Category Archives: Psychedelic

Mike Bloomfield

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Pulling out LPs that I didn’t even know I had. Check out Mike Bloomfield here on Woody Herman’s Brand New (1971).

“Hitchhike on the Possum Trot Line”

Alan Broadbent is playing the groovy electric piano, it’s his tune. Frank Tiberi and Sal Nistico are back there on tenor. Woody is playing the soprano sax. Dig he and Bloomfield dueling it out past the 3:30 mark. You can hear Bloomfield at the top of his game on this record….it was all downhill from there. But then Herman had seen all that before, four brothers’ worth.

According to Ralph Gleason’s liner notes, Bloomfield was a huge fan of swing bands, especially Herman’s. Gleason suggested him to Woody who jumped at the chance. He was always filling the ranks with kids, and his band had a sixties rock’n’roll energy to it. Lots of rock covers, not all worked, but even those were noble failures. Herman confided that the band never got around to sending the charts to Bloomfield, who was freaking. Woody told him not to worry about it, it’s all the blues and to just come in and wail.

Which is how it happened. On the opening cut Bloomfield seems kinda nervous, but he opened up as he went along and by the end of his four tracks he was burning the place up. I don’t think he ever played with the band live, however, which is a drag. But then Bloomfield was a mess by then. I’m sure Woody Herman would have loved to do a whole tour with him. Woody Herman and the New Thundering Herd featuring Mike Bloomfield. Imagine the possibilities. It could have turned kids onto a great, hot band that didn’t sound like their dad’s record collection. And it might have revived Mike Bloomfield’s career. It hadn’t been too long since he’d played on Highway 61 Revisited, or helped Dylan outrage Pete Seeger at Newport. He’d blown minds with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band on East-West in 1966, played Monterey with the Electric Flag in 1967, went gold on Super Session in 1968. He was everywhere in 1969. Nowhere in 1970. By 1971 he was nearly forgotten. Hearing him here with Woody, though, each driving the other up in intensity, it’s hard to imagine that by then he was no longer one of America’s most influential guitarists. But he wasn’t. He was heading toward oblivion. Most people didn’t hear his name at all until ten years later when he was found dead in his car. He hadn’t died in his car. He’d died, rather inconveniently, at a party. So they put him in his car and drove him to another part of town and left him there. No note, no nothing. Police found him in the morning. It was in all the papers. Mike Bloomfield, I remember him.

When this album was released it got some airplay on jazz radio, as Woody Herman albums always did. Rock radio didn’t even know it existed. Oh well. Another of those what ifs that no one even knows was a what if.

MIke Bloomfield and Woody Herman

Mike Bloomfield and Woody Herman

Time Has Come Today

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Trying to encourage flashbacks, I listened to Time Has Come Today–the long version–fourteen times in a row on YouTube this morning. I discovered three things. First, flashbacks don’t come easily, not like on TV. I also learned that Nexium 24 Hour–the little purple pill–is the latest choice for frequent heartburn.  And finally, I discovered that Brian Keenan was a monster drummer back in 1967. No idea who else he played with after the Chambers Brothers, if anybody. He sure rocked on this cut, though. Tore it up. Erupted almost. Happening. Far out. I don’t know if it was the brown acid or the little purple pills, but things were getting strange. About the seventh or eighth listen a naked hippie chick beckoned to me from the corner, but it was only the table lamp. We danced anyway. By the tenth listen I was air drumming like a madman. By the twelfth listen the time had like so come today it blew my mind. The thirteenth was even heavier. On the fourteenth listen my wife asked me what the hell I was doing. I said I was listening to Brian Keenan play the drums. She asked if I had to listen a hundred times in a row. I said it was only fourteen times. She said there won’t be a fifteenth.

So I switched to sulking. Wikipedia is excellent for sulking. Turns out in his earlier days Brian Keenan had played Doo Wah Diddy Diddy with Manfred Mann, a song I truly detest. But that was about it. Then he was a Chambers Brother until ’71 when management and other things got weird. And he died way back in the 80’s. Heart attack. A shame. So Brian Keenan wailed on the traps for the Chambers Brothers but who was he? I run into Willie Chambers on occasion at our local House of Pies (on Vermont at Franklin, or vice versa) and will have to ask him about this cat. He’s a helluva story teller, that Willie Chambers. Musicians generally are. I’ll also ask him if all the people making bad psychedelic videos for the Time Has Come Today make him nervous. They do me. Or maybe that’s just a flashback. That purple pill again. I knew I shouldn’t have dropped three. I have so little acid reflux I’m unbalancing the universe. Now the time has come. Oh there ain’t no life nowhere. I’ll go down to the sea shore and let the waves wash my mind. Break china laughing laughing laughing. Whose baby does the hanky panky? If that cat don’t stop it, man.

