Joan Baez is the reigning spirit of the festival, the beacon that attracts well- and lesser-known musicians from far afield. Barely a year after I first heard her sing in the Club 47, Joan moved to Carmel. Big Sur has become her hometown folk festival. This year she sings with her sisters, Mimi Fariña and Pauline Marden. Judy Collins makes it a foursome. Al Kooper, who contributed the distinctive organ riff to Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” backs up the Baez-Collins quartet on keyboard.
There has been little, if any, bluegrass in Big Sur hitherto, and the change of pace the Charles River Valley Boys provide is warmly welcomed. Bob and Joe and I have been playing together for the better part of five years, briefly interrupted by my recent California sojourn. Bob and Joe are in top form instrumentally, and our three-part vocal harmonies approach sibling symmetry. The audience is surprised to find that our repertoire includes Beatles songs. Last year, the CRVB put out an album on Elektra called Beatle Country, a dozen Beatles songs done bluegrass style, recorded in Nashville, the capital of country music. The infusion of bluegrass-country harmonies and rhythms earned Elektra an appreciative letter from Paul McCartney. When I returned to Cambridge from my unrequited quest on the left coast, I learned the Beatles repertoire, and soon I was as happy singing songs by Lennon and McCartney as I am with tunes I learned from Flatt and Scruggs.
Last year I saw the Big Sur festival as an observer; now I’m here as a performer, enjoying the perfect day and the reunion with friends from Carmel. Of these, Mimi is the one I hold most dear. Since I met her as a fifteen-year-old waif at the Baez home in Belmont, Massachusetts, she has blossomed into a rare beauty and a seasoned performer. Five years ago, I introduced Mimi to her husband-to-be, Dick Fariña, in Paris, in the backseat of my brand-new white Volvo, when Dick was still married to the folksinger Carolyn Hester. Within two years, Dick and Carolyn divorced and Dick married Mimi. Just last year, Dick died on Mimi’s twenty-first birthday, which was also the publication date of Dick’s novel, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me. At a publication party in Carmel Valley, Dick climbed on the back of a friend’s motorcycle for a joyride and never came back. The guy driving the bike survived the crash, but Dick broke his neck.
Even in this out-of-the-way gathering, the pop revolution is represented by ambassadors who have come to make pacts of friendship with the folkies. The Chambers Brothers, who won the hearts of everyone in Cambridge on their first visit to the Club 47, have come up from L.A. Simon and Garfunkel have segued from Monterey Pop to Big Sur. Paul and Art seem to enjoy the low-key gathering and the spectacular setting. Rumor is they’re playing for free (the Big Sur festival sure can’t afford what they might reasonably ask) just to dig the scene.
Before leaving San Francisco, I borrowed Pennebaker’s movie camera. In Big Sur I shoot a little music festival footage of my own. The sight of a professional rig on my shoulder triggers the paranoia of a crew from L.A. who are here to film the festival for TV. They want to rip my film from the camera, but my friend Peter Melchior, Esalen’s assistant director, cools them out. Let him alone, he tells them, and they do.
At the end of the afternoon concert, I welcome the opportunity to initiate a foreigner to a pleasant rite of the California lifestyle. The Chambers Brothers’ drummer, Brian Keenan, is good-hearted, pink of cheek, and infused with all the modesty of the British Isles, whence he comes. Rock and roll is his life and he’s ready for whatever it has to offer—almost. At Big Sur, it’s the custom for the musicians to adjourn to the sulfur baths following the afternoon concert. Knowing what lies in store for him, I fall in beside Brian as we move that way when the music is done. Come on, I say, we’re all going to the baths.
Before the handful of buildings and cabins perched on this grassy ledge with the coast range at their back and God’s own Pacific panorama spread out before them became the Esalen Institute, they were known collectively as Big Sur Hot Springs, for the natural sulfur water that flows from fissures in the coastal cliffs at about 115 degrees Fahrenheit. Down a sloping pathway from the swimming pool and the festival stage are the baths. The building is a rudimentary structure, like many in Big Sur, slapped together out of native timber and set on a concrete foundation, open to the west with only a guardrail between the bathers and a couple-of-hundred-foot drop down the cliff face to the rocks below, which are washed by breakers that roll all the way from Japan.
