Fred Neil - A Dolphin in Greenwich Village

You know “Everybody's Talkin'”, the main theme from “Midnight Cowboy”, the 1969 film directed by John Schlesinger and released in Italy under the title “Un uomo da marciapiede”? Well: even though it was sung by Harry Nilsson, that song was written by Fred Neil, one of the most underrated songwriters of his era and, for many who experienced it firsthand, nothing less than “the songwriter par excellence” or “the songwriter's songwriter”.

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, on March 16, 1936, but raised in St. Petersburg, Florida, the young Fred fell in love with music while following his father, a jukebox salesman and record supplier, around the United States. From childhood he found himself immersed in a nearly boundless musical landscape, practically hearing every record released in the Forties and Fifties. In church, he absorbed the intense language of gospel; at home, meanwhile, he grappled with the hard, spare stories of the hillbilly sound of Hank Williams and Floyd Tillman, artists he came to love and respect unreservedly. Then came the wild rock'n'roll of Jerry Lee Lewis and Buddy Holly, influences that shaped him alongside the polished, urban songcraft of Brill Building pop.
His ambition to become a songwriter drove him to seek his fortune in New York. So, to make ends meet, in 1958 he started writing songs for other artists right in the famous Brill Building, at the time the symbolic headquarters of the American music industry. It wasn't what he wanted, but it was as good a starting point as any, especially since, in the meantime, he had also married Elaine Berman, from whom he would divorce two years later. One of his songs was even recorded by Buddy Holly (“Come Back Baby”), but the latter's sudden death in 1959 kept it from being released. Undeterred, Fred kept writing songs on his own as well, just as the folk-revival movement was beginning to make its presence felt. His first hit as a writer was “Candy Man” (co-written with Beverley Ross), which ended up as the B-side of “Crying,” one of Roy Orbison's biggest hits.
When, however, he felt he had grown tired of that life, he left it all behind and plunged into the bustling world of artists in Greenwich Village, in the west side of Lower Manhattan.

Between the Fifties and Sixties, Greenwich Village established itself as one of New York's main cultural hubs, driven by an intense, freewheeling nightlife. Its streets were dotted with cafés, small stages, alternative hangouts and venues frequented by musicians, students and artists of every stripe. On weekends, Washington Square Park became an informal crossroads of encounters and improvised performances, charged with a strong appetite for experimentation and creative freedom. In that environment, free of rigid rules, folk singers, blues musicians and jazz players ended up cross-pollinating one another, sharing experiences, repertoires and influences.
Many clubs hosted open evenings devoted to emerging talent. These were the so-called hootenannies, where anyone could get up on stage and perform their own music. Venues like Café Wha?, the Bitter End, Gerde's Folk City and the Gaslight helped shape a new, constantly evolving artistic scene. In just a few years, the folk ferment spread well beyond New York, giving rise to new musical communities in cities across America. As the original creative drive of rock'n'roll gradually ran its course, many young people found in folk fertile ground where civic commitment, artistic exploration and popular tradition could coexist, often in close dialogue with the roots of American blues.

(From left to right: Bob Dylan, Karen Dalton and Fred Neil — February 1961)

It was at Café Wha? that Fred made a name for himself, and it was there that a baby-faced Bob Dylan went looking for him one day: “The Café Wha? was a club on MacDougal Street, in the heart of Greenwich Village. A kind of underground cave with no liquor license, dimly lit, low-ceilinged, a bit like a large banquet hall fitted with tables and chairs. It opened at noon and closed at four in the morning. Someone had told me to go there and look for a singer named Freddy Neil, who hosted the afternoon show. I found the place. They told me Freddy was downstairs in the basement, where the coat check was, and that's where I met him.” According to Anthony Scaduto, Dylan's biographer, Fred was among the first to recognize the talent of the very young “minstrel from Duluth.”

