In Search of the Lost Chord

by Danny Goldberg

  Nonetheless, in deference to Oldham, Scully kept a relatively open mind. The trio of festival guys then met with San Francisco Chronicle columnist Ralph J. Gleason, a respected figure in the Haight community. Based on their commitment to donate all profits to charity, Gleason gave the festival his blessing. Scully was impressed that the Beatles PR adviser Derek Taylor was brought in to do the press. Paul Simon’s enthusiasm also had weight with some of the San Francisco musicians. Despite lingering misgivings, the Airplane, the Dead, the Fish, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and Moby Grape signed on to play at the festival.

  The newly powerful KMPX talked up the festival and ticket sales exceeded expectations. The press office was overwhelmed with 1,100 requests for credentials. Derek Taylor said yes to everybody. The international coverage of Monterey dwarfed even the attention that the Be-In had received. Moreover, the festival was filmed. In order to pay for the costs of putting it on, Adler had made a deal for $400,000 with the ABC television network. They chose as the director D.A. Pennebaker, who had made the Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back.

  The crowd at the Monterey County Fairgrounds was so large that having sold twelve thousand tickets, the promoters decided to take down the fence and let another twenty thousand people in for free. Grace Slick recalls, “Even the stalls selling food and concert items were quaint and uninfected by corporate logos and pitchmen. Police cruisers had orchids on their antennas.” A large banner on stage read, LOVE, MUSIC AND FLOWERS.

  Owsley and his partner Rhoney Gissen Stanley were there of course. Mama Cass (of the Mamas & the Papas) asked Owsley to bring acid and he arrived with thousands of purple tablets. He also carried a Murine bottle filled with liquid LSD, which he made available to all of the musicians backstage. Ravi Shankar, who didn’t do any drugs at all, angrily walked out of his dressing room when it was offered to him.

  Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Otis Redding all became overnight rock stars because of media excitement and word of mouth about their performances. Grace Slick wrote of it:

  Were we, the bands, there to invoke the spirits? The gods? Were we pagan? No labeling was necessary. We were all shamans of equal power. Channeling an unknown energy, seeking fluidity. I felt like a princess in a benign court—one without thrones or crowns. I could see “royalty” in every direction. The audiences was just more of “us.” The performers were just more of “us” . . . It was shades of Huxley, Leary, the surrealists, Gertrude Stein, Kafka—the inexhaustible list of artists who’d encouraged multiple levels of observation. It was our turn. We were ready to breathe, ready to celebrate change.

  Perhaps no artist was more affected by Monterey than Eric Burdon, whose group the Animals had been one of the stars of the British Invasion a few years earlier, most notably with their cover of the old blues song “The House of the Rising Sun.” Burdon had been mesmerized by seeing Hendrix take rock and roll to a whole new level in London and was enthralled by the Haight-Ashbury scene and by acid (he wrote a song called “A Girl Named Sandoz,” a reference to the original Swiss manufacturer of LSD). The band was well known by the time they took the stage on the first night of the festival. Rock critic Joel Selvin wrote that “Burdon did nothing short of reinvent himself in front of the audience.”

  Two months later, Eric Burdon and the Animals (as the band was now called) released the single “San Franciscan Nights.” The record starts with a spoken word intro by Burdon: “This following program is dedicated to the city and people of San Francisco, who may not know it, but they are beautiful and so is their city.” He urged Europeans to “save up all your bread and fly Trans Love Airways to San Francisco, USA. Then maybe you’ll understand the song. It will be worth it, if not for the sake of this song, but for the sake of your own peace of mind.” In England the B-side was “Gratefully Dead,” another gesture of respect to the San Francisco scene. In November, the band released Burdon’s song “Monterey,” a celebration of the festival, with shout-outs to many of the artists he saw play there.

  Adler recalls, “By the end the policemen had flowers in their hair and the national guardsmen had painted flowers on their shaved heads. For one weekend the harsh realities of Vietnam, student unrest, the Cold War, racism, and urban riots were suspended and even transcended.”

  Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones was there, and at John Lennon’s request arranged to have a photographer friend smuggle back a couple dozen of Owsley’s purple tabs to London. Also present was actor Dennis Hopper, as well as Peter Tork and Micky Dolenz of the Monkees, who were so impressed with Hendrix that they asked him to open up for them on their upcoming tour. After the first couple of dates, there were so many complaints from parents of young Monkees fans about Hendrix’s sexuality that he was dropped, but by then it didn’t matter. As Slick says, “If any musician represented that era, it was Jimi Hendrix.” His talent was so extraordinary that he immediately entered the pantheon of rock icons alongside the Beatles, the Stones, and Dylan.

  Adler, Phillips, and Pennebaker all thought they had a feature film, not a mere TV program. Adler gleefully told me, “ABC was run then by Tom Moore, a Southern ‘gentleman,’ so we showed him Hendrix fornicating with his guitar and predictably he said, Not on my network. He gave us the film. They were fine with losing the $400,000. They just wanted to get us out of the office.”

  The film, Monterey Pop, is considered one of the best rock films ever. Yet at the time, its existence fanned flames of mistrust among the San Francisco contingent. The Dead refused to be included unless they could also approve the way they were portrayed and where the foundation made donations—two bridges that were too long for Adler to cross. Joplin initially refused to let the Big Brother set be filmed, but her performance was so explosive that her new manager, Albert Grossman (who also managed Bob Dylan), persuaded her to repeat the set so she could be in the movie. It is now one of the performances Joplin is most remembered for. She had seen Otis Redding at the Fillmore while she was on acid a few days earlier, and later said his show had inspired her to dig deeper.

  After the festival, Adler became aware that the Grateful Dead had taken the backline amplifiers from the festival, so he called Scully to ask for them back. “Why don’t you come and get them,” Scully sneered, “and wear some flowers in your hair.”

  Gleason had brought a young journalist named Jann Wenner to Monterey. In November, Wenner would start publishing his new magazine, Rolling Stone. The first page of the inaugural issue had a piece by Michael Lydon, “The High Cost of Music and Love: Where’s the Money from Monterey?” It reported that there was a net profit of $211,451 (including the money from ABC). All of that was given away to various charities by the Monterey International Pop Foundation that Adler and Phillips had set up, but the article implied that the promoters and artists had been profligate in incurring expenses, citing as an example the $345 spent on a hotel room for Johnny Rivers. In a further attempt to ingratiate the new magazine with the Monterey skeptics around the Dead, the piece concluded, “A festival which should and could have been all up front still leaves questions asked and unanswered.”

  Fifty years later, all income allocated for the festival producers from licensing of film footage is still given out by the foundation to a variety of organizations in the name of the artists who performed at Monterey. Looking back, the carping seems absurd, but given the sense of dread that the hippie community was experiencing as mass media overwhelmed its subculture, a certain amount of paranoia was to be expected.

  New York

  The Lovin’ Spoonful’s lead guitarist, Zal Yanovsky, left the band in mid-1967 in the wake of a pot bust that had happened earlier in the year in San Francisco. A Canadian citizen fearful of being barred from the States, Yanovsky had been pressured into setting up the bust of a pot dealer, an act for which he was demonized in much of the hip world. There was an unsigned full-page ad in the Los Angeles Free Press asking fans not to buy the band’s records and women “not to ball them.” Ralph Gleason defended the Lov
in’ Spoonful in an early Rolling Stone piece, but the bad vibes ended Yanovsky’s role in the group and that pretty much eroded their relevance, although they would not officially disband until 1969.

  The Lovin’ Spoonful’s lead singer, John Sebastian, continued to make wonderful music as a solo artist. In the context of twenty-first-century arena-rock nostalgia, Sebastian is not a commercial giant like Bob Dylan or Eric Clapton, but in 1967, he was as incandescent in creativity and influence as anyone.

  The departure of the Lovin’ Spoonful from the rock culture was a huge loss and an early wake-up call about the fragility of the scene. The band’s fragmentation hit particularly hard in New York City, where they had been the princes of Greenwich Village for most of my high school years. (Louie Gross, the first guy I bought pot from, boasted that he had sold to the Lovin’ Spoonful and, man, was I was impressed!)

