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Gary Duncan 6/2019

Gary Duncan (72) – Quicksilver Messenger Service – was born on 4 September 1946 in San Diego, California as Eugene Duncan, Jr., but adopted at birth and named Gary Ray Grubb.

He grew up in Ceres, California, where (as Gary Grubb) he played guitar for the Ratz until they finished their performance itinerary as an opening act for the Byrds and the Rolling Stones at the War Memorial Auditorium in San Jose, California. It was in 1965 when, as Gary Cole, he joined the Brogues, in Merced, California, and met future Quicksilver Messenger Service drummer Greg Elmore. It was with the Brogues that he adopted the stage name Gary Duncan. He stayed with them until they broke up later that year.

In late 1965 Duncan received a call from John Cipollina offering an audition for himself and fellow Brogues member Greg Elmore to join Quicksilver Messenger Service. The group first performed in December 1965 at The Matrix. The complex guitar interplay between Duncan and John Cipollina had a big influence on the sound of psychedelic rock. In early 1969, after recording two albums “Quicksilver Messenger Service” and “Happy Trails”, Duncan left Quicksilver and as he describes it, “I left for a year and rode motorcycles and lived in New York City and Los Angeles and just kind of went crazy for about a year.” Continue reading Gary Duncan 6/2019

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Doug Ingle 5/2024

Doug Ingle 5/2024 (78), was born in Omaha, Nebraska, on September 9, 1945. His father Lloyd, a church organist and accountant, introduced him to music at an early age. The Ingles moved within three months of his birth to the Rocky Mountains in Colorado and later, when he was 11,  the family moved to San Diego, CA.

With the timing right in the mid-sixties and California becoming the hotbed for love-ins and psychedelic rock, Ingle formed the original line up for Iron Butterfly with Ron Bushy on drums. As soon as Iron Butterfly formed, they moved to Hollywood Hills and started an excruciating practice and performing schedule.

Of the four musicians in the In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida lineup, Ingle was the only one who was a founding member, having formed Iron Butterfly in San Diego in 1966. After a handful of lineup changes, a five-piece Iron Butterfly including Ingle and Bushy put out the band’s debut Heavy in 1968; soon after release, the other three members left and were replaced by Brann and Dornan, resulting in the lineup that would create the 17-minute psych-rock epic “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.” Released less than six months after Heavy and the lineup shuffle, In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida would sell a reported 30 million copies worldwide, and a three-minute version of the title track — whose title was based on Bushy’s mishearing of “In the Garden of Eden” — became a Top 5 hit on the Hot 100 and a classic rock staple. Continue reading Doug Ingle 5/2024

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John Cipollina 5/1989

May 29, 1989 (aged 45) John Cipollina and his twin sister Manuela were born in Berkeley, California, on August 24, 1943. Cipollina attended Tamalpais High School, in Mill Valley, California, as did his brother, Mario(born 1954), and sister, Antonia (born 1952). Their father, Gino, was of Italian ancestry. He was a realtor, and his mother, Evelyn, and godfather, José Iturbi, were concert pianists. John showed great promise as a classical pianist in his youth, but his father gave him a guitar when he was 12 and this quickly became his primary instrument.

Trained as a classical pianist, John Cipollina however didn’t just play the usual pentatonic rock and blues riffs; he meandered about the fretboard, producing a plethora of melodic and evocative notes, inflected with plenty of whammy bar, his signature, particularly during the psychedelic era. Simply stated, nobody played lead guitar like John Cipollina!

One of the forerunners of the San Francisco Bay Area sound in the middle 1960s, Cipollina played lead guitar for the fabulous Quicksilver Messenger Service, until the band went “poppy” in the early 1970s. Man do I remember playing Who do you love and Mona. Epic.

Cipollina had a unique guitar sound, mixing solid state and valve amplifiers as early as 1965. He is considered one of the fathers of the San Francisco sound, a form of psychedelic rock.

I like the rapid punch of solid-state for the bottom, and the rodent-gnawing distortion of the tubes on top.

To create his distinctive guitar sound, Cipollina developed a one-of-a-kind amplifier stack. His Gibson SG guitars had two pickups, one for bass and one for treble. The bass pickup fed into two Standel bass amps on the bottom of the stack, each equipped with two 15-inch speakers. The treble pickups fed two Fender amps: a Fender Twin Reverb and a Fender Dual Showman that drove six Wurlitzer horns.

After leaving Quicksilver in 1971, Cipollina formed the band Copperhead with early Quicksilver member Jim Murray (who was soon to leave for Maui, Hawaii), former Stained Glass member Jim McPherson, drummer David Weber, Gary Phillipet (AKA Gary Phillips (keyboardist), later a member of Bay Area bands Earthquake and The Greg Kihn Band), and Pete Sears. Sears was shortly thereafter replaced by current and longtime Bonnie Raitt bassist James “Hutch” Hutchinson who played on the Copperhead LP and stayed with the band for its duration. Copperhead disbanded in mid 1974 after becoming a staple in the SF Bay Area and touring the West Coast, Hawaii (Sunshine Crater Fest on New Years Day of 1973 with Santana), the South (opening dates for Steely Dan) and the Midwest.

In May 1974 Cipollina and Link Wray, whose playing and style had influenced John as a young musician and who he had met through bassist Hutch Hutchinson, performed a series of shows together along the West Coast (with Copperhead rhythm section Hutchinson & Weber and keyboardist David Bloom) culminating at The Whiskey in LA where they performed for four nights (May 15–19) on a bill with Lighthouse (band). Cipollina continued to occasionally perform with Wray for the next couple of years.

In 1975, the Welsh psychedelic band Man toured the United States, towards the end of which, they played two gigs at the San Francisco Winterland (March 21 and 22), which were such a success that promoter Bill Graham paid them a bonus and rebooked them. While waiting for the additional gigs, the band met and rehearsed with John Cipollina, who played with them at Winterland in April 1975. After this, Cipollina agreed to play a UK tour which took place in May 1975, during which their “Roundhouse gig” was recorded.

Rumors that Micky Jones had to overdub Cipollina’s parts, as his guitar was out of tune, before their Maximum Darkness album could be released are exaggerated; only one track, “Bananas”, was to have his track replaced, per Deke Leonard. “Everything … which sounds like Cipollina is Cipollina.”

During the 1980s, Cipollina performed with a number of bands, including Fish & Chips, Thunder and Lightning, the Dinosaurs and Problem Child. He was a founding member of Zero and its rhythm guitarist until his death. Most often these bands played club gigs in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Cipollina was well-known

Cipollina died on May 29, 1989, at age 45. His cause of death was alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency, a lung disease, which he suffered from most of his life and which is exacerbated by smoking.

Quicksilver Messenger Service fans paid tribute to him the following month in San Francisco at an all-star concert at the Fillmore Auditorium which featured Nicky Hopkins, Pete Sears, David Freiberg, and John’s brother Mario, an original member of Huey Lewis and the News. Cipollina’s one of a kind massive amplifier stack was donated, along with one of his customized Gibson SG guitars, and effects pedals, for display in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in 1995.

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Paul Kantner 1/2016

Paul Kantner during Paul Kantner in Concert at Wetlands - 1992 at Wetlands in New York City, New York, United States. (Photo by Steve Eichner/WireImage)

January 28, 2016 – Paul Kantner (Jefferson Airplane founding guitarist) was born on March 17, 1941, in San Francisco, California. Kantner had a half-brother and a half-sister by his father’s first marriage, both much older than he. His father was of German descent, and his mother was of French and German ancestry. His mother died when he was eight years old, and Kantner remembered that he was not allowed to attend her funeral. His father sent him to the circus instead. After his mother’s death, his father, who was a traveling salesman, sent young Kantner to Catholic military boarding school. At age eight or nine, in the school’s library, he read his first science fiction book, finding an escape by immersing himself in science fiction and music from then on. As a teenager he went into total revolt against all forms of authority, and he decided to become a protest folk singer in the manner of his musical hero, Pete Seeger. He attended Saint Mary’s College High School, Santa Clara University and San Jose State College, completing a total of three years of college before he dropped out to enter the music scene.

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Kevin Ayers 2/2013

Kevin AyersFebruary 18, 2013- Kevin Ayers (Soft Machine) was born August 16, 1944 in Herne Bay, Kent, the son of journalist, poet and BBC producer Rowan Ayers, who later originated the BBC2 rock music program The Old Grey Whistle Test.

After his parents divorced and his mother married a civil servant, Ayers spent most of his childhood in Malaysia, where, he would later admit, he discovered a fondness for the slow and easy life.

At age 12, he returned to Britain and settled in Canterbury. There, he became a fledgling musician and founder of the “Canterbury sound”, an often whimsical English take on American psychedelia that merged jazz, folk, pop and nascent progressive rock. As psychedelic rock songwriter, guitarist and bassist, he was quickly drafted into the Wilde Flowers, a band that featured Robert Wyatt and Hugh Hopper.

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Lee Dorman 12/2012

Lee Dorman - Iron ButterflyDecember 21, 2012 – Douglas Lee Dorman was born in St. Louis on September 15, 1942 and moved to San Diego, CA in the mid 1960s.He began playing bass guitar in his teens, he became best known as a member of the psychedelic rock band Iron Butterfly in the second part of the 1960s.

The band formed in 1966 in San Diego, California and signed its first record contract with Atco, a division of Atlantic Records, in 1967, according to the band’s Web site and in early 1968, their debut album Heavy was released. They were represented by the William Morris Agency who booked all their live concerts. The original members were Doug Ingle (vocals, organ), Jack Pinney (drums), Greg Willis (bass), and Danny Weis (guitar). They were soon joined by tambourine player and vocalist Darryl DeLoach. DeLoach’s parents’ garage on Luna Avenue served as the site for their almost nightly rehearsals.

Jerry Penrod and Bruce Morse replaced Willis and Pinney after the band relocated to Los Angeles in 1966 and Ron Bushy then came aboard when Morse left due to a critical family tragedy. All but Ingle and Bushy left the band after recording their first album in late 1967; the remaining musicians, faced with the possibility of the record not being released, quickly found replacements in bassist Lee Dorman and guitarist Erik Brann (also known as “Erik Braunn” and “Erik Braun”) RIP 2003, and resumed touring and then recording the monster album In-a-Gadda-da-Vida.

In terms of sound, the group took inspiration from a variety of sources outside of the rock arena, such as the bongo playing of Preston Epps and the rhythm and blues music of Booker T and the MGs. Around this time, the band notably ran into Led Zeppelin lead guitarist Jimmy Page, who later stated that he used the group as partial inspiration for the name “Led Zeppelin”. In 1969, Led Zeppelin opened for Iron Butterfly at Fillmore East in New York, a fact Dorman was fond of noting.

A commonly related story says that In-a-Gadda-da-Vida was originally “In the Garden of Eden”, but at one point in the course of rehearsing and recording, singer Doug Ingle got drunk and slurred the words, creating the phonetic mondegreen that stuck as the title. However, the liner notes on ‘the best of’ CD compilation state that drummer Ron Bushy was listening to the track through headphones, and could not clearly distinguish what Ingle said when he asked him for the song’s title. An alternative explanation given in the liner notes of the 1995 re-release of the In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida album, is that Ingle was drunk, high, or both, when he first told Bushy the title, and Bushy wrote it down. Bushy then showed Ingle what he had written, and the slurred title stuck.

“In-a-Gadda-da-Vida,” stayed on the national sales charts for two years and became a Top 40 radio hit and the album over time sold more than 30 million copies. The track has been featured in a number of films and television shows, including an episode of “The Simpsons.”

Dorman was an intricate part of the success of that song as he played bass in a style as if it was an equal instrument with the others which many considered an early example of moving from psychedelic rock to heavy metal.

When keyboardist Ingle left the band, due to the grueling tour schedules, Dorman founded another band, called Captain Beyond, in the 1970s. Captain Beyond was a rock group formed in Los Angeles in 1972 by ex-members of other prominent groups. Singer Rod Evans had been with Deep Purple; drummer Bobby Caldwell had worked with Johnny Winter; and guitarist Larry Rheinhart and Lee Dorman came from Iron Butterfly after they broke up. This lineup made their self-titled debut album for the Southern rock label Capricorn in 1972, after which Caldwell was replaced by Marty Rodriguez for their second album, Sufficiently Breathless(1973). Captain Beyond became inactive following the departure of Evans, but was reorganized in 1976. Caldwell returned, and drummer Willy Daffern was added as vocalist for Captain Beyond’s third album, Dawn Explosion (1977), recorded for Warner Bros. Dawn Explosion was Captain Beyond’s final effort.

From 1978 on Dorman continued touring with Iron Butterfly, during the many personnel changes, until he got too sick to do so in the early fall of 2012.

The last keyboard/singer of the band, German born Martin Gerschwitz, who had known Lee Dorman for seven years since he joined the band in 2005, said Mr. Dorman did not have any immediate surviving relatives at the time of his death.
He had suffered from heart problems for some time, a fact that ended his performing career in 2012.

Dorman was reportedly on a heart transplant list when he was found dead in his car, reportedly on his was to a doctor’s appointment, outside his home in Laguna Niguel, California, on December 21, 2012. He was 70 years old.

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Cass Cassidy 12/2012

ed cassidyDecember 6, 2012 – Edward Claude “Cass” Cassidy was born Harvey, Illinois, a rural area outside Chicago, on May 4, 1923. His family moved to Bakersfield, California in 1931. Cassidy began his career as a professional musician in 1937. He served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, and after his discharge held many jobs before becoming a full-time musician again. At one time in the late 1940s, Cassidy played 282 consecutive one-nighters in 17 states. He worked in show bands, Dixieland, country and western bands, and on film soundtracks, as well as having a brief stint with the San Francisco Opera.

Way back when rock ’n’ roll was countercultural — before the members of the Rolling Stones were anywhere close to 50 years old, much less celebrating their 50th anniversary together — the genre tended to emphasize rather than bridge generational divides.

So when the experimental group Spirit formed in the late 1960s, it was different not just for the way it fused jazz and rock, or the way it mixed psychedelia with a particularly tight backbeat. It was also different because its drummer was the 44-year-old stepfather of its 16-year-old guitarist, Randy California.

By the time Spirit formed in 1967, Mr. Cassidy had already had a notable and diverse musical career. He had played with jazz musicians including Dexter Gordon, Chet Baker, Gerry Mulligan and Cannonball Adderly and had formed a folk-blues group with Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder called the Rising Sons.

While Cassidy was performing with other adults, his young stepson, Randy Wolfe, was becoming a fine musician himself. He impressed Jimi Hendrix when they met in a music store in Manhattan, and it was Hendrix who gave Randy the nickname he went by for the rest of his life, Randy California to distinguish him from bass player Randy Texas (Palmer). Hendrix wanted tot take the kid to London, but that was thwarted by Cassidy and soon enough, stepfather and stepson were playing and touring together.

Spirit released more than a dozen albums from 1968 to 1996, but it was the first work that was the most influential and critically praised. Its biggest hit and only Top 40 single, “I Got a Line on You,” was released in 1968; the band was also celebrated for its adventurous 1970 album, “Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus.” That record included the song “Mr. Skin,” which was the nickname Mr. Cassidy’s fellow band members had given him in honor of his shaved head.

Bob Irwin, the president and owner of Sundazed Records, which has reissued many Spirit albums and also released previously unissued tracks, said the band’s early recording sessions were “kind of like a jazz history lesson” in which Mr. Cassidy nurtured his much younger colleagues.

“Ed always encouraged them to color outside the box, to take chances onstage, to play to the best of and beyond their abilities,” Mr. Irwin said.

Early reviews were usually complimentary, but critics were less positive several years later, after the band’s lineup changed. (Mr. Cassidy and Randy California remained its only constant members.) The critic Robert Palmer, writing in The New York Times in 1976, singled out Mr. Cassidy from what he said was an otherwise unimpressive performance.

“Mr. Cassidy’s drumming is still exceptional — his obligatory long solo at the end of the set was the subtlest, most musical part of the evening,” Mr. Palmer wrote.

Cassidy succumbed to cancer on Dec. 6, 2012 at age 89.

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Danny Harris 10/2012

Danny Harris (65) – West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band – was born Daniel Duffy Harris in Colorado Springs, Colorado in March 1947. Danny Harris and his brother Shaun grew up in a musical family — their father, Roy Harris, was a respected composer, and their mother, Joanna Harris, was a pianist who taught at Juilliard. Both of his parents were classical music legends, Roy and Johana Harris. When John F. Kennedy made his Time Capsule of his years in the White House, Roy Harris” 3rd and 5th Symphonies were included.

In 1962, their family relocated to Los Angeles and the Harris Brothers joined a local rock band called the Snowmen, with Danny on guitar and Shaun on bass. Danny and Shaun attended the same high school as Michael Lloyd, who was playing guitar in another, more successful local group called the Rogues; Shaun was recruited to join the Rogues as bassist, and soon Michael, Shaun, and Danny began working together on music of their own. They installed a makeshift recording studio at Lloyd’s house, and cut a handful of fine singles under the name the Laughing Wind, with John Ware as their drummer. Danny played guitar in bands such as Brigadune, California Spectrum, Markley, The Laughing Wind, The Rogues (5), The Snowmen (4), The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band and Scorpio Rises

 The Laughing Wind had become acquainted with noted L.A. producer and scenester Kim Fowley, and Fowley introduced the band to Bob Markley, the Oklahoma-born son of a wealthy oil tycoon who had studied law but had ambitions of making a name for himself in music, having released an unsuccessful single for Reprise Records.

Markley owned a large mansion in Hollywood where he played host to the Yardbirds, who played a party at his home when they found they couldn’t book a public show due to problems with work permits. Markley was impressed by the attention the band received from the audience of music business insiders and teenage girls, and decided he wanted to form a band rather than work as a solo act. Markley liked the Laughing Wind well enough that he made them an offer: if he could join the group as vocalist and lyricist, he would bankroll touring expenses and new gear, including a full light show. The band agreed, and soon Markley had renamed the group the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band; he also drew up contracts that saw to it that he owned the group’s name, as well as their publishing.

And thus, one of the more offbeat acts to emerge during the psychedelic era, the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band were certainly eclectic and ambitious enough to live up to their slightly clumsy moniker, capable of jumping from graceful folk-rock to wailing guitar freakouts to atonal, multilayered, avant-garde compositions at a moment’s notice, but they also reflected a strongly divided creative mindset, with Bob Markley, the lyricist and ostensive leader of the group, on one side and the rest of the band on the other.

In 1966, Markley arranged for the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band to release their first album, Part One, which appeared on a small local label, Fifo Records; it was largely devoted to covers (many recorded by the Laughing Wind before Markley’s involvement), though he did contribute some originals such as “Insanity” and “Don’t Break My Balloon.” While the album’s sales were modest, the band won a following in Los Angeles for their adventurous sound and elaborate light show, and they landed a deal with Reprise Records. The WCPAEB’s first major-label album, Part One, was the first full flowering of the group’s musically ambitious side, through Markley’s lyrics tended to draw a polarized reaction from listeners; the album also saw the group expand into a sextet with the addition of monster guitarist Ron Morgan, another former member of the Rogues who arrived as tensions grew between Markley and Lloyd, the latter of who thought little of Markley’s talents.

In August 1967, just prior to recording sessions for the WCPAEB’s second Reprise album, Shaun Harris took a hiatus from the band. His departure was partly due to his disillusionment with the group, primarily with the WCPAEB’s lack of success, and it served as a waiting period while his brother, Danny, was being treated for depression. Lloyd was gone from the lineup for their third LP, Vol. 2: Breaking Through, released later in 1967, with all but two songs credited to Markley and Shaun Harris. By the time the group began work on their third album, the WCPAEB were beginning to splinter — Danny Harris left the band due to health problems, with guitarist extraordinaire Ron Morgan handling all the guitar chores, and John Ware was out as drummer, with session musician Jim Gordon taking his place. The finished product, A Child’s Guide to Good and Evil, is often cited as the band’s best and most adventurous work, but Markley’s convoluted lyrics became increasingly pretentious and bizarre, and when the album failed to sell, they were dropped by Reprise.

The Harris Brothers and Lloyd formed a short-lived group called California Spectrum with Danny, Lloyd, and Jimmy Greenspoon., but when Jimmy Bowen, who had produced the group’s earlier work, launched his own label, Amos Records, the WCPAEB landed a new record deal. The group’s 1969 release Where’s Daddy? credited Markley and the Harris Brothers, though Michael Lloyd and Ron Morgan also played on the sessions; the album featured several songs that dealt with young women in a somewhat disturbing manner, and once again they failed to connect with a larger audience. California Spectrum toured the Midwest with Markley’s state-of-the-art light show, and released two singles in its brief recording career, “Sassafras” (the same version featured on Volume One) and a cover of the Left Banke‘s “She May Call You Up Tonight”, none of which were met with much attention. When Harris returned to the WCPAEB in 1968, he touted a completely different line-up, and promoted the California Spectrum with his column in the teen zine Tiger Beat until the group disbanded sometime in early 1969. 

Lloyd negotiated with Curb to distribute the group’s fifth and final album on Forward Records. Released in 1970, Markley insisted the album, originally self-titled, should be released under the name Markley, A Group. The album benefited from the full involvement and production experience of Lloyd, who sang the majority of the lead vocals, provided keyboards, and organized the orchestral arrangements. Danny Harris was a key influence on the album, writing half of its tracks. However, although the album is generally considered an improvement over Where’s My Daddy?, the group could no longer cope with Markley’s erratic behavior, and disbanded soon after the album’s release.

Even by this band’s standards, the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band’s swan song was curious: Markley opted to rename the group Markley, and recorded an album titled A Group, though the full WCPAEB lineup appeared on the LP. A Group received little notice, and soon the group was history under either name. Lloyd went on to a successful career as a producer and A&R man, Shaun Harris launched a brief solo career before going into film, Ron Morgan first enriched the Electric Prunes and then went on to play with Three Dog Night.  Bob Markley produced material for other artists until he died in 2003. From the break-up on Danny Harris divided his time between acting and folk music.

