Cryptical Developments

New Riders of the Purple Sage at Peninsula School 4/?28/70 and 5/28/71

2012-02-12T20:28:00.000-08:00

Peninsula School is a progressive, private K-12 school located in Menlo Park, California. Founded in 1925, Peninsula is located in a huge Victorian house on wooded grounds in the eastern part of Menlo Park, just off Middlefield Road. As a junior in high school in Palo Alto, I had never heard of the school until I saw a hand lettered sign at Menlo Park’s Discount Records announcing a Tuesday afternoon gig by the New Riders of the Purple Sage there in April, 1970 (the most likely date appears to be 4/28/70). Because I was not yet of driving age, I rode up there after school on my bike.

Members of the Grateful Dead family had multiple connections to Peninsula School. Bob Weir, John “Marmaduke” Dawson, and recording engineer Bob Matthews all attended the school at various times, and Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter apparently played their first gig there back in 1961. A useful discussion of the school and its shared history with the Dead can be found here.

I had known about Garcia’s flirtations with the pedal steel for some time, largely through its appearance on tunes like CSNY’s “Teach Your Children,” the Airplane tune, “The Farm,” and the album version of “Dire Wolf” on Workingman’s Dead. I was also well aware of Garcia’s musical collusion with a character known as “Marmaduke” through frequent listings in newspaper calendars for “Marmaduke and Friends” which over time had morphed into listings for “The New Riders of the Purple Sage.” There was also a demo tape (later released on an NRPS album, Before Time Began) comprising early versions of “Superman” and “Garden of Eden” that featured Garcia’s loopy steel licks that got very infrequent airplay on KSAN, but that was about all I knew of them. I had tried to see the NRPS late the previous year when they were allegedly billed at the Poppycock in downtown Palo Alto, but they turned out to be no-shows the night they listed in the newspaper ad. The ad for the Peninsula show listed “Jerry Garcia, Mickey Hart, Bob Weir and others from the Grateful Dead,” but Weir was a no-show unless he arrived after I left.

Garcia as Roadie 4/28/70
Photo: M. Parrish

When I arrived at Peninsula, parked my bike, and ponied up my $3. I joined a modest crowd (certainly less than 100 people who mingled on the playground beside the school. The bands set up in a handball court of all places, and there was no backstage whatever. In retrospect, this probably would have been my best chance ever to strike up a conversation with Garcia, who was holding forth with what clearly were a bunch of old friends, but I was far too shy to do so.

Opening Act 4/28/70 Photo: M. Parrish

The New Riders were preceded by another band that played some free jazz with rock overtones. I have no idea who they were, and they didn’t leave much of an impression. Once they had finished, the Riders started to set up, and I was struck by the fact that Garcia, with no road crew in sight, assembled his own pedal steel.

NRPS 4/28/70 Photo: M. Parrish

Recent speculations suggest that the configuration of the New Riders that recorded their first album had most likely only been together a few weeks at the time of this show. Nonetheless, their mutual connections went back several years, to the dawn of the San Francisco rock scene. Garcia and guitarist David Nelson were bluegrass buddies who first started playing together back in the 1961 or so. Dawson, a bit younger, had also been part of the south bay folk-bluegrass scene, and was apparently a sometime member of Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions, the jug band that spawned the Dead in 1964. Nelson had relatively recently played with bassist David Torbert in the mysterious New Delhi River Band, and succeeded the Dead’s lyricist Robert Hunter, their bassist Phil Lesh, and their recording engineer Bob Matthews in the NRPS bass slot. Dead drummer Mickey Hart held down the drum chair as he would do until the end of the year, when he would cede it to Spencer Dryden.

Garcia on Steel 4/28/70 Photo: M. Parrish

The New Riders began their set with an energetic version of Chuck Berry’s “Brown Eyed Handsome Man” sung by the diminutive, mustachioed Dawson, center stage (or racketball court), who kept time with his Guild acoustic guitar. This was my first encounter with lead guitarist David Nelson, and his Nashville licks from his hot-rodded Telecaster were as much a defining element of the early New Riders as Garcia’s inimitable take on the pedal steel. Bassist Dave Torbert, presumably only a few weeks into his term in the band, was still a tentative presence, playing solid bass and adding harmony vocals when the occasion demanded. Off to stage right was Hart, wearing a Giant’s cap and the epitome of a laid back drummer, in sharp contrast to his often furious onstage presence with the Dead. Wedged in between Hart and Dawson was Garcia, rapturously hunched over his pedal steel and sporting a few days of growth towards the latest incarnation of his trademark beard.

Mickey Hart 4/28/70 Photo: M. Parrish

I don’t have a detailed set list for the show, but it did feature a number of Dawson originals, including ”Henry,” “Louisiana Lady,” and “Glendale Train” alongside country classics like “Truck Drivin’ Man,” “Dim Lights, Thick Smoke, and Loud, Loud Music” and “Tonight the Bottle Let Me Down.” As the afternoon shadows grew long, I had to beat a retreat back to Palo Alto, so I don’t know just how long the Riders played, or what other gems they might have pulled out.

Thirteen months later, the New Riders were again booked to play at Peninsula, for a Friday afternoon gig preceding their much more substantial payday at Winterland later in the evening. I was scheduled to attend the Dead/NRPS show that evening, but couldn’t resist the opportunity to see the band in this intimate setting once more. For the 1971 gig, the powers that be at Peninsula had the bands set up on the deck at the front of the main building of the school. Again, a relatively obscure rock band opened the show. With a nod to Garcia, they opened their set with a speedy rendition of the Dead’s first album arrangement of “Cold Rain and Snow.”

Marmaduke 5/28/71 Photo: M. Parrish

New Riders 5/28/71 Photo M. Parrish

When the Riders set up, consipuous in its absence was Garcia’s pedal steel rig. Once the band took the stage, we were informed that Garcia was under the weather and had chosen to rest up for the evening’s show rather than schlepping down to Menlo Park for a few hours. Thus we heard one of the very few New Riders gigs of that era without a pedal steel player. By this time, I had probably heard the New Riders a half dozen times, and their afternoon set held few surprises other than the absence of their steel guitarist. Dawson was shaggier, and was now playing electric rather than acoustic guitar. Spencer Dryden was a dynamic presence on drums, and Torbert was a much more commanding presence on bass and vocals. Because of the logistics involved in going home, picking up my dad, and driving to Winterland, I again missed the end of the Riders set. The drive up to the city turned out to be for naught, as Garcia’s illness had deepened, and the Friday Dead show was cancelled and rescheduled until Sunday evening. We did get to the Sunday show, missing the legendary Saturday show where much of the audience was dosed by some spiked Kool Aid. As far as I know, the 1971 gig was the last time the New Riders played at Peninsula School, and Garcia’s tenure with the band was only to last a few more months. These two shows provided great opportunities to hear the group up close, in their formative stages as a touring entity.

The Grateful Dead visit the Old West - Harding Theatre 11/7/71

2011-11-07T22:22:00.000-08:00

I thought I would take the opportunity of the 40^th anniversary of this show to reflect on the first time I saw the ‘new’ Grateful Dead. After the summer shows, press reports indicated that Pigpen had taken ill and would have to stay off the road for awhile. Rumors were that the band had brought in a new guy as a replacement, who of course proved to be Keith Godchaux. For the first local shows with Keith, the band chose a relatively unique setting – the 500 seat Harding Theater, located in San Francisco’s Divisadero District. A somewhat decaying movie palace that still maintained some of the elegance of yore, the Harding had apparently become somewhat of a hangout for Garcia, as he played there for sure on September 23 (with the New Riders) and possibly on September 10 with Merl Saunders and perhaps even on September 3,4 with the Dead (no confirmation of these latter shows exists other than a calendar listing in the Berkeley Barb, but I tend to concur with JGMF that they may well have occurred, as an audition of sorts for keyboard player Howard Wales).

By this time, the Dead’s local shows were mostly either at Winterland or, occasionally, at the Berkeley Community Theater, so the Harding was indeed a tiny venue for the band. I learned of the 11/7 show the afternoon of the gig, via an announcement on KSAN that indicated that tickets would go on sale at, if I remember correctly, 2 PM (they had also played at the Harding the night before). My long suffering father and I drove up to the city and joined maybe a dozen or so people in line by probably 1:30. Just after two, someone from the band showed up to open up the box office for the theatre, and started selling tickets, collecting the money in one of those little metal cashboxes which was notable for me as the first time I saw the skull and lightning bolt insignia that became so ubiquitous shortly thereafter. With a 500 seat capacity and a two buck cover, the show wasn’t likely to be a big cash night for the band at the door, but it was presumably underwritten to some extent by Warner Brothers, who were sponsoring radio broadcasts in most of the cities on the band’s fall tour, including the 11/7 broadcast on KSFX. At any rate, we collected our tickets, drove back to Palo Alto for awhile, and returned to the show with Mike K., a family friend who had just started at Stanford that fall.

When we got back to the theatre, probably 630 PM, tickets were still available, and we easily got some nice seats stage left about halfway back. The setup in the theatre was pretty loose – there was no real division between the backstage area and the stage proper, and band members and crew were wandering about. What was apparent right off the bat was that the sound was going to be pretty different, as evidenced by Godchaux’s imposing grand piano on the left side of the stage.

Contrary to popular wisdom and convention of the day, the New Riders did not open the show. Instead, the Dead played two long sets – certainly the longest show just by the electric Dead that I had heard up to then. As they were tuning up, Garcia and Lesh waxed academic, with Jerry positing “If you are sitting at home listening to this at home, you’re hearing the sound faster than if you’re in the hall” and Lesh saying “I’d say that was about 432 cycles” to Weir’s howling into the mics.”

After a solid opening tune, “Truckin’” , Weir announced “You’ll all be appalled to learn that our monitors just went out and we just don’t know what to do. That means we don’t have the foggiest idea of what we are doing up here.” Lesh said “This probably isn’t even going out on the radio, so why worry” (it was...). After some more bantering (including a failed attempt by Bill Kreutzmann to get Weir to do a trick with his dog Otis), the monitors were restored and the group played the first of many songs that night that were new to my ears – the gritty Americana ballad “Brown Eyed Women,” followed by a raucous “Beat it On Down the Line.”

At this point, the monitors went out again, and the band finally chose to whip out a nice, letter perfect version of the surf guitar instrumental “Hideaway, ” written and originally recorded by one of Garcia’s principal electric guitar influences, Freddy King, with new guy Keith Godchaux following the changes flawlessly.

With the monitors restored, the band went right into “Sugaree.” Although the band had been playing it since late July, this Garcia/Hunter lament to a lost lover was still pretty fresh. Next up was another pair of brand new tunes, Weir and Hunter’s masterful cowboy opera “Jack Straw” and an uptempo reading of Garcia and Hunter’s infectiously sing-songy “Tennessee Jed,” built on one of those inimitable Garcia guitar arpeggios. On the radio broadcast, Godchaux’s piano was prominent in the mix the whole night, and it was truly impressive how well he had integrated into the subtleties of the group dynamic – making strong melodic and rhythmic contributions without overplaying his hand. Hearing his mastery of the complex and vast repertoire, it was hard to believe that he had auditioned for the band a scant six weeks earlier.

Back on more familiar ground, the group extended their old west motif with “Cumberland Blues,” “El Paso,” and “Big Railroad Blues” before pulling out another new one – the beautifully existential Garcia/Hunter lament “Comes A Time.” The set wrapped up with two new Weir tunes – yet another cowboy ballad with “Mexicali Blues” and “One More Saturday Night” which he prefaced with “Boy are you guys gonna love this!”

After a generous break, Garcia started set two with yet another of the font of new songs, “Ramble On Rose,” followed by Weir’s tribute to Janis Joplin with Kris Kristofferson’s “Me and Bobby McGee.” Next it was back to the barroom for “Loser,” followed by a curious placement for “Sugar Magnolia,” yet to achieve its customary set closing position. A generous jam started with the first live version I had heard of “Dark Star” which led into an “Other One” sandwich with yet another cowboy ballad, “Me and My Uncle,” making up the filling. A broken string brought the jam to a premature end.

Next up was the second Garcia/Hunter card tune, “Deal” which features one of Garcia’s neatest chord progressions. Although the hour was drawing late, the band played on, with another set of shortish tunes: “Brokedown Palace,” a relatively concise “Playing in the Band,” and “Casey Jones” before heading into the home stretch with the era’s traditional set closing “Not Fade Away>Goin’ Down the Road Feelin’ Bad >Not Fade Away” raveup. It was well past midnight, so we hit the road after the first encore of Johnny B. Goode. However, the rest of the crowd was more persistent, and was rewarded (after a very long bout of clapping) with a lilting “Uncle John’s Band” to close out a remarkable evening of music.

My mother managed to tape the show for us back at the ranch, and I must of listened to the tape of this show dozens of times in the era when few such live shows were available. Replete with strong versions of some of Garcia and Hunter’s very best tunes, this remains one of my favorite Dead shows, and it was a pleasure to slip it on to relive that evening that, incredibly, was four decades ago.

For another take on this show from the Dead Listening Guide (and a link to a streaming audio file) go here.

Frost 1970 - Country Joe and Quicksilver

2011-10-31T07:27:00.000-07:00

Greg Dewey and Country Joe
Frost 4/26/70
Photo: M. Parrish

By 1970, the first generation of San Francisco bands had begun to experience significant changes in personnel and style. Janis Joplin had left Big Brother and the Holding Company by late 1968, and both the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead had shifted personnel (and directions) on more than one occasion. However, two of the groups that saw the most drastic makeovers were Country Joe and the Fish and the Quicksilver Messenger Service, both of whom headlined concerts at Frost Amphitheater during 1970.

On April 25, 1970, Country Joe and the Fish headlined a show that also featured the Joy of Cooking and Eric Burdon and War. Another warm, sunny Sunday afternoon of music in the bucolic, tree-lined bowl, with a trio of top-flight acts.

Joy of Cooking 4/26/70 Ron Wilson and Toni Brown
Photo: M. Parrish

The Joy of Cooking comprised guitarist Terry Garthwaite, keyboardist Toni Brown, drummer Fritz Kasten, bassist David Garthwaite, and conga player Ron Wilson. Terry Garthwaite and Toni Brown were both doing the singer-songwriter circuit in Berkeley when their paths crossed and decided to put together a band. Their styles contrasted starkly. Garthwaite’s style was rooted firmly in the blues and she had the gravely voice to carry it off convincingly. Brown had come out of the New England folk scene and was more of a classic singer-songwriter. The two harmonized beautifully and they decided to round out a performing unit with Kasten, Garthwaite’s brother David (who preceded Neighbor on bass), and Wilson. A very popular live act, particularly in the greater Berkeley area, the band was still many months away from releasing the first of their three albums on Capitol records when they played the Frost show. Their set featured a variety of tunes by each of the vocalists, and closed with the dynamic medley of “Brownsville” and “Mockingbird” that was the centerpiece of their first, eponymous album that came out in 1971.

Eric Burdon 4/26/70 Photo: M. Parrish

Lee Oskar (War) 4/26/70 Photo: M. Parrish

Howard E. Scott (War) 4/26/70
Photo: M. Parrish

British rocker Eric Burdon relocated to California in the late 1960s and, after making a couple of psychedelically tinged albums with a new lineup of Animals, gave up the group name entirely to front a multicultural band of Southern California musicians that called themselves Eric Burdon and War. I believe that the band’s set at Frost was their first northern California gig, and it was a loose, open ended affair with lots of extended instrumental jamming. The centerpiece of the set was a fully formed version of “Spill the Wine,” which went on to be the group’s biggest hit. They also played a highly stylized interpretation of the Stones tune “Paint it Black,” and wound things up with a bluesy version of “Mystery Train.” Onstage, Burdon epitomized the ‘long haired leaping gnome’ image with which he self-identified in “Spill the Wine” while his bandmates showed the formidable instrumental chops that served them well for decades after parting company with Burdon in 1972.

Country Joe McDonald 4/26/70
Photo: M. Parrish

Barry Melton and Doug Metzner
4/26/70 Photo: M. Parrish

After completing two classic albums (Electric Music for the Mind and Body and Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die) and one pretty good record (Together), Country Joe and the Fish splintered in early 1969, leaving just Country Joe McDonald and lead guitarist Barry “the Fish” Melton from the classic lineup. After a few months of touring with Big Brother’s rhythm section (bassist Peter Albin and drummer David Getz), the Fish reconfigured with bassist Doug Metzner, keyboardist Mark Kappner (a holdover from the Getz-Albin lineup), and former Mad River drummer Greg Dewey. This lineup was the one that played Woodstock, and was also the one present at the Frost show. The Fish were to break up for good a few weeks later, but they certainly put on an energetic performance that afternoon. The set list was kind of disappointing to me, as it mostly comprised material from the group’s forthcoming album CJ Fish and their most recent (and weakest) effort, Here We Are Again. With his hair cut short, aviator shades, and a trim moustache, McDonald looked quite a bit different than he had at Woodstock the previous summer. Melton, Brillo head of hair fully intact, sung a good number of the tunes, including the stinging set opener, “Babylon” and a hard rocking version of “Love Machine.” The set’s strongest performance was on a relatively innocuous tune from CJ Fish, “Rockin’ All Around the World,” on which McDonald pushed the tempo and inserted one of his blues raps in the middle. Inevitably, the set (and the show) closed with a somewhat desultory run through “Feel Like I’m Fixing to Die” and a long tepid encore of “Motherless Children/Mr. Big Pig/Return of Sweet Lorraine.” The Fish splintered for good a few weeks later, with McDonald reverting to a solo acoustic performance format.

Robert Savage 8/9 /70 Photo: M. Parrish

David Freiberg, Gary Duncan, and Dino Valenti
Frost 8/9/70 Photo: M. Parrish

John Cipollina and his legendary hot-rodded Amp
Frost 8/9/70 Photo: M. Parrish

David Frieberg, Dino Valenti, Gary Duncan
Frost 8/9/70 Photo: M. Parrish

Dino Valenti Frost 8/9/70 Photo: M. Parrish

On August 9, 1970, a seriously retooled Quicksilver Messenger Service returned to Frost after a two year absence. The group’s ‘classic’ quartet lineup splintered at the end of 1968, when guitarist Gary Duncan took off to form a group with QMS svengali Dino Valenti. In the meantime, the remaining three members of Quicksilver jammed with first album producer Nick Gravenites, played on his solo album My Labors, and ultimately convinced master session pianist Nicky Hopkins to join the group. This version of Quicksilver cut a lovely, if overly mellow, LP entitled Shady Grove, but only played a few low profile gigs during the year of its existence. In the meantime, Duncan and Valenti’s group never flourished, and both of them rejoined Quicksilver in time for the band’s 1969-70 New Year’s gig. The early 1970 QMS gigs were spectacular, with a few new Valenti songs and some memorably extended version of tunes like “Who Do You Love” informed by the instrumental textures afforded by John Cipollina’s and Duncan’s twin guitars and Hopkins’ rippling piano fills. The group decamped to Hawaii in the spring and cut two albums dominated by new Valenti tunes as he steadily asserted his dominance as principal singer-songwriter and front man for the band. By mid-summer, Hopkins departed leaving the six-man Quicksilver that played on a blazing hot Sunday afternoon on the Stanford Campus. Opening for Quicksilver was the Robert Savage Group, a heavy blues-rock trio that cut one album before disappearing from sight. At the time, they shared a number of bills with Quicksilver. Their set at Frost featured some powerful lead guitar, but no particularly memorable songs or moments.

The first Valenti-led Quicksilver album Just for Love had come out earlier in the summer, and was eagerly anticipated. Up to then, Valenti, whose roots went back to the Greenwich Village folk scene and had cut a fine, atmospheric solo album for Epic in 1968, was highly regarded by the rock intelligentsia. However, his macho posturing, the deference he showed to his bandmates, and the subjugation of the once free-jamming band into a vehicle for Valenti’s treacly love ballads was painful to see and hear. Echoes of the Quicksilver of old emerged in Cipollina’s “Cobra,” bassist David Freiberg’s lovely take on “Pride of Man,” and an abbreviated run through the Duncan-sung “Who Do You Love,” but the majority of the set was given over to Valenti pieces like “Fresh Air” and “What About Me,” which were the titles of the two albums that came from the Hawaii sessions that had included the seven piece Quicksilver before things started to fall apart. The photos show just how hot it must have been onstage and, Valenti’s presence aside, the band turned in a very energetic, and well received, performance. Sadly, Valenti and Duncan’s further tinkering with the group would lead to its further disintegration with Cipollina’s departure later in the year, followed by Freiberg the next year. I remember really enjoying the set at the time, and my perceptions of the gig are certainly colored by the way the band’s subsequent history unfolded in the months to come.

2/22/70 Delaney and Bonnie and Friends with Eric Clapton

2011-09-06T22:00:00.000-07:00

By 1968, Eric Clapton was arguably one of the biggest stars in the music business, a fact reinforced by the fact that his bay area concerts had migrated from the Fillmore to Winterland and, then, for Cream’s Farewell tour in October and Blind Faith’s sole Northern California date the following August, to the cavernous Oakland Coliseum Arena. Thus, it was a great surprise when his next set of appearances, as a member of Delaney and Bonnie’s Friends, were back at the Fillmore West.

Although Clapton’s appearance at such a small venue was perhaps unexpected, the billing actually made sense. As has been extensively discussed in Clapton’s autobiography and elsewhere, he bonded with Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett when the duo were one of the opening acts on the Blind Faith tour. Clapton, disenchanted with the hype of his own ‘supergroup’ was charmed by the gospel/R&B inclinations and down-home hospitality of the Bramletts, and joined them, along with fellow luminaries George Harrison and Dave Mason, on the group’s European tour. That tour yielded a wonderful live disc, simply titled On Tour (recently expanded to a 4 CD compilation by Rhino’s boutique label Handmade). On the heels of the release of the live album, Delaney and Bonnie, with Clapton in tow, set out for a tour of America that culminated with a four day run at the Fillmore West.

Although I was of driving age by then, I still had to con my brother into going to one of the shows with me, and we ended up going on the final (Sunday) show for some reason, along with his college roommate Dave. It turned out to be quite the adventure.

The booking for the shows included three opening acts – the New York Rock and Roll Ensemble, and Dutch rockers Golden Earring.

New York Rock and Roll Ensemble (Michael Kamen on Left)
Photo: M. Parrish

I had actually seen the New York Rock and Roll Ensemble at Stanford the previous year performing the music for the Joffrey Ballet’s pioneering rock ballet Astarte (an amazing and groundbreaking event in itself, but one I don’t feel qualified to write much about). The group’s forte was bringing classical embellishments into a rock context, and their performance at the Fillmore was solid, but does not bring back strong musical memories. In an interesting serendipity, the group’s keyboardist and principal composer, Michael Kamen, went on to have a very successful career as a composer of soundtracks, and collaborated occasionally with Clapton on projects, including the music for Lethal Weapon II.

Golden Earring 2/22/70
Photo: M. Parrish

Golden Earring hailed from the Hague in Netherlands, and were already big stars in Europe when they came to the US for this support gig. The group’s onstage posturing and over the top volume and attack presaged the imminent rise of heavy metal, but they went on to have a global AM hit with “Radar Love” and remain a popular and active group in Europe today. They had recently gotten quite a bit of airplay with a 19 minute extrapolation of “Eight Miles High” and did not disappoint by performing an appropriately extended version at the Fillmore. Overall, their hard driving set was certainly memorable, and it was fun to watch them thrashing about.

Delaney Bramlett and Eric Clapton 2/22/70
Photo: M. Parrish

Although Harrison and Mason had not chosen to make the stateside trek with Delaney, Bonnie, and Eric, the lineup of their “Friends” at the time still consisted of a stage full of high caliber musicians who all went on to various fame, fortune (and in one case, misfortune). The stellar rhythm section of bassist Carl Radle and drummer Jim Gordon gave the group much of its propulsive drive. After this tour, they along with the band’s organist, Bobby Whitlock, went with Clapton to form Derek and the Dominoes. Radle went on to be Clapton’s bassist for many years, while Gordon played with Traffic, did tons of sessions. Unfortunately, he eventually succumbed to schizophrenia and was jailed after killing his mother.

