of the civil rights movement was
that it expressed a desire for America to get righteous, Uh,
to be inclusive, as its history has indicated. It was

(01:06:46):
give me retired, your poor, your masses yearning to be free.
This was this was a chance to go on public
record as the encouragement, and that then morphed into Oh,
I see we can as a large group get together

(01:07:09):
and in if not influence people's opinions, we can at
least express our own in numbers that would encourage them
to discover what the true facts behind this are. And
so that's when it morphed into the the anti war movement. Uh.

(01:07:31):
It was a natural chain of events, I think, uh
in a sense empowered large groups of people to make statements,
and the music was a thread that ran through all
of that. Okay, but today, do you believe that we
are off course? Or we can only self correct and
have hope? And where is music's place in today's consciousness? Well,

(01:08:00):
you know you're talking to Mr Hopeful here. I mean,
I I am loathed to despair. I mean, I see
inequities still, but I know that in my own life, uh,
I've seen change. So I can't help but feel that
everybody's life has the possibility to change. And I know

(01:08:21):
that we're at longer heads uh conceptually with many of
the people who back Donald Trump. Oh, but I can't
help but feel that when we discover the larger issue,
and that is one of respect and compassion, we will

(01:08:42):
ultimately be joined again. Now, you can't legislate compassion, You
can only invite it by being compassionate yourself. You can't
legislate forgiveness. But you know, taking a page of Mandela's
handling of APARTHEIDU, you can have public forums where people

(01:09:07):
voice their concerns and are, if not assuaged, at least
aware that reconciliation is possible. Because every human life has value.
So the the hope that we will begin to consider
the larger inspiration for the human uh, for the human experience. Ah,

(01:09:38):
it goes on. Um. That's why you know the song
I sang to you before about love with the capital L.
That's that is the awareness. Uh. Sure the atheists will
not accept the G word, you know, but if they've
ever been in love, then they have an inkling of
what it is that can draw us together. And that

(01:10:01):
means that you know, the better angels in us UH
begins to embrace and include our fellow human beings. I
think town halls. You know, actually, they're going to become
a very important aspect because on a local level, they
will allow us to voice concerns that relate directly to

(01:10:26):
our lives, and then we're gonna be able to translate
that into a larger picture. Okay, let's go back to
the six season our timeline. The Beatles come along, they
wipe out a zillion acts, very few sustain. Okay, the
Beach Boys sustained, the four seasons sustained, but ultimately Peter
Paul Mary end up having a couple of gigantic kits.

(01:10:48):
One is I dig rock and roll music? Can you
tell us the story of that? Yeah, Yeah, I got
a I got a great friend. I think I mentioned
him earlier, Jim Mason, who reduced a couple of things
for Poco. I was introduced to him by Dave Dixon,
who was the voice of Norman Normal in a cartoon

(01:11:09):
that I did for Warner Brothers. Um, Jim Mason came in,
sat down in the living room of uh, Dave Dixon's
living room where we used to in New York City
on Jane Street, and Uh, he said, I got a
new tune for you, and he sang datandan that with

(01:11:32):
the most inane lyrics you've ever heard in your life
about my girl. She left me on a Thursday, and
I wonder if she ever cared, you know, that kind
of thing. And I when it got all done, I
looked at Jim and I said, that's the hippest piece
of music to the most banallyps I've ever heard in

(01:11:52):
my life. And he said, well, what do you think
it's about. And so between the three of us we
started writing I did and roll music. Now we just
went through this period of time where I did my
toilet for you in a couple of sound effects. So
I love to mimic uh. And this was we knew

(01:12:13):
all the people that we were making. By this time,
we had Peter Mary and I had met the Beatles
on the set of Hard Days Night, uh, and I
loved I mean ever since, Please Please Me. I was
blown away by their harmonic inventions and their recordings. Uh.
You know. And Donovan bless his bless his soul, was

(01:12:34):
was part folky too. I mean he came to a
couple of Newport folk festivals, uh, and was the one
guy from that era who always, I don't know, our
paths seemed to cross all the time and nicest, nicest
man um but with a very distinctive singing style. And
of course there was the Mamas and the Papas, Oh yeah,