Danny married his wife Victoria in 1984 and performed as a folk music duo for the full 28 years of their marriage, seven of these years in Sweden, where they resided near Stockholm. Daniel had left the band business after the demise of Westcoast Popart Experimental Band and worked in films and became a SAG member in 1997. His best role was the prison minister in The Green Mile.

Danny and his wife Victoria moved to Cambria in 2007 to care for Victoria”s mother, Irina Wilson, and remained residents in the same home. They performed locally as a duo at Sandy”s Deli and CARES, as well as Tognazzini”s Dockside in Morro Bay.  Daniel also became a member of the Cambria Chorale after having read in the Cambrian that director Michael Bierbaum”s favorite influences had been his father, Roy Harris.   Daniel also had performed in the Pewter Plough”s production of “Love Town.

Although Danny Harris was initially disillusioned with the music industry, he recorded the gospel album Thank Him Every Day in 1980. He also worked as a folk musician and actor before dying on the set of Saving Mr. Banks from a heart attack, during a noteworthy California heat wave on October 1, 2012. 

 

West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band – WCPAEB – A Veritable Rabbit Hole

To begin with there was the name itself. Long and unwieldy, it seemed designed to defy recollection and sink the heart of poster designers everywhere. Was it a six-word manifesto of creative intent, or simply a cynical attempt to climb aboard the ‘psychedelic’ bandwagon? Then there were the song credits and album photos, according to which a certain Bob Markley was the band’s driving force, a position seemingly confirmed by the appearance of his final ‘solo’ LP: ‘A Group’. Yet, somewhat confusingly, on the back of that album’s sleeve there appeared – for the first time since the band’s debut on the Fifo label – pictures of all four original members. Last, and definitely not least, there were the songs themselves. Along the way the music encompassed almost every musical genre – harmonic guitar pop, acoustic folk, psychedelic rock, jazz and avant-garde; and then there were those extraordinary lyrics – some starkly political, others naive and child-like; at times dark and sinister, at others simply insane. As Brian Hogg observed in his sleeve notes to Edsel’s mid-80s compilation ‘Transparent Day’: “(t)here are few groups as enigmatic, as mysterious or as plain contradictory…” This article does not pretend to be a definitive account of the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band – indeed, it now seems clear that some questions will never properly be answered – but the story which emerges is fascinating nevertheless, not least as an insight into how extraordinary music could emerge from a group driven by internal conflicts and held in the thrall of a man driven by dubious motives.

Born in Colorado Springs in 1946 and ’47 respectively, Shaun and Danny Harris were brought up with three sisters in an atmosphere of prodigious, but decidedly eccentric, talent. Their father, Roy Harris, was the world-renowned composer of sixteen symphonies while their mother, Joanna, was a classical pianist who taught post-graduate at New York’s Julliard School of Music. As Shaun ruefully recalls, such an environment proved to be something of a mixed blessing: “One day our mother was showing us a couple of harmony things on the piano and my dad came in and said to us: ‘You’re never going to even approximate my success, so let’s go out to lunch!’ Neither Danny nor I were trained in instruments when we were young and our parents didn’t force us. I think that was unfortunate. Later I would be asked to compose movie scores but I had to turn the work down because I didn’t know how to write music.” Years later, Shaun and Danny would proudly play their father the test pressing of the first Reprise album. As Dan recalls: “He listened to it in silence and then told us to sit down. We thought he really liked it until he said ‘It’s like bringing you up for seventeen years and realizing you’re members of the Hitler Youth Movement’! It was just so far removed from his way of musical thinking. That kind of thing has happened all our lives.”

Meanwhile, in Beverley Hills, despite the fact that neither of his parents were professional musicians, Michael Lloyd‘s mother insisted that he take lessons from a young age: “I had been playing classical piano since I was four. In the 4th grade of grammar school I met Jimmy Greenspoon who was a piano player too and we started playing duets and writing our own little instrumental songs. At that time we didn’t really sing so we decided that one of us had to learn the guitar. We both tried, but since Jimmy was more of a piano player than a guitar player, I learnt the guitar and that was when we started to play Surf music.” In 1962, while still at junior school, Michael and Jimmy formed their first band, the Dimensions, and began to play Surf instrumentals inspired by bands like the Ventures. The following year, having built up an impressive reputation locally as a live act, the New Dimensions [as they had now become] cut their first record at Stereo Masters, the 2-track studio where The Beach Boys had made their debut two years earlier: “We actually played with The Beach Boys at a couple of concerts, but we never thought of them as a Surf band because as far as we were concerned the real Surf music was instrumental!” Despite releasing several albums [recently compiled on a Sundazed CD], Lloyd’s band had little of the success of their illustrious predecessors, but it was while recording at Stereo Masters that Lloyd had a chance meeting which was to prove prophetic. As Kim Fowley recalls: “I was there mastering one day when I saw this kid being dropped off by his mother with several reels of tape under his arm. I guess I was 24 and he was 14. I said to him “Excuse me young man, are you a musician, engineer or producer?” He said “All three. Who are you?” It was the beginning of a friendship that was to prove highly significant, not just for Fowley and Lloyd, but also for the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band.

When The Beatles invaded America in 1964 Michael Lloyd, in common with many others, realized that the future belonged to vocal music. For a brief period the New Dimensions performed and recorded as a vocal group under the name the Alley Kats, but when the members drifted apart Michael formed a new group, the Rogues. In the Fall of ’64 he left High School and entered the comparatively liberal atmosphere of Hollywood Professional School and it was there that he met the Harris brothers for the first time.

Shaun and Danny had been living very much in the shadow of their parents’ musical careers, which had taken them all over North America and beyond, but in 1962 the Harris family settled in Los Angeles. It wasn’t long before the two brothers joined the Snowmen, a local band who had already had a minor hit, ‘Ski Storm’, under the guidance of producer Kim Fowley. Shaun remembers: “The guitar player was Chris Gordon who I met at a Summer Camp for entertainers’ children in the mountains. I contacted him when we got back to LA and we ended up in that band. We had a rehearsal place behind one of the members’ houses. Up until then Danny and I had been playing more like folk music and I had never used an electric guitar – only a nylon stringed acoustic – but I really liked playing this guy’s Stratocaster and twin reverb amp. I liked being in a band but I never felt I had the stage presence for it – I just liked the music. The first recording I actually remember was called ‘While I Was Away’, or something like that. When it was pressed up I drove out to California going to little radio stations, but I had no idea of the complexity of the record industry. I heard it played a few times, but it never really saw the light of day. That was quite dispiriting really. When Danny and I went to Hollywood Professional School Lloyd was in a band called the Rogues and we were in the Snowmen. There was a little bit of competition and I remember them coming to see us one night. Michael had real dedication but the rest of his band were just High School students looking for something extra to do [one member of the group, Michael Lembeck, went on to be the Director of the TV show ‘Friends’]. Danny and I had a whole lot of dedication too and I started playing bass in the Rogues. I had never played bass guitar before, but Michael showed me how in about 5 minutes.” For a short while Shaun played bass in the Rogues and whilst he was a member the band released a single on Fowley’s Living Legend label. Entitled ‘Wanted: Dead Or Alive’ b/w ‘One Day’, the A-side was a joint composition between Michael and Shaun.

Danny also remembers this time: “I went to the same Santa Monica High School as Ry Cooder and we would play Bluegrass together. When Shaun and I joined the Snowmen I was 16 and he was 17 and we played every night at the Methodist Church in Pacific Palisades. Although I could play great Bluegrass and Country guitar, I was such a bad electric guitarist that they only allowed me to play a nylon acoustic and no one could hear me! It was just at this time that we met Michael who had his own band the Rogues. Shortly after that we started our last years in High School at the Hollywood Professional School. At that time Michael was living in Beverley Hills and we were living in Malibu, so we would come by and pick him up on the way into school. The teachers there were all at least eighty years old with shiny blue hair. I stood for Student Boy President and won! So I got to meet people like O.J. Simpson. He spoke at the Police Academy and told me: ‘Stay at school Dan and get into your music, but stay healthy!’ Kim Fowley and Michael came out to hear us playing at the church. That was the time when he had groups like the Laughing Wind who were recording on Tower Records. It was a week after that we started playing together. You could say that it happened over night. We were going to the same school and all playing in bands.”

After the trio realized that they shared a common passion for music, they used some recording equipment borrowed from Shaun and Danny’s father to set up a small studio in Michael’s bedroom. It was there that they made some of the rudimentary recordings which would later appear as ‘Volume 1’ on the Fifo label under the name of the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band. Shaun: “My dad had some old Ampex recording equipment in his garage and we took this stuff over to Michael’s house. We would work all night and have school the next day and make demo records for people like Kim Fowley. The personnel in those days were Danny Belsky [who had already played sax with Lloyd in the Dimensions], Michael, Danny and me. Dennis Lambert was a guitar player in the band in the early days and later we added John Ware [who replaced Belsky] on drums. My girlfriend took the picture on the cover of the Fifo album – I think that was outside our recording studio in Beverley Hills.”
As Lloyd recalls: “We sat in my bedroom for a while with some Ampex tape machines and did some stuff there, but then that got to be crazy – we couldn’t have any drums. So we found a little place to rent nearby and we ended up putting our version of a little studio in and recorded all kinds of things, including that record. It was two track and Mono and we really squeezed by on whatever was handy – which wasn’t much – but it was fun. I remember at about that time the Yardbirds were playing in a club over in Hollywood and we hung around with them for a little while, specifically for Jeff Beck, and watched them play. So when we did the Fifo album it was, you know, Fender amplifiers up full and we would hit them and that’s what’s happening in our version of ‘You Really Got Me’. I don’t know if I could get the same sound again. It is just so over-driven, so much distortion – it was crazy! And that’s what all that was about. We would just kind of do each song, see what it sounded like, and then go on to the next one. Not a lot of time was spent on it.”

Danny: “The Fifo album was recorded in the Burton Way studio. The equipment was so good that word got around that we were not just a demo house – we were mastering. We would watch the British invasion on ‘Shindig’ and we loved the sounds. The harmonies of Peter & Gordon and Chad & Jeremy. We loved Marianne Faithfull, we thought the Dave Clark Five were stupendous and, of course, we saw The Beatles at the Dodgers’ Stadium. That was a catalyst to us in the sense that we thought: ‘If these guys can do it then so can we!’ After all, if it hadn’t been for Brian Epstein they might have stayed in Hamburg or Liverpool.”

Judging by their achievements thus far, it is clear that Shaun, Danny and Michael lacked neither the talent nor the ambition to achieve considerable success – had they been left to their own devices. According to Lloyd, the trio had already released a single on Tower records – ‘Good To Be Around’ b/w ‘Don’t Take Very Much To See Tomorrow’ – under the guise of the Laughing Wind. Their destiny was, however, about to take a rather unusual turn, for it was during the period of these early recordings that the fateful meeting with Bob Markley came about.

The unwitting introduction was made by Kim Fowley: “I first met Markley in 1960 because we shared the same Attorney. He was about 7 years older than me and was a guy in the tradition of Robert Conrad. He had a Colgate smile and he looked like an actor. As a child he had been adopted by an oil millionaire. He got a degree in law and was in college groups playing the bongos – a beatnik kind of thing – and he had a TV show in Oklahoma which was like American Bandstand. So there he was as the Dick Clark of Norman, Oklahoma when this Warner Bros executive came through town, saw him on camera and said: “Gee, why don’t you come to Hollywood and be an actor?” So he went to Hollywood and got signed to Warner Bros, but he failed as an actor and then he recorded that single – it was worse than Fabian! Luckily he still had his inheritance and his big house. So he was an actor, singer and lawyer who didn’t act, couldn’t sing and never practised law!” That single was, of course, the infamous Bob Markley ’45 released on Warner Bros: ‘Summer’s Comin’ On’ b/w ‘It Should Have Been Me’. Although on its surface a fairly standard piece of teenage doo-wop, there is something decidedly weird about the record and Markley’s spoken ‘rap’ anticipates the vocal style which he would later adopt on songs like ‘1906’. It would be no coincidence when, a few years later, the Reprise subsidiary of the same label released three albums by the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band.

 In 1965 the Yardbirds followed hot on the heels of The Beatles with their first US tour. It was not a runaway success. As Kim Fowley recalls: “When I was in London in 1964 I met the Yardbirds at Richmond Athletic Club and became friendly with Giorgio Gomelsky. When they came to the States the following year he rang me up to tell me that they were in danger of being thrown out of the country because they didn’t have work permits. Apparently the only way they could perform was by playing a private party. So Giorgio asked me if I could fill a house with people that would break the group and I agreed.” The chosen venue was a smart mansion which Markley had rented in a fashionable district of Beverley Hills. “I told Epic to invite all the radio programmers and rock critics and we had over 180 industry journalists, programme directors, disc jockeys and a handful of the in-crowd. Al Kooper was the warm up act and Phil Spector came with his binoculars so he could watch Jeff Beck’s fingers. The Yardbirds started playing in the dark and when we put the lights up people cried and threw roses.” Amongst the guests were three awestruck teenagers – Michael, Shaun and Danny Harris. They were ‘blown away’ by the band and, like Spector, a certain member’s highly unorthodox guitar technique. As Lloyd recalls: “Jeff Beck was hitting the amplifier with his guitar and using an Vox AC30 to overdrive an AC100. In those days there weren’t any of the little attachments to produce that distorted feedback kind of sound. So there they were playing and I remember in the middle of ‘For Your Love’ and ‘I’m Your Man’ he was doing all these amazing things and we had never heard anything like it”.

But Markley was, apparently, less impressed by the Yardbirds than he was by the crowd which they had drawn to his house – especially the large number of teenage girls. So when Fowley introduced him to Michael, Shaun and Danny and told him that they had a band of their own, he took an immediate interest. According to Lloyd: “He seemed like an OK guy. We were really impressed that he had this great house and he knew all these starlets and stuff. At that time we didn’t have too much equipment and we wanted to get a light show, and so here was this guy who was saying to us: ‘Well, I want to be in your band. What I’ll do is I’ll get the equipment and I’ll just play the tambourine or congas or something’. So that is what happened. He had seen the incredible amount of girls that thought rock and roll was really cool and that was his only motivation.”

Kim Fowley adds another insight: “Knowing Markley he hustled the younger guys. He saw that with Michael and the Harris brothers he could have a Hollywood Surf version of The Velvet Underground with some Frank Zappa thrown in. The Velvets had played in New York and nobody had paid much attention, but Markley followed the media – he wasn’t stupid.” So it was that in this unlikely alliance the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band was born.

It seems that much of the material which made up the Fifo album was already completed by the time Markley became involved. However, the inclusion of certain tracks – ‘Don’t Break My Balloon’ [a prime example of Bob’s ‘singing’] and ‘If You Want This Love’ – indicates that he must have had some influence over the sessions and, more to the point, their subsequent release on vinyl. As Shaun concedes, it was Bob who had the money and the contacts: “The Fifo album came about because Markley was the one who had the money to press up the records and wanted something tangible. He came up with the name – I think it was after he saw The Velvet Underground – but I thought it was pretentious and over-long. We started playing at a trendy club called The Other Place (so-called because there was a trendier club nearby called The Daisy) on Tuesday nights and we had the first on-going light show with a movie screen [see the back cover of the first Reprise album]. Markley would bring people out to watch us and that probably led to the deal with Reprise.”

Danny’s recollections are similar: “How did we end up on Reprise? That’s where Markley came in. It all happened in about six months from the time of the Yardbirds party where he heard about us, but I don’t give Markley any credit. He didn’t discover us. We already had our own studio and he had a volcanic rock pool! Starlets would come up to his house on a Sunday and we wandered into that. It was a kind of trade-off. We said: ‘OK. We’ll record these songs and put them out as a West Coast Pop Art thing and in return we want to be able to come up here and hang out’. Markley was ten, maybe fifteen years older than us and with his long hair and expensive clothes he personified the sixties look, but he had the mind of an astute lawyer. He was gifted with his tongue but not in a musical way. The biggest taunt we could give him was when he was throwing a party and we would put on that single that he did for Warner Bros!
Markley was very good at meeting people and ingratiating himself. He said ‘I’m from Tulsa, Oklahoma, son of an oil tycoon, I own my own house, I lease my place up here on the Strip and all I have to do is find a band, become a non-musical member and look the part’. Then he said that he had registered the name and not the members of the group, that he could replace anyone he chose and even sack the band. He put all the publishing through his own company – that was a typical Attorney’s move – and even though we played some big places like Birmingham, Alabama, all our earnings were nothing like they should have been.”

According to Lloyd, Bob “came to Hollywood, he had a lot of money and he liked to meet people. He played tennis at Jack Warner’s house, who used to own Warner Bros. It was a whole different kind of echelon from what we were working with – we would have been lucky to meet Jack Warner’s gardener!” As for the name, Lloyd explains: “The ‘Pop Art’ stuff was because of Andy Warhol, ‘Experimental’ because we could do almost any kind of music at that point and ‘West Coast’ because we were on the West Coast which at the time was this mystical, special place. Also it was just an odd name. It wasn’t a very serious statement of intent. I think we were just trying to put something together that sounded interesting.”

In the early days the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band appeared fairly regularly on the Los Angeles live circuit and it wasn’t long before they ventured beyond the rather cramped confines of clubs like The Other Place. As Shaun recalls: “The Velvet Underground’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable had been up on Sunset and Markley assembled the light show. We played live at that time and I remember playing at some Exhibition Centre with Frank Zappa and Little Gary Ferguson.” A flier for a gig at The Shrine Exposition Hall on the 17th of September 1966 shows the group sharing a line-up with the Mothers of Invention, the Count V, Lowell George’s Factory and the ‘sensational 7 year old’ Ferguson. The band’s photo shows Lloyd, Markley, the Harris brothers and John Ware sitting in field of flowers. “That was an old picture. Danny is wearing the glasses and the guy on the right was John Ware who played drums.” The latter’s fairly scathing account of the band’s early days, given in an interview with the Omaha Rainbow in 1981, is well known. According to Ware the band’s live performances, dominated by an ambitious light show directly inspired by Andy Warhol, were “the ultimate street happening for a while”, but he suggests that Markley was cynically motivated by the commercial exploitation of his largely teenage audience. He concludes: “It was so dumb. It had nothing to do with music.” Shaun is not impressed: “Ware had a way of saying things which was pretentious, you could say delusional, even. We didn’t make tons of money.” The light show was clearly a large part of the band’s appeal. As Fowley recalls: “I only saw them play once – at The Daisy. It was full of lots of teenagers who Markley had assembled to witness his greatness. They had a great light show done by Buddy Walters, a Hillbilly guy who later did the lights for Hendrix and The Animals.” And Lloyd said: “I think we had some sort of a following around here, I mean the Mothers of Invention opened up for us at the Shrine Auditorium when we played there. It was this gigantic light show that we used.”

With a certain irony, in the summer of 1967 the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band actually played with the Yardbirds [although Jeff Beck had by this time been replaced by Jimmy Page]. Also on the bill at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium were the Strawberry Alarm Clock, Captain Beefheart and Moby Grape and a review of the gig appeared in the LA Free Press. Despite describing the band as “instrumentally quite good” the reviewer took no care to disguise his contempt for their “non-participating producer and general hypester”, observing that “a kid in the audience was keeping better time on his tambourine than Markley.” How far this was a genuine reflection of the group’s live act, and the talents of their apparent leader in particular, is hard to judge – the Free Press was a notoriously left-wing newspaper which would inevitably have taken an antagonistic stance to a band from Beverly Hills – but photographs taken of the group playing at The Other Place the previous year, do show Markley brandishing a tambourine, his microphone conspicuous by its absence.

Wherever the truth lay, the Reprise debut album ‘Part One’ was a stunning album, not least on account of its lurid orange cover, which attempted to convey the excitement of the band’s live performance. In the effusive words of the Los Angeles Times reviewer quoted on the back cover, this was “a total experience. The group developed an S.R.O [standing room only] following”. The music occupied a broad scope, ranging from anthemic pop songs and acoustic ballads to harder-edged psychedelic numbers, but the eclectic mixture said much about the band’s internal contradictions. Markley’s influence surely lay behind the unlikely choice for the album’s only single: ‘1906’ b/w ‘Shifting Sands’. Since the songs were credited to Markley/Morgan and Baker Knight respectively, it was obvious who was in control. Despite being on a major label and having a limited release in France, the single, like the album, was not a commercial success and, given the A-side’s bizarre lyrics, this was hardly surprising. For example:

“See the frightened foxes / See the hunchback in the park / He’s blind and can’t run for cover / I don’t feel well / Hear my master’s ugly voice / See the teeth marks on my leash / Only freaks know all the answers / I don’t feel well.”

From the very beginning the rest of the band were unhappy with Markley’s dominance in the studio which was, in their opinion, out of all proportion to his musical ability. According to Shaun: “In the early days we had to acquiesce with Markley telling us what to do. The part that was frustrating was that he had no musical aptitude of any kind and so what he was trying to do to be different and innovative ended up sounding contrived. It was an embarrassment. I still feel that way.”
Danny agrees: “The musical talent in the band belonged to Shaun, Michael and myself, period. Shaun was an incredible bass player and on the first Reprise album I did a lot of the finger-picking stuff. But not only that. There was a lot of feedback, a lot of spontaneous stuff, a lot of one-take cuts.” It is arguable, however, that such internal tensions contributed much to the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band’s unique sound, since one of the undoubted strengths of their three Reprise albums lay in the constant juxtaposition of musical styles; not just between songs, but also within them. One of those extraordinary tracks was ‘Leiyla’, another was the ‘Overture’ on ‘Volume Two’. Danny: “While decibels of sound were exploding outside I would be sitting in an isolation booth listening on headphones where I would lay on a little classical thing – like a Bach cantata – right into the song.”