Jim Price, Bobby Keys, Bonnie and Delaney Bramlett
Fillmore West 2/22/70 Photo: M. Parrish

The group’s horn section comprised saxophonist Bobby Keys and trumpeter Jim Price. Both were veterans of many rock and R&B tours, and knew just exactly when and how to use their instruments to pump up the group and the audience. After the breakup of this lineup of Delaney and Bonnie and Friends, they were recruited by the Rolling Stones, who also knew a thing or two about getting a crowd on its feet. You can read much about Keys’ legendary exploits in Keith Richards’ autobiography, and Keys is still the group’s first call sax player when they tour. Price keeps a lower profile, doing mostly composition and session work. An Internet search fails to locate any mention of conga player Tex Johnson after the D&B tour.

Vocal support was provided by Rita Coolidge, who went on to be part of Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen troupe before launching a successful solo career. Guesting on piano, possibly just for that one night, was pianist Leon Russell, who at the time was between the successful launch of his first solo album and the role he played as bandleader and mastermind behind the aforementioned Mad Dogs and Englishmen tour later that year.

Bonnie and Delaney Bramlett, Eric Clapton
2/22/70 Photo: M. Parrish

The On Tour album had been released a few weeks before the Fillmore West shows, so the capacity audience knew that Clapton’s role would be principally as lead guitarist and occasional lead vocalist, so there was none of the angry heckling or calls for Cream tunes that had characterized some of the troupe’s earlier UK shows. The repertoire for the night was mostly drawn from the album, with a few other covers and the odd original thrown in. With Delaney Bramlett and Clapton the sole guitarists, the sound was leaner than it had been on the European tour where three and sometimes four guitarists tried to avoid musical collisions.

The Bramletts wrote some strong tunes singly, as a duo, and with collaborators like Clapton, Russell, and Whitlock, who wrote the powerful, "Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way" with Bonnie. At the show I saw, this tune was stretched out with a rousing gospel tinged coda that featured some rousing harmonies between Whitlock and the Bramletts. Clapton sang two songs, the slow, soulful “I Don’t Know Why,” which he wrote with Bonnie, and Robert Johnson’s “Crossroads,” rendered much slower and funkier than the frenetic versions he played with Cream. Johnson was toasted directly with the slow, Memphis tinged Bramlett-Russell medley dedicated to the late bluesman, with Clapton contributing some stinging leads (this medley has recently been revived by the Chris Robinson Brotherhood, the Black Crowes leader’s jam-heavy side project). The set-closer was the Clapton-Bramlett showpiece “Coming Home,” which was built on one of the guitarist’s dramatic, arpeggiated riffs. Brought back for the inevitable encore, the group ripped things up with a Little Richard Medley of "Tutti Frutti," "The Girl Can’t Help It," "Long Tall Sally," and "Jenny, Jenny."

With the concert finished close to 2 AM, our evening turned out to be just getting started. The three of us returned to our parent’s car, a big cream colored Chevy Impala, to find one of the rear tires had gone flat. Maybe an hour later, we had changed the tire, only to find out that the spare was also flat. Fortunately, there was an all night gas station at the corner of Mission and Van Ness that was able to fix the flat. While we were waiting for them to get to the repair, the station was visited by an inebriated fellow who attempted to hold up the station by brandishing a knife. Nonplussed, one of the two gas station attendants smoothly relieved him of the knife and, I believe, sent him on his way without calling the authorities. This may have been business as usual for a gas station south of Market, but it was quite a drama for us kids from the suburbs. The sun was just coming up when the tire was back on the car, just in time for my father, who my brother had called after the spare proved to be flat, drove up in his Austin Healy Sprite. He didn’t seem to mind having gotten up in the middle of the night for nothing, but I think he wished he at least could have heard the concert.

Pepperland Revisited (Again)

2011-09-05T21:07:00.000-07:00

Former Pepperland building from the West
Photos: M. Parrish 7/11

Roof of Pepperland building - note relatively intricate wooden bracing

Thanks to the guidance of an anonymous commentator who worked at Pepperland, I was corrected in my assertion that the building with the Litchfield’s sign in front of the Bermuda Palms hotel was the space that housed Pepperland. Although that building was the home of the Bermuda Palms, the Citadel, and possibly Euphoria, Pepperland itself was a marginally bigger Quontset Hut type building immediately north of the Litchfield’s building. Today it houses Marin Hydroponics, and is indeed considerably changed from its concert configuration in the 1970s. I made a second road trip to the Litchfield Compound in early July, and was given a tour of the former Pepperland building by Al, the very helpful proprietor of the current establishment, who was well acquainted with the building’s storied history, and still rents the property from the Litchfield family. I have to admit that this correction of venue was a relief to me, as the building, sans the bay window in front and the addition on the southern end, was much more recognizably like the structure I remembered from its days as a concert venue. Although the promoters could have probably squeezed 1000 people into the building if the fire marshall wasn’t looking, it was still a good deal smaller than any of the SF ballrooms. One of the notable features of the building is the curved wooden roof, a much more elegant structure than the typical Quontset huts roofed with aluminum sheets (like Sophie's/Keystone Palo Alto on the Peninsula, which I will get around to eventually).

These days, the former concert floor is cut in half by the service counter and a longitudinal wall that splits the east and west halves of the building. Al let me peek in the storeroom area where the stage had been, but it was pretty piled with various kinds of merchandise. I’m no expert on hydroponics, but it appears to be a well-stocked place with a knowledgeable staff and a premier rock and roll pedigree. If you drop by, tell ‘em you read about it here!

Front of the former Pepperland Building from the Southwest 7/11

Pepperland building from the South- side view

Miles Davis and the Dead 4/10/70

2011-06-27T22:22:00.000-07:00

The next round of shows the Grateful Dead played at the Fillmore West represented one of Bill Graham’s most legendary bookings, the inspired pairing of the band with Miles Davis’ electric band. At the time, Davis was at somewhat of an artistic and commercial crossroads. After a few years of touring with an acoustic quintet that had comprised pianist Herbie Hancock, saxophonist Wayne Shorter, bassist Ron Carter, and drummer Tony Williams. During 1968-70, this group gradually unraveled as Carter, Williams, Hancock, and Shorter left one by one to pursue their own careers. Davis was also gradually moving into an electric band configuration in performance, amplifying his trumpet and utilizing electric keyboards and bass. On his two 1969 albums, Filles de Killiminjaro and In a Silent Way, Davis had started incorporating musicians like bassist Dave Holland, keyboardist Chick Corea, and guitarists George Benson and John McLaughlin and had moved from fairly conventional compositions into pieces that were more open ended, evoking a mood or a groove rather than the more traditional construct of stating a theme, following it with a series of solos, and resolving back to the theme at the end.

Miles Davis and Band Fillmore West 4/10/70
L-R (Airto, Dave Holland, Miles, Chick Corea)
Photo: M. Parrish

Davis’ Fillmore West dates came close on the heels of the release of his groundbreaking double LP Bitches Brew, which represented another big artistic leap for the trumpeter. Aggressive and dominated by rock rhythms and electric instruments, the album became Davis’ best seller and brought him before young, white audiences in a way his earlier work had not. The band that Davis brought into the Fillmore West, comprising Corea, Holland, soprano sax player Steve Grossman, drummer Jack Dejohnette , and percussionist Airto Moreira, was fully versed in this new music, and stood the Fillmore West audiences on their ears. Davis described this in his 1989 autobiography (p. 302):

“After Bitches Brew, Clive Davis put me in touch with Bill Graham, who owned the Fillmore in San Francisco and the Fillmore East in downtown New York. Bill wanted me to play San Francisco first, with the Grateful Dead, and so we did. That was an eye-opening concert for me, because there were about five thousand people there that night, mostly young, white hippies, and they hadn’t hardly heard of me if they had heard of me at all. We opened for the Grateful Dead, but another group came on before us. The place was packed with these real spacy, high white people, and when we first started playing, people were walking around and talking. But after a while, they all got quiet and really got into the music. I played a little of something like Sketches in Spain and then we went into the Bitches Brew shit and that really blew them out. After that concert, every time I would play out there in San Francisco, a lot of young white people showed up at the gigs.”

Davis had actually played for Graham a few weeks before at the Fillmore East, on a bill with Neil Young and Crazy Horse and headliner Steve Miller. Davis discusses his lack of enchantment with Miller and his music in his autobiography (p. 301), and he risked Bill Graham’s ire by showing up late every night so he got to close out each show.

Davis had a much better rapport with the Dead, and particularly Jerry Garcia (P. 302):

Jerry Garcia 4/10/70
Photo: M. Parrish

“..it was through Bill that I met the Grateful Dead. Jerry Garcia, their guitar player, and I hit it off great, talking about music – what they liked and what I liked- and I think we all learned something. Jerry Garcia loved jazz, and I found out that he loved my music and had been listening to it for a long time. He loved other jazz musicians, like Ornette Coleman and Bill Evans. “

In Dennis McNally’s Dead history A Long Strange Trip (p; 366), he discussed the impact Davis had on Garcia: “Years later, Garcia would say he learned from Davis’ music the concept of ‘open playing. I got part of that from Miles, especially the silences. Nobody plays better holes than Miles, from a musician’s point of view, anyway. In Indian music they have what you call the ‘unstruck,’ which is the note you don’t play. This has as much value as the stuff you do play.’”

Playing with Davis had a profound impact on all the members of the Dead. Phil Lesh discussed his own reaction in his autobiography, Searching for the Sound (pp. 177-78):

Phil Lesh and Bob Weir 4/10/70
Photo: M. Parrish

“..we played a four night stand at the Fillmore West, where we re faced with the unenviable task of following the great Miles Davis and his most recent band, a hot young aggregation that had just recorded the seminal classic Bitches Brew. As I listened, leaning over the amps with my jaw hanging agape, trying to comprehend the forces that Miles was unleashing onstage, I was thinking What’s the use. How can we possibly play after this? We should just go home and try to digest this unbelievable shit. This was our first encounter with Miles’ new direction. Bitches Brew had only just been released, but I know I hadn’t yet heard any of it. With this band, Miles literally invented fusion music. In some ways it was similar to what we were trying to do in our free jamming, but ever so much more dense with ideas – and seemingly controlled with an iron fist, even at its most alarmingly intense moments. Of all of us, only Jerry had the nerve to go back and meet Miles, with whom he struck up a warm conversation. Miles was surprised and delighted to know that we knew and loved his music, apparently other rockers he had shared it with didn’t know or care.”

McNally (p.365) also described the reaction of the Dead’s two percussionists: ‘Totally embarrassed’ to be asked to follow, Kreutzmann recalled that ‘we played really free, loose’ afterward ‘but I couldn’t get Miles out of my ears.” Mickey Hart’s strongest reaction was understandably to percussionist Moriera, who he characterized accurately as “crawling around on the floor foraging for instruments.”

Prior to the announcement of these historic shows, I had picked up Bitches Brew on the day of its release. My dad had bought In A Silent Way the previous year, and I was entranced by its modal tranquility and the layering of acoustic and electric instruments. As anyone who has heard it knows, Brew is a different beast entirely- aggressive, more open-ended, and stretched generously over two LPs. The cover was equally striking, with its brightly colored and mysterious painted collage with African themes. After repeated playings, I was still trying to digest what Miles had wrought on these discs when the word came out of the Miles/Dead pairing. I knew that I had to get to one of the shows.

As had became somewhat habitual, I ended up going on Friday night, this time with my brother and my dad. As Davis described in his autobiography, the Fillmore West was pretty full, and populated by the customary urban/suburban, primarily Caucasian audience. The poster listed a four act roster, but I have no memory of Scottish progressive rockers Clouds playing. I do remember well the set by the other Scottish group listed on the poster, Glasgowegians Stone the Crows. Their stock in trade was the heavy blues so popular in the UK at the time, and featured the remarkable vocals of Maggie Bell, who elicited apt and favorable comparisons to Janis Joplin at the time.

Steve Grossman, Dave Holland, Miles
Photo: M. Parrish

As was billed on the poster, Miles’ group came on next, with the Dead closing out each of the four nights. Davis had run afoul of Bill Graham during his Fillmore East run in March, where he showed up late enough each night that billed headliner Steve Miller had to play first, with Miles’ group closing out the night. Either some agreement with Graham or Miles’ rapport with the Dead resulted in him showing on time for the Fillmore shows. I do not remember a particularly long break between Stone the Crows and Davis, but the mood in the hall shifted dramatically from a mundane Friday at the Fillmore to deepest Africa when Davis and his band took the stage and started playing. On the darkened stage, Davis stood front and center. He played more at these shows than he did later in his career, and faced the audience although, in typical Davis fashion, barely acknowledging their presence. Davis’ attack was muscular and direct, but he had not as of yet adopted many of the electronic effects that would characterize his sound during the 1970s. Sharing the front stage with Davis was relatively new recruit Steve Grossman, whose piercing explorations on alto saxophone were an essential component of Davis’ “Fillmore” bands.

Much of the textural color of the music came from the electric Fender Rhodes piano of Corea, who had been with Davis since Herbie Hancock left in the summer of 1968. Holland, at Davis’ bequest, had temporarily abandoned his trademark standup bass for a Fender electric, and kept the pulse of the music flowing organically in tandem with the sturdy drumming of DeJohnette. Relatively new to mainstream jazz at the time, Holland has developed into one of the idiom’s best respected and most creative bandleaders and composers.

Airto, Dave Holland, Miles, Chick Corea
4/10/70. Photo: M. Parrish

Like Mickey Hart, I was drawn to Moreira during the band’s set. The percussionist indeed was seated on the floor, and had at hand an arsenal of exotic hand percussion instruments that he rattled, squeaked, and shook to produce a mélange of exotic sounds. For the time, the hirsute and methodical Moreira’s percussion was several notches in strangeness above the weirdest stuff that Hart was able to generate in the Dead at the time, and it was no surprise that the two have ended up collaborating on percussion adventures throughout their subsequent careers.

Miles’ sets drew heavily from the just released Bitches Brew (“Miles Runs the Voodoo Down,” “Bitches Brew,” “Spanish Key,” and “Sanctuary”) along with bits of In A Silent Way (“It’s About That Time”), some as yet unreleased tunes (“Directions,” “Willie Nelson”), a snippet of the ballad “I Fall In Love Too Easily” and Davis’ regular closing coda (“The Theme”) all stitched together into one uninterrupted set.

Davis’ remarkable Friday evening set has been known to tape collectors since shortly after the show. A soundboard recording of the show was broadcast on Berkeley radio station KPFA shortly after the shows. Much later, an edited version of the show was released by Sony in Japan, and later in the states, as the album Black Beauty. In addition to this release, soundboard recordings of the other three nights circulate among Miles aficionados, giving a full perspective on Davis’ repertoire at the time (Ironically, the notoriously well archived Dead’s own performances from the run are much more incomplete, with only the Sunday night set known as a complete soundboard recording).

Garcia, Lesh, Weir, and Pigpen 4/10/70
Photo: M. Parrish

When the Dead finally came on, it was close to midnight, and the audience had been somewhat pummeled into submission by Davis’ powerful juju. As has been their wont since, the Dead built the intensity of their set slowly, staring out with short tunes: “Cold Rain and Snow,” “New Speedway Boogie” and “Mama Tried.” After the reliable “China Cat Sunflower> I Know You Rider medley, Pigpen stepped out front for a dynamic version of “Hard To Handle,” followed by “Casey Jones.”

At that point in the set, the Dead’s equipment crew were called on to rearrange the stage, setting up microphones adjacent to two folding chairs that Garcia and Weir used for a brief acoustic set. The Dead were no strangers to acoustic music, having bluegrass, folk, and jug band backgrounds, and the group had launched many of their late sets the previous year starting with acoustic guitars, shifting over to electric after a pair of subdued tunes, usually Dupree’s Diamond Blues and “Mountains of the Moon.” The first acoustic mini-sets took place at the end of 1969, once at the old Fillmore and once in Dallas, when one or more band members were late to the shows. In January, the band did the bulk of a show acoustically in New Orleans when they experienced equipment failure, and they started introducing pre-meditated acoustic sets at the band’s legendary mid-February run at the Fillmore East.

Bob Weir and Jerry Garcia 4/10/70
Photo: M. Parrish

For the acoustic set I saw, the two guitarists were accompanied by Lesh on very subdued electric bass and Mickey Hart on drums. They played half a dozen songs – new pieces like “Candyman” and “Friend of the Devil” bound for American Beauty, the Workingman’s Dead songs “Black Peter” and Uncle John’s Band,” and old standby “Deep Elum Blues.” The biggest surprise was an upbeat but ragged cover of the Everly Brothers tune “Wake Up Little Suzie.” The acoustic sets would be expanded and refined throughout the year, but there was nothing like seeing one for the first time.

Pigpen 4/10/70
Photo: M. Parrish

After more equipment rearrangement, the second electric segment began with Pigpen’s soulful rendition of the James Brown chestnut “It’s a Man’s World,” which proved to be a perfect vehicle for the group to stretch out. Newly added to the repertoire for this run, the band apparently played it each of the four nights. Sadly, the song’s tenure in the band was brief, with its last appearance at the group’s September stand at the Fillmore East. They continued with another song that allowed for open-ended playing, a long, upbeat rendition of “Dancin’ in the Streets.” At the end of another Workingman’s Dead tune, “High Time,” the official curfew time of 2 AM was approaching. Without skipping a beat, the Dead entered into the longest, most intense version of the “Alligator>Caution” medley I ever heard. As Garcia, Lesh, and Weir explored the tricky improvisational waters, they appeared to be finally digesting the lessons that Davis’s band had posed to them earlier. Playing on and on, the band thumbed their collective noses at the Fillmore curfew. Unfortunately, I encountered a curfew of my own, as I was literally dragged from the floor of the Fillmore out onto Market just as the band was exploring the “We Big You Goodnight” theme instrumentally, much as they did later in the “Not Fade Away”/”Goin’ Down the Road Feelin’ Bad” sandwich. I learned later from another attendee that the band reached the vocal portion of “We Bid You Goodnight” after another quarter hour or so.

Miles and the Dead. A pairing for the ages. Sadly, the Fillmore West run was the only time the two shared a stage. God Bless Bill Graham…

The Buffalo Springfield at the Fox Theatre, 6/1/11

2011-06-04T12:18:00.000-07:00

Until this year, I had never spent over $100 for a regular, non-benefit concert ticket. However, I decided to bite the bullet for the chance to see the first full show in 43 years by the reunited Buffalo Springfield in the intimate confines of Oakland’s Fox Theatre.

The beauty and coolness of this venue can’t be overstated. Located at the junction of Telegraph Avenue and Broadway in downtown Oakland, the art-deco movie palace has been fully restored and is now booked for concerts by Another Planet Entertainment, a group of former Bill Graham Presents employees that have set the gold standard for concert promotion in the Bay Area today. All of the employees I have dealt with there are friendly, relaxed, and helpful, and it comes across as a welcoming venue rather than a place that crowds in as many people as it can without much regard to the comfort of the patrons.

The interior of the theatre is simply stunning, with a vaguely Arabic theme featuring two enormous gold idols with red eyes flanking the stage, which is flanked with intricate gold scrolling. With a capacity of 2800, the theatre is unusually intimate, and it features such welcome amenities as truly comfortable seats, a bar and restaurant downstairs, and an immaculate cleanliness and tidiness often missing from such vintage venues.

The show was opened, as will be the case throughout the brief Springfield tour, by the acoustic duo of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. Their brief set alternated between Welch originals like “Time the Revelator” and traditional country blues tunes like “I’ll Fly Away” and “Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor.” The duo’s harmonies and Rawling’s athletic lead guitar went down very well with the crowd, the bulk of whom (at least from my vantage point in the front of the mezzanine) appeared to be eligible for membership in the AARP.

The stage set for the show also deserves comment. Behind the amps was a huge edifice consisting of six columns that supported a large “Buffalo Springfield” sign flanked by two life size and vividly three-dimensional images of the steam roller that spawned the group’s name,. When the lights went down, the fields between the columns became a field of lights vividly mimicking a starry night. Onstage, the group’s relatively modest amplifiers were joined by the cigar store Indian that has been a familiar fixture at Neil Young concerts over the years and a large Tiffany lamp that lit a vintage upright piano on stage left.

As noted earlier in this blog, I had a chance to see the reunited Springfield at last fall’s Bridge concerts. For that reason, the edge might have been taken off of the anticipation I felt when Stephen Stills, Richie Furay, and Young bounced onstage together to kick off the show with “On The Way Home.” As thrilling as the Bridge sets were, though, this show was an entirely different animal – the reunited group playing their first full show with electric instruments in over four decades. As on the album version of the tune, Furay, at center stage, took the lead vocal, with Stills and Young providing sublime harmonies.

Stills took the lead on the next tune, “Rock and Roll Woman,” with Furay and Young sharing a single microphone for the harmonies. Stills’ performances have been hit or miss over the years, but he has not looked this good or played this well consistently since the 1970s. The formerly chubby guitarist is down to fighting weight and was sharply dressed in a black shirt and blazer. Stills and Young always seem to bring out the best in one another instrumentally, and the pair played off one another brilliantly all night, most notably on a supercharged version of “Mr. Soul” late in the show.

After a brisk run through another chestnut, “Burned,” Young welcomed the crowd, saying “We’re the Buffalo Springfield – we’re from the past.” Young served as the wisecracking emcee most of the night, later recalling Nixon secretary Rosemary Woods and wondering about the ’44 year gap” in the Springfield’s touring history. When he introduced “I Am a Child” he remarked on the cover of the last, posthumous Springfield album, which had him looking in the opposite direction of the other band members. In response to that cover, which symbolized his defection from the group, he said, with evident regret, “that was bad – we shouldn’t have done that – an error.”

The rhythm section, comprising Young’s first call bassist Rick Rosas and long-time CSN drummer Joe Vitale, did a fine, unobtrusive job of keeping the tunes together. Versions of some tunes, like “Hot Dusty Roads” were faithful to the recorded versions while others, notably a slow, grungy take of “Hot Dusty Roads” for which Young brought out his mainstay guitar, the hot-rodded Les Paul known as Old Black. For the letter-perfect version of Furay’s soft ballad “Kind Woman,” Young churned out some honky tonk licks on the upright piano.

At one point, Young cracked, “We only know 10 songs,” but actually they played eighteen over the span of an hour and a half. Late in the show, the group dipped into its back catalogue for a few obscurities, including Furay’s “My Kind of Love,” which remained unreleased until the 2001 box set, and a slow, simmering version of Stills’ Everybody’s Wrong” from the first Springfield album. The set wrapped up with the inevitable “Bluebird,”given a sparkling new arrangement and providing fodder for some more guitar pyrotechnics. After a group stage bow, the group left the stage, Young’s arm slung companionably around Stills’ shoulder.

The three song encore offered more surprises, starting with what is probably the first live version of Young’s cinematic “Broken Arrow,” with Stills playing piano and Young softly playing the clarinet coda from the album on guitar. “For What Its Worth” has not always been delivered well live, but Stills nailed it this time. The night ended with the only song not from the Springfield canon per se, an over –the-top version of “Rocking in the Free World” with soaring three part harmonies and Young and Stills alternating lead vocals.

At the end of the day, the show offered pretty much everything a Springfield fan might want out of a show. Clearly Stills, Young, and Furay seem to be enjoying one another’s company, and the acid test will be whether they choose to extend the franchise into the twenty first century by producing new material. Whether they do or not, these reunion shows should make a powerful case for the Springfield being one of the best bands to have emerged in the 1960s.

February 1970 - Two Nights with the Grateful Dead

2011-05-14T15:21:00.000-07:00

Everyone who followed the Grateful Dead has their favorite year or two. Some people favor the raw, early psychedelia of 1968 and 1969. Others like the Brent years, the Bruce and Vince era, and almost everyone likes 1972. My favorite Dead year, hands down, is 1970, and I consider myself very fortunate to have gotten to see the band’s evolution that year through five shows from four different runs at the Fillmore West.

