THE ELEKTRA RECORDS STORY
Over heard of a “musician’s musician”? Oft en used to describe the likes of Townes Van Zandt, Ben Harper, Gene Clark and others, it’s the notion that working musicians tend to study, not so much the stars, but a higher breed of greed-resistant crusader making music for music’s sake. Well, a similar distinction exists among music business players. If you ask all the great label founders of the 70s and 80s for their guiding reference, the first name you’ll hear is Elektra – the original big city bohemian.
So how did a popular heroine of Greek tragedy get to be re-spelled with a curious k? Elektra’s founder, Jac Holzman, jokes that it was the missing k his parents forgot to include in the name Jac. The story begins in 1950 when Holzman, a loft y 19-year-old 6ft 3in sound enthusiast, opened a Greenwich Village record store called the Record Loft. Although it was a cramped shoe-box operation, he proudly compiled a wide stock of folk and traditional music while tinkering away on his Elektra experiments from the back office.