  However, New York hip culture was very resourceful, no one more so than Steve Paul, whose club the Scene briefly became a powerful magnet for rock-and-roll culture. Paul was born in 1941 and at the age of seventeen decided that being a press agent was his path to becoming part of the show-business world that enthralled him. He figured out how to get items into gossip columns in New York City daily newspapers, of which there were seven at the time. “The rule was you needed either to give them three jokes or three pieces of gossip they wanted for every item you’d get for your client,” he says. “I wasn’t good with jokes so I was spending all my time desperately trying to get people to tell me secrets.”

  With the energy of obsessive youth, Paul succeeded well enough that at the age of eighteen he got the gig as press agent for the Peppermint Lounge, which became internationally famous as the launching pad of the Twist dance craze.

  In 1964, a showbiz vet at the age of twenty-two, Paul hustled the money to open the Scene, which was located on 46th Street near Eighth Avenue. He attracted a unique cultural mix, including Allen Ginsberg, Richard Pryor, Tennessee Williams, Liza Minnelli, and Sammy Davis Jr. Andy Warhol and his “Superstars” were also regular customers. (There is a photo of Edie Sedgwick meeting Mick Jagger at the Scene in the book Edie: An American Biography.)

  Paul greeted patrons at the door with insults or cosmic witticisms. Photographer Linda Eastman, who would marry Paul McCartney a couple of years later, was a fixture. The then-unknown Tiny Tim opened most shows with a solo ukulele performance of music from decades past.

  The Scene entered another realm of hipness after Paul saw the Jimi Hendrix Experience at the Monterey Pop Festival and booked their first New York dates in June of 1967. Hendrix fell in love with the place and would frequently jam there after the other artists were done with their sets. In ’Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky, Hendrix biographer David Henderson wrote:

  Jimi soon found the Scene club irresistible . . . Fans did not hassle you there . . . you could go there and party, or play and just sit alone and drink, and no one restrained you either way . . . He could jam any time he wanted to . . . When the chairs would finally be upside down upon the tiny tables. When Steve Paul himself would finally have to pull the plug, while Jimi, alone in his universe, would be totally unaware of the hour or of the devotees and workers who patiently waited within the exhilaration of his sound. At the Scene, Jimi would completely let himself go—playing all he knew and didn’t know, going beyond sharing—playing all. Trying to get it all out.

  During the making of the Electric Ladyland album, Hendrix would often work out arrangements at the Scene and then walk a few blocks to the recording studio, the Record Plant, and lay down tracks.

  The Doors played their first gigs in New York at the Scene, and in the next few months Jeff Beck, Traffic, and the Chambers Brothers followed suit. The Scene closed in 1970 because of some issues with mob-connected owners of the building, but this didn’t end Paul’s career in the music industry.

  After reading a short Rolling Stone piece about Johnny Winter, Paul flew to Texas and became his manager. He subsequently managed Johnny’s brother Edgar, roles in which Paul made far more money than he ever had at the Scene. But for many of Paul’s friends, this transition reminded them of what he had said when Tiny Tim had a novelty hit and performed on The Tonight Show: “Tiny Tim, who was the universe, gave it up to become a mere star.”

  Psychedelic energy could not be contained by elites and it soon migrated to Long Island, where singer and organist Mark Stein, bassist Tim Bogert, drummer Joey Brennan—later replaced by Carmine Appice—and lead guitarist Vince Martell formed the Pigeons. The band name was changed to the Vanilla Fudge after they got signed to Atlantic Records. The Fudge were very loud and played long, trippy extended versions of songs like the Supremes hit “You Keep Me Hangin’ On.” Their first album came out in 1967, and although they never got attention from the early rock critics, stoner fans loved them and the band is considered one of the seminal origins of what would come to be known as “heavy metal.”