Although Jimmy Bowen was co-credited with Markley as the album’s Producer, he apparently made little contribution to the actual recording. As Danny recalls: “Bowen would come in with his wife at the top of the sessions at United Western recording studios and then come back after three or four hours to check it out. By that time we would have finished a song, including the vocal harmonies and everything, and he would say: ‘My god! A silk purse from a sow’s ear!'” But the presence of Bowen, who had begun his career in Texas with Buddy Holly and later went on to be a Country music producer for MCA, may have had more to do with why the band were able to record for Reprise in the first place.

Shaun: “Jimmy Bowen was basically a southern guy and Markley was from Oklahoma and that was probably how they met.” Another southern contact was Baker Knight, who composed both ‘Shifting Sands’ and ‘If You Want This Love’. “Markley had a friend called Baker Knight who wrote Ricky Nelson’s songs and ‘The Wonder Of You’ for Elvis. Because they had been hits he acted as if he could write songs for any genre – even psychedelic music. He had written very good pop songs but these were fifteen years before. ‘Shifting Sands’ was a good song but I think this owed as much to our arrangement as anything else.” According to Fowley: “‘If You Want This Love’ was originally a hit on Aurora Records for Sonny Knight, a black artist. I remember Markley told me a story once that Baker Knight had tried to commit suicide by sticking his head in a gas oven and lighting a match and he had to have plastic surgery.” By an interesting coincidence [or was it?] Jimmy Bowen’s wife, Keely Smith, had also recorded a swing version of the song under the title ‘This Love of Mine’. Danny: “We changed the time signature and made it very driving. I remember when Baker Knight first heard the playback he didn’t know what to make of it and said [adopts gruff southern drawl]: ‘Hey! I thought this was a Country song!'”

The group’s more commercial side was represented by two tracks which showcased their immaculate harmonies. According to Danny ‘Transparent Day’ “came about in the studio, much like the Everly Brothers. Shaun and I wrote that with Michael.” ‘Here’s Where You Belong’ was, of course, written by the immortal P.F. Sloan: “We were recording a thing for the Ed Sullivan show at The Other Place. It wasn’t a live recording, they were taping our group with our lightshow. Phil Sloan came by with this tune of his – it was this folk-rock Byrds kind of song – and I think Shaun had heard some of his stuff and felt that, if it was embellished with some electric guitar and our three-part harmonies, it could become a very powerful song and help our album out. Michael agreed and so the three of us met with Phil and he had to show us sheet music and how it sounded – these were the days before you had demo tapes – and I guess we recorded that about two weeks later.”
Lloyd recalls: “P.F. Sloan was a big name around here, he was like a big time songwriter. We were going to do a another of his songs called ‘Where Were You When I Needed You’, but I think, because the Grass Roots had the hit, we just didn’t get it recorded in time.” Further contrast was provided by the tracks which closed each side of the album. According to Dan, ‘Will You Walk With Me’ was “primarily coming from a classical background – there’s a string quartet and a celeste.” The song was also a good opportunity for him to demonstrate his ability on the acoustic guitar. The announcement ‘Part 1: The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band’, which introduces Van Dyke Parks’ ‘High Coin’, was an echo of the group’s live act, where the piece would be used to open each portion of the show.
Danny: “Parks was a brilliant musician. His was a piano rendition but for that first album I made my own arrangement so that it became like our break song. To me that was the high point were we blended the acoustic and electric sounds and tied it together with harpsichord.” As Lloyd recalls: “When we played live that was how we used to end each set and begin the next and that’s how ‘Part 1’, ‘Part 2’, etc. came about. We always liked that chord progression – it would fit into our folk kind of thing – but we never really knew the song.” The tune would later reappear on Lloyd’s wonderful Smoke album under the title ‘Daisy Intermission’.

There has long been confusion about who actually participated in the band’s recordings once they were signed to Reprise. According to Shaun: “We recorded the first Reprise album some time in 1966, although it wasn’t released until the following year. I was playing bass, Danny was playing acoustic guitar and either Hal Blaine or Jimmy Gordon played drums. I’m trying to remember who played guitar – I think it was Ron Morgan. Ron was friends with some of the Standells. He was a great guitar player but he had no sense of responsibility or being on time. Sometimes he wouldn’t turn up at all – he wouldn’t even get out of bed to catch a flight! The last I heard of Ron he was driving a cab in Denver.”
The involvement of Morgan, whose distinctive lead guitar playing can be heard on this and all their subsequent albums, has long been overlooked.

A clue to his involvement can to be found on the labels of the records themselves, where he is credited (alongside Markley) with writing some of the most significant songs: ‘1906’, ‘Smell Of Incense’, ‘Eighteen Is Over The Hill’, ‘As The World Rises And Falls’ and ‘A Child Of A Few Hours Is Burning To Death’. Despite this, he appears in only a single album photo – as the mysterious mustachioed figure in the round glasses and cowboy hat on the back of ‘A Child’s Guide To Good And Evil’. He would look much the same a year or so later when he turned up as a member of the ‘new improved’ Electric Prunes on their dismal Reprise swan song ‘Just Good Old Rock And Roll’.

The involvement of Ron Morgan also had another significance, because it seems that his arrival coincided with the departure of Michael Lloyd, an early casualty of the internal conflicts which would eventually destroy the band completely. According to Shaun: “Morgan got involved to replace Michael which was a thing between him and Markley – that was the time when Michael was starting his other projects.” Danny recalls: “I was never involved in that. It wasn’t Michael’s fault. It was a personality conflict because people liked Michael and they didn’t like Markley. The people who liked Markley were the sort of people who wanted to hang out at his house and meet starlets. I remember we were recording an album and there was an argument between Michael and Markley about who was going to walk out of the studio with the master tapes. It developed into a fistfight and Michael broke a guitar over Markley’s back. He just decided ‘Who needs this when I can do this by myself?’ So the studio was shut down over at Burton Way and he had a custom-made 16 track put in his own home. At that time another guy was hired just to play the guitar – that was Ron Morgan. He was a very good lead guitar player and when the band dissolved he went on to play with Three Dog Night. Unfortunately he died last year in a car accident.”

Lloyd himself has difficulty recalling exactly which of the group’s recordings he participated in, but in view of the vast number of other projects in which he was involved this is hardly surprising. During 1966 and ’67, as well as doing production work for Kim Fowley and Mike Curb, he also produced, played and sang on LPs by October Country and his own band the Smoke. He even found time to score Steven Spielberg’s first short film ‘Amblin”. Lloyd only shared one song-writing credit on ‘Part One’ – the beautifully understated ‘I Won’t Hurt You’ – and although he had sung lead on the Fifo version of the track, the Reprise recording was sung by Shaun, who also took lead vocals on most of the other songs on the album. Michael’s name or voice would not reappear on any of the band’s records until the ‘Where’s My Daddy?’ LP. According to Lloyd: “The problem was that, after a little while, it became more and more difficult for the three of us to be in a group with Markley. I don’t want to make it sound like we hated him or that it got into a huge scene, but he started to believe that he was like, you know, the real deal, as opposed to the guy who doesn’t sing and doesn’t really have any musical thoughts and stuff like that. He wasn’t content anymore just being the guy who ended up with the girls that he could get from it. Now he wanted to be respected or something – he wanted more out of it. Well, we had a lot of problems with that, because that wasn’t the deal and yet we were in this kind of symbiotic relationship. So I ended up getting a deal with Tower and Shaun and Danny and I did some stuff over there as the Laughing Wind, but nothing really happened with that.”
On the question of who sang on the records, Lloyd says: “Sometimes all three of us would sing at the same time, like on ‘Sassafras’ for instance. We recorded that as the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, but never used it and put it out later as the California Spectrum. Occasionally we did stuff like that, because Shaun and Danny were kind of folk based – acoustic guitar, finger-picking stuff, you know – and they were used to singing kind of group stuff together. Not like lead singer / backing singer, which I was used to, but people singing harmony all at once. That was something a little different for me and it was a good influence. We did a lot of stuff like that – I don’t remember now on a song by song basis – but a lot of them were Shaun alone. Who sang kind of depended on who was fighting with Bob at the moment and who wasn’t, you know. Before, on the first recordings, it was almost always me and then later, when I had a falling out with Bob, it was mostly Shaun. It was like ‘Well see, he’s my favourite now’, you know.”

Recorded and released in 1967, ‘Volume Two’ (Reprise RS 6270) was a more ambitious work than its predecessor, with all of the tracks credited either in whole or in part to members of the band. The cover art was particularly striking, at its centre a photograph taken through a fish-eye lens showing Shaun, Bob and Danny sitting bare-chested on the floor of a silver bathroom. Inspired, apparently, by the Bond film ‘Goldfinger’, the interior was also highly reminiscent of Warhol’s foil-covered Factory in New York. If one looks very closely, Markley appears to be grinning from ear to ear. On the back of the LP the band’s name appeared beneath the slogan: ‘Breaking Through’ and at the bottom was the declaration: “Every song in this album has been written, arranged, sung and played by the group. No one censored us. We got to say everything we wanted to say, in the way we wanted to say it”. Markley, no doubt, saw this as the perfect expression of the agenda which, like the name, he had foisted on the band, but as far as Shaun Harris is concerned, for ‘we’ read ‘Bob Markley’: “The cover was an Art Director’s bathroom in a house in LA. It was probably someone who Markley knew, but if you look at the back cover you’ll notice that his picture is bigger than Danny’s and mine and this is a guy who is hardly on the record!” Well, in one sense that is true, for, as on the other records, Bob did not play any instrument (with the possible exception of percussion) and even though he contributed some of the vocals this was generally limited to his manic speaking, leaving the actual singing to the Harris brothers. But his ideas and, of course, his lyrics, dominated the record.

The album’s startling opening was ‘In The Arena’, a bold, if not entirely convincing, political satire dominated by Morgan’s strident guitar, Markley’s megaphone-sounding voice and Shaun and Danny’s cascading quasi-religious harmonies. But none of this quite prepared the listener for what followed. ‘Suppose They Give A War And No One Comes?‘ was again dominated by Markley’s extraordinary lyrics, although in this instance the missing credit should have gone to Franklin D. Roosevelt. The opening lines were borrowed from part of a famous anti-isolationist speech which he delivered at Chautauqua, New York State on the 14th of August 1936:

“I have seen war. I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded. I have seen men coughing out their gassed lungs. I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed. I have seen two hundred limping, exhausted men come out of line – the survivors of a regiment of one thousand that went forward forty-eight hours before. I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war.”

Complete with ‘primitive’ noises, an army of percussion and building to an impressive climax before ending with the sound of a baby’s cries the composition stretches the listener’s credibility to its limits.
Dan: “Here’s this song with a strong rhythm behind it and we would slowly build up a wall of sound from the bottom up and the vocal was almost the least important part. The harmonies were right but the lyrics… well we thought that Markley was just an idiot who was trying to fit into a groove that he just wasn’t into.” Depending upon your point of view, it’s either one the most pretentious things you’ve ever heard or a brilliant expression of anti-war sentiment.

Despite co-writing and singing on the next track, ‘Buddha’, Shaun was not impressed with the results: “Believe me, I’m not going to ask that they play that at my wake! Markley would give you a page of lyrics and tell you what sort of song he wanted it to be – that would be ‘slow’ or ‘fast’ – but he couldn’t tell you nuances or anything like that.”
The album’s undoubted highlight, however, was ‘Smell of Incense’, which featured some wonderful interplay between Morgan’s hypnotic guitar, Shaun’s excellent bass playing and some extraordinary drumming from either Blaine or Gordon topped with the Harris brothers’ breathy vocals. Despite the track’s somewhat heady atmosphere, Danny insists that none of the band’s music was drug inspired: “We lived the legend without the drugs. Shaun and I were Irish kids so we both drank a bit, but Michael had a very strict upbringing so he never even drank and Shaun never smoked.” Kim Fowley adds to this: “I didn’t drink, Michael Lloyd was brought up strictly and he didn’t drink and Markley didn’t drink either. All this madness was done without drink or drugs – not even dope. All of Babylon was raging about us but Pat Boone could have walked in and not been offended!”

On the vexed question of what category the band’s music fell into, Danny has this to say: “Was our music psychedelic? I would say that it needed a moniker and all the rest of the stuff was bullshit. We were a band who considered that we could play any style of music – we had classical nuances in all of our albums. Many of these songs were created in the studio and Ron Morgan was a definite influence on the album – this was the one where Michael wasn’t there. Ron’s father was a jazz musician who played in pizza restaurants in Denver. Because he was a lead player I taught him how to fingerpick. This was an opening up our music into an honest statement of what it was – not when we were still searching for some common ground that people would buy. We never cared if it sold or not.”

After the Overture, with Danny’s short but beautiful coda, closed the first side, the flip was something of a contrast. For the first time – but not the last – the dominating theme of Markley’s lyrics was either girls or women, although the distinction between the two seems deliberately ambiguous. ‘Queen Nymphet’ opened the side with the words: “You’re too young / You’re just a child” and continued with the refrain “When you’re older”. ‘Unfree Child’, the B-side to the group’s second and last single – an edited version of ‘Smell of Incense’ – was also the nearest which Bob ever came to singing on record. Beyond the atmospheric beginning of slowed-down tape effects and echoing guitar and tabla the song addressed the unfree child “sitting at a dull desk in a dull school”, then built slowly to a climax before Markley declared: “Let her be free. Let her sneak off on an adventure. Come tomorrow we’ll watch the dawn. Delicate fawn. Let her be free.”

According to Shaun the blistering guitar track ‘Carte Blanche’, with its repeated “Hey Trish, come on home!” and lines like “You left behind a hotel chain and a stately reputation”, was based on a real person: “Carte Blanche was a credit card tied to the Hilton Hotels and Markley was friendly with Trish Hilton who was married to one of the family.” One of Danny’s contributions to the album was the banjo-driven ‘Delicate Fawn’: “That was a very polite little song about a guy who falls in love with a girl and wants to take her riding on his BSA motorbike. I said ‘I don’t want a bass player on this, it’s too heavy.’ So we used a tuba instead and we brought in a bagpipe player who was from the Black Watch – we got him through the Musicians’ Union! We didn’t know how to end the song so we just had him let the air out of the bag”. The song ended with the line “Stay away from dirty old men.” Says Shaun: “If Markley was obsessed with children it wasn’t in a positive way.”

Unfortunately, the inspiration behind the most obviously biographical song, the jazz-flavoured ‘Tracy Had A Hard Day Sunday’ – about a girl who “lit her candle at both ends and started flipping out on Monday” – remains a mystery. According to Shaun: “These were always personal glimpses, these were people Markley knew.”

By 1968 the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band were poised to release their fourth album – but their last for Reprise. Thus far, in terms of record sales at least, they had conspicuously failed to set the world alight – or even the small corner they call Los Angeles. Yet in many ways ‘Volume III – A Child’s Guide To Good And Evil‘ was the group’s most extraordinary achievement. A newspaper piece of the time – the only contemporary record of Markley’s words beyond his lyrics and sleeve pronouncements – provides us with a tantalizing insight into the creative processes at work within the group. After describing a rare live appearance by the band at a Teenage Fair in Portland, Oregon – at which six girls apparently fainted – Bob was quoted as saying this about ‘A Child’s Guide’: “The lyrical content is so meaningful and gets in so deep that we are treading the fine line of perfect taste. Donovan did it on his ‘Sunshine Superman’ album, Dylan did it on ‘John Wesley Harding’ and I hope that we did it here. What I try and do is take as much material about a subject as I can, condense it to an exact point and hope to capture all the meaning that maybe forty pages of material would have.” The article pointed to the album’s closing track, ‘Anniversary Of World War III’, as the perfect example of Bob’s economy with words – three minutes of total silence.

Whether one views the comparisons with Dylan and Donovan as justified – or merely as evidence of Markley’s delusions of grandeur – the album was certainly the band’s most complex offering to date. As its title suggested, the work was a fusion of innocence and malice, the subject matter perfectly reflected in John Van Hamersveld’s striking cover art work. If the ‘butterfly mind’ represented both the transience of innocence and the psychedelic possibilities of a mind in free flight, its stark black and white setting rendered the image distinctly sinister. Hamersveld, who began working as an Art Director for Capitol Records in 1966, produced some of the most enduring images of the age, including the poster for cult surf movie ‘Endless Summer’ and album covers like Jefferson Airplane’s ‘Crown Of Creation’ and the Stones’ ‘Exile On Main Street’. In 1967 he formed the Pinnacle partnership and promoted gigs at the Shrine Auditorium by the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Cream and the Velvet Underground.

John recalls his work on ‘A Child’s Guide’: “Bob Markley wanted a photograph of the band on the back so I took them up onto a hillside near Burbank and photographed them in colour with a Hasselblad camera and a wide angle lens. For the front cover I used the face from a photograph of Stevie, an artist friend who would pose nude for me. I combined my drawings and letterforms in black and white to create a stark contrast in the record racks. Black and white was also an issue in terms of dark and light karma. The butterfly’s wings are a psychological symbol for reading in to the mind, like an ink blot test by a psychologist, but as art. In this image, the head is thinking of the butterfly image – freedom from the karma in the well of darkness.” It was surely one of the most powerful and iconic cover illustrations of its era.

The contrast between light and darkness extended into the music, with the naive peace-and-love message of some of the songs sitting uneasily beside the ironic cynicism of tracks like ‘A Child Of A Few Hours Is Burning To Death’ (“We should have called Suzie and Bobby / They like to watch fires!” Bob cheerfully intoned). Once again, Shaun was distinctly unimpressed with Markley’s ideas and he is at a loss to explain the meaning behind many of the song titles – let alone the lyrics. Take ‘Our Drummer Always Plays In The Nude’, for example: “That certainly wasn’t true! It was just another of his contrived attempts to be hip”. Or ‘Until The Poorest People Have Money To Spend’: “Rest assured that Markley would have been the last person in the world to give anyone a farthing!” Shaun had grown increasingly tired of the way in which his carefully crafted pop compositions were being highjacked by Markley’s bizarre musical agenda: “There would be times when you would have a good melody and you would think: ‘I don’t want to waste it on this…'” Yet, arguably, it was precisely these contradictions which made the work so powerful and unnerving, the disparate words and music often entwining with remarkable effect. Nowhere were the group’s internal conflicts better highlighted than on the album’s title track. The song opened with Shaun’s gorgeous riff and the harmonic fanfare of the wordless chorus before descending unexpectedly into another of Markley’s extraordinary monologues:

“Take my hand and run away with me / Through the forest until the leaves and trees slow us down / A vampire bat will suck blood from our hands / A dog with rabies will bite us / Rats will run up your legs / But nothing will matter. “After the doors of many strange rooms have been bolted and locked / When you come back dragging your day dreams behind you / I’ll give you a new shiny face / And a yellow brick road / The rest of the world is wrong / Don’t let anyone change you. “Evil doesn’t exist anymore / Except for the war”

The mixture of the magical and the macabre was reminiscent of the ‘fairy’ tales of the brothers Grimm, Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice In Wonderland’ or ‘The Wizard Of Oz’, but set to music, as it was here, the unnerving contrast between verse and chorus made the song hauntingly effective.

Another highlight was the Markley / Morgan composition ‘As The World Rises and Falls’. The song’s irresistible guitar line evoked the chord progressions of ‘Smell Of Incense’ while the lyrics were some of Markley’s most mysterious and poetic. Sung by Shaun, the dreamy, echoing vocals and lead guitar leant the song an eerie beauty:

“Your eyes have grown tired of / Hunting for the fox and the owl / For smooth stones / And a safe place to hide in the hills by your home / Now you walk with bare feet / Through the wet sand / And the boy sees you and comes running over / And stands about forty seashells away / Wanting to walk on water / To turn you on / But you don’t pay any attention at all. “As the world rises and falls… “Now you have a woman’s shape / Thunderbolts in your fingertips / He has his eyes pinned on you / Be careful he has whips and chains / And he plays ancient games / Without anyone standing in his way / He can change the colour of the sky / If he wants to / But it’s only magic used (?) to him / Because you won’t be easily taken / Or he won’t remember you at all. “As the world rises and falls… “I tried to tell you not to love him / Strongly as you did / You’ll go out again some day / But you won’t forget him for a long time / He tore the mask off your face / And then put you down / And made you want him / More than anyone before / And then he walked away / And you don’t hear from him at all…”

Once more, Ron Morgan’s strident lead guitar dominated the record. For the first time electric sitar – the unmistakable sound of a Coral Electric – was much in evidence, featuring prominently on ‘Ritual #1’, ‘Until The Poorest Of People…’, ‘A Child’s Guide…’ and ‘Ritual #2’. As Morgan’s younger brother, Bob, recalls: “Ron could really put on his guitar antics! He would use some very unusual effects. He had a Magnatone which Seers Roebuck made for accordions and it had a wild organ-type of sound. He would also use a Lesley speaker and a lot of Vox equipment – amps and 12-strings – because the group were sponsored by them for a while.” The album also used some interesting tape effects. According to Shaun, the 3-note electric sitar line on ‘Ritual #1’ was pre-recorded and then looped. Even more bizarrely, ‘As Kind As Summer’ featured a speeded-up-and-slowed-down-tape sequence which sounded the same played both forwards and backwards but made no sense in either direction!

Like many classic albums (and, no doubt, many more deservedly forgotten) ‘A Child’s Guide To Good And Evil’ was recorded by a group in a state of crisis. Effectively, the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band had now been reduced to a trio. The same newspaper article quoted above listed the personnel for the LP as: “Ron Morgan on lead guitar, Shaun Harris on bass, and Markley on percussion instruments – all sing”. Danny’s involvement was either minimal or non-existent.

