Perfect Sound Forever

THE SEVENTH SONS


Buzzy on guitar and Serge on perc, 1965- photo by Don Don Paulsen

How Indian Music Emptied into the Steel Guitar
(Or the Mistery of the Open Fifths)
Part II by Tony Ruiz
(December 2022)

In case you missed it, see Part I of this article


"My idea of psychedelic music was not that it be loud or too weird but that the artist would be so deeply involved that he would provide a trip for the audience."
Buzzy Linhart1


Adding the guitarist Max Ochs (Phil's cousin and nowadays the only living member of the group), at the end of 1965, The Buzzy Linhart Trio would be called definitively The Seventh Sons.

Max Ochs' (born in 1940) background was shaped in the Maryland/Washington, D.C. scene. He is one of the creators of what today is called 'American Primitive Guitar.' But about the Seventh Sons, there's almost still not a trace on any website that mentions him. His memory easily returns back to that exciting framework:

"The University of Maryland had a folk/fingerpicking scene going on, and Robbie Basho and I were attending it there at the time. Also Dick Spottswood, the record collector, was working in the University Library. And it was only ten minutes to drive into Washington D.C. to attend "hootenenannies" all over town. The Unicorn, a coffeehouse on 17th St. had John Fahey, his girlfriend Pat Sullivan (she was a great guitar player too!), Mike "Backward Sam Firk" Stuart, a big slide guitar player named John Stein who played "Fixing to Die."

Also Elizabeth Cotton played at the Ontario place with Mississippi John Hurt. He and his wife Jessie had moved to Washington. A guy named Lee Talbot played blues guitar all the time on his radio program broadcast from George Washington University, with live performances..."2



Max Ochs had met Serge Katzan in the early 1960's, creating a friendship, recalling more about the drummer and a well-known musical relative of his.

"We left together Annapolis, we shared a loft, we lived in the same apartment in NYC... Serge was chef, he had a job cooking. He'd been drummer, much older than me, surely around eleven years... He knew a lot about jazz and said to me he'd backed Billie Holiday, aside some famous jazz people. He was very hip and cool, I was learning about what that means, how was being cool... I went to the Village in NYC and then Berkeley because that was where the scene was happening, with Dave Van Ronk, and Bob Dylan and my cousin Phil Ochs. And of course, the opportunity to play with a great charismatic singer like Buzz Linhart."

Serge Katzan (with Buzzy Linhart) would be the only original member of the band who lasted until its last round. Aside from being their drummer, Katzan also played hand drums, congas, tabla and Kenyan two-sided signal drum. Besides this, he was also The Seventh Sons' manager. Founding bass player Steve DeNaut remembers a lot about the drummer.

"Serge was the moneyman. He kept us in food and was the person that dealt with the bussiness end of the Sons. Buzzy and I were usually too loaded to deal with agents and recording contracts...

When we first got together as The Seventh Sons, adding Max Ochs on guitar, we went up to upstate New York to a polluted lake and a lodge that had been renamed Paradox Lost... We plugged in our amps from a power outlet and practiced like crazy. It was totally deserted up there so we could make all the noise we wanted. We had some terrific sessions (at least they seemed so at the time) but almost starved to death. At the end of our stay, we were pretty well bonded as musicians and could finally play quite well together."3



After passing those days "locked up" in the country, on November 9th 1965, the band played at the Unicorn in Boston during the infamous East Coast blackout. For the 1965 Thanksgiving long weekend (November 24-27th), The Seventh Sons performed their first "official" set with the proper name (and including Ochs) in Greenwich Village. A series of gigs (called 'Blues Bags') at the Cafe au Go Go were hosted by the venue's owner Howard Solomon, and promoted by the progressive folk label Verve/Folkways and included an incredibly impressive bill: Son House, Big Joe Williams, Bukka White, T Bone Walker, John Lee Hooker, John Hammond, Jr., Geoff Muldaur, Fred Neil, Judy Roderick, The Blues Project and more.


Seventh Sons at Cafe Au Go Go, 1965

Buzzy Linhart played as soloist then and thereafter that with the group. As a special guest, David Crosby (already a Byrd and friends with Buzz since the Coconut Grove days) showed up to join the Sons, which was Buzzy on electric guitar, Ochs on the electric slide, DeNaut on bass and Katzan with Kenyan two-sided signal drum. Some pics were taken by Don Paulsen (Hit Parader editor and photographer) featured Crosby onstage.

