The Black and White Symphony ball is certainly being revived with a blast. The Grateful Dead, one of the world's top rock groups, will play at the March 15 dance that will be a benefit for the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra.
The Symphony Orchestra will play for those who like to waltz at the Sheraton-Palace; Ernie Heckscher's band will play on Nob Hill; his son, Earl Heckscher, and his orchestra in another hotel, while the Country Weather, an East Bay rock group, will alternate with the Grateful Dead.
The last time the Dead played for a society party was the debut dance Sept. 2, 1966, of Ayn and Lynn Mattei at the Hillsborough showplace, La Dolphine, which their grandparents, the Albert C. Matteis, were renting at the time.
It remains to be seen how much dancing there will be to the Grateful Dead. Like other rock groups of late, they present electronic concerts and audiences generally sit on the floor and listen instead of dancing. (Takes old- timers back to the '30s and '40s when people didn't dance, just crowded around the bandstand and listened to those sentimental songs.)
Bob Weir, the son of the Fred Weirs, is the group's rhythm guitarist, and you can expect this Atherton family to concentrate on the Grateful Dead's locale during the lively evening that starts at 9 and continues until 2 a.m.
The ball marks the first time a noted rock group has performed for the Symphony Association, although the Opera Guild had the Jefferson Airplane play at its 1966 Fol de Rol. Reception was mixed -- but the ladies of the Guild feel now that perhaps they were just a little ahead of the times.
(by Frances Moffatt, from the "Who's Who" column, San Francisco Chronicle, 16 January 1969)
* * *
Except for the rock band that may be nicknamed the Ungrateful Dead, Saturday night's revival of the Black and White Symphony Ball was a big, beautiful party enjoyed by more than 2,000 dance-happy people who rode shuttle buses to and from four of the City's major hotels.
Party-goers were short-changed at the Hilton, touted in advance as the place where the action would be. ... The Dead, under contract to play two one- hour sets, played only one.
Rock Scully, manager of the Dead, blamed the problem on the fact that the group had great difficulty in setting up the sound equipment and that there was no liason between them and either the symphony or the ball committee.
As to reports that members of the Jefferson Airplane were planning to join them for the last set, Scully said this was true, but that "there weren't any tickets left" for them, so the guards wouldn't let them in.
However, the guards at the Hilton's Imperial Ballroom did admit a fantastic-looking crowd during the evening -- all of whom were holding the $17.50 tickets.
Some who identified themselves as "members of the family of the Grateful Dead," were children dressed as angels, others were adults in various guises - - clowns, nuns, monks, toy soldiers, convicts, you-name-it.
This sight, plus an enormous light show operated by at least a dozen young people would have blown the minds of party-goers the last time the Black and White was given in 1965.
But most San Franciscans are used to Rock Culture, and the costume look was carried out by plenty of socialites who wore every conceivable combination of black and white -- from Mrs. Kenneth Monteagle's floor-length white skirt with black bodice to Anita (Mrs. Paul) Fay's black and white harlequin pantsuit.
(by Frances Moffatt, from the "Who's Who" column, San Francisco Chronicle, 17 March 1969)
https://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/CHRONICLE-CLASSIC-WHO-S-WHO-2805668.php
* * *
ON THE TRAIL OF THE B&W (excerpt)
It didn't take any effort at all for a group of young people - most of them students at UC's Berkeley campus - to bridge the generation gap and just have a ball at Saturday night's Black and White Ball.
They got their evening off to a gala start by attending a party at the Hilton in the suite held by Mr. and Mrs. Fred Weir for the evening.
The Weirs' pretty daughter Wendy acted as hostess for her friends. Her brother Bob, the lead guitarist for the Greatful Dead, which held sway at the Hilton, had some of his more colorful friends around before he had to excuse himself and join the band.
The girls, many of them Alpha Omicron Pi sorority sisters at Cal, were all appropriately dressed in black and white. [ . . . ]
When 9 o'clock rolled around, heralding the start of the ball, the crowd at the party got restless and ready to have at it. They piled on one of the shuttle buses and headed towards the Mark Hopkins.
"Let's flame," was their battle cry for fun. [ . . . ]
The straight, pump handle beat of Ernie Heckscher in the Peacock Court didn't cramp the group's hip style and they all took to the dance floor for a couple of turns.
But soon it was back to the bus and on to the St. Francis. Someone passed around a flask of bourbon.
Still keeping up with the younger generation, we arrived at last in the Imperial Ballroom in time for the Dead's last set.
No one was tired and at 2 a.m. when the ballroom lights went up, the Weir group was the last there.
That wasn't the end of the evening by any means. It was back up to the Weirs' suite, then on to Berkeley for an early morning breakfast.
Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda couldn't have set a better pace.
(by Virginia Westover, from the San Francisco Chronicle, 17 March 1969)
Thanks to Dave Davis.
* * *
ONE THING AFTER ANOTHER (excerpt)
At the Hilton end of the Black & White Ball, the Grateful Dead, the pioneer S.F. rock group, was making a terrible racket. Jerry Garcia, blackbearded as Smokey the Bear, screeching his guitar up to 130 decibels, louder than a jet engine, the two drummers flailing away and the "Angels of the Dead" - the five little daughters of the group - swaying in the background, wearing white robes, looking like swinging seraphim. Will they be stone deaf, the Grateful Deaf, by the time they're 15? "No, because we never never stand in front of Jerry's speaker."
After the gig, Jerry Garcia was depressed. "We sounded terrible," he lamented, rubbing his thick black beard. "Couldn't get the feel of the room. It was like playing in a cocktail lounge. We wanted to do a good job tonight - this is our home town, after all - but we've played better out on the road after five nights of no sleep. Too bad. But say, did you see all those people out on the floor dancing? Having fun? That part was good. I wish the kids at the Fillmore, who never dance, could have seen that."
With him was Mountain Girl, the ex-playmate of Ken Kesey. Fresh-faced, shining-eyed, apple-cheeked - the most beautiful girl at the Black & White Ball.
As Garcia walked away, a society matron followed him with her eyes and said, "Oh, it talks, does it?" Yeah, it talks. "What in the world do you find to SAY to people like that?" she asked. I couldn't find anything to say to her, so I left.
(by Herb Caen, from the San Francisco Chronicle, 18 March 1969)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mattt317/6303481756/sizes/l/in/photostream/
(This picture also includes a rare poster for the Black & White Symphony Ball, which calls the Dead "one of the world's top rock groups" and says they will be "alternating with Country Weather," another SF rock group whose involvement has been forgotten.)
* * *
We were hired to play at the 1969 Black and White Ball, an annual benefit extravaganza for the San Francisco Symphony. The original idea was to dress up in those black and white striped prisoner outfits made famous in the old time movies, but that proved impracticable. The ones we settled on weren't too shabby, though - Jerry was a pirate, Mickey was Zorro, and I had an 18th-century bell-ringer costume complete with three-cornered hat. All this in black and white. It would have been a smashing success, if only the PA system could have been ready a few hours sooner. Like, by curtain time.
In the preparatory meetings with the Symphony people, Phil and I suggested the possibility of a musical collaboration between the band and the orchestra... They all but laughed in our faces.
(excerpt from Tom Constanten's book Between Rock and Hard Places, 1992)
http://archive.org/details/gd69-03-15.sbd.kaplan.28798.sbeok.flacf
Jun 8, 2013
February 27, 1969: Fillmore West
A DELIGHTFUL SHOW AT FILLMORE WEST
This past weekend's show at Fillmore West was one of the most enjoyable combinations of various musical strains that I've had the pleasure of hearing in some time.
The program the night I saw it included Pentangle, the British group whose album "Sweet Child" (Reprise 2RS 6334) is such a delight; The Grateful Dead, Shades of Joy, the Sir Douglas group and a juggler.
That's right. A juggler, Jim Rinehart, who has appeared numerous times at the hungry i, completely delighted the crowd and may very well have found an entirely new audience for himself. If he will now drop his corny night club rap with which he accompanies his dazzling juggling, the Fillmore audience (and its counterparts throughout the country) will love him.
The thing that turned me on musically about this show, however, aside from the excellence of the musicians themselves, was the marvelous mixture of influences and styles that were included.
Pentangle, as those who are familiar with its album know, does a wild variety of things, from Charles Mingus tunes to versions of old British folk songs. The group is acoustic, the guitars being amplified but not electric. There are two guitars, John Renbourn and Bert Jansch; a bassist (upright, not electric) Danny Thompson; a drummer, Terry Cox; and a girl, Jacqui McShee, who has a beautiful voice.
The guitars and the bass are voiced particularly interestingly and are played so beautifully that when they are heard over the loudspeakers there is no distortion, just a huge guitar sound. Jansch and Renbourn did a guitar duet, "No Exit," which was a delicate and fascinating blending of the two instruments. Thompson was featured on a bass solo which was really impressive, and Jacqui McShee's voice throughout, both in her solo numbers (she sang "No More, My Lord" from the album) and in harmony with the other voices, was beautiful. The whole thing is done in an exquisitely tasteful manner and includes considerable jazz influences in an unobtrusive way.
Shades of Joy is a local group (a spin-off of several other local units) which features wild free form modern jazz saxophone playing by Martin Fierro, a roaring R&B rhythm section and two voices, Martin and Millie Foster who is much better in this role than as a pure jazz singer. It's an exciting and interesting group.
Sir Douglas is really delightful. He got everybody dancing for once (just as Pentangle had all the musicians listening) doing his standards "Mendocino" and "She's About a Mover" and merging his regular group with some of the members of Shades of Joy.
It is rather a wild experience to see a group featuring a saxophone soloist who looks like the leader of a Third World Student picket line accompanied by a drummer who looks like he just got in from the cattle drive. Is there still hope?
The Grateful Dead are the Grateful Dead, which is to say they are absolutely wonderful. They have one of the most individual sounds of any band and its tone is set by the soft butter feeling of Jerry Garcia's guitar lead. They featured Pig Pen on the blues and they did the long side from their last album, "Anthem to the Sun," which is called "That's It for the Other One."
Despite some technical problems on stage they were warm, mellow and moving, and their voices were much more impressive than they have been at times in the past.
To hear their long instrumental passages with Garcia and Phil Lesh (on bass) weaving lines above the tremendous rhythms of the two drummers, Bill Sommers and Mickey Hart, is a joy. Tom Constaten, a pianist who studied at Mills when Lesh was there, is now with the group and Pig Pen occasionally plays conga drums.
It was - all in all - a truly delightful evening.
(by Ralph Gleason, from the "On The Town" column, San Francisco Chronicle, March 3 1969)
Thanks to Lost Live Dead -
See http://lostlivedead.blogspot.com/2011/03/february-28-1969-fillmore-west-grateful.html
And for Pentangle's effect on Garcia: http://lostlivedead.blogspot.com/2010/03/fillmore-west-february-27-march-2-1969.html
See also this recent memoir of the 3/1/69 first set, with a somewhat different lineup: http://cryptdev.blogspot.com/2010/10/finally-grateful-dead-fillmore-west.html
This past weekend's show at Fillmore West was one of the most enjoyable combinations of various musical strains that I've had the pleasure of hearing in some time.
The program the night I saw it included Pentangle, the British group whose album "Sweet Child" (Reprise 2RS 6334) is such a delight; The Grateful Dead, Shades of Joy, the Sir Douglas group and a juggler.
That's right. A juggler, Jim Rinehart, who has appeared numerous times at the hungry i, completely delighted the crowd and may very well have found an entirely new audience for himself. If he will now drop his corny night club rap with which he accompanies his dazzling juggling, the Fillmore audience (and its counterparts throughout the country) will love him.
The thing that turned me on musically about this show, however, aside from the excellence of the musicians themselves, was the marvelous mixture of influences and styles that were included.
Pentangle, as those who are familiar with its album know, does a wild variety of things, from Charles Mingus tunes to versions of old British folk songs. The group is acoustic, the guitars being amplified but not electric. There are two guitars, John Renbourn and Bert Jansch; a bassist (upright, not electric) Danny Thompson; a drummer, Terry Cox; and a girl, Jacqui McShee, who has a beautiful voice.
The guitars and the bass are voiced particularly interestingly and are played so beautifully that when they are heard over the loudspeakers there is no distortion, just a huge guitar sound. Jansch and Renbourn did a guitar duet, "No Exit," which was a delicate and fascinating blending of the two instruments. Thompson was featured on a bass solo which was really impressive, and Jacqui McShee's voice throughout, both in her solo numbers (she sang "No More, My Lord" from the album) and in harmony with the other voices, was beautiful. The whole thing is done in an exquisitely tasteful manner and includes considerable jazz influences in an unobtrusive way.
Shades of Joy is a local group (a spin-off of several other local units) which features wild free form modern jazz saxophone playing by Martin Fierro, a roaring R&B rhythm section and two voices, Martin and Millie Foster who is much better in this role than as a pure jazz singer. It's an exciting and interesting group.
Sir Douglas is really delightful. He got everybody dancing for once (just as Pentangle had all the musicians listening) doing his standards "Mendocino" and "She's About a Mover" and merging his regular group with some of the members of Shades of Joy.
It is rather a wild experience to see a group featuring a saxophone soloist who looks like the leader of a Third World Student picket line accompanied by a drummer who looks like he just got in from the cattle drive. Is there still hope?
The Grateful Dead are the Grateful Dead, which is to say they are absolutely wonderful. They have one of the most individual sounds of any band and its tone is set by the soft butter feeling of Jerry Garcia's guitar lead. They featured Pig Pen on the blues and they did the long side from their last album, "Anthem to the Sun," which is called "That's It for the Other One."
Despite some technical problems on stage they were warm, mellow and moving, and their voices were much more impressive than they have been at times in the past.
To hear their long instrumental passages with Garcia and Phil Lesh (on bass) weaving lines above the tremendous rhythms of the two drummers, Bill Sommers and Mickey Hart, is a joy. Tom Constaten, a pianist who studied at Mills when Lesh was there, is now with the group and Pig Pen occasionally plays conga drums.
It was - all in all - a truly delightful evening.
(by Ralph Gleason, from the "On The Town" column, San Francisco Chronicle, March 3 1969)
Thanks to Lost Live Dead -
See http://lostlivedead.blogspot.com/2011/03/february-28-1969-fillmore-west-grateful.html
And for Pentangle's effect on Garcia: http://lostlivedead.blogspot.com/2010/03/fillmore-west-february-27-march-2-1969.html
See also this recent memoir of the 3/1/69 first set, with a somewhat different lineup: http://cryptdev.blogspot.com/2010/10/finally-grateful-dead-fillmore-west.html
Jun 7, 2013
September 2, 1968: Sky River Rock Festival
SKY RIVER ROCK GROOVE
"The best freaking scene ever," said one musician. The Sky River Rock Festival and Lighter Than Air Show was not dampened by the rain that fell over Labor Day weekend, but made creative use of it. And the proceeds went to an assortment of American Indian and Black organizations.
The Friends of American Indian Rights, the principal Indian beneficiary, the Central Area Committee for Peace and Improvement, and the Black Student Unions of the Pacific Northwest were the principal organizations for which the musicians gave their benefit performances. Some of the proceeds are also going to local institutions for alienated youth, such as the Open Door Clinic and the Seattle Free University.
The music started at 9:30 on Saturday morning and ran till after midnight. Sunday's show ran from nine in the morning till five on Monday and Monday's show was of necessity a little disorganized, but after giving everybody four hours to sleep, the festival wound up with one more eighteen-hour slug of music.
Some forty acts, rock, blues and folk, with a few theater acts such as the Congress of Wonders and the S.F. Mime Troupe, were on stage for the marathon event before an audience of around 15,000. Spectators had trooped in from all over to Betty Nelson's Organic Raspberry Farm in Sultan, Washington (pop. 960), fifty miles outside of Seattle, not to be disappointed.
On Saturday it started to rain. All the less reason to forbid the audience to set up their tents in the field of the natural amphitheater. Soon there was a vast modern-day replica of a Civil War encampment, and the clouds of smoke were immense. The police kept their distance, like decent, law-abiding, privacy-respecting public servants, and everybody was happy.
While the audience was gathered like a great camp meeting in the field, the musicans - all 175 of them - were quartered in the three floors of the Camlin Hotel. Musicians, it is well known, are musicians because they like to play music, and the concentration of musical trips was incredible.
And who was there? Santana, Dino Valenti, It's a Beautiful Day, James Cotton, the New Lost City Ramblers, Kaleidoscope, the Youngbloods, Country Joe and the Fish, Phoenix, John Fahey, Mark Spoelstra, H. P. Lovecraft, Big Mama Mae Thornton. The Grateful Dead played a magnificent set for their last appearance with the personnel of their recordings.
By Monday the field was soggy with rain, but spirits were high. A Mud Cult arose in the principal puddle, improvising Mud Rituals and Mud Dances. The baptism consisted of taking long run and belly-flopping (with your clothes on) in the mud, after which you would be covered with mud and embraced by other cultists.
The Mud People also made half a dozen Charges of the Mud Brigade through the Civil War Encampment. Their Mud Chant went something like, "mud (stomp) mud (stomp) we like mud." Mud was, like they say in ads, Happening, so a couple of dozen fans were swinging with it.
Continuity and saccharine rap between acts were provided by Buddha (not the B., you understand, but a San Francisco underground bartender and former KMPX strikebreaker who goes by the name). His longwindedness was one factor in the concerts' running overtime. Musicians got into the habit of telling each other when they were due on stage in terms such as, "We're on at 4:30-plus-Buddha-rap." "The only crummy ointment on the fly," said one.
The kind of festival it was, when a young man wearing nothing but beads got up on stage during Big Mama's set and started dancing in the lightshow, it was not thought strange. Except perhaps by Big Mama, who had registered dismay when she first saw the Encampment that was to be her audience.
As Big Mama turned to leave the stage, the young man found himself facing the microphone, and impulsively said, "Hey, you know what? I just had a real flash. We're all Jesus Christ," and everybody applauded. Then Big Mama came back to the mike and said, "Wow! Wasn't that weird! I'd heard about it, but I never thought I'd see it!"
There was also a great scheduled balloon ascent, and the balloon was lots of fun, everybody played with it the first day. Then on the second day, the balloon went ahead and ascended, but paying no heed to human schedules. And there was a pig, some sort of personage in the festival. He was already a Mud Cultist from in front.
Many a festival would have been ruined by rain, but not a perfect festival, a festival with lots of festival in it. That's what Sky River was, and Lighter Than Air, too. Many thanks to John Chambless, director, and his assistant Stan Maginnis. And especially to Betty Nelson and her organic berries.
(from Rolling Stone, October 12 1968)
* * *
BLUES OUTCLASSES ROCK AT SKY RIVER FESTIVAL
Thirty-five rock bands, numerous blues and folk artists and a jazz group, several acres of mud, two dramatic units, 15,000 young people, and an indefinable air of freedom remain in the memory after Labor Day weekend at Sultan, Wash.
The occasion was the Sky River Rock Festival, held Aug. 31 through Sept. 2 on Betty Nelson's Organic Raspberry Farm, 40 miles northeast of Seattle in the foothills of the Cascade mountains.
The comments most often heard backstage were "We never played a better set" or "They never grooved more." This was said of or by Kaleidoscope, Willie Mae (Big Mama) Thornton, the Grateful Dead, Country Joe and the Fish, the New Lost City Ramblers, the Floating Bridge, It's a Beautiful Day, and the Byron Pope Ensemble - to name a few.
The festival elicited the interest of Time and local newspapers, who concentrated on the thousands of turned-on spectators doing whatever they liked. While this was an obvious feature of the three-day event, perhaps the musical side could also have been described. In fact, the two aspects were intimately connected. There was a degree of interaction between audience and performers too often lacking in the big halls or in the jazz clubs.
The pinnacle of the festival was reached in a soulful blues session led by Big Mama Thornton, accompanied by James Cotton on mouth harp, Ron (Pigpen) McKernan (of the Grateful Dead) on organ, one of the Dead's two drummers, and a guitarist. The session, late in the afternoon of the final day, seemed to define blues playing in a way that many of the rock groups had only been able to approach.
The Grateful Dead, who preceded Big Mama and were very, very good in their usual bag, sounded square by comparison. Behind Miss Thornton, Pigpen comped and comped and comped - almost no solos.
