Bill Holt: The marketing executive who changed music forever with a sampling side project
In the 1960s, when everyone else was plucking flowers and getting stoned, Bill Holt was working at 3M Company in Philadelphia as a junior sales and marketing executive. If you had told the hippies standing agog in the streets of San Francisco as the sounds of the summer of love washed them with wonder that this suited and booted fellow would soon change the face of music, they would probably have threatened him with a papercut fearing that he was some sort of state censor about the slap the cuffs on their counterculture revolution. As it happens, he was anything but.
Holt may have worked for the man, but his heroes were Bob Dylan and Pablo Picasso, the ground-breaking rogues of this new world. In fact, away from his 9-5, he wanted to be a pioneer of new expression himself, he wanted “to do on a sound recording what René Magritte did on canvas.” Around him, the Cold War was riddling the working day with an undercurrent of fear that rarely went addressed in pop music such was the subtlety of its harrowing presence. But Holt had his eye on it, and he recognised that you’d need a new medium of sound to capture its multifaceted meddling with the everyday pursuit of peace.
To capture this, his suited disposition came in handy. He was a child of the revolution estranged from it by circumstance. He recognised and relished the Age of Aquarius, but he was distant enough to grapple with the wider picture. In essence, he was a keen voyeur of the American Cultural Revolution, and this status would inform his forthcoming art. He saw that something seismic was happening and that the music of the time was so caught up in spearheading it that it often missed vital aspects of the whole picture, so he set about capturing it all for the purpose of posterity.
His rather grand mission statement was to work on a side project that captured the zeitgeist in amber, to bottle up the feel of the times. With music being the main fuel for that, it seemed natural that an album would be the best way to do it. So, he set about making Dreamies Program Ten and Program Eleven. A collage that would pioneer some new-fangled thing called ‘sampling’ and create a time capsule that touched upon everything from political propaganda to street parties, flowers in the ends of rifles and old mothers at odds with it all.
So, he set about collating the story of how a brutal assassination shattered the pre-packaged dream of America and in ten short years things went very weird, very quickly. For Holt, it stood to reason that the centrepiece of his sonic collage should be President Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural address. In that fateful speech, the handsome hero of the future announced: “We are the heirs of a great revolution.” Little did he know just what he was begetting with those words.
With that centrepiece established, Holt tried to take a holistic grab bag of the era that followed—that was easier said than done. Big things were happening, more than you could capture in a conventional song documenting the domino tumble that began with President Kennedy’s head being knocked off its perch. Things were far more peculiar than a few chords could ever capture: a clock was literally counting down the days until the end of the world, but was also, as The Beatles asserted, the world had never been this fun before.
It became Holt’s homework aim to tesselate together a picture from definitive soundbites. So, he sample things like the jury verdict announcement in the Jack Ruby trial (the man who killed Lee Harvey Oswald, a subject of much-heightened conspiracy), field recordings of gunfights in the Vietnam War, Lyndon Johnson pleading with God, and he littered these alongside trivial TV news bulletins, new pop at home popcorn bursting into life, breaking glass, protestors on their day of rest and on and on, all lined-up and orchestrated by holt for maximum effect and fused by strange chordal sounds that play out like the ‘60s trapped in a music box then wound slowly in reverse.
This was what the ‘60s ultimately boiled down to: the war with communism and its funeral precession. As Holt told Psychedelic Baby Mag: “I thought not enough of my piers, young folks at the time, real hippies (I was kind of a fake hippie more a corporate escapee than a genuine flower child) – it did not think people really understood what the fight against communism was about. I wanted even somebody getting stoned listening to Dreamies to get that subliminal message out – we being the heirs of a great revolution. Remember, back then communism was real. There was a bellicose USSR saying they would bury us. Today it’s dead, more an intellectual concept. Back then it was very real.”
So, how did a young marketing exec achieve this? In his basement with a guitar that he saw Glen Campbell playing on TV, a mysterious device called a synthesiser, a couple of tape recorders, a few mixers, a drum machine, and a splicing device. He was the world’s first Garage Band TM. Despite being haunted by the faint hiss of noise (which actually now adds character to the record), with this humble set-up, he was able to make an entirely original album in every sense of the word, without being much of a virtuoso composer. It might have taken him years, but in 1974, he was finally able to herald the forthcoming punk message that expression was what mattered rather than graded talent. And his expression was massive—an edifice that embodied the world’s greatest renaissance fuelled by its most maddeningly rapid transition.
And his engine was sampling—cutting up the world at large and weaving it into a singular piece of art. He was not the first to do this, but Buzz Aldrin wasn’t the first on the moon either and you wouldn’t say he wasn’t a pioneer. Holt’s album and its entirely new tradition soon garnered love from record collector circles and soon the likes of Brian Eno, Kraftwerk and Donna Summers were choosing to go down a similar route. Now, you could argue that Holt’s project is one of the most influential albums in history that very few have heard of. But they will, for Dreamies Program Ten and Program Eleven was made with posterity in mind, and with posterity in mind it will remain, a cloud of the ‘60s set to whizz-up from record players forevermore like a plume of puff, GSR, agent orange and Brylcreem.