As Shaun recalls: “By this time Danny had become ill. He had a sort of manic depressive illness”. The photo on the reverse of the album reflected the same line-up, showing (from front to back) Shaun, Markley and – at last – the elusive Ron, in apparently heavy disguise. According to his brother, after moving to LA from Denver in 1965 Morgan had swiftly immersed himself in the local music scene, recording a demo with two future members of the Iron Butterfly and playing with the early incarnation of Moby Grape, Peter and the Wolves. It was probably through his studio work that he became involved with the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band. “After the first Reprise album he flew back to Denver and he was real happy with that. But he wasn’t very happy with the singing. He wasn’t a solo singer himself – he just did a little back up – but he was always disenchanted with the vocals. Ron kept coming back and forth from LA and Denver and that was how he missed the photo shoot for the second album. It seemed like the band wasn’t organized at all – it was just a case of throwing stuff together whenever they could – and Ron was always out of time. When he got disenchanted with something, he got flaky. I remember that bit about him not getting out of bed to catch a flight. He didn’t want to go back to LA because he knew what he was going into. I think he really wasn’t into it at that time and just wanted to stay in Denver. He said that he would go into the studio where they would have laid down a lot of stuff and he would try and over-dub, but it would have just been awful – it almost had to be done again. To him the musicianship just wasn’t up to snuff. A lot of people had trouble keeping up with Ron – it was quite funny to watch some times. But by the time of the third Reprise album, he told me that the whole thing was just a total embarrassment – it was pieced together so haphazardly. By this time Ron was heavily involved with Three Dog Night so when it came to the photo for the back of the LP he shaved differently and wore these silly glasses and hat in order not to be recognized. And I think he pulled it off!”

Closer investigation of the label credits suggested that, besides Bob Markley, Shaun and Ron, others also had a hand in shaping the album. The fake ‘live’ track ‘Watch Yourself’, with its over-dubbed crowd noises and some very tasty guitar playing, was solely credited to one R. Yeazel. Later a member of Denver outfit Beast, Yeazel’s name would appear on that band’s 1970 single ‘Communication’ b/w ‘Move Mountain (You Got It)’ alongside a familiar cast of characters: Ron Morgan, Jimmy Greenspoon and Roger Bryant. The plot thickened since Bryant, who had shared a credit with Markley on ‘Suppose They Give A War And No One Comes’, now turned up again on the track ‘As Kind As Summer’. An interesting story related by Morgan’s brother may shed some light on this: “According to Ron, Markley was a rare bird. He was off the wall, definitely. One time the band were rehearsing for a Santa Monica gig and they rented this studio at ABC. They were really killing on this one song ‘Watch Yourself’. That was by Bob Yeazel, a local guy. He’s in a bad way right now – got busted for drugs – music really took a toll on him! He was in the band for a short stint during that third album and so was the bass player Roger Bryant, who I also ran into not so long ago. An actor called Joey Bishop had his own TV talk show on the West Coast back then and he invited the band to come on that evening. They set up in the studio and all of a sudden Markley said: ‘Let’s do ‘Help I’m A Rock’. We’ve got to promote the first album!’ Ron couldn’t believe it. Of course the band completely bombed and they didn’t use it. Ron was really livid.”

It was amidst this atmosphere of increasing disillusionment that the California Spectrum was born. Ever since the ‘Legendary Unreleased Album!‘ was released in 1980 by Lloyd and the Harris brothers – apparently in an attempt to kick-start the reissue of all of the albums – this group and its connections with the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band have been the source of much confusion. According to Shaun the origins of the California Spectrum lay in his own growing frustration with Markley’s domination of the group, stemming not only from his antics in the studio, but also his reluctance to promote the band seriously by touring. “Markley would sit there hyping everything and telling you ‘This is great!’ about the songs, but I was disenchanted. I would have been more prepared to believe that his way was right if the albums had sold zillions of copies and we had been really successful, but we weren’t. I think it took some effort to have three albums on Reprise – the same label as Jimi Hendrix – and never really see the light of day. We were never represented by a major booking agency and I don’t think Reprise ever really promoted the band so no one ever got a chance to hear us. I was always unhappy with the situation with Markley – I thought his ultimate aim was just to have an album to show some girl in LA and bring them up to his house. He wasn’t prepared to go out of town and play gigs, for example. Occasionally we would get a deal to play in places like Alabama, but that would have been a highlight – for the most part Markley didn’t aspire to anything other than playing in LA. He thought the Sunset Strip was the coolest place on earth and he was fixated with hustling girls. Twice a year he would get interest on his inheritance and so there were times when he had phenomenal amounts of money and times when he didn’t. He had his nice house up in Beverly Hills and he simply would not have done a hundred-day tour.

“I wanted to move ahead and start playing live more, so around 1968 I decided to take off with the California Spectrum. A guy named Bob Williams, who was this wannabe actor friend of Markley’s, approached us about going out on the road as a band and touring the mid-West, but we weren’t touring because Markley was keeping us in LA. I didn’t know what to do. Should I leave the band? I asked my father and he said he thought we should do it. So my brother and I bought this trailer and we used this drummer called Russ Olmstead. I forget who the guitar player was, but we went through a series of them. For eight months we toured around the central part of the US with a light show and played some West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band stuff, but it was really awful and we made no money. The highlight was playing in Chicago with the Animals in front of about 5,000 people, but we would also have to play beer bars in Illinois from nine ’til four in the morning. One time the Beach Boys were playing at a college nearby and Bruce Johnston, who was a friend of mine, joined us on stage, but no one knew who he was. That’s when I realised that I had made the wrong decision. On that trip I met a few people in the mid-West, bought a house and some offices in Denver and put out some records under the name of the California Spectrum on which I would sing. ‘She May Call You Up Tonight’ was done in just a few minutes at the end of a session Michael had, using musicians like Carol Kaye and Hal Blaine. I would go in and throw the music down and they would play it and later we would add vocals. I sang all the parts on that and I think I speeded it up. The B-side ‘Rainbo’ was just some electronic thing. It was released on Shana records [Shana 7915]. ‘Sassafras’ [later released as Raspberry Sawfly 9735, the B-side ‘Obviously Bad’ was a leftover from the Fifo period] came about in the same way. I would write columns in Teen Beat and Tiger Beat and promote the songs and get them played on record, but there was no band to hire!” Intriguingly, a publicity photo for the California Spectrum gave an address in Hays, Kansas and showed the Harris brothers, Lloyd and someone looking very much like Morgan – everyone, that is, except Markley.

Somehow, despite all this upheaval, the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band managed to record ‘Where’s My Daddy?‘, their fifth album and the last to be released under that six-word moniker. If their previous label had finally lost faith in the group then it appeared that Jimmy Bowen, at least, had not: the Amos label belonged to him. Nevertheless, after the consistently high standard of the trio of Reprise LPs, the new album was something of a disappointment. Quite apart from the quality of the songs and performance, the record simply sounded different. Whether or not the change of studio and engineer had anything to do with it (recorded at Wally Heider, Warner’s Joe Sidore, who had mastered the previous two albums, was replaced by Bill Halverson, engineer on the first Crosby, Stills & Nash sessions), the warm, echoing depth of its predecessors had disappeared and in its place was a crisp and closely-miked sound which appeared unsuited to the band’s style. Perhaps it was nothing more complicated than the absence of reverb, but although the record had its moments – particularly melodic songs like ‘My Dog Back Home’ and ‘Free As A Bird’ – much of the material simply sounded unrehearsed or even unfinished. Several of the songs – ‘Give Me Your Lovething’ and ‘Not One Bummer’ for example – were barely more than laboured riffs. The latter, in particular, suggested that this was a group running short of fresh ideas – if that guitar line sounded familiar that was because it had simply been lifted from Markley’s old single, ‘Summer’s Comin’ On’. Shaun offers a possible explanation: “On the first album we had been playing the songs live and working out arrangements beforehand, whereas later on the songs were just worked out in the studio whilst we were recording the albums.”

Lyrically, in place of the magic and mysticism of the previous album there was madness; instead of dreams, stark social reality. Many of the themes were familiar: the evil’s of wealth (‘Where Money Rules Everything’), conflicts with authority (‘Have You Met My Pet Pig’) and, of course, young girls. Although at first glance the album cover appeared innocuous, closer inspection revealed a distinctly unsettling image. A lonely, barefooted girl, clutching a doll and sitting beside a crumpled beer can, gazed straight into the eyes of the viewer, of whom she seemed to ask the question which was the album’s title. She was, most likely, the same girl whose shrill voice could be heard introducing the album’s second side with the words: “Part IV – The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band”; to be immediately followed by the song ‘Everyone’s innocent daughter’: “Licking her lollipop fingers / Soft is this girl / Wise is this child / Down below in the city / Faces as grim as granite / I want to run tell the world / How much fun you are…” Another track, ‘Coming Of Age In LA’, had even more questionable motivation. After a spoken opening which appeared to have something to do with puberty, Markley exhorted the listener with the cry: “Step right up folks and get your ticket to LA – the greatest freak show on earth!” Appropriately enough, the rest of the song ran through a bizarre list of lowlife characters, but the narrative began and ended with the tale of “Poor Patty, a beautiful orphan of ten in army surplus clothes” who finished up in court before a drunken judge having been beaten, raped and robbed. It ended abruptly with the voice of the same little girl as before exclaiming: “Judge! Not one bummer the whole beautiful summer!”

Against this backdrop the bare-chested photographs of the band on the album’s rear sleeve made an uncomfortable contrast – a return to the line-up of Bob, Shaun and Danny which had last appeared on the back of the second Reprise LP. The younger Harris brother, in particular, looked in a bad way. Shaun: “Dan was not in good shape. I look at that picture and I think that it was exploitative of Markley to allow him to have his picture taken at that time.” What is slightly puzzling, however, is the absence of Lloyd, despite the fact that he shared credits with Markley on three of the songs and could be heard singing on several tracks – ‘My Dog Back Home’ for instance. Likewise, Ron Morgan’s name was nowhere to be seen even though his spidery lead guitar could still be heard throughout the album. Perhaps he was still trying to remain anonymous.

The following year came ‘Markley, A Group‘. In all but name the last recording by the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, the album’s title was hugely ironic. In the back sleeve photos a boyish Michael Lloyd appeared alongside a sinister, grinning shot of Markley and the rather more sombre-looking Harris brothers for the first time since the Fifo LP. Indeed, Lloyd was even allowed to share the production credit. Any ideas the others may have had about a new spirit of democracy within the band, however, soon evaporated when Markley insisted on star billing. According to Lloyd: “The Forward album was about the last of Bob being really coherent. He had progressed to saying: ‘Oh, we can’t call it the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band – it’s got to be my name’. Well, I had arranged this deal with Mike Curb to do an album by the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, which made some sense to him – not a great deal – but some sense. Then Markley wanted to change it. That didn’t come up until we had finished the whole thing and by then, of course, it was too late. It was the same old problem we had with song writing credits and other things and that’s really the way it was across all of the albums, but eventually it just got to be horrible with Markley and contractually impossible. It was a stupid thing really. I mean, we should have called it the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band because at least we would have sold ten copies or something. I don’t know, at that point I think I probably just wanted to get out and get done with it.”

There was also a certain irony in the fact that the LP was on Mike Curb’s Forward label. After all, a year or so earlier it had been Curb who had famously thrown the Velvet Underground and the Mothers Of Invention off Verve (a subsidiary of MGM, of which he was President) because of their association with drugs and ‘weirdness’. Yet here he was releasing an album by a group of musicians who had not only adopted a name directly inspired by the former band, but who had also covered the latter’s ‘Help, I’m A Rock’ – and that was before one even went on to consider some of their own equally bizarre material. Lloyd speaks in Curb’s defence: “I think his motivation was honorable. When you think back to that period of time there were quite a few rock stars who were dropping dead from drug overdoses. Besides, by the time we joined MGM I don’t think the Velvet Underground were selling any more records and their contract might have been up. I went right through all of that and I never drank, I never used drugs – nothing – and I think it was a tremendous blessing. That was despite all of the influences around me, of course. In the 60’s you were almost an idiot if you didn’t take acid – you were like a downer – but I was very focussed on what I wanted to do and it wasn’t something that interested me at all. I didn’t need to feel better because I already felt great. I was doing all the things that I wanted to do.”

As the result, perhaps, of the inevitable confusion caused by the change of name, the ‘Markley, A Group’ album has long been overlooked. For those who favored the harder-edged psychedelic adventures of the earlier recordings, the change of direction after ‘A Child’s Guide’ must have been hard to swallow. Yet in a sense the band had come full circle. After starting out five years earlier in relatively humble fashion on the Fifo label, the high hopes of the three-album Reprise deal had ended with disillusionment and the virtual dissolution of the band. Now, after the low water-mark of the ‘Where’s Your Daddy?’ LP, the band emerged with a work which was, in many ways, a fitting end to their career. Inconsistent certainly, with the first side probably the strongest, the album still had many wonderful moments, particularly a number of delicately structured songs underpinned with subtle arrangements and over-layed with immaculate harmonies.

The record undoubtedly benefited from Michael Lloyd’s full involvement, bringing with him his now considerable production experience. Singing many of the lead vocals, his self-assured keyboard playing featured prominently on several tracks while his orchestral arrangements were exquisite. Danny, too, was once again a full participant in the album, co-writing well over half of the songs on the LP compared with only two on ‘Where’s My Daddy?’ and none on ‘A Child’s Guide’. A clue to his lack of involvement in the previous albums could be found in the opening track ‘Booker T & His Electric Shock’. Sung by Danny, the humorous lyrics belied their serious subject matter. According to Lloyd: “Danny had been a manic depressive and had gone through all kinds of horrible times from way before the band. That song was about a mental institution and the electric shock treatment which he had there. It happened many times and once it started it was almost impossible to stop. It was a horrible thing for him to go through – remember that this was a long time ago when they didn’t really know what to do – but eventually they found out that it was a lithium imbalance.” Shaun, by contrast, recalls having little to do with the album beyond singing on the re-recorded version of ‘Outside/Inside’. With its sweeping strings and trickling harpsichord this was an altogether more confident and polished version than the original, but once again Shaun regarded the lyrics – especially the line “I’m as rough as a cow’s tongue” – as a prime example of Markley’s misguided ruination of his melody.

It seems that Markley was particularly proud of his efforts on this final LP which, for the first time, came with a separate lyric sheet boldly declaring: “Lyrics by Markley.” They were certainly memorable. The usual tirade against wealth continued with ‘Zoom! Zoom! Zoom’ (“Money, Money, Money / Tear it to pieces / Money, Money, Money / I don’t care at all…”) and ‘Roger The Rocket Ship’ was a genuinely funny take on paranoia (“Look out for interplanetary spaceships and magnetic storms / Some sort of advance warning system should be set up / Look out for solar flares, polar bears, and a third eye / That watches every move you make, watches every step you take…”). Not for the first time, however, the abiding theme was childhood innocence facing corruption in an adult world, while a predilection for young girls was evident from the titles alone: ‘Elegant Ellen’; ‘Little Ruby Rain’; ‘Sarah The Sad Spirit’; and ‘Sweet Lady Eleven And The Tattooed Man’. It is tempting to look amongst his lyrics for clues as to how Markley saw himself: perhaps as “the last electric man in the last electric band” of ‘Next Plane To The Sun’; or “Bobby the Bad Bum” loved by ‘Sarah The Sad Spirit’. Amidst the apparently nonsensical words of ‘The Magic Cat’, however, there lay a passage in which Markley almost seemed to anticipate his impending fall:

“Straw the Pink Policeman / Tore thru the wall…DRAW!!! / ‘A gentle fawn on the lawn is nude / And that’s against the law.’ / Girls don’t know much so young / Everyone starts to run…”

If one track justified Markley’s arrogance, however, it was the beautiful ballad ‘Little Ruby Rain’, a song which proved that, despite the internal tensions, the band were still able to unite their disparate talents. Written by Markley and Danny Harris, the latter’s acoustic guitar, played alongside a gorgeous string arrangement, sounded like a mature reflection of his earlier composition ‘Will You Walk With Me’, while the lyrics, confidently sung by Lloyd, were among Markley’s most poetic:

“Stay in the shadows of my hand comfortable friend / You’re a tree-ripened girl, still green, seen on billboards / You’re a baby, not in age, but ideas / Toss and turn my friend to the end of the storm, underneath your sleeping eyelids. Little Ruby Rain, your storm is just a game / But it’s strange to be yesterday’s thunder. You’re the sun reflected in the sand of a faraway land / You’re a circus performer, magnificently twirling / The acrobat inside you is leisurely suspended, using no net / Destiny is below with its casual arithmetic, waiting. Little Ruby Rain… When the vines of Time, squared, electrify your soft hair / And four white horses with ruby-red eyes pull your casket away / Only a thimbleful of people will understand / And as the applause dies down, I’ll remember you the way we are today. Little Ruby Rain…”

If the ‘Group’ album was the last recording to be made by the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, for Michael Lloyd it was only the beginning of an extraordinarily successful musical career which has, to date, netted him over one hundred gold and platinum records. After becoming the Vice President of A & R at MGM, aged 20, in the fall of 1969, Michael achieved his first major hit producing Lou Rawls’ single ‘A Natural Man’, winning himself a Grammy in the process. After forming his own band Friends, along with two Australians Darryl Cotton and Steve Kipner (ex-Tin Tin), Michael recorded an LP in 1973 only to see it pulled by MGM when he and Mike Curb left the label. Unperturbed he went on to record two further albums under the guise of Cotton, Lloyd and Christian. However, he soon discovered that his strength lay in producing and composing for others, most notably those toothsome Mormon siblings the Osmonds (including their ‘experimental’ ‘Crazy Horses’ period and Donny’s solo career), as well as other teen heart-throbs like Shaun Cassidy and Leif Garrett. His greatest achievement – in commercial terms at least – came with the 1987 film ‘Dirty Dancing’, for which he acted as musical supervisor as well as producing and co-writing much of the music. It went on to become one of the biggest-selling soundtracks of all time. Now married with four children, Michael lives in a mansion which used to belong to Oscar-winning actress Gloria Swanson, star of Billy Wilder’s ‘Sunset Boulevard’ and, by a strange coincidence, an early silent film called ‘Shifting Sands’…

Meanwhile, Shaun had also continued his career in music: “In the early 70s when Michael became successful producing Lou Rawls I would act as contractor for his sessions, calling up the musicians and co-ordinating the union contracts. I put together a reel-to-reel tape of four songs and sent them around. Through Michael a single off my album come out on Verve under the name Brigadune, but nothing happened. Then Capitol agreed I could do an album. Both my parents appeared on that – my father arranged some of it and Michael and Danny helped out as well. Unfortunately it came out on Capitol on the same day as ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’ – how could I compete? After that I realized that if you want to be the creative artist you should get someone else to cut your deal for you. It’s not easy to do both and it was stupid to have an album on a major label and have no manager. Nevertheless, it was the first time I had the chance to do what I wanted to do. From that point I worked with Michael and became president of Barry Manilow’s publishing company. After that I started getting calls from everybody.” Apart from his solo LP (‘Shaun Harris’ and the Brigadune 45 (‘I’ll Cry Out From My Grave (God I’m Sorry)’ b/w ‘Misty Morning’), Shaun also collaborated with Danny and Michael on other singles under names like The Grand Concourse and Rockit. Shaun eventually grew disillusioned with the Los Angeles scene and thereafter lived with his family in Oregon. In recent years he has taken up the cause of standards in education, written a play about his childhood and set up a highly successful children’s film festival – even playing host to Margaret Thatcher.

Although Danny admits to losing the plot somewhat during the 70s, in 1980 he also released a solo album, ‘Thank Him Every Day’, which combined synthesisers with religion. He got his life back on track and in 1984 he married Vicky, who he had first met years earlier when she was running an incense booth at one of those infamous Teenage Fairs at which the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band were playing. After they moved to Sweden, where he worked as an alcohol and drugs counsellor, he continued to play folk music – Ralph McTell’s ‘Streets Of London’ was a particular favorite – and recorded another album which has yet to be released. More recently he has established himself as a film actor, appearing in Jack Nicholson’s Oscar-winning film ‘As Good As It Gets’ where he can be seen dancing in the restaurant scene! He is now writing a book about his experiences in the band and beyond. He and Shaun and Michael remain close friends.

Despite being a founder member of Three Dog Night, Ron Morgan never got to share in their phenomenal success. As his brother recalls: “Ron didn’t do well under pressure. He suffered from bad stage fright, but it was really ‘drug fright’ – he was so high all the time that he became paranoid. They played the Whisky and when someone said Eric Clapton was in the audience he just froze. Ron found the pressure of living up to his image – and everyone’s expectation – was too hard to bear. When Three Dog Night gave him a contract he flew back to Denver and the family lawyer had a look at it. It didn’t look favourable for Ron so he didn’t sign and by the time he got back to LA they had already replaced him. He never thought it would amount to anything anyway. He would never admit it, but their success really bugged him. He felt persecuted.” Almost immediately another opportunity arose in the form of established Reprise act, the Electric Prunes, but unfortunately for Ron the group was about to hit the buffers. According to Dick Whetstone, drummer and vocalist with the final Prunes line-up, Ron became involved after John Herron quit unexpectedly during the sessions for the ‘Just Good Old Rock And Roll’ LP: “We knew Ron from a Denver band called Superband that included Jimmy Greenspoon on keyboards. The two of them had landed a gig with the original version of Three Dog Night prior to the first album release. Ron was anxious to play in a less structured band – he wanted more solos! He was a world-class guitar player. He joined us in time to help finish the last tracks on the album and began touring with us, along with his Harley. Ron lived to play music, but the lifestyle contributed greatly to his death.” After Three Dog Night and the Electric Prunes Ron moved back to Denver. Bob: “He was disenchanted, but he wasn’t going to sell out. He did drive a cab for a while – he loved the freedom of it, there were no pressures and he was his own boss – but Ron got in a bad way. He was strung out on ‘reds’ – addictive sleeping pills – which he had been popping with Three Dog Night and he ended up on the street. He had no skills apart from music, but after he got married in ’76 he sorted his life out and became a janitor. He still played and we used to jam a lot. Then he had a motorcycle accident and things went down hill. He got put in a psychiatric ward for a time. His wife divorced him and kicked him out of the house. It was while he was in hospital that he was diagnosed with Hepatitis C. The worst thing you can do with that is drink, but he had a strong constitution – he could always put away the drugs and alcohol. Unfortunately he didn’t know until it was too late. He died in his sleep in 1989 at 44. I can remember Ron getting his royalty cheques – they were usually for about 75 cents. Ron lived the way he wanted to, but I guess music never gave him the security he wanted.” Bob Morgan continues his brother’s legacy with his own band Blackwood Magazine.

