On 11/12/2011 11:17 AM, turquoiseb wrote:
> --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Bhairitu<noozguru@...> wrote:
>> My 60's band often opened for the Fish. In fact at the 1967 New
> Year's
>> concert at the Eagles Auditorium most people left after we played the
>> opening set and there was hardly any crowd for the Fish. That led
> them
>> into insisting we never open for them again. :-D
>>
>> By then they had become far removed from their earlier psychedelic
> roots
>> and the crowd was more into what we were doing than a rock band that
> was
>> playing baseball on stage.
>>
>> Country Joe McDonald is still around and writing music. I saw him
>> perform back in 2006 at a protest in Walnut Creek. He has some new
>> songs about Iraq but the crowd pleaser was still "1-2-3 what are we
>> fighting for."
> It must have been fun to open for them, back in the day. The
> group of hippies I promoted rock concerts and light shows with
> back in that era never hired Country Joe, so I never got to meet
> them. I did attend many of their concerts however.
>
> A few years ago, still living in Santa Fe, I developed a nostalgia
> Jones, fortuitously just after discovering how cheap used CDs
> were on Amazon. So I invested a few bucks and gathered up a
> collection of "the music of my formative youth." We're talking
> Quicksilver and the Dead and Jimi and Janis and Moby Grape
> and the Steve Miller Band and Jefferson Airplane and the
> Byrds and others of the psychedelic era. Stuff I'd once owned
> on vinyl but sold off years ago, after getting tired of moving
> around twenty boxes of LPs.
>
> I sat down and re-listened to them all on CD, and interestingly
> wound up dividing them into two distinct categories. The first
> was "Hey, I really was onto something,...these guys were great,
> and still are." The second category was, "There is no question
> about it...I was stoned." Suffice it to say that the music in the
> former category "held up over time," whereas the latter did not. :-)
>
> Country Joe wound up in the "I was stoned" category. In retro-
> spect I find myself embarrassed by my affection for their
> psychedelia. Jimi and isolated moments of the Dead's work
> wound up in the "I was onto something" category; their music
> is as astounding and as vibrant to me today as it was then.
>
> Janis, not so much...especially with her first meth-head band,
> Big Brother. Moby Grape and the Steve Miller Band both did
> some remarkable work that holds up for me over time, but
> they don't have that same phwam! that Jimi had, or that
> Garcia had when he was on one of his cosmic rolls. Quicksilver
> I can really groove to only if I -- TM puja-like -- allow my mind
> to gracefully float on how much fun they were to party with.
> Although I'm still a big fan of their version of "Mona," which
> gave guitarists Gary Duncan and John Cippolina ("the Agony
> and the Ecstasy") a chance to really stretch it out in long,
> back and forth guitar duels. It was primitive stuff, musically,
> but it had energy and enthusiasm. (Since you're into astrology
> and all, the four guys in Quicksilver were all Virgos, with only
> two birthdays between them.)
>
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D79ujliNh4Q
> <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D79ujliNh4Q>
>
> Not all of the Byrds' stuff holds up for me, but some -- espec-
> ially from The Notorious Byrd Brothers era -- still does. I can
> still somehow psychically springboard off of this one into
> the highest moments of that high time for me.
>
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWhgLjim6Rc
> <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWhgLjim6Rc>
If you ever heard the Byrds live you would have learned they were
largely a studio group. They couldn't sing those harmonies live. Most
likely McGuinn sang a lot of the harmonies. They were a disappointment
in that way. But they were a bunch of nice guys though I've mentioned
my encounter with Crosby knocking on my Holiday Inn hotel door and all
freaked out that we were all going to get busted. That was the Trips
Concert in Portland, Or where the Jefferson Airplane was also on the
bill. After the concert Marty, Grace and some of us listened to the
tape of Sgt Pepper that McGuinn had as the actual album had not been
released yet.
Those were indeed fun days and we opened for a lot of groups and met a
lot of people.
