I remember when Jerry Garcia died and the sidewalk in front of Ben and Jerry’s on Haight Street became a shrine. Candles and crying kids and Friend of the Devil played over and over. A punk rock friend of mine lived next door. After the umpteenth Ripple singalong he couldn’t take it anymore and stormed outside. It’s a fucking ice cream parlor, you idiots! Two hundred red eyed Deadheads looked up at him. It’s OK dude, one said, we’re all upset too, and passed him a joint. He took a hit and relaxed. Someone began singing Friend of Devil. Teary eyed teenage girls asked him if they could stay at his pad. He was a punk rocker in a sea of Deadheads right outside his front door. He fled inside and blasted the U-Men and Mudhoney and the Stooges. Between tracks an endless, droning Sugaree came through the windows. Shake it, shake it, Sugaree they chanted. He finally dozed off as a dozen hippie guitar players on the sidewalk massacred Uncle John’s Band. Sleep was fitful and dreaming. Woke up to teenaged girls knocking on his door. He screamed he wasn’t home.
Category Archives: Psychedelic
Woodstock
Watched Woodstock last night on TCM. Hadn’t realized it’d been so long since I’d last seen it…I hadn’t even seen this Director’s cut yet. All those crazy 18 years old running through the mud are 65 now. Anyway, forgot how beautifully shot that flick was, amazed they pulled it off. You wonder what became of all the interviewees. And if everyone hawking their wares in the drug super market scene wound up in prison. If the Porto-San man’s kid got back from the DMZ ok. Or who wound up with Pete Townshend’s guitar. Just what that glop was the Hog Farm was feeding everybody? And whatever happened to those intricately beautiful hash pipes all the serious freaks seemed to have back then. It’s a long flick, endless, and you have time to wonder about these things. And about how everyone got home. And the psychedelics no one talks about anymore, like DMT, and how mesc was short for mescaline. And how fit everyone was back then. Trim and beautiful. I can’t imagine camera crews spending so much time on skinny dippers at a festival today. There’s a lot of beautifully shot scenes in the flick. There’s one night time scene and someone is on stage, a folkie, alone–maybe Joan Baez–and the shadows through behind on the stage are gorgeous and one of the camera men, no doubt stoned, focused on it for a luxurious several seconds, and it still fills my mind’s eye 24 hours later.
Amazing how different the mood is from Gimme Shelter–another extraordinary concert film–which was only four or five months later. Or from the Isle of Wight flick, less than a year later. Or from Monterey Pop, a mere two years before. Or from the contemporaneous Wattstax, which seemed a world away. And how vastly different it was from Jazz on a Summer’s Day, shot eleven years earlier, or The Decline of Western Civilization, ten years away. That’s a twenty year span, packed full of cultural revolution. Things seemed to move so fast then. They seem so slow now. If not slow, perhaps it’s just that the old never really goes away anymore. It always hangs around. Digitalization makes the dead seem completely alive. Long dead movie stars seem to walk and talk still. People love the Beatles like they never went away, or Miles Davis like he walks among us. Old releases are repackaged and released as if brand new. The long dead comment on new events–I just saw Kurt Cobain predicting Donald Trump; a lie, but that seemed not to matter–and we seem to live our lives shifting between eras as if we were there for all of them. But we weren’t. We only are where we are, and once were where we once were. And I can’t figure out it it’s good or bad that we can conceptually shift between eras like that–imagine how the tripping freaks at Woodstock would have loved the idea–but I do think the long dead should remain dead, the long broken up remain broken up, and we should live in the now, but that’s just me. I mean I love Hendrix and Coltrane and Monk and the Jefferson Airplane, but not they are still here. Meanwhile I’m watching hippies cavort half a century ago, and Jimi Hendrix frozen forever at 27 and the YouTube I’ve been listening to in the background flits through the jazz decades as if time itself was completely irrelevant. Time free like whatever that Albert Ayler thing just was, before this ancient Louis Armstrong thing or the brand new Ben Wendel thing I heard before. A hundred years of music randomly thrown together. Each video sets a mood, each brings out a feeling. Each make me feel like I am elsewhere, and this computer is a pad a paper and these letters my cramped, impenetrable scrawl that no one will ever see.
Down on me
James Gurley back home in Detroit at the Grande Ballroom and losing his psychedelic mind on a guitar solo. I had a pal way back in the 80’s who used to come around and service our xerox machines at work, he’d lived in the Motor City in the sixties and went through all his cash and brain cells every night at the Grande. Said he’d been at this show. He’d been at every show, but he was at this show for sure. I asked him how it was. He had no idea, he’d been so high. Lights and sounds, he said. No one ever seemed to remember anything back then except lights and sounds. I loved that guy. We’d talk and talk and I’d get nothing done. But that’s how you get material, you find yourself a story teller and plunk yourself down and listen. Alas, he died in a motorcycle accident not long afterward. Thus do a million stories disappear.