It was definitely a transitional year, starting with the band smarting from the disaster of Altamont, the loss of many months of income when manager Lenny Hart absconded with their operating capital. In January, the band began what was arguably their heaviest year of touring with an east coast swing, a junket out to Hawaii, and an ill-fated three-night stand at New Orlean’s warehouse, during which the group experienced their storied bust at their hotel in the French Quarter. Keyboardist Tom Constanten elected to exit the group during the Hawaii junket, playing his last gigs with the group in New Orleans. Emotionally and financially bruised, the band retreated to San Francisco to regroup and begin recording their next album, Workingman’s Dead. A combination of financial necessity and the nature of the new material meant that the album was cut quickly and simply, a marked contrast to the extravagant experimentations of their previous two studio albums, Aoxomoxoa and Anthem of the Sun. With new road manager Sam Cutler, the group also began rebuilding their finances through a grueling year of touring that found them playing 134 dates in 20 different states, plus gigs in the UK and Canada. This was also the year they cemented their dramatic fan base in New York, playing 43 gigs in and around Manhattan. They also played a record number of hometown dates as well – at least 34 in the greater Bay Area.

The Dead also transitioned from a headlining act to an entire evening of entertainment as their shows expanded to include acoustic sets and Garcia’s side project with John Dawson and David Nelson, the New Riders of the Purple Sage. Their expansive shows could run to five hours or more, incorporating folk, bluegrass and acoustic blues, the cosmic country of the NRPS, and the Dead’s ever expanding repertoire of originals and their unique takes on an arsenal of rock, country,R&B, and blues tunes. The Dead arguably reached their compositional and recording peak with the two classic albums recorded that year - Workingman’s Dead and its successor, American Beauty, which introduced a rich and enduring set of new compositions into their repertoire

As the year drew to a close, Mickey Hart was poised to leave the group, and they somewhat abruptly morphed into what Jerry Garcia described in a 1971 interview as a ‘a regular shoot-em-up saloon band.’ Anchored by single drummer Bill Kreutzmann’s remarkably fluid chops, they continued to thrive well into the seventies and beyond, but the intimate magic of those 1970 ‘Evenings with the Grateful Dead’ would ever be created again.

The Dead’s first hometown run of 1970 was at Bill Graham’s Fillmore West, where they played their usual extended four-night weekend following an abbreviated set at the Family Dog on the Great Highway on Wednesday night as part of a Ralph Gleason-produced KQED TV Taping that was released years later as A Night at the Family Dog. As fate would have it, I ended up going to two of the four Fillmore West shows, through happenstance rather than by design. I went to the Friday show with my Dad (his first of about a dozen Dead shows), and was then invited to go to the Sunday night show with one of my high school friends and his father. Although it became commonplace for people to attend multiple Dead shows in later years, this was somewhat of a revelation for me, when it became apparent that the setlists of the two shows were almost entirely different (Although we take for granted the exhaustive chronicling of almost every Dead show today, such information was not readily available back then).

Bigfoot 2/8/70 Photo: M. Parrish

For the February run, the Dead topped a bill rounded out by southern Californians – Taj Mahal’s electric blues band and jazz rock quintet Bigfoot. Bigfoot’s opening set was vaguely psychedelic jazz rock (think the initial incarnation of Chicago Transit Authority). The quintet recorded a fine album on Winro Records before splitting. Some of the former members had some Grateful Dead connections. Keyboard/sax player Dave Garland was in one of the incarnations of Bob Weir’s side band Bobby and the Midnights, and guitarist/vocalist Art Munson (a multifaceted musician and producer who had worked with the Righteous Brothers before joining Bigfoot) sold many a blank DAT tape to Dead tape collectors in the 1980s and 1990s through his Cassette House. The group’s bassist, Virgil Beckham, went on to be an active participant in the Los Angeles Christian rock arena, playing in Richie Furay’s early evangelical band as well as with many other ensembles. I remember them putting on fine shows both nights, but don’t remember any specifics.

Taj Mahal Band 2/8/70 - Jesse Ed Davis, Taj, and
Chuck "Brother" Blackwell. Photo: M. Parrish

At the time of these shows, Taj Mahal had just recently released his double LP, Giant Step/De Old Folks at Home, and was touring with a phenomenal band that included guitarist Jesse Ed Davis, bassist Gary Gilmore, and drummer Chuck Blackwell. At Friday night’s show, Taj came out wearing an outfit very similar to that on the cover of that LP, with a broad brimmed hat, kerchief around his neck, workshirt and jeans. His all-electric set drew almost entirely from Giant Step and his previous album, The Natch’l Blues, and went down very well indeed with the crowd. Taj has always known how to work an audience. Davis was an amazing guitarist, the rhythm section cooked, and the overall chemistry of that band was as memorable as it was legendary. It’s a shame they didn’t stay together longer, but Taj seemed artistically restless during the early 1970s (and beyond, for that matter), trying out new bands and new sounds the way many people try on clothes.

Both nights, the Dead played a single, long electric set. I was able to hear most of Friday’s set, but regrettably only the first hour or so of the long, powerful show they played on Sunday. The Friday show featured all of the tunes that would appear on Workingman’s Dead except for the Pigpen showcase “Easy Wind.” This was the first time I heard the Dead’s slow, funky remake of “Cold Rain and Snow” and their joyous, jammed out rendition of “Dancin’ In the Streets.” It was also a good night for Ron “Pigpen” Meckernan, who trotted out a ferocious version of “Hard to Handle” as well as a long version of the recently resurrected Rascals chestnut“Good Lovin’” which was punctuated by a duel between Kreutzmann and Hart. Bob Weir’s cowboy persona was starting to fully flower at the time, and these were the first of countless Weir renditions I was to hear over the years of John Phillips’ “Me and My Uncle” and Merle Haggard’s “Mama Tried.” Once again, the centerpiece of the set was a long segment built on “That’s It For the Other One” which resolved into one of the earliest airings of the poignant Garcia-Hunter ballad “Black Peter.” We exited the house during that song, which meant that I once again missed the opportunity to see Pig strut his stuff for the concluding "Turn on Your Lovelight."

Sunday afternoon, I got a call from my friend Brooks that he and his dad were going up to the Fillmore, and asking if I wanted to go. Although I had not done so on Friday, I grabbed my camera and off we went. Given that it was a Sunday night, the crowd was lighter than it had been on Friday, so we stationed ourselves along the raised walkway to the right of the stage, which afforded a somewhat better view than the middle of the floor (However, one of the real benefits of the Fillmore West was that the sightlines were great everywhere).

Taj Mahal 2/8/70 Photo: M. Parrish

As I remember, the Bigfoot and Taj Mahal sets were pretty similar to those on Friday. For his Sunday show, Taj wore a very stylish African outfit, which I am ill versed to properly characterize, (but is visible in the photos I took that evening).

With the Dead onstage tuning up, I made my way down right opposite the PA speakers on stage left, just a few feet from the band. As has been documented widely elsewhere, Bill Graham enjoyed a complex love-hate relationship with the Dead, and both took the opportunity to bait the other whenever possible. To begin his introduction of the group, Graham presented Jerry Garcia with a framed photo of celebrity-of-the-moment Michael J. Brody, who had received headlines earlier in the week for giving much of his fortune away to various charities. Presumably Graham thought that Brody’s largesse might benefit the currently financially-strapped band and, although aspiring musician Brody got both a recording contract with RCA and an appearance on the Ed Sullivan show, he did not emerge as a benefactor for the Dead (and that was probably a good thing!).

Smokestack Lightnin' -Bob Weir and Pigpen
2/8/70. Photo: M. Parrish

On a roll, Graham needled the beleagured band further with his introduction: “Stars of stage, screen, and radio, fresh from a command performance in New Orleans, these are the Grateful Dead.” It was common for the Dead to build their sets slowly, starting out with something gentle like “Cumberland Blues” two nights before. It was often the hallmark of a really good night for the band when they began by pulling out all the stops, and that is just what they did Sunday night, jumping into a gritty, fifteen minute rendition of the seldom played Howlin’ Wolf field holler, “Smokestack Lightning.” As is often the case in the best Grateful Dead performances, the pace is set by Phil Lesh, whose loping bass lines drive the band along. Lead instrumental duties alternated between Garcia’s stinging lead guitar and Mckernan’s fluid harmonica playing. Near the ten minute mark, Garcia and Weir started trading licks back and forth as Pig briefly sat down at the organ before stepping back out front to sing the last verse.

Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir 2/8/70
Photo: M. Parrish

Since 1967, one of the Dead’s most effective numbers was their version of Bonnie Dobson’s anti-war ballad “Morning Dew.” Usually reserved for deep in the band’s set, that evening they chose to pull it out as a solution to how to follow up the dramatic standard set by the opening tune. Like “Smokestack,” the Dead played “Morning Dew” sparingly, and the versions they did around 1970 were particularly moving and majestic. At the time, Jerry Garcia’s voice still had a delicacy and vulnerability, and Pigpen’s unadorned organ support was a perfect foil for Garcia’s equally emotive singing and lead guitar.

Two songs and a half hour into the set, the Dead toned things down somewhat with the first Workingman’s tune of the evening, Garcia’s dark folk tune “Dire Wolf.” Although Garcia’s pedal steel was onstage both nights, and he played it on Weir-sung tunes at both the Thursday and Saturday shows, he stuck to his electric guitar here both on “Wolf” and Weir’s peppy run through “Me and My Uncle.” Unfortunately, the calls of Monday morning school and work meant that we left during this tune, with the bulk of the Dead’s set remaining to be played. Fortunately, tapes of this show circulate (and can be heard at archive.org), so I was at least able to hear recordings of the rest of the show years later.

Bob Weir Fillmore West 2/8/70
Photo: M. Parrish

Continuing in short tune mode, the band cruised through a peppy version of another relative rarity – their version of the old bluegrass standard “Sitting On Top of the World.” They retreated to familiar ground with the reliable pairing of “China Cat Sunflower” and “I Know You Rider.” Next up was another rarity, a slow, soulful version of the Elmore James blues lament “It Hurts Me Too,” sung with gusto by McKernan. Well past 1 AM, the Dead launched into the heart of their set – a seventy five minute segment that strung together a long, exploratory Dark Star, Saint Stephen (with Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away” sandwiched in the middle), and another long set-capping version of “Lovelight.” Although the best known Dead shows of this era were those from the Fillmore East the next weekend, released on Bear’s Choice and Dick’s Picks Volume 4, I think that the February 8 show is at least as good, if not better, than those shows. I wish I could’ve stuck around for all of it.

Pepperland - then and now

2011-02-27T11:25:00.000-08:00

The music hall called Pepperland is somewhat of a legend in Marin County lore. Although it was open, on and off, for less than three years, and fully operational for less than a year, it played host to a pretty amazing and diverse roster of international talent, including Pink Floyd, Captain Beefheart, Chuck Berry, and many others. I got up to Pepperland two times, once to see what was billed as the Acoustic Grateful Dead and another time to see a dynamite quadruple bill of Grootna, Lamb, Boz Scaggs, and Taj Mahal’s tuba band. Pepperland has been discussed recently on a couple of the Bay Area related music blogs, so I thought I would deviate again from a chronological diary of shows to talk about this funky little venue.

Bermuda Palms 1950s? Image courtesy of Rebecca David.
(Check out her great book, Mid-Century By the Bay
calmodbooks.com)

The Aliens performing at Bermuda Palms, early 1960s. This is clearly the same stage setup used when the hall became Pepperland.

Pepperland had its origins as part of a motel/restaurant complex called the Bermuda Palms which was built in the 1930s by a San Rafael builder/entrepreneur named Whitey Litchfield. Located in downtown San Rafael at 737 E. Francisco Blvd., just off of Highway 101, the club was readily accessible from Sonoma, San Francisco, and the East Bay, yet it was far enough away from those centers to have a distinctly laid-back Marin County vibe.

Poster from the Janis/Big Brother/Gold Hell's Angel's
Party 5/21/70

The layout of the Palms is shown nicely in the 1967 postcard shown above (the cars in the parking lot suggest that the picture was taken much earlier). The ballroom, adorned with the large Litchfield's sign, was located on the front of the property and the W-shaped motel was behind the hall and between Francisco Blvd. and Front Street. A photo taken at an Aliens gig in shows what the hall looked like in the mid-1960s (read more about the Aliens here). A Bermuda Palms poster shows a bill featuring the Sons of Champlin, as does the poster for the infamous Hell’s Angel’s party in the club on May 22, 1970 featuring Janis Joplin and Full Tilt Boogie, Big Brother, and Gold (admission $1!) still had the site identified as the Palms.

By late June of 1970, the dance hall at Litchfield’s was renamed Euphoria, and had a brief, but storied, stint that included gigs by Big Brother as well as two nights featuring the Grateful Dead, the New Riders, and Rubber Duck. David Crosby participated in the Dead’s acoustic set the first night and, at the second, Janjs Joplin appeared again to trade boozy sexual innuendos with Pigpen on “Lovelight.”

The Glyph sound system at Pepperland circa 1970-71

At the end of July, the club closed its doors while it underwent an extensive facelift, emerging in mid September as Pepperland, a Beatles-themed hall that featured a quadraphonic sound system that was one of the earliest projects for sound engineer John Meyer, who later founded Meyer Sound, the East Bay company that started out building custom PA systems for the Dead and others, and has developed into one of the world’s premier sound reinforcement developers and manufacturers.

To complement the psychedelic décor, the support girders for the hall’s roof were adorned with painted portholes that mimicked the designs present in the fanciful craft piloted by the Beatles in their 1968 cartoon movie Yellow Submarine. Even the sound system blended into the décor, with the speakers molded into huge conical fiberglass structures as shown above.What appears to have been Pepperland’s grand opening featured an eclectic triple bill of Hot Tuna, Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band, and jazz flute maestro Charles Lloyd. From then well into 1971, the club offered really interesting triple bills of acts that would normally be Bill Graham’s stock in trade in the city. Notable among these was a legendary Pink Floyd gig in which the band needed to use the ballroom floor to accommodate all of their gear, and one of the shows was plagued by power failures as Floyd’s massive sound system taxed the club’s electrical capacity. The relatively Pepperland portion of the gig list below was culled largely from the web site of Universalightforms, a site run by Bob Pulum, founder of legendary light show crew the Brotherhood of Light, who became the house visual artists at the club beginning with the club’s second gig with Frank Zappa and the Mothers. According to Pulum’s site, Pepperland’s first incarnation lasted from that initial show until an April 11, 1971 bill with Quicksilver, Hot Tuna, and Lizard, after which the promoters allegedly split with the proceeds of that show. Pepperland reopened in September with some of the original employees, including the BOL, in place, but the new venue seems to have only stayed open a few months, closing for good in January, 1972. A nice selection of poster images from Pepperland and Euphoria can be found in this page at the great Chicken on a Unicycle web site.

The Litchfield’s motel appears to have been open during this entire time and developed somewhat of a shady reputation in the 1970s. This reputation is supported indirectly by the Grateful Dead tune "Shakedown Street," which was written in 1978 about the neighborhood surrounding the band’s Front Street studios, which were directly across the street from the rear of the Litchfield’s complex.

Today the site houses a somewhat gentrified Motel 6. In front of the motel is a large building that recently housed the Zebra sofa store, and which was clearly the original Euphoria/Pepperland building. In 2008, the historic Litchfield’s sign was restored on the building through the efforts of Perry Litchfield, Marin County lawyer and Whitey’s son.

Jerry Garcia and David Crosby
Pepperland 12/21/70 Photo: M. Parrish

When I visited Pepperland in 1970 and 1971, it seemed like quite a trek up to the wilds of Marin from Palo Alto, but at least the hall was easy to find once in San Rafael, located as it was on a frontage road right off of 101. What was immediately impressive about the hall was its modest size. Although it competed directly with the Fillmore West for headliners, Pepperland seemed to have been, by the most generous estimate, no more than half the size of the F. West/Carousel, which was already relatively tiny by today’s concert hall standards. As you can see from the photos, it had less-than-optimum dimensions for a music hall, a long, low building with exposed horizontal girders supporting the wide A-framed roof. In its Pepperland makeover, these became girders of the enormous submarine one was supposedly inside within the hall. An interesting concept, but not an entirely convincing fantasy. However, combined with the exotic Meyer sound sculptures and the light show (it appears that none was operational at the 1970 gig, but Brotherhood of Light was very evident at the Mahal show) made for a fairly exotic interior setting, particularly when contrasted with the utilitarian trappings that surrounded the building.

George Marsh and Jerry Hahn Pepperland 12/21/70
Photo : M. Parrish

The 12/21/70 concert has been written about at length elsewhere, most recently in a lengthy blog post by Jerry Garcia’s Middle Finger. The photos I took at this gig are truly terrible as I was unable to adjust for the very low light conditions, but I was able to adjust the images using photoshop, and share a few of them here to give a bit of visual record from the event. These first two images just came to light a few weeks ago when I found a fragment of negatives from the first part of this show. What proved to be a marathon evening of music got underway with a spectacular set by the Jerry Hahn Brotherhood, one of the Bay Area’s most amazing, but generally unheralded, musical aggregations of the era. The group, comprising jazz guitarist Hahn, blues-rock keyboardist and vocalist Michael Finnegan, and the superb rhythm section of drummer George Marsh and bassist Mel Graves, had a relatively short lifespan, disbanding soon after the show I attended. Rocking hard, armed with a splendid set of songs mostly penned by non-member Lane Tietgen, this short lived quartet was very much akin to a Bay Area version of The Band. They did release one fabulous, eponymous album on Columbia, but never achieved the popularity they richly deserved. This was the only time I got to see them, and I believe the group broke up shortly thereafter. I will write much more about this great group at a later date.

Mystery Musicians Pepperland 12/21/70
Photo: M. Parrish

What happened next is not entirely clear. I know that John Kahn played an unbilled set as (I believe) just a duo with a blues guitarist whose name I do not remember (none of the usual suspects like Bloomfield. Gravenites, Bishop, or the like) but I seem to have no photo record of this set. On the other hand, I do have this enigmatic photo of a jazz guitarist and drummer that was positioned chronologically on the film between shots of Hahn and the New Riders. As noted in the jgmf post and the attached poster, Howard Wales was billed in the advance posters. In a response to jgmf, I indicated that Wales had not played, but it is conceivable that he did play and I did not remember it. It was a very long evening of music, and an additional set by Wales and company would perhaps get the headliners coming on as late as they in fact did appear. What I believe I expected was for Garcia to play with Wales, which did not happen. At the time, seeing Wales himself would have been no big deal, as I had seen him a number of times with A.B. Skhy. So either this photo is of the guys who played with Kahn or perhaps part of Wales' band. Neither of the more familiar musicians are visible, so this is likely to remain a mystery unless more information is forthcoming. The guitarist looks somewhat like Terry Haggerty, but I am pretty confident that it is someone else.

Spencer Dryden and David Nelson of NRPS
Pepperland 12/21/70 Photo: M. Parrish

After Kahn and friend(s) came the New Riders of the Purple Sage. I'd seen them many times in 1970, but this was the first time I had seen them with Spencer Dryden on the drum kit instead of Mickey Hart. They played a nice long set, with no real surprises except for the switch in drummers, and finished up well after 1 AM.

Jerry Garcia's nose and David Crosby
Note: Garcia playing an SG and Crosby a Gretsch 6 String
Pepperland 12/21/70 Photo: M. Parrish

The headliners were billed as the "Acoustic Dead" but the group that took the stage was an impromptu quartet comprising Garcia, Lesh, Kreutzmann, and David Crosby. Two tapes of this ensemble (it remains an open question whether Mickey Hart substituted for Kreutzmann in the earlier gigs) from the Matrix a few days earlier (the exact date(s) of those tapes are debated) circulate widely, but their tenure was short lived, and this may have been the last time the quartet performed. I was only able to hear part of their set, which opened with "Alabama Bound" and also included "Deep Elum Blues," "Motherless Children" and "Triad." Clearly they played a lot more (which, based on the tapes from the Matrix show, would have included primal versions of "Bertha" and "Bird Song"), but at that point I was dragged out by my father, who had to go to work the next morning. As noted elsewhere, at least Weir and Pigpen could be seen wandering around backstage, so it is likely that the Dead did indeed play later.

There seemed to be nothing like a curfew at Pepperland, and the musicians were clearly in no hurry to get anywhere.

Crosby, Kreutzmann, Lesh Pepperland 12/21/70
Photo M. Parrish

An interesting question begged by this show's billing, as well as that for the 12/31/70 New Year's show, was the specific timing of the demise of the Dead's 1969-70 acoustic sets. Both of these shows advertised the Dead playing acoustically, but it appears that this did not come to pass at either gig. The last shows at which acoustic sets are verified are the 11/5-8/70 Capitol Theatre shows, and a plethora of subsequent November (11/16, 11/20, 11/29) and December (12/12, 12/26-28, 31) shows are known that do not include acoustic sets. The reasoning for the abandonment of these sets is unclear. The amplification of the acoustic sets was always problematic, and Mickey Hart's imminent departure may have also figured into the issue. Whatever the reason, there is no documented record of the band stepping onstage with acoustic guitars until the 11/17/78 Hunger Week benefit in Chicago (which I got to attend, and will write about another day).

The issue of the drummer for this ensemble has been a source of some confusion. When the tapes of the Matrix show first circulated in the mid-1970s, the tape notations listed Mickey Hart as the drummer. During the Dead's acoustic sets in 1970, who provided percussion seemed to be almost random. Either Kreutzmann or Hart would generally be the principal drummer (except on the many occasions when only Garcia, Weir, and Lesh performed without percussion), so seeing a sole drummer onstage was no big deal. When I was recently able to scan the negatives from this show, it became clear that the drummer this evening was Kreutzmann, not Hart, so it seems equally likely that this was the case at the Matrix show/rehearsal earlier in the week. As discussed over at JGMF, I do not recall seeing Hart in the hall (and only one drum kit was onstage), so he most likely did not perform that evening at all.

Taj Mahal Tuba Band at Pepperland 4/2-4/71
Photo: Dr. Che

The only other time I made it to Pepperland was the next March, for a great bill of three hometown acts and headliner Taj Mahal with his unique four tuba band. As noted earlier, the Brotherhood of Light did provide visuals for that show, which was one of the last under the sponsorship of the original Pepperland booking agents. This show opened with an unbilled set by Grootna. Although this group did perform during the closing week of the Fillmore West, and recorded a single, eponymous album for Columbia produced by the Airplane's Marty Balin, they never really broke nationally, or even achieved headline status in the Bay Area. Grootna consisted of vocalist Anna Rizzo, guitarists Slim Chance and Vic Smith, bassist Kelly Bryan, and drummer Greg Dewey, who had played at Woodstock in the final incarnation of Country Joe and the Fish and went by the nom de plume of Dewey DaGreeze in Grootna. The group's tight blues-rock set probably consisted principally of material from their single album.

Next up was Lamb, which had originated as an acoustic duo consisting of guitarist-vocalist Barbara Mauritz and guitarist-keyboard player Bob Swanson. By the time of this show, they had expanded to an electric quartet, which included bassist David Hayes and a percussionist. The group's eclectic material was jazz influenced, and driven by Mauritz' powerful, hypnotic vocals. Their second album, Cross Between, featured Jerry Garcia on three cuts.

During 1970 and 1971, one of the Bay Area's best bands was the octet led by by Boz Scaggs. After departing the Steve Miller Band at the end of 1968, Scaggs took a year or so off from performing, but cut a legendary, eponymous album in Muscle Shoals with a lot of help from Duane Allman. When that album garnered a lot of airplay. Scaggs went ahead and assembled a band to, as much as possible, capture the tight big band sound he had captured on the album. The new group featured drummer George Rains (late of Mother Earth and the Sir Douglas Quintet), bassist David Brown, jazz keyboard player Jymm Joachim Young, guitarist Doug Simril, and a horn section comprising sax player Mel Martin, trombonist Patrick O'Hara, and trumpeter Bill Atwood (replaced at some point by Tom Poole). The group's diverse sets were drawn mostly from the Atlantic Scaggs album and the band's first Columbia album, Moments, both of which featured a blend of rockers and soulful ballads that were very different than the disco material that brought Scaggs his greatest commercial success in the late 1970s and 1980s. A high point of their sets as the time was a long, spacy version of "Baby's Calling Me Home" which Scaggs had contributed to the first Steve Miller Band album, Children of the Future.

