In Search of the Lost Chord

by Danny Goldberg

  In Southern California, Donahue himself initially programmed KPPC, which was broadcast out of a church basement in Pasadena. KPPC could be heard in the Los Angeles market, and it was where Elliot Mintz would soon move his show.

  As Mintz recalls, “AM deejays shouted at amphetamine-driven speed, using virtually the same language that jocks used in the fifties. On FM, it was as if you would meet someone on the street who would describe an experience with you. We heard disc jockeys talking our language. They didn’t sound like radio announcers, they sounded like us. When they talked about music it was like they were explaining to a friend what a concert was like.”

  As much as the deejays identified with the hippie culture, they were subject to FCC-imposed limitations and a much straighter ownership culture than the underground press had. No songs with dirty words, no cursing on the air, and at some stations, no politics. On October 9, 1967, Donahue wrote to the KMPX staff: “Just a reminder that KMPX is a music station. Stay away from political comments or opinions. And since we do not broadcast the news, stay away from any news that doesn’t involve music or musicians. The music is sufficient to speak for us.”

  The music spoke very loudly. For artists like Country Joe and the Fish and the Grateful Dead, “underground” was the only radio exposure they got and, as it turned out, all that they needed. For the first year or two of the format, there was no research on what worked with audiences, so the deejays programmed their own shows intuitively and could go from the blues to Ravi Shankar to Jimi Hendrix. They played long songs like Dylan’s eleven-minute “Desolation Row,” and invented creative tricks like the “segue” of one song into another. When the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released in the summer, KMPX played it in its entirety—a notion that seems obvious in retrospect, but was a novelty at the time.

  During the few years before corporate broadcasters took over the programming, Mintz recalls wistfully, “We were beating on tom-toms and saying, Hello in there . . . you’re not crazy. There wasn’t first class and caboose. We were all in it together.”

  The Fillmore

  By the end of 1965, the growing audience for psychedelic rock in San Francisco had created a new business. Bill Graham opened the Fillmore Auditorium on December 10, 1965, with Jefferson Airplane as the headliner.

  Graham was born as Wulf Wolodia Grajonca to a Jewish family in Berlin, Germany. He was sent away to escape the Nazi regime, and was raised in a foster home in the Bronx from the time he was ten years old. He had moved to San Francisco in the early sixties, and initially he’d had aspirations to be an actor, but when he couldn’t get that career going he took to managing the San Francisco Mime Troupe, a countercultural collective that was integral to the formation of the hippie scene (and which gave rise to the Diggers). Graham was soon involved as a promoter in several of the early psychedelic dances.

  Graham was thirty-five years old when he opened the Fillmore. He had a vision of how the new iteration of rock and roll should be presented. He commissioned posters by local psychedelic artists such as Rick Griffin and Mouse, which soon became cherished expressions of the culture. Unlike conventional promoters who presented rock shows as cheaply as possible, Graham treated each show as an art form. He printed programs, and featured the kinds of light shows that Ken Kesey had experimented with.

  Graham was the prototype of a kind of hippie businessman who genuinely understood a lot about the youth culture and who was personally well liked by most of the bands, but who was also unapologetic about the fact that he was running a business. He exuded a gleeful sense of entitlement when it came to making a profit.

  Although assorted radical groups sometimes demonized him, Graham walked the line between a genuine understanding of hippie culture and the tough realities of the music business far better than any of his competitors. He was the very opposite of “laid back.” He paced nervously backstage with a clipboard and personally introduced many of the shows onstage, raging at anyone who disrespected his concept of what made the Fillmore special.

  Because he did so much business on the East Coast and would soon open a Fillmore East in New York, Graham ostentatiously wore a Movado watch that showed the time on both coasts. His earthy charisma worked as well on the local cops as it did on acidheads. Although he was capable of blowing up at an artist who refused to do an extra encore, Graham loved many of the bands who played for him. Artists may not have made the percentage of profits from Fillmore concerts that would later become the norm, but they felt appreciated and safe when they played there. There was a moment at the Trips Festival in 1966 when Jerry Garcia broke his guitar and Graham tried to repair it. Although the instrument proved to be unfixable, Garcia appreciated the intensity of his effort and a bond was formed that served Graham well. If a business guy was okay with the Dead, he was okay with most other artists as well.

