I’ve just returned from a tour of Holland, Germany and the Eastern USA that started the second week of October. Before I get into that, though, I’d like to tell you about a couple of special gigs I had at the end of the summer. Also, following this “What’s Up” piece I’ll include an article I wrote recently for the German newspaper, Süddeutsche Zeitung about The Summer of Love (1967).
In late August, my friend, Todd Kwait, premiered his new movie in San Francisco, a documentary about jug bands called, “Chasin’ Gus’ Ghost” (referring to the great Gus Cannon and an album of the same title by John Sebastian and The J Band.) As part of the splash, Todd invited a few of us to the Bay Area to perform… much like he did for the Tokyo concert a couple of years ago.
The gig took place at The Great American Music Hall, a beautiful and spacious nightclub that traces it’s roots back to San Francisco’s Barbary Coast era. The bill consisted of Jim Kweskin, John Sebastian, Maria Muldaur, David Grisman, Dan Hicks, myself and Fritz Richmond’s jug band from Portland, Oregon - The Barbecue Orchestra. It was a jug band dream. The big surprise of the evening was The Barbecue Orchestra. Although they were there to back up Kweskin, Hicks and others, they also opened the show. I don’t think anyone was prepared for how good they’d be, so the audience was thrust into enjoyment from the get go. “Jug band music certainly was a treat to me”.
In September I got news that my Irish leprechaun promoter, Larry Roddy, was ‘in hospital’ with some serious business to deal with. So I decided to cancel the Irish portion of my upcoming tour and had a little time on my hands. What to do? Soon I got a call from T-Bone Burnett and was asked to write some horn charts for B.B. King’s new album. So, luckily, one door closed and another opened. B.B. recorded songs that influenced him as a young man including a couple by Lonnie Johnson (an early blues man acquaintance of mine), T-Bone Walker, and others. I did four horn arrangements in all. It was an honor of course. B.B. is the last inventor of the blues to remain standing. When he leaves us, the blues will officially become a classical form.
Now the tour….
I left Los Angeles for Amsterdam October 9th and arrived on the 10th. Amsterdam is becoming my jet lag decompression chamber for entering Europe. The hotel I stayed in was well-located, away from the ‘coffee shops’ (cannabis dens) and tourist clutter. Having arrived in the afternoon, I started looking for something to do that evening. I asked the front desk clerk if there were any concert halls in the area and he told me that the ‘Concertgebouw’ (one of the finest in Europe) was across the street. How handy. I checked it out and found that the Muir String Quartet was playing that night and performing Fritz Kreisler and Schubert pieces. So, I bought a ticket, went and ate a good meal, came back for the show, took my seat and shortly thereafter fell asleep. This is becoming an expensive habit.
The next day, my friend Alet and I headed over to Rembrandt’s house (Museum het Rembrandthuis). Not too shabby. He was in the chips when he bought the place in 1639, but by 1658, Rembrandt was bankrupt and living in a smaller rented house. Fortunately, an inventory of his belongings was taken in 1656, so historians have been able to accurately reconstruct the house and acquire it’s original artworks. The studio on the top floor is the perfect pad, and across the hall is a room full of items of every description which Rembrandt used as props and models…. snake skins, tortoise shells, gourds, spears, stuffed birds, etc. Some of these must have been brought back from ports of call to the East Indies, where the blood-thirsty Dutch and those conniving Brits were butchering natives and each other for pepper, nutmeg and cloves.
I played four dates around Holland, two of them below sea level (Nieuw-en St. Joosland in Zeeland and Hoorn) …. a first for me. After I got my head above high tide, I traveled out to Bemmel where I played for Jan Meurs and his friends at the Cultureel Centrum de Kinkel. The last time I was in Bemmel, I was there to relax and Jan was my host. He took me to an old working windmill that he is learning to operate and the Open Air Museum in Arnhem. On that visit, I was treated to his wife, Anneke’s, home cooking (beef soup…. yes!!) and shown around the area . On this visit (two nights), Jan and Anneke spoiled me again with more beef soup, and they offered me their bedroom. I thought they had another room to sleep in, but when I looked in their home office the next day, I saw two sleeping bags on the floor. I felt bad for them… a bit embarrassed. But did I offer to give up the bedroom? (Any person of character would certainly have done that.) No, I did not, and I was very comfortable with the decision…. so to speak.