Taj Mahal was ubiquitous in the Bay Area during the era, but this was the first time, to my knowledge, that he performed locally with the remarkable band he assembled for a couple of tours that was documented in The Real Thing. Taj was always staking out new musical territory, but the so called "Tuba band" was perhaps his most audacious (and probably expensive) experiment. Comprising first call musicians like guitarist John Hall (later leader of Orleans), one-time Hendrix bassist Billy Rich, pianist John Simon, drummer Greg Thomas, and conga player Kwasi "Rocky" DziDzournou, the group's most startiing element was the quartet of tuba players led by Howard Johnson and also featuring Bob Stewart, Joseph Daley, and Earl McIntyre.

Few vocalist-guitarists have enough presence not to be upstaged by a quartet of tubas, but the combination worked remarkably well. Taj used the tubas mostly to provide a tremendous bottom to tunes like "Sweet Mama Janisse" and the extended "You Ain't No Street Walker Mama, But Honey I Love the Way You Strut Your Stuff." After doing a couple of songs solo, Taj brought the rest of the musicians out for a slow, breezy version of "Ain't Gwine To Whistle Dixie (Anymo') highlighted by both exclamations from the tuba section and Hall's jazzy guitar. It was a great set and, given that it was a Saturday night, we stayed until the end.

The Interior of the Pepperland Building Circa 2/2011
The stage was located back by the flat Screen TV and
the exercise balls. Photo: M. Parrish

The Bermuda Palms/Euphoria/Pepperland Building
Circa 2/2011 Photo M. Parrish

Curiosity about the current state of the building and the Litchfield’s site led to a Cryptical Road Trip to sunny San Rafael, Taking the exit off of 101 that leads to the Richmond San Rafael Bridge onramp, a sudden sharp left turn leads to Francisco Blvd., a high volume frontage road that parallels 101 on its eastern side. A few blocks northward, the Litchfield’s property loomed, replete with the large, restored sign. Emerging from my car I discovered that the building has been carved up into a few retail areas, one of which is currently occupied by a Fitness Warehouse. Comparing the interior photo to the best shot I could find of Pepperland in its prime (a great shot by Dr. Ché from the interior of Taj Mahal’s Real Thing album, which was not recorded at Pepperland, but at the Fillmore East), it appears that the stage area was located just about where the exercise balls now reside. Needless to say, the submarine trappings are long gone, as is the Meyer-built Glyph sound system. The proprietors of the store had no idea of the building’s illustrious past, but also didn’t seem all that interested.

The former site of Le Club Front as of 2/2011
Photo: M. Parrish

Being in the neighborhood, I popped around the corner to pay my respects to the former site of Le Club Front. The warehouse, which most recently housed a plumbing supply store, is currently unoccupied. I got out to take some photos, but beat a hasty retreat when a truck pulled up to the curb and what looked like some clandestine transaction got underway. It was clearly time to bid adieu to shakedown street, and a memorable bit of Marin County rock history.

Gig Lists

Bermuda Palms

7/28/67 Sons of Champlin, Baltimore Steam Packet, Thursday’s Island, Mieville Square, The IV Kings.

5/21/70 Hell’s Angels Party with Janis Joplin and Full Tilt Boogie (billed as Main Squeeze, but they had broken up by then), Big Brother and the Holding Company, and Gold.

Euphoria

7/3,4,5/70 Big Brother and the Holding Company, A.B. Skhy, Joy of Cooking

7/14, 16/70 Grateful Dead, NRPS, Rubber Duck

7/20/70 Country Joe and the Fish, Southern Comfort

7/24,25,26 Chambers Brothers, Boz Scaggs, Southern Comfort

Pepperland

9/18,19/70 - Pepperland Ballroom Hot Tuna, Capt. Beefheart, Charles Lloyd

9/25,26/70 - Pepperland NBL Productions - Frank Zappa & Mothers, Tim Buckley, Kindred

10/16,17/70 - Pink Floyd, Kimberly, Osceola

10/24,25/70 - Steve Miller, Jerry Hahn, Dan Hicks & Hot Licks

11/13,14/70 - Incredible String Band, Doug Kershaw, Joy Of Cooking

11/28/70 - Leon Russell, Capt. Beefheart, Clover, Truk

12/18,19/70 - Chuck Berry, Sir Douglas (or Edward’s Hand?) , Boz Scaggs

12/20/70 - Joan Baez

12/20/71 – Grateful Dead?, Crosby/Garcia/Lesh/Kreutzmann, John Kahn and?, NRPS, Jerry Hahn Brotherhood

1/22,23/71 - Youngbloods, Sea Train, John Fahey

1/29,30/71 - Cold Blood, Boz Scaggs, Stoneground

2/5,6/71 - Elvin Bishop, PG&E, Tower Of Power

2/20,21/71- Big Brother, The Sons, Clover

2/26,27/71- Spencer Davis, Dan Hicks&Hot Licks, Country Weather

3/5,6/71- Steve Miller, John Lee Hooker, Bronze Hog

3/12,13/71- Lee Michaels, Joy Of Cooking, Fourth Way

3/11/71 - Linda Ronstadt, Clover, Little John, Chris Darrow

3/19,20/71 – It’s A Beautiful Day, Odetta, Victoria

4/2-4/71 - Taj Mahal, Boz Scaggs, Lamb, Grootna

4/11/71 - Quicksilver, Hot Tuna, Lizard

Last NBL show

9/9-11/71 - Steve Miller, Yogi Phlegm, Nazgul, Clover

9/24,25/71 - Mike Bloomfield, Stoneground, Clover

11/13/71- Tower Of Power, Cold Blood, Norman Greenbaum

12/4/71 - Boz Scaggs, Earthquake, Staton Bros.

12/11/71- Joy Of Cooking, Commander Cody, Crossfire

1/22/72- Tower Of Power, Redwing, Roger Collins

IABD at Frost, The Dead at Winterland, and CSNY at UCSB

2011-01-28T01:01:00.000-08:00

Old Davis, Stanford 10/5/69 Photo: M. Parrish

Looking back on 1969, I actually was able to see quite a bit of music for a kid without a driver’s license. The fall brought several more memorable concerts, including another memorable multi-act bill at the Frost Amphitheatre, my first of many visits to the late, lamented Winterland, and a chance to see Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young in their formative period.

As mentioned in an earlier post and in several places on the MFU site, the Midpeninsula Free University had to abandon their El Camino Park Be-Ins in 1968. However, they continued to sponsor music events, and the October 5 SCORE (Stanford Committee on Radical Education) concert held at Frost Amphitheatre was sponsored by the MFU and served as a benefit for the Defense fund for a group of individuals arrested in a demonstration at SRI earlier that year.

This show was memorable for me in that it was the first time I had gone out anywhere with a girl. I had known Monica for a year or so as our parents were mutual friends, so we ended up spending a lot of time with her and her brother at dinner parties and such. Because we liked the same kind of music as well, it made sense that we would go to this together. Still, it was a big step for me, and she was great company at both this show and the Winterland Airplane-Dead show I will describe next. It turned out that these were the only two shows we went to together, but I enjoyed her company and have fond memories of both outings.

The SCORE show took place on another beautiful sunny Stanford Sunday afternoon. As has been mentioned before, the correlations between who was advertised at one of these Frost shows and who actually appeared was often pretty low. In this case, two of the major acts advertised, Southern Comfort and the Bloomfield/Gravenites band, did not appear. According to a review by Craig Okino in the Stanford Daily, these two acts pulled out because of a financial dispute, and Buddy Guy, who was advertised as part of the bill early on, was unable to make the gig because of scheduling issues. Nonetheless, the show had a good representation of second-tier San Francisco bands.

When scanning my photos of the event, I came upon shots of a band that I did not remember at all. After a certain amount of detective work, and a consultation with Rock Prosopography's Corry 834, it was established that this group was peninsula band Old Davis, which at one point had future Santana-Journey member Neil Schon as a guitarist. Obviously, they did not make a lasting impression on me. Another group listed on the posters, Stone Rock Outcrop, I neither remember nor photographed. They may have played before we got to the show, or were also no-shows.

Sanpaku 10/5/69 Photo: M. Parrish

Much more memorable was the set by jazz inflected rock group Sanpaku. Sanpaku is another of those groups that were a mainstay of ballroom and festival bills on the west coast for a couple of years that never released any music commercially. You can learn much more about Sanpaku here. At the Frost show, they played a long set, enlivened by a dramatic percussion solo where bare chested drummer Duane (Motor) Temme beat on his kit, microphone stands, and pretty much anything else he could find, while an unperturbed hippie dog walked past him onstage. I wish I had some better tools for describing Sanpaku’s music that afternoon, but details elude me after all these years, especially in light of the absence of recorded music as a reference point. Stanford Daily reviewer Craig Okino likened them to a cross between Santana and the Sons of Champlin, which to my memory is not too far off the mark.

Cold Blood 10/5/69

This was the first of many times I heard Cold Blood. One of the second-tier San Francisco bands, Cold Blood is another big, horn-heavy ensemble led by charismatic lead vocalist Lydia Pense. The group had just released their first, eponymous album on Bill Graham’s San Francisco label, and their powerful set built on the momentum established by Sanpaku, closing with “You Got Me Humming,” which was an FM radio hit at the time. Okino was clearly not a big fan, citing tired horn riffs and arrangements. Amazingly, a version of Cold Blood still tours today, and Pense remains a remarkable vocal presence, whose youthful appearance belies the fact that she has over four decades of gigs under her belt.

Dancing Girl 10/5/69 Photo: M. Parrish

As at the Monterey Jazz Festival a few weeks earlier, I was fascinated by my fellow audience members, and took quite a few shots of the proceedings in the crowd. It was one of those warm, sunny late fall afternoons, and the sun and the great music animated and energized the lively, capacity crowd.

Crowd 10/5/69 Photo: M. Parrish

The show’s closing act was It’s a Beautiful Day, who were by then well established as a headlining act in the ballrooms, had released a popular debut album, and had a solid FM radio hit with “White Bird.” Since I saw them a year earlier, leader David LaFlamme had acquired a moustache and the band had hired a new keyboard player, Fred Webb, who had recently replaced Linda LaFlamme. The group’s set again included most of their debut album, along with material such as the instrumental “Don and Dewey,” which would come out on their second release, Marrying Maiden, the following year. The group was more confident than they had been at when I saw them open for Cream, and had developed a harder edge. Laflamme and vocalist Patty Santos had developed a dynamic stage presence, and their vibrant vocal harmonies at the time were reminiscent of the similar chemistry seen between Marty Balin and Grace Slick in the Jefferson Airplane. All in all, it was another great afternoon of music. No real superstars, but a consistently interesting and energetic lineup of groups.

It's A Beautiful Day 10/5/69 Photo: M. Parrish

It's a Beautiful Day 10/5/69 Photo: M. Parrish

A few weeks later, Monica and I went to Winterland for the first night of the weekend stand with the Dead and the Jefferson Airplane co-headlining. Since I was still a few weeks shy of driving age, my parents again acted as chauffeurs, and the four of us had dinner on Union Street before they deposited us in front of the big ice arena right at showtime.

Although I had been to the Fillmore a few times by then, the much larger Winterland was definitely an adjustment. By the time we got into the hall, the lights were down and the huge hall, which seemed generously oversold, was full to the rafters with revelers. We ended up staking out a bit of floor space near the back of the hall, which was not too bad a location given that the stage was located on the wide, western end of the hall. However, being crammed into the extremely crowded floor was a very different experience than being at the Fillmore, which somehow never seemed too crowded, even when a show was sold out.

Opening the evening was a curiosity for an evening of San Francisco music. Cajun fiddler Doug Kershaw had recently released a mainstream album on Warner Brothers that was getting a lot of airplay on local FM stations. For his set at Winterland, Kershaw was backed by Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen, still relatively new to the area after relocating to Berkeley from Ann Arbor, Michigan. I recall a high energy set, with Kershaw playing his biggest hits, “Diggy Diggy Lo” and “Louisiana Man” along with a bunch of other stuff. Cody and company played dutiful backup, but did not have a venue to demonstrate their own arsenal of talent that evening.

After a longish break, the Sons of Champlin played a great set of music very similar to the one they had delivered at Monterey several weeks earlier. Their set from this show actually circulates in collector’s circles, and consists of all but one track from their second album (which, according to a stage announcement from Bill Champlin, was due to be released the following week) followed by a long medley of “Get High” and “Freedom” from their earlier release “Loosen Up Naturally.”

Sons 10/24/69 Photo: M. Parrish

After another long break, the Dead finally came on about 10 PM. I was starting to get nervous, because we had planned another midnight meeting with my parents outside, based on the assumption that each band would play two sets in the evening as had been the protocol at the Fillmore West shows I had seen. It was quickly becoming apparent that this would not be the case that evening, and indeed, from then on, all Graham-run shows I saw consisted of a linear progression of acts rather than the earlier format comprising six set evenings with each act playing twice.

The Dead played a nice set (you can listen to part of it here), although it paled in comparison to their amazing performance back in March at the Fillmore. Although the Dead had four albums worth of material I knew well, the bulk of their set was new to me. They opened with a quartet of original songs that would find their way out on the group’s next studio release, Workingman’s Dead, the following year. Casey Jones had first appeared in the Dead’s sets the previous June, and was still a work in progress, delivered at a breakneck tempo, and without the syncopated, rolling cadence it was played at by the time it was recorded early the following year. At least on the partial audience tape of the show that circulates, Tom Constanten’s roller rink organ was prominent in the mix the entire show. On artistic grounds alone, it is clear why he parted company with the Dead a few months later, as their new music did not leave a lot of space for the sound of his keyboards.

Grateful Dead 10/24/69 Photo: M. Parrish

“Dire Wolf,” Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter’s sardonic little gambling ballad, had already been through an interesting evolution. Appearing in June as an acoustic ballad sung by Garcia, it then became one of several songs that allowed Garcia to flex his chops on his new pedal steel guitar. During this juncture, Bob Weir assumed the lead vocals, presumably because of the difficulty of playing the pedal steel and singing lead simultaneously. By the time of the Winterland show, Garcia had established a more regular pedal steel outlet with the New Riders of the Purple Sage, so he was back to singing the song while playing regular electric lead. The slow, mournful “High Time” was another new Garcia/Hunter tune that had emerged as a favorite point of resolution out of open ended tunes like “Dark Star” and “China Cat Sunflower,” but here they went straight into it after the relatively unadorned “Dire Wolf.”

When I first saw the Dead at the Fillmore West in March, Pigpen was all but invisible, as Constanten was at both shows I saw in which he participated. However, at Winterland, Pigpen was prominent in the front line, behind a pair of conga drums. He was also featured prominently in the set list, first with an early, extended version of “Easy Wind,” one of the few songs in the Dead’s repertoire that had a sole authorship credit by Robert Hunter. The middle section of the tune developed into a bit of an instrumental jousting match between Garcia and Constanten.

Grateful Dead 10/24/69 Photo: M. Parrish

From its origination, “China Cat Sunflower” had been a song in search of an ending. At its introduction, in early 1968, it had flowed directly into “The Eleven” with which it was originally linked lyrically. When “The Eleven” found its way into the Live Dead suite between St. Stephen and Lovelight, China Cat was dropped from the live setlist for awhile, and then, in the spring of 1969, became the frequent jumping off point for “Doing That Rag” and later “High Time.” At Winterland, it was newly paired with “I Know You Rider,” a combination that was maintained throughout the rest of the Dead’s performing history. The version that night was revved up, with an extended jam out of the last verse of “I Know You Rider” that ultimately crashed back down into an additional version of the old folk song’s refrain.

Pigpen stepped to the microphone again for Otis Redding’s “Hard to Handle,” another tune relatively new to the band’s repertoire. This became a real show stopper for the band in 1970 and 1971, but it was no less energetic, if a bit less polished, in this early version. Although Redding’s original is hard to beat, Mckernan owned this song, and there was nothing like his shouting out the refrain and the band cranking out that three chord riff in response.

Based on my first experience with the Dead and their soon-to-be-released Live Dead (which I had already heard in its entirety on the radio numerous times), I was expecting a long, improvised segment and, nearly an hour into the Dead’s set, they began one with “Cryptical Envelopment.” Fully warmed up at this point, the tune naturally evolved into a medium length version of “The Other One.” The only part of this suite that I’ve heard on tape is a snippet beginning late in “The Other One” and moving into “Cosmic Charlie.” This passage contains some brilliant playing, as one tune morphs gradually into the next. Garcia started things off with a wailing banshee riff that Lesh soon anchored with his bass. Over the next minute or so, they switched back and forth between that intro and the chords of the “Cryptical” reprise before dropping deftly and gently into “Charlie.”

The Dead rounded out their set with another extended extravaganza, their Pigpen sung adaptation of the Rascals hit “Good Lovin’. At this point, this tune was newly restored to their repertoire, and, like “Hard to Handle,” it lacked some of the punch it developed over the next couple of years. However, it gave the two drummers plenty of space to strut their stuff, and wrapped up the set nicely.

I suppose I should have been thrilled to have heard such a strong set by the Dead back in 1969, but I was actually pretty unhappy at this point. The Dead’s set was largely unfamiliar to me, and included none of Live Dead. Worse was the fact that they wrapped up after 1130 and, thanks to another set change, the Airplane didn’t hit the stage until about 5 minutes before our pumpkin coach was to arrive outside. At this point, I was probably as big a fan of the Airplane as the Dead, and had never seen them live. Regrettably, all I can describe of their set was the corrosive version of their apocalyptic “House at Pooneil Corners” that opened what presumably was a lengthy set, which we heard as we were making our way to the door.

One of the big music events of late 1969 was the Rolling Stones tour, and I really wanted to see the band at their show at the Oakland Coliseum. Regrettably, both shows were sold out by the time I had arranged transportation. As a result, I did not see the Stones until 1972 as my parents, very wisely as it turned out, did not let me trek up to Altamont for that fabled social disaster of a free concert the next month. As a consolation prize for missing the Stones in Oakland, I ended up getting a plane ticket down to Santa Barbara to visit my brother, who was then a freshman at UCSB. In addition to seeing the campus and visiting my now collegiate sibling, the occasion was one of the very early gigs by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, at the university’s stadium. It was a cold, cloudy day, and Bill and I ended up getting pretty good seats in the stadium stands for the sold-to-capacity afternoon show.

The opening act was Los Angeles octet Sweetwater, with their eclectic mix of folk-jazz-rock. Lead singer Nancy Nevins’ gentle voice, August Burns’ cello, and Albert Moore’s flute gave the group a much mellower edge than many of their contemporaries. Sweetwater had played the first day of the Woodstock Festival a few months earlier, but they did not end up in the movie or receive any of the attendant secondary fame that many of the other festival acts enjoyed. At UCSB, they played a rather long set, but I was unfamiliar with their music at the time so can offer no particulars about what they played. Just weeks after the UCSB gig, Nevins was severely injured by a drunk driver, and she suffered through a lengthy recovery. The band did record two albums after the accident, but broke up in the early 1970s. Today, a revived version of Sweetwater exists, featuring Nevins, along with original bass player Fred Herrera and keyboardist Alex Del Zoppo.

The Steve Miller Band was booked to play between Sweetwater and CSNY, but they ran into travel delays, and we endured a lengthy break while waiting for Miller’s arrival. Finally, the decision was made to have CSNY go ahead and play, with the Miller Band slated to play afterwards if and when they showed up.

Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young were still a very new commodity in November 1969. The initial album by Crosby Stills and Nash had come out in mid-1968, to universal acclaim and sold briskly, reaching #6 on the charts and receiving Gold status within weeks of its May, 1969 release. In the meantime, Stephen Stills’ old bandmate Neil Young had recorded two solo albums. His eponymous debut didn’t generate a lot of heat, but Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, which also came out in the summer of 1969, generated a tremendous buzz thanks to the long, corrosive guitar jams he recorded with Crazy Horse and the album’s radio-friendly single, “Cinnamon Girl.” When Crosby, Stills, and Nash set out to tour, they realized they needed another instrumentalist, and Stills lobbied for Young’s inclusion. As history has shown, the charges in this powerful nucleus of talents were consistently unstable, and alliances between group members were broken and forged repeatedly over the decades. However, in the fall of 1969, all was new, and the group was seemingly reveling in their talents and in the steady flow of creative energy the new partnership had brought.

In Santa Barbara, the group played a wonderful, long set, opening with a bunch of acoustic tunes led off by Stills’ omnipresent harmony vehicle “Suite Judy Blue Eyes.” No known recordings of the show exist, and I did not keep a detailed set list, but the group played the bulk of the Crosby Stills and Nash album along with a long, jammed out version of Young’s “Down By The River” and some new songs like Stills’ “4 + 20”, and “So Begins the Task,” Young’s “Helpless” and “Sea of Madness,” and the group’s luminous cover of Lennon and McCartney’s “Blackbird.” The set was also notable for what was not played. At one point mid-set when the group was debating what to play next, an exasperated Young piped up “Let’s play a Grateful Dead tune.” They didn’t take the bait, but the possibility is strong that they could have done one of the Dead’s new country inflected tunes. The quartet, and Stills and Crosby in particular, had been hanging out with the Dead in recent months, and helping them hone their harmonies. As the set neared the end, Nash announced that the group would next do a brand new tune written by Joni Mitchell about Woodstock. After more onstage sturm und drang, someone within the group decided that Mitchell’s tune was not ready for prime time, although they were playing it regularly onstage within a couple of weeks.

Sometime during the CSNY set, a large group of people outside the stadium broke down a fence and charged into the grounds, espousing the then popular philosophy that all music should be free, and that the era’s musical heroes should presumably ply their craft freely without compensation. The effect of this civil disobedience was that those that tore down the fence got to hear a few minutes of music, and the UCSB Stadium was not used for outdoor concerts for nearly four years. It also meant that Steve Miller never did play, although it is unclear whether his band ever made it to Santa Barbara or not.

As mentioned earlier, I did not make the trek to Altamont and, as it turned out, the CSNY show was the last major concert I attended in 1969. It had been a remarkable year for popular music, and I was lucky to have heard many of the era’s icons at, or near, their peaks.

Monterey Jazz Festival September 19-20, 1969

2010-12-22T10:59:00.000-08:00

From 1958 to the present, the Monterey Jazz Festival has remained one of the best and most popular outdoor music festivals on the west coast and, for that matter, in the world. In my youth, I got to go to the festival once, for the 12^th iteration in 1969. Then, as now, the festival took place at the Monterey County Fairgrounds, which was also the site of the memorable Monterey Pop festival two years earlier. Since 1983, the festival has expanded to include venues throughout the fairgrounds property, but back then the entire event took place in the relatively intimate fairgrounds arena. Seating has always been reserved in the Arena (capacity 5850) and, not unlike the venue of a popular sports team, prime seats, particularly those on the elevated stands on either side of the stage, are kept by patrons year after year. However, back in 1969, my family and I were able to get fairly good floor seats in advance for the Friday evening and Saturday afternoon shows.

Starting in 1966, the Monterey Jazz Festival had experimented with adding rock acts to their lineup, with Paul Butterfield’s very electric blues band added to the traditional Saturday afternoon blues show. At the next year’s festival, Big Brother and the Holding Company, who had become stars at the same venue a few months earlier during the Monterey Pop Festival, played the Saturday blues show. After a 1968 festival with no real rock based acts, the festival moved significantly in the direction of popular music for 1969, including such pure rock acts as Sly and the Family Stone and Lighthouse as well as jazz artists such as Tony Williams and Miles Davis who had wholeheartedly embraced electric jazz fusion.