Fred Neil, another old Grovite, started playing solo but then the Sons joined him after a few songs. It was probably the last time that Fred was backed by The Seventh Sons. Paulsen remarked about the astonishing quintet:

"The huge brick walled cellar was jumping with the scintillating exchange of musical ideas that make a spontaneous live performance exciting... (they) launched all these different changes of music, folk and blues and jazz and country and raga-like drones going on, with this incredible tapestry of so many different musical forms. Fred was an early pioneer of taking people from different schools of music and putting them together to see what develops. It wasn't folk. It was something else entirely new."4



For that time, Buzzy saw things this way:

"Folk-rock didn't mean that you had to have folk instruments but you might take something that could be done on acoustics and beef it up some... And Fred and Timmy [Hardin] were intent upon having the music be first. Same with Richie Havens and John Sebastian. They weren't up there to do tricks and stuff. They were serious musicians. I took it as a form of folk-jazz myself..."5.

If this was Linhart's aesthetics, Max Ochs carried on more cohesion, playing steel guitar and also the electric slide, taking the music to raga, drifting through the Gretsch Electromatic neck. According to Ochs what the Sons formerly crafted might be called "soulful rhythmic folk rock, with powerful vocals by Buzz in the style of Ray Charles, and above average original songs composed by Buzz." Ray Charles' shadow fell over Fred Neil, Tim Hardin, Richie Havens and Buzzy himself.

Listeners would hear the swinging lament of the blues, intoning to find the liveliest diction, repeating the vocal phrasing at different levels and on the spot, but at the same time, that stubborn lack of fixation in pitch, improvising on the tempo, scatting about to get lost. All of this upon a rhythm & folk-blues impulse. In 1960, Neil and Dino Valenti used to cover Ray Charles's "What I'd Say" when performed as a duo at the Cafe Wha? Neil's "That's The Bag I'm In" and "The Sky Is Fallin'" and Tim Hardin's "Reputation" and "Yellow Cab" would be staples in the Sons' and Buzzy's repertoires.



The instrumental amalgamation of the Sons came together in a wider degree since late 1965 and throughout 1966, at least until DeNaut and Ochs said goodbye. The NYC scene had broke into psych-pop/rock and obscured rhythm and blues units while the folksinger scene started being looked out of fashion. After the Lovin' Spoonful's success, at those electrified Village nights appearing other bands such as the Myddle Class, The Magicians, The Strangers and The Blue Magoos, mostly releasing singles. On the other hand, there was stranger fair like The Godz, Holy Modal Rounders, The Fugs and the Jim Kweskin Jugband (from Boston) which would be booked by labels like ESP, Vanguard and Verve (MGM), through Verve/Folkways and Verve/Forecast, which was Richie Havens' and Tim Hardin's home in the mid-late 1960's.

But in The Sons, there is the community element and the choral distension attached to the blues, Their organically variable stylings were difficult (if not imposible) to pigeonhole by any label. According to all the sources, they always were rehearsing and jamming, sharing time with other musicians. In the first part of this account, we saw how the Katzan/Ochs East Village loft hosted an incredible asortment of names: David Blue, Jesse Colin Young, Felix Pappalardi, John Sebastian, Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James, Jesse Fuller, Paul Butterfield, Gram Parsons.

Skip James and Mississippi John Hurt slept at the Katzan's loft when they came to the city to tour the Village and folk festivals. Ochs tells how much those circles assessed old blues and forefathers like Skip James or John Hurt: "a deep profound almost immeasurable influence on me and the whole folk scene. Almost like religious devotion."



In March 1966, the Sons came back to play the Cafe au Go Go. A bunch of dates with The Fugs were "very trippy" in DeNaut words. In the Spring, the Sons briefly toured the East Coast with The Chamber Brothers, and also did some dates with The Paul Butterfield Blues Band. In the Village, the band kept performing at joints like the Bitter End regularly and also the Gaslight, the Flat Black Pussycat and Gerde's Folk City (where Buzzy as a solo act would become a fave through the 1970's). As Ochs explains:

"Buzz was a genius, a charismatic and authentic composer. His voice was like "the white Ray Charles." It was a privilege to play with him... He was funny, always joking, he was a personality... He was a real showbussiness star... In between sets with the Sons, when Buzzy performed one of his solo sets, Bob Dylan joined to him singing along 'Oxford Town.'"