The gig in Bemmel was sweet. Friends came out from Amsterdam (Alet, Jitta and Peter) and, I’m honored to say, “Funeral Man Rob” was there.
The next day, Jan drove me to Eindhoven to play a gig at a cultural center. The presenter was Ad van Meurs, a Dutch picker, bluesman. His partner, Ankie, took care of sound and stage setup. They couldn’t have been nicer. Ad drove me to Duisburg, Germany the following morning and I hopped on an ICE train to Berlin to meet up with Joe Boyd.
Joe was starting a tour there for his new book, “White Bicycles”, and his publisher, Kunstmann, invited me along to play a few songs. This was easy going for me. Joe read a bit in English, a German fellow – Detlef Dietrichson - read some of the book in German and I played a few songs. I really enjoyed just sitting there with very little to do at times… different for me, but nice.
After Berlin, Joe went on to Hamburg and I headed for Munich to see friends and do a guitar workshop. Kuntsmann provided me with a charming guide for Munich in the person of Katrin Sorko. The first night found us at the Herkulessaal, a concert hall within the complex of buildings called The Residenz. Bavarian dukes and kings occupied these lavish quarters from 1508 to 1918. Now it is home to cultural centers and government agencies, museums, public gardens, etc. Luckily, Katrin and I caught an evening of the Artemis String Quartet performing Beethoven, Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky. With only a little jet lag still with me, I stayed awake throughout.
After the concert, we headed to a basic traditional restaurant called The Weisbräu and knocked back some leber knödel suppe. Ah!
The next day, my friend Carl-Ludwig Reichert and his wife, Monika Dimpfl treated me to a famous Bavarian restaurant called Zum Sedlmayr. The food was very special. Carl is a writer (historian, poet, critic, playwright, etc.) and was lead singer with a popular Bavarian rock band called Sparifankal. The band was disassembled in 2005. He now leads a group called Wuide Wachl – “Bavarian primitive music”. Monika, also an author, recently wrote an important and much-needed biography of Munich humorist, Karl Valentin. It was Valentin who commented about the eight large clocks on the Peterskirche (the city’s oldest parish church) bell tower…. saying they were placed there so that eight people could tell the time at once.
That evening, Carl-Ludwig and I went over to a local music store called Folkladen where I gave a guitar workshop. The store’s proprietors are Rüdiger and Heidi Helbig. Rüdiger is a fine banjo player and composer of bluegrass tunes. Heidi is not a banjo player, but she is fine nonetheless. I was made to feel very welcome with smiles, hugs and good coffee. The students persevered and we got through my lessons without complaints. Actually, there were times when the whole group was in sync on one of my guitar arrangements. This always feels good when it happens.
The next day, Katrin and I visited the Pinakothek der Moderne. The museum was presenting a Beckmann exhibition, but I had already seen the show in Amsterdam in the Spring so we concentrated on the permanent collection. It was not impressive. Surprisingly, though, I enjoyed the design exhibits on the bottom floor – cars, pottery, clocks, furniture, shoes, you name it… arranged in historical order.
I had just enough time to pick up some lederhosen for my new grandson before getting ready for the evening. Joe and I did a ‘show’ at a bar / restaurant named Vereinsheim with Carl-Ludwig doing the honors as German reader. The place was packed, with local hipsters in attendance. The only thing missing this evening was the attendance of two friends - Karl Bruckmaier (Bayerischer Rundfunk [Bavarian Radio]), and Jasmin Grubwinkler (Optimal Records). Both were down with the flu. Fortunately, Karl’s wife, Isabella, was there as was Christos Davidopoulos, owner of Optimal. After the show, we were treated to a fine restaurant (soup and cheese and wine [for some]) by Antje Kunstmann, owner of the German publishing company for Joe’s book. It was a gracious setting. Once again, in Munich, I was in fine company.
Joe and I then headed to Frankfort with Andreas Schäfler from Kunstmann who would be our steady German reader and travel guide for the four remaining gigs. We had a little time in Frankfurt to go to Schirn Kunsthalle to see an exhibition of pre-abstractionists called Entdeckung der Abstraktion, with works by painters, authors and illustrators including JM William Turner, Victor Hugo and Gustave Moreau. I didn’t take to this show, but there was a gem in the last room by William Hogarth, an illustrated book (1753) called “The Analysis of Beauty” subtitled, ‘Written with a view of fixing the fluctuating ideas of taste’. How utterly British (how Roman, how American!)…. but Hogarth is so, so good.