The scene was loose. A young man who earlier in the day had discarded his clothes jumped on the stand during the session and stood by the singer, who told the audience, "He's doing his thing, and I dig him doing it."
Saturday, Aug. 31, opened with sunshine and about 10,000 admissions, some through the woods but most through the gate. In addition to the large bandstand with 1,000 clean watts of amplification, there was a smaller nearby stand for folk singers and the San Francisco Mime Troupe. A large arts and crafts sale area was set up, along with the usual food stands, a soul food booth, and an Indian salmon barbecue. Wet ground was soon trampled into mud, and many listeners set up camps in the upper meadow and hillside. The scene was reminiscent of Civil War photographs.
A summary of the most outstanding events of various types follows:
Rock: Country Joe and the Fish (wild performance with conflicts between drummer Chicken Hirsch and others that were resolved dramatically and musically); Kaleidoscope (mixed bag of straight blues, Near East pieces with great oud playing, and flamenco numbers); Floating Bridge (the best local group, playing hard blues, with lead guitarist Rich Dangle); Country Weather (a very groovy Bay Area rock band, better than many on record); Anonymous Artists of America (another good Bay Area rock unit); Juggernaut (Seattle blues-rock quartet with some soul); It's a Beautiful Day (closed the festival at 3 a.m. Tuesday; great electric violinist).
Blues: The James Cotton Blues Band from Chicago; in a class by itself, at least at this festival. Other blues groups included Santana and the Frumious Bandersnatch, both from California.
Jazz: The Byron Pope Ensemble was the only jazz unit, as the term is loosely defined. Altoist-piccoloist - composer Pope came from Canada and is beginning a year's term as Visiting Lecturer in Music at the University of Washington. In his quartet, which projected his avant garde jazz competently, were pianist Gwint Coleman, bassist Alphonse LaRue Wynn, and drummer Steve Solder.
Folk: Alice Stuart Thomas (country blues); Mark Spoelstra; Dr. Humbead's New Tranquility String Band (traditional country); New Lost City Ramblers (good bluegrass); All Men Joy; Billy Roberts; Ramblin' Jack Elliott.
Other bags: A new San Francisco drama group, the Congress of Wonders, blew some minds. Three young hippies in street clothes, they presented a different play each day in a way that made the Mime Troupe appear old-fashioned.
Saturday night the rains came, and Sunday dawned deep in mud. But the atmosphere was established, and some of the best performances happened that night. Monday dawned clear and everyone dried out. Monday evening was damp and foggy, but nobody cared by then. There was just too much happening.
The Sky River Rock Festival and Lighter Than Air Fair, to spell out its full name, was organized by New American Community Inc., with the idea that proceeds of the benefit would go to American Indian and black causes. However, because of planning that "got out of control," according to festival director John Chambless, bad weather, and infiltration through the woods, gate receipts didn't quite meet the nut.
Chambless, whose regular occupation is professor of philosophy at the University of Washington, said the festival was a musical and spiritual success, and will be repeated at a better location next year.
We've never heard so much good music in so short a time.
(by Lowell Richards, from Downbeat magazine, October 31 1968)
Thanks to http://jgmf.blogspot.com/2011/03/gd19680902-sky-river-rock-festival-and.html for the scan & some memories of the festival.
See also http://www.historylink.org/index.cfm?DisplayPage=output.cfm&File_Id=5425 for another account of the festival, based on Walt Crowley's memoir.
http://archive.org/details/gd1968-09-02.sbd.miller.115592.flac16
"The best freaking scene ever," said one musician. The Sky River Rock Festival and Lighter Than Air Show was not dampened by the rain that fell over Labor Day weekend, but made creative use of it. And the proceeds went to an assortment of American Indian and Black organizations.
The Friends of American Indian Rights, the principal Indian beneficiary, the Central Area Committee for Peace and Improvement, and the Black Student Unions of the Pacific Northwest were the principal organizations for which the musicians gave their benefit performances. Some of the proceeds are also going to local institutions for alienated youth, such as the Open Door Clinic and the Seattle Free University.
The music started at 9:30 on Saturday morning and ran till after midnight. Sunday's show ran from nine in the morning till five on Monday and Monday's show was of necessity a little disorganized, but after giving everybody four hours to sleep, the festival wound up with one more eighteen-hour slug of music.
Some forty acts, rock, blues and folk, with a few theater acts such as the Congress of Wonders and the S.F. Mime Troupe, were on stage for the marathon event before an audience of around 15,000. Spectators had trooped in from all over to Betty Nelson's Organic Raspberry Farm in Sultan, Washington (pop. 960), fifty miles outside of Seattle, not to be disappointed.
On Saturday it started to rain. All the less reason to forbid the audience to set up their tents in the field of the natural amphitheater. Soon there was a vast modern-day replica of a Civil War encampment, and the clouds of smoke were immense. The police kept their distance, like decent, law-abiding, privacy-respecting public servants, and everybody was happy.
While the audience was gathered like a great camp meeting in the field, the musicans - all 175 of them - were quartered in the three floors of the Camlin Hotel. Musicians, it is well known, are musicians because they like to play music, and the concentration of musical trips was incredible.
And who was there? Santana, Dino Valenti, It's a Beautiful Day, James Cotton, the New Lost City Ramblers, Kaleidoscope, the Youngbloods, Country Joe and the Fish, Phoenix, John Fahey, Mark Spoelstra, H. P. Lovecraft, Big Mama Mae Thornton. The Grateful Dead played a magnificent set for their last appearance with the personnel of their recordings.
By Monday the field was soggy with rain, but spirits were high. A Mud Cult arose in the principal puddle, improvising Mud Rituals and Mud Dances. The baptism consisted of taking long run and belly-flopping (with your clothes on) in the mud, after which you would be covered with mud and embraced by other cultists.
The Mud People also made half a dozen Charges of the Mud Brigade through the Civil War Encampment. Their Mud Chant went something like, "mud (stomp) mud (stomp) we like mud." Mud was, like they say in ads, Happening, so a couple of dozen fans were swinging with it.
Continuity and saccharine rap between acts were provided by Buddha (not the B., you understand, but a San Francisco underground bartender and former KMPX strikebreaker who goes by the name). His longwindedness was one factor in the concerts' running overtime. Musicians got into the habit of telling each other when they were due on stage in terms such as, "We're on at 4:30-plus-Buddha-rap." "The only crummy ointment on the fly," said one.
The kind of festival it was, when a young man wearing nothing but beads got up on stage during Big Mama's set and started dancing in the lightshow, it was not thought strange. Except perhaps by Big Mama, who had registered dismay when she first saw the Encampment that was to be her audience.
As Big Mama turned to leave the stage, the young man found himself facing the microphone, and impulsively said, "Hey, you know what? I just had a real flash. We're all Jesus Christ," and everybody applauded. Then Big Mama came back to the mike and said, "Wow! Wasn't that weird! I'd heard about it, but I never thought I'd see it!"
There was also a great scheduled balloon ascent, and the balloon was lots of fun, everybody played with it the first day. Then on the second day, the balloon went ahead and ascended, but paying no heed to human schedules. And there was a pig, some sort of personage in the festival. He was already a Mud Cultist from in front.
Many a festival would have been ruined by rain, but not a perfect festival, a festival with lots of festival in it. That's what Sky River was, and Lighter Than Air, too. Many thanks to John Chambless, director, and his assistant Stan Maginnis. And especially to Betty Nelson and her organic berries.
(from Rolling Stone, October 12 1968)
* * *
BLUES OUTCLASSES ROCK AT SKY RIVER FESTIVAL
Thirty-five rock bands, numerous blues and folk artists and a jazz group, several acres of mud, two dramatic units, 15,000 young people, and an indefinable air of freedom remain in the memory after Labor Day weekend at Sultan, Wash.
The occasion was the Sky River Rock Festival, held Aug. 31 through Sept. 2 on Betty Nelson's Organic Raspberry Farm, 40 miles northeast of Seattle in the foothills of the Cascade mountains.
The comments most often heard backstage were "We never played a better set" or "They never grooved more." This was said of or by Kaleidoscope, Willie Mae (Big Mama) Thornton, the Grateful Dead, Country Joe and the Fish, the New Lost City Ramblers, the Floating Bridge, It's a Beautiful Day, and the Byron Pope Ensemble - to name a few.
The festival elicited the interest of Time and local newspapers, who concentrated on the thousands of turned-on spectators doing whatever they liked. While this was an obvious feature of the three-day event, perhaps the musical side could also have been described. In fact, the two aspects were intimately connected. There was a degree of interaction between audience and performers too often lacking in the big halls or in the jazz clubs.
The pinnacle of the festival was reached in a soulful blues session led by Big Mama Thornton, accompanied by James Cotton on mouth harp, Ron (Pigpen) McKernan (of the Grateful Dead) on organ, one of the Dead's two drummers, and a guitarist. The session, late in the afternoon of the final day, seemed to define blues playing in a way that many of the rock groups had only been able to approach.
The Grateful Dead, who preceded Big Mama and were very, very good in their usual bag, sounded square by comparison. Behind Miss Thornton, Pigpen comped and comped and comped - almost no solos.
The scene was loose. A young man who earlier in the day had discarded his clothes jumped on the stand during the session and stood by the singer, who told the audience, "He's doing his thing, and I dig him doing it."
Saturday, Aug. 31, opened with sunshine and about 10,000 admissions, some through the woods but most through the gate. In addition to the large bandstand with 1,000 clean watts of amplification, there was a smaller nearby stand for folk singers and the San Francisco Mime Troupe. A large arts and crafts sale area was set up, along with the usual food stands, a soul food booth, and an Indian salmon barbecue. Wet ground was soon trampled into mud, and many listeners set up camps in the upper meadow and hillside. The scene was reminiscent of Civil War photographs.
A summary of the most outstanding events of various types follows:
Rock: Country Joe and the Fish (wild performance with conflicts between drummer Chicken Hirsch and others that were resolved dramatically and musically); Kaleidoscope (mixed bag of straight blues, Near East pieces with great oud playing, and flamenco numbers); Floating Bridge (the best local group, playing hard blues, with lead guitarist Rich Dangle); Country Weather (a very groovy Bay Area rock band, better than many on record); Anonymous Artists of America (another good Bay Area rock unit); Juggernaut (Seattle blues-rock quartet with some soul); It's a Beautiful Day (closed the festival at 3 a.m. Tuesday; great electric violinist).
Blues: The James Cotton Blues Band from Chicago; in a class by itself, at least at this festival. Other blues groups included Santana and the Frumious Bandersnatch, both from California.
Jazz: The Byron Pope Ensemble was the only jazz unit, as the term is loosely defined. Altoist-piccoloist - composer Pope came from Canada and is beginning a year's term as Visiting Lecturer in Music at the University of Washington. In his quartet, which projected his avant garde jazz competently, were pianist Gwint Coleman, bassist Alphonse LaRue Wynn, and drummer Steve Solder.
Folk: Alice Stuart Thomas (country blues); Mark Spoelstra; Dr. Humbead's New Tranquility String Band (traditional country); New Lost City Ramblers (good bluegrass); All Men Joy; Billy Roberts; Ramblin' Jack Elliott.
Other bags: A new San Francisco drama group, the Congress of Wonders, blew some minds. Three young hippies in street clothes, they presented a different play each day in a way that made the Mime Troupe appear old-fashioned.
Saturday night the rains came, and Sunday dawned deep in mud. But the atmosphere was established, and some of the best performances happened that night. Monday dawned clear and everyone dried out. Monday evening was damp and foggy, but nobody cared by then. There was just too much happening.
The Sky River Rock Festival and Lighter Than Air Fair, to spell out its full name, was organized by New American Community Inc., with the idea that proceeds of the benefit would go to American Indian and black causes. However, because of planning that "got out of control," according to festival director John Chambless, bad weather, and infiltration through the woods, gate receipts didn't quite meet the nut.
Chambless, whose regular occupation is professor of philosophy at the University of Washington, said the festival was a musical and spiritual success, and will be repeated at a better location next year.
We've never heard so much good music in so short a time.
(by Lowell Richards, from Downbeat magazine, October 31 1968)
Thanks to http://jgmf.blogspot.com/2011/03/gd19680902-sky-river-rock-festival-and.html for the scan & some memories of the festival.
See also http://www.historylink.org/index.cfm?DisplayPage=output.cfm&File_Id=5425 for another account of the festival, based on Walt Crowley's memoir.
http://archive.org/details/gd1968-09-02.sbd.miller.115592.flac16
Jun 6, 2013
March 8, 1968: Melodyland, Anaheim
SAN FRANCISCO BANDS SHORTCHANGE ANAHEIM AUDIENCE
The Jefferson Airplane may be flying high with 'White Rabbit' and 'Somebody to Love' in constant play on the radio dial, but it seemed about to crash last Friday night when the band and "Friends" came into Melodyland, the former live theater-in-the-round opposite Disneyland in Anaheim.
A scowling Marty Balin left the stage three times during the group's hour-long performance, for all appearances angry, and failed to reappear for the finale. As the Jefferson Airplane's founder, male vocalist and chief songwriter, his absences threw the show off kilter, with members of the Orange County audience puzzled by the bizarre behavior.
Grace Slick, the band's much photographed "face," carried on, but at one point shrugged as Balin again left mid-song. She also commented that it had been a long time since she had seen so many "young guys in suits" among the date-night Melodyland audience.
With no backstage area at the venue, it was not possible to speak to anyone from the band for an explanation of Balin's behavior. They were in their cars and off the premises before anyone could ask for a comment.
The opening act in the "Jefferson Airplane and Friends" publicized show turned out to be the Grateful Dead, though they were not identified by name. The San Francisco band, now signed with Warner Bros., stepped onto the revolving stage without an introduction and played just two very long, mostly instrumental songs in its allotted 30 minutes, not bothering to identify either number by name.
As an audience member in an adjacent seat said at the close of the show, "Maybe we're just too conservative in Orange County for hip San Franciscans." Perhaps. Ed Ames, the Association with Wes Montgomery, and Pat Boone with the Mills Brothers will be appearing at Melodyland in May.
(by Bill Wasserzieher, from the Long Beach Press-Telegram, March 14 1968)
The Jefferson Airplane may be flying high with 'White Rabbit' and 'Somebody to Love' in constant play on the radio dial, but it seemed about to crash last Friday night when the band and "Friends" came into Melodyland, the former live theater-in-the-round opposite Disneyland in Anaheim.
A scowling Marty Balin left the stage three times during the group's hour-long performance, for all appearances angry, and failed to reappear for the finale. As the Jefferson Airplane's founder, male vocalist and chief songwriter, his absences threw the show off kilter, with members of the Orange County audience puzzled by the bizarre behavior.
Grace Slick, the band's much photographed "face," carried on, but at one point shrugged as Balin again left mid-song. She also commented that it had been a long time since she had seen so many "young guys in suits" among the date-night Melodyland audience.
With no backstage area at the venue, it was not possible to speak to anyone from the band for an explanation of Balin's behavior. They were in their cars and off the premises before anyone could ask for a comment.
The opening act in the "Jefferson Airplane and Friends" publicized show turned out to be the Grateful Dead, though they were not identified by name. The San Francisco band, now signed with Warner Bros., stepped onto the revolving stage without an introduction and played just two very long, mostly instrumental songs in its allotted 30 minutes, not bothering to identify either number by name.
As an audience member in an adjacent seat said at the close of the show, "Maybe we're just too conservative in Orange County for hip San Franciscans." Perhaps. Ed Ames, the Association with Wes Montgomery, and Pat Boone with the Mills Brothers will be appearing at Melodyland in May.
(by Bill Wasserzieher, from the Long Beach Press-Telegram, March 14 1968)
Spring/Summer 1968: The San Francisco Ballrooms
S.F. BALLROOM CIRCUIT GROWS
San Francisco, where the rock and roll dance concert originated, is rapidly becoming the hub of a national network of ballrooms and concert halls. The local scene is showing more signs not only of growth, but of health as well, than at any time in the past year, now supporting three full-time ballroom operations on the weekends, plus assorted other gigging.
The Fillmore East, Bill Graham's venture in New York, opened last month to local critical acclaim and popular success. "It's making waves ten feet high," according to one music industry-alist; "Looks like an enormous money-maker," said another. The opening night performance of Janis Joplin of Big Brother and the Holding Co. drew raves; the Doors were featured in a subsequent show. Despite rumors of moves to London and other places, Graham insisted, "I have no intention of franchising this operation. There will not be a Tucson Fillmore. I am not expanding after New York."
The Family Dog has reversed the downhill trend of its Denver branch after a shake-up in the police department there. Chet Helms has been devoting his full-time attention to the Denver Dog so Whitey Allen, late of Portland, is now running the show at the Avalon Ballroom where Family Dog dances are held in San Francisco. Allen is also responsible for coordinating operations with ballrooms in Portland, Oregon, Vancouver, B.C., and Anchorage, Alaska. "By working together and guaranteeing the bands four weeks of work, we can present better music than when we were going it alone at the Avalon," he said.
Ron Rakow, who helped put on the Great Northwest Tour of the Grateful Dead and Quicksilver Messenger Service, has leased the Carousel Ballroom near downtown San Francisco for a series of weekend dances that have so far featured the Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Chuck Berry, and Country Joe & The Fish. The Carousel holds substantially more people than the Fillmore or Avalon...and a lot more of them dance. The owners of the Carousel also run a chain of dance halls in England and on the Continent, and have reached an agreement with Rakow about using them for a tour of American rock bands.
(from Rolling Stone, April 27 1968)
* * *
The Grateful Dead and a group of other rock bands, including the Jefferson Airplane, have taken a lease on the old Carousel Ballroom on Market Street (formerly the El Patio) and beginning Friday night will run dances there regularly.
Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights the Airplane and the Dead will play there for dancing.
Next weekend, Chuck Berry and the Buffalo Springfield will appear.
The Carousel is owned by Bill Fuller, the Irish ballroom operator who has similar properties in Chicago, New York, Boston, London, Manchester, and throughout Ireland.
As part of the current arrangement, it is hoped to organize a European tour later this year with some of the San Francisco groups based on Fuller's ballrooms.
In another aspect of this band-oriented operation, the Grateful Dead, Steve Miller's Blues Band and other groups are forming their own publishing groups to be operated jointly.
(excerpt from Ralph Gleason's column, SF Chronicle, March 13 1968)
Courtesy of Lost Live Dead
* * *
At midnight Tuesday night it was a beautiful scene at the Carousel Ballroom. People came in off the street with late election news and inside there was a long jam session going on with all kinds of guitar players and saxophones and rhythm men and on the floor there was more dancing than I've seen anywhere in months.
Throughout the ballroom an outstanding feature was the peacefulness and the joy as a wondrous assortment of people relaxed. There were Hells Angels and hippies, many black people and many long-haired youth. It seemed for a moment like the hope of the future.
And then I went outside, got into the car and punched the radio button only to hear a voice saying "...when Senator Kennedy was shot tonight." And the terrible real world came crashing in on me again.
(excerpt from "Strung Between Dreams and Reality" by Ralph Gleason, SF Chronicle, June 7 1968)
Courtesy of jgmf.blogspot.com
* * *
FILLMORE SCENE MOVES TO NEW CAROUSEL HALL
The Fillmore Auditorium, of supergroup, lightshow and dance poster fame, ended its two-and-a-half year career as a fulltime rock hall on July 5. Bill Graham, the Fillmore's manager, is moving his scene to the old Carousel Ballroom, which recently became a well-known rock dancehall in its own right under the goodhearted but insufficiently professional ownership of Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead and some cronies. The Carousel will henceforth be known as the Fillmore West, to complement Graham's recently opened New York operation, the Fillmore East.
There were several reasons for Graham's move. The old 1500-capacity Fillmore was always overcrowded, for one. Graham usually booked big acts on prime nights not at the Fillmore, but at nearby Winterland, which has a capacity of 4200, though its dance floor is small. For another, the Fillmore is located in the Fillmore District, a Black ghetto, and the sporadic instances of harassment of patrons had become more frequent since the assassination of Martin Luther King, according to Graham. And finally, the Carousel is a more desirable hall, larger and more attractive and more accessible by public transportation.