This story extends beyond, according to Buzzy himself, as he told years later, if speaking unfairly about his former bandmates:

"(Bob Dylan) had written a song about me for me to play vibes on. And my other band members at the time, who were not perhaps the proper band members were not happy for me at all and said that if I played on Dylan's album and he didn't use them that they wouldn't play with me any more. I just was always brought up to try to be nice and I told Bob I was sorry I couldn't play on his album. And that song was "Like A Rolling Stone." And Al Kooper did a magical thing on there with the organ..."



Randy Burns, another folk-blues act who recorded three albums issued by ESP in between 1966-1967, saw the Sons during a former mini fest.

"The Morning, my band back then, played with the Seventh Sons, the Fugs and Tiny Tim at the Village Theatre. Sold out benefit for the breast cancer. Each act was great... The Sons were good, solid, fun... They were doing a little raga in their sets. Some rock and some really strange music too. Innovative. Everyone in the Village loved them."6

A rare item about the band appeared in May 1966 Hit Parader movies section. A mysterious brief review including a pic featuring Ochs and Buzzy backstage at the Cafe au Go Go. Vagabond Beets was a forgotten film for teenagers (starring Mickey Rooney), whose "background music features half backed rags by the Lizz Bunhart (sic) locomotor ataxia." Any reference about this film (not even among the actors' filmographies) could be found. It's a soundtrack that has never been apparently named, not even in the BuzzArt (Buzzy Linhart legacy) webpage.

The quartet got to play in Cocoa Beach (Florida) opening for Freddy Cannon. According to DeNaut, they performed in Cleveland (Buzzy's and Neil's hometown) a few times "to packed houses and probably did the best shows we had ever done." The Seventh Sons never played the West Coast but did perform in Chicago, Ohio, Philadelphia, "We opened for The Doors!" says an enthusiastic Max Ochs. This occured probably when the fabled L.A. band traveled from the West Coast to the East Coast for the first time, in November 1966, during its stint at the Ondine Discotheque in NYC, or when the Doors acted in Brockton, Massachussets, in late 1966.

In December 1966, The Sons was the main act at the first be-ins in Tompkins Square Flick-Theque, opened by The Magic Mushrooms. The gig was full of films, color projections and acid tests. In the poster, the "Raga And Rock" motif featured bigger-lettered than The Seventh Sons name. Buzzy: "It was so funny 'cause we were the biggest band that no one had ever heard of before. We were just waiting and playing one big giant thing every couple of months."



During 1966, The Seventh Sons recorded demos for Mercury, Capitol and Elektra. It was at the time they also were photographed for promotion purposes. There are a few promotional portraits of the quartet (Linhart/Katzan/DeNaut/Ochs) taken when the folk-rock fever already was turning into psychedelia -the sound that they had advanced so early as 1964.

The demos included Buzzy's songs like "A Tear Outweights A Smile," "Time Will Show The Way," "Baby" and "Sing Joy," the Sons' sort of main (raga) theme. But the repertoire recorded for the labels was mostly based on covers: "Willie Gene" by the obscure folksinger and actor Ben Carruthers, a folknik fave which Buzzy learnt from Crosby along with the aforementioned "Yellow Cab" and "Reputation" (both of them by Tim Hardin) and "Oxford Town" (Bob Dylan), "Parchman Farm" (Mose Allison) and "Goodtime Music" (Lovin' Spoonful).

According to Steve DeNaut, during the Elektra demo session, producer Paul Rothchild (Fred Neil, Tim Buckley, The Doors, Love) offered the band a deal, only if the drummer was substitued. Although Serge Katzan refused to leave his instrument.7. As DeNaut remembers:

"Serge was quite a personality. He predicted great things for us all and bankrolled the group. We really wanted to believe him. Serge made all of the bussiness decisions... I really liked the guy and miss him like crazy but he was a difficult manager to say the least... Offers were made but Serge turned them all down in hopes of a better deal. He was never satisfied and the companies fell by the wayside. It was the main reason that I quit after investing three or four years. We had worked so hard and didn't seem to be moving forward."

Ochs does not remember exactly the date he gave and left the Sons. By then, he would go back to the Yoga Ashram in upstate NY, where he inmersed in meditation. He would also be imprisoned for a year in New Mexico for attempting to block a military parade. Regarding his farewell,he concludes: "I think it was a philosophy/philosophical disagreement with Serge and a calling to migrate to the West Coast."