The show in Frankfurt didn’t live up to the ones in Berlin and Munich (especially Munich), nor did the next ones in Köln (Cologne), Bremen and Düsseldorf, but for me it was very enjoyable…. just hearing Joe’s stories; listening to Andreas reading in German… especially the account of Lonnie Johnson’s warning to Joe, Warwick (Joe’s brother) and me ‘to beware the’ “fuzzy monster that causes all the trouble” (it’s so appealing in German, you would never heed the warning); hearing the audience questions and Joe’s answers, and having a good old time of it with Joe and Andreas as we traveled by ICE train. It was all a breeze. Most of my travel is solo, so this short tour was a nice break from that.
After Düsseldorf, Joe flew off to Rajasthan for a music festival and I took a train back to Amsterdam. On the platform at the Düsseldorf hauptbahnhof (main station) I asked an elderly German woman if I was standing at the correct track and section for the Amsterdam train. She assured me I was, and then, with a smile, said, “guten fahrt”. I thought, “How did she know?”
When I got to Amsterdam, I checked into my hotel and then flagged a taxi for a ride over to see my Dutch family… Alet, Peter, Jitta, Liza and Arlo the Cowboy. Along the way, I noticed there were more bicycles than usual on the streets. Also, the trams were out in force, making for rigorous navigation. I said to the taxi driver, “Look at all of this. It must be difficult to be a taxi driver in Amsterdam.” And he said, “Ah, yes….. you start out the day with a pint of whiskey and a big joint. Then you will survive.” I thought to myself, “I love this town.” Then I searched for the seatbelt.
After a bite to eat at Alet’s, the four adults (Alet, Jitta, Peter and Geoff) headed out to the Bimhuis to hear Mose Allison. I didn’t even know he was alive, but Peter very nicely bought me a ticket. I supposed Mose was froze or lying flat on his back with a rose in his toes waiting for the final bulldoze. But alas, he was still doing shows… and he sounded exactly like Mose Allison. “Baby, please don’t go. Baby please don’t go”. He was full of energy and just terrific.
The next morning, Peter took me to his doctor to get a shot of prednisone in my trigger finger. Actually, it was my left ring finger. The condition is called ’trigger finger’. Dr. Bokma was very conservative… 5 mg or ml or cc or whatever… 5 something… but it did the trick and I was able to finish out my touring in the States. I was back in the ballgame, just like Sandy Koufax. Yeah, me and Sandy…. peas in a pod.
After the appointment at Dr. Bokma’s, Peter and Alet drove me out to Schiphol for my flight to Boston. There were plenty of hugs, ‘goodbyes’ and ‘thank you’s’. It’s so nice to have a Dutch family.
When I arrived in Boston I drove straight to Maine for some R&R at my friend John McAlevey’s house. John’s an accomplished woodworker who I first met in New Hampshire through Eric Von Schmidt in the 60s. So we go back quite a few years… and it was nice to hide out with him and his wife, Penny, for a few days before resuming my tour. I didn’t do too much when I was there, but John did take me to a wonderful school called the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship. John had done some teaching there and it was The Ritz. It had two or three or four of everything a woodworker could ever want… they had multiple, redundant dream workshops. John also showed me his own, more humble, shop and gave me a quick look at how he turns bowls…. his new passion.
I left Maine for Woodstock, NY where I bunked up and then drove down the next day to New York City for a rehearsal of my new chamber works. Dick Connette, the producer of my Bix tribute album, Private Astronomy, has taken an interest in some of my newer musical excursions, so we’ll see what happens. This time the compositions and arrangements are written for cello, French horn, bassoon, clarinet and violin. I’m over my head with this stuff, which is usual with any new project I start.
I drove back to Woodstock that night and then on to Boston the next day for a gig in Somerville. All went well…. the finger held up. Now it was time to visit family and friends on Martha’s Vineyard… especially my new grandson, Quinlan. It was time to deliver the lederhosen.
