Hale and Richard:The Spark of the Covenant

I’ve been invited to rock ‘n’ roll’s inner sanctum by its madcap custodians; they who will usher me into the catacombs from whose torchlit stores they assemble their annual tent revival at the Lobero theatre. They’ve put together a particularly wig-flipping rock show for José Lobero’s venerable 150-year-old opera house, the curtain rising on their newest and trippiest on August 29^th. 

Hale Milgrim and Richard Salzberg are so frankly thrilled with what they’re about to unveil they’ve invited a prize-festooned music journalist into their secretive hideaway to get a taste. That didn’t work out for them and they had to settle. I assure you, I am up to the… I’m up… aw hell, what’s –TASK! I am up to the task.

I’m conflicted, though, about gazing into the Vault of Boundless Rock ‘n’ Roll Wisdom, my face bathed in the unearthly light of transcendence. Am I worthy? Will my awestruck expression morph to one of piercing horror as I hideously melt in time-lapse? I saw that in a movie once and it was not cool. Fingers crossed.

“Jeff, come on in!” 

The former President and CEO of Capitol Records grinningly gestures me into the house with a mild game show flourish. Hale Milgrim is onetime steward of the iconic record label synonymous with generation-spanning American popular music, the legendary cultural juggernaut whose offices at 1750 North Vine in Hollywood famously mimic a stack of records 150’ tall. Milgrim’s Partner in 4/4 Time, Richard Salzberg is an all-encompassing rock ‘n’’ roll resource, an archivist, walking library, and rock proselytizer. Salzberg extends a hand in greeting, smiling through his power moustache. 

Milgrim cuts a slightly more diaphanous figure. I notice immediately his facial expression is continually alight, eyebrows arched in seeming perpetual wonder even as he stands in the middle of a familiar room. Milgrim’s deportment is buoyant and he wears an amused, unfaltering grin; a human-scale character balloon cut loose from the parade, a genie. 

We say our hellos and they start riffing as they talk to me. The tour will begin upstairs, and Milgrim cracks wise. “Why don’t we just take the escalator?” Richard starts in about a neighbor’s elevator, a pneumatic tube of the kind banks use to shuttle paperwork around the building. 

“What Richard didn’t tell you,” Milgrim murmurs in a confidential tone, “is they have to shrink you down, put you in a little package and send you on up!” He reconnoiters. “What was that movie with the shrinking submarine?” 

“Fantastic Voyage!” I reply, citing 1967’s true story of a surgical team injected into the neck of an injured diplomat. Raquel Welch is attacked by leucocytes and Donald Pleasence is eaten by a white corpuscle. I mention the Raquel Welch business and there is a moment of deafening silence. 

“Let’s head upstairs,” Richard says.

UPS UPS AND AWAY

“I’d known about Hale through mutual friends of ours that owned a record store in town…” (Just Play Music) “…so I knew about Hale. I knew that he’d been president of Capitol Records, and we would occasionally run into each other at the UPS store, next to Peet’s Coffee on State Street.” 

Today these guys’ renowned and utterly implausible extravaganza at Santa Barbara’s Lobero Theatre is a rock ‘n’ roller’s wet dream (very very figuratively speaking), a gathering that may best be described as a secular church service with amplified apparitions. The yearly Lobero staple mines Hale Milgrim’s endless font of rock ‘n’ roll anecdotes, Richard Salzberg’s overflowing wellspring of music knowledge (not sure why the sudden water imagery, but let’s move on), and the congregation’s deep-seated faith in rock ‘n’ roll’s ability to both bend metal and stir the hardened heart. 

“Richard has an incredible wealth of content,” Milgrim says. “Wonderful music and artists that in some cases only a few people have seen. But that’s a key.” 

The top of the stairs open onto a kind of large loft with several doors leading to separate rooms. In a corner of the loft overlooking the home’s lower level there is a large desk with computer, above which a beautiful Brad Howe mobile slowly spins in household currents. Richard starts opening cabinets and specialized, media-crammed closets, and my remaining hair stands on end, packs its bags, and prepares to leave my scalp.

“So what I wanted to show you here is my collection,” Salzberg says. “This is all music. I have about 15,000 albums and CDs, essay CDs, DVD audios, high resolution formats. Most of what you’re looking at here is a sampling because I don’t really pull my CDs out anymore. I downloaded most of them. I’ve got a 32-terabyte drive with a red light on. The red light means ‘no more please.’ And that’s mostly audio material. That’s not even the video material. We have an endless amount of material.” 

“I’m old enough to have seen the Zombies when they first played in America,” Milgrim says. [Reader, PLEASE put on the Zombies song Tell Her No at your earliest opportunity] “And I’m old enough to have seen… well, we were at the right place at the right time. When these artists speak to the heart, those are the ones that we then try to fit into a particular show. There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds, well over probably a thousand artists that we have thought ‘this one will be perfect for this show.’ And by the time we get closer to the show, they didn’t quite make the cut. Not that they weren’t still brilliant!”

“And that’s the hardest part,” Salzberg says. “Because they’re like our children, and there’s only room in the boat for enough of us. When we have to throw some into the water, which ones are going to stay and which ones are going to go?”  