  The San Francisco Sound

  The Grateful Dead never had a hit song in the sixties, but they were one of the highest-profile embodiments of what came to be known as the “San Francisco Sound.” They were one of the first rock bands to have two drummers—Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann—and they had four members who could sing: Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, who also played the harmonica and organ, guitarist Bob Weir, bassist Phil Lesh, and Jerry Garcia, who played lead guitar, sang many of the lead vocals, and emerged as the first among equals in the eyes of most people in the extended Haight-Ashbury family.

  Garcia was always very clear about the centrality of LSD to the creation of the Grateful Dead’s sound and attitude. Describing their first performances at Kesey’s “Acid Tests,” he said, “The audience didn’t come to see us but to experience something altogether different. We had the luxury of playing where nothing was expected of us. It gave us glimpses in the form that follows chaos. When you throw out all the rules, other stuff starts to happen. That was a clue to how we dealt with things in our interior way. I can’t imagine any other context which would have allowed us to learn that.” Mickey Hart adds, “We were just the soundtrack of the culture. We weren’t playing singles. We’d play four or five hours. How are you going to bottle that?”

  The Dead were mostly apolitical, but this was not the case with Country Joe and the Fish, whose name was inspired by a quotation from Mao Tse-tung that said that a “guerrilla” is like a fish that swims in the ocean of the people. They had an attitude that didn’t pander in the slightest to the music business, and the ability to evoke the psychedelic spirits in concert. Donahue once said, “I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t like Country Joe and the Fish.”

  I got into the band earlier than most kids on the East Coast by another one of the quirks of fate that seemed routine at the time. One day in early 1967, a bunch of kids went over to Susan Solomon’s house. Susan was a year behind me at Fieldston. Her father Seymour was a cofounder of Vanguard Records.

  The Solomons had the best stereo system I had ever encountered—you could hear every nuance. Susan put on a record called Electric Music for the Mind and Body by Country Joe and the Fish, who Vanguard had just signed. We were into it right away. The kind of rock and roll they were playing didn’t have a name yet, but it was obvious that they were even farther out than Jefferson Airplane, whose “White Rabbit” was a big hit at the time.

  Some of us had taken LSD in the last few months and were convinced that we were part of a rarefied elite of teenage expeditionaries and mystics who were trying to discover the meaning of life in a far deeper way than our liberal parents had. My parents were smart and progressive, but their intellectual heroes were pessimistic intellectuals like T.S. Eliot and Eugene O’Neill. We acidheads were into joy. You didn’t have to be depressed to be smart! We reveled in the fact that “White Rabbit” used images from Alice in Wonderland (which our parents had read to us as “literature”) as an obvious metaphor for a psychedelic trip.

  Country Joe’s guitarist, Barry Melton, played long solos; the singer, Country Joe McDonald, had an attractive combination of fie
rceness and vulnerability; and the album included an overtly political song called “Superbird” that parodied President Johnson. The last song was called “Grace”; we correctly assumed it was written for the singer of “White Rabbit,” Grace Slick. Country Joe also wrote a song that I loved called “Janis” about the Big Brother lead singer who he’d briefly dated. It felt as if there was very little showbiz distance between the band and the listeners. We studied the photos on the back of the album, trying to figure out what made such an intense group of people tick. I was particularly struck by the wild look in the eyes of Country Joe’s drummer, Gary “Chicken” Hirsh.

  A year or so later, Susan was interning as a substitute receptionist at Vanguard one day when the band visited the label. She and Hirsh instantly connected and by the next day she was staying with him at the Chelsea Hotel. (Paul McCartney and his soon-to-be wife Linda Eastman were beginning their romance at the Chelsea at the same time.)

  Susan moved with Hirsh to the Bay Area, where members of the Dead and the Fish called her “Susie Sunshine.” They married and soon after she gave birth to their son Adam, now the singer-songwriter and composer Tree Adams. Susan would come back to New York several years later. It had been difficult being a mother in the midst of the psychedelic rock scene and her marriage soon ended. She went to college and law school as a single mother. Years later, she married the Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Paul Goldberger and they had two more sons, Ben and Alex.