I stayed with my friends, Whit Griswold and Laura Wainwright and their daughter Lila. I’ve known them since the 70s and it was a cozy time at their place. They live in a comfortable setting looking across James Pond to the Vineyard Sound. Fortunately, Whit’s boat was still in the water so we were fishing the rip off of the Gay Head cliffs in no time. I got lucky and pulled in a bluefish for dinner.
There was a Halloween party at The Chilmark Community center that night so I went up there to see friends and see if Quinlan would get a prize for his dragon outfit. He did… “Funniest Costume.” I ran into old friends, Emmett and Kathie Carroll, and Emmett invited me to help myself to some oysters hanging off his boat in Menemsha harbor. I thanked him, and did gratefully take him up on his offer.
The following day was calm and easy. I went and picked up a standing rib roast for the next evening’s dinner and toodled around the Vineyard aimlessly…. a non-activity I relish. That night we played hearts in front of the fireplace; a good book, and lights out. Ah!
The next afternoon we got a call from a friend, Albert Fischer, who said he saw fish breaking off of the beach where he lives. Whit and I jumped on it and in a short time we were bouncing across the dunes in Whit’s truck to the magic spot. We threw on our waders and began casting into the surf. The sky was dramatic. The waves were breaking at our feet. Paradise. I love to fish this way. Once again, I got lucky and pulled in a fish… this time a striped bass. It was the most beautiful fish I had ever seen, but, then again, I’ve said that before. Whit released the fish with my blessings. The sky became more dramatic… ominous. A mean storm was brewing. The radio predicted hurricane-force winds due to the fact that the storm was - you guessed it - a hurricane: Hurricane Noel. So Whit and I hurried back to his house where he prepared his trailer to haul his boat out of the water. I was booked on a ferry the next afternoon so that I could get to a gig in Rhode Island, but it wasn’t looking good for ferry boats, or any kind of boat, once that storm hit. So, I booked a passage on the last boat of the day... 9:30pm. This gave me enough time to pack my clothes and cook the rib roast while Whit hauled his boat out with another friend.
At dinner time, my daughter, Dardy and her husband Sean brought over the little tyke, Quinlan. Albert Fischer and his wife, Linda, joined us as well. We ate oysters and rib roast with potatoes, onions and carrots and a delicious salad. Then we took pictures of grandpa with his precious grandson. Whit handed me a piece of pie for the road and I beat it for the ferry.
No boats ran the next day after the early morning, so I had made the right move. I was safe and sound in Newport, but that evening the storm hit full force. I was amazed to find out that the gig was on… more amazed that the venue still had electricity… and ever so pleased to find that over a hundred people had braved the storm to come hear me. This is why I do what I do. By the time I finished playing that night, the storm had passed. I drove back to where I was staying and slept like a log.
When I woke up, I drove to Vermont for a two-night gig near Burlington (Hinesburg) at the Good Time Cafe. It’s a little joint with a lot of love and I enjoy doing it. From there I drove across the Islands of Lake Champlain and around the Adirondacks on the northern side. I’d never done this before. I wouldn’t want to be there in the dead of winter.
I played a gig the next day with my old partner, Jim Kweskin, at the Edwards Opera House in Edwards, NY. I had played there before and wanted Jimmy to see this place. It’s a beautiful all-wood, Victorian turn-of-the-century theatre with a hand-painted curtain showing a pastoral scene… cows and all. We used the house next door as a green room. Bob and Elaine Archer hosted us and they were great to talk to... my kind of people. They reminded me of some of the folks I spent time with on Martha’s Vineyard. Bob’s a hunter, fisherman and guide and, as it was ‘the season’, he was in the woods each morning, helping to put hunters in front of a deer. The pantry held containers of home-made wine, honey, jams. Don’s fresh apple cider was the best I’ve ever had.
The gig went very well. Jim brought along his Boston-area bass player, Matt Berlin, and he hired on a great local fiddler named Don Woodcock. Don had a plaintive and seasoned sound to his playing that got to my heart.
The next night I was in my old home town of Woodstock, NY for a gig at The Kleinert Theatre. Happy, Jane and April Traum showed up, as did Peter Ecklund (the whistler on my version of “Brazil”), Jim Kweskin (in town to do an instructional DVD with Happy) and other good friends. This gig is a walkover. Carla Smith and her people always treat me very well.