Brian and I follow a gaggle of musicians down the path: Joan and her sister Mimi, in long colorful dresses, laughing in the midst of Joe, Willy, Lester, and George Chambers. They turn into the doorway of the bathhouse. I usher Brian in ahead of me and he finds himself confronted by a few dozen people of both sexes, every one of them stark bare-assed naked, except for the Baez sisters and Chambers brothers, who are in the process of getting that way.
Brian turns very bright pink.
“Okay, man, listen,” I say to him. “Just take your clothes off, right now, and I promise you—I promise you—that in ten minutes, you’ll forget all about it. Trust me. You only feel self-conscious around naked people when you’ve got clothes on.”
As I speak, I’m removing my own garments as if they’re on fire. To the everlasting credit of the olde country, Brian starts to undress. Ten minutes later I see him sitting on the edge of a tub, pink all over, chatting with a naked girl as confidently as if he were in a pub on Carnaby Street.
The CRVB’s next gig is at the Jabberwock, a folk music coffeehouse in Berkeley. With or without mind-bending chemicals, Big Sur is an alternative reality where humans and our constructs are humbled by the natural world. Returning from that powerful coastscape to the bustle of Berkeley makes me feel like a time traveler. For my compatriots from the valley of the Charles River, the sudden immersion in the full-blown gooniness of Berserkeley amounts to culture shock.
Bob and Joe regard the goings-on with varying degrees of askance. Bob Siggins dances the Nebraska bop to rock and roll, and you’d never guess he’s got a Ph.D. in neuropharmacology unless you chance to pass an offhand remark about serotonin in his presence. He has incorporated Bill Keith’s dazzling new style of banjo fingerpicking into his Scruggs picking to produce a sound that is distinctly his own. You can take the banjo out of the country, but it’s not gonna sound like city-boy bluegrass so long as Bob is playing the flat-top Gibson Mastertone. His musical tastes go well beyond bluegrass and country, and his bullshit detector tends to peak out in the presence of folk purists who are a little too pure. He’s tickled by the Berkeley scene and not above sampling the wares, acoustic or vegetable, but on the whole he prefers to conduct his serious pharmacological experiments in the laboratory.
Joe likes to play the straight man. The unfettered lunacy of the scene is beyond his wildest imaginings, up to now, but he’s got a sense of humor. He takes it all in with a twinkle in his eye, as he tries to stay upwind of the smoke.
After our sojourn in Big Sur, Peter Berg is solidly in the CRVB groove. He has decided that the rest of us talk more than enough during our performances, and from here on out, beginning with our three nights at the Jabberwock, he never says a word onstage. In the Summer of Love, nobody blinks at a bluegrass band with a mute electric bass player who resembles a short, purple Superman.
A few days later, we play the opening night of the tenth annual Berkeley Folk Festival. The festival’s director, Barry Olivier, is keeping up with the times. Last year, his inclusion of Jefferson Airplane must have been something of a surprise to Pete Seeger and Phil Ochs and the Greenbriar Boys. This year, the Charles River Valley Boys share the opening-night bill with the Reverend Gary Davis, Janis Ian, an oral storyteller, and Kaleidoscope, an electrified band from L.A. that has brought Middle Eastern influences into the psychedelic mix. There’s patchouli and pot in the air, and the colorful clothing worn by many in the audience evokes memories of the midway at Monterey.
In the course of the five-day festival, the dazzling guitar work of Doc Watson and the passiona
te singing of Richie Havens are interspersed with electric explorations and blues that boogie from Crome Syrcus, Red Crayola, the James Cotton Blues Band, and Country Joe and the Fish, which is a Berkeley band. The Steve Miller Blues Band commutes between the folk festival and the Fillmore, where they’re playing nights with Chuck Berry and Eric Burdon and the Animals.
The mix of sounds on the Berkeley stages makes visible for me what was groundbreaking about the Pop Festival at Monterey. It was the first festival of the sixties that was not organized around acoustic folk music. For almost a decade, since the folk revival kicked into high gear, the model has been festivals with “folk” in the title, from Newport and Indian Neck and Philadelphia to Berkeley and Big Sur, each presenting many of the same artists who travel the summer circuit, featuring English ballads and Scotch-Irish fiddle tunes and American work songs and union songs and songs of the westward migration, a songwriter or two like Dylan, Tim Hardin and Tom Paxton, along with bluegrass and old-time music, and the greatest American form, the blues.