It’s a peninsula.

 Time Has Come Today https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ea_bpzJWZfw

Chambers Brothers

The Chambers Brothers, Brian Keenan–they called him Curly–on the left.

Spencer Dryden

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I heard “If You Feel” on the radio tonite, in the car, as I sailed down the 101 freeway, windows open, volume jacked up all the way to eleven. It’s not a song you hear much, but I love it, love the way the drums drive the thing, carry it aloft, make it happen. When I got home I listened to the tune again, then remembered this obituary. It was the summer of 2005….

Spencer Dryden died the other day.  Cancer and other things.  He was 66.  Spencer Dryden played drums in Jefferson Airplane.  And he was my favorite rock drummer.

Dryden played jazz drums in a rock band…that’s what made it so special.  Just listen:

On “If You Feel”, off of Crown of Creation, a stuttering shuffle kicks off the tune into an archetypal Airplane groove, and as the tune picks up he shifts into rapid polyrhythms, sticks never too loud rattling off the snare and back and forth across the toms and sliding around Jack Casady’s massive bass chords.  He tried to play it at Altamont…you can see it in Gimme Shelter, but just as he gets going some biker clocks Marty Balin and that ended it. (Alas, that’s wrong. They’re doing “Other Side of This LIfe” when Marty gets walloped and falls back into the drum kit, knocking over the ride cymbal. Spencer, feeding off the violence, rises to his feet and keeps up the tune’s impulsive, swinging rhythm. I love that moment.) Continue reading →

And I swore I would never write about the Shaggs

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Gavin Harrison, the super-virtuoso prog/fusion drummer (King Crimson, etc.) is a Shaggs freak. He’s played “My Pal Foot Foot” during drum clinics…and confessed that sometimes he would play Shaggs drummer Helen Wiggin’s beats (sic) during King Crimson sets.  The idea of playing My Pal Foot Foot to a bunch of proghead drum students really appeals to me. Imagine them coming home, twirling their sticks, and youtubing it. Feel their pain.

The first time I ever heard the Shaggs was their hit “My Pal Foot Foot”.  Maybe hit is an exaggeration. Only a hundred copies were pressed in 1969 and though some were sent to radio stations (seriously) rock stardom eluded them. By the time I heard their record (at a party, though I can’t remember where) it would have been late into the second Shaggs revival, circa early 80’s (the first Shaggs revival was in the seventies, when Frank Zappa would play them on the Dr. Demento show and said they were better than the Beatles.) I remember distinctly that hearing “My Pal Foot Foot” was an unsettling experience. I couldn’t figure them out at all. I knew they had been a real band yet they were obviously from another planet or at least a long dead civilization. Maybe this is what they listened to in Atlantis as it slipped into the sea. Even the song’s title was disturbing. Like what the hell was a foot foot? Later I discovered it was a cat, which didn’t help things. Who names their cat Foot Foot? Even linguistically it’s wrong. I mean what part of Indo-European don’t they understand? The whole thing was so wrong and bewildering, all of it. When I first heard Trout Mask Replica (recorded the same year as “My Pal Foot Foot”, actually, in 1969) it was all wrong, but it was smart and intellectual and deliberate. Captain Beefheart made sense once you got it. There was a logic, a method. Musicians could play it. But “My Pal Foot Foot”?

So I never did pick up the album, Philosophy of the World. (Philosophy of the World?) I was fascinated and repelled at the same time, like watching the Crumb documentary. I don’t think I ever heard anything that helped me put it into context until I picked up a mess of CDs of Indonesian music and discovered their own meter free music. And while the Shaggs weren’t actually meter free–they just couldn’t play together, and their songs lurched and stalled like a dying carburetor—they might have been huge in certain parts of Indonesia. Foot Foot would have even made linguistic sense there. (What morphologists call reduplication—repeating a word to make another word, like foot into foot foot—doesn’t sound weird at all to an Indonesian.) Somehow that made me feel better.

Still, though, I’d rather not think about it.