I headed to Washington, DC the following day for a gig at The Institute of Musical Traditions. The show went better than ever and I also got to spend a little time with my dear friend, Dorothy Jackson, an alumna of the Cambridge days. Dorothy and I chit chatted and chortled and generally socialized as much as we could in the short time I was there.
From Washington, I drove down below the Mason-Dixon line to Virginia, a place I’m not too comfortable with ever since the incident in Richmond when I played there with Butterfield in the 70s. Here’s what happened (harp glissando)….
We were playing some university… a loud echo-heavy gymnasium gig. Boz Scaggs was the opener. When we arrived for the sound check we found out that there was no dressing room - something that was clearly called for in the contract. So Butterfield got salty and they let us use the men’s locker room. We had ladies with us, so when the girls came into the ad hoc ‘dressing room’ with us, the university security guards were opposed. This might have been due, in no small part, to the fact that our bass player, Bill Rich, a black man, was there with his light-colored Spanish-blooded wife, Rose. At that point, Butterfield got even saltier but, after some barking, all was apparently worked out. We did our sound check, warmed up and did all our usual things before going on stage.
Playing with Butterfield was amazing…. Paul’s energy was contagious. We always rocked the joint. At the end of our set, we would do a Bobby Charles tune called, “He’s Got All the Money”. Towards the end of the tune, the band would peel off one by one and leave the stage while Paul continued playing his harmonicain a rabble-rousing cadenza. Eventually, Paul would find a rhythmic lick to cue us in and we would fall back onto the stage one by one again. But this time was different; no Bill Rich. He was nowhere to be found. Boz picked up Bill’s bass and finished out the tune with us. When we got off stage, we found out that Bill had been handcuffed and taken off to jail. We hurried to the hotel so we could get on the phone and look for Bill. When we got there we found out our rooms had ransacked. I called over to the jail and asked for Bill Rich. The voice on the other end of the line said, “White or colored?”
So, you get the picture. It all worked out eventually, but it left me in a bad way when it comes to the South. I harbor prejudice about a place that is known for its prejudice. As I traveled south from Washington, I carried this with me, and as usual I was tripped up by meeting some wonderful people. Exceptions are the bugaboo of generality.
I had a gig in Charlottesville ,VA and stayed with a good friend named Jim Quarles. We’re pretty new acquaintances, but we have so much in common that it seems as if we’ve know each other for a long, long time. He’s rehabbing a little house in town… something he does very well. The digs were nice and we talked about music, guitars, building, women, trees… stuff. I had a gig at a local venue and I didn’t exactly set the box office on fire, but I enjoyed the gig anyway.
The next day I drove down to Winston-Salem, NC. I was smarting a bit from the night before, so I expected to have a rough time of it playing even farther behind enemy lines. But, lo and behold… the fellow who presented my show, Richard Emmett was a real nice guy, and he did a good job of getting the few existing Winston-Salem hipsters to the gig. The audience knew their music and they listened up real good, ya here now… y’all? (You see, show me a little respect and I love you. I become you. It’s sick.)
Time to head north again. First an overnight stop in DC and more chit chat with Dorothy and then I headed up to another of my old stomping grounds, Princeton, NJ, for a gig in nearby Stockton on the Delaware River. Local radio personality, John Weingart (“Music You Can’t Hear On The Radio”), puts on four or five shows a year in an old building at the Prawlsville Mills. It’s a beautiful location… a great place to play. The place filled with smiling folks, a few old friends among them.
The next day I drove all the way back to Woods Hole, MA where I had gotten the ferry to Martha’s Vineyard a couple of weeks before. There’s a nice gig there at the Woods Hole Community Center put on by the WH Folklore Society. Some of my family and friends came over from the Vineyard to hear the show…. Whit, Laura, Lila, Dardy, Sean, Quinlan!, and my sister, Diana with a few of her friends. I play the gig every two years and it does very well for me and the Society. I think the audience agreed with me that Quinlan is the cutest baby on the planet Earth. I checked with them to find out if I was just being… well you know… prejudiced.
That was it; tour over. I flew home to LA the next day.