And what became of Bob Markley? Appropriately enough his fate was the most bizarre of all. Towards the end of the sixties he was involved in a few other projects beyond the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, most notably producing an LP by J.J. Light – actually Jim Stallings, bass player with the Sir Douglas Quintet – called ‘Heya’. Despite claims that this album also involved other members of the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, none of those spoken to have any recollection of it, although the guitar playing does bear the unmistakable signature of Ron Morgan. The title track was a hit throughout Europe and Markley later shared a song writing credit on a re-recorded version (although not the original) on United Artists under the priceless name of Zonk. He was also involved with Lloyd and Danny Harris in a gospel album called Goodness and Mercy. After the ‘Group’ LP, however, it appears as if Markley simply dropped out of music all together.

Fowley takes up the story: “It was 1971-2 and I had grown tired of living in Laurel Canyon. There were forest fires and I didn’t want to burn. Markley was living on the beach at Santa Monica and at his suggestion I moved down there too. When I walked into his place I couldn’t believe it! Here was a guy who had lived in a big mansion on Sunset Strip and now here he was living in this 1920’s house which was tacky and furnished like a beachcombers shack. I asked him: ‘What happened, did you lose your money?’ He said: ‘I don’t want to talk about it, but girls down here don’t like nice things – they want you to look like you just washed up on the shore.’ He wore a torn T-shirt and he had a dog to attract girls – he really was like a character out of a surf movie! I moved in to a place ten minutes away and I would go down to the beach and see this Pied Piper figure walking around with short girls and his big St. Bernard talking beach jargon. That’s when he said to me: ‘Never come by unless you call me first’. Eventually I moved to England where I reconnected with Jeff Beck and Ian Hunter and I lived there for about a year from 1972 to ’73. Then in the middle of all this I got a message from LA: ‘Bob Markley has run into problems’. I knew it had something to do with women. Well, I came back from England to the story that he had disappeared. Then I remembered his rule: ‘Always call first’. Now Markley, with all his wealth and emphasis on physical possessions, was always something of a bully, but it was then that I realised that, for all his indulgences, at least he didn’t involve his friends in his other world – and whatever the issues were that caused his problems with law enforcement. Bob was always very secretive about his male and female encounters.”

Shaun takes up the story: “One day the police came looking for Markley. I was living next door to him at the time, near the beach. They hassled me and even Gray Frederickson who was one of the producers of the Godfather movies. I heard that Markley ended up getting beaten up in Detroit.” Lloyd: “What happened to Bob is he kept seeing younger and younger girls. He was living at the beach – very Bohemian. You would never guess this guy was a successful attorney who used to live in a fancy house. Then one day he came home and there was a bunch of policemen outside the door. Shaun was living in the next apartment and he heard everything about it because then the police busted his place. Apparently Bob had been seeing two very young sisters down at the beach. I guess he was able to get away and we didn’t hear anything about him for some time – maybe he called or something. Apparently he ended up in Detroit. He had some horrible run-in with like gang members, got hit on the head with a baseball bat, he was in hospital – horrible stuff. It was something to do with some girls he was involved with there. Then he went to the Bahamas, something like that. Anyway he was gone for quite some time. Eventually he came back to LA and got arrested. He went to trial and I guess he was in jail for a short while, or maybe he had bargained some sort of plea. I would like to think that was in the early to mid-70’s. Every once in a while Kim would tell us what was going on, or we would get a call from Bob out of the blue saying: ‘I’m in such and such a place. I’ve changed my name’ – crazy stuff. It was very sad. I mean we had antagonistic times and everything, but still this was our friend. It was a bad scene. Years later, in about 1980, I was recording Shaun Cassidy and Bob was the furthest thing from my mind. Then out of the blue he called me – he was strange sounding – and he said: ‘I’ve written more stuff, it’s the best thing I’ve ever done’. Then he sent me this tape and it was weird stuff – you can’t imagine how weird! I still have it, the notes and everything. Not long after that he disappeared again. The next person to hear from him was Kim.”

Fowley continues: “In about 1983 I was lecturing at UCLA as part of a music convention. I was standing talking to some students when this guy walked up to me with a scarred face and these strange eyes – he looked like the Scarecrow of Oz! All the students were recoiling in horror and at first I didn’t recognise him. Then he introduced himself. It was Bob. I asked him what he was doing and he just said ‘You know me, I just like to have fun!’ Then he left. The rumour I heard was that he had disappeared from California and ended up in Detroit. He fell in love with a black girl and her family didn’t like it so they had him beaten up. Then one day in about 1988-89 I dropped by my lawyer’s office and there was this thing in the corner of the room – like a broken body crumpled up in a chair, shaking with palsy. You know those pictures of Howard Hughes in the last years of his life: toothless, weighing 70 pounds with white hair. But it was Bob. Apparently his father had just died and he had come by to pick up some documents – he was now worth millions. I went up to him and he looked right through me. It was very scary. Then a few years later, in 1991 or ’92, I heard a story from J.J. Light, who was an old friend of Markley’s. He told me that Bob had been sitting in this rowing boat on a lake near Las Vegas – he was like a recluse. It got loose from its moorings and he drifted off alone for a day and a half. He was already pretty messed up, but he got very badly dehydrated. When they eventually found him he was taken to some hospital and placed on a life-support system, unable to speak or think. J.J. went to visit him there, but he said he was so spooked by what he saw in the hospital that he never went back.”

Back to Lloyd: “This was maybe five years ago, probably more. He was in a hospital at this point, like a vegetable. We’ve tried to call a couple of times, but we can’t get through – you can’t even talk to the doctor. He has no family, no one to call, no one to say anything – just bunches of money. To me, in an awful sense, it sounds like some place he has been put where they know he has got a lot a money and he is just going to sit there sedated, or whatever they do to these kind of patients, because there is no reason to do anything else. It sounds horrible to say, but to me that’s what it looks like – he’s just being slowly bled dry.” Kim again: “So in the end Bob Markley was like Dorian Gray! He’s probably dead by now. One factor in all of this was Bob Markley junior. Apparently Markley had made a girl pregnant while he was at college. I don’t know whether he knew at the time or not, but I heard that he didn’t meet his son until the early 70’s when the kid was 18. Bob was mind-blown – apparently he was a really nice kid. Then his son died in a car wreck. Do you think that the death of his long-lost son threw him over the edge and led to a downward spiral? His only contact with decency and normality was gone. He was a guy with a trust fund – smart but not immensely talented; clever but not brilliant. He threw parties and then decided to form a band and write songs. Then, when it was all over, he found out he had a child who he never knew – who almost immediately died – and he freaked out because he was growing old, his only child was dead and his rock and roll hobby was over – so why not terrorize the neighbourhood!”

Shaun: “Markley? I’ve heard he’s in a mental asylum. I called there once out of curiosity but I couldn’t even get to talk to him. He seemed to do so many things in life. I’m not very big on religion but if there’s such a thing as karma he could be the poster boy for it. He took advantage of people – not just in a dollars and cents way – but he was ethically indigent and morally bankrupt and it ended up being reflected in his life. I think he was an encumbrance. To even refer to him as musical is outrageous. Musically he was an embarrassment – he would have a dead microphone on stage. It was like dealing with a caricature. I’m not sure if meeting him was such a good thing in the end. When you look at bands like Buffalo Springfield who had record companies who were involved in their careers and had direction, they were making musical statements instead of having this nut with a fascination for hustling underage girls. That’s partly why I became progressively less and less interested. If you look at the first albums I was really involved, but by the end it was a dry hole – it was just a vehicle for him to be able to say that he had a new album out. And he wasn’t getting cured either. The fact that he had his name on the last one, for instance. Look at the Doors – without Morrison the band could do nothing – but Markley brought nothing to the table. I think if we had not had Markley insisting that we do asinine stuff it would have been very good. I wish we had got a record deal without him. It would have been called something else, but I think we would still have recorded. We would have had more mainstream success – I don’t mean a cop out – but if you had taken any artist of the period and made them do the same thing I think it would have had the same sort of negative effect. I ran into a woman once who said she was a program director in Boston for seven years and they played ‘I Won’t Hurt You’ for the sign-on song every day. If we had been handled like a regular band with a major booking agency and management firm things might have been different.”

Lloyd: “Markley constantly wanted to do weirder things, but we weren’t into that. It was like two bands on one record – you can see from cut to cut. He made the deals and that was both a good and a bad thing. It was a good thing because it existed, but it was a bad thing because we had to deal with him. This was our compromise: for every ‘Transparent Day’ there would have been something like ‘A Child Of A Few Hours Is Burning To Death’, or ‘In The Arena’ – that was Markley.” Kim: “Bob Markley created his own legend in his own mind and when he talked to me I almost wondered if it was a press release which he had written and then memorized. That was his downfall: he was narcissistic. He had certain musical ideas and wasn’t totally stupid, but there was so much psychedelic shit around in those days. Markley was attempting to be like the Mothers Of Invention but it was silly and a waste of time – except for getting laid. When Michael and the Harris brothers were left alone by Markley to sing and play it was remarkable – they were wonderful songs – but when there was all that weird shit, that was when Markley wrote the words and it was a waste of time.”

The history of music is littered with tales of missed opportunities and stolen chances, yet even amongst these the troubled story of the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band reads like a fable. Undoubtedly, much of the abiding fascination with the group stems from Markley’s involvement, but it would be a mistake to concentrate upon his contribution to the exclusion of all else. For whatever Markley brought with him, he also took a great deal away – perhaps quite literally. Had the more accessible compositions been chosen for the singles; had they received more promotion from their record company; had they gigged more widely without an aging front-man who could not sing; had they even chosen a less cumbersome name, then it seems certain that – within their own time at least – they would have received the recognition they so richly deserved. Looking back over the intervening years, it is clear that Michael, Shaun and Danny have decidedly mixed emotions about their experiences and, from the recollections of his brother, it appears that Ron Morgan, too, became gradually disenchanted. Inevitably, much of their disappointment is focussed upon Markley – and who can blame them. His motives for joining the band were dubious, to say the least, and the nature of his talent will always be open to debate. Yet the fact remains that, while others came and went, it was Markley alone who made his unmistakable imprint on every album. Indeed, of one thing we can be certain: if Markley had never become involved then the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band as we know them would never have existed. The essence of any classic band will always be something more than the sum of their individual participants and here was a group filled with contradictions: they recorded ‘psychedelic’ music while, for the most part, eschewing drugs; they railed against the evils of money despite the fact that most of them came from privileged backgrounds; and they sang anti-war anthems whilst they fought with each other.

Giving his own impression of the West Coast scene of the time, John Cale wrote once: “It was some kind of airy-fairy puritanism that was based on the suppression of adult feelings about what was out there in the world.”

Undoubtedly an egotist, Markley was a spoilt orphan who came to despise his inheritance and who seemed terrified of growing old. The sleeve photos bear witness to a man obsessed with looking younger, while the album covers, song titles and lyrics became increasingly preoccupied with childhood and the transience of beauty and innocence. Yet what set the music of the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band apart from many of their peers was the way they reached beyond such themes to explore the darker side of an age which, with the turning of the war in Vietnam, the assassination of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, riots in many American cities and – in Los Angeles itself – the Manson murders, was about to reach an ugly climax. If one record, above all, tells you all you need to know about the group – and the influence of Markley in particular – it is ‘A Child’s Guide To Good And Evil’. Its monochrome cover superimposed a butterfly’s wings upon a child’s face, while the songs dwelt on love and hate, greed and war and, above all, the concept of the innocence of every human being until corrupted. In doing so, it showed remarkable prescience.

Side one of the ‘Markley, A Group’ LP ended with the short, bittersweet coda ‘Message For Miniature’. Given that the missive was clearly addressed by an adult to a child and that its signatory had already appeared as an ageing, eccentric ‘hero’ on the J.J. Light album, it is tempting to assume that Henry B. Glover was Bob Markley. As things were to turn out, the song might serve well as his epitaph.

by Tim Forster

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James Gurley 12/2009

james gurley2009 – James Gurley was born on December 22, 1939 in Detroit Michigan, the son of a stunt-car driver, and attended the city’s Cooley high school. His father would sometimes enlist his son’s ­support, strapping him to the bonnet of a car and driving through walls of fire. Gurley had his first encounter with a guitar at the age of 16 when an uncle brought one to his home, but initially he showed no interest. He took up the instrument seriously three years later, at age 19, initially teaching himself the rudiments by listening to recordings of the bluesman Lightnin’ Hopkins. In 1962 he moved with his wife Nancy and son to the Bay area in San Francisco.

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Marmaduke 7/2009

John “Marmaduke” Dawson

July 21, 2009 – Marmaduke aka John Collins Dawson IV was born on June 16th 1945 in Detroit. The son of a Los Altos Hills, California filmmaker, he took guitar lessons from Mimi Fariña, Joan Baez’s sister, before attending the Millbrook School near Millbrook, New York. While at Millbrook, he took courses in music theory & history and sang in the glee club.
After stints at Foothill College and Occidental College, Dawson’s musical career began in the mid-1960s folk and psychedelic rock music scene in the San Francisco Bay Area.

He soon became part of the of Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions, a jug band that included Jerry Garcia and several other future members of the Grateful Dead. It is here where he also met fellow guitarist David Nelson.

John “Marmaduke” Dawson had original tunes in his pocket and a guitar in his hands in 1969 when a buddy just learning to play pedal steel guitar often joined his weekly gig at the Underground, a San Francisco Bay Area hofbrau house. The friend was Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead, and those sessions set the stage for the New Riders of the Purple Sage, a group they considered “the original psychedelic cowboy band.”

John decided that it was his life’s mission to combine the psychedelia of the San Francisco rock with his beloved electric country music and by 1969, he had written a number of country rock songs, so with Jerry Garcia the two began playing coffeehouse concerts together while the Grateful Dead was off the road.

By the summer of ’69 John and Jerry decided to form a full band, David Nelson was recruited from Big Brother to play electric lead guitar, Robert Hunter on electric bass and Grateful Dead Mickey Hart on drums. This was the original line-up of the band which became known as the New Riders of the Purple Sage.

In 1970 and 1971, the New Riders and the Grateful Dead performed many concerts together. John also appeared as a guest musician on three Grateful Dead albums — Aoxomoxoa, Workingman’s Dead, and American Beauty and he co-wrote the Dead’s “Friend of the Devil”.

Buddy Cage replaced Jerry Garcia as the New Riders’ pedal steel player, John and David Nelson led a gradually evolving lineup of musicians in the New Riders of the Purple Sage, playing their psychedelic influenced brand of country rock and releasing a number of studio and live albums.

In 1982, David Nelson and Buddy Cage left the band. John Dawson and the New Riders carried on without them, taking on more of a bluegrass influence with the addition of multi-instrumentalist Rusty Gauthier to the group. John continued to tour with the band and released the occasional album, until their eventual retirement in 1997 when John relocated to Mexico to become an English teacher and made several guest appearances at the revival of the New Riders concerts in the mid 2000s onwards.

He died in Mexico from stomach cancer on July 21, 2009. He was 64.

• Rob Bleetstein, archivist for the New Riders, wrote in an e-mail, “Dawson’s songwriting brought an incredible vision of classic Americana to light with songs like ‘Glendale Train’ and ‘Last Lonely Eagle.’ “

• With that material and such other “wonderful” Dawson songs as “Garden of Eden” and “Henry,” the band “simply had to become a reality,” claimed Dennis McNally, a Grateful Dead publicist.

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John “Mitch” Mitchell 11/2008

MitchMitchell-630-85November 12, 2008 – Mitch Mitchell was born on 9 July 1947 in Ealing, west of London. He started life in show business as a child actor on the TV series “Jennings At School”.

His love for jazz and pop music drove him to become a musician. Mitch’s main influences in music were Max Roach and Elvin Jones, teaching himself on the drums, he mixed jazz and rock styles, which later became known as “fusion”, of which he was a pioneer. In the early days he found work as a session player and worked with groups such as Johnny Harris and the Shades, the Pretty Things and the Riot Squad and in 1965 he began playing with Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames.

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Martin Fierro 3/2008

Martin FierroMarch 13, 2008 – Martin Fierro was born on January 18th 1942.

Unlike the famous, but epically somber poem by Argentinian poet José Henriquez published in two parts, El Gaucho Martín Fierro(1872) and La Vuelta de Martín Fierro (1879 Martin Fierro was a magnificent and funny Session saxophone player in the San Francisco Bay Area who was also known as “the Meester” to his many loving fans.

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Buddy Miles 2/2008

buddy-milesFebruary, 26, 2008 – George Allen ”Buddy” Miles, Jr. (Band of Gypsies) was born on September 5, 1947 in Omaha, Nebraska. Buddy’s father played upright bass for the likes of Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Charlie Parker, and Dexter Gordon and by age 12, Miles Jr. had joined Miles Sr. in his touring band, The Bebops. In 1964, at the age of 16, Miles met Jimi Hendrix at a show in Montreal, Canada, where both were performing as sidemen for other artists.

“He was playing in the Isley Brothers band and I was with Ruby & The Romantics,” Miles remembered, adding: “He had his hair in a pony-tail with long sideburns. Even though he was shy, I could tell this guy was different. He looked rather strange, because everybody was wearing uniforms and he was eating his guitar, doing flip-flops and wearing chains.” Continue reading Buddy Miles 2/2008

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John Locke 8/2006

August 4, 2006 – John Locke (Spirit, Nazareth) was born on September 25, 1943 in Los Angeles, California. His father was a classical violinist and his mother sang operas and was a composer. In 1967 he formed the Red Roosters with guitarist Randy California. Later that year they had changed the name to Spirit Rebellious and signed a record deal for four albums under the jazz/hard rock/progressive rock/psychedelic band Spirit name.

The group’s first album, Spirit, was released in 1968 and “Mechanical World” was released as a single. John appeared on their next eight albums and remained involved with the band during most of his career.

When Randy California went solo, band members Jay Ferguson and Mark Andes formed Jo Jo Gunne, while Ed Cassidy and John briefly led a new Spirit, recording the album Feedback in 1972 with Al and Chris Staehely.

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Arthur Lee 8/2006

arthur lee of love with jimi hendrixAugust 2, 2006 – Arthur Lee (Love) was born Arthur Taylor Porter on March 7, 1945 in Memphis, Tennessee. During his parents’ divorce proceedings in early 1950, Lee and his mother packed their things and took a train to California, while his father was at work.

Lee’s first musical instrument was the accordion, which he took lessons from a teacher. He adapted to reading music and developed a good ear and natural musical intelligence. While he was never formally taught about musical theory and composition, he was able to mimic musicians from records and compose his own songs. Eventually, he persuaded his parents to buy him an organ and harmonica. Graduating from High School, Lee’s musical ambitions found opportunities between his local community and classmates. As opposed to attending a college under a sports scholarship, he strived for a musical career. His plan of forming a band was under the influence of Johnny Echols,(lead guitarist for LOVE, after seeing him perform “Johnny B. Goode” with a five-piece band at a school assembly.

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Syd Barrett 7/2006

July 6, 2006 – Roger ‘Syd’ Barrett (Pink Floyd) was born on January 6th 1946 in Cambridge, England.  His parents were Dr. Max and Mrs. Win Barrett). Roger was the fourth of five children, the others being Alan, Don, Ruth and Rosemary. The young Roger was actively encouraged in his music and art by his parents – at the age of seven he won a piano duet competition with his sister – and he was to be successful in poetry contests while at high school.

Max died when Roger was 15 and his diary entry that day consisted of one single line: “Dear Dad died today.” The loss cost him dearly. Three days later he wrote to his girlfriend Libby that “I could write a book about his merits – perhaps I will some time.” Continue reading Syd Barrett 7/2006

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Pierre Moerlen 5/2005

pierre-moerlenMay 2, 2005 – Pierre Moerlen (Gong) was born on October 23, 1952 in the French Alsace Wine region.  The third of five children, his father Maurice Moerlen was a famous organist (one of his teachers was Maurice Duruflé) and his mother was a music teacher. All five Moerlen children learned music with their parents and all became musicians. Pierre’s younger brother, Benoît Moerlen, is also a percussionist (he worked also with Gong and Oldfield).

In January 1973, Pierre joined Daevid Allen‘s band, Gong, as percussionist, debuting on the Angel’s Egg album.

In June 1973 he was asked by Virgin’s boss Richard Branson to play percussion with Mike Oldfield for the premiere of Tubular Bells.

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Spencer Dryden 1/2005

Spencer Dryden with Grace SlickJanuary 11, 2005 – Spencer Dryden was born in New York City on April 7, 1938. His father, a British actor and director, was a half-brother of Charlie Chaplin but Dryden carefully concealed his relationship to his celebrious uncle, preferring his talents to stand on their own merits, rather than on any potentially nepotistic influences of his uncle Charlie’s name.

His parents divorced in 1943, but Spencer fondly recalled playing at his famous uncle’s Hollywood studio as a child. In the late 40s Spencer became friends with jazz fan Lloyd Miller also born in 1938 and living down the street on Royal Boulevard in Rossmoyne in Glendale. Miller said they should start a band and encouraged Spence to play drums. Since Spence didn’t have a drum set, Miller fashioned Dryden’s first drum by thumb tacking an old inner tube over a wooden barrel with no ends. Miller would pump his player piano, play cornet or clarinet and Spence would bang out beats on the drum.

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Mel Pritchard 1/2004

Mel PritchardJanuary 28, 2004 – Mel Pritchard was born in Oldham, Lancashire, England on January 20th 1948.