  By 2016, Susan was the cofounder and CEO of the eleven-year-old New York Stem Cell Foundation Research Institute. When I reconnected with her, I wasn’t sure what her feelings would be about the psychedelic sixties given the turmoil of the times and how it personally affected her. Yet her eyes lit up when recalling the era: “There was a sense of possibility then. People felt that they could change the world with love—and briefly, it worked.”

  In addition to Country Joe and the Fish, there were many other bands who helped form the San Francisco Sound, including Santana, the Steve Miller Blues Band, Moby Grape, the Quicksilver Messenger Service, and Big Brother and the Holding Company, whose lead singer was Janis Joplin. But the first San Francisco band to make a truly national impact was Jefferson Airplane.

  Bassist Jack Casady and guitarist Jorma Kaukonen had been part of the folk scene, and even at the peak of the Airplane’s hippie power they played a psychedelic version of Fred Neil’s folk song “The Other Side of This Life.” The Airplane’s sound was unique both because of the instrumental virtuosity of Kaukonen and Casady and the spooky harmonies of Grace Slick and Marty Balin. Slick told me, “We were sloppy and never rehearsed our harmonies the way Crosby, Stills & Nash did later. We just did what we felt like and that’s how it came out. When we recorded, the people at RCA thought we were too weird to mess with so they let us do it the way we did in concert. Rock and roll is not Puccini.”

  Slick was the only true female rock star of the San Francisco scene other than Janis Joplin. She joined the group for their second album. (The band’s first album featured vocals by Signe Anderson, who Slick replaced in early 1967.) The Airplane’s first hit, “Somebody to Love,” was written by Darby Slick, who had been in Grace’s first band, the Great Society, along with his brother Jerry (who was married to Grace at the time). In a Facebook post in 2016, Darby explained that the lyrics were written in the wake of President Kennedy’s death: “‘When the truth is found to be lies, and all the joy within you dies,’ was very much about assassination and loss. They took away somebody we loved.”

  Howie Klein, who later in life became president of Reprise Records, was a student at the State University of New York in Stony Brook in the late sixties. He had a radio show on the college station and also booked the entertainment at the college. He would go to San Francisco a couple of times a year to buy pot. Bill Graham sent Howie an early tape of the Airplane to play on his show and Howie booked them to perform on February 18, 1967. It was their first trip east after the release of Surrealistic Pillow. To save money on hotels, the band crashed at Howie’s place.

  On June 3, 1967, the Airplane was a guest on the long-running teen rock and dance show American Bandstand. Host Dick Clark described the band as “a little controversial.” The show clumsily tried to acknowledge the psychedelic moment by shooting their performance of “White Rabbit” on a set which included several lava lamps and a backdrop of a Victorian house shot by a camera which was occasionally turned upside down. After the performance, Clark asked the band, “Do parents have anything to worry about?” Paul Kantner replied, “I think so—their children are doing things that they didn’t do and they don’t understand.”

  The Airplane did not shy away from politics the way the Dead did. However, shortly after the release of Surrealistic Pillow, the band took some flack from the left because they agreed to do several commercials for Levi’s blue jeans. In a letter to the Village Voice in May 1967, Abbie Hoffman complained about the endorsement: “It summarized for me all the doubts I have about the hippie philosophy. I realize they are just doing their ‘thing,’ but while the Jefferson Airplane grooves with its thing, over one hundred workers in the Levi Strauss plant on the Tennessee-Georgia border are doing their thing, which consists of being on strike to protest deplorable working conditions.” The band opted out of doing anything more for Levi’s; in fact, they never did another commercial for anyone.

  Despite Hoffman’s criticisms, no lasting damage was done. Hoffman soon became friends with Slick, and the Airplane was the only group written about favorably in Anita Hoffman’s Trashing (published under the pseudonym Ann Fettamen). On their first trip to New York, in addition to their regular gigs, the band played a free concert for the Diggers on the roof of the Chelsea Hotel.

