Talkin' About that Unbroken Circle -- Deborah Grabien on Music in 2007

2007 - musically and karmically - was the year of past and present looping, and meeting.

The year began with me sprawled out on the grass in Lindley Meadow, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. It was a nice January day; forty years ago, the hippies and the Diggers and other Haight-Ashbury residents came together in this spot, for the original spontaneous Human Be-In.

In 2007, there were about two hundred people there, playing frisbee and playing guitars, reminiscing about the original event and people who were there but were now gone -- Chet Helms, Jerry Garcia, others. They were also eating their heads off; many of us had brought goodies. The local mainstream news media covered it, and a film student with a pricey camera walked around, making a documentary, asking questions: what was it like? What's a yippie?

I wasn't at the original Be-In. In January 1967, I was six months shy of thirteen, on the other coast. By the end of the following year, I'd been politicized, thinking about the world in an adult way. I'd also begun a lifelong love affair with both West Coast rock and the electrified - and electrifying -- traditional music that was coming out of the UK: Pentangle, Jacqui McShee's angelic vocals. Steeleye Span, watching Maddy Prior dance. And Fairport Convention: Sandy Denny's lyrical voice, and Richard Thompson's jaw-dropping guitar.

Jump forward, 1967 to 1970, and there I was, preparing to jump myself, from east coast to west.

I'd become a Deadhead, backstage at the east coast shows. The Dead played a series of shows at Bill Graham's legendary Fillmore East, called Dead at Midnight. They'd begin at midnight with an acoustic set, and do an electric set to close it out. I'd stagger out into the sunrise, having danced the night away backstage, and take a subway to school, stoned and blissed, humming Garcia's guitar riff from Dark Star under my breath. I was sixteen years old.

Between the Dead's acoustic and electric sets, there was a different band, a wonderful country-rock group called the New Riders of the Purple Sage. They're one of the bright strands in that circle of gold, then and now.

My memory of NRPS is set in stone: John Dawson (aka Marmaduke), guitar and lead vocals. David Nelson, guitar and vocals. Dave Torbert on bass, taking over a lot of songwriting duties, and vocals. Jerry Garcia, playing a wailing, idiosyncratic pedal steel, recognizable at fifty yards. The Dead's Mickey Hart on drums, soon to be replaced by the Jefferson Airplane's drummer, Spencer Dryden.

I came to know, and love, these guys. Every memory of NRPS from those days is a good one; that's not something I can say about most things. But the Riders, as people, were kind, intelligent, and completely without rockstar BS. It was a pleasure to know them. Turns out, it still is.

Musically, if I close my eyes, I can hear Marmaduke's plaintive, friendly voice, giving a happy audience Glendale Train or Portland Woman. The Riders' songs told me stories; Marmaduke's stuff was in the pure bardic tradition. Every song was a progression, a history unto itself, and every one could have begun with "Once upon a time..." As someone who'd grow up to be a storyteller myself, that rang my bells and rocked my world.

(February 2007: my husband Nic and I watched a show at the Akebono Theatre, Pahoa, the Big Island of Hawaii. The band was DNF -- David Nelson and Friends, and yes, that's the NRPS David Nelson -- with a stellar lineup: Barry Sless on lead guitar and pedal steel, Mookie Siegel on keyboards, John Molo on drums, the incomparable Pete Sears on bass. The band had just come over from two dates on Maui, and after the flight from hell resulted in a two-hour start time delay with half of Barry's pedal steel still on the runway back on Maui, they launched into a set that was lean, mean and the level of tautness you only get when the music you're playing has to release some jangled nerves. More about DNF and those connections in a bit.)

1967 was also the original Summer of Love. The 40th Anniversary was a big deal, a free show in Speedway Meadow, Golden Gate Park, produced by Boots Hughston and his 2B1 Productions. The gig was huge: Labor Day Sunday, an incredible line-up, nine or so hours of music, punctuated at noon by San Francisco Poet Laureate Jack Hirschman's incendiary political poetry reading. Jack was immediately followed by...

The New Riders of the Purple Sage.

And for the first time in a long time, we got to see Marmaduke back where he belongs, with the band he founded: the New Riders, arguably the original alt-country rock band, and in my mind, the best yet.

The next day, there was Marmaduke one more time, an encore performance, at the Sausalito Arts Festival. I didn't get to see that one; I was in Marin, helping NRPS First Fan and Founding Marmaduke's Marauders member Michelle McFee prepare for a post-show party, for NRPS family and friends. I'm told the Riders played a brilliant set, but I'm okay with having missed it. I got to see Marmaduke for the first time in thirty years, to hold on to him for a minute at the party, to share fifteen seconds of memories from forty years ago. As deep as my love for the music goes, that topped it.