  The death of John Coltrane from cancer at the age of forty on July 17 was a devastating loss, but it focused even more attention on his 1965 masterpiece, A Love Supreme, which was informed by a deep spiritual vision. Coltrane was influenced by both Muslim and Hindu texts. A posthumous album called Om, released in 1967, included chants from the Bhagavad-Gītā. A religious congregation in San Francisco regarded Coltrane as a saint and eventually formed the Saint John Will-I-Am Coltrane African Orthodox Church, which incorporated his music and his lyrics as prayers in its liturgy.

  While most of the jazz world remained fixed in the zone of virtuosity and prehippie cool, a few embraced psychedelia in the space that Coltrane had helped to create. Ornette Coleman, long an innovator, released The Empty Foxhole with Charlie Haden on bass and Coleman’s ten-year-old son Denardo on drums. Denardo says, “The title was obviously a reference to Vietnam.”

  The trippiest figure to emerge from the jazz world was Sun Ra. Like Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller, Sun Ra was in his fifties in 1967. Born Herman Poole Blount, he was a highly talented pianist who got work at a young age in local Alabama bands. In his twenties, he claimed to have had a spiritual experience that transported him to the planet Saturn and back. In the early fifties, he legally changed his name to Le Sony’r Ra, which was soon shorted to Sun Ra. (“Ra” is a reference to ancient Egypt’s god of the sun.) An avid reader of history and mystical texts, Sun Ra became a fixture in the Chicago music scene with his label El Saturn Records and a band with frequently changing members called the Arkestra.

  Sun Ra and the Arkestra arrived in New York in the early sixties and within a few years became as ubiquitous as the Fugs at rock shows, benefits for countercultural causes, and outdoor celebrations. The Arkestra had flamboyant stage shows and costumes, and Sun Ra’s mystical intensity both fit in perfectly with and broadened the psychedelic scene. Although most mainstream jazz players thought he was too weird, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk were both vocal admirers.

  Psychedelic Rock Spreads Its Roots

  The hippie idea traveled around the country seemingly overnight. The New Yorker’s Ellen Willis would write of “the bohemianization of rock” and insisted that “psychedelic music was not so much a sound as a spirit.” That spirit was not limited to New York and California. In Philadelphia, Todd Rundgren created Nazz in 1967 and went on to have a career that still evoked psychedelia decades later. In Detroit the MC5 were formed in 1964, and by 1968 had recorded one of the seminal political rock albums with an energy that prefigured the punk movement. Believe it or not, Ted Nugent’s first band, the Amboy Dukes, based in Detroit, released a psychedelic rock song, “Journey to the Center of Your Mind,” in 1968; it was a period when Bob Seger was also developing his career in Michigan prior to his debut release in 1969.

  There was a vibrant music scene in Boston fueled by the city’s vast college population. The psychedelic bands Ill Wind and the Hallucinations were local favorites. In 1968 an assortment of record company executives and local radio programmers tried to declare the “Bosstown Sou
nd” as the successor to the scene in San Francisco. The young community of rock critics sharply criticized the contrived gimmick but the scene would nurture many important rock bands of the early seventies, including the Cars, Aerosmith, and the J. Geils Band, which Peter Wolf, a popular underground deejay, joined as lead singer in 1967.

  Duane Allman and his younger brother Gregg grew up in Daytona Beach, Florida, where they formed their first bands, the Escorts and the Allman Joys. I saw them in another incarnation, Hour Glass, at the Fillmore in 1967, two years before they finally formed the Allman Brothers Band, which fused blues roots with psychedelic culture, and created “Southern rock.”

  One of the most intense psychedelic local music scenes sprouted in 1965 in Austin, Texas, home to a lot of excellent roots musicians and to the University of Texas, which, like various other colleges at the time, included many students who were enthusiastic about LSD. Singer-songwriter Steve Earle, who was precocious enough to take acid in his early teens, recalls that the players at football rival Texas A&M referred to the University of Texas team as “the hippies” instead of their traditional nickname, the Longhorns. The center of the scene was a club called the Vulcan Gas Company. Bands that emerged from Austin included the Conqueroo, Shiva’s Headband, and the 13th Floor Elevators, whose first album, The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators, released in 1966, is, along with the Airplane’s debut album, considered one of the first psychedelic rock albums ever released.