Indian cadences weren't so foreign in the US in the early 1960's. Jazz was taking it in via modalism some years back (ie. Sun Ra, John Coltrane, Yusef Lateef, Chico Hamilton, Gabor Szabo), when reapproaching bop and blues, and folk traditions within and outside North American. Noisy drones were performed at art galleries and other collective lofts in the Lower East Side, not too far from Katzan's loft. Serialism renegades (partly coming in from the Fluxus collective) played for hours the hypnotic power of durations and tones, inspired by Coltrane and Pandit Pran Nath. Tony Conrad, Angus McLise, Billy Name, John Cale, La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, Terry Jennings and Terry Riley got together, in different line-up variations, as The Theatre Of Eternal Music (The Dream Syndicate).

Searching for an alternative harmonic system, sustaining dense textures on static sound clouds, minimalism was founded on a partly Indian inspiration, tackling the individualist Western composer role and dissolving it in some ways. In the same pathway, Henry Flynt was applying modal frequencies using hillbilly instruments like steel guitar, banjo and fiddle. A new panavision about the creation of sound was shaped in a more comprehensive scene. As Ochs explains:

"Serge was friends with Philip Glass and.many conceptual artists like Bob Janz, Gene Highstein, Harvey Cohen, Michele Zeltzman... Donovan, Phil Ochs, Skip James played at the loft... There was an almost spiritual church feeling when we sat in a circle and played various instruments improvising ragas with 12 or 20 people, all under the influence of psychedelics... We felt that our music was relevant, valuable and important, with a message both in word and musical ideas too."

He goes on to explain how blues fit into the mix:

"I was in a group of people that liked old Mississippi blues, the old country blues from late 1920's and 1930's, bluesmen Robert Johnson, Mississippi John Hurt, Charley Patton... Those old records were 78 rpm, old blues and jazz but I also was listening to Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan. And because new records came out in 33 rpm, you could hear music from India and I loved that stuff too. I discovered by my own, because I could pick a slide guitar and making it sound like a sitar... Open 5ths... In sitar, in ragas, in India, they have no 3rds, no 3rds! Major or minor playing it was very easy. I was always playing ragas for everybody. I tuned my guitar in open 5th, DADDAD guitar tuning..."

Around this time at a Boston apartment, Ochs and Katzan were taped by producer ED Denson, John Fahey's partner at theTakoma label. Ochs, backed by Katzan on hand drums, would become a soloist on his own "Raga" track (which by the way has anything to do with the Sons later issued Raga). The song would open the historical Contemporary Guitar sampler album, issued by Takoma in February 1967, including songs by Ochs, Fahey, Basho, Harry Taussig and Bukka White. The track -really two separated pieces- keeps on captivating because of its rhythmcly daring and far timbric mind-blowing outing with huge Delta resonances.

Ochs would also record an obscure single for (the recently deceased) Joe Bussard and his tiny but decisive, folk label Fonotone. "Imaginational Anthem" was the name of the song and has given it title to the 21st century Tompkins Square label sampler series, which has re-discovered the American Primitive Guitar world, compiling instrumental guitarists and string players.



Buzzy's raga induction origins had been different, going back to Coconut Grove in 1964 when he co-wrote a song with an early fiance: "quoting a Ravi Shankar raga, a famous thing called Improvisations From Pather Panchali. It came out in 1959, with Bud Shank on flute... it is just mysterious... when you improvise, you often throw in other songs. It's just not that common a thing in rock... so magical and I really always wanted to get something that would sound more Indian than the normal guitar tuning... get like a raga sound... but I don't know anything more than these open fifths."

Buzzy was referring to Shankar's take of his own Pather Panchali film theme, issued by World Pacific label. But it was Sandy Bull (as it was told in the first part of this article) who would teach him all that needed to know about those mysterious open fifths. Bull, John Fahey and Robbie Basho had opened the steel guitar tuning to the Indian fluidity in the early 1960's, but also made room for other inspirations aside the strictly Hindustani, not caring if they came from the Middle East, Japan or North Africa.

Among other raga and wide-open folk rock acts' achievements of the mid-1960's, Vanguard would release Sandy Bull, Mimi & Richard Farina and Peter Walker. 1966 was the year of raga in folk-rock and blues-rock. The Paul Butterfield Blues Band with Mike Bloomfield, The Byrds, Country Joe & The Fish and Buffalo Springfield performed it with different approach and diversity, breaking boundaries with exotic instruments and far frontiers, live and in the studio, much like many other bands in the West Coast and England.