Mel and lifelong friend Les Holroyd were together at Derker Secondary Modern school where they joined a school band, then went on to form Heart and Soul and Oldham blues-rock band called The Wickeds. The band gained a good reputation playing semi-professional gigs. After adding two members from a rival band, the Keepers, the group emerged as Barclay James Harvest in 1966.

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Skip Spence 4/1999

skip spenceApril 16, 1999 – Alexander ‘Skip’ Spence was born on April 18, 1946 in Windsor Ontario, Canada. His parents moved to San José, California in the mid 1950s where his father found work in the aviation industry, having been a decorated bomber pilot during the war.

He was given a guitar by his parents at the age of 10. A precocious talent, he also played the drum in his school band, a skill which would come in handy when he dove into the burgeoning hippie scene of the San Francisco Bay Area in the mid 1960s.
Spence had already been approached to join Quicksilver Messenger Service as a guitarist when he bumped into Jefferson Airplane singer Marty Balin at the Matrix, a San Francisco club also used as a rehearsal room. Dissatisfied with the drummer Jerry Peloquin, who was only in so the group could use his apartment in Haight Ashbury, the frontman offered the drumming stool to Spence, who looked the part. Spence jumped at the chance and joined a Jefferson Airplane line-up which also featured the guitarists Paul Kantner and Jorma Kaukonen and singer Signe Toly Anderson. “It’s No Secret”, the Airplane’s first single, was released in February 1966, just as Jack Casady replaced the original bassist Bob Harvey.

Spence stayed with the Airplane for over a year and contributed several songs (notably “Blues From An Airplane”) to their debut album, entitled Jefferson Airplane Takes Off, eventually issued by RCA Records later that year. Further personnel changes saw Anderson quit to have children and Grace Slick, formerly lead vocalist with the Great Society, take over, bringing with her “White Rabbit” and “Somebody To Love”, two seminal compositions which became the Airplane’s first hits and true flower-power anthems. Anderson coincidentally died January 2016 on the same day Airplane founding member Paul Kantner passed away.

By the time these million-selling singles reached the US Top Ten in 1967, Spence, who felt his songwriting was being eclipsed by the other members’ (though his “My Best Friend” was included on Surrealistic Pillow, the group’s second album), had stopped attending rehearsals and was dismissed in favor of Spencer Dryden, who was dating Slick at the time. At the same time, the Jefferson Airplane switched their management to a local concert promoter Bill Graham, leaving Matthew Katz in the lurch.

Katz kept Spence on his books and hatched a plan to form a band around him in San Francisco. He asked the guitarist Peter Lewis and bassist Bob Mosley to come up from Los Angeles to see if they fitted in. Adding a drummer, Don Stevenson, and guitarist, Jerry Miller, the group, Moby Grape, started to rehearse and instantly found a distinctive sound, blending three guitar parts, vocal harmonies and distinctive compositions of all five members, with Spence often at the helm. “Skippy was always `high’ on this other level,” said Peter Lewis in the sleeve notes to a 1993 compilation, Vintage: The Very Best of Moby Grape.

He recalled:
His mind was always churning with stuff. It was hard for him to sit and talk. He didn’t deal in words but in ideas. He was the most unique songwriter I’d ever heard. Like in “Indifference” on the first album, the way he changed keys right in the middle of the song. Skippy was definitely not copying anybody I’d ever heard. Yet it always came out great.

The name Moby Grape reflected the crazy times. According to Jerry Miller, who passed in 2024, Skip and Bob (Mosley) went out to have a little lunch and they came back laughing like crazy with a name for the band. They were thinking of this joke: what’s purple and swims in the ocean? So they came back in and said: Moby Grape, we’ll just be Moby Grape. That’s how it happened. We all laughed and got along with that pretty good. Our manager liked Bentley Escort because it related to Jefferson Airplane and Strawberry Alarm Clock but we hated that one. Moby Grape sounded good and it was made up by the band. Skippy appeared to be crazy but he was crazy like a fox. He was a full- on Aries, laughing all the time.

After two months of solid rehearsals in Sausalito, the group played the Fillmore in San Francisco in November 1966 and instantly started a bidding war between record companies. “When I first saw them play,” remembers David Rubinson, the A&R man who won the battle and signed the group to Columbia, “I knew this was a band that could go around the country, around the world and really kill!” Sam Andrews, guitarist with Big Brother and the Holding Company (featuring Janis Joplin) was full of praise too. “You guys are better than the Beatles,” he told Lewis.

Indeed, the quintet’s debut album, simply entitled Moby Grape, remains a classic of its time, worthy of inclusion alongside The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Love’s Forever Changes, also released in 1967. Unfortunately, an over-eager record company and inept manager conspired to oversell the group with a lavish launch in June at the Avalon Ballroom during which thousands of purple orchids fell from the ceiling. The next day, Miller, Lewis and Spence were found in Marin County with three under-age girls and duly arrested, though charges were later dropped.

Columbia also simultaneously issued five singles from the album when they should have been concentrating on the stunning “Omaha”, a Spence composition which nevertheless crept into the Top 100. Moby Grape reached No 24 on the LP charts (though drummer Don Stevenson’s raised finger had to be erased from the sleeve). ” `Omaha’ was pure Spence energy,” declared David Rubinson later.
He was the maniacal core of the band, the guy who would say fuck it, let’s do it anyway. He was an idiot savant. He couldn’t add a column or figures, couldn’t pay a check in a restaurant. But he saw things in a clear light. He could see through immediately to the truth of what was going on.

The truth was that the five members didn’t get on. “Six months after we met, we were rock stars. That was horrible,” admitted Lewis. Later that year, following abortive sessions in Los Angeles, the group were sent to New York to complete Wow, the follow-up album, which made the Top Twenty. The relocation seemed to have pushed Spence, who consumed psychedelic drugs at an alarming rate, over the edge. Considering that the singer had howled “Save me, save me!” when recording a demo of “Seeing”, the others should have seen the writing on the wall. One day in 1968, Spence went looking for them with an axe. He was jailed and committed to the Bellevue Hospital for six months.
The four remaining musicians attempted to carry on, even touring the UK, despite becoming embroiled in a dispute with Katz, who claimed all rights to the Moby Grape name and put together a bogus version of the band which played the ill-fated 1969 Altamont gig. The legal dispute would rumble on for years; the original group members attempting to reform even resorted to calling themselves Maby Grope or Legendary Grape.

Following his discharge from hospital in 1968, Spence went to Nashville and in four days recorded the dark and whimsical Oar, a truly solo album on which he played every single instrument. Over the years, this record gained something of a cult following and, after its reissue on CD in 1993, was even the subject of a “Buried Treasure” feature in Mojo magazine. By then, Spence had been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic and had been in and out of mental institutions for most of the Seventies and Eighties. Sometimes, he managed to rejoin his former cohorts but, more usually, he would contribute the odd track to one of their albums before disappearing again.

Spence wrote some music for an episode of the revived television series The Twilight Zone and the X-Files film, but neither score was used. He struggled on with various illnesses and, before his death, heard More Oar, a tribute album assembled by the likes of Tom Waits, Robert Plant, Wilco, and Michael Stipe of REM.

It was with Moby Grape however, that Spence found his greatest musical fame, writing among other songs, “Omaha”, from Moby Grape’s first album in 1967, a song identified in 2008 by Rolling Stone Magazine as one of the 100 greatest guitar songs of all time.

Mental illness, drug addiction and alcoholism prevented him from sustaining a full time career in the music industry. He remained in and around San Jose and Santa Cruz, California.

Skip Spence, singer, songwriter, guitarist, drummer and father of three sons and one daughter, died from lung cancer in Santa Cruz, California on April 16, 1999. He was 52.

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Randy California 1/1997

Randy California 1979January 2, 1997 – Randy Craig Wolfe aka Randy California was born on 20 February, 1951.

Jimi Hendrix gave him the name Randy California, to distinguish him from Randy Texas, who also played in Jimi’s backing band the Blue Flames, during his 1966 New York stint. His real name was Randy Craig Wolfe and he was lead guitarist and one of the founders of the Psychedelic Rock Band “Spirit” who gained worldwide recognition for songs like “Fresh Garabage”, “Mechanical World” and ‘Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus’ which introduced us to Mr. Skin.

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Jerry Garcia 8/1995

Jerry Garcia300August 9, 1995 – Jerry Garcia was the frontman/guitarist for the most famous psychedelic jamband in the history of Rock and Roll: the Grateful Dead.

Jerome John Garcia is born on August 1, 1942 in San Francisco, CA to Jose Ramon “Joe” Garcia and Ruth Marie “Bobbie” Garcia, joining older brother Clifford “Tiff” Ramon. “My father played woodwinds, clarinet mainly. He was a jazz musician.”

In 1947 a wood chopping accident with his older brother at the Garcia family cabin causes Jerry to lose much of the middle finger on his right hand at the age of five. That winter, Jerry’s father drowns while on a fishing trip.

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Dino Valenti 11/1994

dino valentiNovember 16, 1994 – Dino Valenti was born Chester “Chet” William Powers Jr on October 7, 1937 in Danbury CT to Carnival entertainment parents. He became known by the stage name “Dino Valenti” and as a songwriter he was known as Jesse Oris Farrow in the Greenwich Village folk music scene. His first claim to fame came after he wrote the famous 1960s song “Get Together”, the quintessential 1960s love-and-peace anthem.

In first years of the 1960s, he performed in Greenwich Village coffeehouses such as the Cock ‘n’ Bull/Bitter End and the Cafe Wha?, often with fellow singer-songwriter Fred Neil, and occasionally with Karen Dalton, Bob Dylan, Lou Gossett, Josh White, Len Chandler, Paul Stookey (Peter, Paul and Mary) and others. He influenced other performers including Richie Havens, who continued to perform some of Powers’ early “train songs”. Powers was prevented from acquiring a cabaret license due to an earlier arrest, a requirement that was beginning to be imposed on Village entertainers at the time.

Moving west was the only route left for him, and upon arriving there, he became a member of the band Big Sur in the LA area and later received greatest acclaim as the lead singer of San Francisco psychedelic rock group Quicksilver Messenger Service.

He played in an early line-up of the Quicksilver Messenger Service when John Cipollina, David Freiberg, and Jim Murray all joined this group in 1964. He later rejoined the group as its lead singer and main songwriter. He was busted for marijuana and amphetamines on several occasions and unfortunately had to sell the publishing rights to his greatest composition GET TOGETHER, to pay for legal defense.

In 1970 he tried with fellow bandmate Gary Duncan to start a band called “the Outlaws” which however went nowhere. Back in the Quicksilver fold he wrote eight of the nine songs on the group’s next album, Just for Love (August, 1970), six of them under the pseudonym of “Jesse Otis Farrow”. He remained the primary songwriter on their next album, in December, What About Me?. Despite occasional personnel changes the band released Quicksilver (1971) and Comin’ Thru (1972) before calling it quits. The 2-LP Anthology was issued in 1973 and a tour and album, Solid Silver, appeared in 1975.

Dino underwent brain surgery for an AVM (arteriovenous malformation) in the late 1980s. In spite of suffering from short-term memory loss and the effects of anti-convulsive medications, he continued to write songs and play with fellow Marin County musicians. His last major performance was a benefit at San Francisco’s Great American Music Hall on July 27 sometime in the late 80s.

He died unexpectedly at his home in Santa Rosa, California on November 16, 1994, although his younger sister mentioned on his website that Dino was getting bored with life around him and was ready for something new. “The night he died, he called a lot of people…some of whom he hadn’t talked to in quite a while.  It’s my understanding that it was all casual conversation, no revelations, or profundity, or theatrics, but more like he was saying hello one final time.  I think, just as the Phoenix knows, he knew that his time was at hand, and being the “Gypsy soul” that he was, must have felt that such an event was about to take place.  I think, too, that he grew weary of his “home” on this planet, and he felt he had done the best he could here, and was ready to try something else – see the next place, meet the next people, and move on.  After all, Dino was a carnie.

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Papa John Creach 2/1994

Papa John CreachFebruary 22, 1994 – Papa John Creach (Jefferson Airplane) was  born in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania on May 28th, 1917.

At age 18, he began playing violin in Chicago bars when the family moved there in 1935, and eventually joined a local cabaret band, the Chocolate Music Bars. Moving to L.A. in 1945, he played in the Chi Chi Club, spent time working on an ocean liner, appeared in “a couple of pictures”, and performed as a duo with Nina Russell.

In 1967, Creach met and befriended drummer Joey Covington. When Covington joined the Jefferson Airplane in 1970, he introduced Creach to them, and they invited him to join Hot Tuna. Though regarded as a session musician, he remained with the band for four years, before leaving in 1974 to join Jefferson Starship and record on their first album, Dragon Fly. Creach toured with Jefferson Starship and played on the band’s hit album Red Octopus in 1975. Around 1976, Creach left to pursue a solo career. Despite this, he was a guest musician on the spring 1978 Jefferson Starship tour.

A year later, Creach renewed his working relationship with Covington as a member of the San Francisco All-Stars, as well as with Covington’s Airplane predecessor, Spencer Dryden, as a member of The Dinosaurs. He also continued occasional guest appearances with Hot Tuna, and was on stage at the Fillmore Auditorium in 1988 when Jack Casady and Jorma Kaukonen of Hot Tuna reunited with Paul Kantner and Grace Slick for the first time since Jefferson Airplane disbanded.
In 1992, he became one of the original members of Jefferson Starship – The Next Generation and performed with them until he sadly succumbed to pneumonia and congestive heart failure on February 22, 1994.

Papa John Creach suffered a heart attack during the ’94 Northridge California earthquake on January 17th. This led to him contracting pneumonia, from which he died a month later. He was 76 years old.

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John Cipollina 5/1989

john-cipollinaMay 29, 1989 – John Cipollina. He and his twin sister Michaela were born August 24, 1943 in Berkely, California, into what he described as a musical family. (There is also another sister, Antonia, and a brother, Mario who was the bass player in Huey Lewis and the News.) Cipollina’s mother, Evelyn, was an opera singer, a protege of the classical pianist Jose Iturbi, who became the twins’ godfather. Cipollina was born with chronic asthma and had to be held upright to fall asleep. (It was a condition that would not prevent him from becoming a chain smoker, however.) In his infancy, he lived in San Salvador and Guatemala, moving to Mill Valley, California, when he was six.

Naturally, the first instrument Cipollina was taught to play was the piano, as early as the age of two, but he began to be attracted to the guitar in his early teens. He recalled riding in the car with his mother and hearing Mickey and Sylvia’s “Love Is Strange” on the radio. “I look over at my mother and I go, ‘What’s that?’” he said, “and she goes, ‘It’s an electric guitar.’” Cipollina had heard acoustic guitars and amplified guitars, but never an electric guitar, and never the single note lines of Mickey Baker. “I really identified with it,” Cipollina said. “I thought, ‘You just said the ‘F word,’ without saying any words. Nobody in my family could bend a note on a keyboard. I thought, ‘God, that’s really cool!’”

Before long, Cipollina was absorbing the playing of Scotty Moore, James Burton and Link Wray, though at his parent’s insistence, he took classical lessons for a short time. “I drove this guy nuts,” he said of his instructor, “because everything I wanted to do, he didn’t want me to do. Then after I had thoroughly snowed my parents, I went out and got an electric guitar and completely forsaked everything else.”

Cipollina was in his first band, the Penetrators, by 1959. “It was more of a gang than a band,” he said. The gang played the popular rock’n’roll of the time – Elvis Presley, Ray Charles, Jerry Lee Lewis and Fats Domino – at high school dances.

But as the ‘50s gave way to the early ‘60s, rock faded in favor of folk music. Cipollina, now about to turn 20, and in a band called the Deacons, didn’t change his style. “Folk music was hip and cool and avant-garde,” he said “and I’m still a rocker. I’m still punking around. I’ve still got my long shirt on and I got my dark glasses.” Along with his black Dan-Electro guitar, it wasn’t a look that went down well at hootenannies.

Cipollina took up playing what he called the “steak and lobster” circuit, handling requests for “Girl From Ipanema,” while, in the daylight hours, trying to become a real estate salesman. Meanwhile, his living arrangements had become unusual. “I hung out with a bunch of crazy flamenco guitar players in a troupe,” he said. “I was living in a huge ferry boat with 11 other people and we were paying a little under $3 a month rent – we were still late on the rent!”

In 1964, Cipollina finally began to run into people who wanted to play rock’n’roll many of them coming out of the folk movement. There was Chet Powers (who changed his name to Dino Valenti and, later, Jessy Oris Farrow), a budding songwriter who wrote “Get Together” and was managed by disc jockey and record company owner Tom “Big Daddy” Donahue. And there was Jim Murray, a harmonica player who learned guitar.

It was Valenti who organized the group. “I can remember everything Dino said,” Cipollina recalled. “We were all going to have wireless guitars. We were going to have leather jackets made with hooks that we could hook these wireless instruments right into. And we were going to have these chicks, backup rhythm sections, that were going to dress like American Indians with real short little dresses on and they were going to have tambourines and the clappers in the tambourines wer going to be silver coins. And I’m sitting there going, ‘This guy is going to happen and we’re going to set the world on its ear.’” The next day, Valenti was arrested for possession of marijuana. He would spend the better part of the next two years in jail.

As Valenti went into jail, David Freiberg, a folk guitarist friend of his, who had been in a band with Paul Kanter and David Crosby, got out. “We were to take care of this guy Freiberg,” Cipollina said, and though they had never met before, Freiberg was added to the group. The band also added Skip Spence on guitar, and began to rehearse at Marty Balin’s club, the Marix. Balin, in search of a drummer for the band he was organizing, soon to be called Jefferson Airplane, convinced Spence to switch instruments and groups.

It was this odd circumstance, however, that led to the gelling of Cipollina’s band, since Balin, to make up for the theft, suggested they contact drummer Greg Elmore and guitarist-singer Gary Duncan, formerly of a group called the Brogues. This new version of the band had its first paying gig in December 1965, playing for the Christmas party of the comedy troupe the Committee.

The band gained financial backing from the Committee’s management, which in turn was working with Bill Graham, then part of the Mime Troup, and so Quicksilver Messenger Service became one of the early bands featured at the San Francisco dances that Graham promoted in 1966.

How the name Quicksilver Messenger Service came about

“Jim Murray and David Freiberg came up with the name,” said Cipollina. “Me and Feiberg were born on the same day, and Gary and Greg were born the same day; we were all Virgos and Murray was Gemini. And Virgos and Geminis are all ruled by the planet Mercury. Another name for Mercury is Quicksilver. Quicksilver is the messenger of the gods, and Virog is the servant. So Freiberg says, ‘Oh, Quicksilver Messenger Service.’”

By this time, of course, Valenti was finally out of jail, but according to Cipollina, he passed on rejoining the group he had started unless Elmore and Duncan were dropped. The band declined.

The quintet of Cipollina, Murray, Freiberg, Duncan, and Elmore became one of the top San Francisco bands, headlining over such contemporaries as the Grateful Dead at the Fillmore and Avalon ballrooms in 1966 and 1967, and even playing at the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967. But unlike the other bands, Quicksilver delayed signing a record contract.

“We didn’t want to sign,” said Cipollina, explaining that, early on, the group had gotten a bad taste in its mouth about record companies since it felt it had not received support from Donahue and his Autumn Records, and had then been rejected by other companies. By 1966 and 1967, when the major labels were coming to San Francisco with their checkbooks, “we didn’t need them,” Cipollina said. “We had no use for them, and we were unsigned. And we were making more money. We would make double the money of the guys who had the record contract.

“We watched everybody else. We watched the Dead, who used to be a fairly funny band, and they were happy-go-lucky, groovin’ kind of guys. And we’d come by and we’d see them getting’ real serious and talking about having to pay back the company. And we watched Jefferson Airplane. They got a record contract and they were just hustling all of the time. Somebody gives you a whole bunch of money one day, and the next day you owe all this money back.”

Reasonable as this sounds, it meant that Quicksilver was not heard on record until after the first blush of publicity and notoriety about San Francisco and the Summer of Love had already passed. They never had the chance to ride that wave to national popularity, as Jefferson Airplane did in the summer of 1967, and, as it turned out, they didn’t stick around long enough to build a loyal mass following, as the Dead did.

The group finally signed to Capitol Records in the fall of 1967, at which time Murray quit. He did stay around long enough to work on the first recording sessions, which produced two songs used on the soundtrack for the film Revolution, issued in March 1968.

It was as a quartet, however, that Quicksilver recorded their first album at the end of 1967. “The first album was the easiest because we didn’t know any better,” Cipollina said. “We didn’t know what constituted making an album. I had lots of trouble in the old days. In those days, when you would record, they had a huge red light, a hundred-watt lightbulb sitting on a floor stand, that would light up ominously when the record button was on. Besides, they had a sign outside that said, ‘Recording. Do Not Open This Door.’ And every time that red light would go on, I would just freeze up. It took me a couple of days to convince these guys, ‘You gotta just get rid of that light, man! I don’t want to know what’s going on!’”

Released in May 1968, Quicksilver Messenger Service featured “Pride Of Man,” a former folk song written by Hamilton Camp (since reclaimed for folkies by the Washington Squares) and a 12-minute song by Duncan and Freiberg called “The Fool.” Rolling Stone, the arbiter of all things from San Francisco at the time, pronounced the album too derivative of the Electric Flag, though it was complimentary toward Cipollina’s playing. The album entered the Billboard charts on June 22, and reached #63, staying in the charts for 25 weeks, a better showing than the Grateful Dead’s Anthem Of The Sun, but far below Jefferson Airplane’s Top 10 Crown Of Creation, and Big Brother And The Holding Company’s chart-topping Cheap Thrills.

Cipollina’s remarks indicate a vast preference for playing live over studio work, a common opinion among San Francisco musicians of the time. Accordingly, the band’s second album, Happy Trails, was recorded live in the fall of 1968. “Live recording was easy,” Cipollina said. “The second album was live, and it was a piece of cake. I think it was probably the best album we ever did, for that reason.”