Featured with three songs (“Linin Track,” “The Sky Is Falling” and “That's The Bag I'm In”) on the compilation “Hootenanny – Live At The Bitter End,” Fred had in the meantime formed a duo with guitarist Vince Martin (Vincent Marcellino). One evening, Jac Holzman of Elektra caught them performing at one of the Village's clubs and immediately offered them a contract. With contributions from John Sebastian (who would go on to lead the Lovin' Spoonful) and Felix Pappalardi (who would later produce the first two Cream albums before founding Mountain), the album Tear Down The Walls was put together, released in April 1964 and consisting mainly of reworkings of traditional songs (“I Know You Rider,” “Morning Dew,” “Lonesome Valley,” “Weary Blues,” “Linin' Track”) along with original Fred compositions in which folk (save for the raga-tinged mirages of “Baby”) was still very much a throwback to old times rather than a glimpse of worlds to come (the sweet, dreamy “Red Flowers,” the utopian title track, the fairy-tale feel of “Toy Balloon” – co-written with Martin – and a “Wild Child In A World Of Trouble” whose existential undertones already hinted at his solo career to come).

As Richie Unterberger rightly points out, "the most innovative features of the album are the arrangements, which combine two twelve-string guitars with Felix Pappalardi on guitarrón (a Mexican bass) and John Sebastian on harmonica. The result is an embryonic folk-rock, missing only electric guitar and drums to complete the transition."

While Elektra was already thinking about a second album, Neil voiced all his doubts about continuing the duo's experience and, after boycotting the recording of a show (which also cost him a furious row with Pappalardi), he managed to convince Holzman to give him a shot as a solo artist.
So, still backed by Sebastian and Pappalardi, joined now by Pete Childs on second guitar and Douglas Hatelid on bass, in May 1965 he released Bleecker & MacDougal, an album whose cover portrayed the singer-songwriter strolling with his guitar through a nocturnal Greenwich Village, right where the two streets of the title intersect. In the photo, taken by Mort Schuman, you can also spot the San Remo Cafe, the famous haunt frequented for years by writers and musicians. And yet, in these grooves the spirit of the folk revival was gone, replaced by a folk-blues that turned enchanting on "Blues On The Ceiling", "Yonder Comes The Blues" and "Handful Of Gimme", chugged along like a train on "Mississippi Train", and alternated between skittish and jaunty on "Sweet Mama" and "Candy Man". On the opening title track, that blend showed real vigor, as Fred gave voice to his nostalgia for his own Ithaca:

I was standing on the corner
Of the Bleecker and MacDougal
Wondering which way to go
I’ve got a woman down in Coconut Grove
And you know she love me so
I wanna go home

Fred, a man of the South, looks back to his roots on the furious "Country Boy". "Other Side Of This Life", meanwhile, is his most famous song after "Everybody's Talkin'": in the years to come it would be covered by Peter, Paul & Mary, Lovin' Spoonful, Youngbloods and, above all, by the Jefferson Airplane, who turned it into a live staple. On "Other Side of This Life", Fred reveals that his life is in chaos and that wandering is his preferred condition. Always being on the move suits his restlessness - indeed, it's its most visible reflection. The price, more often than not, is loneliness, also because, in the vein of Kerouac's "On The Road", the real journey presupposes no destination at all, only an inexhaustible search for the self, so that the title's "other side of this life" alludes to an existential possibility destined to always remain out of reach.

Would you like to know a secret
Just between you and me?
I don’t know where I’m going next
I don’t know where I’m gonna be
But that’s the other side to this life I’ve been leading
But that’s the other side to this life

The album's best and most magical moments, however, lie elsewhere: "Little Bit Of Rain", a shadowy ode wrapped in the watery reverb of the guitar, which brings out Fred's most introspective side, one that would go on to influence countless songwriters in the years to come; "Travelin' Shoes" and "Gone Again", in which the fusion of folk and rock (already foreshadowed by Dylan's "Bringing It All Back Home") is captured in all its raw effectiveness; and, finally, "The Water Is Wide", a drifting that is really an eternal return to the self, somewhere between jazz-tinged candor and ecstatic wonder, with Fred's voice - a deep, cavernous baritone, shaped by both folk and gospel - landing like a caress on the heart.

But love is gentle
And love is kind
As to a jewel
When first it’s new
But love grows old
And it fades with time
And it fades away
Like morning dew

Build me a boat
That could carry two
And both shall row
My love and I
My love and I
My love and I

From a lyrical standpoint, Bleecker & MacDougal showed just how original Fred Neil was compared to most of his peers. Here again Unterberger offers a sharp insight: "At a time when many of his contemporaries wanted to change the world or vent personal frustrations, Neil came across as a detached observer, at times puzzled, occasionally overwhelmed, a country man who above all wanted to escape the chaos of the big city for a private refuge of his own. He also avoided traditional verse-chorus-bridge structures in favor of slow, elliptical compositions, where mood and expressiveness mattered more than direct messages."