(01:12:55):
the John Phillips signature stuff and Mary newcasts really well.
And so we put this thing together almost like in secret.
I mean it was like we went into the laboratory.
Peter played guitar and recorded it backwards, so we get
that muss you know, that backwards sound. I imitated Donovan's voice,

(01:13:17):
we did Mary did the oh yeah, the tagline for
the Moms and the Papas. And here's the funny story.
We're in Australia when the test pressing comes through. Well
we don't have any way to play a test pressing.
We're in a hotel, you know. So we go to
the local record store and we put it on and

(01:13:38):
we asked if we can borrow one of the booths,
and the guy says, yeah, I'll just leave the door open.
So we left the door open. We play it and
he says to us, who's who's that? Who's that saying?
And we said it's Peter, Paul and Mary because he
didn't he didn't recognize us, and he said well, that
will never sell. So that was and that was a

(01:14:06):
remarkable UH comeback. But that's not the true irony. The
true irony is leaving on a jet plane, which happened
in ninev just before the group took its seven years
off for good behavior. And that irony was based on
the the lament and the angst that was shared by

(01:14:29):
so many families and their sons and their daughters and
the soldiers returning to or departing for the war in Vietnam. Uh.
John Denver's tune was just touched so many buttons at
that point, and that that tune was on an album
that was released two years earlier that had I did

(01:14:50):
rock and roll music on. I remember that because you know,
in UH youth groups, religious youth groups, myself, I was involved.
Album seven teen hundred was a big deal. We always
sang leaving on in Jepline. Then what it was ultimately
a hit was such a surprise. But I have to
ask those of us number it was called album seventeen
hundred because was number seventeen hundred in the Warner Brothers catalog.

(01:15:13):
Who came up with that. Our idea was to try
to escape the title, and we just wanted the number
of the album to be the title, and we were
thinking he was gonna be like or you know, two
thousand twelve or whatever. We didn't care. We just wanted
that was our idea. That was Peter, Mary and I said,

(01:15:35):
let's just have the number. We told that the Warners
Warner said fine. So when seventeen hundred came out, we said,
seventeen hundred, that'sn't even number. What's so memorable about that?
And you got the word album in front of it.
We didn't want that, but it turned out not to
matter because hundred head really quite a few major turning

(01:16:00):
point tunes for us. By that time. Peter and I
were generating a lot of the material. Um, I don't
I don't remember what was on that album specifically, besides
I did rock and home music. But I think it
might have had the song was Love, It might have
had him, It might have had might have had the
House song on it. There were those were mine. I
think I think the great Mandela was on it. Peter's

(01:16:23):
anti war tune. Yeah, that was a end. It was
the last of the albums done by Phil Ramon, who was,
you know, a production genius. Uh he he did come
back and do a album that disappeared quickly called Reunion.
Oh no, not the Reunion album. He did the one
after that, Lifelines Live Lifelines and Lifelines Live where we

(01:16:47):
uh reconnected in the early eighties with John Sebashian and
Dave Van Rock and Odetta and Richie Havens and u
uh Susan Werner a lot of our friends Emmy Lou
Harris to do an album songs. Okay tell me the
story though, was too much of nothing because I was

(01:17:08):
on the Basement Tapes and was unknown the Basement Teams album.
There have been a number of iterations, but the original
double album was not out yet, so most people did
not know the song. And this not only was a
Dylan song, the ultimate arrangement was different and it had
very modern recording productions. Yep. Well you know, we got

(01:17:31):
we got better at setting the tunes and we also
had access to really brilliant musicians that slide guitar and
too much of nothing is just I mean, there is
always an attempt when you're producing a piece of lyrical

(01:17:54):
music to have the music joined the lyrics, uh, you know,
as an additive, to be part of what's being said.
Not only suit the mood, but maybe even embellish the
character a little bit. Sometimes it gets out of hand,

(01:18:15):
you overshoot. I can remember there are sometimes where I
used to play some color chords to a Woody Guthrie tune.
By color chords, I mean like a major seventh, you know,
We're diminished or something that Peter would go, you can't
play that, said, why not? He said, that's not what
the song is about. And I you know, you understand
on a certain level you have to capitulate to what

(01:18:39):
the song is trying to say. But on too much
of nothing, you know, the embellishment really suited it. Uh.
We had a great drummer. I don't remember what his
name was, but uh yeah, too much a nothing can
make a man feel ill at ease, and as certainly
as the time in which we live now, and that's
for sure. Okay, Ultimately the group separates and everybody puts

(01:19:02):
out a solo album. Uh, you're the only one who
has a hit, and it's a pretty big hit, the
wedding song. And then ultimately you even donate the income
from that song and start a foundation. Can you tell
us all that? Yeah, well, you know, the creation of
the song was I had gone through a real spiritual turnaround.

