Rock: New York City 1960s Overview

At the start of the decade, Paul Simon, Neil Diamond, and Lou Reed were among the hopeful young songwriters walking the warrenlike corridors and knocking on the glass-paneled doors of publishers in the Brill Building and its neighbours along Broadway. Only Diamond achieved significant success in the traditional manner. A craftsman who took his place on the assembly line, he wrote songs for Don Kirshner that were recorded by the Monkees, Lulu, and others before he launched his own successful career as a performer.

Diamond’s New York City contemporaries found a different route, developing a repertoire and reputation through live performances in the coffeehouses and clubs of Greenwich Village and the East Village, where they hoped to attract the attention of people who mattered. Among the tastemakers were Robert Shelton, who wrote about folk and country music for The New York Times; Paul Rothchild, artists-and-repertoire (A&R) man at Elektra Records, the leading folk music label; and Albert Grossman, manager of the folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary and of the singer and songwriter Bob Dylan.

When Dylan’s series of albums for Columbia became the soundtrack for the college-educated generation, Grossman left New York City and began operating out of his lair at Woodstock in upstate New York, redefining the structure of the music industry on behalf of his clients. According to his rules, advances could be hiked up in anticipation of substantial album sales, recording artists could control the packaging and marketing strategies of their albums, and live performers were due larger shares of gate receipts. Music industry executives, accustomed to pulling the strings from their seats in air-conditioned skyscraper offices, were obliged to meet Grossman’s terms, and thus the industry was changed forever.