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Milt Okun was born December 23, 1923 in Brooklyn. He was
something of a prodigy as a pianist, starting to play at age 4. Okun was on
course to be a concert pianist until he contracted a kidney disease, nephritis,
at 16, prior to the advent of antibiotics. Okun couldn't play piano for the two
years of his recuperative period; when he returned to playing he found - to his
great dismay - that he had lost the "naturalness and spontaneity that you need
to be a major pianist," and he decided to pursue a career as a music teacher.
- Okun graduated from NYU with a degree in music education in '49 and got his
masters in the same from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in '51, thereafter
becoming an NYC junior high music teacher. While he was teaching in the early-
- and mid-50s, Okun, a lover of folk music, also recorded nine albums of
traditional folk songs as a singer/guitarist for the Stinson, Riverside, and
Warwick labels. His subspecialty was playing folk songs with symphony
orchestras; he wrote the orchestra arrangements himself, and played a number of
concerts with orchestras across the country.
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- Okun's friend Robert DeCormier was Harry Belafonte's conductor; in '57
DeCormier hired Okun to play piano (during Okun's school vacation) for a
Belafonte summer tour. After the tour Okun accepted a full-time job with
Belafonte, first as pianist and then as background singer. Belafonte then
organized a 12-man vocal group called the Belafonte Folk Singers, of which Okun
became a member; the group toured with Belafonte and recorded three albums of
their own for RCA between '58 and '61.
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- In '58 DeCormier quit and Okun became Belafonte's conductor and arranger. Okun
believes that Belafonte's late-50s albums weren't as successful as his mid-50s
classics because producer Bob Bollard didn't have an ear for the right take. "It
was a lesson to me that a marvelous singer with the best arrangements in the
world could be destroyed by an unfeeling producer," he says.
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- While he was working for Belafonte, Okun was hired to do arrangements for folk
records by artists such as Leon Bibb, Esther Ofarim, Paul Robeson, and Martha
Schlamme, mostly for the Vanguard label. Okun then came upon folkies the
Chad
Mitchell Trio, recently arrived in New York from Washington state and playing at
Greenwich Village's Blue Angel club. Okun brought the trio songs and
arranged/co-produced their first album for Colpix in '60. In the liner notes to
Varese Sarabande's The Chad Mitchell Trio Collection, member
Mike Kobluk says
Okun was "responsible for any success we had. He was the leveling influence, the
coach, the referee, and the person with the musical taste who helped to develop
ours."
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- Okun then helped the trio get a deal with Kapp Records through Belafonte's
production company, and arranged and/or produced subsequent albums through the
mid-60s which included their hits "Lizzie Borden," "The Marvelous Toy" and "The
John Birch Society."
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- At the end of '60, Okun's contract with Belafonte ran out and it was not
renewed - he knows not why. Though he was disappointed at the time, Okun calls
this "the best thing that ever happened to me," because he was forced to leave
the Belafonte umbrella and go out on his own.
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- Okun had a measure of poetic justice: Irving Burgie, aka Lord Burgess, wrote
most of Belafonte's biggest hits including "Day-O," "Jamaica Farewell," "Come
Back Liza," "Kingston Market," and "Angelina." When his publishing contract with
Belafonte's company ran out in the '80s, Okun's Cherry Lane offered Burgie a
deal that has increased his annual income five-fold. As a result of Burgie's
success, Belafonte even brought his own publishing to Cherry Lane for a time.
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- Soon after Okun left Belafonte, manager-producer Albert Grossman hired him to
arrange and "direct" (today Okun would be called the producer and Grossman the
executive producer) for his new folk trio Peter (Yarrow), Paul (Stookey) and
Mary (Travers). "I desperately tried to avoid it because they were terrible when
they came to me," Okun confides. "Mary sang flat, and the two guys didn't much
like her. I asked three different arrangers to take them over from me, but each
one said they were hopeless. I thought they were hopeless too. I worked with
them for about nine months and they finally got seven or eight songs down.