(01:19:25):
Peter saw that, uh, we are you know, we are
still a trio, but it's getting a little lobbily because
I'm beginning to proselytize on stage and really challenging the
uh the Jewish audience, because I haven't learned the language
of inclusiveness yet. And and yet Peter approaches me and says,

(01:19:48):
you know, Mary Beth and I are getting married, and
we would love you to bless our wedding with the song.
And I've said this from stage before, you know. I
I knew that I wasn't authorized to dispense blessings, but
I knew where I could get one. So so I
prayed for the song and the and the prayer was

(01:20:10):
unique insofar as it was not give me a song
for Peter's wedding. It was how would you capital why
manifest yourself at Peter's wedding? And the lyric was, I
am now to be among you at the calling of
your hearts. Rest assured this bozo, which I changed the

(01:20:34):
troubador is acting, is acting on my part anyway. The
lyric came so quickly, I, you know, could barely write it.
Down and you've heard these stories from other songwriters before
where it just flows, but it was direct answer to prayer.
So flash forward nine months later, I've recorded it on

(01:20:55):
a solo album. The trio is no longer together, and
I am driving to New York, back to the Rye
House from Scarsdale. I think I can't remember, maybe we
were visiting somebody in New Hampshire. But anyway, I've kind
of make a decision about publishing. Every one of the

(01:21:15):
tunes is Scott. You know. I'm doing a tune by
Bill Hughes called Meanings Will Change. I've you know, I've
written a lot of the tunes that are on the album,
but there's this tune that I can't really incredibly except
the authorship of because I prayed for it. I mean,
you know, they had a category in songwriting that said

(01:21:36):
good Steward. Maybe I'll qualify, you know, but they don't
allow that in publishing. Either wrote it or you didn't
write it. So as I'm driving, I turned to Betty
and I say, you know, I ain't gonna give this tune.
I'm going to give this tune to a foundation and
then so that way the money's will still come in

(01:21:57):
there won't be a new portion the Warner Brothers parking
a lot that knowns that belongs to some executive because
he didn't have to pay out the money for the publishing.
The money will go to not now mind you, this
is still just a track on an album. I don't
know that it's gonna go you know, platinum as a
single or become a mainstay for weddings. Uh. So I

(01:22:20):
gave it to the public Domain Foundation, made sure that
everybody knew that that's where the money should go. And
you know what, the Public Domain Foundation fostered the Music
to Life Organization, which now supports young singer songwriters all
over America in their various communities. It also, you know,

(01:22:42):
in that process, uh supported a lot of other charities too.
And the nice thing about it, U was I got
to choose who the charities were because it was such
a homespun foundation. I mean, yeah, I gave you know,
public Domain Foundation gave thirty dollars to Oxfam, which a

(01:23:03):
lot of people know the works of. But it also
gave like forty one dollars and thirty four cents to
a church in Alabama to get its roof fixed. That
kind of flexibility was just a joy to me. Um,
you know, and people didn't know where to apply to
the foundation. But the Moneys went for you know, for

(01:23:25):
good causes. And I felt like I had made a statement.
And the song continues to make a statement. Okay, you know,
you can't talk about the music business without talking about
the money. What do we know back then? You know,
contrat tickets could be a dollar fifty records could be
two dollars and fifty cents. You didn't write a lot

(01:23:48):
of these songs now, one level economics were different. There
was more of a middle class. We didn't have billionaires.
So I guess it's you know, a multipart question, which
was a did you see the money? Could you live
with a lifestyle you were comfortable with? Do you felt
feel like you were ripped off when the heyday was done?