The folk revival scorned pop music. In Cambridge, we put down the commercial folk acts, the guy duos and trios, the brother groups that smoothed out the mountain harmonies and rewrote traditional English and Appalachian ballads so the lines rhymed where the originals didn’t. The early rockers got our attention—the Everly Brothers, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Carl Perkins, and, of course, Elvis—but they were from somewhere else; they weren’t us, and their music wasn’t ours.
Now, with the transition from folk to folk-rock and the rise of the San Francisco bands, pop music has become Us. Janis Joplin’s Monterey sensation, “Ball and Chain,” is grounded in the twelve-bar blues, but the San Francisco Sound of Big Brother and Quicksilver and the Airplane and the Dead represents a leap that transcends gradual evolution. In logic, a sudden advance based more on intuition, or faith, than logic, is called the inductive leap. In music maybe we can call it the psychedelic leap.
On the Fourth of July, the Charles River Valley Boys follow Country Joe and the Fish and precede Doc Watson in the Berkeley Folk Festival’s grand finale, which is held at UC’s Greek Theater, up in the hills. The order of performance may be purely serendipitous, or maybe Barry Olivier sees the CRVB’s bluegrass-style Beatles tunes as an appropriate bridge between Country Joe’s far-out music of the present moment and Doc Watson’s traditional roots.
The last whistle stop on our California ramble is L.A., where we play five days at the Ash Grove. Founded in 1958, the same year as the Club 47 in Cambridge, the Ash Grove has served a similar role as a focal point for the folk boom. It feels friendly and familiar, but our L.A. crash pad is a far cry from the funky folkie houses in Berkeley and the rustic cabins of Big Sur.
Purple Man’s father and stepmother have a house on the beach in Malibu. Better still, they’re out of town. Peter clears it with the folks, and we settle down in a style to which we’re quickly accustomed, lulled by the rhythm of the waves and dazzled by the view of the Pacific out the floor-to-ceiling windows. The album of the month is Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the grass of the month is a particularly elevating harvest called Ice Bag, so named because it comes packaged in plastic bags intended for ice-dispensing machines. Two hundred bucks a key. Peter’s folks’ liquor cabinet features Jack Daniel’s, which we sip at first, then tap more liberally. (I hope we replaced it.) Evenings after the Ash Grove, we often end up paralyzed on the living room floor by a combination of the two, trying to detect the exact moment when the perpetual chord at the end of “A Day in the Life” finally evaporates in the sound of the surf.
The day we arrive in town, we’re driving along the Sunset Strip in Peter’s VW bus when Neuwirth suddenly shouts, “Stop! Stop the bus, man! Pull over here!” He has spotted, walking on the sidewalk, a stunning model whose acquaintance he made in New York, back in the spring. The unlikelihood of seeing someone you know walking along the street in L.A. is astronomical, given that nobody in L.A. walks anywhere. In the residential sections of Beverly Hills, a pedestrian is likely to be stopped by the police and questioned as a suspicious character. The Sunset Strip, for a mile or so, is a stroller’s sanctuary.
Bobby intercepts Phyllis, their relationship blooms in the California sunshine, and they take over one of the guest rooms in Malibu. Phyllis is cheerful, gorgeous, and very fond of Bobby. He gives her a nickname, Tonto, which she accepts and invites us to use freely. For Bobby, it’s an ironic way of admitting that he is modifying, for now, the Lone Ranger’s role that he has so carefully refined. I have never seen him so much at ease. Witnessing the flowering romance is one more intoxicant that lightens our Malibu days. For my own part, the ladies of the canyons find the beach house a pleasant place to visit, and I am warmed by their company.
Joe Val declines to share our beachfront idyll, choosing instead to keep himself at a safe remove from the goofy hippies his bluegrass cohorts have become. It’s bad enough that Bob Siggins and I took to wearing psychedelic shirts onstage in Berkeley. What gives Joe real concern is that we might get him arrested for being in company with a bunch of potheads. In Cambridge, nobody smokes dope in the Club 47 and Joe finds it fairly easy to distance himself from the illicit practices of his fellow musicians. In Northern California, he was eating and sleeping in the same premises where we indulged our enhanced explorations. Assuring him that the cops can’t be bothered busting everybody with a joint in his hand hasn’t brought Joe peace of mind. In L.A., Joe looks up a musician friend who has fled the freezing slush of Boston winters for the land of swaying palms. He never sets foot in the Bergs’ Malibu house. During our gig at the Ash Grove, Joe sleeps safe and sound, far from the surf and the scent of Ice Bag. Each evening, properly attired in black jeans, dress shirts, vests and string ties, we meet Joe at the Ash Grove and belt out our own mix of breakdowns, heart songs, gospel tunes and Beatles songs.
