Hippie Redux: #36 Why I'm Glad I'm Over 65!

Photo: Art Kane

Strange Days Have Found Us !

The new music of the Sixtie's was amazing for the variety of style and focus created by various bands. The Doors carved out their own unique territory. With surreal lyrics by Jim Morrison, theatrical arrangements by the band, and the inclusion of extended numbers on the first three albums (The End, When the Music's Over, Five to One), the Doors presented us with music as psycho-drama, dealing with the inner quest, exposing what is hidden behind assumptions, a balance between the carnal and the mystical. We'd never heard anything like it.

Hippie Redux: #34 Why I'm Glad I'm Over 65!

Bitches Brew: Music was Music

I remember being in a communal hippie house in 1967 in New Hampshire. Several people were excited to bring home the new jazz album Sorcerer by Miles Davies. In those days music was music. We loved rock but any music that was new and fierce was ours, even from a forty-one year old jazz trumpet player. In 1970 Davis came out with Bitches Brew, a double album of long improvisations including electric guitar, electric piano and electric bass. The bass player, Harvey Brooks, was from a rock band called the Electric Flag. The music had strong funk, african and rock influences, was a huge hit, and was highly influential. It sat in my record collection with Let It Be by the Beatles and Sticky Fingers by the Stones.

Hippie Redux: #30 Why I'm Glad I'm Over 65!

The Voices of Bob Dylan

In the early sixties, Bob Dylan was the darling of the folk musical revival. He sang with the rough rural tones of his hero, Woody Guthrie. And some songs, like Blowing in the Wind, were anthems for the protest movement.

In 1965 he changed his voice. He mounted the stage at the Newport Folk Festival with a four piece band behind him, strapped on a Stratocaster electric guitar, and tore into “Maggie's Farm”. There was booing from the audience. His new music, with surreal lyrics, was sung in a wry, often sardonic tone, with words twisted and elongated.

In 1967, after a long seclusion, his voice became spare and prophetic on the album John Wesley Harding, one of my favourites.

Two years later we reacted in dismay with rumours his new album was country. Nashville Skyline had Dylan on the cover smiling in a cowboy hat and even included a duet with Johnny Cash. Reluctantly perhaps, we accepting his lowered pitch and more natural phrasing.

In the following decades his voice shifted from album to album. This year's album, Shadows in the Night, his 36th, finds him covering Frank Sinatra songs. It has received critical aclaim. Dylan probably feels he has the right to try some mellow crooning. Any roughness now comes from his 74 years.

This man wrote some of the best music of the age, stood as a mysterious and charismatic presence, and treated us to one of the most unique and changeling voices.

HIPPIE REDUX: #28 Why I'm Glad I'm Over 65!

Photo: Art Kane

Jefferson Airplane, Take Me to the River !

This is one of my favourite bands of all time. They achieved a looseness and spontaneity in their music that was almost jazzlike. A wild and emotional feel. In Grace Slick and Marty Balin's duets they wound their voices in and out of each other like some ecstatic choir. With songs like White Rabbit, Somebody to Love, and the gorgeous Ballad of You and Me and Pooneil they were the ultimate San Francisco band. Photo: Art Kane.

HIPPIE REDUX: #27 Why I'm Glad I'm Over 65!

The Beatles !

Amazing how quickly the Fab Four entered our hearts. In the early days of Beatlemania the sheer joy and energy in their music was irresistable. So too the haircuts and cheeky manner. I remember sitting with friends in the cinema when Richard Lester's A Hard Day's NIght started playing. We were shocked that we almost couldn't understand their thick Liverpool accents, but we got their mad humour.

We heard eagerly every new single when it came out on the radio, and albums were major events. Their style began to shift with albums like Revolver, then came the magnificent Rubber Soul, followed by classics like Sgt. Peppers, and the White Album. Incredible music!
I saw them in concert in Toronto in 1965. It was almost impossible to hear what song they were playing, no wonder they stopped touring.
As with many bands who split up, solo work never achieved quite the brilliance as the ensemble. But John, George, Paul and Ringo all kept making great music. And Paul played a dynamic three hour arena set in Toronto this summer at the age of 73.
Their four very different personalites blended to a unique whole. We could love them all, but still have our favourite. Who was yours?