I’ll be playing on A Prairie Home Companion at Town Hall in NYC in a couple of weekends (12/7 and 12/8) so I’ll be putting together some horn charts for that over the next few days. After I return to LA again, I’ll go back to working on my chamber music with a show at McCabes at the end of January to show it off. Oh yes…. Have a Merry Christmas!!
Geoff
p.s. Summer of Love article below….
The Summer of Love
When The Jim Kweskin Jug Band arrived at the Fillmore on June 8th 1967, we were set to share the night with a new electric folk rock group. The gig was booked as a co-bill. My friend (and producer of my first album) Paul Rothschild, had taken a few greenhorns down in LA and turned them into a real band. As a new ‘breaking’ group, they were coming up to San Francisco…. to be shown off to the denizens of the new cultural Mecca.
This was not the first time Rothschild had fostered musical fledglings. A few years earlier, in response to the Cambridge-based Kweskin Jug Band’s coming to national prominence, and the predictions in the press, and on television, of an impending “jug band craze”, Paul had assembled a flock of talented New York City youngsters and called the group The Even Dozen Jug Band. In the band were John Sebastian (Lovin’ Spoonful), Maria D’Amato (later Muldaur), Steve Katz (Blood Sweat and Tears), David Grisman, Stefan Grossman, Joshua Rifkin, et al. They recorded on Rothchild’s adopted label, Elektra Records. Amazingly, nothing came of The Even Dozen Jug Band…. and, less amazingly, of the “jug band craze”.
Paul persevered, however, recording The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Fred Neil, Tom Rush, John Sebastian and others. When Elektra moved to LA, Paul moved along with it and kept digging for talent. In 1967 he recorded a local LA quartet called The Doors. By the time The Doors showed up at The Fillmore to play that “co-bill” with The Jim Kweskin Jug Band they had become stars and the night was theirs. We had become the openers.
Bruce Conner, San Francisco counter-culture artist, filmmaker and light show innovator at the Family Dog’s Avalon Ballroom describes the Summer of Love as “the beginning of the end”. That sounds about right to me.
In 1967, life in the USA was still very easy-going compared with our stressful and insecure life today. Our economy and infrastructure were sound. Our institutions, although corrupt, were tolerably so. The middle class was thriving. People were educated in ways helpful to the sustenance of an interesting and fairly equitable society. Health care was available to all who needed it. Income taxes were graduated by income bracket, etc. etc.
On a personal level, I lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts (across the river from Boston) with Maria and our daughter, Jenni. We paid $90 a month for a beautiful 6-room apartment in the posh, off-Brattle Street, area. I drove a new 1967 yellow Mustang convertible. Food was high-quality and plentiful and we would stock up for the week at Haymarket Square in Boston…. about $20 for the week not counting dairy products. We were working at an easy pace and having fun. On most nights we would be out at the Club 47 hearing friends or listening to visiting musicians play. We would probably have eaten a great meal at a friend’s apartment or at one of the great Greek, Lebanese or Italian restaurants in town. If someone like Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, Ali Akbar Khan or Jerry Lee Lewis were doing a show at a club or theater, we would be there. If the Bruins or Celtics or Red Sox were playing in town, I would likely be there with my cronies. Most nights we drank beer and shots at The Oxford Grill across from the Club 47. The bartender’s name was Joe. It seemed bartenders everywhere in the area were named Joe. Late at night we might close up the Club 47 and listen to rembetika music and drink ouzo with the manager, Byron Linardos. Or maybe we’d head over to Fritz Richmond’s apartment and fire up some hashish and toss nickels into his magnificent juke box; or we’d be over at Von Schmidt’s picking music or playing poker, or at Farina’s singing and playing and ogling Mimi (at least I couldn’t keep my eyes off her). We were within a couple of hours’ drive of Martha’s Vineyard and Von Schmidt’s farm in Henniker, New Hampshire. The party never stopped… we gathered food for the big meals…. we collected mushrooms and watercress… caught fish, dug clams… we swam and played bocce on the sand dunes, and, of course we played and listened to a lot of music together. Time was expanded due to our youth and our zeal. We needed every minute. Life was very good.
But things were changing. A confluence of trends, events and conspiracies (our media have demonized this word as it did with the word ‘liberal’) were beginning to reshape the structure of our country.