“I thought [Joe Val] was a really good steady guy, and a good musician. . . . Either through maturity or good character, he put up with all our craziness with very great equanimity, and didn’t give anybody a hard time about being strange. I thought that was absolutely wonderful.”
Peter Berg
Joe’s day job compels him to fly back to Boston before our last night at the Ash Grove. With our straight man homeward bound, we cast off the last restraints we’ve kept in place out of love and respect for Joe. Chris Darrow, of Kaleidoscope, sits in on mandolin. On the whole, I don’t perform bluegrass stoned, not since the night a few years earlier, at the Club 47, when the words to several songs suddenly eluded me midverse. Tonight I cast my fate to the wind. If I forget the words, I’ll make up new ones.
Our imaginations, fueled by intoxicants consumed during the Malibu cocktail hour, lead us to a new plane of psychedelic bluegrass. We call on Neuwirth’s artistic talent: Before we go onstage, Bob paints our faces. The style is more appropriate to an acid test than the warpaths of the Old West. We announce to the audience that the evening’s entertainment will be a bluegrass opera, but it’s a narrative only in the most free-associative sense, a tale that Aldous Huxley could follow more easily than Puccini. We introduce each song with a story that’s made up on the spot. The next singer picks up the story and carries it forward to introduce the next song. That’s the idea, anyway. Along about midevening the narrative threads grow exceedingly thin, but our Ash Grove audience is ready for anything. If by chance anyone recorded the proceedings, please contact me by Galactic Express Priority Overnight.
CHAPTER FIVE
Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay
JANIS AND BIG Brother are frustrated by a feeling of a bright promise delayed. After their spectacular success at Monterey they are touring the same circuit of gigs that has become familiar to them. They play the Avalon, the Fillmore, the California Hall. They play the Straight Theater and Golden Gate Park. They play around the Bay.
In August, their first record album hits the stores, but the rec
ord isn’t all they hoped it would be and its appearance now is bittersweet. They signed with Mainstream—a small label known mostly for blues and jazz—over a year ago. At the time, the recording contract seemed like confirmation that the group was bound for bigger things, and it had the more important effect of solidifying Janis’s connection to the band.
Big Brother was first approached by Bobby Shad, the owner of Mainstream, in the summer of ’66. The band had been playing together for eight or nine months, but Janis was a new addition, called up from Texas by her fellow Texan, Chet Helms, who had midwifed the birth of Big Brother and the Holding Company, and who had functioned since its beginnings as the band’s manager without portfolio.
Shad was in San Francisco to check out the new rock groups. He expressed interest in recording Big Brother, but he triggered all of Helms’s distrust of outsiders from the Music Business, and Chet rebuffed the offer. Chet’s out-of-hand dismissal of Shad’s interest proved to be the catalyst that led Big Brother to dissolve their informal management arrangement. Chet had established Family Dog Productions within a hippie commune of the same name. It was a catch-as-catch-can organization, very much in the spirit of the times, that managed the Avalon Ballroom and associated events. Big Brother felt their needs were playing second fiddle to Chet’s other interests. It was time for someone a little more professional.
Soon after parting from Chet, the band took a monthlong booking at a club in Chicago called Mother Blues, but Janis wasn’t sure she would go.
“I have a problem,” she wrote to her parents in Port Arthur, Texas. She told them what she had not yet told the boys in the band: She had been approached by a record producer named Paul Rothchild. Paul worked for Elektra Records. He had produced a handful of folk artists including Tom Rush and Tom Paxton. He produced the Butterfield Blues Band. The first record Paul ever produced was the Charles River Valley Boys, but he had no reason to mention this bit of arcana to Janis. In the summer of 1966, Paul had sold Elektra’s president, Jac Holzman, on an idea: He would assemble a group of young urban interpreters of the blues, pay their expenses for six months, and see if the effort produced a viable band. Jac came to San Francisco with Paul, they auditioned Janis, and Jac liked what he saw.
On the Road with Janis Joplin Page 6