Okay? Here I am in the presence of these twin pillars and the deep, happy, dedicated energy is palpable. We’ve all had the experience with a pal; “check out this song!” These gents have parlayed that vibratory love of songs, songwriters, and the rock ‘n’ roll canon into a mission. Salzberg is the walking encyclopedic rock archive and self-described Music Maniac^™, Milgrim is – yeah – former CEO of Capitol Records, having risen to that exalted station from an inaugurating clerkship at Discount Records in Isla Vista, a management position with that chain in Berkeley, and from there a suborbital rocket ride with stops at WEA group in San Francisco, Warner Bros., Elektra/ Asylum/Nonesuch, Reprise. Milgrim’s rise through the music biz is half American dream and half interval-leaping guitar solo. When he and his wife Anne move up to Santa Barbara post-Capitol, Milgrim throws his superpowers at the local music fiefdom, joining the board and becoming heavily involved in the resuscitation of the Santa Barbara Bowl, co-producing the Sings Like Hell series at the Lobero for the whole of its nearly two decade run, and hosting his own radio show on KTYD.

“That’s Roger Dean,” Salzberg is saying of some personally signed album art on the wall. “He did all the Yes album covers.”

These guys are hobbyists like Stradivari was a woodworker. Their combined collection is preposterous, a deep cache of rock ‘n’ roll musical history, shelved and catalogued in every audio and visual format humankind has yet produced. No big deal.

I can’t quite believe my good fortune. I’ve sneaked into the Chocolate Factory and am stuffing my yap. There is no NDA placed before me, no legal instrument pressing me to keep the lid on. When I jokingly ask if I will ever be allowed to leave the place, the guys just stare, Milgrim’s unwavering grin unnerving. 

Quips and Klipsch 

“Come on,” Salzberg says, Strawberry Fields-like. “We’ll take you down.” The gents have some sort of tricked out, acoustically pristine home theater downstairs where I will be privileged to see a fractal of what their August 29 Lobero show
will feature. 

Salzberg and Milgrim, it occurs to me, are not just collectors, not just generous showmen. The keynote is conservation. These guys are rock gadflies, yes, but they’re also a consequential rock ‘n’ roll Smithsonian on wheels. Hale and Richard’s voluminous holdings are arguably Rock ‘n’ Roll’s Svalbard Seed Vault – the high-tech backup for the world’s crop diversity that lives in the remote Arctic Svalbard archipelago, the completist seed library that will restart the ruined world should it come to that. Milgrim and Salzberg have built a repository from which future generations can draw breath with Colin Blunstone and rewild the world’s parking lots with Joni. The Lobero extravaganzas are the joyous expression of something both soul-seizing and necessary; conservation to which you can Twist and Shout. 

“So this is my theater room,” Salzberg says. The room is black clad and leather-bound, the enfolding comfy chairs just the ticket for ecstatic/hypnotic launches into the rock ether. He gestures at two black refrigerators on either side of the enormous screen up front. “These speakers were designed in the 1940s by Paul Klipsch. At a time when probably the most powerful amplifier was 20 amps, Klipsch wanted something that he could put into a hall that could produce a large amount of sound with very low wattage.” Salzberg pauses, possibly for effect. He needn’t bother. I glance at Milgrim and he smiles, eyebrows arching, as if to say How about that? “If I turn these up,” Salzberg says with some gravity, “we could blow ourselves out of the room. But it’s only 150 watts per speaker. And I have these two Macintosh amps. There’s Dolby Atmos speakers in the room which you’ll experience. This is also a 3D projector. We do some 3D in here. Pick a place, sit wherever you’re comfortable.”

The August 29 show at the Lobero has the theme of “Little if ever seen/largely unknown video clips of artists in unusual and intimate settings” (my drawn-out nomenclature…). McCartney flubbing a lyric and apologizing on an outtake before a small audience, B.B. King wailing on guitar (and reportedly terrified) at Sing Sing, whose tenants movingly writhe and laugh in their seats, losing themselves in the moment’s pure freedom, Taylor Goldsmith, Israel Nebeker, and more stupefying stuff. The lights come up. Milgrim, seated next to me, sees I’m stunned and is pleased. I’d heard that he signed Mazzy Star back in the day and I have questions about process, about creative intuition at that level. 

“You never know what anyone is going to become,” Milgrim says. “All I know is what I’m hearing right then and there and seeing. Bonnie Raitt put out seven records before she did Nick of Time. Mazzy Star took years to do a record and then took years to do the follow up to Fade into You, and I wasn’t even at the company by the time they did the next record. I signed Radiohead off of ‘Creep,’ but I was gone from the company with their subsequent records.” Salzberg is listening and nodding. 

“Richard will tell you,” Milgrim says. “He’ll go through all the music that he was listening to in the ‘80s, ‘90s, 2000, 2010 and on and on. Richard and I have talked about the difference in our age a few times. I was born in the late ‘40s. So just being at that right age at that moment in time and being able to go to concerts in downtown L.A. or whatever was – they were $2.50, $3.”

“I’ve asked friends,” Salzberg says. “I’ve even asked Hale this question. How many times do we sit down and listen to an album anymore? Listen to the whole album beginning to end and soak it all in?” 

Dylan didn’t know how right he was. The times have indeed changed, but for these two, it’s all of a piece – to our common good fortune. 

“I never actually dreamt of any of this,” Capitol’s former CEO says, his grin widening (if that’s even possible). “Those things were not my dream. My dream was to be able to work in a record store. Do you remember them?”  

Go To Hale Quips and Clips: MUSIC FROM THE VAULT
Saturday, August 29 Showtime 6:52 pm,
pre-show Doors Open 6:22 pm

Lobero Theatre
33 East Canon Perdido Street
Santa Barbara, CA 93101