The sessions for Bleecker & MacDougal had been far from easy. Exasperated by clashes with producer Paul Rothchild, Fred one day walked out of the recording studio without saying when - or indeed whether - he would return. To keep the project from grinding to a permanent halt, his most trusted collaborator, Pete Childs, took him in at the Greenwich Village apartment he shared with John Sebastian and invited him to make music together to ease the tension. The performances, captured on tape and released only in 2020 as 38 MacDougal, show the two friends at one of the most genuine moments of their collaboration. The repertoire includes several songs that would later end up on Bleecker & MacDougal, alongside an intense version of the blues standard "Sweet Cocaine" and two traditional numbers rarely associated with his recorded output: "Once I Had A Sweetheart" and "Blind Man Standing By The Road And Crying".

Despite the merits of Bleecker & MacDougal, an album that captured a moment of transition between traditional folk and what would later become folk-rock, Fred's fame remained confined to a small circle of devotees. No great loss: he was a shy type, and the spotlight certainly didn't do much for him. Seizing the opportunity to recharge, he retreated to Coconut Grove, Miami's oldest neighborhood, returning to New York only now and then, and solely to perform with the Seventh Sons, a group of friends that included multi-instrumentalist Buzzy Linhart, who enjoyed stretching out into long improvisations somewhere between raga-rock and psych-folk (without Fred, in 1968 they would release their first and only album, "4:00 A.M. at Frank's").

(Fred with the Seventh Sons)

During his time in Florida, Neil discovered the Miami Seaquarium, home to dolphins and cetaceans living freely. It was love at first sight: he learned to care for the younger dolphins while, guitar in hand, he tried every way he could to communicate with them. Toward the end of 1966, Fred was forced to leave that little paradise behind, as he was expected at a studio in Los Angeles. Herb Cohen, who had meanwhile become his manager, had convinced him to leave Elektra (which, in his view, was doing too little to promote his music) and sign with Capitol, who immediately pushed for a new record to be made. No great matter, because his love for dolphins certainly hadn't been set aside, and the song "The Dolphins", one of the finest on his self-titled album (December 1966), stands as proof, with its tremulous guitar flutters (evoking the dance of light on the waves) and that placid, resigned gait which his warm, deep voice caresses as one would a wounded animal, reminding us that this world "ain't never gonna change the way it's been" and that no wars "can change it back again". If it's hard to tell the world how to live in harmony, it's certain that "peace will come when all hate is gone". Meanwhile, Fred keeps searching for the dolphins, “l’emblema/ dell’Altro che cerchiamo/ con affanno” (lines by Giorgio Caproni), playful souls of the ocean symbolizing freedom, harmony and the salvation of the shipwrecked.

This old world aint never change the way it's been
And all the ways of war can't change it back again
I've been a-searchin' for the dolphins in the sea
And sometimes I wonder, do you ever think of me
I'm not the one to tell this old world how to get along
I only know that peace will come when all hate is gone
I've been a-searchin' for the dolphins in the sea
And sometimes I wonder, do you ever think of me

"The Dolphins" was evidently inspired by his visits to the Miami Seaquarium, where he was especially taken with Kathy, one of the five dolphins made famous by the TV series "Flipper" (which aired between 1964 and 1967) and trained by Ric O'Barry, who ended up becoming a close friend of Fred's.
As O'Barry himself recalled: "I let him be with the dolphins because I knew he took the idea of interspecies communication seriously. I remember Kathy coming up onto a floating platform at water level, while he played a D chord in open tuning, trying out different things. She'd come up out of the water and touch the guitar, tapping on the wood, examining it. It was clear she was trying to communicate too. She'd follow the strings down to Fred's left hand and would even go so far as to pluck them. It was a fascinating thing to see."

On "Everybody's Talkin'", Fred sings of his longing to return to Florida's sun-drenched, soothing landscapes. Surrounded there in the Village by thousands of people, all he can perceive is the echo of his own thoughts and the shadows lurking in other people's eyes. All that's left for him is to head toward the sun, the one that "keeps on shining/ through the pouring rain", almost in a crossed-glances exchange with Albert Camus, the poet of the absurd who, just a few years earlier, had discovered, in the depths of winter, an "invincible summer" within himself.