HIPPIE REDUX: #21 Why I'm Glad I'm Over 65!

And The Name of The Band Is…….

Late 50’s rock musicians had mostly sane names - Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly and the Crickets, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins -with Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and The Big Bopper being exceptions.

The names of the British Invasion, starting in late 1963 with the Beatles, changed all that. Suddenly we had the Kinks, the Yardbirds, Them, the Who, Procal Harum, the Troggs, the Animals, Pink Floyd, the Zombies, King Crimson, the Rolling Stones, the Pretty Things, Ten Years After, and the band shown here.

America soon responded. The Grateful Dead, Moby Grape, the Electric Prunes, Vanilla Fudge, the Strawberry Alarm Clock (food fetish here?), Iron Butterfly, the Byrds, Deep Purple, the Mothers of Invention, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Lovin Spoonful, Velvet Underground. From Canada we had the Guess Who, Steppenwolf, the Paupers, and the Band (about as perverse a name as you can get).

And the guys pictured here? Definitely the cream: Ginger Baker, Jack Bruce, Eric Clapton of Cream.

HIPPIE REDUX: #19 Why I'm Glad I'm Over 65!

The Greatest Rock and Roll Band in the World (Still)!!

As soon as they came out, I played The Rolling Stones early albums daily for a year or two, in love with the groove and swagger of their music. I was only dimly aware that they were imitating their heroes, the great bluesmen of Detroit, Chicago, Memphis. The Stones, these skinny kids from London, were perhaps the first white blues band. And with very few digressions, they have remained true to the feel of Black music since then (I know they included a Chuck Berry classic in every concert I saw). Formed in 1962, they will be touring South America in a few months, Jagger is 72.

HIPPIE REDUX: #15 Why I'm glad I'm over 65!

Santana at Woodstock: Latin Rock

The music scene was re-energized in 1964 with the so-called British Invasion of the Beatles, Stones and many other bands. Although largely simple rock n roll, this changed quickly as groups on both sides of the Atlantic began to experiment. The number of brilliant musicians who showed up in the next eight years was astounding. And rock took on many new forms, latin rock, prog rock, folk rock, country rock, rock opera, psychedelic rock, glam rock, shock rock. We didn’t know how lucky we were to have new albums by Pink Floyd, the Doors, King Crimson, Steppenwolf, all in the same month perhaps. By 1972, the transformation of popular music was complete and glorious.

HIPPIE REDUX: #13 Why I'm glad I'm over 65!

photo: Gered Mankowitz

The Man

In 1967 I was going through a record store bin in the Oshawa Shopping Center when I found an album by a group I'd never heard of, the Jimi Hendrix Experience. The cover was cool, so I bought it ($3.29?) and took it to a friends house nearby. His dad had a large stereo in the basement, and we slapped on the vinyl. When the first chords of Purple Haze came crashing out of the speakers, our jaws dropped. We didn't know music could be so wild, so chaotic, but so beautiful.

HIPPIE REDUX: #11 Why I'm glad I'm over 65!

The Band

This Canadian group formed around 1960 in Toronto as the Hawks, backing up Ronnie Hawkins and then Bob Dylan. Their first solo album, Music From Big Pink, 1968, established them as channeling the sound of a rural past, without ever being "country", and always keeping a Rock'n'Roll grittiness. Everyone was doing psychedelic music, and Big Pink came out with banjos and mandolins. "What the hell is this," we thought, and then got blown away. They somehow captured more of the feel of American music than any American band. Amazing ensemble musicians, The Band were perhaps one of the best groups ever formed, and their music never fails to move me.

HIPPIE REDUX: #9: Why I'm glad I'm over 65!

How young we were.
The band Buffalo Springfield who put out their protest hit "For What It's Worth" in 1966, made 3 great abums before disbanding. That's Steven Stills pointing upward, and you can probably guess who the guy in the crazy sweater is.