The Carousel had been operated for several months by Headstone Productions, a corporation initially financed by a series of dances given by the Dead and the Airplane starting on St. Valentine's Day this year. The operation of the Carousel was marked by careless mismanagement in many details, although it was generally agreed that the feeling of the dances was good. On several occasions Headstone booked unwisely, paying high fees for low draws, and it was saddled with what Ralph Gleason has called "the stupidest lease in show business." The Free City Convention, a freakout with nude dancing, public grass-smoking and a "dirty" word ("cunt") on the marquee, started bringing an undesirable amount of police attention to the hall, and when Headstone fell several thousand dollars behind in its rent, landlord Bill Fuller opened his ears to Bill Graham.
Graham had started organizing dances as manager of the San Francisco Mime Troupe. The first Mime Troupe Benefit held at the Fillmore, on December 10, 1965, headlined Jefferson Airplane, the Great Society and John Handy. Graham's Fillmore dances began on a regular basis in March 1966, at first alternating weekends with the Family Dog. In the early days Graham had to overcome the reputation rock concerts had for violence, and the Fillmore happened to be one of the halls in town that would rent to him. Today, after innumerable hassles with civic authorities, he can point to two and a half years of dances without a major disruption.
Graham's lease on the Fillmore runs to March, 1973. He plans to put the hall at the disposal of the Fillmore community, at no profit to him, for Black-run political events and musical and theatrical productions. He has already contacted Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panthers, the Peace and Freedom Party and the Black Student Union. Graham emphasizes that the incidents of harassment of the dance patrons have never involved militant Blacks.
As for the new Fillmore West, Graham plans to remodel the stage and perhaps replace the satin ceiling. The Tuesday night musicians' jam session instituted under Headstone will be revived and one night a week will probably be set aside for "jamming" and rapping among local lightshow technicians. Graham also has hopes of establishing a "young political platform" and building the solidarity of the underground community. "Haight Street is a tragedy," he has said, "and it should be saved."
(from Rolling Stone, August 10 1968)
(Rolling Stone also printed a picture of the Carousel with its final marquee sign: NOTHING LASTS.)
* * *
History will show, I believe, that the San Francisco dance renaissance played a key role in the evolution of teen-age schlock-rock into music, as well as a key role in the social-cultural and political revolution in which we are involved.
The sheer existence of Bob Dylan, the Beatles and, to a lesser extent, the Rolling Stones opened the way for the logical expression of the forces that were frustrated, denied and also generated by the rock concert syndrome of the Cow Palace shows (i.e. the big, stageshow presentation of rock from Alan Freed to Murray the K to Tom Donahue).
The Byrds' gigs at Ciro's in Hollywood opened the last gate and it was obvious that dancing was a necessary thing. It was at this point that the San Francisco dance scene came into existence, created by necessity and provoked by the imagination of a group called the Family Dog (of which, at that time, Chet Helms was not a member). The Family Dog put on the first adult rock dances in San Francisco at the Longshoremen's Hall in October, 1965, with the Lovin' Spoonful, Jefferson Airplane, the Charlatans, the Warlocks (now the Grateful Dead), the Great Society and others.
This was before the first rock dances at the Fillmore and before the Trips Festival. At that time, Bill Graham was manager of the San Francisco Mime Troupe and the Mime Troupe was in its customary financial panic. They ran a benefit at their loft to which some of the rock bands came and played. This was in October, 1965, also. A second benefit in December for the Mime Troupe was staged at the Fillmore Auditorium, which for decades had been the scene of dances for the black community run by Charles Sullivan and presenting everyone from Count Basie to Ray Charles.
After the Trips Festival in January 1966, Graham took over the Fillmore, first alternating weekends with the Family Dog. Luria Castel and Ellen Harmon, the originals and the visionaries who saw what was needed, had left the Dog and it then consisted of Chet Helms and John Carpenter. There had been a couple of other transitory Dog personnel, among others, Rock Scully and Danny Rifkin, now managers of the Grateful Dead.
Their instant success spun off into a myriad of benefits at every available place in the Bay Area. An incredible number of dances for fund raising purposes, for profit and for fun took place. It has been an unbelievable three years. The response to the dances was ecstatic. The floors leaped and tumbled and swirled with the dancers and the evolvement of light shows as an adjunct was spectacular.
Other cities began to turn the same way, with varying degrees of success depending on local conditions. The poster business became a heavy profit-making arm of the dance halls and the whole scene contributed to the emergence of innumerable groups, record label activity and other attempts to skim off some of the available bread. At times there were probably as many recording executives in turtleneck sweaters and jeans scouting talent as there were dealers. In fact, one record company officer went around with a stash of hash in his pocket for months, signing up bands.
It ought to be said, it seems to me, no matter what any individual may feel pro or con about either the way the Fillmore Ballroom has been operated or the man who operates it, that during the past two years the Fillmore and Bill Graham have brought an incredible list of great and important music and performers to San Francisco. Its presentations have been, in effect, a crash course in American popular music without which San Francisco and (to the heavy extent that San Francisco has set the pace for the rest of the country) the U.S. would have been a great deal poorer culturally.
Now a struggle is going on between those who want to dance and those who want to listen. It repeats the situation of the Forties in which the swing era dancers (the jitterbugs) became listeners, first crowding around the bandstand and then sitting on the floor and then demanding chairs. The Benny Goodman band was astonished when it first played the West Coast that the people pushed up to the lip of the stage to hear the trumpet player (Bunny Berrigan). Eventually, of course, dances ceased almost altogether and the stage-show concerts took over.
The stiffness of the concert hall is a drag and the booze of the night clubs is a bigger drag, and so the informality and the flexibility of the dance halls has been delightful. The problem is two-fold at the moment - the press of the crowd and the floor covered with people sitting and lying down.
At some point in the near future, somebody will build a structure to house these shows which is designed for the new purposes. I don't know what it will look like but it will obviously need to provide space for seeing and dancing, ease of movement and places to sit from time to time.
Meanwhile, the ways in which the changing audience feeds back and changes the bands is interesting to observe. That alone reconfirms the star system. Individual applause breeds stars and breaks up bands. How long will Janis Joplin be part of Big Brother and when will it become Janis Joplin AND Big Brother? . . .
(by Ralph Gleason, from Rolling Stone, June 20 1968)
San Francisco, where the rock and roll dance concert originated, is rapidly becoming the hub of a national network of ballrooms and concert halls. The local scene is showing more signs not only of growth, but of health as well, than at any time in the past year, now supporting three full-time ballroom operations on the weekends, plus assorted other gigging.
The Fillmore East, Bill Graham's venture in New York, opened last month to local critical acclaim and popular success. "It's making waves ten feet high," according to one music industry-alist; "Looks like an enormous money-maker," said another. The opening night performance of Janis Joplin of Big Brother and the Holding Co. drew raves; the Doors were featured in a subsequent show. Despite rumors of moves to London and other places, Graham insisted, "I have no intention of franchising this operation. There will not be a Tucson Fillmore. I am not expanding after New York."
The Family Dog has reversed the downhill trend of its Denver branch after a shake-up in the police department there. Chet Helms has been devoting his full-time attention to the Denver Dog so Whitey Allen, late of Portland, is now running the show at the Avalon Ballroom where Family Dog dances are held in San Francisco. Allen is also responsible for coordinating operations with ballrooms in Portland, Oregon, Vancouver, B.C., and Anchorage, Alaska. "By working together and guaranteeing the bands four weeks of work, we can present better music than when we were going it alone at the Avalon," he said.
Ron Rakow, who helped put on the Great Northwest Tour of the Grateful Dead and Quicksilver Messenger Service, has leased the Carousel Ballroom near downtown San Francisco for a series of weekend dances that have so far featured the Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Chuck Berry, and Country Joe & The Fish. The Carousel holds substantially more people than the Fillmore or Avalon...and a lot more of them dance. The owners of the Carousel also run a chain of dance halls in England and on the Continent, and have reached an agreement with Rakow about using them for a tour of American rock bands.
(from Rolling Stone, April 27 1968)
* * *
The Grateful Dead and a group of other rock bands, including the Jefferson Airplane, have taken a lease on the old Carousel Ballroom on Market Street (formerly the El Patio) and beginning Friday night will run dances there regularly.
Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights the Airplane and the Dead will play there for dancing.
Next weekend, Chuck Berry and the Buffalo Springfield will appear.
The Carousel is owned by Bill Fuller, the Irish ballroom operator who has similar properties in Chicago, New York, Boston, London, Manchester, and throughout Ireland.
As part of the current arrangement, it is hoped to organize a European tour later this year with some of the San Francisco groups based on Fuller's ballrooms.
In another aspect of this band-oriented operation, the Grateful Dead, Steve Miller's Blues Band and other groups are forming their own publishing groups to be operated jointly.
(excerpt from Ralph Gleason's column, SF Chronicle, March 13 1968)
Courtesy of Lost Live Dead
* * *
At midnight Tuesday night it was a beautiful scene at the Carousel Ballroom. People came in off the street with late election news and inside there was a long jam session going on with all kinds of guitar players and saxophones and rhythm men and on the floor there was more dancing than I've seen anywhere in months.
Throughout the ballroom an outstanding feature was the peacefulness and the joy as a wondrous assortment of people relaxed. There were Hells Angels and hippies, many black people and many long-haired youth. It seemed for a moment like the hope of the future.
And then I went outside, got into the car and punched the radio button only to hear a voice saying "...when Senator Kennedy was shot tonight." And the terrible real world came crashing in on me again.
(excerpt from "Strung Between Dreams and Reality" by Ralph Gleason, SF Chronicle, June 7 1968)
Courtesy of jgmf.blogspot.com
* * *
FILLMORE SCENE MOVES TO NEW CAROUSEL HALL
The Fillmore Auditorium, of supergroup, lightshow and dance poster fame, ended its two-and-a-half year career as a fulltime rock hall on July 5. Bill Graham, the Fillmore's manager, is moving his scene to the old Carousel Ballroom, which recently became a well-known rock dancehall in its own right under the goodhearted but insufficiently professional ownership of Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead and some cronies. The Carousel will henceforth be known as the Fillmore West, to complement Graham's recently opened New York operation, the Fillmore East.
There were several reasons for Graham's move. The old 1500-capacity Fillmore was always overcrowded, for one. Graham usually booked big acts on prime nights not at the Fillmore, but at nearby Winterland, which has a capacity of 4200, though its dance floor is small. For another, the Fillmore is located in the Fillmore District, a Black ghetto, and the sporadic instances of harassment of patrons had become more frequent since the assassination of Martin Luther King, according to Graham. And finally, the Carousel is a more desirable hall, larger and more attractive and more accessible by public transportation.
The Carousel had been operated for several months by Headstone Productions, a corporation initially financed by a series of dances given by the Dead and the Airplane starting on St. Valentine's Day this year. The operation of the Carousel was marked by careless mismanagement in many details, although it was generally agreed that the feeling of the dances was good. On several occasions Headstone booked unwisely, paying high fees for low draws, and it was saddled with what Ralph Gleason has called "the stupidest lease in show business." The Free City Convention, a freakout with nude dancing, public grass-smoking and a "dirty" word ("cunt") on the marquee, started bringing an undesirable amount of police attention to the hall, and when Headstone fell several thousand dollars behind in its rent, landlord Bill Fuller opened his ears to Bill Graham.
Graham had started organizing dances as manager of the San Francisco Mime Troupe. The first Mime Troupe Benefit held at the Fillmore, on December 10, 1965, headlined Jefferson Airplane, the Great Society and John Handy. Graham's Fillmore dances began on a regular basis in March 1966, at first alternating weekends with the Family Dog. In the early days Graham had to overcome the reputation rock concerts had for violence, and the Fillmore happened to be one of the halls in town that would rent to him. Today, after innumerable hassles with civic authorities, he can point to two and a half years of dances without a major disruption.
Graham's lease on the Fillmore runs to March, 1973. He plans to put the hall at the disposal of the Fillmore community, at no profit to him, for Black-run political events and musical and theatrical productions. He has already contacted Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panthers, the Peace and Freedom Party and the Black Student Union. Graham emphasizes that the incidents of harassment of the dance patrons have never involved militant Blacks.
As for the new Fillmore West, Graham plans to remodel the stage and perhaps replace the satin ceiling. The Tuesday night musicians' jam session instituted under Headstone will be revived and one night a week will probably be set aside for "jamming" and rapping among local lightshow technicians. Graham also has hopes of establishing a "young political platform" and building the solidarity of the underground community. "Haight Street is a tragedy," he has said, "and it should be saved."
(from Rolling Stone, August 10 1968)
(Rolling Stone also printed a picture of the Carousel with its final marquee sign: NOTHING LASTS.)
* * *
History will show, I believe, that the San Francisco dance renaissance played a key role in the evolution of teen-age schlock-rock into music, as well as a key role in the social-cultural and political revolution in which we are involved.
The sheer existence of Bob Dylan, the Beatles and, to a lesser extent, the Rolling Stones opened the way for the logical expression of the forces that were frustrated, denied and also generated by the rock concert syndrome of the Cow Palace shows (i.e. the big, stageshow presentation of rock from Alan Freed to Murray the K to Tom Donahue).
The Byrds' gigs at Ciro's in Hollywood opened the last gate and it was obvious that dancing was a necessary thing. It was at this point that the San Francisco dance scene came into existence, created by necessity and provoked by the imagination of a group called the Family Dog (of which, at that time, Chet Helms was not a member). The Family Dog put on the first adult rock dances in San Francisco at the Longshoremen's Hall in October, 1965, with the Lovin' Spoonful, Jefferson Airplane, the Charlatans, the Warlocks (now the Grateful Dead), the Great Society and others.
This was before the first rock dances at the Fillmore and before the Trips Festival. At that time, Bill Graham was manager of the San Francisco Mime Troupe and the Mime Troupe was in its customary financial panic. They ran a benefit at their loft to which some of the rock bands came and played. This was in October, 1965, also. A second benefit in December for the Mime Troupe was staged at the Fillmore Auditorium, which for decades had been the scene of dances for the black community run by Charles Sullivan and presenting everyone from Count Basie to Ray Charles.
After the Trips Festival in January 1966, Graham took over the Fillmore, first alternating weekends with the Family Dog. Luria Castel and Ellen Harmon, the originals and the visionaries who saw what was needed, had left the Dog and it then consisted of Chet Helms and John Carpenter. There had been a couple of other transitory Dog personnel, among others, Rock Scully and Danny Rifkin, now managers of the Grateful Dead.
Their instant success spun off into a myriad of benefits at every available place in the Bay Area. An incredible number of dances for fund raising purposes, for profit and for fun took place. It has been an unbelievable three years. The response to the dances was ecstatic. The floors leaped and tumbled and swirled with the dancers and the evolvement of light shows as an adjunct was spectacular.
Other cities began to turn the same way, with varying degrees of success depending on local conditions. The poster business became a heavy profit-making arm of the dance halls and the whole scene contributed to the emergence of innumerable groups, record label activity and other attempts to skim off some of the available bread. At times there were probably as many recording executives in turtleneck sweaters and jeans scouting talent as there were dealers. In fact, one record company officer went around with a stash of hash in his pocket for months, signing up bands.
It ought to be said, it seems to me, no matter what any individual may feel pro or con about either the way the Fillmore Ballroom has been operated or the man who operates it, that during the past two years the Fillmore and Bill Graham have brought an incredible list of great and important music and performers to San Francisco. Its presentations have been, in effect, a crash course in American popular music without which San Francisco and (to the heavy extent that San Francisco has set the pace for the rest of the country) the U.S. would have been a great deal poorer culturally.
Now a struggle is going on between those who want to dance and those who want to listen. It repeats the situation of the Forties in which the swing era dancers (the jitterbugs) became listeners, first crowding around the bandstand and then sitting on the floor and then demanding chairs. The Benny Goodman band was astonished when it first played the West Coast that the people pushed up to the lip of the stage to hear the trumpet player (Bunny Berrigan). Eventually, of course, dances ceased almost altogether and the stage-show concerts took over.
The stiffness of the concert hall is a drag and the booze of the night clubs is a bigger drag, and so the informality and the flexibility of the dance halls has been delightful. The problem is two-fold at the moment - the press of the crowd and the floor covered with people sitting and lying down.
At some point in the near future, somebody will build a structure to house these shows which is designed for the new purposes. I don't know what it will look like but it will obviously need to provide space for seeing and dancing, ease of movement and places to sit from time to time.
Meanwhile, the ways in which the changing audience feeds back and changes the bands is interesting to observe. That alone reconfirms the star system. Individual applause breeds stars and breaks up bands. How long will Janis Joplin be part of Big Brother and when will it become Janis Joplin AND Big Brother? . . .
(by Ralph Gleason, from Rolling Stone, June 20 1968)
April 14, 1968: Greynolds Park, Miami
3,000 TUNE IN, TURN ON FOR LOVE-IN
They arrived in everything from Cadillacs to wheelchairs.
From as far as Wyoming and as near as across the street, they just happened by Greynolds Park Sunday for what they predicted would be the state's largest "massive Easter love-in."
Some hippies drove to Dade from Tampa just for the happening; some were student hippies from northern colleges, visiting in South Florida for the Easter vacation.
More than 3,000 of them made the scene, just a few hours after Easter sunrise services had been concluded in the North Dade park.
By mid-afternoon one corner of the park was a carpet of guru shirts and flowered blue jeans.
The quiet of a Sunday afternoon was broken only by an occasional discordant note on a guitar or the clicking of "peace beads," as one of the be-beaded people shifted listlessly.
A Dade sheriff's officer squinted at the haze of smoke drifting skyward and said, "We know they're smoking it; you can smell it in the air, but we're not going to make any arrests for possession of marijuana; there's only two of us and thousands of them."
"Most of them dress pretty crazy, but so far they've all been pretty peaceful," he said as a bikini-clad girl in rose-colored glasses wandered by.
Just when the happening began to drag, a six-man combo from San Francisco climbed up on a makeshift stage. The Grateful Dead were about to liven things up for the hippies of Greynolds Park.
While the group hauled its three-foot Chinese gong onto the stage for the first number, the drummer took home movies of the crowd.
A blonde in an ankle length robe distributed the latest issues of the Libertarian Watchdog, an underground newspaper banned a few weeks ago from Coral Gables. Most didn't read it - just sat on it.
A motorcyclist wore Army fatigues with a yellow daffodil in his lapel. A bearded teenager wore a stylish gunny sack. One youngster wore nothing at all, but no one objected to the infant's simple attire.
"It's just like church, some people come because they believe and some come just to show off their clothes," said Mike Pinera of Tampa, a member of a little band called the Blues Image.
Dale Robertson, a Fort Lauderdale plasterer during the week, leaned on a carved wooden walking stick his wife had given him as an Easter gift.
"Some people think the folks here are weirdos, but I think they're just ordinary people," he said.
He added, "My wife is here and we would have brought the baby, too, but I think five months is too young for something like this," he said.
(by Mike Turner, from the Miami Herald, 15 April 1968)
Thanks to jgmf.blogspot.com
* * * * *
An edited version of the article was distributed nationally by the Associated Press:
HIPPIES STAGE LOVE-IN AT MIAMI, FLA.
Hippies arrived for the Easter love-in riding in everything from limousines to wheelchairs.
The flower children, male and female, wore their hair long and mostly uncombed. One, just an infant, wore nothing at all but no one seemed to mind.
Long flowing gold robes, peace beads, men's shorts slashed off roughly above the knee, guru shirts, even a gunny sack, were the nonconformist costumes for the hippie Easter parade.
One motorcyclist wore army fatigues with a yellow daffodil in his lapel. Flowers were painted on clothes and even on skin.
"It's just like church," said Mike Pinera of Tampa, member of a band called Blues Image which played at the love-in. "Some people come because they believe and some come just to show off their clothes."
More than 3,000 made the scene in a corner of Greynolds Park where the acrid smell of marijuana smoke drifted upward.
A Dade County deputy squinted at the haze and said: "We know they're smoking it. You can smell it in the air. But we're not going to make any arrests for possession of marijuana. There's only two of us and thousands of them."
At first the quiet of a Sunday afternoon was broken only by an occasional guitar or the clang of a three-foot Chinese gong. When the happening began to drag, a six-man combo from San Francisco called The Grateful Dead climbed onto a makeshift stage and added cool sounds to the love-in.