But there were other problems. “The band started to fall apart during that one,” Cipollina said. “Gary Duncan quit the band as soon as we started recording it, which took a lot of the fire out of the band.” Surprisingly, Duncan hooked up with Valenti, who had released a solo album in 1968.

Happy Trails was released in the spring of 1969. It entered the charts on March 29 and rose to #27, far better than the first album (and roughly the same showing as the band’s next three albums would have). It has come to be remembered as the band’s best work. Even critic Dave Marsh, who is dismissive of Quicksilver, was impressed. “The group made only one noteworthy record, Happy Trails,” he wrote in The Rolling Stone Record Guide in 1979, “which catches them live, at their peak, on versions of ‘Who Do You Love’ and ‘Mona.’ Both tracks feature guitar extravaganzas by John Cipollina that are among the best instrumental work any San Francisco band did.”

Unfortunately, Quicksilver was not able to capitalize on their popular and critical success. “After we did the Happy Trails album, we took a year off,” Cipollina said. “This is when trios were happening, but we were not a power trio. Elmore could cover. Elmore loves trios. But Freiberg is not a trio bass player and I’m not a trio guitar player. ‘Cause, like a trio guitar player’s gotta use all six strings, which is something I’ve never gotten around to doing.”

To fill out the sound, Quicksilver surprisingly added keyboards. “I wanted a piano player.” Cipollina explained. “Quicksilver was the only band I had ever played in without keyboards. And I decided that we wanted (British session ace) Nicky Hopkins, even though I had never met the guy. I didn’t know anything about him; I decided that’s who we needed and the band went along with it. Nicky and I became real good friends and we ended up doing the third album, Shady Grove.” The album was recorded I the fall of 1969 and issued at the start of the new year.

Rolling Stone approved of the new sound. “The old Quicksilver was immediate, instrumentally flashing and frenzied,” wrote Gary Von Tersch. “The Quicksilver on Shady Grove has had its collective head turned around by Nicky Hopkins. The result is a more precise, more lyrical, and more textured Quicksilver.” It was also a short-lived Quicksilver, at least in this exact configuration.

“Quicksilver was slated to play at the New Year’s gig at Winterland, ’69-70,” Cipollina said, “but by this time we were a little hesitant, because we had no singer other than David and we really had trouble writing songs. It took us a year to get the material for Shady Grove together. And of course the company wanted us to do more and more originals and we had more and more trouble doing that.

“When we got Nicky, now we had a full sound, but we didn’t really have the singers. Who comes back in town but Dino and Gary, and they heard our record. Everybody thought that we hated each other, so we said, ‘Let’s prove ‘em wrong. Let’s all go down there as friends.’ And Dino, of course, was always meant to be an original member of the band, and never was, and we thought, ‘How cool to go down and do a show. We’ll just blow everybody out.’ It was a one-shot thing. We went down, and we played the New Year’s show with us and the Dead, and we did so good that before the night was over, Graham had hired us to play at the Fillmore East the following week. And the Dead were setting up a tour and they asked us to come as a headliner. And it just seemed like a natural. So, out of that one gig, Dino and Gary were back in the band.”

This happy state of affairs lasted five months, until May 1970, when the band went to Hawaii and cut what turned out to be its next two albums, Just For Love and What About Me, albums dominated by the songs of Valenti (or Jesse Farrow, as he was called for contractual reasons).

“We started having differences,” Cipollina said. “First of all, I found out that the difference between a four-piece band and a six-piece band is I had less and less to do. And due to the music that we were doing, which was more folk-oriented than I was used to and very simple, there was less and less playing for me to do. So I just sat around and did less playing.”

Cipollina found other places to play. “Nicky turned me on to doing sessions,” he said, “which was not a cool thing. Being in the band was kind of like being married. And playing with somebody else was like cheating on your spouse. I can remember coming in one day after I had done a Brewer and Shipley track. I came into rehearsal and I got the cold stares and the cold shoulders. And finally, somebody said, ‘So you played with Brewer and Shipley!’ Like, ‘How could you,’ you know? ‘You’re sleeping on the couch tonight!’

“I got it put to me that, ‘Well, do you wanna play in a band, or do you wanna do sessions?’ I left Quicksilver (officially) October 5, 1970. Nicky and I left about May. That’s when the showdown came. But then we had obligations, so I ended up doing two more national tours up till October.”

Just For Love had been released in the summer of 1970, and What About Me came out at the start of the new year. Feiberg left the band in 1971 to join Paul Kanter and Grace Slick. Valenti, Duncan and Elmore carried on as Quicksilver for two more albums.

As for Cipollina, “I ended up doing about four years in the studio where basically that was all I did,” he said. “In fact, there was a magazine I read some place that quoted me, I was like at one time the busiest session man in San Francisco. Which is real misleading, anyway, ‘cause San Francisco isn’t that big of a recording town. But I was the busiest session man; I was working every day.”

Cipollina also put together a new band, Copperhead, that featured, at various times, Jim McPearson on keyboards, Hutch Hutchinson on bass, Pete Sears on bass and keyboards, Gary Phlippet on guitar, keyboards and vocals, and Dave Weber on drums. “I started looking for new directions, because I was so burned out at that time with the San Francisco bands,” Cipollina said. “At first, we were all fighting for individuality, and we fought so hard that we were stereotyped. I thought, man, if I see another pair of Levis with patches on the knees, and if I see another guitar with an STP sticker on it, I’m gonna puke. I started looking for something fresh.

“We were an early punk band. In fact, the term ‘punk rock’ was coined for one of the early reviews that Copperhead got, late ’70, early ’71. It was a San Francisco critic, in disdain, who said, well it’s not really San Francisco rock, and it’s not really hard rock, its’ kind of punk rock. And I thought, that looks good, that’s us. We did have a real bad attitude which I was really proud of. It might not have been commercial, but it was definitely more professional.”

Copperhead never got a chance to find out how commercial it might be. The group released an album on Columbia Records in May 1973, the same month that label president Clive Davis, who had signed them, was fired. “They’re cleaning out (Davis’s) desk,” Cipollina said, “and they find this contract for $1,350,000, and they went, ‘Who are these guys?’ So they killed the act. They printed, as far as I know, 60,000 units and that was just accidentally. And then they stopped it. And that was it. In fact, we talked to some booking agents and I found out later that CBS threatened them. They said, ‘If you book Copperhead we’ll take off every CBS act you got.’ They made sure we didn’t work. So by ’74 we just kind of drifted; there was no sense in it.”

But Copperhead was far from Cipollina’s only project at the time. He had met Terry Dolan shortly after his breakup with Quicksilver, and played in Dolan’s band, Terry and the Pirates, until his death. “I got my first time running in with Terry and my last session I did with Quicksilver back in 1970,” Cipollina said. “Nicky had already left Quicksilver and he was producing this guy Terry Dolan. I had just left PHR (Pacific High Recording) studios. We were doing the last overdubs on the What About Me album. And then I ended up going to Wally Heider’s studio.

“I remember I got in a jam with (Jerry) Garcia and Jorma (Kaukonen) and a bunch of bozos. It was just one of those things you do when you don’t want to go home, you know? It was about four in the morning and I’m almost ready to go home now. I got a call from Nicky saying, ‘Hey, come on over, man, I’m over at Lone State Recorders. You ought to come over here, it’s a lot of fun. I’m doing a session. We’d really like you to put a track down or two.’ So I went over there and that’s how I ran into Terry. And then he kept doing sessions and then somewhere along the line, I guess it was after Copperhead, or during Copperhead, he decided to do some gigs. They were real easy and it was a lot of fun. After Copperhead, I ended up playing a lot in Terry and the Pirates. And then of course I went and did the Man thing.”

Man, a Welsh band led by Mickey Jones, Terry Williams and Deke Leonard, had been heavily influenced by Cipollina. “They came to San Francisco and they were big fans and they wanted to meet me,” he said. “So I went in and I met them and they immediately accused me of not being me. I didn’t live up to their expectations at all. They said, ‘Aw, you can’t be him. How tall are you?’ And I said, ‘I’m five-nine.’ And they said, ‘Everybody knows Cipollina’s at least six-two to six-four.’ I said, ‘Bullshit.’ They said, ‘We’ve seen pictures of Quicksilver. He’s a big, tall guy.’ And I actually showed them my license.

“I had never had anybody accuse me of not being me before. It was weird. Deke Leonard said, ‘Well, if you’re Cipollina, here, play something like him. And I don’t know how ‘he’ plays, you know? So we did a jam and I guess I passed.” Cipollina played with the band at the Winterland in San Francisco, and agreed to return with them to England. He appeared on their Maximum Darkness album, released in 1975. but the association was short-circuited by a call from home.

“We were just about to go to Spain,” Cipollina said, “and I got a call from the States saying, ‘Hey, we got Quicksilver back together.’ Before I’d left, somebody had asked me if I would ever play with Quicksilver again. And I was very explicit. I said, ‘Yes, but only if it was the original musicians and you got everybody to agree with it.’ So I went back and did the Quicksilver reunion (Solid Silver), and then did two tours coast to coast with the band.” The album, which came out in the fall of 1975, was only a moderate seller, peaking at #89, and the Quicksilver reunion proved a temporary affair.

Still working with Dolan and doing sessions, Cipollina moved on to a new band project, organized in a typically offhand way. “I had gotten involved at a party with a bunch of L.A. bigwigs and we were all under the influences of whatever,” he said. “We were quite egotistical, including myself. And somebody said, ‘Do you write songs?’ ‘Oh, yeah, I write, sure, you bet!’ ‘Well do you got any new material?’ ‘You bet! I just spit ‘em out, man, like gum.’ And they said, ‘Well, God, we gotta get you in the studio, love to hear your stuff.’ So, three years later, they finally said, ‘Come on, are you gonna go in or not?’ And at the time I had a couple of tunes that I had written and I was ready to put down and I had to pull a band together.

“So I got members of the last three bands that I had worked with, who were Quicksilver, Copperhead, and Terry and the Pirates. And I put Raven together in the beginning of ’76. I went in the studio and cut a bunch of my stuff and we had so much fun in the studio, we looked at each other and said, ‘Hey, let’s do some gigs. Come on, what do you say?’ And that’s how Raven started, and then it just got to be crazy. We only did about four gigs.”

Though recorded in 1976, the resulting Raven album would not be released until 1980, and then on the German Line Records label. Cipollina sold the Raven album to Line while on a tour of Germany with Nick Gravenites, the blues-rock singer, who had produced and played with Quicksilver. It was one of many tours he would undertake with Gravenites, another association that lasted until his death.

Along with his work with Dolan and Gravenites, Cipollina continued to do extensive studio work throughout the 1980s, and to play in San Francisco-based bands in a bewildering profusion. Bands like Thunder and Lightning and Problem Child, with whom Cipollina frequently played on the Bay Area club circuit, never recorded. But other bands, such as the Ghosts, the post-Grateful Dead band led by Keith and Donna Godchaux, did make records. The Ghosts metamorphosed into the Heart of Gold Band after Keith Godchaux’s death and, eventually, into Zero, which issued an album on Relix Records in 1987. Another major affiliation for Cipollian was the Dinosaurs, a band consisting of former members of various San Francisco bands, including former Country Joe And The Fish guitarist Barry Melton, that eventually issued an album on Relix in 1988.

Despite this activity, Cipollina was in declining health. He was sidelined for three months in 1988 due to respiratory problems. When traveling, he reportedly used wheelchairs in airports because he couldn’t walk long distances. The steroids prescribed by doctors for his disease weakened his hip bones, forcing him to use crutches offstage, and he usually sat while playing. Of course, performing in smoke-filled clubs was bad for his health, but he refused to stop playing, even completing a tour of Greece with Gravenites this spring. On Monday, May 29, 1989 he was rushed to Marin General Hospital after an asthma attack. He died in the later evening hours.

Cipollina was cremated and his ashes were spread on Mt. Tamalpais in San Francisco on June 1. He had been scheduled to play with Thunder and Lightning at the Chi Chi Club in San Francisco on June 2, and Gravenites and his band Animal Mind, joined by Mario Cipollina and Greg Elmore, played a tribute show instead. But no one in the room could have played guitar like John Cipollina. No one ever did. Rolling Stone Magazine rated him nr. 32 on the list of best guitar players.

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Keith Godchaux 7/1980

July 23, 1980 – Keith Richard Godchaux (The Grateful Dead) was born on July 19th 1948 born in Seattle, Washington, but grew up in Concord, California where he commenced piano lessons at five at the instigation of his father (a semiprofessional musician) and subsequently played Dixieland and cocktail jazz in professional ensembles as a teenager.

According to Godchaux, “I spent two years wearing dinner jackets and playing acoustic piano in country club bands and Dixieland groups… I also did piano bar gigs and put trios together to back singers in various places around the Bay Area…playing cocktail standards like ‘Misty’ the way jazz musicians resentfully play a song that’s popular – that frustrated space… I just wasn’t into it… I was looking for something real to get involved with – which wouldn’t necessarily be music.” He met and married former FAME Studios session vocalist Donna Jean Thatcher in November 1970.
The couple introduced themselves to Jerry Garcia at a concert in August 1971; ailing keyboardist/vocalist Ron “Pigpen” McKernan (who would go on to play alongside Godchaux from December 1971 to June 1972) was unable to undertake the rigors of the band’s next tour. At the time, Godchaux was largely supported by his wife and irregularly employed as a lounge pianist in Walnut Creek, California. While he was largely uninterested in the popular music of the era and eschewed au courant jazz rock in favor of modal jazz, bebop, and swing, several sources claim that he collaborated with such rock acts as Dave Mason and James and the Good Brothers, a Canadian trio acquainted with the Grateful Dead.

According to Godchaux, “I first saw the Grateful Dead play with a bunch of my old lady’s friends who were real Grateful Dead freaks. I went to a concert with them and saw something I didn’t know could be really happening… It was not like a mind-blowing far out, just beautiful far out. Not exactly a choir of angels, but some incredibly holy, pure and beautiful spiritual light. From then on I was super turned-on that such a thing existed. This was about a year and a half ago, when I first met Donna… I knew I was related to them.” He was also known to Betty Cantor-Jackson, a Grateful Dead sound engineer who produced James and the Good Brothers’ debut album in 1970.

Although the band had employed several other keyboardists (including Howard Wales, Merl Saunders and Ned Lagin) as session musicians to augment McKernan’s limited instrumental contributions following the departure of Tom Constanten in January 1970, Godchaux was invited to join the group as a permanent member in September 1971. He first performed publicly with the Dead on October 19, 1971 at the University of Minnesota’s Northrup Auditorium.

After playing an upright piano and increasingly sporadic Hammond organ on the fall 1971 tour, Godchaux primarily played acoustic grand piano (including nine-foot Yamaha and Steinway instruments) at concerts from 1972 to 1974. Throughout this period, Godchaux’s rented pianos were outfitted with a state-of-the-art pickup system designed by Carl Countryman. According to sound engineer Owsley Stanley, “The Countryman pickup worked by an electrostatic principle similar to the way a condenser mic works. It was charged with a very high voltage, and thus was very cantankerous to set up and use. It had a way of crackling in humid conditions and making other rather unmusical sounds if not set up just right, but when it worked it was truly brilliant.” The control box also enabled Godchaux to use a wah-wah pedal with the instrument.

He added a Fender Rhodes electric piano in mid-1973 and briefly experimented with the Hammond organ again on the band’s fall 1973 tour; the Rhodes piano would remain in his setup through 1976. Following the group’s extended touring hiatus, he primarily used a baby grand piano in 1976 and early 1977 before switching exclusively to the Yamaha CP-70 electric grand piano in September 1977. The instrument’s unwieldy tuning partially contributed to the shelving of the band’s recordings of their 1978 engagement at the Giza Plateau for a planned live album.

Initially, Godchaux incorporated a richly melodic, fluid and boogie-woogie-influenced style that intuitively complemented the band’s improvisational approach to rock music; critic Robert Christgau characterized his playing as “a cross between Chick Corea and Little Richard.” According to Garcia in a 1980 interview with Mark Rowland conducted shortly before Godchaux’s death, “Keith is one of those guys who is sort of an idiot savant of the piano. He’s an excellent pianist, but he didn’t really have a concept of music, of how the piano fit in with the rest of the band. We were constantly playing records for him and so forth, but that wasn’t his gift. His gift was the keyboard, the piano itself.” Bassist Phil Lesh lauded his ability to “fit perfectly in the spaces between our parts,” while drummer Bill Kreutzmann was inspired by his “heart of music.”

Increasingly frayed from the vicissitudes of the rock and roll lifestyle, Godchaux gradually became dependent upon various drugs, most notably alcohol and heroin. Throughout the late 1970s, he was frequently embroiled in violent domestic scuffles with Donna, who also developed an alcohol use disorder.

Following the Grateful Dead’s 1975 hiatus, he largely yielded to a simpler comping-based approach with the group that eschewed his previously contrapuntal style in favor of emulating or ballasting Garcia’s guitar parts. Despite occasional flirtations with synthesizers (most notably a Polymoog during the group’s spring 1977 tour), this tendency was foregrounded by the reintegration of second drummer Mickey Hart, resulting in a heavily percussive sound with little sustain beyond Garcia’s leads. During this same period, Godchaux’s playing in the Jerry Garcia Band — which had fewer instrumentalists and hence a more “open” sound — retained more elements of his earlier work with the Grateful Dead.

In early 1978, rhythm guitarist Bob Weir began to perform slide guitar parts with an eye toward variegating the group’s sonic palette, with Weir concluding that “desperation is the mother of invention.” Garcia biographer Blair Jackson has also asserted that “the quality of Keith’s playing in the Dead fell off in ’78 and early ’79. It no longer had that sparkle and imagination that marked his best work (’72-’74). Much of what he played in his last year was basic, blocky, chordal stuff. I don’t hear many wrong notes, but he’s not exactly out there on the edge taking chances and pushing the others, as he frequently did, in his own quiet way, in his peak Grateful Dead years. I guess the worst thing you could say about later-period Keith is that he was just taking up sonic space in the Dead’s overall sound. Did this affect the others? No doubt, though it can’t be measured.”

Eventually, according to Donna Jean Godchaux, “Keith and I decided we wanted to get out and start our own group or something else – anything else. So we played that benefit concert at Oakland [2/17/79], and then a few days later there was a meeting at our house and it was brought up whether we should stay in the band anymore…and we mutually decided we’d leave.” The Godchauxes were replaced by keyboardist/vocalist Brent Mydland.

During his tenure with the Dead, his only lead vocal was “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away,” from Wake of the Flood (1973). It was performed live six times, all in 1973. Keith and Donna Godchaux issued the mostly self-written Keith & Donna album in 1975 with Jerry Garcia as a member of their band. The album was recorded at their home in Stinson Beach, California, where they lived in the 1970s. A touring iteration of the Keith & Donna Band with Kreutzmann on drums and former Quicksilver Messenger Service equipment manager Stephen Schuster on saxophone frequently opened for Grateful Dead-related groups in 1975, allowing Garcia to sit in on several occasions. Following the dissolution of this ensemble, the Godchauxes performed as part of the Jerry Garcia Band from 1976 to 1978. “Six Feet of Snow,” a collaboration with Lowell George of Little Feat, was featured on the latter group’s Down on the Farm (1979); George had recently produced the Grateful Dead’s Shakedown Street (1978).

After Godchaux’s departure from the Grateful Dead, he cleaned up and remained in the band’s extended orbit, performing alongside Kreutzmann in the Healy-Treece Band (a venture for Dan Healy, the band’s longtime live audio engineer) and on at least one occasion with lyricist Robert Hunter. He also formed The Ghosts (later rechristened The Heart of Gold Band) with his wife; this aggregation eventually came to include a young Steve Kimock on guitar.

Godchaux sustained massive head injuries in an automobile accident while being driven home from his birthday party in Marin County, California, on July 21, 1980. He died two days later at the age of 32.

In 1994, he was inducted, posthumously, into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the Grateful Dead.

A much more revealing story titled:

How Keith Joined the Dead

 On September 17, 1971, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan went into the hospital, seriously ill and near death. The Dead were faced with a dilemma – just a month later, a midwest tour was to start in Minneapolis. Would they go on without a keyboard player? The decision was made quickly. From September 28, we have our first tape of their rehearsals with Keith Godchaux.
What happened in between?