Great Society
Here’s an obscure psychedelic classic by San Francisco’s Great Society. You used to hear this spooky take on Sally Go Round the Roses on the free form FM stations on occasion in the ancient daze when a DJ was hip to the band. Recorded in 1966, released in ’68 after the Airplane became superstars (Grace Slick began in this band), check out Darby Slick‘s guitar extended solo….way ahead of the curve, he soon went off it entirely, when he went to India to really get deep into the roots. (Check him out on Facebook). Also, dig Peter Van Gelder‘s soprano sax in the long vamp that leads into White Rabbit. If any other rock band was getting that far out (as they used to say) with the Trane inspired reed work in 1966 I’ve never heard ’em, and notice how naturally it folds into Darby Slick’s raga inspired solo that follows. Grace Slick’s vocals blended in perfectly. Brilliant and vastly underrated stuff by a band that even more than most at the time, didn’t seem especially concerned about being rock stars, let alone making top forty singles. I had an early vinyl version of these recordings–think it was a double LP–way back when, have no idea where it went. Somewhere stoned, no doubt. Feed your head.
Beach Boys
Wow…I made one New Year’s resolution, which was not to make fun of dead people. I’ve been doing that lately. Not real dead people, but iconic ones. People get all dippy when a famous person dies and before you know it another Facebook saint is canonized. Even people who absolutely despised them in life find wonderful things to say about them post-mortem. Drives me nuts. If you hated somebody while they breathed, why love them once they’ve stopped? Anyway, to get back to my story, I saw some weirdness by Beach Boys fans on Facebook this morning. Now I like the Beach Boys well enough….like some of their stuff, but I hate some of their stuff too because it’s truly awful, which by definition makes me not a Beach Boys fan, who like everything they ever did, even Student Demonstration Time, and who see nothing unusual about spending your adult life in a sandbox also utilized by the cat. I see a piano in a litterbox and I think something’s wrong. Not so the Beach Boys fan. In fact the only thing that gets them riled up is a picture of Mike Love. It certainly did this morning. He was pouring champagne and wishing them all a Happy New Year. Bad mistake. They hated him. Really hated the guy. I had no idea anybody could hate Mike Love or hate anything Beach Boy. Hate seems like such a strong word for such a mild topic. And when one of the angry fans called him the original Abominable Snowman I was completely bewildered. Abominable Snowman? A Beach Boy? One was from the Himalayas, the other Hawthorne. One is covered with hair and the other wears a bald guy hat. How does that make sense? But it all made sense to the Beach Boys fans. Some kind of in-concept, that I was not in enough to understand. It was weird and cult-like and creepy. A harmless kind of creepy, maybe, but still creepy. So, of course, I had to go and write a nasty comment, all about how strange and disturbing Beach Boy fans are. It was uncalled for, I admit. But irresistible. I’m weak, I gave in, got very literary and sarcastic. And now perhaps a few Beach Boy fans are listening to Pet Sounds and feeling self-conscious as they get all moon eyed humming God Only Knows. Maybe I dampened the innocence of staring at the album cover and thinking wouldn’t it be nice if they were feeding one of the goats too with Brian and Dennis and Carl and Al and Mike Love (who isn’t actually feeding the goats, which is why goats as well as Beach Boys fans hate him). Subtextually, of course, I was actually making fun of the iconic Brian Wilson…if you make fun of Beach Boys fans you are making fun of the Beach Boys and by default making fun of Brian Wilson. Who isn’t dead, I know, but might as well be. Which is how New Year’s resolutions go right out the window.
Dennis feeds an invisible goat while waiting for the drugs to wear off.