(01:24:08):
Was there any money coming in? Oh, that's such an
uninformed question, Bob. We'll lay it on, criticize, we go
for it. Oh yeah, I mean, well, let's work backwards.
Even today, from Warner Brothers Publishing or New World Publishing,

(01:24:33):
which is my own, or Peters I think it's Silver
Dawn Publishing. We get accountings. They come in the form
of two inch thick uh pieces of paper, a two
inch stack of papers typed out by a computer that says,

(01:24:55):
for instance, too much of nothing Singapore point zero zero
one to five cents. These things add up, and when
you're talking about a worldwide release, they had up to
a considerable amount of money. So even to this date,

(01:25:17):
I probably just my part of it. And I'm you know,
I didn't have puff the magic dragon. You know, I
didn't have I would say the lion's share of the publishing.
But even to this date, I'm well into five figures
uh publishing moneys that come in quarterly. Um So, I'm

(01:25:37):
just blessed beyond belief, really, And I think most people
who had record deals from the sixties who are revisited
for nostalgia purposes or revisited because an advertising campaign wants
to use their music the ask cap and after and
all of the unions that have protected artists these past

(01:26:01):
years have done their work very well. And to the
extent that you earn in royalty, uh, you get a
pretty fair shake from the world around you. Um So
I have I have no complaints, no quarrel with the
way that the money's were played out. There probably are

(01:26:22):
horror stories based on unscrupulous managers, you know, or unscrupulous
companies who had you sign on a dotted line in
invisible length that went away or went through a shredder
or into some offshore account. But for the most part,
the people that we dealt with were very upright, very

(01:26:45):
uh yeah, very honorable folks. And most of the music industry,
I think, is that way. Well, as I say, there's
certainly horror stories. Thank god it wasn't down in your
neck of the woods. Let's go to the Music to
lie when. So, when did you start Music to Life
And what is the mission you sort of generally said,
and what are the activities of the organization? For asking

(01:27:09):
because that is a contemporary thing and most people like
to dwell in the land of nostalgia. When they talked
to a a former member of Peter, Paul and Mary,
the fact is, as I mentioned before, folk music has
an ongoing life, and that means that there are writers,
singer songwriters out there who are writing about contemporary events,

(01:27:31):
contemporary concerns, and they are a group of songwriters nationally
and probably even worldwide. Now that an organization called Music
to Life that was begun by my daughter Elizabeth Sunday
Stooky UH support but the evolution is interesting, and it's

(01:27:52):
interesting because most people can identify with the beginnings easier
than they can with where it has come. In the beginning,
there were folk festivals and at these folk festivals there
would be singer songwriters. One of the primary folk festivals
was in Texas in the little town called Cerville. And

(01:28:14):
every year, beginning in the late hundreds, UH, Elizabeth, my
daughter and I would scan anywhere between three hundred and
five hundred applicants to be included on an album called
Music to Life, and UH an appear at the Silver

(01:28:38):
Thorn Theater. UH as one of ten finalists who would
receive receive awards. Those were curious concerts UH beginning. Then
First of all, they were recorded live and released later
as an album. But what what what year was in

(01:29:00):
the beginning, But it went on until two thousand six,
two thousand nine, actually I think it was the last
one UM, and they supported and encouraged singer songwriters to
speak about UH contemporary concerns. UM. The it was recorded live, UH.
The CD was released didn't really make much money, but

(01:29:21):
it was great to go on record as having uh
encouraged these singer songwriters. Well over the course of that
period of time, my daughter Liz begin to understand that
many of these artists didn't do the music just because
it was a hip thing to do. They did it
because they were factoring as a lifestyle into the community

(01:29:46):
and concerned with homelessness, concerned with the environment, concerned with
So the music wasn't only to be sung at a
rubber chicken benefit dinner. It was actually could be used
with a group of people as a kind of an
anthem for them. So by community sponsorship, Uh, they for instance,

(01:30:13):
in Austin, Texas, now there's a homeless group that gathers
weekly and they make up songs together. Um. They sing together.
They have more of a sense of family than they
ever could isolated as you would imagine they would be. Um.
The they're singing in prisons now. UM. So that music