The Monterey Fairgrounds is a large facility not too far from the center of the relatively small seaside community of Monterey. After a seafood dinner, we got there in plenty of time to see the evening’s opening act, a quintet co-led by vibraphonist Red Norvo and clarinet player Peanuts Hucko. Individually and collectively, the group’s leaders had worked in big bands, backed up Billy Holiday, and worked in a variety of small postwar ensembles. Their short set certainly swung, but my teenage mind was more fixated on the rock-based acts to come later in the evening.

Modern Jazz Quartet 9/19/69
Photo: M. Parrish

The Modern Jazz Quartet had already been together for 17 years when they played the Monterey Festival for the seventh time after the Norvo-Hucko set. At the time, the quartet, comprising vibraphonist Milt Jackson, pianist John Lewis, bassist Percy Heath, and drummer Connie Kay, had the unlikely distinction of being the only jazz act on the Beatles’ Apple label, for which they recorded two albums. Despite that rock connection, the MJQ’s music was very much classy, elegant acoustic jazz, delivered with precision and style. Unfortunately, I was too unschooled in the MJQ’s repertoire to have a concept of the set list, but did have the pleasure of hearing two of the leading vibe players in jazz to begin the evening.

Although Miles Davis had dramatically blended rock elements into jazz, as opposed to groups like Blood Sweat and Tears or the Sons bringing some jazz sensibilities and instruments into rock, Davis had yet to realize the full potential of electric instrumentation to his ensembles by the fall of 1969. He used electric instruments to great effect on the meditative In a Silent Way, but the pathway into the snarling loud fusion of Bitches Brew was led by one of Davis’ most distinguished alumni, drum prodigy Tony Williams. After leaving Davis, Williams assembled the Tony Williams Lifetime, bringing together organist Larry Young and British guitarist John McLaughlin. Williams’ dynamic, polyrhythmic style had been a hallmark of Davis’ bands since he joined him in 1962 at the age of 17. However, he clearly had a louder, denser goal in mind, and had an inspired notion of bringing together two other very different and gifted young musicians to assemble his dream power trio.

Tony Williams Lifetime 9/19/69
Photo: M. Parrish

The original trio version of Lifetime made a very dramatic initial statement with Emergency! An adventurous (and loud) double album that came out during the summer of 1969 and received an undue amount of airplay in my bedroom in the next several months. Lifetime was grounded by Young’s organ, with both Williams and McLaughlin soloing furiously around him in different eccentric orbits. Their power trio approach was closer to Cream than to any other jazz trios of the day, and they really laid the groundwork for Bitches Brew (for which Miles enlisted both McLaughlin and Young) and, by extension, the entire jazz fusion movement to come. If there was a weak link in their approach, it was William’s attempts as a lead vocalist and lyricist, although “Via the Spectrum Road” has an off-kilter charm, with the band sounding sort of like a loopy, fusion version of Traffic.

Tony Williams Lifetime 9/19/69
Photo: M. Parrish

As compelling as Lifetime was on record, they were even more exciting live. Williams was certainly the visual focus, all of his limbs in constant furious motion as he bent over his kit. McLaughlin, bent studiously over his fretboard, was a study in concentration with only his flying fingers giving visual evidence of the maelstrom of music coming out of his amplifier. Emergency had not been well received by critics in the jazz world, and the audience that evening was clearly divided between rock fans who relished the band’s wall of sound and the large, more conservative contingent that clearly did not appreciate them. It was a sign of the times that I was able to walk up to the front of the stage to take photos from a vantage point that is only possible today with press credentials.

Sly and the Family Stone 9/19/69
Photo: M. Parrish

The headliner for Friday evening was Sly and the Family Stone. Although their landmark Woodstock performance had taken place a month earlier, it had not yet lent them the mass popularity that arose when the Woodstock movie came out the following year. They were simply a very popular Bay Area band with a stack of hit singles, including anthems like “Stand” and “Everyday People” that called for the kind of racial harmony that the Monterey festival both celebrated and epitomized. Unfortunately, that message was diluted that evening as the crowd grew restless when the band’s late evening appearance was delayed for a half hour while a search was undertaken for the stool that Stone used to sit at his organ. By the time they got underway in earnest, the band delivered a performance that was every bit as mesmerizing as their Woodstock set, except to about 295,000 fewer people. I don’t recall when it ended, but it was a very long evening.

Sons of Champlin 9/20/69
Photo: M. Parrish

The weather in Monterey can be unpredictable, but the Saturday afternoon blues show opened to beautiful, hot, sunny weather. The bright daylight showed the crowd’s finery off and, as another sign of the times, a few audience members dispensed with many if not all of their clothes, much to the amusement and/or consternation of the more conservative members of the crowd. The opening act was supposed to be veteran pianist Willie “The Lion” Smith, but the always reliable Sons of Champlin were called in as a last minute replacement. The Sons played a strong set that consisted largely of the extended material from their second album, the cover of which announced “The Sons of Champlin have changed their name to THE SONS.” Shaggy and freaky as the Sons were at the time, their music resonated with the audience thanks to their artful introduction of horns, Geoff Palmer’s vibes, and guitarist Terry Haggerty’s jazz scales and chord progressions.

Two acts, Roberta Flack and the Canadian horn-heavy rock band Lighthouse, played two sets each during the afternoon. Flack, who became best known as a ballad singer later in her career, gave feisty, energetic performances climaxed by her dynamic version of Eddie Harris’ “Compared to What,” which became an anthem of the era thanks to Les McCann’s masterful performance of the the tune on the McCann/Harris live album Swiss Movement. However, Flack, who was brought to Atlantic Records by McCann, recorded the first version of the tune for her debut album, First Take, which came out during the summer of 1969.

Buddy Guy Blues Band 9/20/69
Photo: M. Parrish

Although the afternoon’s set was concentrated more on rock than its traditional blues orientation, the crowd was treated to a typically over-the-top performance by one of Chicago’s best, Buddy Guy. Still near the beginning of his career, Guy relied much more on his instrumental dexterity and vocal firepower than he would in later decades. Fronting a quintet without his frequent collaborator Junior Wells, Guy pretty much stole the afternoon’s show with his dazzling fretwork and frenetic body language. In subsequent years, Guy’s performances have sometimes been hit-and-miss, but he remains one of the genre’s premier showmen, vocalists, and instrumentalists.

Lighthouse was a popular group from Toronto who had also released their debut album the previous summer. Led by drummer Skip Prokop, the group was one of the largest of the era with 13 members including the usual rock instrumentation along integrated with full horn and string sections. The group was riding high following a successful major label debut and a landmark performance at Carnegie Hall the previous May, and their big, pop-oriented sound earned them the headlining slot for the afternoon. The blend of instrumentation was certainly interesting, and the highlight of their set was the group’s swirling, extended adaptation of “Eight Miles High.” Lighthouse went on to become one of Canada’s most enduring and popular bands. After breaking up in 1976, the group had one temporary reunion in 1982, and then reunited on a more permanent basis in 1992, and continue to tour today mostly in Ontario.

Lighthouse 9/20/69
Photo: M. Parrish

In retrospect, I have no idea why we did not stay for the Saturday evening concert, which featured Miles Davis’ ‘lost quintet’ (sax player Wayne Shorter, bassist Dave Holland, keyboardist Chick Corea and drummer Jack DeJohnette) along with the groups of Thelonious Monk and Joe Williams. Maybe we were unable to get tickets. As it turned out, I never did get the opportunity to see Monk, although I would get to see Miles during one of his career peaks a few months later in San Francisco.

After some of the cultural and artistic divides that arose during the 1969 festival’s experiments to blend jazz and rock acts, the Monterey festival returned to an all jazz format from 1970 to the present. This proved to be the last Monterey Jazz Festival I would see until 2006. As fabulous as the lineups can be for this festival, it remains somewhat of a challenge for the devoted listener, as the scene in the arena has seemed to me as much about being seen, partying, and talking with friends as it has been about listening to the performers, and those early fall evenings outdoors can be bitterly cold as the fog rolls in. Some of these issues were alleviated in the 1980s, when several smaller venues on the grounds began hosting concerts as well, but the end result was still bigger crowds and, because the bulk of the attendees did not have seats in the arena, getting into the smaller shows requires a combination of intrepid planning and luck. However, as an enduring celebration of one of America’s most important art forms, the Monterey Festival has few, if any peers.

Duke Ellington Orchestra, Herbie Hancock Sextet, Redd Foxx, and Smoke. Frost Amphitheatre 5/4/69

2010-11-21T15:00:00.000-08:00

A few weeks before I got my dad to the Fillmore West to see Woody Herman and the Who, he took me to see another outstanding jazz concert closer to home, back at the Frost. We went to the second day of a weekend celebration of African American culture entitled “Two Days in May.” The first day, which we did not attend, featured mostly vocalists: O.C. Smith, Lette Mbulu, Oscar Brown Jr. and the Chicago Blues All Stars. The show we attended was a Sunday afternoon jazz affair headlined by Duke Ellington and also featuring Herbie Hancock’s sextet, and Bay Area contemporary jazz combo Smoke. Rashaan Roland Kirk was also advertised as part of the bill, but did not appear.

Although it was a beautiful sunny Sunday afternoon, attendance was relatively light – a shame, given the calilber of the musicians. Activist comedian Dick Gregory was the planned emcee, but he was incarcerated at the time, so he was replaced by another popular comedian, Redd Foxx. Foxx, still three years away from his big career break in Sanford and Son, gave what were certainly the raunchiest monologues that my tender ears had heard up until that time during the course of the afternoon. Racy or not, he had the crowd rolling in the aisles.

The first act, Smoke, was a popular Palo Alto based quartet led by vibist Woody Webb that at the time also featured bassist Chris Cristy, sax player Kenny Washington, and drummer John Felder. No clear memories of their set, but I do remember them being very good, with some tuneful yet extended explorations. The original group released an eponymous album on Session Records in 1970, which my dad had and regrettably I no longer have. Webb and a different lineup released a second Smoke album, Smoke Everything, on a different label, in 1974. Both are now extremely rare, and neither has been released on CD.

After touring with Miles Davis for five years, Herbie Hancock struck out on his own by putting together a sextet in 1968. The lineup at the Frost was the same group that recorded Hancock’s 1968 Blue Note album Speak Like a Child, comprising Johnny Coles (trumpet, flugelhorn), Garnett Brown (trombone), Joe Henderson (sax, flute), Buster Williams (bass), and Tootie Heath (drums). Hancock, who continued to do sessions with Miles until 1972, was used to using electronic keyboards with Davis, but his performance at the Frost was entirely on acoustic piano, with Williams also playing standup rather than electric bass. Their repertoire included material from Speak Like a Child, as well as a luminous, extended performance of Speak Like a Child. Contemporary jazz had really first caught my attention when my father picked up Davis’ revolutionary In a Silent Way, and the Hancock performance was close enough to the territory Miles (and Herbie) mined on that album to be particularly appealing to me. Only months later, Hancock would be commissioned to write the soundtrack for the television cartoon series based on Bill Cosby’s character Fat Albert and the soundtrack from that show, Fat Albert Rotunda, would mark his shift into more electric jazz funk.

After some more blue humor from Foxx, we were treated to an exemplary performance by one of the giants of jazz, or, for that matter, any American music idiom. Duke Ellington came to the Bay Area days after celebrating his 70th birthday at the White House in a legendary celebration that included an incredible list of guests including Earl “Fatha” Hines, Willie “The Lion” Smith, Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie, Cab Calloway, and Richard Rogers. According to Ellington biographer A.H. Lawrence1, Ellington politely sat through some piano renditions of his compositions by Vice President Spiro Agnew before Ellington himself took the stand for a marathon jam session that included numerous other jazz luminaries including drummer Louie Bellson, pianists Dave Brubeck, Hines, Hank Jones, saxophonists Paul Desmond and Gerry Mulligan, bassist Milt Hinton, and guitarist Jim Hall. By the time the jam session was underway, President and Mrs. Nixon had retired to bed.

For the Frost show, Ellington’s orchestra consisted of trumpeters Cootie Williams, Cat Anderson, Rolf Ericson, Mercer Ellington, and Ray Nance, trombonists Lawrence Brown and Chuck Connors, a sax section comprising Paul Gonsalves, Johnny Hodges, Norris Turney, Harold Ashby, Harry Carney, and Russell Procope, second pianist Wild Bill Davis, bassist Victor Gaskin, drummer Rufus Jones, and vocalist Tony Watkins. The Ellington band was in transition at this point. He retained loyal employees like Hodges, Carney, Williams, Procope, Brown, and Golsalves who had been with him (in some cases on and off) for 25 up to 40 years or more, but was working with a rhythm section and vocalist who were newcomers to the fold. His loyal composition partner and ‘deputy pianist’ Billy Strayhorn had passed away the previous year, and his position onstage was occupied by Davis, another relative newcomer.

Ellington, who served as an icon of one of the most successful and visible African American bandleaders, was also walking a political tightrope that required all of his charm and diplomacy. He graciously accepted the White House invitation, but provided a guest list that did not clearly align with the current administration’s politics. The day after the Stanford performance, Ellington performed at San Francisco State, where he fell short of denouncing the embattled President S.I. Hayakawa but did dedicate the concert to “those of us who are totally dedicated to developing the Black Studies Program.2”

At Stanford, politics did not present themselves, but Ellington and orchestra did deliver a remarkable afternoon of music. This was my first exposure to one of the classic big bands, and it was remarkable to see them decked out in their suits and matching music stands. I was too new to this music to remember the entire set list, but Ellington did perform a good chunk of what was his second Sacred Concert, which he had recorded in New York and performed at a number of churches, including San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral the preceding year, along with classics like the inevitable “ Take the A Train.” As usual, Ellington premiered some new music as well possibly part of his Latin American Suite, but I regrettably can’t summon up any further details.

I was mightily impressed by Ellington’s music, and as much by his charisma and style, which were such a strong contrast to the earthier presence of many of the rock musicians to which I was being drawn. I do remember feeling that Ellington was impossibly old, but a current reality check is that both the Grateful Dead’s Phil Lesh and Hancock celebrated their respective 70th birthdays this year, and I am only 13 years behind them. To his credit, Ellington stayed on the road playing one nighters until he was hospitalized with advanced cancer a couple of months shy of his 75th birthday, and he passed away less than a month after that milestone.

My father was ecstatic about the concert, but dismayed at the relatively sparse attendance at the event. It spurred him to write a letter to the Dean of Bay Area music critics, Ralph Gleason, bemoaning the apparent failure of the Stanford student body to get the word out about the show. Gleason’s short, hand typed reply to my father is one of my favorite musical mementos from the era.

1. Lawrence, A.H. 2001. Duke Ellington and His World, Routledge Press, New York. Pp. 377-380
2. Gleason, R.J. San Francisco Chronicle, 5/7/69.

The Doors, Lonnie Mack, Elvin Bishop. Cow Palace, 7/25/69

2010-11-07T21:20:00.000-08:00

When my cousins came in from the Midwest, they decided they would like to hear some rock music on a Friday night. We had the choice of going to the Fillmore to see Steve Miller and Albert King or going to the 15,000 capacity Cow Palace, in Daly City just south of San Francisco, to see the Doors, Lonnie Mack, and Elvin Bishop. In retrospect, it seems odd that the Who would play the Fillmore West while Bill Graham would need to rent the Cow Palace to handle the demand for the Doors. The Los Angeles quartet were at the height of their popularity in 1967-68, and Jim Morrison’s infamous bust for public exposure in Miami in March did nothing to dent demand for the group, at least in California. It did result in at least 24 of the spring Doors engagements being cancelled by the promoters in other parts of the country, and this was only the group’s ninth gig since the bust three months earlier.

The Cow Palace got its name from the cattle shows that used to be held there regularly. Hardly an ideal concert venue, it resembles a grossly oversized Quontset hut. Nonetheless, it hosted many high profile shows dating back to the mid Sixties when groups like the Beatles and the Stones had played there. I had been there many times previously to attend the Boat and Sports show held there each January, but this was my first concert experience there.

I can’t remember whether seats were reserved or not, but my cousins and I (one of them was of driving age, so my parents weren’t called on this time) got pretty nice seats on the risers on the east side of the arena pretty close to the stage. The hall was really full, but I don’t know whether it was sold out.

Elvin Bishop Group
7/25/69 Photo: M. Parrish

The opening act was blues guitarist Elvin Bishop and his relatively new group. Bishop has played on a bit of a cornpone image since being given the nickname “Pigboy Crabshaw” during his days in the Butterfield Blues Band, but he was no slouch intellectually, having attended the University of Chicago as a physics major in the early 1960s. It was there that he started frequenting the amazing blues clubs nearby and met blues harmonica player-vocalist Butterfield, initially performing as a duo with Butterfield and then becoming the lead guitarist in the original incarnation of the Butterfield Blues Band. In 1965, the group was augmented by the prodigious Michael Bloomfield on lead and slide guitar, and the group recorded two extraordinary albums for Elektra including the classic East-West, which featured some remarkable extended improvisational duels between the two guitarists that presaged similar workouts by groups like the Allman Brothers, Cream, and the Dead. Bloomfield left in 1967 to form the Electric Flag, and Bishop carried on for another year or so, recording two more albums as Butterfield gradually moved the band in a jazz direction, adding a full horn section. During 1968, Bishop spent more and more time in San Francisco, jamming with folks like Jerry Garcia and Steve Miller, and he ultimately moved there permanently by mid year, subsequently forming his own group that was one of the first acts signed to Bill Graham’s fledgling Fillmore Record Label.

Elvin Bishop Group
7/25/69 Photo: M. Parrish

Bishop’s debut album, The Elvin Bishop Group was released in 1969, but I’m not sure if it had come out yet by the time of the Cow Palace gig. His band was pretty much the same lineup featured on the album, comprising keyboard player Stephen Miller (not to be confused with guitarist Steve Miller), bassist Art Stavros, drummer John Chambers and harmonica player Applejack, and the set consisted mostly of that material as well. From what I can remember, Bishop took all the lead vocals, despite the fact that Miller is an excellent blues-rock vocalist who took the bulk of lead vocals in his other band, Linn County – another top flight, but largely unheralded bay area blues rock group. Miller appears to have played in both groups simultaneously from 1968-70. Although Bishop’s vocal range was limited, his aw-shucks stage patter and, particularly, the band’s dynamic ensemble playing and his stinging lead guitar, won the large crowd over.

Lonnie Mack 7/25/69
Photo: M. Parrish

Second on the bill was Indiana blues rock icon Lonnie Mack. Mack, who had a major hit in 1963 with a blistering instrumental version of “Memphis,” was enjoying his first of several high profile comebacks of his career, having recently been signed to Elektra records where he had just released the first of three albums for that label, Glad I’m In the Band. Largely unknown on the West Coast, Mack had come to the attention of Elektra and west coast music fans when Rolling Stone published a piece in late 1968 extolling the virtues of Mack’s revolutionary blues guitar technique, which brought country/bluegrass picking techniques into a blues/rock context, so his appearance, which I believe was his first bay area gig since the Stone article, was eagerly anticipated.

Lonnie Mack 7/25/69
Photo: M. Parrish

Like Bishop, Mack proved a master showman, making good use of his guitar wizardry through his trademark Gibson “Flying V” guitar and also working the crowd with his rich, gospel-tinged vocals. In addition to sharing a bill and a label with the Doors, Mack subsequently guested on their next studio album, 1970’s Morrison Hotel, taking the memorable guitar break on “Roadhouse Blues.” Mack’s strong set at the Cow Palace was politely received by the crowd, but it was clear that the audience was impatient for the headliners. In a precursor to the big business model of rock shows soon to come, the show at the Cow Palace had a much less intimate feel than those in the friendly confines of the Fillmore West. It also seemed that there was a lot more alcohol in evidence, and thus it was no surprise that the audience was more rowdy as well.

The mood of the patrons was not improved by the lengthy break that ensued between the end of Mack’s set and the time the Doors took the stage perhaps an hour later. Jim Morrison’s erratic onstage antics have been well documented elsewhere, most vividly in Greg Shaw’s excellent (but sadly out of print) book The Doors On the Road. Until now, little has been written about their Cow Palace performance, probably because no tapes circulate of that show.

The Doors had just come off of a very successful two night stand at the Aquarius Theater in Los Angeles which subsequently formed the basis of their Absolutely Live album and were subsequently released in their entirety on the Doors Bright Moonlight label. For those shows, the Doors focused on earlier material, some of Morrison’s extended poetry pieces, and blues-rock covers like “Little Red Rooster” and “Who Do You Love?.” Therefore, this was the first real gig that the band performed since the release of their fourth album The Soft Parade, a month before. Possibly for this reason, the group attempted a more generous chunk of the album than they did before or since. Unfortunately, things did not go all that well.

Doors 7/25/69
Photo: M. Parrish

An obviously well lubricated Morrison took the stage and kicked things off with, I believe, “Five to One.” (Note: I do not have a setlist for this show, so any remembrances of order and even material performed are based on 41 year old memories. If anyone out there knows more specifics, please chime in). As can be seen from the photos, Morrison’s metamorphosis from sex symbol to beefy, hirsute Irish poet was well underway, and his heavy beard and baggy clothes emphasized his new image.

The Doors 7/25/69
Photo: M. Parrish

In the body of the show came “Break on Through,” "When the Music's Over," "Alabama Song," “Touch Me,” and, I’m pretty sure, a rare version of “Tell All the People,” along with some other standard fare of the day. Morrison hung on the microphone, slurred his words at times, and certainly didn’t move around as much as he did in previous years. The rest of the band played well, and Krieger's guitar work was particularly memorable.

The Doors 7/25/69
Photo: M. Parrish

One positive was that Morrison did not get into any verbal or physical spars with the audience, but he did fail to heed a request from the promoter to wrap things up for curfew. Morrison tried to lead the band into the “Soft Parade” medley, got as far as the spoken “Seminary School” monologue before the emcee (I think it was Jerry Pompili) called time from an offstage mic. At this point, Morrison got belligerent and egged the crowd on to demand that the band be allowed to keep playing. With the stage lights off, Morrison continued to rant and the crowd got more and more insistent. A standoff continued for a long time, maybe 20 minutes, and finally the band won out, although the overtime union fees probably came out of their proceeds for the evening. From what I remember, they then ran through the full “Soft Parade” and wrapped things up with a speedy, but pretty energetic, run through “Light My Fire.”

One might think that such behavior at a Bill Graham venue would prompt permanent banishment, but the Doors were back at Winterland for two nights the next February, their last gigs in Northern California before Morrison retired to write in Paris.

Compared to other Doors gigs of the era, things could have been worse. No one in the band or the audience were injured, and no arrests were made. In retrospect, it was a pretty satisfying evening of music, with some classic Jim Morrison psychodrama thrown in for good measure.

The Who, Woody Herman’s Herd, A.B. Skhy – Fillmore West 6/19/69

2010-11-04T13:29:00.000-07:00

I finally conned my father into going to the Fillmore West with me in June. His teen years paralleled mine in that he was a kid from the suburbs who spent a lot of time in the theatres and ballrooms in Chicago hearing the big bands that were such a part of the pre-war era. At that time, as now, Chicago was one of the epicenters of the popular music world, so all of the best big bands were frequent visitors – Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington – and Woody Herman’s Herd. When I told him that the Herman band was being billed with the Who, he took the bait. We bought some tickets at Discount Records, and off we went.

Even though the Who were touring behind Tommy, which was by far their biggest commercial success to date, the Fillmore West was by no means oversold. It shows how much the music industry has changed that groups like the Who and the Dead could play a roughly 1000 seat hall in 1969-70 and not sell it out. I remember that we parked on Van Ness just around the corner from the Fillmore West entrance, got in line, and were in within a few minutes.

Dennis Geyer and Jim Marcotte of
A.B. Skhy 6/16/69 Photo: M. Parrish

The show was opened by A.B. Skhy, one of a cluster of very good blues-rock bands plying their craft in San Francisco at the time. At this time, A.B. Skhy comprised the quartet that recorded the group’s first album on MGM – guitarist Dennis Geyer, bassist Jim Marcotte, drummer Terry Anderson and Hammond B-3 organist Howard Wales.