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Thunderclap Newman
(March 30, 2016)
Alas, Andy Thunderclap Newman has passed on. What a strange thing his namesake Thunderclap Newman was, and even stranger what a thing that Hollywood Dream LP was. I remember playing it in the car as I drove down Hollywood Blvd right after moving here in 1980, blasting the title cut out the window and thinking wow, I’ve made it. I wish there was a Hollywood, I sang along, just like there used to be, with long black cars and paper hoods and a film star on my knee. Except that my canary yellow (with grey primer) Buick Opel didn’t have a cassette player when I first moved to Hollywood, it had an AM radio, and unless KHJ was playing Something in the Air, Andy Newman’s unhurried piano never saw the inside of my beat up little car. Now, as I mash together memories, formats, and automobile sound systems I’m listening to an Accidents (long version) that I copped off the internet. Andy takes a wonderfully ancient solo like we’re watching Buster Keaton chasing his hat in a windstorm, so unhip it hurts. “I see Jimmy climbing on the milkman’s van, laughing,” sings Speedy, “on his feet were a pair of granddad’s shoes / Then I looked around / And he was gone / Are we to lose?” Then a melodic solo by Jimmy, a penny whistle, and more of Andy accompanying Buster Keaton. I recall how unpopular a party album this was at our pad. It was an acquired taste, like an aged but weird wine. Andy himself, I always thought, was even better on a b-side of Something In the Air called Wilhelmina that one can safely assume probably did not get as much airplay as the a-side. He sings nothing like Mick Jagger over a barrelhouse piano nothing like Keith Emerson and though Jimmy McCulloch does a very nice psychedelic fill it’s as unrock’n’roll a thing as you can imagine. I love it. Now Andy Thunderclap Newman is gone, following Jimmy McCulloch and Speedy Keen, and the band is gone too. Life is just a game, you fly a paper plane, there is no end.
Speedy, Andy, and Jimmy on the cover of Tiger Beat.
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The Trip
Sat down to watch The Trip again last night, the Roger Corman/Jack Nicholson flick with Peter Fonda, and about ten minutes in it dawned on me that I had never seen The Trip. How I do not know. Great psychedelic freakout turned free form jazz score with the Electric Flag, though the occasional bass line kept making me think it was Country Joe and the Fish. A living, breathing, uncharred Gram Parsons in the club. Bruce Dern with a frightening beard. Dennis Hopper being quintessentially Dennis Hopper. Plus women in strictly supporting roles, this being the sixties. Lots of psychedelicized screwing. Grooviness and paranoia. What’s with all the horses? I didn’t know LSD came in gel caps. Peter anxious. You’re always nervous your first time Bruce Dern says. Bruce Dern knows. He knows. The score gets hazy, eastern, psychedelicized. Peter coming on. Dig those crazy colors. Peter holds an orange. That’s the sun in my hands, man! Jack Nicholson wrote, Oh, it gives off an orange cloud of light that just flows right out over the sea! Bruce Dern smiles knowingly beneath that mammoth beard. The camera follows Peter. Peter one with the universe. Peter naked and freaking. Peter home invading in a creepy scene. Peter weirding out the lady in the laundromat, who steals the scene. Peter freaking big time. You’re stoned out of your mind, aren’t you, said the blonde waitress. Peter staring, child like. Peter must have gotten laid like crazy with that look. Now Peter smelling bacon, ditching the pigs. Peter lost in acid terror, finds himself back at Dennis Hopper’s pad. Dennis senses his trauma. I wish there was some hip way of telling you this, baby, he tells Peter, but, ah… you’re one with and part of an ever-expanding, loving, joyful, glorious, and harmonious universe. I think the police are after me, Peter says. Bummer. I got a house full of pot, Dennis says, you better split. Peter back on Sunset Boulevard. Chicks everywhere, groovy blonde chicks, Susan Strasberg even, dancing, giggling, balling. Free love, baby, when in doubt, fuck. Peter is in doubt. Peter is one with everything, yet not one with anything. Crazy sax blowing turns to flute exploration. Peter is down at the sea shore to let the waves wash his mind. In the gray dawn perfectly good breakers go unsurfed. This is so beyond Frankie and Annette now. Beyond Dick Dale even. The naked lady dresses as Mike Bloomfield plays some crazy blues figure on the guitar. She asks Peter about the trip. Did he find what he was seeking? Yeah, I’m hip about time, but I just gotta go, Peter says, in the wrong movie. In comes the Electric Flag, grooving over the credits. That’s it, baby. Self-actualization, rock’n’roll and screwing on the Sunset Strip.
You’re stoned out of your mind, aren’t you?