In death as in life

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Ya know, since Lou Reed died I’m hearing the Velvet Underground everywhere non-stop, but only the nice stuff. “Jesus” is suddenly everyone’s favorite song, and it’s all about the third album or that mellow live 1969. I mean I like those too but come on, if that’s all there was you wouldn’t even remember who they were. Just another sweet folkie band. You know the Velvet Underground because of Heroin and European Son and Sister Ray. It was all that crazy noise that set them apart. Noise and heavy, ugly lyrics. Heroin is not a pretty song. New York’s not a pretty place.
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I think that when someone dies and you only show his sweet, sensitive side you’re insulting him. In death as in life, I say.
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Turn it up.
Just like Sister Ray said.

Just like Sister Ray said.

Circle Game

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(2013)

Celebration At Big Sur…I saw that movie. Think I was in high school. It was mondo hippie, that flick, all incense and folk music and babies spinning prayer wheels. I remember Stephen Stills sucker punched a communist. Then he said the answer is to love everybody. You love everybody then you don’t sucker punch communists. Those were complicated times. Joan sang a Dylan tune, and Joni sang where she’d never been, and Judy sang a Circle Game. Oh Happy Day went round and round and round.

celebration-at-big-sur cropped

Somebody asked me about the baby in the picture with Judy, Joni, Joan and Cass. I had no idea. I hadn’t even noticed there was a baby. But Stewart Brand tells me–well, the Stewart Brand hologram, since he is no longer with us–told me the baby was the product of all four of them. It was a group conception at a Love In and they named her Aquarius and everyone shared in its nurturing and caring and loving and diapering and she is now 44 years old and owns a high tech company that has an app that can turn GMO’s into pure love and save the planet and the whales and walk around naked at Burning Man and recite the Whole Earth Catalog from memory and made the Stewart Brand hologram that told me that the baby was a group conception at a Love In and they named her Aquarius and everyone shared in its nurturing and caring and loving and diapering and she is now 44 years old and owns a high tech company that has an app that can turn GMO’s into pure love and save the planet and the whales and walk around naked at Burning Man and recite the Whole Earth Catalog from memory and made the Stewart Brand hologram that told me that the baby was a group conception at a Love In and they named her Aquarius and everyone shared in its nurturing and caring and loving and diapering and she is now 44 years old and owns a high tech company that has an app that can turn GMO’s into pure love and save the planet and the whales and walk around naked at Burning Man and recite the Whole Earth Catalog from memory and made the Stewart Brand hologram that told me this.

Dude, I said, Escher. Way Escher.

Stewart looked at me without blinking.

Celebration At Big Sur…I saw that movie. Think I was in high school. It was mondo hippie, that flick, all incense and folk music and babies spinning  prayer wheels. I remember Stephen Stills sucker punched a communist. Then said the answer is to love everybody. You love everybody then you don’t sucker punch communists. Those were complicated times. Joan sang a Dylan tune, and Joni sang where she’d never been, and Judy sang a Circle Game. Oh Happy Day went round and round and round.

Mitch Mitchell

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(Found this posted on both Just Another Blog From L.A. and MetalJazz.com. Both are great blogs, btw. I assume I’d written it as an email. 2008)

RIP Mitch Mitchell. Jimi Hendrix’s drummer. The dude wailed like nobody. Tiny little English bastard doing his best Elvin Jones. Cool. And man could he get up a shambolic shuffle. Listen to “Hey Baby”…the one from “Rainbow Bridge”. Hip hippie jazzness at it’s best. Wasn’t another rock drummer that could play just like that. Dropping in Max Roach snare snaps and rim smacks and riffling popping toms, some heavy tom shit like Joe Morello in “Take Five” (remember that one? Mitchell apparently dug Morello’s thunder rolls) and all that Elvin that Jimi wanted–like when they come out at Monterey and light into “Killing Floor” and Mitch’s rolls are so all over and so in there (or close enough) and man, it’s frigging glorious. Crazy crazy rock’n’roll, man. Just like god intended it to be, if god smoked a lot of dope and didn’t worry too much about meter….

Did he and Keith Moon ever play together? Can you imagine?

Nice guy, too. It was a dinner party somewhere in Silver Lake, eons ago. All these miserable guitar players wanted to play “Red House” with him, like he hadn’t been there and done that like sooooooooooooooo much better…. Incredibly, he smiled and put up with them all. They raise ’em polite over there in England, apparently. When at last freed from his throne there was a dinner party inside. Someone put on Mingus. Two, three notes into it and Mitchell flipped. I love this!!! Who put this on!!!!!! Outside some guitar players were brutalizing Red House, and inside Mitch Mitchell is hovering over the phonograph, hearing nothing but Mingus. Yeah, alright. They can’t live forever.