  They were also as into psychedelia as the Dead were. The Airplane visited Leary in Millbrook, and handfuls Orange Sunshine acid were often thrown into the audience at their shows. In her memoir, Grace Slick described her first peyote trip: “Instead of viewing certain things or people as passing scenery, as something inconsequential, the peyote made everything and everyone seem equally important. Suddenly I could see no isolation, no overabundance. It was all just energy, exhibiting itself in infinite dimensions.” Not all that different from Huxley’s description in the fifties, nor from what my friends and I talked about—that is, when we could actually form the words.

  Monterey

  Lou Adler was thirty-three years old in 1967 and was a powerhouse in the then-small Los Angeles music business. His label Dunhill Records had Steppenwolf under contract, and Adler had produced and released “Eve of Destruction,” but his biggest artist was the Mamas & the Papas, who’d had a string of hits that resonated with hippie audiences. Even though the group did not have a guitar hero and was more pop than rock, the Mamas & the Papas’ harmonies and lyrics connected with potheads (especially on the song “California Dreaming”) and the photos of the band on the album cover gave them a distinctly hip aura. Adler and John Phillips, the group’s leader, were approached by promoter Alan Pariser and William Morris agent Benny Shapiro, who had a contract with the fairgrounds where Monterey Jazz Festival had been taking place. They were planning the first Pop Festival, and they’d booked Ravi Shankar and some blues acts but they realized they needed a bigger name to sell tickets.

  “They offered us more than the Mamas & the Papas usually got for a show,” remembers Adler, “but that night at three in the morning, John called me with the idea that to do something special, all of the artists should perform for free with profits going to charity.” Phillips thought that with this approach they could afford to have three days’ worth of performances and thereby do justice to the cultural moment. Benny Shapiro was old-school and hated the idea. So Phillips, Adler, Johnny Rivers, Paul Simon, and Terry Melcher each put up $10,000 to buy him out. Phillips and Adler opened an office at the old Renaissance Jazz Club on Sunset Boulevard in LA to pull the festival together. They only had seven weeks before June 16, which would be the opening night of
the festival.

  Simon & Garfunkel immediately committed, as did Johnny Rivers and the Byrds. To broaden their reach, Adler enlisted Andrew Loog Oldham, the producer and manager of the Rolling Stones, who had temporarily moved to Los Angeles to avoid his native London. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had been busted for drugs in Keith’s Redlands home weeks earlier and Oldham didn’t want to attract the attention of the London police. He recruited the Who for the festival, and also asked Paul McCartney for advice on artists. The Beatle said that Jimi Hendrix was a must. The twenty-five-year-old Hendrix had recently electrified London club audiences with his mind-blowing virtuoso fusion of blues and rock guitar, and had dazzled the Beatles by playing a psychedelic version of the title song on their newly released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band at London’s Albert Hall.

  Then the Monterey team headed north. Adler acknowledges, “We knew we needed the fresh rock and roll coming out of San Francisco, and that people there thought of us as slick and commercial.” It didn’t help that Phillips had just written and produced “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair)” for Scott McKenzie. It was an instant hit on Top 40 radio, but was perceived by the Haight hippies as a simplistic exploitation of their scene. Adler, Oldham, and Phillips flew up to San Francisco for a meeting with the managers of the Dead and the Airplane. Adler remembers, “It almost came to blows and I couldn’t figure out what the fight was about. I guess they thought we were somehow gonna make money from their culture.”

  In his memoir Living with the Dead: Twenty Years on the Bus with Garcia and the Grateful Dead, the band’s former manager Rock Scully gives his version:

  It starts with John and Michelle Phillips of the Mamas & the Papas coming to see us, representing themselves as fellow musicians who have also taken acid or maybe taken acid . . . Phillips is a musician whose group we respect, but why, we wonder, is he talking like that? The hip malapropisms, the music-biz clichés, the fake sincerity. We are soon to discover that once you get beyond the fur hat and the beads he is just like a goddamn LA slicko. We all get the same vibe from him: he’s here to exploit the San Francisco hippie/love phenomenon by building a festival around us and Janis and Country Joe and Big Brother and Quicksilver and the Airplane.