But the Sons' excursionist side could sound like Fred Neil's "Cynicrustpetefredjohn Raga" (from his Capitol eponymous 1966 LP). A genuine stampede realm without trappings (four acoustic guitars, two of them 12-string), enabled by the guy who had provided the conviction to The Buzzy Linhart Trio to play in that vein during 1965.



With Ochs and DeNaut out of the Sons in late 1966 or early 1967, James Rock was recruited by Katzan and Buzzy possibly in the days in which the band toured the Northeast. Justly then, the Raga track/album was taped in Baltimore, where they had performed that night. ames Rock, who usually would play bass (instead DeNaut), would play second guitar on the recording, with Serge Katzan on Kenyan two-sided signal drum throughout. One Frank Evantoff would play flute as a special guest, aside being the recording engineer, because it was taped at his loft in Baltimore to test his new Ampex 601 reel-to-reel recorder.

Buzzy: "I'm glad he did record it and it was released as rough as it was, because it turns out we never did have any other official releases as the Seventh Sons."8 Taped sometime in 1967, the ESP label released it one year later, after the Sons had just broken up in June 1968. How the reel to reel tape landed at label head Bernard Stollman's NYC headquarters was not known- the ESP deal with the Sons apparently never existed.

"Raga" was performed by the Buzzy/Katzan/Rock/Evantoff quartet, Buzzy holding a 1910 Gibson 20-string harp-guitar, and without vibes aside -as was mistakenly credited in the original liner notes. The piece is really a 32-minute excerpt of an acoustic jam mostly instrumental but with non-verbal vocalization, plus some parts, phrasing and lyrics of the song "Sing Joy" and another Buzzy Linhart composition called "Wish I Could Find."

As Buzzy recalled: "(The Gibson 20-string harp guitar) didn't ring sympathetically, you've got to actually strike the ones that are on the harp part, but it's just great. You put big old fat piano strings on the low and you get a real low note. And string it any way you want it to and of course we put it together to play in this B mountain modal tuning... Actually, James Rock and I pass it back and forth a couple times. One is playing a six string and the other is playing the twenty string and we pass them back and forth."

Ochs does not like the album that much: "I thought it was not that good. Too long and repetitious, boring and lame to be realistically marketable unless the listener was very stoned -which the musicians obviously were."



There have been many presumed cultural shortcomings of The Seventh Sons. It goes without saying that precise 'Popular Music' is full of these impurities and inappropriateness, but also raga as such a measurable genre, using Western criteria, has no place in the Indian heritage. Far from what is believed, Indian raga really lacks fixed rules and structures. O. C. Gangoly (Indian art and music scholar): "A raga is more than its physical form... It has a soul with which inhabit the body. In the language of Indian poetic this soul -this principle- is known as the Rasa, flavour, its sentiment, its impassioned feeling."9

As Derek Bailey (free form guitar improviser and author) explains: "Until its performance the raga is unformed. It is a set of ingredients all of which are variable and out of which the musician must fashion his performance, his interpretation of these elements... As with the most of the terms used in Indian music there is an ambiguity about the raga which makes a precise definition always, in some respects, misleading. But one can make a generalised description. It is, firstly, an ascending and descending series of svaras, a specific collection of notes which do not, on their own, establish the identity of the raga... The distinction might be in how the svaras are treated, how they are approached, how they are ordered or grouped, how they are felt, which svara is selected for emphasis."10



Nevertheless, the Sons' "Raga" make up the theme according to the mood of those present, in phases, and creating an unqiue mood and presence, determining its words. Like a tide crawled by the wind, it sways, guided by Linhart's voice (barely echoed by the others) and 20-string harp guitar, as if stretching. Elements close to jazz cannot fail to be head, but beyond the improvised nature, there is the inertia, that unclassifiable tendency where there's no individuality but the collective sounding as an unit.

Dissonant intermissions creep in on the strings, strutting across with atonal gravity, while in between, the flute outings wake up a displacement, a kind of charming amateur level, displaying waves with abrupt free blow parts. Laziness traps other times, the flute's disorderly entry/exit game and the whole on-the-spot ambience printed by the home recording gives us a very rough idea of the music of The Seventh Sons as they were, perhaps not at its best period (it had better heard with Ochs), but with the added flute (already not those early vibes), which create a weirdly brave mood by itself. In passages, the sum abstracts from the general perception, like a floating, rooted proof of an time and place, blurred by substance abuse but not neccesarily attached to it. A worthy experience to hear, even only as a single document.