Their sound was defined by Geyer’s soulful vocals and Wales’ swirling jazz-influenced chops. Today, the group is probably most often remembered for the presence of Wales, who shortly thereafter forged a musical partnership with Jerry Garcia that resulted in one very fine jazz rock album Hooteroll as well as a myriad of local club gigs, mostly at the Matrix.

Howard Wales 6/19/69
Photo: M. Parrish

A.B. Skhy recorded two albums for MGM,. Their first eponymous release featured a full horn section backing the quartet, and its material formed the basis of their live shows the few times I saw them, including their swaggering cover of B.B. King’s “You Upset Me Baby” and Wales’ instrumental showpiece,”Camelback.” The second A.B. Skhy album, “Ramblin’ On” featured a different lineup. Wales and Anderson were gone, replaced by drummer Rick Jaeger and guitarist James Curley Cooke, who was all over the San Francisco blues rock scene, starting with the original lineup of the Steve Miller Band and later fronting his own Hurdy Gurdy Band and gigging with pianist Ben Sidran. The album was produced by noted LA Scenester Kim Fowley, and it was more polished, but the raw energy that fueled the Wales iteration of the group was missing, although it was definitely in evidence that evening at the Fillmore West.

The show turned out to be a funny hybrid between the format that Bill Graham had been using previously with two sets per group each night and the one he went to shortly thereafter with each band only playing once. Although the other two bands each played two sets, the centerpiece of the show (between the first sets by AB Skhy and Woody Herman) being one long set by the Who. The reason for the single set and their early position on the bill was that the band had to catch a redeye to New York City after their set, where Townshend had to stand trial for an event that had occurred at the Fillmore East the previous month. They were in the middle of their set when a plain clothes policeman commandeered the microphone to announce that a fire had broken out in the adjacent building. Townshend, not realizing what the policeman was up to, assumed he was some tripping audience member trying to take over his stage and kicked him off the stage. Needless to say, New York’s finest did not take this kindly, and Townshend was arrested. At his court appearance, he ultimately was assessed a $30 fine for his infraction. There is a great reminiscence of that show here.

The Who 6/19/69 Photo: M. Parrish

What this meant for us was a single long set by the Who, a bit road weary from a long tour, but still firing on all cylinders. In a format that was familiar for them at the time, they opened with a string of short tunes, starting with perennial set openers “Heaven and Hell” and “Can’t Explain.” At this point, I had all of their albums, but was not fully prepared for the sonic and visual assault that was the Who in their prime. Like Clapton, Townshend had twin Marshall stacks that seemed a lot louder in the friendly confines of the Fillmore West than they did in a big hall like the Oakland Arena. Townshend’s jumps and windmills were a revelation in that era before concert videos, as was Keith Moon’s hyperkinetic drumming. It was a surprise to see vocalist Roger Daltrey, who had sported a Beatlish bob on previous album covers, with what subsequently became his trademark mop of curls. I think their overall presence was probably quite a culture shock for my dad, as were the dense clouds of non-tobacco smoke wafting about, but he took it all in stride, and certainly appreciated the Who’s chops as well as their showmanship.

After a quicker than usual run through Mose Allison’s “Young Man Blues” the Who played the bulk of Tommy in an abridged version that ran just under an hour. Again, a plethora of archival video and audio releases have made the remarkable vehicle that was the concert version of Tommy familiar, but at the time it was a remarkable, and very energized alternative to the album version. Eschewing the overture, the group plowed directly into the rock opera’s plot following a verbal synopsis from Townshend. The more remarkable parts were the blazing “Sparks” with taciturn bassist John Entwhistle leading the charge, an uptempo version of “Eyesight to the Blind,” a charged version of their single of the time “Pinball Wizard. The larger than life finale “See Me Feel Me” had not yet worn out its welcome, and provided a dazzling climax to the rock opera.

With Tommy under their belt and an eye on the clock, the group closed with a speedy medley starting with Entwhistle’s macabre “Boris the Spider” followed in quick succession by “Summertime Blues,” “Shakin’ All Over” and an extended “Magic Bus.” Much to the crowd’s dismay, they took their leave without an encore or even a guitar-smashing “My Generation” finale – but they had a good excuse, and apparently made their 1130 flight without any trouble. A very good audience recording of this performance exists among collectors, and it is regarded as one of their finer shows of the era by Who aficionados.

No one except possibly Jimi Hendrix should have had the task of following the Who at that point in their career, but that was the daunting task that faced Woody Herman and the Herd. However, Herman knew a thing or two about whipping a crowd into a frenzy, and had the raw power of his horn heavy big band to do so. Herman had been courting a rock audience in recent years, and his recent album had featured covers of both “Light My Fire” and Richard Harris’ schmaltzy “MacArthur Park.”Being ignorant of their repertoire at the time, I can’t offer many details of their set, but they did indeed succeed in winning the crowd over. A year or so later, Herman went even further into the rock arena by cutting an album, Brand New, that was a collaboration with bay area guitar icon Michael Bloomfield. We left after the first Herman set – it was a Thursday night and I’m pretty sure my father had to go to work the next day.

The Who 6/16/69 Photo: M. Parrish

Woody Herman's Herd 6/19/69 Photo M. Parrish

My experience of the audiences at the Fillmore West was that they were open to anything, and Bill Graham had a long tradition of diverse bills that brought jazz, blues or salsa veterans together with the headliner rock acts of the era. Unfortunately, this tradition fell by the wayside, even for Bill Graham’s bookings, as popular music became more of a big business. In its day, it made for some fine, eclectic shows, and this one was certainly a highly memorable one for me.

Buffalo Springfield Again - Bridge Benefit 10/24/10

2010-10-27T21:47:00.000-07:00

In my first post of this blog, I bemoaned passing up the chance to see the Buffalo Springfield at our local high school (Palo Alto's Cubberley) in April, 1967. Forty three and a half years and a couple of aborted reunion attempts later, the three surviving members of the group united for a couple of shows at Shoreline Amphitheatre, a scant two miles from the site of the concert I missed back in 1967, so I determined not to miss them this time. Forgive my delving briefly into the present, but those who have expected this to be a purely chronological blog have had their expectations dashed already.

Shoreline Amphitheatre is the south bay version of the large outdoor concert shed, built by Bill Graham and his associates back in the late 1980s. It allowed Graham to stage his own large scale concerts during the spring through fall months, and had its own distinctly Northern California stamp, down to resembling a Grateful Deadish skull when viewed from the air.

The occasion was the twenty fourth annual benefit for the Hillsborough, CA Bridge School for children with severe physical and/or speech impairments hosted by Neil Young and his wife Pegi, who is on the school’s board. As is always the case, the two shows were each daylong events featuring a smorgasbord of rock, pop, and country acts, all playing acoustic instruments. For scheduling reasons, I was only able to attend the Sunday show, but it also turned out to have the more interesting lineup, at least to me.

Following a longstanding tradition, Neil opened the show with the same two songs, “Sugar Mountain” and “Comes a Time” that he always seems to pull out to get things underway. First up were two relatively young bands, Grizzly Bear and Modest Mouse (17 years and counting, so not so young, I guess). Both were interesting – the Grizzlies had the northwest Pendleton look down pat and some rich, throaty vocal harmonies. Modest Mouse seemed to bend over backwards to be eclectic and quirky, but the punky demeanor of lead singer Isaac Brock (the guy sitting next to me said “He seems like an Angry Mouse!”) was a stark contrast to the group’s densely layered horn, string, and percussion textures.

Kris Kristofferson was slated to appear with Merle Haggard, but Haggard had to cancel for medical reasons, so Kristofferson delivered a short, somewhat rusty set of his most familiar tunes, closing with the possibly appropriate “Sunday Morning Coming Down.”

The longest stretch of the show was given over to T. Bone Burnett’s Speaking Clock Revue, which has featured a different lineup of artists that have been produced by Burnett during its ongoing national tour. It was a somewhat stripped down revue for the Bridge show, with Elvis Costello, Jeff Bridges, Neko Case, Ralph Stanley, and the piano duo of Leon Russell and Elton John taking successive turns at center stage. High points were the short, rocking set by Costello and the considerably longer one by Russell and John, which featured the bulk of the material from their just released joint album, the Union. Jeff Bridges was a crowd pleaser as he sang two songs from Crazy Heart, including a winning version of “Fallin’ and Flyin’” with Burnett and Costello adding harmonies at a shared microphone.

Through numerous previous Bridge Benefit appearances, Pearl Jam has figured out how to convey the energy of their rock performances using acoustic instruments. Eddie Vedder’s powerfully craggy voice helps a lot, and the group drew on a seemingly unlikely string section for some added firepower that worked better than one would expect. Young joined the band for a powerful version of his “Walk With Me” from his recently released album, Le Noise.”

Six hours of music and a couple of hours of rain into the show, the headliners finally made their appearance. Reunions between Stills and Young have been fairly commonplace over the years, but the two Bridge shows (they also played the previous evening) marked the first time the original three guitar lineup of Stills, Young, and Furay have shared a stage since 1968. The energy of the trio was palpable, with the ebullient Furay leading the charge as the group went right into the original Springfield arrangement of “On the Way Home,” replete with its introductory round of “oo-ooh-ooh’s.” In what was obviously a well rehearsed set, the trio, augmented by Young’s regular bassist Rick Rosas and Stills’ preferred drummer Joe Vitale, proceeded to reprise ten of their most familiar tunes, all reasonably faithful to the arrangements on the original recorded versions, with the exception that the electric guitars were replaced by the trio’s acoustic instruments.

All three musicians looked and sounded great, especially a slimmed down Stills, and Young broke out a fringed leather jacket as another nod to the good old days. The unplugged format precluded some of the sweet country licks on tunes like “Go and Say Goodbye” and the blazing guitar interplay on “Bluebird” that is evident on the few live recordings of the group in their heyday. Stills and, particularly, Young have maintained the highest profiles since the group disbanded, it was really Furay, taking the bulk of the lead vocals and bouncing around at center stage with a huge grin on his face, that was the secret ingredient that made this feel like a genuine Springfield reunion. Given that both members of the band’s original rhythm section, drummer Dewey Palmer and bassist Bruce Palmer, passed away recently, this is as close to a reunion as we will ever see.

Considering Furay’s full time gig as a pastor in a Colorado church and Young’s mercurial temperament, it remains to be seen whether this new Springfield chapter will extend beyond the Bridge concerts. Regardless of any future plans, it was a true delight to see the three singers and songwriters of the group come together one more time and to succeed so well in rekindling their old magic.

Dixieland Jazz in San Francisco

2010-10-25T13:19:00.000-07:00

from sftradjazz.org

The first popular music concert I recall going to in California was a 1962 performance by Turk Murphy and his Dixieland jazz band at Murphy’s club, Earthquake McGoon’s on Clay Street in San Francisco. Although Dixieland originated in New Orleans, and is inextricably tied to that city, it had a long tradition in San Francisco as well. Sometimes derided by those who were boosters of the modern jazz that became a vital part of the bay area music community by the 1950s, Murphy’s band and its evolutionary ancestor, Lu Watters’ Yerba Buena jazz band, were well established, very popular groups that included some ferocious players.

Cornet player Lucius “Lu” Watters was born in Santa Cruz in 1911 and spent time working in some conventional big bands before deciding to form a Dixieland ensemble, the 12 piece Yerba Buena Jazz Band, in 1939. The Watters band was unusual in that the musicians were all Caucasian, and none of them had worked in Dixieland bands in New Orleans. For the next eleven years, Watters and company held forth as the house band in two successive venues, first the Dawn Club, at 20 Annie Street just south of Market, and later the legendary Hambone Kelly’s across the bay at 204 San Pablo Avenue in El Cerrito. During World War II, Watters was drafted and led an army big band in the Navy. His band carried on without him in San Francisco, but Watters’ leadership was missed, and the Dawn Club was closed when he returned from the war and discovered that no one had been paying taxes for the club or the band.

Watters then opened Hambone Kelly’s in the basement of a place that had formerly been called the Hollywood Club, run by legendary fan dancer Sally Rand. Watters and band inherited a big club with a 100 foot bar, a large dance floor, and an extremely exotic décor. The band members lived in apartments upstairs from the club, and it again became a very popular venue where the band could hold forth until dawn if they so desired. At the beginning of 1951, Kelly’s closed and Watters broke up the Yerba Buena band. He retired from music entirely in 1957, moved up to Marin County, and got a degree in Geology.

With the demise of the Yerba Buena band, bay area Dixieland continued a long run under the tutelage of Turk Murphy, who had been the trombonist in Watter’s ensemble. Murphy was born in 1915 in rural Palermo, California, and was exposed early to traditional jazz by his father, who played both trumpet and drums. As a young musician, Murphy did yeoman’s duty as a trombone player in touring big bands, but ultimately ended up in the bay area, where he, along with clarinet player Bob Helm and trumpeter Byron Berry, started a traditional jazz band in 1937. Ultimately, all of these players were drafted into the Watters band, where they remained during the period described above. Like Watters, Murphy served in the armed forces during World War II, when he worked as an aviation mechanic.

Earthquake McGoon's
on Broadway

When the Watters band broke up, Murphy freelanced for awhile, but ultimately assembled his own group and spent the rest of his career doing regular residencies at a variety of San Francisco venues, starting with the Italian Village at Columbus and Lombard. Murphy’s band was smaller than Watters, but included a number of colleagues from the earlier band, including Helm, trumpet player Bob Scobey, pianist Burt Bales. Murphy’s band was typically a more manageable 6 piece, but its stock in trade remained the traditional New Orleans music that the Yerba Buena band had embraced. In 1960, the Murphy Band opened the first of several nightclubs named Earthquake McGoon’s after a character in Al Capp’s “Lil Abner” comic strip. The initial club was at 99 Broadway, in the middle of the nightclub district.

In 1962, the club relocated to the Financial District, at 630 Clay Street, in what had formerly been the William Tell Hotel. The new club had a kitchen and apparently, in order to maintain their liquor license, the place also had to serve food. It was here, a few weeks after the second McGoon’s opened, that my entire family ventured out to hear some live Dixieland jazz. I don’t recall whether my parents had heard Murphy’s band live previously, but the fact that the new venue did serve food meant that we, as minors, could attend. I remember a Friday evening drive into what then was an unfamiliar part of the city, and entering the ornate, Barbary Coast style place. We arrived early for dinner and, at the time, were about the only patrons in the place. Our order was taken by Murphy himself, and he also did the cooking. According to one online source, he did the cooking for several years, and would make a great show of getting off the bandstand and stomping into the kitchen if some hapless patron would order some food once the band had started playing. From what I can remember, he was cordial enough to us, but the steaks he brought us were horrible. A few years later, a fan Murphy met in Japan apparently took over kitchen duties, presumably to the bandleader’s relief.

As time went on, the room filled up, and Murphy and company delivered a rousing evening of traditional New Orleans jazz. I don’t remember a lot of details (after all, I was nine years old at the time), but the entire event made quite an impression on me.

Regrettably, that evening in 1962 was the only time I saw Murphy perform. He kept the Clay Street version of McGoon’s going for some 16 years, and then relocated two more times, first to a club off the Embarcadero, and then to tourist destination Pier 39, finally closing up for good in 1984. Murphy then played regularly at the Fairmont Hotel’s aptly named New Orleans room before passing away in 1987.

Murphy’s delving into New Orleans traditional music was, ironically, derided by some modern jazz critics and aficionados as being too conservative and/or too commercial. However, the pursuit by Murphy, Watters, and their colleagues of a traditional music form that was relatively obscure at the time was commendable, and the arranging skills and chops of the musicians were commendable. Over time, Dixieland became an integral part of the San Francisco artistic scene, and Murphy became a sufficiently heralded city figure to have a tiny street running between Broadway and Vallejo, not far from the original McGoon’s location, named Turk Murphy Lane in his honor. The San Francisco Dixieland musicians also made a number of economic and artistic decisions that were embraced by the pioneers of the burgeoning rock community a few years later, such as communal living and owning their own venues so that they could play as long and as often as they wished – not to mention co-opting a traditional American music form into a more contemporary context.

Real New Orleans Dixieland music was also popular in the Bay Area, and I saw the touring version of the house band of that city’s Preservation Hall on a number of occasions in the 1960s, including a gig at the newly erected events center at my high school, Cubberley, during my time at the school. Preservation Hall, which opened in 1961 remains a vital center for traditional New Orleans music.

Finally – the Grateful Dead (Fillmore West 3/1/69: Grateful Dead, Pentangle, Frumious Bandersnatch)

2010-10-18T23:06:00.000-07:00

Although the Grateful Dead got their start in the Palo Alto/Menlo Park area, they went a very long time (1967 to 1973) without getting onto a stage together in the mid-peninsula. Although some fantastic musicians did come within striking distance in 1968, I really wanted to see the Dead, and I wanted to see them in one of the ballrooms in San Francisco.

Another group I had become particularly enamored of was UK acoustic quintet the Pentangle. Although I was not to enter a major British folk rock phase until some decades later, the Pentangle’s combination of the acoustic guitar wizardry of Bert Jansch and John Renbourn, Jacqui McShee’s exquisitely ethereal vocals, and the jazz influenced rhythm section of standup bassist Danny Thompson and percussionist Tony Cox was unlike anything else on the radio at the time, and I picked up their sophomore release, the double LP Sweet Child, as an import when it first came out at the end of 1968.

When Bill Graham booked these two groups together, along with the horn-heavy San Francisco version of Doug Sahm’s Sir Douglas Quintet, for a four day weekend at the Fillmore West, I made a sufficiently good case to my parents that they had to let me go to one of the shows. This was a major concession and, as things turned out, quite an imposition on them (they spent a couple of hours caught in Chinese New Year’s traffic), but I have been forever grateful to them for the opportunity. The way we worked it out was that they drove me and my friend Llew up to the city the Saturday night of the run, let us out at Market and Van Ness, and arranged to pick us up in front of the Fillmore West at midnight.

The Fillmore West was located upstairs above the Waters Buick dealership and you entered mid-block up a tall narrow stairway after buying your tickets at the ground level (If I remember correctly, we in fact did pick up our tickets at the door rather than in advance). At the top of the stairs was a long hallway parallel to Market which housed the coat check room where those attending a Sunday night show could pick up free posters for the next week’s show. Just inside the ballroom proper was a refreshment stand that sold cokes and snacks, and, just beyond, the ballroom itself. It was a long, rather narrow room with the stage backing up to the Van Ness Avenue side. At the opposite end was the elevated platform where the light shows worked their magic. Most of the floor was just that, a big wooden dance floor left over from the hall’s earlier incarnations as a big band and Irish dance hall. Along the south wall, opposite the entrance, was a raised area where one could stand and get a good view of the stage, which was a surprisingly low affair that afforded those in the front of the hall an unusually intimate connection with the bands. Near the light show platform in the back were several well worn but cozy sofas. I have been unable to get a precise estimate of the Fillmore West’s capacity, but I would estimate its legal capacity at somewhere just above 1000 people, an incredibly small venue by today’s standards. The funky accoutrements, the light show, and the elbow room afforded by the full-but-not oversold room made for a concert experience that simply could not be duplicated in today’s market. Llew and I found a spot on the floor maybe 1/3 of the way back, which was close enough for me to get some photos, although the combination of low light and the required slow shutter speeds made for some less-than-stellar results.

Frumious Bandersnatch
3/1/69 Photo: M. Parrish

The evening began with a disappointment, as illness caused the slated Sir Douglas Quintet to be a no-show on Saturday (they played at least one of the other nights). In their place was Frumious Bandersnatch, who again delivered a solid set of straight rock and roll. As was the convention up until sometime in 1969, the show’s format called for all three bands to play twice, so the opening set was less than an hour in length.

Next up was the Pentangle. The stage was largely cleared, save for Terry Cox’s modest drum kit, two chairs for the guitarists, and a stool for vocalist McShee. Because of the small size of the Fillmore West, the extremely attentive audience, and the hall’s remarkable sound system, the group’s delicate music came across perfectly. I do not recall the entire set list, but they did draw heavily on Sweet Child, starting, as did the album, with the evocative group composition “Market Song.”

Jacqui Mcshee and Bert Jansch
3/1/69 Photo: M. Parrish

The group’s strongest draw was probably guitarists Jansch and Renbourn, both of whom had very successful careers as solo jazz-folk pickers before teaming up in Pentangle. Whether trading solos or weaving together remarkable instrumental harmonies, the pair were ably supported by Cox and Thompson, whose extensive experience in acoustic jazz combos was perfect training for the group’s complex harmonies and time signatures. McShee has one of those high, silky voices that was a welcome counterpart to Renbourn’s gruff pipes and Jansch’s plaintive midrange vocals. Simply a superb group, the Pentangle carried on until 1973, when they disbanded. Today, McShee continues to lead a version of the group, and the original lineup has reunited successfully a couple of times, most notably a 2008 40^th Anniversary outing that found them able to successfully recapture past glories. It has been postulated that the gigs with the Pentangle were at least one factor that led the Grateful Dead, eight months later, to begin including a few numbers, and then an entire acoustic set, into many of their 1970 shows. However, the Dead were already experimenting with acoustic guitars onstage, and in fact would use them for the first two songs of their second set later that evening.

The Grateful Dead 3/1/69
Photo: M. Parrish

After another short break, Bill Graham announced the headliners with one of his inimitable introductions: “The American Version of the Japanese film Magnificent Seven – the Grateful Dead!” At that point, my chief point of reference for the Dead was Anthem of the Sun, and I was particularly taken with the first side’s swirling psychedelic suite “That’s It for the Other One/New Potato Caboose.” Thus I felt richly rewarded when Jerry Garcia counted out “One, Two, Three, Four!” and led his comrades into a long, intense version of the bulk of that opus, which had actually become a rarity in their concerts by that time.

Those who only saw the Dead in the 90s, 80s, or even 70s might have difficulty envisioning the intensity and aggression that characterized their playing that evening. Garcia and bassist Phil Lesh paired up dramatically at the top and bottom of the music, respectively, with Bob Weir and keyboardist Tom Constanten providing swirling midrange color. From our vantage point, the three standing guitarists and the two drummers were the visual focal point, with Ron “Pigpen” Mckernan and Constanten largely invisible back in the shadows. The aural intensity was mirrored by the onstage stances of the musicians, with Garcia, Lesh, and Weir forming a tight circle as they stretched the instrumental passages of “The Other One” far beyond its length on the album.

Phil Lesh and Bob Weir 3/1/69
Photo: M. Parrish

After reaching a dramatic crescendo, the group dialed way back energetically for the slow, mellow “Cryptical Envelopment Reprise” with dueling arpeggios that led into another long terminal crescendo, with Lesh’s booming bass leading the charge this time, eventually dissolving into Garcia playing the slow, languid strains that open the Lesh/Robert Peterson composition “New Potato Caboose." Although the vocal harmonies were a bit ragged, this was another spellbinding performance, highlighted by a long Lesh bass solo and a dramatic arpeggiated middle passage in which Lesh’s bass had fallen painfully out of tune. As on the album, the tune concluded with a long, lyrical Garcia solo that builds to a huge final D chord. Ironically, this was to be one of the last few live performances of NPC by the Grateful Dead proper, although it has been resurrected by several of the subsequent ensembles led by Dead alums Weir and Lesh.

Instead of leading into Bob Weir’s punky “Born Crosseyed” as on the album, the band charged into a pair of new tunes that they were recording at the time in the studio for their next album, Aoxomoxoa. “Doin’ That Rag,” with its playfully modal chord structure, was an early harbinger of Robert Hunter’s recycling of lyrical motifs from the traditional American music in which he, Garcia, and Weir had immersed themselves before going electric. Not yet fully formed, the Fillmore version had some rough edges, but it has a lot of heart and Garcia’s voice, yet to be ground down by decades of cigarettes, was a high, playful delight.

Grateful Dead 3/1/69
Photo: M. Parrish

Without taking a breath, the group launched into “Cosmic Charlie” rendered at the breakneck tempo employed in the first studio versions of the song and as performed by Garcia the previous October 8 with Mickey Hart and the Hartbeats, a far cry from the mellow shuffle it became on the album. Screaming banshee guitars led into a ferocious guitar and bass boogie with Garcia and Weir singing the bulk of the song in unison, Lesh lending some high harmonies towards the end. The song ended with another batch of banshee power chords, an instrumental chorus, and a final round of “Go on home, your mama’s calling you” to round out the set. As the group headed offstage, Weir promised they would be back for “Another Set – a long one.”