HIPPIE REDUX: #6: Why I'm glad I'm over 65!

How Young We Were

Two of these guys are dead, a third is almost deaf, the fourth has viral meningitis, but The Who continue touring to sellout crowds 50 years later.

HIPPIE REDUX: #5: Why I'm glad I'm over 65!

Janis, Grace, and Monterey

The first large rock festival of all time was at Monterey in California. There were performances by established bands such as the Byrds, Country Joe and the Fish, Simon and Garfunkel and the Jefferson Aiplane. Grace Slick and Marty Balin of the Airplane showed their mastery of the ecstatic vocal duet, something few bands have done. Bands that played to large audiences for the first time were The Who, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, and Big Brother and the Holding Company featuring a 24 year old singer named Janis Joplin. Janis burned up the stage in an amazing performance full of honest emotion, I don't know how she could have been better. Perhaps one of the best filmed performances from the sixties. Check it out on youtube. Janis Joplin - Monterey Pop - Ball and Chain from the doc by DA Pennebaker

HIPPIE REDUX: #4: Why I'm glad I'm over 65!

The Psychedelic Poster

The Sixties were a tremendous time for music and the graphic arts. Perhaps less so for literature. The posters for San Francisco venues like the Fillmore and the Avalon Ballroom, full of colour, swirling forms, the whimsical or bizarre, and script that had to be deciphered, expressed in part the times. This poster, more reserved than many, and in a derivative art nouveau style, I like especially. (Well I own an original print and better still, went to the concert!)

HIPPIE REDUX #2: Why I'm glad I'm over 65!

Country Joe and the Fish - Electric Music for the Mind and Body.

In 1967 this tripped out band, and first album, blew us away. We always cut up the hash on the back cover, and I still have the album, with the razor marks!!

HIPPIE REDUX #1: Why I'm glad I'm over 65!

Photo: Bob Siedemann

The Grateful Dead haunt the suburbs, 1967.

I Was In a Rock n Roll Band

Cale, Freddy Fuckup and Jimi Fuckup at the 751, November 2009

It was called the British Invasion. 1964 was the year when suddenly everyone my age was listening to music by dozens of new bands, all from England. There were the Animals, the Yardbirds, Gerry and the Pacemakers, the Dave Clark Five, Pink Floyd, the Who, the Small Faces, the Kinks, the Pretty Things, the Spencer Davis Group. There was the most popular, the most talked about, the Beatles.

And there were the Rolling Stones. Although we owed them no special allegiance, my memory is that I listened to the Stones everyday for years, playing their first four albums over and over again, in love with the intense groove and swagger of their music. Little realizing that what I was listening to was white English kids paying homage to their favourite Rhythm & Blues musicians, trying to channel, with uncanny success, black dudes from Chicago, Memphis and Detroit like Howling Wolf, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Willy Dixon, Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters, Marvyn Gaye.

My first experience of live Rock'n'Roll was a local group whose performance I attended at the Knights of Columbus Hall in our little town of Whitby. I remember them doing a Bobby Womack tune, It's All Over Now, getting that riff of dropping chords just right like the Stones cover did. What magic was this? What glorious chaos?

You can imagine my feelings when on the 29th of June, 1966, I went to Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto to see the Rolling Stones. This was my first big concert and the Stones did not disappoint. I remember little except that the music was great, Jagger wore a cream jacket with a tree applique rising up the back, and I was especially thrilled the moment I recognized Ian Stewart, their friend and former member, playing piano in a corner. Made me feel I was in the know.

Fifteen days later I was at something called the Battle of the Bands at the Whitby Arena. The audience stood in the center, the bands were up on platforms built on the bleachers. Five Toronto bands performed, Jon and Lee and the Checkmates, Bobby Kris and the Imperials, Little Caesar and the Consuls, the Five Rogues and the Ugly Ducklings. It seems the English were somewhat better at naming bands than we were. The first four were soul music, quite popular in Ontario at that time. My favourites of the night, The Ugly Ducklings, were sort of a Stones/Kinks/Who/Pretty Things copy band. Big on long hair, rhythm guitar and bluesy rock. The singer animated, the other musicians performing with a sullen stoicism that seemed total cool. Again I was fascinated with both how a band made music and the magical aura, like talismans, of the instruments: the guitars, the bass, the mikes and the drums, the amplifiers. Their arcane names: Gibson, Guild, Fender, Gretsch, Rickenbacker, Zildjian, Marshall. The curves, dials, shine and muted colours of the guitars, especially the bass with its four fat strings, long neck and huge tuning pegs.