(AP story from the Colorado Springs Gazette, April 16 1968)
Thanks to Lost Live Dead
See also http://lostlivedead.blogspot.com/2009/12/greynolds-park-love-in-north-miami.html
They arrived in everything from Cadillacs to wheelchairs.
From as far as Wyoming and as near as across the street, they just happened by Greynolds Park Sunday for what they predicted would be the state's largest "massive Easter love-in."
Some hippies drove to Dade from Tampa just for the happening; some were student hippies from northern colleges, visiting in South Florida for the Easter vacation.
More than 3,000 of them made the scene, just a few hours after Easter sunrise services had been concluded in the North Dade park.
By mid-afternoon one corner of the park was a carpet of guru shirts and flowered blue jeans.
The quiet of a Sunday afternoon was broken only by an occasional discordant note on a guitar or the clicking of "peace beads," as one of the be-beaded people shifted listlessly.
A Dade sheriff's officer squinted at the haze of smoke drifting skyward and said, "We know they're smoking it; you can smell it in the air, but we're not going to make any arrests for possession of marijuana; there's only two of us and thousands of them."
"Most of them dress pretty crazy, but so far they've all been pretty peaceful," he said as a bikini-clad girl in rose-colored glasses wandered by.
Just when the happening began to drag, a six-man combo from San Francisco climbed up on a makeshift stage. The Grateful Dead were about to liven things up for the hippies of Greynolds Park.
While the group hauled its three-foot Chinese gong onto the stage for the first number, the drummer took home movies of the crowd.
A blonde in an ankle length robe distributed the latest issues of the Libertarian Watchdog, an underground newspaper banned a few weeks ago from Coral Gables. Most didn't read it - just sat on it.
A motorcyclist wore Army fatigues with a yellow daffodil in his lapel. A bearded teenager wore a stylish gunny sack. One youngster wore nothing at all, but no one objected to the infant's simple attire.
"It's just like church, some people come because they believe and some come just to show off their clothes," said Mike Pinera of Tampa, a member of a little band called the Blues Image.
Dale Robertson, a Fort Lauderdale plasterer during the week, leaned on a carved wooden walking stick his wife had given him as an Easter gift.
"Some people think the folks here are weirdos, but I think they're just ordinary people," he said.
He added, "My wife is here and we would have brought the baby, too, but I think five months is too young for something like this," he said.
(by Mike Turner, from the Miami Herald, 15 April 1968)
Thanks to jgmf.blogspot.com
* * * * *
An edited version of the article was distributed nationally by the Associated Press:
HIPPIES STAGE LOVE-IN AT MIAMI, FLA.
Hippies arrived for the Easter love-in riding in everything from limousines to wheelchairs.
The flower children, male and female, wore their hair long and mostly uncombed. One, just an infant, wore nothing at all but no one seemed to mind.
Long flowing gold robes, peace beads, men's shorts slashed off roughly above the knee, guru shirts, even a gunny sack, were the nonconformist costumes for the hippie Easter parade.
One motorcyclist wore army fatigues with a yellow daffodil in his lapel. Flowers were painted on clothes and even on skin.
"It's just like church," said Mike Pinera of Tampa, member of a band called Blues Image which played at the love-in. "Some people come because they believe and some come just to show off their clothes."
More than 3,000 made the scene in a corner of Greynolds Park where the acrid smell of marijuana smoke drifted upward.
A Dade County deputy squinted at the haze and said: "We know they're smoking it. You can smell it in the air. But we're not going to make any arrests for possession of marijuana. There's only two of us and thousands of them."
At first the quiet of a Sunday afternoon was broken only by an occasional guitar or the clang of a three-foot Chinese gong. When the happening began to drag, a six-man combo from San Francisco called The Grateful Dead climbed onto a makeshift stage and added cool sounds to the love-in.
(AP story from the Colorado Springs Gazette, April 16 1968)
Thanks to Lost Live Dead
See also http://lostlivedead.blogspot.com/2009/12/greynolds-park-love-in-north-miami.html
February 15, 1968: San Quentin Prison
HIPPIES SUPPORT QUENTIN PAPER
Five hundred hippies danced and sang on a grassy knoll outside San Quentin Prison Thursday in a show of sympathy for the men behind the walls.
The songfest involving long-haired, bearded young men and sack-wearing girls was to coincide with a threatened strike of prison inmates which never materialized.
The Grateful Dead played for the flower children on the sunny hillside overlooking San Francisco Bay.
They hung flowers on the iron prison gate and let a few balloons bearing peace symbols float over it into the enclosure. A sign saying "rehabilitate the penal system now" was posted outside the gate.
The tribal gathering was touched off by an appeal in an "underground" prison sheet calling for a strike by San Quentin's 3,900 inmates against alleged mistreatment.
But Associate Warden James W. Park said the day was uneventful inside the walls. Prisoners were bustled off to their jobs an hour early as precaution against possible intimidation by those agitating for the strike.
Absenteeism from work in the shops was normal, the warden's office said. Some agitators, including those who published "The Outlaw," had been disciplined. The call for a strike in the underground sheet had been picked up by the "Berkeley Barb," a hippie newspaper last week.
The Greatful Dead rock group set up their electronic gear on a flatbed truck and the music blared out for about three hours. The convicts may have picked up a few strains of it before their late afternoon meal. The hippies trickled away as darkness came.
The real highlight of the day in San Quentin was the graduation exercise for 373 inmates who completed various phases of education, from grammar school to college education courses.
(from the Hayward Daily Review, February 16 1968)
Thanks to Lost Live Dead.
* * *
A similar piece from the LA Times...
HIPPIES PARADE
STRIKE CALL FIZZLES AT SAN QUENTIN
SAN RAFAEL - An underground newspaper at San Quentin Prison called on 2,700 convicts to strike Thursday.
But less than 50 did - despite the moral support of 250 Bay Area hippies who staged a flower-power rally outside the prison gates.
The Outlaw, a will-o'-the-wisp newspaper published sporadically since last June by prisoners at San Quentin, called for a "unity day" strike to enforce demands for earlier releases and better living conditions and food.
The Berkeley Barb, an anti-establishment newspaper which is the San Francisco-area equivalent of the Los Angeles Free Press, heard about the strike plan and publicized a rally to back prisoners' demands.
Prison walls rarely divided one world from another more dramatically than they did Thursday at the huge prison near here.
Outside, bearded men, long-haired women, and laughing, squealing children meandered with dedicated aimlessness along the road that ends at San Quentin's silver-painted gate.
They garlanded the gate with yellow wildflowers, briefly blocked traffic, taunted unsmiling guards with friendly jibes, then wandered onto a spit of land which juts into San Francisco Bay and listened to musicians from a group called The Grateful Dead play a folk-rock concert.
Inside, it was another tough day in a tough place. Uniformed, neatly barbered convicts followed the countless clocks that told them exactly when to be exactly where. And, said, prison officials, it was a day of work as usual:
Tough, blunt-spoken warden L.S. Nelson, 58, told a reporter:
"The great bulk of the population went about their work as if they'd never heard of The Outlaw."
Perhaps one reason was that they had heard what had happened to the Outlaw staff. . . .
[The rest of the article details the various punishments for the prisoners who called for a strike - being shipped to Folsom or put in solitary.]
(by Dial Torgerson, from the Los Angeles Times, 16 February 1968)
See also http://lostlivedead.blogspot.com/2009/12/grateful-dead-san-quentin-performances.html
Five hundred hippies danced and sang on a grassy knoll outside San Quentin Prison Thursday in a show of sympathy for the men behind the walls.
The songfest involving long-haired, bearded young men and sack-wearing girls was to coincide with a threatened strike of prison inmates which never materialized.
The Grateful Dead played for the flower children on the sunny hillside overlooking San Francisco Bay.
They hung flowers on the iron prison gate and let a few balloons bearing peace symbols float over it into the enclosure. A sign saying "rehabilitate the penal system now" was posted outside the gate.
The tribal gathering was touched off by an appeal in an "underground" prison sheet calling for a strike by San Quentin's 3,900 inmates against alleged mistreatment.
But Associate Warden James W. Park said the day was uneventful inside the walls. Prisoners were bustled off to their jobs an hour early as precaution against possible intimidation by those agitating for the strike.
Absenteeism from work in the shops was normal, the warden's office said. Some agitators, including those who published "The Outlaw," had been disciplined. The call for a strike in the underground sheet had been picked up by the "Berkeley Barb," a hippie newspaper last week.
The Greatful Dead rock group set up their electronic gear on a flatbed truck and the music blared out for about three hours. The convicts may have picked up a few strains of it before their late afternoon meal. The hippies trickled away as darkness came.
The real highlight of the day in San Quentin was the graduation exercise for 373 inmates who completed various phases of education, from grammar school to college education courses.
(from the Hayward Daily Review, February 16 1968)
Thanks to Lost Live Dead.
* * *
A similar piece from the LA Times...
HIPPIES PARADE
STRIKE CALL FIZZLES AT SAN QUENTIN
SAN RAFAEL - An underground newspaper at San Quentin Prison called on 2,700 convicts to strike Thursday.
But less than 50 did - despite the moral support of 250 Bay Area hippies who staged a flower-power rally outside the prison gates.
The Outlaw, a will-o'-the-wisp newspaper published sporadically since last June by prisoners at San Quentin, called for a "unity day" strike to enforce demands for earlier releases and better living conditions and food.
The Berkeley Barb, an anti-establishment newspaper which is the San Francisco-area equivalent of the Los Angeles Free Press, heard about the strike plan and publicized a rally to back prisoners' demands.
Prison walls rarely divided one world from another more dramatically than they did Thursday at the huge prison near here.
Outside, bearded men, long-haired women, and laughing, squealing children meandered with dedicated aimlessness along the road that ends at San Quentin's silver-painted gate.
They garlanded the gate with yellow wildflowers, briefly blocked traffic, taunted unsmiling guards with friendly jibes, then wandered onto a spit of land which juts into San Francisco Bay and listened to musicians from a group called The Grateful Dead play a folk-rock concert.
Inside, it was another tough day in a tough place. Uniformed, neatly barbered convicts followed the countless clocks that told them exactly when to be exactly where. And, said, prison officials, it was a day of work as usual:
Tough, blunt-spoken warden L.S. Nelson, 58, told a reporter:
"The great bulk of the population went about their work as if they'd never heard of The Outlaw."
Perhaps one reason was that they had heard what had happened to the Outlaw staff. . . .
[The rest of the article details the various punishments for the prisoners who called for a strike - being shipped to Folsom or put in solitary.]
(by Dial Torgerson, from the Los Angeles Times, 16 February 1968)
See also http://lostlivedead.blogspot.com/2009/12/grateful-dead-san-quentin-performances.html
October 2, 1967: The Bust
THE DEAD DID GET IT: REPORTERS AND COPS
"That's what ya get for dealing the killer weed," laughed state narcotics agent Jerry Van Raam at the 11 members of the Grateful Dead household he and his agents had rounded up into the Dead's kitchen.
The Good Ole Grateful Dead had gotten it. Eight narcotics agents, followed by a dozen reporters and television crews, raided the Dead's house at 710 Ashbury Street on October 2nd. A little after 3:30 in the afternoon, two members of the band, Pigpen and Bob Weir; their two managers, Rock Scully and Danny Rifkin; their equipment manager, Bob Matthews; and six friends had been busted on dope charges.
The cops carried no warrant and broke in the front door even after being denied entry. Danny and Rock weren't in the house, but were yanked from the porch when they came strolling by after the reporters had arrived. As well as members of the band, the police confiscated the files, money and phone books of the band and of the Haight Ashbury Legal Organization, whose offices are in the Dead's house.
While the narcs did their work, a rooting section gathered across the street from the house and, like a Greek chorus, filled the air with a running commentary on the proceedings.
Jerry Garcia and Mountain Girl weren't home at the time of the bust. Drummer Bill Kreutzmann and bassist Phil Lesh live elsewhere, but Phil's old lady, Florence, was at 710 and was handcuffed to Weir on the way to the Hall of Justice.
After six hours in jail, the dastardly 11 were released on bail. On October 23rd, they return to the Hall of Justice for a preliminary hearing. Their chances look good. In the meantime, they showed up at their bail bondsman's office the cold morning after the arrest, were arraigned in Court (where Rock was arrested again on the additional charge of maintaining a house where narcotics were used), and had a press conference.
The press conference was held in the Dead's living room, filled to capacity with a tangle of microphones, television cameras, lights, wires, notepads, soundmen, reporters and photographers. Danny opened it with a statement:
"The arrests were made under a law that classifies smoking marijuana with murder, rape and armed robbery as a felony. Yet almost anyone who has ever studied marijuana seriously and objectively has agreed that marijuana is the least harmful chemical used for pleasure and life-enhancement.
"The law contains an even greater evil. It encourages the most outrageously discriminatory type of law enforcement. If the lawyers, doctors, advertising men, teachers and political officeholders who use marijuana were arrested today, the law might well be off the books before Thanksgiving. The law creates a mythical danger and calls it a felony. The people who enforce the law use it almost exclusively against individuals who threaten their ideas of the way people should look and act.
"Behind all the myths is the reality. The Grateful Dead are people engaged in constructive, creative effort in the musical field, and this house is where we work as well as our residence. Because the police fear and misinterpret us, our effort is now interrupted as we deal with the consequences of a harassing arrest."
Questions and answers followed, much like a Beatle press conference. In response to "How long did it take you to grow your hair that long, Danny?" Rifkin said, "We've always figured that if we ever held a press conference, the first reporter who asked a stupid question would get a cream pie in his face, and you're him."
A huge bowl of whipped cream was ceremoniously produced, to everyone's obvious delight including all the reporters except the one. He cringed and Danny, taking pity, spared him. After the conference was finished, cookies, coffee and cake were served and the predictable jokes made.
Rolling Stone didn't leave. We adjourned to the porch to take a few pictures of one of the most beautiful bands in the world.
Notice all the rifles. Pigpen has a big collection. If he had been thinking quick, he would have been prepared for all eventualities.
Dig Jerry: he's Big Man on Campus. Who else has a T-shirt like that? Jerry said that if they put out a warrant for his arrest — which so far they haven't — he would beat them to it and go down to the Hall of Justice voluntarily to surrender, carrying a white flag.
Oh, yeah. Ever see a picture of Phil wearing those dark glasses before?
(by Jann Wenner, from Rolling Stone, November 9 1967)
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/the-grateful-dead-did-get-it-reporters-and-cops-19671109
* * *
NARCOS BAG GRATEFUL DEAD
(from the Stanford Daily, 4 October 1967)
* * *
The Stanford Daily is a slightly-rewritten copy of the SF Chronicle article from the day before:
ROCK BAND BUSTED
POT ARRESTS
HAIGHT ROUNDUP
COPS RAID PAD OF GRATEFUL DEAD
Two members of the Grateful Dead - the lively San Francisco group responsible for such rock hits as "Good Morning, Little Schoolgirl" - were busted on marijuana charges yesterday.
The raid - on the Dead's way-out 13-room pad at 710 Ashbury Street - also led to the arrest of the group's equipment manager, two business managers, and six girls, variously described as "friends," "visitors," and "just girls."
The 3 p.m. foray by State agents and San Francisco police was described by State narcotics bureau head Matthew O'Connor as the start of a stepped-up attack on Haight-Ashbury marijuana traffic.
Within three hours there were two more raids. At about 5 p.m., nine other persons were busted at 360 Haight Street for possession of some five kilograms of marijuana. Then, an hour later, agents swooped down on eight hippies at 234 Divisadero Street and also charged them with possession.
Arrested in the first raid were Ron (Pig Pen) McKernan, 22, The Dead's flamboyant, long-haired singer; rhythm guitarist Robert Weir, 19; Robert C. Matthews, 19, the equipment manager; and the business managers, Rock Scully, 26, and Daniel Rifkin, 23. All - including the six girls - were later released on $500 bail.
O’Connor, the State narcotics chief, said he was not sure whether charges would be filed against the three other members of The Dead not present at the pad — lead guitarist, Jerry (Captain Trips) Garcia, 24; Phil Lesh, 27, bassist and song writer; and Bill Sommers, 21, the drummer.
Scully was arrested as he walked up the steps of the two-story pad and told observers he knew of no pot arrest.
A San Francisco inspector then took him by the shoulder and led him inside.
Five other persons - a 13-year-old girl, a young man and three other girls - were inside the house at the time but were released.
O'Connor said the Grateful Dead raid was made because other investigations "kept turning up the address of 710 Ashbury as a supply source."
He said the five state agents and two city inspectors confiscated over a pound of marijuana and its big brother, hashish.
"They were processing some marijuana in the kitchen," he said, "by running it through a colander to get rid of the seeds and stems."
The hippies who were released walked across the street and sat on the sidewalk watching the proceedings. When the first person came out of the house in handcuffs, one long-haired girl yelled a familiar 12-letter epithet at the officers.
But it had little effect and the ten hippies were put in a paddy wagon, taken to city prison, and booked on one charge each of possession of marijuana.
The girl friends were identified as Susan Swanson, 19; Rosalyn Stevenson, 19; Veronica Grant, 23; Christine Bennett, 23; Florence Nathan, 21; and Antoinette Kaufman, 22.
All except Miss Kaufman told officers they lived at the Dead's house. She gave her address as 1333 Lincoln Boulevard.
The band's attorney, Michael Stepanian, arrived at City Prison at 4:30 p.m. and said he would have everybody out as soon as bail was set.
The Dead, who have bent the minds of high society as well as hippies at the psychedelic dance halls, came on the scene last year as the group playing for a Capital Records documentary called "LSD." The record was produced by Owsley Stanley, a 31-year-old who reportedly retired a millionaire by selling acid before it became illegal.
Then the group teamed up with Ken Kesey for his "Acid Test" happenings.
Critics have said that as exponents of the "San Francisco Sound" The Dead can be equaled - if at all - only by Jefferson Airplane. One critic wrote that "together, they sound like live thunder."
Most recently, the band has been playing at the Straight Theater School of Dance - a unique combination of entertainment and instruction which began last Friday under the watchful eyes of city police and fire inspectors.
The name of the group, informed sources commented ironically, comes from an Egyptian prayer:
"We grateful dead praise you, Osiris..."
(from the SF Chronicle, 3 October 1967)
http://blog.sfgate.com/thebigevent/2013/07/25/grateful-dead-and-the-710-ashbury-st-drug-bust-of-1967
* * *
LOTS OF GRASS -- GRATEFUL DEAD MOWED DOWN
Two members of the Grateful Dead, a leading rock band, three of their managers, five girl friends, and 26 others face narcotics charges today following a series of Hippieville raids by police and state agents.
The forays began yesterday afternoon at 710 Ashbury St., the 13-room pad of the Dead where 1-1/2 pounds of marijuana and hashish were seized, then continued on into the night with four more swoops.
Of the 36 arrested, two were juveniles. Municipal Judge Joseph Kennedy released the others, all charged with possession of narcotics, on $550 bail each.
The band members booked are Robert Hall Weir, 19, guitarist, and Ronald Charles (Pig Pen) McKernan, 22, long-haired blues singer.
The managers charged are Robert C. Matthews, 19, who handles the equipment, and Rock Scully, 26, and Daniel Rifkin, 23, business managers.
The five girls arrested with them were Rosalyn B. Stevenson, 19; Antoinette Victoria Kaufman, 22; Veronica Grant, 23; Susan Swanson, 19; and Florence L. Nathan, 19.
Police Lt. Norbert Curry and Matt O'Connor, head of the State Narcotics Bureau, said the raids culminated several weeks of investigation in which two state agents, who grew beards and lived in the Haight-Ashbury district, were used.
The other four raids were made at 234 Divisadero St., 10 arrests; 369 Haight St., seven arrests; 366 Herman St., four arrests; and 140A Fillmore St., five arrests.
"These raids, "O'Connor said, "were touched off by complaints from the parents of runaways that their children were becoming marijuana users.
"Information from our undercover agents indicated that 710 Ashbury, headquarters of the Grateful Dead, was frequently mentioned as a source. At least, we have dried up that one."
The third member of the band, guitarist Jerry Garcia, was not at home and escaped arrest.
The Grateful Dead, whose name comes from an Egyptian Prayer, is much in demand in the City's ballrooms and concert halls specializing in San Francisco Sound music.
The group had planned to move to New Mexico to a farm later this fall.