Fred Neil reflects the condition of a man who hasn't set his anxieties aside: he has simply accepted them, turning them into the subject of deep meditation. This comes through in the delicate yet introspectively glimmering textures of "I've Got A Secret (Didn't We Shake Sugaree)" (from the songbook of Elizabeth Cotten), in the West Coast scents gathering around the nonsense of "Badi-Da", but also in the instrumental excursions - between jazz, raga and exotic spices (Cyrus Faryar on bouzouki) - of "Cynicrustpetefredjohn Raga", eight minutes and sixteen seconds born of the experience with the Seventh Sons and close in spirit to the syncretic vision of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band's seminal "East-West", in which one can already catch a foretaste of the acid-rock "trips" that would soon flood into popular music. When, on the other hand, folk and blues shake hands rather absent-mindedly, the result is more ordinary fare like "That's The Bag I'm In" and "Sweet Cocaine". By contrast, while "Green Rocky Road" wins us over with its hypnotic pulse and a refrain ("Who do you love") that winks at Bo Diddley, "Faretheewell (Fred's Tune)" reminds us how often love and suffering go hand in hand.

Woke up this morning
It was drizzlin’ rain
All around my heart
Was an aching pain

Faretheewell
Oh my honey
Faretheewell
Faretheewell

Unlike what Paul Rothchild had done at Elektra, the new producer, Nick Venet, avoided interfering too much with the free flow of Fred's music, letting it make its own way from the instruments to the mixing desk. Venet, after all, had understood that if you really wanted to get something out of Fred, you had to forgo "producing" his music in the classic sense: "We'd just walk into the studio and say, 'What are we doing today?' Once Fred said, 'How do we come up with something new?', and I started playing a riff that later became 'Green Green Rocky Road'. As for planning or preparing things, that wasn't Fred at all. Everything was spontaneous. So spontaneous that I could point to at least one whole song, and part of another, where the bass and drums are out of time with the rest of the instruments. Things could get really loose. Did Fred work meticulously on details? No, no, no. That was absolutely not his style."

Just like Bleecker & MacDougal, this new record too (featuring, among others, the trusty Pete Childs, bassist James Edward Bond Jr., better known as Jimmy Bond, and drummer Billy Mundy, at the time still orbiting the Zappa-led Mothers Of Invention) sold very little, mostly due to Fred's reluctance to tour and promote his own records.
Increasingly convinced he was an exile in New York, Fred began to think of music in terms of pure expressive freedom. So, in October 1967, he recorded several late-night improvisations again with Bond, Childs and other guitarists, including Bruce Langhorne, already a veteran of Bob Dylan's circle. Much of that material went into Sessions (January 1968), presented in the liner notes as a collection of "eight transcriptions of the life of Fred Neil", an artist captured live as he stretches out, in the act of improvising, songs that had been born in perfect solitude.
The result is his most dynamic and free-flowing record, split between intense reworkings of other people's songs ("Please Send Me Someone To Love" by Percy Mayfield, marked by his vibrant baritone), gritty folk-rock pieces more or less tinged with blues ("Fools Are A Long Time Comin'" by Herb Metoyer, "Rolls On Rosie" and a "Looks Like Rain" enriched by a great guitar interplay), and odysseys fit for a true star-sailor, in which, having set the rock component aside, Fred transfigures folk into a matter of crystalline strings, the deepest unease and plunges into the murkiest waters of the unconscious — the same waters into which, a couple of years later, Tim Buckley would dive on the enigmatic and immense "Lorca" ("Merry Go Round" and above all the slowcore ante litteram of "Look Over Yonder", whose absorbed slowness and rarefied lyricism anticipate both the melancholy of "Driftin'" and the metaphysical breath of "Anonymous Proposition").