Unfortunately for us, the midnight hour was approaching, and we had to head outside to meet my folks after hearing a few songs of the second Bandersnatch set. It would be another ten years before I finally heard a primitive audience tape of the second set, which consisted of two more Aoxomoxoa tunes (“Dupree’s Diamond Blues” and “Mountains of the Moon” leading into the familiar Live Dead suite of “Dark Star,” St. Stephen, “The Eleven,” and “Turn on Your Lovelight,” concluding with a very ragged Pigpen sung version of "Hey Jude" for the encore.

Over time, this show has been regarded as one of the classic Dead performances, and it, along with the other three nights of the run, were released as a deluxe 10 CD set by Grateful Dead records back in 2005. It certainly was a great introduction to the Fillmore West, which I still consider by far the finest rock venue of the many I have attended over the years.

Cream/The Collectors/It’s a Beautiful Day. Oakland Coliseum Arena 10/4/68

2010-10-08T06:58:00.000-07:00

I was completely captivated by Cream’s Wheels of Fire when it came out in the summer of 1968. In particular, I played the live disc over and over, probably much to the dismay of our long suffering next door neighbors. I had actually received Disraeli Gears as a present at Christmas the year before, but my father was much more of a fan of it at the time than I was, although it certainly grew on my by the time Wheels of Fire came out. When Cream’s farewell tour was announced in late summer 1968, we got tickets. Ironically, this was still not to get me to the fabled ballrooms in San Francisco. Instead, the concert was to be held at the nearly new Oakland Coliseum Arena (now Oracle Arena), just off of the Nimitz Freeway (now Hwy 880) in Oakland. The giant Arena, developed in conjunction with the adjacent outdoor Oakland Coliseum, opened in 1966 as an urban alternative to the aging and cavernous Cow Palace across the bay in Daly City.

Although all of the Cream appearances in San Francisco had been held at the Fillmore Auditorium or Winterland, under the aegis of Bill Graham’s organization, the Oakland show was put on by a different promoter, Concert Associates, Inc. Graham had booked Cream for two extended engagements at Fillmore/Winterland, one in August-September 1967, and the second in March, 1968, but apparently Graham refused to come up with the fees demanded by Cream manager Robert Stigwood so Cream had bypassed San Francisco on their June, 1968 tour (playing instead at the San Jose Civic Auditorium) and did not book the Farewell tour show in Oakland. Also, Graham had yet to try to build a market for shows at the huge Coliseum Arena (original concert capacity ca. 15000, expanded in 1997 to 20000), although he would promote the Rolling Stones there in November of 1969 and he would start using it regularly starting in 1973. In 1968, the two biggest touring rock acts were Cream and Jimi Hendrix, so it is not that surprising that they were two of the earliest rock acts to play the Arena.

As originally booked, the Oakland Cream show was a British rock dream pairing of Cream and Traffic. However, by the time the show rolled around, Traffic was off the bill, presumably because Dave Mason’s second departure ground their tour plans to a halt. By show time, Traffic had been replaced by two acts with less commercial clout, Canadian band the Collectors and rising San Francisco band It’s A Beautiful Day. Both had made a few 2^nd and 3^rd bill gigs at the Family Dog and Fillmore by that time, but neither was a headliner by any means.

I vividly remember the drive over to Oakland that Friday night. It was the first time I had gone over the new, spacious span of the San Mateo Bridge, which had opened the previous year, and it was a somewhat surreal experience being that high over the bay. Because my father was driving, I had plenty of opportunity to gape. Although it seems pretty conventional by today’s standards, the Coliseum Arena also had a somewhat space age appeal at the time with its cylindrical shape, its vast expanses of glass, and curving promenades both indoors and outside. Despite a major indoor makeover that added an additional 5000 seats, the external appearance of the arena today is largely unchanged.

We had decent seats, on the low risers on the right side of the stage maybe 1/3 of the way back. Unlike the rock shows in San Francisco at the time, there was no light show, just conventional spots. The show was my first experiment in shooting an indoor concert, and dealing with low light always proved to be a challenge under those circumstances. What I generally did was to use Tri-X film chemically pushed to 3X its normal ASA value, which sort of worked. Today, with the aid of Photoshop, it is possible to recover a lot more detail from these negatives than I could at the time. Still, these are far from magazine quality shots, although they do have some historical significance.

It's A Beautiful Day 10/4/68 Photo: M. Parrish

It’s a Beautiful Day was a relative newcomer to the Bay Area music scene. Although violinist David LaFlamme had earlier been part of the infamous Orkustra with Manson family member Bobby Beausoleil, IABD itself was basically put together by infamous manager Matthew Katz, who asked David and Linda Laflamme to join the group he was crafting as a vehicle for 18 year old singer Patty Santos. Relationships with Katz did not go well, and the group split from his management in early 1968, after they felt he was not able to get them either gigs or a major label recording contract. Katz maintained that he owned the group name, and has subsequently spent decades in legal tussles over ownership of materials by IABD, Moby Grape, and even the Jefferson Airplane. By spring of 1968, the group had started played some gigs at both the Avalon and the Fillmore, but the opening gig for Cream at the Oakland Arena was by far the biggest break the group had received to date – remarkable for a group whose debut album would not appear for another six months or so.

It’s a Beautiful Day played a remarkable set that evening, consisting of material that would appear on their eponymous debut album in 1969, including extended versions of "Bombay Calling" and "Time Is," as well as a great version of what would become their signature piece, "White Bird." The chemistry between David LaFlamme and Santos was dynamic, and their soaring vocals and LaFlamme’s searing violin playing easily filled the gigantic room.

The Collectors 10/4/68 Photo: M. Parrish

Next up were the Collectors, an eclectic quintet from British Columbia whose dark, swirling music was a sharp contrast to IABD’s bright, sunny vibe. The hall was literally dark for their set, which is why the pictures I took of them evaded clarification even through the magic of Photoshop. The group’s debut album evoked strongly polarized opinions, but it’s magnum opus, the stark 19 minute What Love (Suite) was in heavy rotation on KSAN at the time, and was the centerpiece of their set that evening. Multi-instrumentalist Claire Lawrence played everything in sight including (as pictured) the trombone.

Cream 10/4/68 Photo: M. Parrish

After a longish break, it was finally time for Cream to play. This was the opening night of the band’s Farewell tour, and the group had not performed together, or even been in the same room, for nearly four months. They apparently spent the afternoon rehearsing, and it was reportedly not the happiest of reunions. Nonetheless, they came out with figurative guns blazing for a dramatic, if musically erratic, 65 minute set. They opened with their then-current FM hit “White Room,” and it was undoubtedly the loudest thing I had heard up to that point. Both Eric Clapton and Jack Bruce were playing through two Marshall stacks, and Ginger Baker did not seem to have any trouble matching their volume, through sheer physical stamina (and some well amplified drums). Clapton’s extravagant wah-wah filigrees washed over Bruce’s sturdily rumbling bass lines, although the two did not always sound in synch. Bruce and Peter Brown’s lumbering blues “Politician” was next, with an over-the-top vocal by Bruce. Crossroads had a new intro and was performed at the kind of laid-back tempo that Clapton has favored in recent years, although his and Bruce’s rapid fire soloing offered a sharp contrast to the song’s lumbering pace. Announced as “our last single,” the group offered a perfunctory reading of “Sunshine of Your Love” highlighted by emotive shared vocals by Bruce and Clapton and Baker’s thunderous drum fills.

Cream 10/4/68 Photo: M. Parrish

One of the highlights of Wheels of Fire was the extended cover of Willie Dixon’s “Spoonful.” At the Oakland show, this seventeen minute extravaganza found Clapton and Bruce both wailing away with fury but considerably less substance than the recorded version, relying largely on the same riffs played over and over again for much of the song while Bruce injected a lot of vocal scats and Baker attempted to ground the proceedings with jazzy fills. It finally ground to a somewhat anticlimactic halt – not one of their finest quarter hours.

Next, the group played a couple of very unusual numbers at the show that indicated their intention to showcase a bit of an expanded repertoire for their last tour. Supposedly the plan was to release a double album made up, as was Wheels of Fire, of a live disc and a studio disc, so perhaps they were hoping to capture performances of songs beyond their admittedly limited live repertoire at the time (ultimately the final album Goodbye had three tracks from the 10/19 Forum gig as well as three final studio tracks). Whatever the motivation, the attempts to expand beyond the familiar were seemingly abandoned after the Oakland gig, resulting in a couple of unique performances. “Deserted Cities of the Heart” was a somewhat experimental Bruce-Brown composition from the last album that was a harbinger of some of the interesting directions Bruce would take in his solo career. What seems to be the only live performance of the song ended up (along with "White Room" and "Politician") on both Live Cream Volume 2 and the box set Those Were the Days. It’s a spirited but perfunctory performance, with both Bruce and Baker pushing the tempo, and Clapton taking a fiery solo between the verses.

Ginger Baker 10/4/68 Photo: M. Parrish

The next number has been identified on bootlegs as “Passing the Time” and also by the mysterious name “Scattafragus.” It indeed begins with the intro to “Passing the Time” from Wheels of Fire, but that song’s lyrics are gone, replaced by a short bit of very off key scat singing by the three musicians that led into a bit of trio jamming and then into the inevitable Baker drum solo. Indeed, it is hard to imagine how they would have been able to deliver the delicate, cello-ornamented lyric section early in the song in a live power trio context. The drummer acquitted himself admirably, playing with both substance and fury before the two guitarists joined in for a very ragged finish. I was enamored of “Toad” at the time, and found this a mysterious replacement, although it remains an interesting artifact.

The show ended with an equally ragged, but energetic version of “I’m So Glad,” and no encore was forthcoming. Listening to the excellent stereo soundboard of this show that circulates today, it is easy to be critical of one of the group’s less than stellar performances. However, I consider myself lucky to have been able to see Cream, warts and all. To juxtapose two overused but entirely appropriate rock critic clichés, they truly were an elemental force of nature onstage, and the strength of the three personalities (and those Marshall stacks) made for a larger than life performance.

40 Years Ago Today - Three Bands for Three Dollars at Winterland

2010-10-04T13:55:00.000-07:00

I’m going to deviate from a strict chronological narrative in order to tip my hat to the 40^th anniversary of an eventful, if not necessarily uplifting, hallmark in the history of San Francisco music. For the evenings of October 4^th and 5^th, 1970, the Grateful Dead, the Jefferson Airplane, and Quicksilver Messenger Service leased Winterland from Bill Graham for two shows billed as “Three Bands for Three Dollars.” By this time, it was very traditional for this ‘big three’ groups to share billings, but getting all of them on one bill was becoming difficult, and indeed this was the last time even any two of the groups would appear together (not counting the two dual Dead-Jefferson Starship billings in GG Park on 3/23/75 and 9/28/75). In honor of the occasion, radio stations KSAN and KQED, along with KQED TV partnered to deliver a live broadcast of the show on TV with Quadraphonic sound. In honor of this occasion, I created an ad-hoc media center in our living room with my own little stereo tuned to KQED, the family stereo on KSAN, and the TV from the family room.

The broadcast began awhile after the show began, and reputedly there was a set by the New Riders before the broadcast began, with just a snippet of “Truckin’” as a check of the broadcast gear, which at the time I believe consisted of phone lines from the hall to the radio studios. The broadcast began in earnest with a very energetic version of the Hunter/Garcia tune “Till the Morning Comes” which did a nice job of separating out the drum kits of Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann. The rest of the Dead’s shortish set was well played, heavy on tunes from both Workingmans Dead and the soon-to-be released American Beauty. However, exploratory pieces like “The Other One” and “Dark Star” were not played, possibly because of time restrictions. The sole stretched out part of the set was a rousing “Good Lovin,’” which included two extended percussion breaks before and after the first verse. The set was also notable because Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, who had returned to playing keyboards when Tom Constanten left the band the previous January, ended up playing tambourine for the set because the Dead’s organ was mistakenly left back at the studio.

During the set break, word came through that Janis Joplin had passed away from a heroin overdose down in Los Angeles. Understandably, this put a damper on the proceedings, but the musicians carried on as best they could. Next up was the Jefferson Airplane, whose set opened with their recent single “Have You Seen the Saucers.” The Airplane’s set was relatively well played, but dissention among the ranks was visible on TV. New drummer Joey Covington sang a couple of clunky rockers, “Whatever the Old Man Wants” and “The Man (Bludgeon for a Bluecoat,” and Marty Balin’s contributions were “Up and Down,” “Emergency,” and “You Wear Your Dresses Too Short.” Otherwise, the set was dominated by Grace Slick and Paul Kantner, who had largely assumed leadership of the group by this time. At the end of an explosive medley of “We Can Be Together” and “Volunteers,” Balin shouted “ I need a new band!” slammed his microphone back into the stand, and walked off stage. As far as I know, it would be the last time he performed with the Airplane proper until their 1989 reunion. The next night was the debut of fiddler Papa John Creach, whose bluesy electric violin veered the band even further away from its folk-rock roots.

After a longish break, a radically retooled Quicksilver Messenger Service took the stage, with singer Dino Valenti clearly calling the shots. For the first time, the band included a horn section, including the ubiquitous Martin Fierro on saxophone, and was also augmented by electric pianist Mark Naftalin. The group’s set was very short, just about 40 minutes, and consisted entirely of Valenti tunes including “Fresh Air,” “Subway,” and “What About Me?” Tempos were sluggish, the horn section ill-rehearsed, and the hour late, so their set wound up just about 2 AM anticlimactically with another Valenti dirge “Call on Me.” This would prove to be guitar icon John Cipollina’s last regular gig with QMS, although he returned briefly to play with the group for their New Year’s Eve performance a few blocks away at the Kabuki Theatre. It is clear from some onstage bickering audible on the recording from this show that this short lived attempt at détente made for another tense evening.

The broadcast terminated at that point, so I do not know if any intra-band jamming took place afterwards. It is possible that stalwarts like Garcia, Kaukonen, and Cipollina could have done so but, given the dark tone of the evening, I doubt it. Ironically, what was scheduled as a celebration of the best of San Francisco music ended with the death of one of its brightest stars and the loss of key members to two of the three groups on the bill. Audio tapes of these shows circulate, taken from one or the other halves of the quadraphonic mix, but apparently no video from the broadcast exists.

Record Stores I Have Known and Loved

2010-09-25T22:21:00.000-07:00

In our current era where almost anything can be Googled or bought on Amazon or Ebay, the vital role that record stores played in the 60s and 70s might be hard to grasp. For those of us living down on the Midpeninsula, such stores played a vital role beyond just selling records, by serving as an information pipeline to what was occurring in the fast evolving rock world in San Francisco, other American cities, and the UK. Because most regular newpapers (Ralph Gleason’s postings in the San Francisco Chronicle being a notable exception) did not mention anything beyond the biggest musical events, the bulletin boards in these stores, and the knowledge of their staff, were vital sources of information for what was going on in the local music communitiy.

The Midpeninsula had an abundance of stores, each with their own distinctive character. One big difference had to do with who got things first. For at least the last decade, the mainstream music industry has decreed that all ‘product’ will be released on Tuesdays. In the sixties, records could come out any day of the week (well, maybe not Saturday or Sunday), and it was certainly true that not all stores got new releases on the same day. I remember having a bunch of new friends for a day back in December 1968 when I got a copy of the Beatles White Album a day or two before it was in most stores because the record store at Mayfield Mall somehow got a stack of copies before everyone else. I developed a routine of dropping into various of the area stores a few times a week, either riding there on my bicycle or grabbing a ride with family members of driving age.

The Music Box at Mayfield Mall was not that terribly different than the Mall stores of the last couple of decades with the exception that they sold vinyl records instead of CDs. They had a nice selection of cut-out records that would sell for $1.00 or less, and I did find some interesting things there, including the aforementioned Beatles early release and one of the few copies I ever saw in a store of the original Grateful Dead single version of “Dark Star”/”Born Crosseyed.”

Mayfield Mall was an interesting institution. One of the very first indoor malls, its advantage to me was a short, easy commute from home or school. You can read about its history here. It was converted to a Hewlett Packard facility in 1984.

A bit further away (and requiring a somewhat perilous transit over the Central Expressway/San Antonio overpass) was San Antonio Music, located in the San Antonio Shopping Center. I remember this store as having more knowlegable employees, and almost always having new releases on sale. I remember vividly riding over there in the summer of 1968 and snapping up a copy of the garishly foil covered Cream album Wheels of Fire, which was one of the earliest double LP releases by a rock act, for six bucks the day it came out. The music store is long gone, but the San Antonio Shopping Center remains, albeit seriously mutated from its mid-60s configuration. Gone are such icons as the iconic Menu Tree food court, which was two stories and featured a bunch of singing animated bird, and the San Antonio Hobby Shop, which started out in a small storefront on the eastern strip that also contained Thrifty and Woolworth’s and expanded to become one of the largest such stores in the country. Today all of these are long gone, and the center features such franchises as a 24 Hour Fitness, a Trader Joe’s, and a Walmart. Incredibly, the 60s vintage Sears store remains its centerpiece, although it also nearly closed a few years ago.

Going northward from home, another regular stop was Town and Country Music, located near the back of Town and Country Village where the Day One baby supply store is located now. This was kind of a mom and pop operation, as I remember, but they did have a good selection as well as good prices. As a link to a still earlier era, they retained listening booths with turntables and headphones long after this user-friendly convention disappeared from the music sales culture. Of course, in today’s version of this, you can generally scan a CD’s bar code and listen to mp3s at a listening station at your neighborhood Border’s or check out samples online. Although the music store, again, is gone, Town and Country remains a thriving destination, little changed physically from its 1960s form.

The area’s best record store was arguably Menlo Park’s Discount Records, on El Camino Real just across Live Oak Avenue from the original location of Kepler’s Books. Discount Records was a small chain, but the Menlo store didn’t have anything like a corporate feel. Years before I began collecting records myself, this was a regular stop on the Saturday rounds I would take with my dad and sometimes my brother. Like Kepler’s, Discount Records was a place where hanging out was encouraged, and it would be common for us to be there for at least an hour while he pored over their always impressive stock of jazz records. It’s pretty easy to see where my own habits developed, and I became like the proverbial kid in a candy store once I got started. The staff there always knew their music well, and generally played really interesting records on their top-quality sound system.

As the rock era dawned, Discount Records was right there. They sold tickets to the Fillmore and other venues, and would receive a shipment of the small handbill sized reproductions of the Fillmore posters every Tuesday afternoon, which I made a point of picking up whenever possible. They also tended to have posters advertising regional events, and it was there that I learned about the 1970 and 1971 appearances at nearby Peninsula School by the New Riders of the Purple Sage that I will get to in a future post.

Another big asset the store had was a large selection of British Import LPs. In the 60s and 70s, British versions of LPs were generally pressed on thicker, higher quality vinyl and had sleeves made of a different, shinier formulation of cardboard. Many British albums were never released in the US (the two volumes of Diary of a Band by John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers comes to mind), and they often came out in the UK months before they were released in the US, like the first two albums by Traffic. When a British act did release an album in the US, it was often drastically different in sequence and content than the UK version, a phenomenon best exemplified by the UK vs. US versions of the pre-Sergeant Pepper Beatles albums.

In 1970, what became my favorite area record store opened in Downtown Palo Alto. World’s Indoor Records established itself in part of a Victorian that still stands at the corner of Kipling Street and Lytton Avenue. WIR was a small, funky, one-person shop, owned by a friendly red headed dude named Roy. His avuncular, laid back manner, and his encyclopedic knowledge of the new music coming out, made it a great place to hang out, listen to, and buy music. The single big room was cozy, and stuffed with interesting records. Somehow he always seemed to come up with things that weren’t available elsewhere (like the original, super rare Glastonbury Fayre 3 LP set that came out in 1972), and he was also a passionate advocate (and canny salesperson) for obscure records. I remember him putting on the debut album by Jesse Winchester, then essentially unknown in the states, pointing out the production and engineering credits by Robbie Robertson and Todd Rundgren, respectively, and the few of us in the store being simply awestruck by the quiet glory of that magnificent, timeless record. He was also service oriented. I recall him actually trying to talk me out of buying Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica, and even offering to take it back if I hated it (I kept it, of course).

In short order, World’s Indoor Records was joined in the Victorian by Chimera, which sold used books and used records. While used records and CDs are a common coin of the realm today, stores that sold them were still relatively rare as the seventies dawned, and Chimera, like its retail housemate, seemed to attract some of the best and most obscure recordings, most of which could be bought for around $2.00 at the time. Starting with a single room downstairs, Chimaera’s mostly literary holdings ultimately sprawled through the rest of the downstairs and all of the upstairs of the house, and ultimately outlived World’s Indoor Records, which closed sometime in the late 1970s. Today the Victorian is broken up into apartments. Chimaera moved onto University Avenue for many years, and is now up on Middlefield Road in Redwood City.

A final oddity worth mentioning is Banana Records, which appeared in the late '60s on El Camino Real south of California Avenue. It had a reasonable, but not outstanding selection, but was notable because it was housed in a wooden cube resembling a record crate. The building remains, just a few doors down from the Palo Alto Fry's and it currently houses an Ipod repair facility.

Up in the city, the ultimate record destination in this era was the Tower Records store at Columbus and Bay Streets, perched between North Beach and Fisherman’s Wharf. Long before it became an international franchise, there were three Tower locations, the initial store in Sacramento, the San Francisco store, and one on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. In this pre-Amazon era, Tower was legendary among the music community for having the greatest selection of records. It was not at all uncommon to find both local and touring musicians browsing through the vast converted grocery store. Tower also initiated the giant painted murals of album covers that adorned the exterior of the San Francisco and Los Angeles stores. Sadly, the entire Tower chain was sold and liquidated in 2006.

Before I wrap this up, a couple of other regional nods. I first experienced the treasure trove that was (and is) Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley when one of the first bootleg records, Liver than You’ll Ever Be, came on the market in late 1969. At that point, the only place to buy it was Leopold’s, which at that time was in a small storefront in the mall on the north side of Durant on the block east of Telegraph, just across the street from where its much larger location ended up for a couple of decades until it closed several years back. During my college years and thereafter, Telegraph was the place to shop for used records, with the prime locations being the basement of Moe’s Books, which stopped selling records probably 30 years ago, and the original tiny location of the first Rasputin’s on the west side of the first block of Telegraph. Rasputin’s sprawled and has spawned a number of rather uninspired locations throughout the bay area, but the Berkeley location, particularly its roomy basement, still yields up some cool stuff.

In 1990, Amoeba records opened a bit further down Telegraph, and it quickly became and has remained the destination of choice for those of us that still buy records and/or CDs. Easily as big as the original San Francisco Tower, Amoeba has immense collections of virtually every genre of music, well organized and nicely displayed. The other two stores in the chain, on Haight Street in San Francisco and on Sunset in Hollywood, are even bigger, but the Berkeley store is still the best of the lot in my book.

The time warp award goes to Logos on Pacific Avenue in Santa Cruz. When I moved to Santa Cruz for college in 1971, it was in a small shop on Cooper Street, just opposite the Cooper House. In short order, it moved to a location on Pacific proper a couple of blocks down the street. The building housing Logos was leveled after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, but it rose like a phoenix into its current two story location between Cathcart and Lincoln Streets, kitty corner from the Del Mar Theatre. Even before vinyl became cool again, they had a massive collection of vinyl that, I would swear, contained the same copies of Moby Grape and Doobie Brothers albums that they were selling back in the seventies. Their prices have risen recently in keeping with the resurgence of vinyl collecting, but they still have an amazing assortment of albums.

Well, I’ve wallowed in this particular brand of nostalgia long enough, and I apologize to those of you for whom record stores are not all that fascinating. I will get back to musical events proper in the next post.