The final act was the Five Rogues, a “soul crusade” by white boys soon to change their name to the Mandala. They wore double-breasted cream suits with prominent stripes, black shirts and white ties. The keyboardist played a Hammond organ with a mysterious box beside it in which two opposing speakers whirled around, changing speed constantly (I later learned this was a Leslie speaker). The guitarist was Domenic Troiano who went on to minor international fame. He played a Fender Telecaster, and could use a sustain effect that drew out the notes and sounded like demented bagpipes. In the climatic last number, in the midst of disorientating strobe lights and Troiano's screaming Tellie, the lead singer “collapsed”, overcome with soul I guess, and had to be led offstage like James Brown. Rehearsed or not, bachanalia had come to Whitby.

In following years I saw a lot of live music, including the Stones three more times, the Beatles, The Band, the Grateful Dead, David Bowie and the Jefferson Airplane. And truly exceptional performances by Jeff Beck and Van Morrison: artists who swept us up in the power of their expression: uniting an audience who knew this was no ordinary night.

In 2006 my son Nathan decided to do Rock and performed for the first time, calling himself Freddy Fuckup. The venue was the Smiling Buddha bar on Queen Street, the day Halloween, the songs his own and the only back-up his friend Cale on drums. What was fun was watching his attitude change during this performance, from initial hesitancy, to dawning awareness that he loved this thing and was good at it, to exhilaration at the end.

Cale also played drums in another group called the Monitors which included Cale's father, Keith, playing a vintage Gibson Melody Maker. The band wasn't around for long, but made some phenomenal music. Keith and Cale's father/son act inspired me to consider joining Freddy as the third member, on the bass the band needed.

My son was happy with my backing him up, if I could play. So I went to Long and McQuade and bought a big, hotrod red, Fender Jazz Bass, with the fat strings and the huge tuning pegs, just like the guy in the Ugly Ducklings. I started practicing, and I also learned by playing along with videos I had of Freddy performing all his songs.

The first rehearsal I attended was at Cale's. His dad Keith is a Juno award-winning recording engineer. With musicians in the family, the basement is a funky, permanent rehearsal/recording space crammed full of drums, amps, mikes, guitars, foot pedals, keyboards, control units and cords, cords, cords.

This is where Cale, Nathan and I set up. We started a number and for the first time I'm playing my Fender with a drummer and a guitarist. There was a moment halfway through where I felt a rush of elation, undefined, but it was probably close to “Holy Fuck! I'm playing in a Rock band!!” Although I went on to back up Freddy at four shows, that one moment that one day was worth it all.

I've sold the big red bass. I've stopped practicing. But I lived that moment. I've been in a Rock band.

The Bushel Basket, Folk Music, and an October Evening

The other day I took some audio equipment to a repair shop run by a guy named Ted Syperek. Of all the people I know, excepting my Sister, he’s my longest acquaintance. I met him at the Bushel Basket Coffee House.

In 1965 some friends and I decided to have a coffee house in our church basement in Whitby, Ontario. We named it the Bushel Basket, I designed a logo, and we put out the word. We arranged tables, stuck candles in Brio bottles, and on the first night, John McKibban and I got up and sang a Beatles song to my three guitar chords. At this level how long this might have gone on before boredom would have ended it, is anyone’s guess.

But just a few weeks later the door opened and in walked about a dozen strangers from nearby Oshawa, friends from a folk spot called the Green Door. Mostly musicians, these people proceeded to entertain us with some amazingly good music, and become regular additions to the basement event.

