JORMA KAUKONEN

Jorma and Jack play "Embryonic Journey" at the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame, 1996

Jorma Ludwik Kaukonen Jr first came to our attention playing lead guitar with the San Francisco rock band, Jefferson Airplane. Psychedelic acid rock--you know it well. Jorma Kaukonen helped shape the sound. Listen to that weird loping solo on "White Rabbit." Better yet, listen to the electric guitar on the live version of "Plastic Fantastic Lover" from "Bless its Pointed Little Head."

Lead guitar with the Jefferson Airplane, circa 1966

In 1969, Jorma and fellow bandmate Jack Casady formed Hot Tuna. The band began as a side project where they could explore wild heavy blues, both acoustic and electric. Their early repertoire was derived mainly from American country blues artists such as Rev. Gary Davis, and Arthur Blake (Blind Blake).

Before long, Jorma and Jack left the Airplane completely (the rest of the band became Jefferson Starship...) and concentrated on this "new" old sound. When not playing electric, Jorma was playing an intricate fingerstyle on the acoustic guitar. Watch and listen as Jorma accompanies the melodic line with an alternating thumb pattern, then try playing like that on your own guitar. You may want to bash it to bits, but remember that he didn't learn that fancy stuff overnight.

Hot Tuna in 1972, the year they released "Burgers." Jorma (bottom right) with Jack Casady, Papa John Creach, and Sammy Piazza. Rolling down the blues highway...


Jorma plays "Genesis" at D.O.C. Music Club Studio on Italian TV, 1980


"Uncle Sam Blues," Hot Tuna, featuring Papa John Creach. 1971

Jorma was always a hell of a fingerpicker, and continues to play his intricate patterns with Jack in Hot Tuna. He also teaches guitar at Fur Peace Ranch, a guitar camp in the hills of Southeast Ohio. You just grab your guitar and pack in, stay in a cabin, and play guitar all day. Wouldn't that be cool? There's more to it--just click the link below.

Jorma Kaukonen today

Listen to "I Am the Light of This World" (Rev. Gary Davis) performed by Jorma. Click button:


Explore Jorma's Fur Peace Ranch guitar camp here. Hot Tuna's official website here.

WISH YOU WERE HERE

Richard Wright, keyboard player and founding member of Pink Floyd, has died at 65 after a bout with cancer.

Wright formed the band with Roger Waters, Nick Mason, and Syd Barrett in 1965. Later on they were joined by David Gilmour and the band pulsed and mutated, osmosed, and swelled to porcine proportions. They became a huge mainstream hit, even with the squares and fratboys, without ever abandoning their avant garde weirdness. They say "Dark Side of the Moon" sold as many records as there are molecules in the red sands of Mars, and I'm not surprised.

1965: Roger Waters, Nick Mason, Syd Barrett, and Richard Wright

Their experimental sounds and Orwellian excursions might rate a dismissive smile from lazy journos who would tweezer them from the petri dish of sixties tumult and subculture and examine them in a vacuum with 20/20 hindsight. You know the drill. It's a standard editor's ploy: write a eulogy that secretly harbors a judgment, the whiff of sulfur, the chill of old ghosts, the terrible and lurid excesses of the day--and give it some sex and drugs and funny hairstyles. There's a template: File photo, End of an Era. Film at eleven.

Don't get me wrong. I won't be joining boorish boomers weeping over their beers and conjuring up past shows like veterans of St. Crispen's Day. I have my tales, sure, but I won't be pissing them away at parties. Some things are best kept private--even for bloggers. God knows, my uncensored Floydian reminiscences might alert the Thought Police, or at the very least ruin my chances for a future presidential bid.

1972: Roger Waters, Nick Mason, Dave Gilmour and Richard Wright

So I'll keep my mouth shut about Pink Floyd. I might wince on the inside when I hear drive time radio jocks jabbering in Cheech and Chong voices about how rad the Floyd were--Dude, they were like totally awesome--but I'll reserve the right to sing along to their music, alone, in my car. If you were there, you know what I mean. We saw something special. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.