(from the San Francisco Examiner, 3 October 1967)
A brief early report in the 10/2/67 Examiner, "Grateful Dead Pad Raid," added one detail:
While narcotics agents and San Francisco police were inside the flat, one member of the band arrived to find newsmen waiting outside on the steps.
"There's no bust going on here," he told reporters, and walked in.
* * *
'GRATEFUL' MANAGER RE-ARRESTED (excerpt)
At least one member of the rock-n-roll Grateful Dead was less than grateful today as he pleaded not guilty to one narcotics charge and was promptly re-arrested on another as he left the courtroom.
Booked in City Prison for maintaining a place where narcotics were either sold or dispensed was Rock Scully, 26, one of two business managers of the aggregation.
His bail was set at $2500.
Scully and four companions entered their not guilty pleas before Municipal Judge Harry Low, who set Nov. 27 for a preliminary hearing on charges of possession of marijuana.
The others [are] all out on bail. [ ... ]
(from the San Francisco Examiner, 4 October 1967)
* * *
NOT DEAD YET
"We're not guilty. That's our plea, and our lawyers will prove it."
This is the comment of Danny Rifkin, manager of the Grateful Dead, about the Monday afternoon raid on the Dead's pad at 710 Ashbury where eleven people were arrested by rampaging state narks.
The busted included Pig Pen, the Dead's organ grinder, and Bob Weir, rhythm guitarist. Both were charged with possession of marijuana.
Neither of them turns on.
Pig is a devoted wine freak, and Weir, who has long been a student of eastern meditation, has been applying the methods of the Maharishi Yogi for the past two weeks. The meditation methods forbid the use of drugs.
Three more raids were made in the city the same day, including one on the Blue Cheer's house at 369 Haight St. Ten people were arrested there, though none of the members of the band were in the house at the time. [ . . . ]
[The 10/13/67 issue included a correction: "BARB erroneously stated that a house belonging to the Blue Cheer was busted, with narks netting ten people. Though the statistics were correct, the house did not belong to the Cheer. The confusion was cleared when the Cheer's former equipment manager appeared at the BARB office and stated that the house formerly belonged to him."]
Feeling runs high that the Dead bust was in retaliation for their playing at the Straight Theater School of Dance last weekend. Blue Cheer is also scheduled for an appearance there.
However, the parties involved tend to discount this rumor. They feel rather that there is a mass push to bust, regardless. One theory is that by busting the rock bands, state and city police hope to create an unfavorable image of the people they claim local teenagers emulate.
In any case, more than a few houses, particularly those belonging to bands, have undergone hasty clean-ups since the Monday raids.
(from the Berkeley Barb, 6 October 1967)
* * *
GRATEFUL DEAD TELL THEIR SIDE OF THE BUST
The sign at the head of the stairs proclaimed, "Funeral in Process."
But the noise and clatter filtering out of the Grateful Dead's house at 710 Ashbury St. yesterday indicated that something else was happening.
The Dead staged a jolly news conference to tell their view of the saga which ended in the arrest of two of the rock band's members and three of its managers, and the confiscation of some grass - not the green kind - last Tuesday.
The five members of the City's No. 2 rock band, managers, and attorney, sat around a desk in the two-story post-Victorian flat and cheered as manager Danny Rifkin read a statement about the arrests and subsequent charges for possession of marijuana.
A giant crock of whipped cream sat on the desk in front of them, reserved for newsmen who asked inane questions like: "How long did it take you to grow your hair that long?"
The statement read by Rifkin said:
"The San Francisco Police Department and the state narcotics officers invaded this house on Tuesday for the unpeaceful purpose of arresting 10 persons (six visitors and the four members of the Dead company) on charges of possession of marijuana.
"We have invited you (the press) to our 'way out pad' to discuss the meaning of this action."
The statement said that the law classifies the smoking of marijuana with murder, rape, and armed robbery as a felony, and that the people who enforce the law "use it almost exclusively against the individuals who threaten their idea of the way people should look and act."
Finally Rifkin's statement said:
"The Grateful Dead are people engaged in constructive, creative effort in the musical field and this house is where we work, as well as our residence.
"Because the police fear and misinterpret us, our effort is now interrupted as we deal with the consequences of a harassing arrest."
The statement finished, the group, along with their attorney, Michael Stepanian, braced themselves for a barrage of questions from newsmen.
The Grateful Dead thoroughly enjoyed themselves and patiently and lightly answered the questions:
Were the police picking on The Dead?
"No, they arrested other people too," Rifkin said.
Did The Dead stage the bust as a publicity gag?
"Why would we want to do a thing like that?"
Has the bust hurt or helped their record sales and bookings?
"We don't care about such things. Our thing is to make music," said the group's lead guitarist Jerry Garcia.
Are they going to try to get the narcotics law changed?
"No," Rifkin said, "but we hope our arrest will make some impression on the narcotics laws."
Did anyone in the group give the narcotics agents permission to enter the house?
"No, we didn't give them permission, but we couldn't stop them."
On and on the questions came, leading questions were answered with calm indulgence.
Fans and friends stood around and cheered them on.
When it was all over, The Grateful Dead served cake and coffee.
(by Walterene Jackson, from the San Francisco Examiner, 6 October 1967)
See also: http://deadsources.blogspot.com/2015/03/june-1968-dead-in-court.html
"That's what ya get for dealing the killer weed," laughed state narcotics agent Jerry Van Raam at the 11 members of the Grateful Dead household he and his agents had rounded up into the Dead's kitchen.
The Good Ole Grateful Dead had gotten it. Eight narcotics agents, followed by a dozen reporters and television crews, raided the Dead's house at 710 Ashbury Street on October 2nd. A little after 3:30 in the afternoon, two members of the band, Pigpen and Bob Weir; their two managers, Rock Scully and Danny Rifkin; their equipment manager, Bob Matthews; and six friends had been busted on dope charges.
The cops carried no warrant and broke in the front door even after being denied entry. Danny and Rock weren't in the house, but were yanked from the porch when they came strolling by after the reporters had arrived. As well as members of the band, the police confiscated the files, money and phone books of the band and of the Haight Ashbury Legal Organization, whose offices are in the Dead's house.
While the narcs did their work, a rooting section gathered across the street from the house and, like a Greek chorus, filled the air with a running commentary on the proceedings.
Jerry Garcia and Mountain Girl weren't home at the time of the bust. Drummer Bill Kreutzmann and bassist Phil Lesh live elsewhere, but Phil's old lady, Florence, was at 710 and was handcuffed to Weir on the way to the Hall of Justice.
After six hours in jail, the dastardly 11 were released on bail. On October 23rd, they return to the Hall of Justice for a preliminary hearing. Their chances look good. In the meantime, they showed up at their bail bondsman's office the cold morning after the arrest, were arraigned in Court (where Rock was arrested again on the additional charge of maintaining a house where narcotics were used), and had a press conference.
The press conference was held in the Dead's living room, filled to capacity with a tangle of microphones, television cameras, lights, wires, notepads, soundmen, reporters and photographers. Danny opened it with a statement:
"The arrests were made under a law that classifies smoking marijuana with murder, rape and armed robbery as a felony. Yet almost anyone who has ever studied marijuana seriously and objectively has agreed that marijuana is the least harmful chemical used for pleasure and life-enhancement.
"The law contains an even greater evil. It encourages the most outrageously discriminatory type of law enforcement. If the lawyers, doctors, advertising men, teachers and political officeholders who use marijuana were arrested today, the law might well be off the books before Thanksgiving. The law creates a mythical danger and calls it a felony. The people who enforce the law use it almost exclusively against individuals who threaten their ideas of the way people should look and act.
"Behind all the myths is the reality. The Grateful Dead are people engaged in constructive, creative effort in the musical field, and this house is where we work as well as our residence. Because the police fear and misinterpret us, our effort is now interrupted as we deal with the consequences of a harassing arrest."
Questions and answers followed, much like a Beatle press conference. In response to "How long did it take you to grow your hair that long, Danny?" Rifkin said, "We've always figured that if we ever held a press conference, the first reporter who asked a stupid question would get a cream pie in his face, and you're him."
A huge bowl of whipped cream was ceremoniously produced, to everyone's obvious delight including all the reporters except the one. He cringed and Danny, taking pity, spared him. After the conference was finished, cookies, coffee and cake were served and the predictable jokes made.
Rolling Stone didn't leave. We adjourned to the porch to take a few pictures of one of the most beautiful bands in the world.
Notice all the rifles. Pigpen has a big collection. If he had been thinking quick, he would have been prepared for all eventualities.
Dig Jerry: he's Big Man on Campus. Who else has a T-shirt like that? Jerry said that if they put out a warrant for his arrest — which so far they haven't — he would beat them to it and go down to the Hall of Justice voluntarily to surrender, carrying a white flag.
Oh, yeah. Ever see a picture of Phil wearing those dark glasses before?
(by Jann Wenner, from Rolling Stone, November 9 1967)
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/the-grateful-dead-did-get-it-reporters-and-cops-19671109
* * *
NARCOS BAG GRATEFUL DEAD
The Haight-Ashbury pad of The Grateful Dead — San Francisco's reigning
"acid-rock" band — was raided yesterday by State narcotics agents and
two members of the group were booked on marijuana charges.
They will appear in court this morning.
The raid on the Dead's 13-room Victorian house at 710
Ashbury Street also led to the arrest of the group's equipment manager, two
business managers and six girls — ranging in age from 13 to 22. The two
recording stars bagged were Ron "Pig Pen" McKernan, the Dead's lead
singer, and Robert Weir, a rhythm guitarist.
It was uncertain yesterday afternoon if charges would be
filed against the three other members of the group not actually present at the
house at the time of the raid — Jerry "Captain Trips" Garcia, the
lead guitarist, Phil Lesh, the bass player and song writer, and Bill Sommers,
the drummer.
Of the eleven taken down to the station, all were free on
$500 bail a few hours after their arrests.
The bust was pulled by State agents and San
Francisco police at three in the afternoon, and was described by
State Narcotics Bureau Chief Matthew O'Connor as the start of a stepped-up
attack on Haight-Ashbury marijuana traffic.
O'Connor said the Grateful Dead raid was made because other
investigation "kept turning up the address 710 Ashbury as a supply
source."
He said the five state agents and two city inspectors
confiscated over a pound of marijuana and hashish.
The chief described the scene as follows: "They were
processing some marijuana in the kitchen by running it through a colander — to
get rid of the stems and seeds."
Some hippie acquaintances who were in the house when the
raid came but who were released, walked across the street and sat on the
sidewalk to watch the proceedings. When the first person came out of the house
in handcuffs, one girl yelled a familiar 12-letter epithet at the officers.
But it had little effect, and the eleven hippies were put in
a paddy wagon, taken to city prison and booked on one charge each of possession
of marijuana.
Most recently the Grateful Dead have been playing at
the Straight Theater in the hippie district. The managers of the theater have
lately delighted Hashbury by side-tracking a city ban on further dance halls in
the area. They call themselves a dancing school.(from the Stanford Daily, 4 October 1967)
* * *
The Stanford Daily is a slightly-rewritten copy of the SF Chronicle article from the day before:
ROCK BAND BUSTED
POT ARRESTS
HAIGHT ROUNDUP
COPS RAID PAD OF GRATEFUL DEAD
Two members of the Grateful Dead - the lively San Francisco group responsible for such rock hits as "Good Morning, Little Schoolgirl" - were busted on marijuana charges yesterday.
The raid - on the Dead's way-out 13-room pad at 710 Ashbury Street - also led to the arrest of the group's equipment manager, two business managers, and six girls, variously described as "friends," "visitors," and "just girls."
The 3 p.m. foray by State agents and San Francisco police was described by State narcotics bureau head Matthew O'Connor as the start of a stepped-up attack on Haight-Ashbury marijuana traffic.
Within three hours there were two more raids. At about 5 p.m., nine other persons were busted at 360 Haight Street for possession of some five kilograms of marijuana. Then, an hour later, agents swooped down on eight hippies at 234 Divisadero Street and also charged them with possession.
Arrested in the first raid were Ron (Pig Pen) McKernan, 22, The Dead's flamboyant, long-haired singer; rhythm guitarist Robert Weir, 19; Robert C. Matthews, 19, the equipment manager; and the business managers, Rock Scully, 26, and Daniel Rifkin, 23. All - including the six girls - were later released on $500 bail.
O’Connor, the State narcotics chief, said he was not sure whether charges would be filed against the three other members of The Dead not present at the pad — lead guitarist, Jerry (Captain Trips) Garcia, 24; Phil Lesh, 27, bassist and song writer; and Bill Sommers, 21, the drummer.
Scully was arrested as he walked up the steps of the two-story pad and told observers he knew of no pot arrest.
A San Francisco inspector then took him by the shoulder and led him inside.
Five other persons - a 13-year-old girl, a young man and three other girls - were inside the house at the time but were released.
O'Connor said the Grateful Dead raid was made because other investigations "kept turning up the address of 710 Ashbury as a supply source."
He said the five state agents and two city inspectors confiscated over a pound of marijuana and its big brother, hashish.
"They were processing some marijuana in the kitchen," he said, "by running it through a colander to get rid of the seeds and stems."
The hippies who were released walked across the street and sat on the sidewalk watching the proceedings. When the first person came out of the house in handcuffs, one long-haired girl yelled a familiar 12-letter epithet at the officers.
But it had little effect and the ten hippies were put in a paddy wagon, taken to city prison, and booked on one charge each of possession of marijuana.
The girl friends were identified as Susan Swanson, 19; Rosalyn Stevenson, 19; Veronica Grant, 23; Christine Bennett, 23; Florence Nathan, 21; and Antoinette Kaufman, 22.
All except Miss Kaufman told officers they lived at the Dead's house. She gave her address as 1333 Lincoln Boulevard.
The band's attorney, Michael Stepanian, arrived at City Prison at 4:30 p.m. and said he would have everybody out as soon as bail was set.
The Dead, who have bent the minds of high society as well as hippies at the psychedelic dance halls, came on the scene last year as the group playing for a Capital Records documentary called "LSD." The record was produced by Owsley Stanley, a 31-year-old who reportedly retired a millionaire by selling acid before it became illegal.
Then the group teamed up with Ken Kesey for his "Acid Test" happenings.
Critics have said that as exponents of the "San Francisco Sound" The Dead can be equaled - if at all - only by Jefferson Airplane. One critic wrote that "together, they sound like live thunder."
Most recently, the band has been playing at the Straight Theater School of Dance - a unique combination of entertainment and instruction which began last Friday under the watchful eyes of city police and fire inspectors.
The name of the group, informed sources commented ironically, comes from an Egyptian prayer:
"We grateful dead praise you, Osiris..."
(from the SF Chronicle, 3 October 1967)
http://blog.sfgate.com/thebigevent/2013/07/25/grateful-dead-and-the-710-ashbury-st-drug-bust-of-1967
* * *
LOTS OF GRASS -- GRATEFUL DEAD MOWED DOWN
Two members of the Grateful Dead, a leading rock band, three of their managers, five girl friends, and 26 others face narcotics charges today following a series of Hippieville raids by police and state agents.
The forays began yesterday afternoon at 710 Ashbury St., the 13-room pad of the Dead where 1-1/2 pounds of marijuana and hashish were seized, then continued on into the night with four more swoops.
Of the 36 arrested, two were juveniles. Municipal Judge Joseph Kennedy released the others, all charged with possession of narcotics, on $550 bail each.
The band members booked are Robert Hall Weir, 19, guitarist, and Ronald Charles (Pig Pen) McKernan, 22, long-haired blues singer.
The managers charged are Robert C. Matthews, 19, who handles the equipment, and Rock Scully, 26, and Daniel Rifkin, 23, business managers.
The five girls arrested with them were Rosalyn B. Stevenson, 19; Antoinette Victoria Kaufman, 22; Veronica Grant, 23; Susan Swanson, 19; and Florence L. Nathan, 19.
Police Lt. Norbert Curry and Matt O'Connor, head of the State Narcotics Bureau, said the raids culminated several weeks of investigation in which two state agents, who grew beards and lived in the Haight-Ashbury district, were used.
The other four raids were made at 234 Divisadero St., 10 arrests; 369 Haight St., seven arrests; 366 Herman St., four arrests; and 140A Fillmore St., five arrests.
"These raids, "O'Connor said, "were touched off by complaints from the parents of runaways that their children were becoming marijuana users.
"Information from our undercover agents indicated that 710 Ashbury, headquarters of the Grateful Dead, was frequently mentioned as a source. At least, we have dried up that one."
The third member of the band, guitarist Jerry Garcia, was not at home and escaped arrest.
The Grateful Dead, whose name comes from an Egyptian Prayer, is much in demand in the City's ballrooms and concert halls specializing in San Francisco Sound music.
The group had planned to move to New Mexico to a farm later this fall.
(from the San Francisco Examiner, 3 October 1967)
A brief early report in the 10/2/67 Examiner, "Grateful Dead Pad Raid," added one detail:
While narcotics agents and San Francisco police were inside the flat, one member of the band arrived to find newsmen waiting outside on the steps.
"There's no bust going on here," he told reporters, and walked in.
* * *
'GRATEFUL' MANAGER RE-ARRESTED (excerpt)
At least one member of the rock-n-roll Grateful Dead was less than grateful today as he pleaded not guilty to one narcotics charge and was promptly re-arrested on another as he left the courtroom.
Booked in City Prison for maintaining a place where narcotics were either sold or dispensed was Rock Scully, 26, one of two business managers of the aggregation.
His bail was set at $2500.
Scully and four companions entered their not guilty pleas before Municipal Judge Harry Low, who set Nov. 27 for a preliminary hearing on charges of possession of marijuana.
The others [are] all out on bail. [ ... ]
(from the San Francisco Examiner, 4 October 1967)
* * *
NOT DEAD YET
"We're not guilty. That's our plea, and our lawyers will prove it."
This is the comment of Danny Rifkin, manager of the Grateful Dead, about the Monday afternoon raid on the Dead's pad at 710 Ashbury where eleven people were arrested by rampaging state narks.
The busted included Pig Pen, the Dead's organ grinder, and Bob Weir, rhythm guitarist. Both were charged with possession of marijuana.
Neither of them turns on.
Pig is a devoted wine freak, and Weir, who has long been a student of eastern meditation, has been applying the methods of the Maharishi Yogi for the past two weeks. The meditation methods forbid the use of drugs.
Three more raids were made in the city the same day, including one on the Blue Cheer's house at 369 Haight St. Ten people were arrested there, though none of the members of the band were in the house at the time. [ . . . ]
[The 10/13/67 issue included a correction: "BARB erroneously stated that a house belonging to the Blue Cheer was busted, with narks netting ten people. Though the statistics were correct, the house did not belong to the Cheer. The confusion was cleared when the Cheer's former equipment manager appeared at the BARB office and stated that the house formerly belonged to him."]
Feeling runs high that the Dead bust was in retaliation for their playing at the Straight Theater School of Dance last weekend. Blue Cheer is also scheduled for an appearance there.
However, the parties involved tend to discount this rumor. They feel rather that there is a mass push to bust, regardless. One theory is that by busting the rock bands, state and city police hope to create an unfavorable image of the people they claim local teenagers emulate.
In any case, more than a few houses, particularly those belonging to bands, have undergone hasty clean-ups since the Monday raids.
(from the Berkeley Barb, 6 October 1967)
* * *
GRATEFUL DEAD TELL THEIR SIDE OF THE BUST
The sign at the head of the stairs proclaimed, "Funeral in Process."
But the noise and clatter filtering out of the Grateful Dead's house at 710 Ashbury St. yesterday indicated that something else was happening.
The Dead staged a jolly news conference to tell their view of the saga which ended in the arrest of two of the rock band's members and three of its managers, and the confiscation of some grass - not the green kind - last Tuesday.
The five members of the City's No. 2 rock band, managers, and attorney, sat around a desk in the two-story post-Victorian flat and cheered as manager Danny Rifkin read a statement about the arrests and subsequent charges for possession of marijuana.
A giant crock of whipped cream sat on the desk in front of them, reserved for newsmen who asked inane questions like: "How long did it take you to grow your hair that long?"
The statement read by Rifkin said:
"The San Francisco Police Department and the state narcotics officers invaded this house on Tuesday for the unpeaceful purpose of arresting 10 persons (six visitors and the four members of the Dead company) on charges of possession of marijuana.