Formerly, the album sold a few hundred copies. Reissued by ESP-Disk in Europe including liner notes by Steve DeNaut on CD, it was relaunched ilegally by the Fallout and Get Back labels, which retittled it as 4 AM At Frank's. Raga has become an obligatory ítem in psych rock and raga folk anthologies and discographies. Finally, the album was released digitally by BuzzyArt in 2016, enhancing the split track (previously side A and side B on vinyl). Other Seventh Sons items might be released in the future if the implied parts agree to do it. Aside the aforementioned demos, there are treasured reel to reel tapes including jams at the Katzan's loft to be discovered.




In June 1968, The Seventh Sons, again as a trio (Buzzy/Katzan/Rock), played its last ever gig, opening for Jeff Beck and the Grateful Dead at the Fillmore East. Buzzy: "We hadn't released a record yet but we had a following of a few thousand people playing all the be-ins with Abbie Hoffman and Professor Leary and Country Joe & The Fish." The Seventh Sons disolved permanently after that concert.

According to Ochs: "Serge returned to Annapolis with his little girl Dena, who is now my god-daughter." The drummer would be credited on Todd Rundgren's Something/Anything? (Bearsville, 1972) and would be Levon Helm's manager for some time, before retired. Buzzy would ignite his career as a soloist and successful pop composer. DeNaut would return to California to be a 16 magazine editor and an acting teacher. Frank Evantoff and James Rock would found the prog rock band The Organ Grinders, recording two albums. Katzan, DeNaut and Linhart have all passed away.

Currently living in Severna Park (Maryland), Max Ochs has kept writing poetry, and he has always been involved in an array of social and spiritual projects. Tompkins Square finally released the songs that he taped in the late 1960's, besides an entire new album called Hooray For Another Day (2008) with old and new instrumental blues and ragas.

Buzzy: "It's like that idea of free flow, like Kerouac could get into, but it's musical. You can get ideas for other parts of songs to throw in where you let your mind open..."

With the passing of the time, American Primitive Guitar and raga-ed drones have become an underground religion in the USA through a ton of progeny, including Sun City Girls, Gastr Del Sol, No Neck Blues Band, The Coney Island Drone Orchestra, Pelt, Spiral Joy Band, Jackie-O Motherfucker, Powers Rollins duo and more paying tribute to the Indian masters, Bull, Fahey, Basho, Flynt, Conrad, McLise et al. Since the 1990's, specialized labels have multiplied, deeping that music. As such, it is worth to put the Sons in its genuine and pioneering place, having been massively forgotten until now.

Maybe because of their precariousness at the borders of popular Music circuits, which gave them enough impetus to merge from a collective vision, the Seventh Sons maintained an exhilarating, if not vibrantly historical home in the lore of '60's music. Freed from Western Music patterns fixation but enhanced by diverse sources, languages, traditions and much loft jamming, the Sons always performed from a mesmerized stream, as if a river would never end, emptying, revealing the unmeasurable color of its Delta.


Thanks to Max Ochs, Steve DeNaut (RIP), Xeno Rasmussen, Randy Burns, Peter L. Neff, Simon Wordsworth, Pat Thomas, Cian McHugh, Jesss G. Hermosa.


NOTES

1. "The Seventh Sons," Green Groceries mag, Netherlands 2002.

2. All the Max Ochs quotes from an interview with the author, September 2022.

3. All the Steve DeNaut quotes from a 2001 interview with the author, except where noted.

4. Don Paulsen quotes from the Hit Parader mag (January and May 1966), Simon Wordsworth's "Fred Neil, The Last Great Undiscovered Greenwich Village Folk Legend" (Goldmine, April 1996) and Peter Neff's book That's The Bag I'm In. The Life, Music And Mystery Of Fred Neil (Blue Ceiling, 2019).

5. All the Buzzy Linhart quotes from the Robert Silverstein interview for Guitar Player magazine www.mwe3.com except where indicated.

6. Randy Burns interview with the author, October 2022.

7. The Buzzy Linhart Story, Shelly Toscano documentary, 2006.

8. The Seventh Sons 4 AM at Frank's Restored Raga (Bandcamp, Decenber 2016)

9-10 Derek Bailey: Improvisation. Its Nature And Practice In Music. (Da Capo, 1993).


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