I soon knew...
Dennis Delorme (aka Reverend Orval Rutabaga), a multi-instrumentalist who later became pedal steel guitar player for the award-winning country-rock band Prairie Oyster. Paul Grady wrote songs that were recorded by three national acts and had his own career. Macbeth Swackhammer, a man as eccentric and wonderful as his name, proved to be a consummate blues harmonica player. Chris Cuddy (aka Jeremy Dormouse) is still active in the music scene. T.R. Gleecoff became a local radio DJ. Of the three Shaw siblings, Karen became my first serious girlfriend. Then there were the Aiken brothers, John Gurney, Ellen Hunter, Penny Sidor, Kathy Reid, Rick Gullison, Zeke Mazurek (aka Fiddlin Zeke Zilch) and many more. And Ted Syperek.

This was the era of tremendous interest in folk music, both the traditional music reaching into the past of America and Britain, and new offerings with personal or protest themes from astounding songwriters. This was the era of Bob Dylan, Eric Anderson, Richie Havens, Phil Ochs, Donovan, Jim Kweskin Jug Band, Hamilton Camp, Dave Van Ronk, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins, Gordon Lightfoot, Tim Buckley, and a Canadian poet, Leonard Cohen, who much to our surprise came out with some music, singing his songs in a rough voice.

There are certain sweet qualities to folk music. When someone sings a personal song or a cover of something like Cohen's Suzanne, using an acoustic guitar played with a gentle finger-picking style, a pensive spell hangs in the air. On the other hand a number of people on stage with several guitars, a fiddle and mouth harp, performing some blues or jug band tune, creates awesome manic energy.

I was not the happiest teenager in those days, convinced that I was an academic, social and athletic failure at high school. The folk crowd was almost the only place outside of my family where I felt accepted and affirmed. This group helped fan the flames of my life-long love affair with music. And I'll never forget Dennis, who I idolized, surprising me one day by saying he thought I was cool.

In 2001 I got a call from Paul Grady, who wanted to do a Bushel Basket reunion. Using the new function of email, the two of us contacted almost all the people from thirty-five years before. The response showed me I was not the only one for whom the Bushel Basket had been important. 

The event took place in the original church basement on October 13th, with a crowd of original members, augmented with spouses and offspring. People flew in from the States and the West Coast. There was a meal, an impressive evening of performance, and great joy in reunion. It was a real pleasure to see my son playing guitar in an ensemble for one number. And Paul recorded the event on CD for us as “An October Evening”.

I am far from upset these days when an audio component needs attention; it’s an excuse to go and see Ted, another Bushel Basket alumnus. 

Greetings From Tim Buckley

Between 1965 and 1972 there was an amazing transformation in popular music, brought about by the appearance in those seven years of some of the major musical talents of the twentieth century.

Bands like the Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Jefferson Airplane and Santana, to name just a few, came at us with a full body slam.

A number of performers presented us with a different music, rich in subtle emotion and poetic image. Of course we interpreted the wild imagery as psychedelic in origin, a disservice to their talents and proof of our naiveté, but hey, it was the Sixties.

Poetry was being smuggled into our consciousness through popular music.

Singers such as Tim Buckley, Phil Ochs, Judy Collins, Leonard Cohen, Jim Morrison and Bob Dylan all performed music with mystical lyrics and a sense of longing. Some of them, like Ochs, Collins and Dylan, came from a folk music, protest song background, but albums like Ochs's Pleasures of the Harbour, and Collins's Both Sides Now turned away from that towards a more experimental and esoteric meaning. Dylan gave one song, his hypnotic Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands, a whole album side.

The standout for me is Tim Buckley. This man produced music that still thrills. In songs like Pleasant Street, Chase the Blues Away, Sweet Surrender, Song to the Siren, Phantasmagoria in Two, Carnival Song, No Man Can Find the War, Morning Glory, his voice has an impressive range from high falsetto to deep growl, his tone has a sweetness and purity, his emotion is often one of a deep yearning. Let me limit myself to saying, before I descend into shameless hyperbole, that his voice is magic. 