Flyer
A buddy of mine told me about the time he and some of his teenage surfer doper buddies were sitting around the quad at USF eyeing the chicks and digging the scene. This was 1966, I think, at the epicenter, just off Haight. Things moving fast, things moving slow, and walking across the street on acid was just like Section 43. Country Joe and the Fish, he said, which I knew already. Electric Music for the Mind and Body wasn’t released yet, he reminded me. Though I knew that too, since I had the record, I’d bought it used from a hippie record store. Someone very high had drawn perfect little flowers in ball point pen on the cover. But I didn’t let on. It was his story, his movie, his narrative, and I pictured him, young and tanned, a Ventura County boy, tripping and walking and laughing on a gray day in San Francisco. You could touch the sounds, he said. They had a feel. They’d walked all the way from Haight Street feeling the sounds. Now he and his pals were sitting around a table beneath an umbrella and taking hits from a joint rolled like a Lucky Strike. LSMFT. LSLSD. They giggled and tried not to. Coeds walked past. They smiled. A couple long haired dudes in wild get ups came through, handing out flyers. They were guitar players, they said. He took one of the flyers. It was cool and psychedelic. Big Brother and the Holding Company is looking for a singer, it said. You guys know any chicks that can sing? My friend apologized and said he couldn’t think of anybody. Well if you do, give them the flyer. He said he would.
Wow, I said. He sighed and stared past me, remembering. I wish I’d held on to that flyer, he said.
Joe Cocker
(2014)
Joe Cocker’s performance at Woodstock was so freaking outrageous, his live act was so demented that when I first heard he’d been a working man I didn’t believe it. I thought he must be mad. And what a band he had, that Grease Band, one of the great forgotten bands of the time. They are so hard and so on, that crunching guitar is so gigantic, those ridiculous backing vocals are so perfect, and when Joe says Baby it sounds like a hurricane, a tornado, a volcano blowing itself to pieces. That silly little nothing of a Beatles song rendered rough and Wagnerian by a band you could have seen in a bar. Nothing but dynamics, loud guitar, cool organ, falsetto, a hard ass rhythm section and a voice like a really angry god. Joe loved his Ray Charles, obviously, but, Ray never hurled a Baby into the void like that, this wasn’t soul, it was Götterdämmerung. Joe was on that day. And if there was one day you wanted to be on, it was that one, in front of all those people and all those movie cameras. I doubt he was ever that on again. Some things come only once in a lifetime, you do it, and spend the rest of your life wondering just what got into you that day.
I remember seeing Woodstock back in the early seventies when I was impressionable and fragile and sitting in a dark, dank movie theatre full of hippies and freaks and weed smoke and thinking uhhh, wow. Still, my experience was nothing like my pal Richie, rest in peace, who spent a wintry New Jersey afternoon smoking hash and wandered into the local cinerama dome to see Woodstock feeling three feet tall and the light was vibrating and like a little kid he decided to sit in the very front row and melted into the seat and the music and images surged over and around him and Joe Cocker was like some enormous monster, Godzilla sized, destroying the city. Richie was frozen, wide eyed, terrified, exultant, and when Joe let loose that Oh Baby to the gods above Richie thought it was the end of the world.
Ollie Halsall
(written 3/14/2015)
My pal John Altman just pointed out that today would have been Ollie Halsall’s 66th birthday. Alas, he barely made it into middle age. The usual things. But I did manage to see him one night at the Whiskey with John Otway, opening for the incredible Pere Ubu. It was 1979, I think. A duo–an unusual format at the time–pairing an utterly mad singer with an utterly mad guitar player. Now I knew John Otway’s name somehow–he used to pop up in the pages of Zig Zag, looking mad–but I had no idea who the guitar player was at all. Ollie somebody. They certainly put on a berserk show. At one point Otway hurt himself somehow–he was already bleeding from a split lip where the mic had bashed him, when some kind of backflip ended badly and he was prostrate momentarily, then staggering around out of sorts and it just seemed to drive accompanist Ollie to new heights. Crazed virtuosity. Wild eyed, fingers a blur, rule book out the window. Some people thrive on anarchy, and those were anarchic times. Certainly made an impression on me, especially right at the front of the stage as I was. It was years before I found out who he was. I was telling a friend about this incredible guitar player I’d seen with John Otway. He said that was Ollie Halsall. Didn’t ring a bell. So he gave me a mix tape that included a Patto tune. Loud Green Song. Jazzy prog guys doing proto-grunge or something. Whatever, it was more crazy playing. I wore the cassette out. I mentioned the cassette to another friend. You have to hear Patto, I said. He remembered Patto. Not his thing. But he gave me a custom made Patto tee shirt for my 40th birthday. I still have it. It’s several sizes too small (I stopped wearing large when I was in grade school, I think) so it is still in perfect shape. A one of a kind Patto tee shirt in mint condition. Probably worth a zillion dollars on Ebay. Maybe two zillion. John Altman snuck me into the one time ever Rutles reunion gig at the Pig and Whistle (open bar!) and I told Patto/Rutles drummer John Halsey about the shirt. He looked at me like I was an idiot. Drummers can tell these things.
Ollie Halsall in 1980.
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