Look over yonder
Hot sun turnin’ over
Look over yonder
Hot sun turnin’ over
And it won’t go down
No, don’t go down

Can’t you hear
Whippoorwills wailin’
Can’t you hear
Whippoorwills wailin’
Sure sign of rain
Sure sign of rain

The fluid, almost extemporaneous nature of these compositions betrayed a deeper affinity with the language of jazz than with the folk tradition of Greenwich Village, and this was reflected both in Fred's artistic approach and in his peculiar way of accompanying himself on 12-string guitar, built on broken rhythms, unpredictable accents and a dense, shadowy, strongly rhythmic sound, far removed from the characteristic jingle-jangle of Roger McGuinn. This expressive openness also found fertile ground in his baritone timbre, which had a natural affinity with the language of blues. Freed from the conventions of the traditional ballad and from rigid two-part harmonies, his singing could finally expand with greater freedom, exploring the poetic labyrinths of the human voice.
As Odetta once put it: "There are two voices I've heard in my life that no microphone can really capture. One is Paul Robeson's, the other is Fred's. When you hear him live, there are other levels. His voice is a healing instrument."
With hindsight, if Tim Buckley remains rock's greatest "starsailor", Fred Neil was unquestionably its archetype, and that ought to be remembered more often, because a thick blanket of oblivion still hangs over him, and above all over these most precious grooves of his.

The experiment of Sessions (in the end, Fred's masterpiece, alongside his self-titled 1967 record) pleased Venet above all, who began keeping a close watch on an artist increasingly reluctant to make music his main occupation. The producer nonetheless managed to convince him to record more material, on which, it seems, Fred was also backed by Johnny Cash and Kris Kristofferson. But nothing ever came of it. Meanwhile, some of his songs kept being covered by other artists, in more than one case achieving no small success, sometimes even a resounding one, as in the case of "Everybody's Talkin'", whose cover by Harry Nilsson was already mentioned at the start of this story.

It was precisely at the peak of his success that Fred once again chose to disappear. In the end, it was to be expected. A man like him wasn't cut out for the spotlight. He rejected the logic of the record industry, avoided touring, didn't much care for being in the studio recording his songs, and had besides developed a growing aversion to the image of the "singer-songwriter on display", to the point of feeling that performing in public was, in part, alien to his very nature. So, buoyed also by the financial independence he'd achieved thanks to the royalties from "Everybody's Talkin'" (which had grown enormously after the success of "Midnight Cowboy"), he initially turned down both the Woodstock festival and the one in Miami, also refusing to appear on several television shows. Venet, however, didn't give up, and one way or another managed to get him back into the studio, where he recorded reworkings of some traditional songs with the help of, among others, Dino Valenti, Gram Parsons and Stephen Stills. That wasn't enough to fill a whole album, so Capitol added a live set recorded at a club in Woodstock, including some of his most important songs, among them "Everybody's Talkin'" and "The Dolphins". The result, Other Side Of This Life (1971), marked Fred's swan song, after which he retreated to the coast of South Florida, to be near his beloved dolphins and devote himself to the Dolphin Project (initially called the Dolphin Research Project), an organization founded in April 1970 by Ric O'Barry and funded, in its early years, by donations and benefit concerts held at the Coconut Grove Playhouse.

Despite everything, Fred kept on recording music, but most of that material remained unreleased. These recordings include some 1973 sessions with John Cipollina of Quicksilver Messenger Service, recordings made in Woodstock with guitarist Arlen Roth, others with John Sebastian on harmonica, Harvey Brooks on bass and Pete Childs on guitar at the 1975 Montreux Jazz Festival, and, at least according to Ric O'Barry, two albums of covers of little-known songs made between 1977 and 1978, which Columbia Records refused to release because it was after something more commercial… According to O'Barry, the first of these projects was recorded in Miami with a stripped-down lineup, with Fred backed by the faithful Pete Childs on guitar, John Sebastian on harmonica and Harvey Brooks on bass. The second record, made the following year, instead featured richer arrangements and the participation of the celebrated New York session band Stuff, along with some longtime friends such as Slick Aguilar. The repertoire included compositions by writers such as Bobby Charles, John Braheny, Bobby Ingram, Billy Joe Shaver and Billy Roberts, the latter the author of "Hey Joe".

His last public performance dates back to 1981, at an open-air concert at the Old Grove Pub in Coconut Grove, where he joined Buzzy Linhart for a song and stayed on stage for the rest of the set.
In the years that followed he lived an increasingly reclusive life in his beloved Florida, where he passed away in 2001, after battling skin cancer.
Years after his death, his old friend Childs tried to sum up his essence this way: "There's a line from one of his songs that I often use to describe him: 'a lost child in a world of pain'. Fred was too sensitive. He'd pull away from things most people would normally run towards, because he couldn't bear the pain of them. He paid a price for that sensitivity, but it was genuine. He was a tormented soul, but a golden one, who gave the world something truly precious".