"We have invited you (the press) to our 'way out pad' to discuss the meaning of this action."
The statement said that the law classifies the smoking of marijuana with murder, rape, and armed robbery as a felony, and that the people who enforce the law "use it almost exclusively against the individuals who threaten their idea of the way people should look and act."
Finally Rifkin's statement said:
"The Grateful Dead are people engaged in constructive, creative effort in the musical field and this house is where we work, as well as our residence.
"Because the police fear and misinterpret us, our effort is now interrupted as we deal with the consequences of a harassing arrest."
The statement finished, the group, along with their attorney, Michael Stepanian, braced themselves for a barrage of questions from newsmen.
The Grateful Dead thoroughly enjoyed themselves and patiently and lightly answered the questions:
Were the police picking on The Dead?
"No, they arrested other people too," Rifkin said.
Did The Dead stage the bust as a publicity gag?
"Why would we want to do a thing like that?"
Has the bust hurt or helped their record sales and bookings?
"We don't care about such things. Our thing is to make music," said the group's lead guitarist Jerry Garcia.
Are they going to try to get the narcotics law changed?
"No," Rifkin said, "but we hope our arrest will make some impression on the narcotics laws."
Did anyone in the group give the narcotics agents permission to enter the house?
"No, we didn't give them permission, but we couldn't stop them."
On and on the questions came, leading questions were answered with calm indulgence.
Fans and friends stood around and cheered them on.
When it was all over, The Grateful Dead served cake and coffee.
(by Walterene Jackson, from the San Francisco Examiner, 6 October 1967)
See also: http://deadsources.blogspot.com/2015/03/june-1968-dead-in-court.html
Jun 1, 2013
May/June 1967: Band Biographies
THE GRATEFUL DEAD *** VERSION 1
Lead guitarist, Jerry Garcia, known to San Franciscans as "Captain Trips" because of the excursion boats he once piloted up the Sacramento River, was born in Mazatlan, Mexico, of Spanish noble parents. They fled their native country during the Civil War after their nutmeg plantation was burned and looted. But soon after Jerry's birth, they were assassinated in an obscure Chilean coup attempt, and he was left to be raised by a wizened old Hopi lady, assisted by a pack of wolves, who immediately accepted the little Garcia as one of their own. Many acute listeners have identified, in Garcia's far-out solo runs, evocations of long-remembered Hopi chants. Jerry spoke no English until 1957 when he moved into San Francisco's Hopi colony. A graduate of the San Francisco Academy of Stringed Instruments, he began his rock-and-roll career doodling with the radio on the Thresher, the converted mine-sweeper with which he took weekly tourist excursions between Stockton and Oakland. Now he belongs to the ages.
Bass player, Phil Lesh, was well-known to two generations of American youngsters as the loveable Miss Frances of "Ding Dong School." Lesh's remarkable ability at characterizations was further demonstrated in 1960, when he campaigned for the Presidency in several states under the name of Richard Nixon. Lesh grew up on a nutmeg plantation in southwest Louisiana, and his interest in music stemmed from his childhood habit of humming musical radio commercials to himself as he worked in the fetid bayous. However, Phil later received classical music training, and he spent two years as featured singer with the San Francisco Opera, handling such varied roles as the leads in Aida and Falstaff. Entering rock-and-roll because of the social stigma attached to operatic performers in this country, Lesh quickly established himself as the outstanding big-beat interpreter of the songs of Stephen Foster. In his non-performing moments, Phil sculpts miniature figurines of major San Francisco political figures, a common pastime of the city's "hippies".
Ron (Pig-Pen) McKernan, organist and harpist, enjoyed several successful years as leader of an all-organ blues band before joining the "Dead". Born and raised in Palo Alto, California, McKernan earned his nickname while in high school. In his senior year, for a biology project, Ron shared his room with several young porkers, subjecting them to unusually intense study, and eventually turning out a research paper on "The Habits of Pigs." (He got an A.) Flunking out of the nearby San Francisco Academy of Pedaled Instruments on grounds of dirt, McKernan took a job as a shipping clerk in an Oakland nutmeg works, where the songs shouted by the workers along the noisy assembly line gave him his obvious feeling for urban blues. Then, for several years, Ron was organist for several of radio's top soap operas (careful listeners can detect that he sneaks the "Guiding Light" theme into every solo).
Percussionist, Bill Sommers, began his lifelong fascination with rhythm as a poor, but honest, newsboy on the streets of San Francisco. In order to stimulate sales, he cried out the headlines in rhythmical sing-song, devising little tap-dance steps to attract further attention. This procedure was so effective (during the famous circulation war, the Chronicle and Examiner continually attempted to outbid each other for his services) that Sommers kept the job all the way through college, paying for his tuition and investing in several small dormitories on the side. Hanging up his dancing shoes forever, Sommers joined the Jug City Trombone Ramblers, a local band, and introduced the novel approach of using jugs as percussion instruments. His rapid-fire technique, however, soon broke every jug the Ramblers owned, and Sommers quickly turned to a part-time job as a door-to-door nutmeg salesman until he was invited to join the "Dead". The rest, of course, is history.
Bob Weir is the scion, or son, of a socially prominent family on the San Francisco peninsula. Expected by his parents to become a doctor, Bob maintained the fiction that he was going through medical school while secretly sitting in on guitar with big-name dance bands traveling through San Francisco. Only 18 years old, he is, nonetheless, the youngest rhythm guitarist ever to play with the "Dead." Weir still manages to convince his parents that he is, in fact, a doctor, by subscribing to medical journals and stuffing his hair under a surgical cap whenever they visit. The most literary of the "Dead," Weir has to his credit two books documenting Communist influence in rock-and-roll music, and a collection of poems and drawings about the Russo-Japanese War. It is Weir's drawing of McKernan that appears on the thousands of "PigPen" t-shirts being worn by San Franciscans, one of hundreds of sketches and photos of McKernan that hang in Weir's room. No one has yet asked why. It is, by now, well established that Weir invented the word "hippie."
(Version II was posted here:
http://deadsources.blogspot.com/2012/02/june-1967-band-biographies.html )
Lead guitarist, Jerry Garcia, known to San Franciscans as "Captain Trips" because of the excursion boats he once piloted up the Sacramento River, was born in Mazatlan, Mexico, of Spanish noble parents. They fled their native country during the Civil War after their nutmeg plantation was burned and looted. But soon after Jerry's birth, they were assassinated in an obscure Chilean coup attempt, and he was left to be raised by a wizened old Hopi lady, assisted by a pack of wolves, who immediately accepted the little Garcia as one of their own. Many acute listeners have identified, in Garcia's far-out solo runs, evocations of long-remembered Hopi chants. Jerry spoke no English until 1957 when he moved into San Francisco's Hopi colony. A graduate of the San Francisco Academy of Stringed Instruments, he began his rock-and-roll career doodling with the radio on the Thresher, the converted mine-sweeper with which he took weekly tourist excursions between Stockton and Oakland. Now he belongs to the ages.
Bass player, Phil Lesh, was well-known to two generations of American youngsters as the loveable Miss Frances of "Ding Dong School." Lesh's remarkable ability at characterizations was further demonstrated in 1960, when he campaigned for the Presidency in several states under the name of Richard Nixon. Lesh grew up on a nutmeg plantation in southwest Louisiana, and his interest in music stemmed from his childhood habit of humming musical radio commercials to himself as he worked in the fetid bayous. However, Phil later received classical music training, and he spent two years as featured singer with the San Francisco Opera, handling such varied roles as the leads in Aida and Falstaff. Entering rock-and-roll because of the social stigma attached to operatic performers in this country, Lesh quickly established himself as the outstanding big-beat interpreter of the songs of Stephen Foster. In his non-performing moments, Phil sculpts miniature figurines of major San Francisco political figures, a common pastime of the city's "hippies".
Ron (Pig-Pen) McKernan, organist and harpist, enjoyed several successful years as leader of an all-organ blues band before joining the "Dead". Born and raised in Palo Alto, California, McKernan earned his nickname while in high school. In his senior year, for a biology project, Ron shared his room with several young porkers, subjecting them to unusually intense study, and eventually turning out a research paper on "The Habits of Pigs." (He got an A.) Flunking out of the nearby San Francisco Academy of Pedaled Instruments on grounds of dirt, McKernan took a job as a shipping clerk in an Oakland nutmeg works, where the songs shouted by the workers along the noisy assembly line gave him his obvious feeling for urban blues. Then, for several years, Ron was organist for several of radio's top soap operas (careful listeners can detect that he sneaks the "Guiding Light" theme into every solo).
Percussionist, Bill Sommers, began his lifelong fascination with rhythm as a poor, but honest, newsboy on the streets of San Francisco. In order to stimulate sales, he cried out the headlines in rhythmical sing-song, devising little tap-dance steps to attract further attention. This procedure was so effective (during the famous circulation war, the Chronicle and Examiner continually attempted to outbid each other for his services) that Sommers kept the job all the way through college, paying for his tuition and investing in several small dormitories on the side. Hanging up his dancing shoes forever, Sommers joined the Jug City Trombone Ramblers, a local band, and introduced the novel approach of using jugs as percussion instruments. His rapid-fire technique, however, soon broke every jug the Ramblers owned, and Sommers quickly turned to a part-time job as a door-to-door nutmeg salesman until he was invited to join the "Dead". The rest, of course, is history.
Bob Weir is the scion, or son, of a socially prominent family on the San Francisco peninsula. Expected by his parents to become a doctor, Bob maintained the fiction that he was going through medical school while secretly sitting in on guitar with big-name dance bands traveling through San Francisco. Only 18 years old, he is, nonetheless, the youngest rhythm guitarist ever to play with the "Dead." Weir still manages to convince his parents that he is, in fact, a doctor, by subscribing to medical journals and stuffing his hair under a surgical cap whenever they visit. The most literary of the "Dead," Weir has to his credit two books documenting Communist influence in rock-and-roll music, and a collection of poems and drawings about the Russo-Japanese War. It is Weir's drawing of McKernan that appears on the thousands of "PigPen" t-shirts being worn by San Franciscans, one of hundreds of sketches and photos of McKernan that hang in Weir's room. No one has yet asked why. It is, by now, well established that Weir invented the word "hippie."
(Version II was posted here:
http://deadsources.blogspot.com/2012/02/june-1967-band-biographies.html )
May 28, 2013
June 1967: New York City
JUNE 1 - TOMPKINS SQUARE PARK
THE YOUTHQUAKE AND THE SHOOK-UP PARK (excerpts)
[The article starts with a fight between police & hippies in Tompkins Square Park on Tuesday May 30, Memorial Day.]
...In the late afternoon on Memorial Day, the Flower People were out in force, complete with kirtan and bongoes... The park foreman had had enough. It had been a peaceful, if boring, park before the hippies came... The hippies were playing musical instruments, and sitting on the grass at that, both in violation of park regulations.
[A noise complaint was made to the police.]
A couple of cops went over to the park and told the hippies to shut up and get off the grass. The kids laughed, and kept singing. The cops ordered them to leave. “They laughed at us,” patrolman John Rodd explained. “That’s when the trouble began.”
[The cops attacked & arrested a bunch of the hippies, but this backfired.]
...As city departments competed with self-absolutions and veiled accusations, the hippies emerged from the crisis as a community. They had won the park. The next day, the grassy battleground was designated a “troubador area” by Parks Commissioner August Heckscher, the gates were opened, and the “keep off the grass” signs removed. [ . . . ]
The Group Image played to a packed park Wednesday night, but there were no cops around to love. Their absence was regretted later in the evening when a group of Puerto Rican youths, upset by the hippies’ newly-won dominance of the park, rained rocks and beer cans on the musicians. The Group Image made a hasty exit. [ . . . ]
[The police captain met with the East Village Defense Committee, hearing protests against police actions.]
June began on Thursday, and the Grateful Dead were in town and, despite some rumble rumors from the Puerto Ricans, the prospects for peace looked promising. A happy, scruffy parade of 80 marched down St. Mark’s Place, complete with police escort, to present the Dead with a white carnation key to the East Village, graciously accepted by Pigpen. And the Tompkins Square bandshell rocked with San Francisco glory until a noise complaint was lodged in the late afternoon. Rather than tune down, the Dead turned off. [ . . . ]
[There was another committee meeting that night.]
Meanwhile, the Tactical Police Force was back in Tompkins Square Park.
All day there were rumors that the Puerto Ricans were uptight. The rumors were true. They knew about Memorial Day, and they had heard the “LSD music” and they thought that the hippies were taking over the park. The park was tense Thursday night as the Pageant Players performed three anti-war plays. “There was some hostile response,” Michael Brown of the Pageant Players recalled, “but there always is when we perform in the street. The last thing we tried was an improvisation about the events in the park Tuesday. At the end of it, there was a small fight in the audience.”
The Pageant Players were followed by a folk-rock group, and a group of Puerto Ricans came to the bandshell and demanded Latin music. Some words were exchanged, and a scuffle started, and the iron curtain was pulled down to close the stage. [ . . . ]
[A mob formed, attacking people & wrecking cars; police arrived & dispersed the crowd. The Puerto Rican community met & decided to have another concert Friday night, June 2.]
The park was jammed Friday night. Mongo Santamaria played, and Len Chandler sang, and China Garcia from the Real Great Society mc’d in Spanish. [ . . . ] Hippies and Puerto Ricans together grooved on the Latin music. And when the music stopped, shortly before midnight, everyone held his breath. But there was no riot. [ . . . ]
Saturday afternoon the Fugs played in the bandshell, and tourists swarmed into the park. [ . . . ] The community rallied to discourage the tourists, and Sunday the bandshell was closed. [After a stabbing, the Parks Commissioner revoked a permit for further concerts in the bandshell.] It was felt that the concerts attracted tourists, but were not representative enough to satisfy the community.
(by Don McNeill, from the Village Voice, June 8 1967)
https://www.villagevoice.com/2010/02/19/hippies-cops-and-puerto-ricans-battle-for-tompkins-square-park/
http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=KEtq3P1Vf8oC&dat=19670608&printsec=frontpage&hl=en (6/8/67 Village Voice - Dead mentioned on p. 21)
See also: http://lostlivedead.blogspot.com/2009/12/june-1-1967-tompkins-square-park-new.html (particularly the comments)
*
RETURN OF THE HIPPIES
Tompkins Square Park began to emerge as a sort of Mecca of psychedelia yesterday as about 3,000 assorted hippies gathered to commemorate the two-day-old Memorial Day Bash-In.
They sprawled out in every direction from a bandstand in the three-block-square park in the East Village, listening to an amplified explosion of rock 'n' roll by a San Francisco band that calls itself The Grateful Dead. They drew wide-eyed stares from oldsters sunning themselves in the park, and won support from at least one old woman who commented, "If I was young again, I'd probably be doing just the same thing."
Since nothing can be called just a crowd anymore, this gathering was called a "real-in." Its alleged purpose was to show police that the hippie element had not been intimidated by the battle Tuesday in which 42 hippies were arrested after they defied orders to leave the park. Several policemen stood at the rear of the crowd yesterday but did not interfere with the hippies' day in the sun.
The Grateful Dead, playing loud enough to raise the ungrateful dead, began playing at 2 PM and the music could be heard for blocks in every direction. The hippies began emerging from their nearby tenements and lofts and converging on the park in their usual varied get-up, including assorted combinations of long hair, beards, sandals, boots, saris, jeans and miniskirts. "We just gather here to be in the sun," said one hippie as he did his yoga exercises.
Some of the hippies were still in the park last night, but a large crowd gathered that was a mixture of non-hippie or anti-hippie, most of them youths. Several incidents were reported, and scores of police were rushed to the scene. In one incident a motoryclist was pulled from his cycle, which was then wrecked. In another, some clothes were ripped off a 29-year-old woman. Police rescued her, and she refused to press charges against anyone. Both incidents were attributed to the anti-hippie element, since the hippie code centers on peace and nonviolence. In contrast to Tuesday's battle, the cops asked the crowd to disperse last night, and then most of the policemen left without trying to break up the crowd with force.
(from Newsday, June 2 1967)
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2983925/newsday6167.png
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COOL SCENE ON N.Y. GREEN AS HIPPIES GET THEIR WAY
NEW YORK (UPI) - The biggest outpouring of hippies in the short history of New York's dropout generation converged on Tompkins Square Park Thursday to prove to police that they cannot be intimidated.
Clad in exotic attire that managed to combine the fashions and fragrances of Delhi and Dogpatch, the longhaired ones were over 3,000 strong at the daylong "real-in" in the Lower East Side park.
Tompkins Square was the scene of a bloody melee Memorial Day night when 200 hippies refused police orders to stay away from grassy sections of the park, which were closed to the public in order to keep the turf green. Nine persons were injured and 38 were jailed.
Mayor John V. Lindsay appeared to go along with subsequent criticisms of police, allowing that the incident might have been avoided if patrolmen had been "more tactful." The gates to the park's grassy areas were opened and the hippies lolled on the greensward playing bongo drums and reading poetry unmolested.
Parks Commissioner August Heckscher, one of the nation's leading experts in cultural transition, voiced concern that "America's youth are involved in a musical explosion and New York's Bohemian element has to get a permit to take part."
The explosion burst on Tompkins Square Thursday afternoon when a rock 'n' roll band, "The Grateful Dead" from San Francisco, with amplifiers turned up to infinity took over the bandshell and loosed a blast that could be heard blocks away. Oldsters sunning themselves in the normally quiet park looked stunned.
From surrounding streets the longhaired ones in leather, saris, jhelabas, jeans, and miniskirts filtered into the park. Many danced as in a trance, beads and Buddhist bells attached to their costumes jangling in weird accompaniment. Others sat on the grass, swayed, clapped hands, and smoked.
"We just gather here to be in the sun," said one hippy as he did his Yoga exercises. "We're friends, that's all."
He found an unexpected friend in a septuagenarian woman on a nearby bench.
"If I was young again, I'd be doing just the same thing," she said.
(UPI report, from the Independent, 2 June 1967)
*
From the New York Daily News:
1,000 HOP AT NEW HIPPIE HAPPENING
The hippies were back in Tompkins Square Park last night [May 31]. So were their bongo drums, guitars, a harmonica, and all the noise they could produce. In fact, they had a sound truck amplifying the music so it could be heard six blocks to the north, at 13th St.
Thirty-five gyrating hippies swayed on the bandstand where four guitarists, a harmonica player, and a bongo player twanged and banged. And 1,000 other hippies, ringed by about 500 scowling older neighborhood residents, were gathered round the bandstand, at the south end of the park, which is between Avenues A and B and Seventh and 10th Sts.
The shindig lasted four hours, until 10:40 P.M., 20 minutes before the permit time limit.
And the hippies promised even bigger and bashier doings today. Between 2 and 5 P.M. the Grateful Dead, a California outfit, will perform before a turnout expected to be large. And from 6 to 11 P.M. there will be a concert by a unit calling itself the Group Image.
Five of the 38 hippies arrested Tuesday were interviewed on Bleecker St. yesterday and said they still loved the police. "Let us accept the police as people in a peaceful manner, with gentle voices," they urged other hippies.
Gentleness was not particularly noticeable in hippie music at the park last night. And the band's loud speakered noise was punctuated by the explosion of firecrackers set off by hippies in the crowd around the bandstand.
Hyman Abromowitz, 67, a cab driver who lives nearby at 40 Avenue D, sat with his wife, Rae, 62, on a park bench. His music comment for the evening was: "I never saw anything like this. They're wild people." His wife nodded and said: "They're for the birds."
Another neighborhood veteran chimed in: "It's a shame. The old-timers around here are afraid to come into the park because these bums have taken over."
Bowery derelicts had drifted into the park, looking for handouts. One could distinguish them from the hippies because the derelicts were older, quieter, less extreme in their clothing, and were pinch-smoking cigaret butts.
Some hippies were inhaling a smoke that smelled like incense. They waved thin, burning strips before their noses and breathed deeply. Another hippie wore a World War I helmet, painted black and emblazoned with this message on white: "LSD Forever."
Yesterday afternoon hippies "grooved" on the bright sunshine and on some of their music tootled by a flute player in the park.
[ . . . ]
(by Edward Benes & Patrick Doyle, from the Daily News, 1 June 1967)
FAITHFUL HIPPIES COME EN MESSE TO TOMPKINS SQ.