Richard Wright, RIP

The clip at the top of the post: Pink Floyd reunited in the summer of 2005- for the first time in 24 years - for the Live 8 concert in London's Hyde Park. Below, Pink Floyd live at Pompeii, Italy, 1972.

OS MUTANTES

Last night, at the art opening, a trio played bossa nova and punk rock, and Jim asked if we knew Os Mutantes.

The psychedelic Brazilian band was an important part of the Tropicalia movement, a 1960s Brazilian art movement that encompassed music, theater, art, and poetry -- a renaissance that flowered until the military government saw them as politically subversive and tried to wipe them out. Tropicalistos were creative experimenters who smashed down walls, and weren't afraid to address social issues; as a result, many were jailed, tortured, and exiled. Founders Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso were incarcerated, then exiled.

Musically, the movement was all over the map. Tropicalistos combined pop, bossa nova, African music, Bahian folk, Portuguese fado, and rock. Os Mutantes ( "The Mutants" in Portuguese) played a particularly bright psychedelic mix. Formed by the Baptista brothers, Arnaldo and Sergio, and lead singer Rita Lee, in 1965, they released many popular albums that showed a love of traditional Brazilian forms as well as the psychedelic music of The Beatles, Hendrix, and Sly and the Family Stone. They met and worked with Gilberto Gil, who got them into the center of the movement. Predictably, they were threatened by the military government but managed to elude those narrow-minded thugs and produce some wild, free, crazy music we still enjoy today.

Os Mutantes went on to influence everyone from David Byrne to Beck. The above clip is the trailer from an upcoming documentary about the group.

Click button to hear A Minha Menina by Os Mutantes

WORKINGMAN DEAD: ALTON KELLEY

Alton Kelley passed away Sunday

Psychedelic poster artist Alton Kelley died Sunday at the age of 67. Kelley, who teamed up with longtime collaborator Stanley Mouse (pictured below, Kelley on the left) created some of the greatest psychedelic posters of the Summer of Love, Haight-Asbury hippie scene, including iconic work for the Avalon Ballroom, the Family Dog, Winterland, the Fillmore, and various Bay Area bands like the Airplane and the Grateful Dead. They designed the covers of Dead albums "American Beauty" and "Workingman's Dead."

Kelley and Mouse helped create the acid-infused look of san francisco in the 1960s

"Stanley and I had no idea what we were doing," Kelley told The SF Chronicle last year. "But we went ahead and looked at American Indian stuff, Chinese stuff, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Modern, Bauhaus, whatever. We were stunned by what we found and what we were able to do. We had free rein to just go graphically crazy. Where before that, all advertising was pretty much just typeset with a photograph of something."

FATHER OF LSD DIES AT 102

Albert Hoffman, the Swiss scientist who created LSD, died at his home near Basel, Switzerland at the age of 102.

To some, LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) may seem to be an anachronism, a souvenir of the psychedelic counterculture of the 1960s like lava lamps and black lights, but the drug was actually created in 1938. It's powerful psychoactive properties weren't discovered for five more years, when Hoffman accidentally ingested the drug and experienced its powerful effects while riding his bicycle home from the lab.


"[Hoffman] then took LSD hundreds of times, but regarded it as a powerful and potentially dangerous psychotropic drug that demanded respect. More important to him than the pleasures of the psychedelic experience was the drug’s value as a revelatory aid for contemplating and understanding what he saw as humanity’s oneness with nature. That perception, of union, which came to Dr. Hofmann as almost a religious epiphany while still a child, directed much of his personal and professional life."
--the New York Times, 4/30/08

From a BBC documentary on LSD:


A link to the New York Times obituary, click HERE.

KENNY ROGERS BLOWS HIS MIND

Somebody must have slipped Kenny Rogers some mind-bending drugs in this hilarious clip. Most people forget that the Santa-bearded country "Gambler" was once a psychedelic pop singer with the First Edition. Obviously, regarding drugs, Kenny didn't know when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em.