(01:30:38):
becomes kind of educational and a collective tool for the
movement itself. Um. And to that end, my daughter Liz
has started the Activist Artist program, which these two of
the two of the people on this album are activist artists.
The others are still on the point where they're commenting

(01:31:00):
on the circumstances, but uh, not taking a role in
the community yet, So we raise money, we mentor them. Uh.
The most one of the local guys, uh, you know,
Miles Bullen down in Portland, Maine. It was a former

(01:31:21):
addict and we support him on a monthly basis and
he deals with high schools. I mean he has to
do it because of the pandemic. Now you know through
zoom or through uh you know, through online methods. But
we support these artists and their involvement in their neighborhoods
as they bring their message of hope and their Yeah,

(01:31:46):
they bring their message of hope through music to their
their fellow citizens. Okay, now you recently put out an album,
and how high hands on are you personally? Well, you
know that that brings That's a good question, and it
brings to mind the fact that I didn't properly answer

(01:32:08):
the question about the earlier aspect of who chose these
songs to go on this album? Out of the three
to five hundred tunes that was a great cast at
Kathy Mattea, Judy Collins, Tom Chapin, Tom Paxton, A lot
of the folkis uh served on a board that analyzed
and listened to these tunes. So this same concept now

(01:32:32):
came to bear on these fifteen tunes. Uh. My involvement,
aside from being one of the judges, was two sequence.
I'm from the old school. I'll bet you are too.
I When I put a record on, I love to
hear what the next tune is going to be. And
I mean it's part of what makes radio so fascinating.

(01:32:53):
If the disc jockey is really good, then he tells
a story with the songs that he tends to program.
So sequencing was important to me on this album. Hope
rises Um. That was probably a major contribution. Uh. The
fact is the I would say fully a dozen of

(01:33:16):
the fifteen tunes were selected just by quantitatively, uh saying
this song spoke spoke to me on a scale of
zero to ten. This was a nine, or this is
an eight and a half, or this was a But
three of the songs, and I can't remember which ones
they are, but three of the songs are on the
album because well they damn well should be. It was

(01:33:37):
one of those Okay, everybody gets a personal vote at
some point, you know, you get the it's the opposite
of a veto, it's a must have so uh so
it was mostly a democratic process that brought the songs together.
But the there's a great deal of excitement, and you
know what really knocks me out. These are fifteen very

(01:33:59):
diverse started. I mean we're talking hip hop, we're talking reggae,
we're talking uh, we're talking folky, we're talking lots of echo,
we're talking no echo, we're talking spare, we're talking to lush,
And I don't you know, I'd like to claim credit
that because of the sequencing, you're drawn into it. But
the nicest compliment that we've gotten so far is that

(01:34:20):
people can put on the record and they can play
the entire record and they're not put off by any
of the changes. I mean, as diverse as all of
these tracks are, they flow one to another. Now one's
got a secretly hope that the reason for that is
because the intention is selling the tune, that the caring

(01:34:41):
that these artists have is being expressed in a way
that's subliminal, and you just can't help but warmly respond
to it. Now, needless to say, the landscape in society,
in the music world is completely different from when you
guys came up in the early sixties. So when we

(01:35:02):
talk about this type of music, I'll use labels, which
you know, don't really nail it, but message music, music
that might you know, reflect society or want to push
it into a certain degree. Many people who have been
around felt that we'd see a surge of this music
after the surge when we had a rack war in
the earlier part of the century. But what we know

(01:35:23):
is that no specific uh, social commentary, anti war political
song has come top of mind and society. So I
must ask you, is that a matter of the breath
of music today and that it's almost hard to have

(01:35:45):
anything heard by everybody? Or are we lacking the one
specific writer or artist who will make something definitive and
then start a new movement. I think both of those
possibilities are true. For instance, uh, and we will remind
you of Bruce Springsteen and his important position in bringing

(01:36:09):
two the public mind issues and perspectives on the way
that we live our lives together. Whether that whether he
enacted it through his you know, ten thousand people in
an in an arena, or whether he does it on Broadway,
So and and Lady Gaga, you know, uh, to a

(01:36:31):
certain extent, But these Lady Gaga is perhaps more niche
in in terms of what she is expressing. Uh, but
nonetheless So that's why that's why the the other possibility
that you introduced is also correct. There are just so
many fragments of musical opportunity that exists now for artists