The lower East Side got a small taste of the long, hot summer yesterday as several thousand hippies cosied into Tompkins Square Park to hear teeth-rattling rock music that even had the concrete band shell vibrating.
But if some neighborhood residents expected a replay of Tuesday night's riot, they were disappointed. What they saw was a massive display of "flower power," otherwise known as the power of love and peace.
Love was much in evidence, from the couples lolling on the grass to the lyrics of songs belted by a group called The Grateful Dead.
The day's events opened at 2 P.M. with a parade from Cooper Square to the park. It can be stated authoritatively that the line of march totalled 82 persons, not counting the occupants of three police radio cars that brought up the rear.
The real show was in the audience, where the mode of dress would have driven a fashion editor into shock. Girl hippies wore everything from baggy granny dresses to blush-length miniskirts. Boy hippies went from Luftwaffe jackets to cowboy outfits. Ronnie Jackson, known locally as Ronnie Mau Mau, and who seemed in charge, made the scene in a shirt open to the navel.
An anxious police sergeant from the 9th Precinct asked Ronnie if it was true that 4 or 5,000 college kids were expected to show up for tomorrow's concert by The Fugs and got a who-knows? answer.
It was obvious that police were walking a tightrope to avoid a repetition of the riot. Uniformed cops remained discreetly outside the park but others in casual civilian dress tried vainly to blend into the scene around the band shell.
[... The rest of the article warns that "50,000 Hippies from all over the country will be migrating to the East Village" this summer, bringing marijuana and LSD with them. Local hippie representatives are working to establish communes where they can stay, and raising a communal bail fund in anticipation of increased "narco busts."]
(by Douglas Sefton, from the Daily News, 2 June 1967)
[ . . . ] The hippies had their third happening yesterday in the now un-restricted area of the park and it went without incident.
Police were nowhere to be found as some 500 weirdly dressed patrons of love-ins clapped their hands in rhythm as they marched behind "The Grateful Dead," a guitar playing group of mangy hippies from the West Coast.
Older residents sat trying to enjoy the park, but it was impossible as the hippies all sang and danced along with the group.
[ . . . ]
Meanwhile reports have been coming into City Hall, Police and Parks Department that a swarm of the new beat-generation who believe in love and music, were on their way from all parts of the country.
With a long summer ahead, officials are trying to cope with the problem and yet not allow the same situation to arise as in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco.
For the past month police have been deluged with parents asking for help in finding their young daughters and sons. Daily parents come into the station houses and ask for an escort into the "Land of the Hippie" to retrieve a child.
Bigger and better things are planned for the newly arriving "lovers," including a community center where the hippie can get a place to live, raise bail, and maybe even a few bucks.
(by William Federici, excerpt from "Night Mayor Hit On Hippie Foulup," Daily News, 2 June 1967)
WHAT'S HIPPENING IN PARK? SUN IS HOT, CROWD IS COOL
The hot sun shone on Tompkins Square Park yesterday [Sat. June 3] as swarms of hippies, college kids, tourists, and local young people converged for an afternoon and evening of entertainment. Serenity reigned under the watchful eyes of hundreds of cops.
Braced for a hot day and night of action in the battle-torn park, police watched from rooftops and inside the park for that spark of trouble - but vigilante groups from all factions of the neighborhood kept the peace.
In the band shell, the Fugs, an off-key rock group, bounced, twanged, and sweated out three hours of songs and antics as a varied group sat entranced.
The sound could be heard all over the park, but was barely audible outside the fence surrounding Tompkins Square.
Parks Department technicians manned the audio equipment, donated by an electronics company.
The older residents and the mothers with children seemed to be unaware of the entertainment. They enjoyed the park and sun.
Police and city officials on the scene seemed relaxed after Friday's meeting at City Hall. [ . . . ]
Leaders of all factions of the lower East Side neighborhood - Puerto Ricans, Negroes, Slavs, Italians, Jews and hippies - were cooperating.
Constantly on the move in the swarm of beards, long hair, crewcuts and miniskirts were men with white armbands. They were appointed by the vigilante committee, and had the full force of the police waiting for a sign of trouble.
Trouble had been expected, for the Fugs' appearance at the park was widely publicized at East Coast colleges. They are noted for songs of protest and irreverant presentations, and authorities watched intent listeners.
"It's amazing," one official said. "Why anyone would want to sit in the hot sun and listen to this is beyond me. But look at them. They're not all of the same cut. This is the new 'in' thing, I guess, and so everybody gets into the act."
Police will remain on duty until 10:30 P.M. daily. They hope they will not have to move in, as they did on Memorial Day and last Thursday [June 1].
(by William Federici, from the Daily News, 4 June 1967)
*
JUNE 8 - CENTRAL PARK
THE MUSIC IS HIP IN CENTRAL PARK
450 at the Band Shell Hear Electric-Guitar Combos
Hippies armed with electric guitars occupied the band shell at the Mall in Central Park yesterday and opened up their musical artillery. An audience of about 450 withstood the two-and-a-half-hour barrage.
About half the audience was composed of hippies, from 15 to 32 years old. The rest appeared to be passers-by.
Earlier this week the Parks Department barred such musical entertainment at the amphitheater in Tompkins Square Park, on the Lower East Side. But it gave permission for the use of the Central Park bandshell from 2 to 5 p.m. yesterday.
A combo called the Group Image - five electric guitars plus drums - achieved a sound at times that suggested a derailed freight train plunging over a cliff. Then a group called the Grateful Dead came on with electronically amplified variations on rock 'n' roll music.
The young people, some with bare feet and others wearing sandals or socks, did some moderately contortionate dancing at first. But then the pace quickened, and soon they were jumping around like rag dolls being jerked by wires.
"Part of our thing is to try to turn people on with our music, because if you're up tight, you can't relax," said Laird C. Grant of the Grateful Dead.
"I'm a pothead," a young man said amiably, walking by with a kitchen pot on his head.
(from the New York Times, June 9 1967)
Previously included here:
http://deadsources.blogspot.com/2012/02/june-8-1967-central-park-nyc.html
*
JUNE 12 - THE CHEETAH
SCENES (from the Village Voice 6/15/67)
The Flower People went uptown Monday night for the first of a series of “Inter-Tribal Community Benefits” at Cheetah... Many who came in suits took out their handkerchiefs and used them for headbands. Many who came in shirts took them off.
The Grateful Dead played to their people for the third free time in their ten-day tour. They have functioned not only as missionaries of the San Francisco sound but as emissaries from the Haight. “It’s happening here,” Rock Scully said. “New York is still two years behind the Haight, but two months ago it was three years behind.”
The Group Image also played and they made people dance. It is possible that the tribal-fling sound might catch on further out than the East Village because of its influence on dancing.
Years ago the twist revolutionized dancing because it was so easy to do, but during the last few Beatle years, rock music has become complex and with it discotheque dancing has become something more demanding than just moving your hips.
The kind of full throttle runaway tuning up raga blast that the Group Image plays is very formless. A newcomer trying to dance to this sound at first finds it hard to figure out what to do. After a while the sound gets to you and you discover that you can dance to it but only if you forget old cliches.
Anyone, repeat, anyone can frenzy dance to the Group Image. You can jump up and down and wave your hands in the air and hurtle in circles and fall on the floor. Anything goes.
More freaking out at the Cheetah next Monday and profits go to buy paper for the Communications Company and more bail money for the Jade Companions.
http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=KEtq3P1Vf8oC&dat=19670615&printsec=frontpage&hl=en (6/15/67 Village Voice, see p. 19)
[Note: the show wasn't actually free. The same column also prints a letter from the San Francisco Oracle, saying they’re expecting thousands of people journeying to San Francisco, and they need to bring more than flowers and bananas: money for rent & food, sleeping bags, camping equipment, extra food, warm clothing, and ID. This issue of the Village Voice also has some fascinating articles & letters about the Tompkins Square situation, and the divisions in the community, particularly between the pacifist hippies who want to drop out & the political activists who want to reform society, and the inability of anyone to agree on what to do.]
*
From "What Goes On," Crawdaddy, Issue 10, July/Aug 1967:
There's still no real rock scene in New York, but things are happening very fast. (Rock Scully: "When I was here a month ago, New York was three years behind the Haight. Now it's two years behind.") The Grateful Dead came to town, and played so many free concerts that the SF tradition of music in the parks seems firmly established here.
The Group Image has been a particularly important influence on the scene. (The Image are an amorphous bunch who produce music, posters, confusion, and other useful items. As yet, their music is nothing very good, but their performance is very enjoyable - the audience makes as much noise as the Image, and it's all very tribal and very real.)
Monday nights at the Cheetah are now devoted to the community, following a marvelous Grateful Dead-Group Image concert there early in June. For the first time, the Cheetah had good people onstage and good people in the audience, and it made all the difference in the world.
*
From “Miles’ Trip: New York,” by Barry Miles, from the UK magazine International Times, 6/30/67 – an update on the NYC scene for English readers.
Tompkins Square Park is the focal point for hippie-power in the Lower East Side of New York. In the surrounding blocks are the Tompkins Square Bookshop, 10th Street Books, The Peace Eye Bookshop, the old E.V.O. Office, The Leather Shop, The Psychedehcatessen, Psychedelic Community Centre and many cafes, bars and boutiques all serving the hippie community. Two weeks ago the first major encounter between police and hippies occured in the park where the hippies got their heads smashed and the city apologised – Mayor Lindsey's second in command saying that the hippies should remember that the police are essentially a fascist organisation... Three police stand on each corner of the park now and more are available from an emergency van parked just off the square. The Ukranians and Puerto Ricans of the area have not made any arrangements with the hip community and the "melting pot" just doesn't melt. [. . . ]
The Mothers of Invention expect to be here [London] in late September. Their stage act in New York is, like their new album Absolutely Free, structured like an opera. Zappa stands amid dozens of people who appear in a state of total anarchy. At the raise of his arm they move from one number to another or stop or start. Groupies leap about the stage with tambourines or sweep up the mashed fruit that another Mother eats and spits out again into the audience – all a bit messy. The act requires a fairly complete knowledge of American classic pop music for a good appreciation of its musical content – they will blow people's minds here.
The Fugs are still playing in the Village – the words making up for a certain lack of music continuity. Ken Weaver's brilliant humour and Sanders' direct approach hold the audience in a way that no other group could... The pornographic interlude in the middle of the show would probably be unintelligible here but is very funny. Tuli Kupferberg visualises many of the songs in a way of his own, particularly in 'Kill For Peace'.
The Grateful Dead and the Group Image were at the Cheetah with an expensive light show. The Dead play like a more electronic version of Tomorrow, the Group Image are a mixture of the Soft Machine and A.M.M. – heavily experimental, heavily amplified. The light show is overdone and becomes tame. It seems to be preselected or programmed in some way though there seemed to be operators on the projectors.
[The rest of the article is about Tim Leary's activities.]
*
http://www.radiounnameablemovie.com/audio/
The Bob Fass radio show from 6/7/67 has an interview with several Group Image members, and Rock Scully & Danny Rifkin representing the Dead.
This isn't a normal question & answer radio show, though, mostly just stoned banter & laughter. (There's even a group humming session.)
They announce the Central Park show the next day, from 2-5 pm. The Group Image are looking forward to playing out in the park. “Free in the park, tomorrow – free freak!”
Foss asks the Group Image to describe their sound. "Come tomorrow and find out, listen to us!"
Foss: “You’re also doing something at the Cheetah for money.”
“It’s a benefit for the Lower East Side community, it’s gonna be every Monday night during the summer at the Cheetah.” They talk about ticket arrangements, how the money will be divided between the tribes, Group Image's control of the events, the situation at Cheetah, and how the light show is run.
Foss says, "The peace in Tompkins Square Park seems to have been restored by the people wearing armbands.”
“And playing in rock bands – of course the rock bands started it!”
Foss: “You think that’s true?”
“No. [But] that kind of music stirs people up - it gets people to freak.”
"You know something, it doesn't stir people up violently in sunshine, rock music and sunshine go together real well."
Introducing the Dead, Foss says to Scully, “I hear a lot of beautiful things about you, you have a lot to live up to... People have been telling me about you for well over a year, and that's a long time..."
He says, “Rock’s from San Francisco where the name ‘Grateful Dead’ makes a lot of sense.”
And he asks Rifkin, “How do you guys compare with Moby Grape?”
“Favorably!”
Scully & Rifkin complain about the scary police in San Francisco, who are out to get the hippies. (They seem to think that in NYC, police just keep the peace & stop crime...) Foss compares the San Francisco & New York Be-Ins (there had been a couple Be-Ins in Central Park), feeling that in SF the people were all watching the bands, while in NYC everyone did their own thing. Scully & Rifkin disagree, talking about the different circles of people all over Golden Gate Park, and describing the experience in glowing terms. Foss is curious about San Francisco & asks them what the "tribes" are like out there - they think it's much the same as in NYC, but it's easier for people to get together out west.
*
http://www.gdao.org/items/show/837898
Jim Fosso, a Group Image member, remembers playing with the Dead at the Tompkins Square Park show.
"The park had become a hippie hangout of sorts, with weed being smoked more or less openly until the cops staged a big raid, beat up several people and threw them in jail. This caused a huge uproar, police were shamed for their brutality, and proclaimed that they wouldn't be patrolling the park anymore.
I had co-founded a band called "Group Image" (name inspired by Marshall McCluhan's "The Medium Is The Message"). We planned to play a benefit concert, I think to help with legal expenses for the police victims, and we contacted the Dead to invite them to join in. They accepted because they were in town anyway, and visited us at the loft for a brief jam a day or two before.
They played a few of their songs for us, and then asked us to play some of ours. One of us replied, "We don't have any songs. We just play free." We were known as the loudest band in New York, having learned how to stack columns of Marshall amps together at a time when the Beatles were using little Standells. We would often set up at St Mark's Church or some other venue such as the Balloon Farm, set up a light show, and just start jamming, improvising, the word would spread, crowds showed up. We were wild, primitive, unstructured, like a tribe, and the music sprang from that roughly organized chaos.
I was a fan of Charles Lloyd, a jazz musician in the Coltrane, Albert Ayler mold (although much more whimsical in his "Free Music" style) and had translated that genre into rock in my own crude way, with a lead guitar style similar to the Byrds "Eight Miles High". I was also a hanging-out friend of Larry Coryell, one of the early jazz fusion guitarists, whose apartment was across the street from Tompkins Square. Anyway, I brought my crude oddball guitar style with those influences to the Tompkins Square concert. I think the Dead and Group Image played some songs, then jammed for about 5-6 hours. The crowd went insane, as they usually did at our shows.
Toward the end, things got increasingly crazy and scary...women being assaulted, weapons brandished by ethnic groups that were somewhat resentful of the hippie invasion of the Lower East Side, with no cops in sight. We were on our own to get out of there. We quickly tore down our gear, packed up and ran for our lives. I think I remember Weir slamming the last of their gear into the back of a Chevy panel truck."
(Judging by the newspaper reports, which describe neither long jams nor assaults at either of the Dead's park shows, he may be mixing up memories of the Group Image's May 31 Tompkins Square Park show and the Dead/Group Image June 8 Central Park show.)
See also:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oC0zqyMJ8J8 - the Group Image on TV, 1969
The Dead also played at the Cafe au Go Go from June 1-11, but I haven't seen any news reports about that.
THE YOUTHQUAKE AND THE SHOOK-UP PARK (excerpts)
[The article starts with a fight between police & hippies in Tompkins Square Park on Tuesday May 30, Memorial Day.]
...In the late afternoon on Memorial Day, the Flower People were out in force, complete with kirtan and bongoes... The park foreman had had enough. It had been a peaceful, if boring, park before the hippies came... The hippies were playing musical instruments, and sitting on the grass at that, both in violation of park regulations.
[A noise complaint was made to the police.]
A couple of cops went over to the park and told the hippies to shut up and get off the grass. The kids laughed, and kept singing. The cops ordered them to leave. “They laughed at us,” patrolman John Rodd explained. “That’s when the trouble began.”
[The cops attacked & arrested a bunch of the hippies, but this backfired.]
...As city departments competed with self-absolutions and veiled accusations, the hippies emerged from the crisis as a community. They had won the park. The next day, the grassy battleground was designated a “troubador area” by Parks Commissioner August Heckscher, the gates were opened, and the “keep off the grass” signs removed. [ . . . ]
The Group Image played to a packed park Wednesday night, but there were no cops around to love. Their absence was regretted later in the evening when a group of Puerto Rican youths, upset by the hippies’ newly-won dominance of the park, rained rocks and beer cans on the musicians. The Group Image made a hasty exit. [ . . . ]
[The police captain met with the East Village Defense Committee, hearing protests against police actions.]
June began on Thursday, and the Grateful Dead were in town and, despite some rumble rumors from the Puerto Ricans, the prospects for peace looked promising. A happy, scruffy parade of 80 marched down St. Mark’s Place, complete with police escort, to present the Dead with a white carnation key to the East Village, graciously accepted by Pigpen. And the Tompkins Square bandshell rocked with San Francisco glory until a noise complaint was lodged in the late afternoon. Rather than tune down, the Dead turned off. [ . . . ]
[There was another committee meeting that night.]
Meanwhile, the Tactical Police Force was back in Tompkins Square Park.
All day there were rumors that the Puerto Ricans were uptight. The rumors were true. They knew about Memorial Day, and they had heard the “LSD music” and they thought that the hippies were taking over the park. The park was tense Thursday night as the Pageant Players performed three anti-war plays. “There was some hostile response,” Michael Brown of the Pageant Players recalled, “but there always is when we perform in the street. The last thing we tried was an improvisation about the events in the park Tuesday. At the end of it, there was a small fight in the audience.”
The Pageant Players were followed by a folk-rock group, and a group of Puerto Ricans came to the bandshell and demanded Latin music. Some words were exchanged, and a scuffle started, and the iron curtain was pulled down to close the stage. [ . . . ]
[A mob formed, attacking people & wrecking cars; police arrived & dispersed the crowd. The Puerto Rican community met & decided to have another concert Friday night, June 2.]
The park was jammed Friday night. Mongo Santamaria played, and Len Chandler sang, and China Garcia from the Real Great Society mc’d in Spanish. [ . . . ] Hippies and Puerto Ricans together grooved on the Latin music. And when the music stopped, shortly before midnight, everyone held his breath. But there was no riot. [ . . . ]
Saturday afternoon the Fugs played in the bandshell, and tourists swarmed into the park. [ . . . ] The community rallied to discourage the tourists, and Sunday the bandshell was closed. [After a stabbing, the Parks Commissioner revoked a permit for further concerts in the bandshell.] It was felt that the concerts attracted tourists, but were not representative enough to satisfy the community.
(by Don McNeill, from the Village Voice, June 8 1967)
https://www.villagevoice.com/2010/02/19/hippies-cops-and-puerto-ricans-battle-for-tompkins-square-park/
http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=KEtq3P1Vf8oC&dat=19670608&printsec=frontpage&hl=en (6/8/67 Village Voice - Dead mentioned on p. 21)
See also: http://lostlivedead.blogspot.com/2009/12/june-1-1967-tompkins-square-park-new.html (particularly the comments)
*
RETURN OF THE HIPPIES
Tompkins Square Park began to emerge as a sort of Mecca of psychedelia yesterday as about 3,000 assorted hippies gathered to commemorate the two-day-old Memorial Day Bash-In.
They sprawled out in every direction from a bandstand in the three-block-square park in the East Village, listening to an amplified explosion of rock 'n' roll by a San Francisco band that calls itself The Grateful Dead. They drew wide-eyed stares from oldsters sunning themselves in the park, and won support from at least one old woman who commented, "If I was young again, I'd probably be doing just the same thing."
Since nothing can be called just a crowd anymore, this gathering was called a "real-in." Its alleged purpose was to show police that the hippie element had not been intimidated by the battle Tuesday in which 42 hippies were arrested after they defied orders to leave the park. Several policemen stood at the rear of the crowd yesterday but did not interfere with the hippies' day in the sun.
The Grateful Dead, playing loud enough to raise the ungrateful dead, began playing at 2 PM and the music could be heard for blocks in every direction. The hippies began emerging from their nearby tenements and lofts and converging on the park in their usual varied get-up, including assorted combinations of long hair, beards, sandals, boots, saris, jeans and miniskirts. "We just gather here to be in the sun," said one hippie as he did his yoga exercises.