From the Dead’s perspective, Godchaux came out of nowhere. They had several other keyboard players they had been working with, who could have joined:
Ned Lagin had played on American Beauty, and guested with them at the Berkeley shows in August ’71, along with several other ’71 shows and backstage experiments. But as far as we know, he wasn’t considered, or turned them down.
He mentions in his interview with Gans, “That fall I went back to Boston for graduate school. Brandeis gave me a fellowship that included all expenses, plus recording tape and all sorts of stuff to work with in their electronic music studio.” Many college students wouldn’t think twice between the option of another year at school or joining the Grateful Dead; but Lagin was on his own path. (Ironically, he became unhappy with Brandeis and soon dropped out, to resurface on a later Dead tour…)

Merl Saunders, of course, was playing with Garcia all the time, plus he had done studio overdubs on several songs for the Dead’s 1971 live album that summer. But if they asked him, he was not interested. In later interviews, he sounds like he preferred the independence & freedom to work on his own projects.
When he was asked why he hadn’t joined the band in 1990, he said, “I’ve always done my own thing. Before the Dead, I was working with Lionel Hampton, Muhammad Ali, Miles Davis. Why would I want to work in the Dead and just be the way they worked?” He was proud of doing music theater: “During the late ’60s, I was doing a Broadway play in New York at the George Abbott Theatre. I was musical director for…Muhammad Ali. So those are the things that if I was with the Grateful Dead, I couldn’t do. I played with Miles Davis for about a year. The Lionel Hampton Band. Did a lot of recording with Harry Belafonte and Lena Horne. I wanted to be myself and go the direction I wanted. Although I did record with the Dead. But when they asked me to come in and do their thing — to join them — I didn’t really want to join the band. When it’s Grateful Dead time you have to do a Grateful Dead thing.”
His associations with these other people may have been very brief in real life, but it should be noted he was much prouder of his work with them than any work he could have done with the Dead.
http://www.digitalinterviews.com/digitalinterviews/views/saunders.shtml
http://www.musicbox-online.com/merlint1.html

Howard Wales had also played on several songs on American Beauty, and had jammed with the band back in ’69, and had a close personal connection with Garcia – although he hadn’t played the Matrix club dates with Garcia for a year. The Dead even planned to play a benefit with him at the Harding Theater on September 3-4, 1971:
http://jgmf.blogspot.com/2011/03/gd19710903-4-harding-theater-sf-ca.html

It’s not known whether this benefit actually happened (probably not). But McNally tells the story of Wales auditioning with the Dead around this time. Weir (no doubt rolling his eyes) recalled: “We spurred him towards new heights of weirdness and he spurred us towards new heights of weirdness…much too weird much too quick…everybody backed off, scratched their head and said, ‘Well, maybe, uh, next incarnation.'”
Apparently Wales’s free-flowing weirdness, which Garcia enjoyed fitting into, was a bit too strong for a band that was now more focused on shorter ‘normal’ songs. Garcia would soon get the chance to play some more with Wales in the January ’72 east-coast tour supporting the Hooteroll release. (I would imagine Lesh might also have liked to play with Wales more – back in ’69 he had complained to Constanten: “Phil pointedly remarked how much he preferred Howard Wales’s playing when he sat in with the band.”)
On the other hand, from Wales’ perspective, the Dead might have been a little too big for him. He had apparently stopped playing at the Matrix when too many people started coming to see Garcia! John Kahn remembered, “One night there were a lot of people out there, and Howard realized that that’s not what he wanted to do, and he stopped doing it.” Garcia also said, “Howard went off…periodically he gets this thing of where he just can’t deal with the music world any more, and he just disappears.”

Of course there were plenty of other keyboard players around San Francisco who might have auditioned. It was Godchaux, though, who showed up at just the right moment and grabbed the baton.
Keith & Donna Godchaux, who’d married in November 1970 shortly after her first Dead show, were both already Dead fans. Donna had gone to the 10/4/70 Winterland show (drug-free), taken by some deadhead friends, and had quite an experience. As she said in a Relix interview, “The Grateful Dead came on, and it was more than music…I just could not even believe it. I had not taken anything, and I was just blown away.” She told Blair Jackson, “I couldn’t sleep that night because I was so excited. I kept thinking, ‘What did they do? How did they do that?’ They weave a spell. There’s this whole mystical energy that happens when you see the Grateful Dead and you’re ready to receive it. I was ready to receive it, and I got it. So every opportunity, every rumor that we heard that they might be playing, there we were… We’d all go see the Dead together, or at the very least get together and listen to Dead records.”
One of these friends of friends turned out to be Keith, who was also in these Dead listening parties. As he said in the Book of the Dead in ’72, “I first saw them play with a bunch of my old lady’s friends who were real Grateful Dead freaks. I went to a concert with them and saw something I didn’t know could be really happening… It was not like a mind-blowing far out, just beautiful far out. Not exactly a choir of angels, but some incredibly holy, pure and beautiful spiritual light. From then on I was super turned-on that such a thing existed. This was about a year and a half ago, when I first met Donna… I knew I was related to them.”

As it happened, they were introduced almost simultaneously to the Dead and to each other, and soon married. Getting connected with the Dead took a little longer, but surprisingly, in hindsight neither of them had any doubt it would happen.
Donna: “I had a dream that it was supposed to happen. It was the direction our lives had to go in. The only direction.”
Keith: “It had to happen. I knew it had to happen because I had a vision… Flash: go talk to Garcia… I wasn’t thinking about playing with them before the flash. I didn’t even try to figure out what the flash was…I just followed it, not knowing what was going to happen. I wasn’t playing with anyone else before that. Just playing cocktail lounges and clubs.”

He played jazz piano & cocktail music in a Walnut Creek club, but was just starting to get into rock & roll. As Donna said, “Keith would practice his rock & roll piano at home, and I was basically supporting the two of us.” He’d had no rock experience at all, and apparently listened to little rock music. Though he’d played with small jazz bands before, he was tired of bar gigs: “When other kids my age were going to dances and stuff, I was going to bars and playing… I was completely burned out on that. Then I floated for about six months, and then ended up playing with the Grateful Dead.”
He’d played piano in club bands since he was 14: “I spent two years wearing dinner jackets and playing acoustic piano in country club bands and Dixieland groups… I also did piano bar gigs and put trios together to back singers in various places around the Bay Area…[playing] cocktail standards like Misty the way jazz musicians resentfully play a song that’s popular – that frustrated space… I just wasn’t into it… I was looking for something real to get involved with – which wouldn’t necessarily be music.” (Getting a job was out of the question: “I could never see working during the day, and nobody would hire me for anything, anyway.”)
Considering what he would play later, it’s surprising that when his jazz trio went “in the Chick Corea direction,” Keith decided “I didn’t really have any feeling for that type of music,” and instead listened to big-band jazz, Bill Evans, and bebop: “the musicians the guys I was playing with were emulating… After gigs we’d go to somebody’s house and listen to jazz until the sun came up. They dug turning me on to bebop and where it came from. So I understood those roots, but I never got taken on that kind of trip with rock and roll – and I never had the sense to take myself on it.”
Until he met Donna, who turned him on to rock & roll. He sighed in ’76, “I’m just now starting to learn about the type of music I’m playing now… I never played rock and roll before I started playing with the Grateful Dead.” (Shades of Constanten!)
The interesting thing is that when he saw the Dead, he thought they needed more energy: “When I’d heard them play a couple of times, they really got me off; I was really high. But there were still a lot of ups and downs. Like [they] didn’t quite have the strength to pull the load…”

As far as I know, all the accounts of Keith’s joining the Dead come from Donna’s story – as told to Blair Jackson for the Golden Road magazine in 1985. The turning point came during a visit to their friends Pete & Carol (who had introduced them and turned them on to the Dead, and so played a hidden part in Dead history).
“One day I came home from work and we went over to Pete’s and he said, ‘Let’s listen to some Grateful Dead.’ And Keith said, ‘I don’t want to listen to it. I want to play it.’ And it was like, ‘Yeahhh! That’s it!’ We were just so high and in love! We said to Pete & Carol, ‘Hey guys, we’re going to play with the Grateful Dead!’ And we really believed it. We had no doubt.
We went home, looked in the paper and saw that Garcia’s band was playing at the Keystone, so we went down, of course. At the break, Garcia walked by going backstage, so I grabbed him and said, ‘Jerry, my husband and I have something very important to talk to you about.’ And he said, ‘Sure.’
…I didn’t realize that everyone does that to him. So Garcia told us to come backstage, but we were both too scared, so we didn’t. A few minutes later, Garcia came up and sat next to Keith, and I said, ‘Honey, I think Garcia’s hinting that he wants to talk to you. He’s sitting right next to you.’ He looked over at Jerry and looked back at me and dropped his head on the table and said, ‘You’re going to have to talk to my wife. I can’t talk to you right now.’ He was just too shy. He was very strong but he couldn’t handle that sort of thing. So I said to Jerry, ‘Well, Keith’s your piano player, so I want your home telephone number so I can call you up and come to the next Grateful Dead practice.’ And he believed me! He gave me his number.
The following Sunday the Dead were having a rehearsal and Jerry told us to come on down, so we did. But the band had forgotten to tell Jerry that the rehearsal had been called off, so Jerry was down there by himself. So Keith and Jerry played, and we played him some tapes of songs that I had written and was singing on. Then Jerry called Kreutzmann and got him to come down, and the three of them played some. Then the next day the Dead practiced, and by the end of that day Keith was on the payroll.
They asked me to sing right away, but somewhere in my ignorant wisdom I said I wanted to Keith to do it first, so he did two tours and I stayed home… So Keith and I went into it as green and innocent as we could be. I’d never sung before an audience before, really, and Keith had done only very small gigs.”
She also pointed out to Relix that “Keith and I didn’t know that Pigpen was sick or anything.”
http://www.blairjackson.com/chapter_twelve_additions.htm
http://www.levity.com/gans/Donna.980328.html
http://www.tonibrownband.com/donnajg24-4.html

McNally has but a few details to add:
He notes (from a different Donna interview) that after meeting Jerry, she tried calling the Dead’s office a few times with no luck – “she called the office and left several messages, but was ignored. Finally she got him at home.” So it may have been a more circuitous path between the first meeting and the rehearsal, but in Donna’s memory it was about a week.
He identifies the Dead’s rehearsal space as “a warehouse off Francisco Boulevard in San Rafael.” (The tapes of Keith’s rehearsals are labeled as being from an unknown location in Santa Venetia – but Santa Venetia is basically a neighborhood of San Rafael, so it is likely the same place. Possibly they could have moved to a studio to tape some of the sessions, though.)
And he says that “Keith and Donna played Garcia a song they’d written, Every Song I Sing.”
Donna told Blair Jackson, “When Keith and I first got together, we wrote some music that we wanted to be meaningful and spiritual. We wanted to write music to the Lord, because it didn’t seem like there was much out there that was spiritual. But when we heard the Grateful Dead…it seemed to have such spiritual ties. It had a quality that was magical, ethereal, spiritual, and that’s part of what was so attractive about it.”
What’s interesting here is that they’re playing Garcia THEIR music, in order to convince him of their rightness for the band. And there does seem to have been a spiritual tie – this moment prefigures not just Keith’s time with the Dead, but the later Keith & Donna band with Garcia sitting in, and the Garcia Band circa ’76 with Keith & Donna, bringing gospel music into the shows. (I think she has mentioned how she, Keith & Jerry would listen to lots of gospel music at home circa ’76.) So they hit Garcia with just the right note.

Blair Jackson observes that Keith had also played on a James & the Good Brothers record (a band the Dead were friends with) – Kreutzmann played drums on one track, and the album was recorded by Betty Cantor, so Keith may not have been a complete unknown to Garcia. (On the other hand, Keith is not mentioned in the album credits, so it’s a mystery where Jackson got this info.)

In early 1972, the Dead had a little promotional flurry, releasing a few band biographies for the press & fans. These offer a less detailed, but slightly different course of events. The Dead’s spring ’72 newsletter recounted:
“Pigpen was extremely ill, and unable to travel. Jerry had about this same time met Keith Godchaux, a piano player he and Billy had jammed with at Keystone Korner, a small club in San Francisco. With Pigpen sick, three major United States tours facing them, and the desire to have another good musician to add to their music, Keith was asked to join.”

Promo bios of each of the bandmembers released at the same time include this about Keith:
“After jamming with Jerry and Billy at a small club, and getting together with the Dead to work out some tunes, he joined the band in September of 1971.”
Keith was also quoted in the Book of the Dead: “We went into this club in San Francisco where Garcia was playing, and just talked to him. A couple of days later I was playing with him and Bill, and it just sort of came together.”

While these bios are brief and lacking in detail (Donna’s role is not mentioned at all), they were written only a few months later, so they should be taken into account.
The first surprise is to read that Keith had jammed with Jerry & Bill at the Keystone. This seems to have entirely slipped Donna’s memory! Is it possible there was a “lost” Jerry & Keith jam at the Keystone sometime in September ’71?
(Perhaps someone mixed up the Keystone and the rehearsal space – either way, Jerry & Bill jammed with Keith before the rest of the band did.)
It’s also a curious detail that Keith initially got with the Dead “to work out some tunes.” This is frustratingly vague – it may mean nothing; or it may mean that the initial intention was not to actually join the Dead.
Keith confirms that no time passed between meeting and playing: “a couple of days later…” This is even briefer than in Donna’s account!

This brings up the question of just which was the Keystone show where Keith & Donna met Garcia. He had a couple shows with Saunders in this month:
Tuesday, Aug 31
Thursday, Sept 16
The 16th has been considered the most likely date, since it’s closest to Keith’s first rehearsals. Note that Pigpen went into the hospital the next day. Donna remembered the Dead rehearsal being scheduled for “the following Sunday,” but the Dead canceled and only Jerry came. I have to think that, if it was Sunday the 19th, due to the sudden turmoil of Pigpen’s illness, it seems unlikely Jerry & Bill would have jammed with anyone that day. (It also may explain why Donna had a hard time reaching Jerry on the phone that week, though there doesn’t seem enough time for multiple phone calls.)
But note: the jerrysite lists the New Riders playing the Friends & Relations Hall in San Francisco on Sept 17-19, which wouldn’t preclude daytime rehearsals. And Keith did say he played with Garcia just a couple days after meeting him.
Or, if Donna’s memory is right, possibly Sunday the 26th was the first day Keith played with Jerry. This seems superhuman, though – it means his first day with the full Dead would have been the 27th. Our first rehearsal tape comes from the 28th, and it by no means sounds like Keith’s second day with the band. In fact, it sounds like he’s already settled in. (Not only that, it would mean they lost no time in taping rehearsals with the new guy, in fact starting immediately. Pretty speedy, for the Dead!)

So while it’s possible that Keith only started playing with the Dead near the end of the month, I think it’s also possible that he’d met Garcia on 8/31, and perhaps even jammed with him & Kreutzmann a time or two at Keystone Korner; and rehearsals may have started earlier than we think. The Dead may have been considering a new keyboard player even before Pigpen succumbed, and if Keith had already been playing with Garcia informally, their next candidate was right in front of them. (We don’t know how poor Pigpen’s health was in early September, but the Dead may have been aware before 9/17 that he was in decline.)
Or perhaps the Dead initially saw Keith as a temporary stand-in, a Hornsby-like figure until Pigpen could be eased back in. It would’ve become obvious pretty soon, though, that Keith was born to play with the Dead.
Or, the traditional story could be true: the Dead suddenly discovered after the 17th that they needed a new player; Garcia met one that very week, and they snatched him up immediately; and he learned all their songs in a week or less. Serendipity in action…

A closer listen may reveal more, but for now it sounds to me like there is not one attempt to teach Keith a single new song in these rehearsal tapes, only practiced run-throughs of already-learned songs. Very few songs even stumble or break down. At least when they rolled the tapes, Keith was ready to go on every song. This suggests that at the least, there were more than one or two days of rehearsal before these tapes were made.
Admittedly, Keith was quite familiar with the Dead’s music before playing with them; also, some of these songs were as new to the Dead as they were to Keith!
Lesh was quite impressed with Keith: “He was so brilliant at the beginning. That guy had it all, he could play anything… It’s like he came forth fully grown. He didn’t have to work his way into it.”
Lesh wrote in his book that in the first rehearsal, “all through the afternoon we played a whole raft of Grateful Dead tunes, old and new. That whole day, Keith never put a foot (or a finger) wrong. Even though he’d never played any Grateful Dead tunes before…[he] picked up the songs practically the first time through…everything he played fit perfectly in the spaces between [our] parts.”
Kreutzmann later told Blair Jackson, “I loved his playing. I remember when we auditioned him. Jerry asked him to come down to our old studio and the two of us threw every curveball we could, but he was right on top of every improvised change. We just danced right along on top. That’s when I knew he’d be great for the band. He was so inventive – he played some jazz stuff and free music that was just incredible. He had a heart of music.”
Manager Jon McIntire remembered when he first heard about Keith: “I saw Garcia and asked him what it was about, and he shook his head, very amazed, and said, ‘Well, this guy came along and said he was our piano player. And he was.'”

Surprisingly to anyone who ever saw him, Keith said in ’72 that “what I’ve contributed to the band as a whole is an added amount of energy which they needed, for my taste… I have a super amount of energy. I’m just a wired-up person and I relate to music super-energetically… The part of their music which I played fit in perfectly, like a part of a puzzle.”

It’s notable that Keith plays both piano and organ equally during the rehearsals. (Possibly the first instrument he played with Garcia was the organ, though I don’t think Keith had any experience with it; at any rate, organ was the Dead’s first choice for many of the new songs.) Over the course of the tour, though, he gradually dropped the organ altogether, and played it only rarely thereafter. When he is on piano during these rehearsals, the honky-tonk sound from many fall ’71 shows is very clear.

Our tapes come from several days – they’re cassette copies with variable mixes and shifty sound quality. (Note that on some tracks Keith can hardly be heard, being too low in the mix.)
http://archive.org/details/gd71-09-29.sbd.cousinit.16891.sbeok.shnf – Keith mostly on organ
http://archive.org/details/gd71-09-30.sbd.cousinit.18109.sbeok.shnf – Keith mostly on piano
http://archive.org/details/gd71-10-01.sbd.rehearsal.cousinit.16896.sbefail.shnf – very little Keith can be heard
http://archive.org/details/gd71-09-xx.sbd.unknown.16897.sbeok.shnf – compilation; Keith mixed up on some tracks
http://archive.org/details/gd1971-09-29.unsurpassed-masters-vol4-vol6.116951.flac16 – bootleg comp; different mixes, sometimes very trebley, but Keith comes out more (for instance Brokedown #2, where he takes over)

The Keith highlight is the first few tracks of 9/30, with Keith in full barrelhouse mode. It’s also interesting to hear him on organ on songs like Jack Straw, Tennessee Jed & Truckin’ on 9/29. (There’s also an oddly assertive moment before Cold Rain & Snow on the compilation, where Keith channels Keith Jarrett for a little solo riffing.)
There are almost no jams here, just straight songs (there is a short, interesting band jam on 10/1, and a rehearsal of the Uncle John’s jam on 9/29). I would guess there must have been more rehearsals over the next couple weeks (they had to have tried out some of the ‘deep’ jams), but no more tapes have come forth. Perhaps the Dead did not bother recording more improvisational jams.

We know Garcia gave Keith a batch of live tapes that had been recorded at the August shows, so Keith would also have been able to listen & practice the songs at home before his 10/19/71 live debut. Not that he did!
From a note on the Dick’s Picks 35 “Houseboat Tapes”: “In the late summer of 1971, just before Keith Godchaux began rehearsals with the Dead, Garcia handed him a big box of tapes and said, “Here, this is our most recent tour. Learn our music.” The irony was that Donna Jean doubts mightily Keith ever bothered to listen to them – he’d never listened to the Dead all that much before he auditioned… In any case, he left the tapes on his parents’ houseboat in Alameda, and there they stayed.”
In fact, in one interview with Lemieux it was speculated that Keith never even took the reels out of their box. But it makes sense – when you can rehearse with the band each day, there’s little need to check out their tapes.

So Pigpen stayed at home until December, while Keith went out and surprised Dead audiences. (Some were thrilled, others dismayed.) This was the second time Pigpen had been replaced by another player; but he probably took it in stride, as he had more serious things to worry about. He was still eager to rejoin the Dead, though, and went back on tour perhaps sooner than was wise. Lesh later felt guilty about this: “It would have been better for him if we’d just canceled the tour and let him recover all his strength at his own pace… It was agreed that Pig would rejoin the band when he felt up to it. Without realizing it, we put a lot of pressure on him to hurry up and get better.”
That was the band’s pattern, though, as the future would reveal – they wouldn’t cancel a tour no matter who was dead or dying. (And though no one knew it, Pigpen was likely beyond recovery by that point anyway.) Though he didn’t necessarily live for the road, Pigpen’s identity was bound up with the band, and he lashed himself to their mast as long as he could, whatever the cost to himself.
He would not be alone. The years on tour wouldn’t be kind to Keith either – indeed, the damage Dead keyboardists inflicted on themselves would become well-known – but Keith started out feeling cosmically optimistic. “The Dead’s music is absolutely 100% positive influence. When I met them, I knew these were people I could trust with my head. They would never do anything which would affect me negatively… They are righteous people.”

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Pigpen McKernan 3/1973

pigpen-janisPigpen McKernan 3/1973 (27) was born on September 8, 1945 in San Bruno, CA. He came from Irish ancestry, and his father, Phil McKernan, was an R&B and blues disc jockey, who has been reported to have been one of the first white DJs on KDIA (later renamed KMKY), then a black radio station, by several sources. Other sources place him at Berkeley station, KRE (later renamed KBLX-FM). Ronald grew up with African American friends and enjoyed black music and culture. As a youth, he taught himself blues piano, guitar and harmonica and developed a biker culture image.

McKernan was a participant in the predecessor groups leading to the formation of the Grateful Dead, beginning with the Zodiacs and Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions. Bob Weir and Bill Kreutzmann were added and the band evolved into the Warlocks. McKernan grew up heavily influenced by African-American music, particularly the blues, and enjoyed listening to his father’s collection of records and taught himself how to play harmonica and piano. He began socializing around the San Francisco Bay Area, becoming friends with Jerry Garcia. After the pair had played in various folk and jug bands, McKernan suggested they form an electric group, which became the Grateful Dead.Around 1965, McKernan urged the rest of the Warlocks to switch to electric instruments. Around this time Phil Lesh joined, and they became the Grateful Dead.

McKernan was the band’s original frontman and played harmonica and electric organ, but Garcia and bassist Phil Lesh’s influences on the band became increasingly stronger as they embraced psychedelic rock. McKernan struggled to keep up with the changing music, causing the group to hire keyboardist Tom Constanten, with McKernan’s contributions essentially limited to vocals, harmonica, and percussion from November 1968 to January 1970. He continued to be a frontman in concert for some numbers, including his interpretations of Bobby Bland’s “Turn On Your Love Light” and the Rascals’ “Good Lovin'”.

 While his friends were taking LSD, marijuana and other psychedelics, McKernan preferred alcoholic beverages such as Thunderbird and Southern Comfort. While a frontman, he steadily added more signature tunes to the Dead’s repertoire, including some that lasted for the remainder of their live performance career such as “Turn On Your Love Light” and “In the Midnight Hour.” Continue reading Pigpen McKernan 3/1973