MFU Be-In, El Camino Park, Palo Alto 9/29/68

2010-09-19T21:34:00.000-07:00

The Palo Alto/Stanford/Menlo Park region has always been an intellectual incubator and, particularly during the 1950s through the 1970s, it was also notable for concentrating a critical mass of free thinking bohemians that, ultimately, changed the nature of the world we inhabit in profound ways. From 1966 until its demise in 1971, one of the most visible manifestations of this energy in the community was the Midpeninsula Free University. As the name would suggest, offerings by the MFU were free, and essentially anyone could offer a course, but it also attracted its share of Stanford professors and others to its open-ended ranks. The university had its own publication, the Free You and a strong populist political manifesto. There used to be a fine web site, compiled by MFU lawyer Jim Wolpman, documenting the history of the MFU, but it seems to have disappeared. There is a decent Wikipedia entry here.

From1967 through 1968, it held its own Dionysian gatherings, with free music and plenty of speeches, in El Camino Park, a slim plot of greenery wedged between El Camino Real and the Southern Pacific tracks just opposite Stanford Shopping Center. The first MFU Be-In, held on or around 6/24/67, featured the Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and the Anonymous Artists of America. An eyewitness account can be found here.

My entire family and I made a very brief appearance at a Be-In held in the summer of 1968, probably the one on 6/23/68 advertised here, and featuring, among others, The Sons of Champlin and Charlie Musselwhite. At any rate, we parked at Stanford Shopping Center, walked across the street, and were confronted with a seething mass of people with no easy way to get close enough to the stage to even determine who was playing. The scene was too much for my family, and I don’t think we stayed more than ten minutes.

MFU Be In 9/29/68 Photo: M. Parrish

Not to be dissuaded by this experience, and with the Stanford Summer Rock show under my belt, I somehow convinced my folks to let me ride my bike to the Be-In held on September 29, 1968. This time, undeterred by uncomfortable family members, I stayed pretty much the whole day and, camera in hand, got to document a very memorable day of music. The event was nonetheless somewhat of a culture shock for me. I think it was the first time I saw such widespread consumption of pot and even alcohol, and there were also a few audience members letting their freak flags fly, so to speak. Paradoxically, it was also quite a family event, as demonstrated by the many young children hanging out on and near the stage. I guess I approached all of this with the eye of a cultural anthropologist and focused on the music. For this show, the stage was set up at the north end of the field, and you can see from the photos that the P.A. and onstage sound reinforcement was very primitive relative to what you see at a typical rock show today.

Like the Frost shows, the rosters of artists at these events tended to be pretty fluid, so you could never be sure quite who would actually perform. The posters for the September Be-In promised Quicksilver Messenger Service and the Youngbloods but, unless either played in the gathering darkness after I left, they were no-shows. However, Quicksilver manager Ron Polte’s stable was well represented by two fine groups that, regrettably, did not make much of a commercial impact at the time, Freedom Highway and Phoenix.

Freedom Highway was a San Francisco band dating from the earliest days of the confluence of musicians that ultimately gave birth to the ballroom scene. According to guitarist Richi Ray Harris, they were regulars at Rodney Albin’s jam sessions at 1090 Page Street in 1966, where they were heard by Bill Graham, who offered them a gig at the Fillmore opening for the Buffalo Springfield and the Steve Miller Band (April 28-30, 1967). They also came under Polte’s management wing early on, and often shared bills with other West Pole (Polte’s management company name) artists like Quicksilver, the Ace of Cups, and Phoenix.

Freedom Highway 9/29/68 (From Left: Scott Inglis, Gary Phillipet,
Bruce Brymer, and Richi Ray Harris) Photo: M. Parrish

For most of 1968, Freedom Highway consisted of guitarist Ray, second guitarist Gary Phillipet, drummer Bruce Brymer, and bassist Scott Inglis. I remember a high energy set with plenty of interplay between the two guitarists but, in the absence of any recorded material for comparison at the time, can’t provide a lot more information beyond this photograph. Miraculously, a Freedom Highway LP (now on CD) was released in Germany in 2002 and is available now on CDBaby. This disc, recorded in Freedom Highway’s house in 1968 and 1969 by engineers Bruce Walford and Paul Stubbelbine, reveals a sound that references both Quicksilver and Moby Grape, featuring memorable melodies, nice harmony singing, and relatively concise performances relative to some of the indulgences of the era. In 1969, Inglis was replaced on bass by David Shallock, who had worked with the Sons and subsequently played in the post-Janis Big Brother before returning to the Sons in both their seventies and 90’s-21^st century incarnations.

Phoenix 9/29/68 (From left - Ed Levin, Jef Jaisun,
Stan Muther) Photo: M. Parrish

Phoenix 9/29/68 (from left: Tom Hart, Thomas Dotzler,
and Jef Jaisun) Photo: M. Parrish

Dotzler, Hart, and a fan 9/29/68. Photo: M. Parrish

Following Freedom Highway was another San Francisco group, Phoenix, whose lineup, carefully documented at the Chicken on a Unicycle website. At the time of the Be-In, Phoenix was a six piece, consisting of guitarists Stan Muther and Warren Phillips, drummers Tom Hart and Ed Levin, multi-instrumentalist Thomas Dotzler, and bassist Jef Jaisun. Unlike Freedom Highway, no recorded music from Phoenix has ever been commercially released or, to my knowledge, distributed among collectors, but I recall their improvisations being much more extravagant, and Jaisun and Levin’s bare shirts and Phillips’ and Muther’s posturing and proto-head banging could have served as physical (but definitely not musical) models for many heavy metal bands. As documented in the Chicken on a Unicycle Family Tree, Phoenix experienced some cross-pollination of personnel with another band, Mount Rushmore, which at one time included Dotzler, Phillips, and Levin. Mount Rushmore released two albums, now available on a single CD High on//1969, but none of the Phoenix members play on them (although they apparently featured a number of Phillips-penned tunes). Jaisun left Phoenix in late 1968, scored a cult hit with his witty solo single “Friendly Neighborhood Narco Agent,” and is now a respected blues and jazz photographer. Phoenix continued for another year through a number of additional personnel changes, breaking up at the beginning of 1970.

Bobby Winkleman and Ross Valory 9/29/68
Photo: M. Parrish

Jack King, David Denny, and an athletic Jimmy
Warner 9/29/68. Photo: M. Parrish

Both of these bands were received enthusiastically and, as can be seen from the photos, attracted a large number of very young kids on and near the stage. However, the audience really resonated with the next group, Frumious Bandersnatch. Although they never performed much outside of the Bay Area, and only released one EP during their initial tenure as a band, Frumious Bandersnatch’s members are familiar to many for their subsequent musical endeavors. Most of the band did stints in the Steve Miller Band, and bassist Ross Valory and early member George Tickner were in the original lineup of Journey. At the time of the Be-In, Frumious Bandersnatch was in its best known and most stable lineup comprising guitarists David Denny, Bobby Winkleman, and Jimmy Warner, bassist Valory, and drummer Jack King. With their three guitar attack, soaring harmonies, dynamic stage presence, and crisp songwriting, Frumious Bandersnatch deserved a bigger spot in rock history than they have received. One audience member who was mightily impressed by Frumious Bandersnatch was Steve Miller, who by 1970 had recruited 4/5 of the band (Valory, King, Winkleman, and Denny) to shore up his own group when his ‘classic’ lineup gradually splintered during the next year or so. Today a surprising amount of Frumious Bandersnatch material is available on CD, including their original EP (on a compilation called The Berkeley EPs: Nuggets From the Golden State), a disc of studio recordings called A Young Man's Song, a privately released set of additional studio outtakes featuring a trio of Warner, Winkleman, and bassist Jack Notestein, and a fine 2008 reunion disc, Flight of the Frumious Banderstatchthat is available on CD Baby. They even have a Myspace Page. Finally, meticulously researched family trees for both Frumious Bandersnatch and the Steve Miller Band can be found on Bruno Ceriotti's fine San Francisco Sound website.

Tim Davis and Steve Miller 9/29/68
Photo: M. Parrish

Miller was the last act I caught, and I suspect his was probably the last band to play, as he was still on and darkness was approaching when I left around 7 PM. Although the five piece Steve Miller Band comprising Miller, keyboardist Jim Peterman, bassist Lonnie Turner, drummer Tim Davis and guitarist Boz Scaggs did not break up until later in 1968, Miller played that afternoon in a trio configuration with just Turner and Davis. Perhaps for that reason, the music he played was more blues based than what I expected based on his ethereal first two Capitol albums Children of the Future and Sailor. I remember for sure that he played "Mercury Blues" and "Your Old Lady," both of which appeared on the wonderful (but regrettably out of print) soundtrack to the 1968 film Revolution. Miller had played the night before at the Fillmore West, filling in for Michael Bloomfield for the live Super Session gig that came out as The Live Adventures of Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper. As documented in Al Kooper’s liner notes from the album, another guest guitarist that evening was Carlos Santana, and Miller apparently invited Santana down to Palo Alto the next afternoon to sit in for part of his set. Since I had heard the still unrecorded Santana a few weeks before, I knew what to expect, and the two played off each other with aplomb. Unfortunately, I ran out of film earlier in Miller’s set, so I did not get to document their collaboration photographically.

Dancers, El Camino Park 9/29/68 Photo: M. Parrish

Over the summer of 1968, the MFU ran afoul of the Palo Alto City Council over the noise generated by the Be-Ins. Although the sound system’s power was minimal compared to arena sound reinforcement today, there were sufficient complaints from residents nearby that the MFU’s permit was pulled in July. The council decision was appealed in court and ultimately overturned, but the September event turned out to be the last of the El Camino Park Be-Ins. Needless to say, they went out with quite a bang.

The Airplane and the Dead at Stanford 66-67

2010-09-07T08:36:00.000-07:00

As the San Francisco Bands were building an audience and looking for places to play, it was inevitable that they would turn their attention to some of the universities in the Peninsula. This was particularly true of the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead, as they had deep roots in the folk clubs of the mid and south peninsula. Still, given the proximity to San Francisco and the potential of large audiences of college students, neither group played the Palo Alto area particularly often after they became established. The last Airplane show, discussed below, was in May, 1967 and the Dead did not play the Stanford Campus at all between the 66 gig discussed here and their memorable performance at Maples Pavilion on Feb. 9, 1973.

Finding information on rock, jazz, and folk performances in the mid-Peninsula area is challenging because they were only infrequently listed in the San Francisco Chronicle and were all but ignored by the Palo Alto Times and San Jose Mercury News. However, the Stanford Daily proves to be a font of such information, between calendar listings and advertisements. A recent perusal of the microfilm records of the Daily during the mid-1960s yielded some specifics about the early performances by the Dead and the Airplane, as well as some obscure records of a few other concerts held at Frost Amphitheater in in the mid to late ‘60s.

I’ll start off with a real curiosity, from the California Avenue shopping district of Palo Alto. Somewhat of a second downtown, California Avenue was at one time a real downtown of a separate community, Mayfield. Mayfield was annexed into Palo Alto in 1925. Mayfield’s original downtown remains a popular shopping and entertainment area, drawing many from the adjacent Stanford Community. In the latter third of the 20^th Century, the region was home to a great music venue, originally called Sophie’s and later renamed the Keystone Palo Alto. But what I want to highlight here is a short, but tantalizing remnant of a different establishment that sprouted across the street from the future home of the Keystone, at the corner of California and Park Avenue. The Red Hat, established on Sept. 24, 1966, advertised “Grandly Terrific Paranorma, Nocturnal Banquets, and Libations.” What was particularly interesting, however, was a brief writeup of the Hat in the Stanford Daily, which alluded to a run there by a band called “The Hasty Assembly,” made up of the best of several professional bands, including Rose Anne, original singer of the Jefferson Airplane.” Airplane fans know that the group’s original singer was Signe Anderson, and none of the Airplane biographies mention a Rose Anne, so either she played the folk clubs with some of the Airplane members before the band was established, but is seems unlikely that she was in the Airplane per se. One wonders if the Hasty Assemblage might have included some other musicians who went on to greater success in later aggregations. Alas, this is their only mention, and the two items shown here were the only references I could find to the Red Hat in the Daily. For the last several decades, the corner where the Red Hat was situated has been occupied by venerable watering hole Antonio’s Nut House.

Anyway, back to the Airplane. It appears that they performed twice at Stanford. The first show, a co-bill with the Butterfield Blues Band, was held October 6 at the Stanford Basketball Pavilion. This was not Maples, where the Dead played in 73 when it was newly built, but what was subsequently called the “Old Pavilion” and more recently remaned the Burnham Pavilion, which appears to have had a capacity close to 2000 for a concert setting.

On October 6, the Airplane and the Butterfield Band were in the midst of a co-billed engagement at the Fillmore and Winterland (they played together in SF 9/23-25, 9/30-10/2, 10/7-9, and 10/14-16, certainly one of the longest runs ever at a Bill Graham venue). On the last day of the Fillmore run, Signe Anderson , who left the Airplane to have her first child, was replaced by Grace Slick, but she would have been on hand for the Stanford Show. The Butterfield Band was also at the height of its initial power during this run, with Michael Bloomfield and Elvin Bishop sharing lead guitar duties on extended versions of tunes like “The Work Song” and their trademark improvisational extravaganza “East West.” Tickets for this show, sponsored by the Stanford Senior Class, ranged from $2 to $3.50.

Incidentally, this is not the only time the Butterfield Band played on campus. Here is a poor quality scan of a photo, credited to photographer Tom Wong, showing the Butterfield band at a Friday afternoon performance as part of a series of Chicago blues bands.

Seven months later, the Airplane was invited back to campus, this time to play at Frost Amphitheater in a co-bill with comedian Dick Gregory. Unlike later Frost rock shows, this one featured chairs and reserved seating, with tickets ranging from $1.75- 3.25. This was the most familiar Airplane lineup, comprising Slick, Airplane founder Marty Balin, guitarists Paul Kantner and Jorma Kaukonen, and the rhythm section of bassist Jack Casady and drummer Spencer Dryden. In these few months, the Airplane had morphed from a fairly polite folk rock band into a psychedelic force of nature, as evidenced by a bootleg performance of their show two weeks later at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, where they mixed older material with harder edged material like “White Rabbit” and “Saturday Afternoon/Won’t You Try.” The Daily published an uncredited photo from the Frost event that also included the following succinct review as a caption: This is the Jefferson Airplane. They make music, sometimes. They also make commercials for white Levi’s. They played at Frost Amphitheater on Sunday. They stank.” Had you been there, your mileage might have varied, but the Daily reporter was clearly not impressed.

Perusing the Daily archives through 1970 failed to turn up evidence of another Airplane performance at Stanford, and certainly not a co-bill with Santana, which is why I asserted in a previous post that it was most likely that Michael Shrieve would have first heard Santana at the 7/28/68 Summer Rock show rather than at a show where they supported the Airplane. Although the Airplane played numerous shows during ’66 and ’67 in San Jose and at Santa Clara University (Kaukonen’s alma mater), and then performed at the Northern California Folk Rock Festival on 5/18/68, it, surprisingly, appears that the May show at Frost was the last time the group played in the Palo Alto/Stanford area.

It is well known that the Grateful Dead got their start in the Palo Alto-Menlo Park area, and members of the group undoubtedly played the area folk clubs scores of times.

Their show, held on at the Tresidder Memorial Union, had an admission cost of $1.25. The location was identified on the ad as the TMU Deck, which I believe corresponds to the union’s back patio, where classical and jazz concerts are held today.

While I was researching these shows in the Daily microfilm archives, I came up with a few other interesting shows that took place at Frost during that era.

First, three weeks after the Airplane/Gregory show, R&B star Wilson Pickett played the venue.

A couple of months after the Summer Rock show, on 9/24/68, the Associated Students of Stanford sponsored a concert with the Youngbloods and Sundown Collection. This was notable in being an evening concert, starting at 8 PM. As Frost does not have lights, the logistics of this show would have been interesting, to say the least - a bit like trying to play baseball at night at Wrigley Field before they put in the lights. The Youngbloods, fairly recently arrived from the East Coast, were coasting on the first top 40 run of their cover of Dino Valenti’s Get Together. At this point, they would have been in their original quartet configuration comprising front man Jesse Colin Young, guitarist Jerry Corbitt, multi-instrumentalist Lowell “Banana” Lovinger, and drummer Joe Bauer. Over the next year or so, Corbitt would leave, the band would pick up bassist Michael Kane, and they would come to epitomize the west Marin County laid back lifestyle.

The Sundown Collection were a pioneering country rock band, based in Los Angeles but originally from Fort Worth, Texas. The group, which never recorded, featured John “Rabbit” Bundrick, who went on to play with Bob Marley and a bunch of British rockers including Free and the Who, with whom he has toured since the 1980s to the present. The group had hopes for a major recording contract, but they broke up before one materialized.

I will get to some of the other notable shows held at Frost in 1969-1070 in a later post.

Summer Rock, Frost Amphitheater, Stanford, CA 7/28/68

2010-09-02T05:05:00.000-07:00

As I spent more and more time listening to the music coming out of San Francisco, I became frustrated about it being so near and yet so far (particularly for a non-driving 9^th grader. At that point, going to shows in either San Francisco or San Jose was pretty much out of the question for me, Thus it was a cause for celebration when I learned that a day-long rock festival was going to be held just a few miles away from home, at Stanford University’s gorgeous Frost Amphitheater. The Frost is a nice big bowl ringed on all sides by Eucalyptus trees. This picture, two years later at the second QMS appearance at Frost, gives a feel for the amphitheater, which is simply a great place to hear music of any kind. A sloping tiered grass lawn makes for good sight lines from almost anywhere. It turned out to be a cloudy Sunday afternoon, which was a real asset from a comfort standpoint, as I learned going to a few sun drenched scorchers at the Frost in subsequent years.

I think I learned about this show from a poster at one of the area record stores (more on these later). Paradoxically, the only mention of this show I could find in the Stanford Daily was this little calendar listing:

My parents were initially leery of even such nearby event, but agreed to me going with Tim A., one of my neighborhood buddies. For some reason, I did not have the foresight to take my camera to this show, but Tim and I did attempt to make an audience tape of parts of the show on a little 3 1/2” reel tape recorder he had (we were foiled in our clandestine effort by some weak batteries that left the results unlistenable. And no, I don’t know what happened to the tape!).

Quicksilver at Frost Amphitheater 8/70 Photo: M. Parrish

One thing that was true of almost all of the rock events that occurred at Frost was that the lineups listed on the posters rarely corresponded to who actually appeared.This was true of Summer Rock right at the outset, when it was announced that the planned opening act, Morning Glory, would not appear. Appearing in their place was Beggar’s Opera, not the Scottish band but a group from the east bay that did not make much of an impression on me at the time. I remember a curly haired lead singer and that’s about it.

Next up were the Sons of Champlin. At this point, they were unrecorded, except for a very obscure single (“Sing Me a Rainbow”/”Fat City”) released in 1967 on Verve Records that I don’t remember hearing on the radio at all. What did get them a great deal of airplay was their first Capitol single, “Jesus is Coming (pts. 1 and 2),” which they offered for free through the mail for anyone requesting it. The Sons at that point featured the longtime core of organist-vocalist Bill Champlin, guitarist Terry Haggerty, and vibes, keyboard and horn player Geoff Palmer. The rest of the group was rounded out by the original rhythm section of bassist Al Strong and drummer Bill Bowen, and the horn section of sax player Tim Cain and trumpeter Jim Beem. At the Frost, their set was pretty much drawn from the material that came out early in 1969 on Loosen Up Naturally, their first and best album. Knowing them only from the single at that point, I found their combination of jazz influences (Haggerty’s angular, unorthodox solos, the horns, and Palmer’s vibes) and Champlin’s soulful vocals and organ) irresistible. This was either my first or second time seeing the Sons (my brother Bill and I also saw them at an evening gig in downtown Palo Alto at, I believe, the St. Thomas Aquinas church sometime in 1968, but I have kept seeing them whenever I get the opportunity over the years. Although the group has broken up more than a few times, and changed players with abandon, I have never seen a bad Sons gig. For all things Sons see the excellent San Francisco Sound Blog, Sons roadie Charlie Kelly's Sons Page and the Sons own site.

Sons of Champlin Winterland 10/24/69 Photo: M. Parrish

Following the Sons were the Santana Blues Band, who were not in the advertised lineup. I knew their name from their frequent appearances as a supporting act at the San Francisco ballrooms, but did not know at all what to expect since they had no recorded music released at the time. As you might imagine, seeing Santana in their formative years was quite another unexpected treat. Having no context at the time, I imagine their set was mostly drawn from material that ended up on their first album, along with regularly performed early material like “Fried Neckbones.” I clearly remembered them closing their set with a long, long piece called “Freeway,” but did not see any evidence of this composition either on records or on concert tapes until the 2 CD Live at the Fillmore ’68 was released. That double disc set, which concludes with a ripping half hour “Freeway,” is probably a good representation of what the the band sounded like that July afternoon. This was a transitional version of the Santana band with fellow Cubberley High school alum Greg Rolie already on keyboards and vocals but with original drummer “Doc” Livingston and a somewhat different percussion lineup. They all looked to be about 14 years old. I clearly remember a trumpet player, which does not jibe with the family tree at the San Francisco Sound website, but perhaps this was either a guest musician or an early appearance of Jose “Chepito” Areas, who joined the band officially the next year. From what I have been able to determine researching Frost shows in the ‘60s, this was in fact Santana’s first appearance there, which means this was probably the first time future drummer Michael Shrieve saw the band as well (see discussion here).

Creedence Clearwater Revival’s first album had been played as an advance tape for months on KSAN and KMPX, and I picked it up right when it was released a few weeks earlier, so we had a pretty good idea of what to expect. At this point, the group was in transition from the more extended explorations of the first album to the amazing string of albums that came out in the next 3 years showcasing John Fogerty’s concise, tuneful songwriting and the group’s crisp ensemble playing. At Summer Rock, the group played first album material like “Suzie Q” and “I Put A Spell On You” along with a bunch of material from what became their second album, Bayou Country, including “Born on the Bayou”, “Proud Mary,” and a long, long version of “Keep On Choogling” that closed the set. A remarkable event during the closing number when a classmate of ours who was a remarkable dancer to the catwalk that spanned the orchestra pit and proceeded to do an amazing solo boogie that seemed to energize the band as much as the audience.

The Chambers Brothers were advertised as headliners, but ended up playing next, because the Quicksilver Messenger Service were late in arriving. At that point, “Time Has Come Today” was omnipresent on both the AM and FM airwaves, and the Chambers Brothers were at the top of their game. The group came out in hip finery including an assortment of straw hats (see the cover of Shout! which features two photos taken at this gig) and held the audience in the palms of their hands for a good 90 minutes. All I clearly remember of the setlist was “People Get Ready” and the inevitable long, long version of “Time Has Come Today" that closed out the set.

It was late in the day by the time Quicksilver finally took the stage. Theie eponymoua debut was one of the first San Francisco albums I bought, and the group put on a fine set that drew mostly on material from that release. Even though the bulk of their their extraordinary live album Happy Trails was recorded a few weeks earlier at the Fillmore East, I do not recall them playing either of the extended Bo Diddley songs that made up the bulk of that record. Instead, I remember a very professional set, hour long set that included stretched out versions of “The Fool” and “Gold and Silver” along with the shorter, folkier tunes like “Light Your Windows,” “Dino’s Song” and “Pride of Man.” The group was in their best gunslinger finery, and I was particularly impressed by Cipollina’s remarkable amplifer setup, with the klaxon horns grafted onto its front. Although I got to see the Valenti-led group at Frost a couple of years later, this was my only chance to see the original quartet, and I felt very fortunate in retrospect to have had the opportunity.

I suppose Tim and I were picked up by one of his or my parents after the show as darkness started to descend on the Stanford campus. Given that it was July, this meant this long, very memorable day of music had been going on for seven hours or so. It was a hallmark of that era that one could see two bands that were among the most popular of their day (the Chambers Brothers and QMS), a perennial ballroom favorite (the Sons), and two emerging groups that made history at Woodstock a year later (Santana and Creedence) all on the same bill for $4. When you consider that was about the price of a record album in 1968, it really brings home what a bargain live music was at one time.