Mitch Mitchell wailing on the snare.

Jimi Hendrix at the Hollywood Bowl, 1968

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Is it love, baby, or is it just ablution?

Soon afterward they filled in the reflecting pool with tables and rich people. Once I was sitting right about where that guy is standing arms outstretched. He was tripping his hippie brains out, I was drinking two buck chuck and trying to hide the bottle. Our realities began to merge in vivid dreamy hallucinations. A whole herd of  gorgeous wild women wearing nothing but feathers were dancing around me in an endless circle, shaking everything shakeable. Pinch me, I said to my wife, I must be dreaming. She hit me. The vision passed as suddenly as it began and the girls disappeared stage right. The band was still there, shitty as before. I hated the band. They were bumming my trip. Suddenly the vision returned, the women walking across what once was water, glittering, swaying, undulating, their boas like trails that lingered pink and gold. The men at their feet were about as chakra’d as a man can be in mixed company. Then the vision passed again, stage left, for good.  The shitty band remained making their shitty music and totally ruining my trip. No Hendrix for us. That is where me and the wet hippie with the outstretched arms parted. He got an encore, maybe two, and then Wild Thing. I got Never Gonna Let You Go.

Well, as Jack Benny once said. Well.

A picture of John Altman and Peter Green

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The two are definitely on the same wavelength here. I really like this photo. They had a band then, quite jazzy, Peter getting modal, Bitches Brew, out there, groovy, John on every reed and woodwind he could get his hands on. Hippie brilliance. He was so good, that Peter Green, and the horizon was limitless, such were the times. 1970. Jimi lived, the Beatles still were. Miles was a rock star and blues, rock, jazz and eastern sounds swirled together in a perfect ever changing mix. Musicians siphoned that mix into their own sound, their own bands. This was another of those bands, with Peter Green and John Altman and other outstanding London musicians. I wish I could find the names (although that is English bluesman Duster Bennett on harp, and vocalist Danny Da Costa left his story in the comments below), but there’s nowhere to look that I can find. It was an ephemeral moment, lost but for a photo and memories four decades old. There were so many of those throw together bands then. There’s stories, there’s legends. The ultimate, you’ll remember, was Jimi Hendrix and Miles Davis together. That was the ultimate band, the dream band, the jazz rock band of all jazz rock bands. And that band never even existed. Miles sent the music over to Jimi. Jimi couldn’t read music. That ended that. Peter Green’s jazz rock band–the name, if they had one, escapes me–did play one storied gig at a packed London club. This might be a photo of that gig. If not, there’s another I’ve seen, Peter with a soloist’s concentration, John waiting his turn, two or three saxophones and a clarinet hung round his neck. That’s all I know, though, a couple photos, John Altman’s stories and an anecdote or two by audience members who commented on John’s Facebook page.  No audio, no video, just a couple photos and memories. And then Peter met some strange Germans, took a chemical trip to Valhalla, and that was that. 1970 was a rotten year for rock ‘n roll, full of dead and wounded and the missing in action. A rock star Viet Nam.

Look again at the photo. I have no idea who took it, but  it’s one of those perfect shots, so vivid, and with such great composition, that it goes beyond the visual and you can almost hear the music and follow the action and catch the vibe of the moment. That’s a rare thing, those shots. You can look through a mess of  Facebook galleries and a pile of photo albums and not see one. I don’t think a person gets more than a couple of shots like this in a life time. One that people can see generations later and think wow, that’s what it was like. But music fans look at a photo like this and they sigh. They wonder what might have been, and they sigh.

John Altman and Peter Green

Peter Green and John Altman in 1970. Duster Bennett in the background..

Grace Slick

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An old jazz piano playing buddy of mine was telling me yesterday how back in 1967 this hippie chick he was dating (ahem) took him to see Jefferson Airplane at the monthly love-in in Griffith Park. He really liked the Airplane–a lot of jazz cats did–but the hippie chick insisted on standing right in front of the stage. The PA was so huge and so ridiculously loud that he was deaf for two weeks. He was mad as hell at that hippie chick, but continued dating her. Ahem. But it turns out the real reason he did not leave the front of the stage was he could not take his eyes off of Grace Slick. She was so beautiful. He even remembered how short her mini-skirt was. Jazz piano players seem to remember those things, even fifty years later. One minute they’re talking about Ray Bryant, the next Grace Slick’s underwear.