Some of the hippies were still in the park last night, but a large crowd gathered that was a mixture of non-hippie or anti-hippie, most of them youths. Several incidents were reported, and scores of police were rushed to the scene. In one incident a motoryclist was pulled from his cycle, which was then wrecked. In another, some clothes were ripped off a 29-year-old woman. Police rescued her, and she refused to press charges against anyone. Both incidents were attributed to the anti-hippie element, since the hippie code centers on peace and nonviolence. In contrast to Tuesday's battle, the cops asked the crowd to disperse last night, and then most of the policemen left without trying to break up the crowd with force.
(from Newsday, June 2 1967)
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2983925/newsday6167.png
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COOL SCENE ON N.Y. GREEN AS HIPPIES GET THEIR WAY
NEW YORK (UPI) - The biggest outpouring of hippies in the short history of New York's dropout generation converged on Tompkins Square Park Thursday to prove to police that they cannot be intimidated.
Clad in exotic attire that managed to combine the fashions and fragrances of Delhi and Dogpatch, the longhaired ones were over 3,000 strong at the daylong "real-in" in the Lower East Side park.
Tompkins Square was the scene of a bloody melee Memorial Day night when 200 hippies refused police orders to stay away from grassy sections of the park, which were closed to the public in order to keep the turf green. Nine persons were injured and 38 were jailed.
Mayor John V. Lindsay appeared to go along with subsequent criticisms of police, allowing that the incident might have been avoided if patrolmen had been "more tactful." The gates to the park's grassy areas were opened and the hippies lolled on the greensward playing bongo drums and reading poetry unmolested.
Parks Commissioner August Heckscher, one of the nation's leading experts in cultural transition, voiced concern that "America's youth are involved in a musical explosion and New York's Bohemian element has to get a permit to take part."
The explosion burst on Tompkins Square Thursday afternoon when a rock 'n' roll band, "The Grateful Dead" from San Francisco, with amplifiers turned up to infinity took over the bandshell and loosed a blast that could be heard blocks away. Oldsters sunning themselves in the normally quiet park looked stunned.
From surrounding streets the longhaired ones in leather, saris, jhelabas, jeans, and miniskirts filtered into the park. Many danced as in a trance, beads and Buddhist bells attached to their costumes jangling in weird accompaniment. Others sat on the grass, swayed, clapped hands, and smoked.
"We just gather here to be in the sun," said one hippy as he did his Yoga exercises. "We're friends, that's all."
He found an unexpected friend in a septuagenarian woman on a nearby bench.
"If I was young again, I'd be doing just the same thing," she said.
(UPI report, from the Independent, 2 June 1967)
*
From the New York Daily News:
1,000 HOP AT NEW HIPPIE HAPPENING
The hippies were back in Tompkins Square Park last night [May 31]. So were their bongo drums, guitars, a harmonica, and all the noise they could produce. In fact, they had a sound truck amplifying the music so it could be heard six blocks to the north, at 13th St.
Thirty-five gyrating hippies swayed on the bandstand where four guitarists, a harmonica player, and a bongo player twanged and banged. And 1,000 other hippies, ringed by about 500 scowling older neighborhood residents, were gathered round the bandstand, at the south end of the park, which is between Avenues A and B and Seventh and 10th Sts.
The shindig lasted four hours, until 10:40 P.M., 20 minutes before the permit time limit.
And the hippies promised even bigger and bashier doings today. Between 2 and 5 P.M. the Grateful Dead, a California outfit, will perform before a turnout expected to be large. And from 6 to 11 P.M. there will be a concert by a unit calling itself the Group Image.
Five of the 38 hippies arrested Tuesday were interviewed on Bleecker St. yesterday and said they still loved the police. "Let us accept the police as people in a peaceful manner, with gentle voices," they urged other hippies.
Gentleness was not particularly noticeable in hippie music at the park last night. And the band's loud speakered noise was punctuated by the explosion of firecrackers set off by hippies in the crowd around the bandstand.
Hyman Abromowitz, 67, a cab driver who lives nearby at 40 Avenue D, sat with his wife, Rae, 62, on a park bench. His music comment for the evening was: "I never saw anything like this. They're wild people." His wife nodded and said: "They're for the birds."
Another neighborhood veteran chimed in: "It's a shame. The old-timers around here are afraid to come into the park because these bums have taken over."
Bowery derelicts had drifted into the park, looking for handouts. One could distinguish them from the hippies because the derelicts were older, quieter, less extreme in their clothing, and were pinch-smoking cigaret butts.
Some hippies were inhaling a smoke that smelled like incense. They waved thin, burning strips before their noses and breathed deeply. Another hippie wore a World War I helmet, painted black and emblazoned with this message on white: "LSD Forever."
Yesterday afternoon hippies "grooved" on the bright sunshine and on some of their music tootled by a flute player in the park.
[ . . . ]
(by Edward Benes & Patrick Doyle, from the Daily News, 1 June 1967)
FAITHFUL HIPPIES COME EN MESSE TO TOMPKINS SQ.
The lower East Side got a small taste of the long, hot summer yesterday as several thousand hippies cosied into Tompkins Square Park to hear teeth-rattling rock music that even had the concrete band shell vibrating.
But if some neighborhood residents expected a replay of Tuesday night's riot, they were disappointed. What they saw was a massive display of "flower power," otherwise known as the power of love and peace.
Love was much in evidence, from the couples lolling on the grass to the lyrics of songs belted by a group called The Grateful Dead.
The day's events opened at 2 P.M. with a parade from Cooper Square to the park. It can be stated authoritatively that the line of march totalled 82 persons, not counting the occupants of three police radio cars that brought up the rear.
The real show was in the audience, where the mode of dress would have driven a fashion editor into shock. Girl hippies wore everything from baggy granny dresses to blush-length miniskirts. Boy hippies went from Luftwaffe jackets to cowboy outfits. Ronnie Jackson, known locally as Ronnie Mau Mau, and who seemed in charge, made the scene in a shirt open to the navel.
An anxious police sergeant from the 9th Precinct asked Ronnie if it was true that 4 or 5,000 college kids were expected to show up for tomorrow's concert by The Fugs and got a who-knows? answer.
It was obvious that police were walking a tightrope to avoid a repetition of the riot. Uniformed cops remained discreetly outside the park but others in casual civilian dress tried vainly to blend into the scene around the band shell.
[... The rest of the article warns that "50,000 Hippies from all over the country will be migrating to the East Village" this summer, bringing marijuana and LSD with them. Local hippie representatives are working to establish communes where they can stay, and raising a communal bail fund in anticipation of increased "narco busts."]
(by Douglas Sefton, from the Daily News, 2 June 1967)
[ . . . ] The hippies had their third happening yesterday in the now un-restricted area of the park and it went without incident.
Police were nowhere to be found as some 500 weirdly dressed patrons of love-ins clapped their hands in rhythm as they marched behind "The Grateful Dead," a guitar playing group of mangy hippies from the West Coast.
Older residents sat trying to enjoy the park, but it was impossible as the hippies all sang and danced along with the group.
[ . . . ]
Meanwhile reports have been coming into City Hall, Police and Parks Department that a swarm of the new beat-generation who believe in love and music, were on their way from all parts of the country.
With a long summer ahead, officials are trying to cope with the problem and yet not allow the same situation to arise as in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco.
For the past month police have been deluged with parents asking for help in finding their young daughters and sons. Daily parents come into the station houses and ask for an escort into the "Land of the Hippie" to retrieve a child.
Bigger and better things are planned for the newly arriving "lovers," including a community center where the hippie can get a place to live, raise bail, and maybe even a few bucks.
(by William Federici, excerpt from "Night Mayor Hit On Hippie Foulup," Daily News, 2 June 1967)
WHAT'S HIPPENING IN PARK? SUN IS HOT, CROWD IS COOL
The hot sun shone on Tompkins Square Park yesterday [Sat. June 3] as swarms of hippies, college kids, tourists, and local young people converged for an afternoon and evening of entertainment. Serenity reigned under the watchful eyes of hundreds of cops.
Braced for a hot day and night of action in the battle-torn park, police watched from rooftops and inside the park for that spark of trouble - but vigilante groups from all factions of the neighborhood kept the peace.
In the band shell, the Fugs, an off-key rock group, bounced, twanged, and sweated out three hours of songs and antics as a varied group sat entranced.
The sound could be heard all over the park, but was barely audible outside the fence surrounding Tompkins Square.
Parks Department technicians manned the audio equipment, donated by an electronics company.
The older residents and the mothers with children seemed to be unaware of the entertainment. They enjoyed the park and sun.
Police and city officials on the scene seemed relaxed after Friday's meeting at City Hall. [ . . . ]
Leaders of all factions of the lower East Side neighborhood - Puerto Ricans, Negroes, Slavs, Italians, Jews and hippies - were cooperating.
Constantly on the move in the swarm of beards, long hair, crewcuts and miniskirts were men with white armbands. They were appointed by the vigilante committee, and had the full force of the police waiting for a sign of trouble.
Trouble had been expected, for the Fugs' appearance at the park was widely publicized at East Coast colleges. They are noted for songs of protest and irreverant presentations, and authorities watched intent listeners.
"It's amazing," one official said. "Why anyone would want to sit in the hot sun and listen to this is beyond me. But look at them. They're not all of the same cut. This is the new 'in' thing, I guess, and so everybody gets into the act."
Police will remain on duty until 10:30 P.M. daily. They hope they will not have to move in, as they did on Memorial Day and last Thursday [June 1].
(by William Federici, from the Daily News, 4 June 1967)
*
JUNE 8 - CENTRAL PARK
THE MUSIC IS HIP IN CENTRAL PARK
450 at the Band Shell Hear Electric-Guitar Combos
Hippies armed with electric guitars occupied the band shell at the Mall in Central Park yesterday and opened up their musical artillery. An audience of about 450 withstood the two-and-a-half-hour barrage.
About half the audience was composed of hippies, from 15 to 32 years old. The rest appeared to be passers-by.
Earlier this week the Parks Department barred such musical entertainment at the amphitheater in Tompkins Square Park, on the Lower East Side. But it gave permission for the use of the Central Park bandshell from 2 to 5 p.m. yesterday.
A combo called the Group Image - five electric guitars plus drums - achieved a sound at times that suggested a derailed freight train plunging over a cliff. Then a group called the Grateful Dead came on with electronically amplified variations on rock 'n' roll music.
The young people, some with bare feet and others wearing sandals or socks, did some moderately contortionate dancing at first. But then the pace quickened, and soon they were jumping around like rag dolls being jerked by wires.
"Part of our thing is to try to turn people on with our music, because if you're up tight, you can't relax," said Laird C. Grant of the Grateful Dead.
"I'm a pothead," a young man said amiably, walking by with a kitchen pot on his head.
(from the New York Times, June 9 1967)
Previously included here:
http://deadsources.blogspot.com/2012/02/june-8-1967-central-park-nyc.html
*
JUNE 12 - THE CHEETAH
SCENES (from the Village Voice 6/15/67)
The Flower People went uptown Monday night for the first of a series of “Inter-Tribal Community Benefits” at Cheetah... Many who came in suits took out their handkerchiefs and used them for headbands. Many who came in shirts took them off.
The Grateful Dead played to their people for the third free time in their ten-day tour. They have functioned not only as missionaries of the San Francisco sound but as emissaries from the Haight. “It’s happening here,” Rock Scully said. “New York is still two years behind the Haight, but two months ago it was three years behind.”
The Group Image also played and they made people dance. It is possible that the tribal-fling sound might catch on further out than the East Village because of its influence on dancing.
Years ago the twist revolutionized dancing because it was so easy to do, but during the last few Beatle years, rock music has become complex and with it discotheque dancing has become something more demanding than just moving your hips.
The kind of full throttle runaway tuning up raga blast that the Group Image plays is very formless. A newcomer trying to dance to this sound at first finds it hard to figure out what to do. After a while the sound gets to you and you discover that you can dance to it but only if you forget old cliches.
Anyone, repeat, anyone can frenzy dance to the Group Image. You can jump up and down and wave your hands in the air and hurtle in circles and fall on the floor. Anything goes.
More freaking out at the Cheetah next Monday and profits go to buy paper for the Communications Company and more bail money for the Jade Companions.
http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=KEtq3P1Vf8oC&dat=19670615&printsec=frontpage&hl=en (6/15/67 Village Voice, see p. 19)
[Note: the show wasn't actually free. The same column also prints a letter from the San Francisco Oracle, saying they’re expecting thousands of people journeying to San Francisco, and they need to bring more than flowers and bananas: money for rent & food, sleeping bags, camping equipment, extra food, warm clothing, and ID. This issue of the Village Voice also has some fascinating articles & letters about the Tompkins Square situation, and the divisions in the community, particularly between the pacifist hippies who want to drop out & the political activists who want to reform society, and the inability of anyone to agree on what to do.]
*
From "What Goes On," Crawdaddy, Issue 10, July/Aug 1967:
There's still no real rock scene in New York, but things are happening very fast. (Rock Scully: "When I was here a month ago, New York was three years behind the Haight. Now it's two years behind.") The Grateful Dead came to town, and played so many free concerts that the SF tradition of music in the parks seems firmly established here.
The Group Image has been a particularly important influence on the scene. (The Image are an amorphous bunch who produce music, posters, confusion, and other useful items. As yet, their music is nothing very good, but their performance is very enjoyable - the audience makes as much noise as the Image, and it's all very tribal and very real.)
Monday nights at the Cheetah are now devoted to the community, following a marvelous Grateful Dead-Group Image concert there early in June. For the first time, the Cheetah had good people onstage and good people in the audience, and it made all the difference in the world.
*
From “Miles’ Trip: New York,” by Barry Miles, from the UK magazine International Times, 6/30/67 – an update on the NYC scene for English readers.
Tompkins Square Park is the focal point for hippie-power in the Lower East Side of New York. In the surrounding blocks are the Tompkins Square Bookshop, 10th Street Books, The Peace Eye Bookshop, the old E.V.O. Office, The Leather Shop, The Psychedehcatessen, Psychedelic Community Centre and many cafes, bars and boutiques all serving the hippie community. Two weeks ago the first major encounter between police and hippies occured in the park where the hippies got their heads smashed and the city apologised – Mayor Lindsey's second in command saying that the hippies should remember that the police are essentially a fascist organisation... Three police stand on each corner of the park now and more are available from an emergency van parked just off the square. The Ukranians and Puerto Ricans of the area have not made any arrangements with the hip community and the "melting pot" just doesn't melt. [. . . ]
The Mothers of Invention expect to be here [London] in late September. Their stage act in New York is, like their new album Absolutely Free, structured like an opera. Zappa stands amid dozens of people who appear in a state of total anarchy. At the raise of his arm they move from one number to another or stop or start. Groupies leap about the stage with tambourines or sweep up the mashed fruit that another Mother eats and spits out again into the audience – all a bit messy. The act requires a fairly complete knowledge of American classic pop music for a good appreciation of its musical content – they will blow people's minds here.
The Fugs are still playing in the Village – the words making up for a certain lack of music continuity. Ken Weaver's brilliant humour and Sanders' direct approach hold the audience in a way that no other group could... The pornographic interlude in the middle of the show would probably be unintelligible here but is very funny. Tuli Kupferberg visualises many of the songs in a way of his own, particularly in 'Kill For Peace'.
The Grateful Dead and the Group Image were at the Cheetah with an expensive light show. The Dead play like a more electronic version of Tomorrow, the Group Image are a mixture of the Soft Machine and A.M.M. – heavily experimental, heavily amplified. The light show is overdone and becomes tame. It seems to be preselected or programmed in some way though there seemed to be operators on the projectors.
[The rest of the article is about Tim Leary's activities.]
*
http://www.radiounnameablemovie.com/audio/
The Bob Fass radio show from 6/7/67 has an interview with several Group Image members, and Rock Scully & Danny Rifkin representing the Dead.
This isn't a normal question & answer radio show, though, mostly just stoned banter & laughter. (There's even a group humming session.)
They announce the Central Park show the next day, from 2-5 pm. The Group Image are looking forward to playing out in the park. “Free in the park, tomorrow – free freak!”
Foss asks the Group Image to describe their sound. "Come tomorrow and find out, listen to us!"
Foss: “You’re also doing something at the Cheetah for money.”
“It’s a benefit for the Lower East Side community, it’s gonna be every Monday night during the summer at the Cheetah.” They talk about ticket arrangements, how the money will be divided between the tribes, Group Image's control of the events, the situation at Cheetah, and how the light show is run.
Foss says, "The peace in Tompkins Square Park seems to have been restored by the people wearing armbands.”
“And playing in rock bands – of course the rock bands started it!”
Foss: “You think that’s true?”
“No. [But] that kind of music stirs people up - it gets people to freak.”
"You know something, it doesn't stir people up violently in sunshine, rock music and sunshine go together real well."
Introducing the Dead, Foss says to Scully, “I hear a lot of beautiful things about you, you have a lot to live up to... People have been telling me about you for well over a year, and that's a long time..."
He says, “Rock’s from San Francisco where the name ‘Grateful Dead’ makes a lot of sense.”
And he asks Rifkin, “How do you guys compare with Moby Grape?”
“Favorably!”
Scully & Rifkin complain about the scary police in San Francisco, who are out to get the hippies. (They seem to think that in NYC, police just keep the peace & stop crime...) Foss compares the San Francisco & New York Be-Ins (there had been a couple Be-Ins in Central Park), feeling that in SF the people were all watching the bands, while in NYC everyone did their own thing. Scully & Rifkin disagree, talking about the different circles of people all over Golden Gate Park, and describing the experience in glowing terms. Foss is curious about San Francisco & asks them what the "tribes" are like out there - they think it's much the same as in NYC, but it's easier for people to get together out west.
*
http://www.gdao.org/items/show/837898
Jim Fosso, a Group Image member, remembers playing with the Dead at the Tompkins Square Park show.
"The park had become a hippie hangout of sorts, with weed being smoked more or less openly until the cops staged a big raid, beat up several people and threw them in jail. This caused a huge uproar, police were shamed for their brutality, and proclaimed that they wouldn't be patrolling the park anymore.
I had co-founded a band called "Group Image" (name inspired by Marshall McCluhan's "The Medium Is The Message"). We planned to play a benefit concert, I think to help with legal expenses for the police victims, and we contacted the Dead to invite them to join in. They accepted because they were in town anyway, and visited us at the loft for a brief jam a day or two before.
They played a few of their songs for us, and then asked us to play some of ours. One of us replied, "We don't have any songs. We just play free." We were known as the loudest band in New York, having learned how to stack columns of Marshall amps together at a time when the Beatles were using little Standells. We would often set up at St Mark's Church or some other venue such as the Balloon Farm, set up a light show, and just start jamming, improvising, the word would spread, crowds showed up. We were wild, primitive, unstructured, like a tribe, and the music sprang from that roughly organized chaos.
I was a fan of Charles Lloyd, a jazz musician in the Coltrane, Albert Ayler mold (although much more whimsical in his "Free Music" style) and had translated that genre into rock in my own crude way, with a lead guitar style similar to the Byrds "Eight Miles High". I was also a hanging-out friend of Larry Coryell, one of the early jazz fusion guitarists, whose apartment was across the street from Tompkins Square. Anyway, I brought my crude oddball guitar style with those influences to the Tompkins Square concert. I think the Dead and Group Image played some songs, then jammed for about 5-6 hours. The crowd went insane, as they usually did at our shows.
Toward the end, things got increasingly crazy and scary...women being assaulted, weapons brandished by ethnic groups that were somewhat resentful of the hippie invasion of the Lower East Side, with no cops in sight. We were on our own to get out of there. We quickly tore down our gear, packed up and ran for our lives. I think I remember Weir slamming the last of their gear into the back of a Chevy panel truck."
(Judging by the newspaper reports, which describe neither long jams nor assaults at either of the Dead's park shows, he may be mixing up memories of the Group Image's May 31 Tompkins Square Park show and the Dead/Group Image June 8 Central Park show.)
See also:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oC0zqyMJ8J8 - the Group Image on TV, 1969
The Dead also played at the Cafe au Go Go from June 1-11, but I haven't seen any news reports about that.
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