Can empowerment flower again?
Jonathan Taplin, who went from managing ’60s bands to producing Scorsese, wonders if pop culture can still make a difference
Jonathan Taplin had just graduated from high school in 1965 when fate delivered him backstage at the Newport Folk Festival on the weekend Bob Dylan plugged in his electric guitar and turned the worlds of folk music and rock ’n’ roll upside down.
Taplin didn’t know it, but his life would change as well, as his new memoir, “The Magic Years: Scenes from a Rock-and-Roll Life,” describes.
In time, Taplin would work as road manager for Dylan, the Band and Judy Collins, among others. He produced George Harrison’s Concert for Bangladesh, with stars such as Eric Clapton and Ringo Starr. He was at Woodstock with the Band; he connected the Rolling Stones with artist Robert Frank, who produced their iconic “Exile on Main Street” album art (and a later, largely suppressed documentary).
When Taplin left music for the movies, his first film as an independent producer was something called “Mean Streets,” the breakout film for then-unknown director Martin Scorsese. A few years later, he connected the billionaire Bass family of Texas with the Walt Disney Co. to help fight off a hostile takeover.
“You know, there was a Creedence Clearwater Revival song called ‘Fortunate Son,’ ” Taplin says of the way his life had been planned for him: Princeton, then Harvard, then joining his father’s law firm. But things turned out much differently than planned.
“The Greeks talk about the role of Fortuna,” he says of the goddess of luck. “I would meet somebody, like I take Bob Dylan to the Isle of Wight Festival, then George Harrison would show up in a helicopter. And then he kind of took to me and invited me to his house.
“Out of that came Bangladesh, and then out of Bangladesh came an invitation to do the Rolling Stones tour. And, well, I’d just had all this trouble with Eric Clapton, and Keith Richards seemed to be suffering from the same disease, and I thought, it was hard enough for one night — doing it for a 50-city tour, I would die.”
So instead, Taplin headed to Hollywood, taking his own advice, which he’s often shared with students as a professor at USC:
“When a great opportunity presents itself, don’t be afraid to take it.”
Music and culture
As a teen during the early ’60s, Taplin stepped through a door that opened for him when he embraced the civil rights movement.
Folk music was often the soundtrack for protests, marches and gatherings, and in “The Magic Years” he writes about the ways music and culture worked together to advance society and democracy.
His sense that this is no longer the case was why he decided to write the memoir, Taplin says.
“I think the political events of the last year kind of triggered a kind of memory sense of the early days of the civil rights movement,” he says. “You know, I’m almost 74. I came into that movement in 1963, and in that sense, it was very much a multiracial movement, White kids, Black kids, Brown kids.
“And the cultural part of it was very important,” Taplin says. “The music was a crucial piece of the puzzle. If you were involved in a sit-in, the music was a way to kind of keep your courage up.
“So on one level, I saw some parallels in the Black Lives Matter marches last summer, where it was very much a cross-racial solidarity kind of thing. And on another hand, I felt that maybe there was a little piece missing, too, in the sense that I’m not sure that the musicians are as culturally engaged as they were in 1963.”
“That worries me, and it also worries me that the pop culture writ large has a kind of nihilistic tone to it,” Taplin says, referencing the rise of the antihero in film and television and the often materialistic, self-focused nature of pop music today.
“Bob was the first person that just reached out to me and grabbed me by the throat,” Taplin says of the appeal of Dylan’s music and his message. “That was a combination of both the sense of rebellious stance — the times they are a-changin’, mothers and fathers get out of the way — and it just felt like it was speaking to me.
“In that sense, it really reached me in a very deep way,” he says. “It was tied up in the social movement of the day, you know.
“We were trying to change the world.”
Going Hollywood
When Taplin decided to leave music for the movies in the early ’70s, he did so with the naivete of someone who didn’t entirely know what he was getting into.
“I essentially had been a concert producer for four years, so I figured I could produce,” he says. “I could organize a crew and keep the train moving, you know.
“But my perception was that maybe people in Hollywood were a little more personally responsible,” Taplin says of the frustrations that had grown as some members of the Band became less than reliable on the road.
“So I thought, well, let me try something else, and I was fairly soon disabused of the notion that the film actors were completely responsible,” he says, mentioning an actor he encountered a few years later. “He was just a crazy man. He was just as out there as any rock ’n’ roller could be.”
For “Mean Streets,” which alongside Scorsese put actors Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel on the map, Taplin says he quickly learned another important lesson about Hollywood.
“Nobody told me you weren’t supposed to invest your own money,” he says, laughing. “OPM, you know, that’s what they say in Hollywood: other people’s money.”
It worked out in the end, as “Mean Streets” was released to acclaim, played the Cannes Film Festival, and Taplin recouped his portion of the $500,000 budget.
Over the years that followed, he produced or executive produced such films as “The Last Waltz,” Scorsese’s concert film about the Band’s farewell shows; “Until the End of the World” from German auteur Wim Wenders; and “To Die For,” the Nicole Kidman black comedy from director Gus Van Sant.
He also made headlines in Hollywood trade publications in the mid’90s when producer Harvey Weinstein accosted him in a restaurant during the Sundance Film Festival after Taplin sold distribution rights to “Shine,” which later earned actor Geoffrey Rush an Oscar for best actor, to Fine Line and not Weinstein’s Miramax.
Glimmers of hope
Taplin’s 2017 book, “Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy,” covered areas that “The Magic Years” addresses more peripherally.
While Taplin appreciates many of the advances technology has delivered, he remains concerned about the impact of social media on society at large.
But beyond the algorithm-driven chart-toppers and box-office winners, Taplin says he remains optimistic that music and movies remain culturally and politically influential even if it’s harder for their signals to cut through all the noise.
“You have to remember that in ’62, ’63, the big hits on the radio were Frankie Avalon and Fabian,” he says. “Bob Dylan was not selling any records. He was making records, but his first record sold like 4,000 copies. So it’s not as if the significant cultural stuff is necessarily always popular.
“It’s usually the pop stuff is like Marvel movies,” Taplin says. “Marty [Scorsese] calls them theme-park rides, the stuff that’s most popular. And then there’s, you know, ‘Nomadland’ or ‘Judas and the Black Messiah.’ They aren’t the most popular movies at all, but at least they’re trying to say something.
“So that’s always a tension that exists.”
Taplin serves on the board of the Americana Music Association and says that every year at its festival in Nashville, Tennessee, he’s heartened by artists new and old, from singerbanjoist Rhiannon Giddens to Mavis Staples, Jason Isbell to Brandi Carlile.
“Now, they don’t sell a huge number of records but they have a very passionate community around them,” Taplin says. “So it could be we’re in that 1962-63 phase, where there’s a lot of stuff that’s kind of irrelevant that’s clogging the radio waves.
“But underneath, underground, there’s this other stuff that’s very important, and we’ve got to just look for it,” he says.
“I mean, who the hell remembers Fabian’s records today? And Bob Dylan is still part of our canon.”