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- "Their first show was at Gerde's Folk City in Manhattan. Maynard Solomon - the
head of Vanguard Records and an old friend - sat down next to me and just
started laughing at these kids because they really sounded awful; I didn't even
admit that I had done the arrangements, but the audience just loved them. They
cheered and cheered. The next day I told Al, 'Those guys have got to shave their
beards and Mary has got to get a decent dress,' and he just smiled at me. He
knew better than I what was happening."
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- If they were so bad, why was anyone interested? "There were four folk groups
happening at the time and they were all clean cut: Kingston Trio,
Brothers Four
(for whom Okun was musical director), Chad Mitchell Trio, and the
Limeliters. Al thought there was room for a beatnik-type group, and he was right. Peter and
Paul were very solid guitar players - that was the foundation of their sound.
Although they were slow to learn songs, once they had them down they did them
perfectly, which they do to this day. Also, while their voices weren't
'musically' great, they were distinctive and very appealing."
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- Regardless of the trio's steep learning curve, the combination of Grossman's
savvy, Okun's musical acumen, and their own magical vocal blend led their debut,
Peter, Paul and Mary, to No. 1 for seven weeks in '62, selling 2 million copies
and spinning off classics like "Lemon Tree," "500 Miles," "If I Had a Hammer,"
and the protest song "Cruel War."
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- With Grossman producing, Okun arranging and directing, and a sincere
commitment to social justice, PP&M became the most popular folk group of the
'60s, recording songs that have come to define a generation including Yarrow's
"Puff (The Magic Dragon)" and Bob Dylan's "Blowin' In the Wind" and "Don't Think
Twice, It's All Right."
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- By '67 Okun was co-producing the trio with Grossman, and they generated more
greats in "I Dig Rock and Roll Music," "Too Much of Nothing," and the group's
only No. 1 single, John Denver's "Leaving On a Jet Plane" in '69.
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- Meanwhile, when Chad Mitchell went solo in '65, he was replaced in the
now-Mitchell Trio by a young singer/songwriter from New Mexico named John
Deutschendorf, who continued with the group until it broke up in '68 (Okun
produced the group's later records on Mercury). Okun suggested that
Deutschendorf change his name to "Denver" and go solo.
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- Fortunately, Okun was able to secure a four-album deal from RCA, because it
was Denver's fourth album, Poems, Prayers and Promises, led by the singalong
classic "Take Me Home Country Roads," that finally hit in '71 (although it was
included on Poems, "Sunshine On My Shoulders" wasn't released as a single until
'74). Poems, '72s Rocky Mountain High , and '74's Back Home Again (his most
solid studio album with the title track, "Annie's Song," "Sweet Surrender," and
"Thank God I'm a Country Boy") form the unshakable foundation of Denver's
enormous folk/country-pop career, a career that was often maligned in the
cynical '70s due to the singer's sunny disposition and earnest environmentalism.
But talent will out: since Denver's untimely death in an experimental airplane
accident in late-97, people have begun to remember what he was (a great
entertainer and singer/songwriter of high quality), not what he wasn't (an
innovator or challenger of the status quo).
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- Okun gives an example of Denver's integrity: when Denver's first publishing
deal with Cherry Lane expired in the mid-70s - at the peak of his commercial
success - he chose to renew with Cherry Lane under the same terms as his
original deal rather than to exercise his clout and demand a more favorable
deal, or to go elsewhere.
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- In the '80s Okun's conservatory-trained sensibilities found their greatest
expression in a series of records with the great Spanish/Mexican operatic tenor
Placido Domingo (one of the "3 Tenors"). Their first album together, Perhaps
Love, went platinum and is representative of their formula: provide a lush
orchestral bed over which Domingo's resonant instrument floats through a
collection of newish pop songs ("Annie's Song," "Perhaps Love" - with John
Denver, "Time After Time") and standards ("American Hymn," "Yesterday," "To
Love").
Updated :
mars 24, 2023 |