When we put together the Jim Kweskin Jug Band in the spring of 1963, John Kennedy was our president. That fall, he was assassinated. By 1967, the country was fed up with his successor, Lyndon Johnson, and with the Viet Nam War. Our next president would be Richard Nixon, and the country would never fully recover.
After performing with The Doors in the summer of 1967, the Kweskin Jug Band played at the Mount Tamalpais Magic Mountain Festival w/ Canned Heat, Dionne Warwick et al., Saratoga Performing Arts Center w/ the Lovin’ Spoonful, The Newport Folk Festival w/ Sippie Wallace (and scores of other great artists), the Carter Barron Amphitheater w/ Peter, Paul and Mary and the Rheingold Music Festival in Central Park NYC. Festivals were the thing. The music that had started in coffee houses and college student unions had taken on a new sound and the general public was getting on board.
For those of us who grew up in the fifties and sixties - especially around the urban centers - the era of hip poets, jazz, beatniks, abstract expressionism, R&B and the like… the idea of music or art being “hip” and, at the same time, being popular to mass audiences was an oxymoron; a logical contradiction. We danced to Little Richard… the “squares” danced to Pat Boone. The operating generality was: to be hip was counter-culture; to appreciate something with popular appeal, by definition – unhip. ‘We’ were hip; ‘they’ were ‘the herd’. Even in San Francisco, the early hipsters were being overrun by the influx of pretenders…. weekend hippies, who dressed up in hippy clothing, motorcycled into town to act like hippies and then made it to their accounting offices on Monday morning in their suits and ties.
As the record industry began to consolidate in the 60s and distribution systems insured more control for the big labels, local record labels went out of business. Artists began to record for a larger audience… the music less identifiable as regional…. it’s essence diluted. Many of the R&B artists made the switch to larger markets - Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Tina Turner – but in the main, “hits” by less polished, but nonetheless important musicians like Jimmy Reed, Johnny Otis, Guitar Slim, or Big Mama Thornton were to be no more.
Coincidental with this was the emergence of British artists in the American record market. This could not have been possible in the 50s. The audiences of that day were savvy to the grease. They knew where the backbeat was supposed to be.
The Brits were using American music as a vehicle for their own theater. They were very were good at their theater and they were very focused and serious about their business. I remember being told by my artist liaison at Warner Brothers something like, “Geoff, we spend a lot of time trying to make your records special and to make sure you are happy with them, but I have these British guys who fly into LA and put a fully completed, platinum record on my desk, no problems, and then they fly home and we all get rich.”
The audience was dumbing down and the record industry was right there with them step by step. Jimmy Hendrix’s pathetically sophomoric bit of setting his guitar on fire at Monterrey could not have gotten a rise out of a black audience in the south a few years earlier where they had seen the likes of The Swan Silvertones, The Blind Boys of Alabama, James Brown or Joe Tex do their impossibly athletic spins and splits and mike manipulations. (When I saw The Coasters at The Brooklyn Paramount in 1957 they did splits in time to the beat of their hit song, [And Then] Along Came Jones. It was mind-boggling to watch.)
Golden Ages come and go. This one has gone. It started in the late 19th century, perhaps due to the invention of the phonograph record. There was a zeitgeist; an abundance of musical geniuses in all genres. By the late-sixties – with few exceptions - they were all gone. There has never been another Maria Callas or Jussi Bjorling; another La Niña de los Peines or Pepe Marchena, Ioannis Papaioannou, Louis Armstrong, Joe Heaney, Bela Bartok, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Arthur Rubinstein, Django Reinhardt, Om Kalthoum or David Oistrakh. We are lucky for their recordings, just as we are lucky for the artwork of the renaissance.
We all know exceptions of course. B.B. King is one. He invented what thousands of white boys now imitate every night around the world and he is still playing today. I first met B.B. King that summer in 1967 at The Newport Folk Festival. He bought my daughter, Jenni, a bag of popcorn. I shook his hand and promised never to wash mine again. A few days ago (40 years later) I wrote a couple of horn charts for his upcoming album. Life continues to be rewarding if one stays with it. Just because the flame is out, it doesn’t mean that we can’t look for the matches.
Perhaps on that night in June of 1967 at the Fillmore Jim Morrison sang…
“This is the end, beautiful friend
This is the end, my only friend
The end”
For you maybe Jimmy Boy. Not for me.
Geoff Muldaur