My poet friend Martin Singleton and I were lucky to see him at the Riverboat in Toronto in 1969, a show I had high hopes for, but for some reason didn't impress me that much. Buckley often threw his fans off with sudden changes in direction. I do remember how surprised I was that such a powerful voice came from a small man.

Tim made his first album at the age of nineteen, and made eight more before his death at twenty-eight of a heroin overdose. HIs son Jeff made one album before his death from accidental drowning at the age of thirty in 1997.

I recently saw a film called Greetings From Tim Buckley. The story jumps between two time periods, one in the late Sixties portrays Tim, the longer interval in the Nineties explores the life of his son Jeff Buckley, who saw almost nothing of his Father. The main focus is a Tim Buckley memorial concert in New York City (which actually occurred on April 26, 1991), in which Jeff reluctantly performs and which forces him to confront his feelings about his deceased father. An aspiring singer himself, one of my favourite scenes shows Jeff jamming with a guitarist who offers some new guitar licks he has been working on and Jeff begins to croon over top of them. The movie makers allow those of us familiar with Jeff's only album to realize for ourselves the song will later become the ecstatic Grace from his critically acclaimed album of the same name. A wonderful moment.

It's a good little film, although I grew somewhat tired of the actor playing Jeff doing "brooding and conflicted" while he showed off his handsome bone structure. A number of Tim's songs are on the soundtrack and their unexpected appearance each time gave me goosebumps.

A book called Dream Brother: The Lives and Music of Tim and Jeff Buckley, is on my To Read list.

The Voice of Sade

Sade Adu

I used to have customers I'd never met, but when they picked up the phone and said hello, I immediately knew who it was. Given that this word had already lost some of its fidelity by being forced through an electronic interface, its amazing the unique character their voice gave those two syllables that allowed me to identify the individual.

I know little of the technical nature of sound. It is obvious that there are many aspects, including things like pitch, timbre, tone, harmony and loudness. Add to this the ability of the human mouth to further form the words and phrases that issue from the vocal chords, and we have a substance of great complexity. 

The most amazing musical instrument seems to be the human voice. Expressive as a violin or sax or guitar may be, the human song has more capacity, more character, and speaks to us more, after all it is our voice. 

We take this ability too much for granted. Opera stars of course are given their due as having perfect voices, but I've heard people talk about Dylan or Leonard Cohen or Tom Waits as people who "don't have very good voices", and yet they are great singers. The essential sound of a particular human vocal seems to have a complex but unique quality with the ability to stir up strong emotional reactions within us. How else to account for the amazing devotion given to singers like Caruso, Piaf, Halliday, Evora or Cohen. And the power of some voices outside of song, like orators, actors, healers, poets and story tellers.

A great singer seems to have a unique voice, and then know how to use it in song. Few musical groups that rely on vocals get very far without a superb singer. Someone like Eric Clapton may be the exception, not a particularly unique voice, but he can sing, although he's really there for his guitar playing. I guess anyone can learn reasonably effective singing, but if you don't have a unique voice to start, you don't go far.

Every voice has it's special character, mood, emotion, spell. Sade strikes me as this uniqueness at its most powerful. I almost feel addicted to the sound of it. 

She sings with a husky, languid, smoothness and sensuousness. There's a sense of deep yearning. The level and range is not strong. She avoids emotional displays in her singing. Her music is solidly pop/jazz, in no way innovative, and I've heard one person call it elevator music. It's a genre I usually avoid, but hearing her never fails to move me.

Eighteen years after her first album she is still hugely popular world wide (and now a 53 year old mother). She has sold 25 million albums in the US alone. Her latest tour was seen by 800,000.

The woman is absolutely gorgeous. And she displays a poise and grace, a serenity, that seems to have all her fans convinced she's a person of class and integrity, her subdued, natural sensuality all the more appealing for this. In one video it seems the audience applauds just watching her walk across a stage.

In particular I find her rendering of The Slave Song to have tones and harmonies that almost literally resonate inside me.

It has to be the unique character of her vocal sound that the fuss is all about. Like no other singer I've heard, she makes me believe the human voice can invoke magic.