LOVE

LOVE deserves some respect. The group is roundly ignored by meat-headed classic rock stations, and sadly remains unknown to younger music fans. With the amazing Arthur Lee at the helm, Love first scored radio play in 1966 with the garage nugget "My Little Red Book," followed by their first real "hit" early the next year, "7 and 7 is," which hinted at things to come. In 1967 they emerged with strings, brass, and spanish guitars to deliver their masterpiece, "Forever Changes," a collection of shimmering baroque pop and psychedelic rock tunes that perfectly captured the spirit of the time like a butterfly in amber.

Love is acknowledged as a major influence on everyone from the Doors and Pink Floyd to Yo La Tengo, but nothing came easy for the band. Lee was fragile, both physically and mentally -- not the only qualities he shared with Syd Barret and Brian Wilson -- and terrified of flying, which held the group back from a wider success since they rarely left Los Angeles. I'm glad they ventured up the coast on at least one occasion, when I saw them perform in Portland. Shortly after the release of "Changes," the band fell apart.
In 1996, Arthur Lee was sent to prison for twelve years for illegal possession of a firearm. He served six years of his original sentence, and was released in 2001. Lee died of leukemia in 2006.

This film clip is from the "Forever Changes" anniversary tour in 2002.

PSYCHEDELIC EXPLOITATION MOVIE TRAILER

Some guy had a brilliant idea -- film all the crazy hippie runaway kids flooding the Haight and make a ton of money selling it to the curious squares! Why not? There were already tour buses jammed full of gawkers, why not some cheesy weirdo lava lamp psychedelic "trip" for the grindhouse? That's a very young Jack Nicholson, who acted in a lot of similar Roger Corman flicks, and Bruce Dern in a frightwig. This was the tipping point, a subculture on the verge of being packaged and sold by waterbed entrepreneurs with pencil-thin mustaches.

This clip reminds me of the Psychedelic Supermarket, a little rundown shop where I bought a blacklight poster and a teardrop-shaped peace amulet on a cheap leather string. It was lame, but to a sixth grader it seemed pretty cool. Squinting at the brilliant Day-glo posters, I literally stumbled into a dark backroom that looked like a sultan's tent with parachute silk ceilings and oriental rugs, and as my eyes adjusted to the darkness I saw faint images of hippies sprawled out on beanbag chairs. A pretty girl in a headband swayed to the music, undulating to trippy psychedelica, maybe the Electric Prunes, and there was a whiff of strawberry incense in the room, and the slightly acrid smell of burning leaves. I probably got a contact high just standing there. I was dumbstruck. The baseball team would never believe this. I felt like Toby Tyler, first discovering the circus. There was no turning back now. PSYCH OUT! PSYCH OUT!!!!

SOMETHING NEW

Robert Wyatt is unique. The rack-jobbers can't seem to find a cubbyhole for his experimental avant-music, which puts him at a great disadvantage -- at least commercially -- in this age of Balkanized musical tastes, where so-called "indie music" is often just a marketing tool and truly avant-garde music is off the map and hard to discover. If popular musical tastes are the mainstream, and so-called "alternative" music is a major branch of the river, Wyatt isn't even near the water. He's standing far off in a morning field, playing a silver horn as the sun comes up. To a horse.

Wyatt is the former drummer and singer for Soft Machine, a mid-sixties British art-rock group from the psychedelic Canterbury scene. Soft Machine predates other excessive art-rock Brits like Tull and King Crimson, and preferred jazzy, experimental sounds to the overwrought theatrics that would come with the later prog acts. Wyatt has been recording ever since those halcyon days, writing his own stuff and doing some surprising covers like "I'm a Believer" by the Monkees -- which BBC wouldn't let him perform on television while sitting in a wheelchair (Wyatt has been paralysed from the waist down since an accident in 1973). His music is fragile and complex, with elements of pop and jazz swirling around a frail voice like mist around a bare winter tree. His music is not for everyone. Most people (like those surveyed by Komar and Melamid -- see below) probably won't like it, but give it a chance and you will discover something new.

"Just as You Are," from Robert Wyatt's new album, "Comicopera"