(01:36:55):
that they have to pick their particular community to speak to.
There is not going to be one. I mean, unless
the Messiah is going to arrive and be accompanied by
a twelve piece band and bring a whole different kind
of music that everybody immediately recognizes as the answer to
all of the foibles of humankind, that's not gonna happen

(01:37:21):
in the way that we were able to accept music
of the civil rights movement, music of the anti apartheid movement,
music of the environmental movement. I mean, these are, uh,
they're bigger than splinters, they're probably even planks, But they're
not an entire house interesting metaphor. Okay, Uh, just to

(01:37:45):
cover one thing before, because we're gonna have to wrap
it up, you have to go, and we've gone at length.
Do you ever get tired of singing these legendary songs?
I do have a little trouble with puff the magic Dragon.
Um though, you know, sometimes just in defense of the

(01:38:06):
poor dragon who's maligned for his a parent or alleged
association with drugs, I don't mind standing up for the
poor little guy, uh, you know, and setting the record
straight that he is really just a song about a
kid who's coming of age. Uh. It's what Tom Paxson

(01:38:26):
had a great line for this, Bob. He said, it's
all right to look at the past, you just don't
want to be caught staring at it. And to the
extent that I'm still writing new tunes and embracing tunes
by other artists that speak to the here and now. Ah,

(01:38:49):
I feel like it's important to include some songs of
the past, but it's also important to register the fact
that we are living temporarily and that there is a
possible future before us that has a brighter light, uh
than the than the world that we're living in now.

(01:39:12):
I'm that note of optimism. I don't think I can
add anything more, Nol. This has been fantastic. You're very erudite,
very articulate. You can speak as well as saying I
really appreciate you spending the time, Bob. I was not
looking forward to this at all, two hours out of
my life was not the kind of thing that I

(01:39:33):
wanted to do. And you are an irascible, wonderful old
host who brought the best out of my history. I
enjoyed so much, uh this time with you. And once again,
to make that analogy, I entered this door with an expectation,
and I am leaving with a far greater excitement than

(01:39:58):
I thought I would have. Thank so much for having me.
Well to use that old Yiddish expression, I'm veelling even
though people can't see it on the screen, but you know,
you have to understand. You know, there's a huge thought
that today's society, youngsters don't have a sense of history.
They talk about baseball players not knowing the people before.

(01:40:20):
But for those of us who live through this era, okay,
not only is it a thrill to speak with you,
but I am aware. I mean, the the folk era
has been distilled essentially to Dylan going to electric a Newport. Okay,
you know, forgetting the whole essence of what was going on,

(01:40:40):
not that that was not important, the relative to the
scene at large, which is much larger, and the fact
that you can talk about it and put it in
context is certainly thrilling to me. And I'm not I'm
not exaggerating. It's like, you know, if we had more time,
what was it really like? I mean, I grew up
only fifty miles away. I'll tell you something that you'll get,

(01:41:01):
which most people won't. And then I was a freshman
in high school and we're social studies. We were going
to go on a trip, a field trip, and we're
deciding where to go, and we were going to go
to Sturbridge Village. You're aware of Sturbridge Village, right, that's
you know, just over the line from Connecticut, Massachusetts. It's
kind of like Williamsburg. People know better where it's, you know,

(01:41:24):
a reenactment of the way life used to be. All
of a sudden, the guy in the back, Steve Blink,
he says, we can't go there. It's terrible, all the people,
it's crowded, and we're all sitting there in classic you
know what is he talking about? Sturbridge Village? And then
somebody says, you mean Greenwich Village? Uh? And as I say,

(01:41:49):
it was such a scene. You know, it's funny that
you know, things happened. I wouldn't say, right under my
nose because I was young at the time and I
was not living in the city and I didn't have wheels.
But these you all scenes fomented and you were right
there at the epicenter, and as I say, once again,
you can talk about it, which is very impressive to me.
So maybe in a future day we can go deeper

(01:42:10):
into some of those scenes. But thanks again so much
for doing this. It was my pleasure. Thank you again.
It was really fun. Til next time. This is Bob Left.
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