(December 1970, backstage at a New York theatre for the Dead during a blizzard, an iconic moment: the Jefferson Airplane dropped by to jam. A killer show, not least for being the second time I met some of the Airplane, notably Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady.)

Forty years, the snake swallowing its own tale in that famous little circle? Bear with me -- slight diversion.

I'm lucky to live in a city where free music is part of the landscape, and the social fabric of the town itself. Which brings me to a series of free shows every summer in downtown San Francisco called Jewels in the Square, and a band called Moonalice.

Roger McNamee, known in many circles for being Bono's partner in Elevation Partners venture capital, likes Bay Area rock and roll. He likes it so much that he decided to be a part of it, and keep the tradition alive and thriving: first, with the Flying Other Brothers, and lately, with Moonalice. The lineup includes Roger, his wife Anne on vocals, Jimmy Sanchez on drums, G.E. Smith on guitar, and -- no, you're not hallucinating, yes you've seen these names in this piece already -- Barry Sless on pedal steel, Pete Sears on keyboard this time, and Jack Casady on bass.

Roger plays for one of the best reasons on earth: he wants to. He doesn't do it for the money; he doesn't need to. He does it because there's a kid with a guitar just under the surface of his skin, and the kid is saying ooooh! This is beyond cool! I can tell stories with the guitar, and people will like it and move around, and dance, and give me some deep interesting energy, and then I can give it right back to them! ROCK!

In 2007, we saw Moonalice three times in Union Square, ninety minutes a pop of high-energy good times, always free. Tourists wandered through, stopping to listen and take photos. Locals took extended lunch breaks to watch and dance. I developed a serious jones for a song written and sung by Smith, called "Dusty Streets of Cairo," and always gave the big "YEAH!" when they began it.

Midsummer, I did a two-hour stint on Piratecat Radio. We talked about a lot of things, but Melinda, the DJ, asked for my take on music, 2007: what had I been listening to?

New Riders, I said. Moonalice. DNF. Here. Listen.

One more connection in that bright golden circle: still summer 2007, I wandered into Amoeba Records, Haight Street. Jorma Kaukonen, whom I hadn't seen in thirty years, was signing his CD, "Stars in My Crown".

I was nervous as hell, going in; I'd walked away from local music for thirty years for reasons that don't matter here, or to anyone who isn't me. Jorma was the one remaining person I hadn't reacquainted myself with.

We had -- in my mind, anyway -- a very nice reunion. We talked about his parents (I knew and liked them very much), about a splendid Siamese cat called Tekla (Jorma gave her to me, and she lived well into her twenties; she's the inspiration for Bree's cat Farrowen in my upcoming mystery series, the Kinkaids), about people and days gone by and just, in general, well, everything. And music, of course. Always about music.

Jorma has a deep love of the American spiritual. He did a lot of them with Hot Tuna, everything from Reverend Gary Davis to Mahalia Jackson and everything in between. I remember that his mom, a wonderful woman called Beatrice, had loved that music, so Jorma comes by it honestly.

More than that, he plays it honestly. And that's the only way it works: if you don't believe it, you don't feel it. And if you don't feel it, you can't play it.

OK. So. One more connection.

Remember that whole "city with free music" thing I mentioned? Every October, San Francisco throws a party in Golden Gate Park. It's called Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, and it's becoming an annual institution. The brainchild of Warren Hellman, it runs three days on five stages, and draws some serious star power (try Nick Lowe, Emmylou Harris, Richard Thompson, Elvis Costello, John Mellencamp and Earl Scruggs). Admission is free to all. The estimate this year was over half a million people coming to Golden Gate Park. Just like old times

Sunday afternoon, Moonalice, with Jack Casady, played on one stage. Later, on a different stage, there was Jorma, with Barry Mitterhoff, playing what a friend called a "transcendent" set, the best of the weekend. No argument here: there was a serenity, a tranquility, to every nuance of the music. When they played "Sea Child," I began weeping and nearly couldn't stop. So many memories, years gone, people gone who I'll never see again. I never thought I'd hear that song played live again, not in this life.

All those pretty threads, shining in memory and in flesh, all connecting into a bright circle. Or maybe it's just a road, then and now, beginning meets end, that 'snake and its own' tail thing. Whatever it is, I'll take it.

As I write this, it's not quite Halloween, and my dose of live music for 2007 is far from over. There's the NRPS show at the Great American Music Hall, the night before Thanksgiving; I may try and talk my hiphop-loving daughter into coming along, thereby extending that circle. The current NRPS lineup is David Nelson fronting, with Ronnie Penque on bass, Buddy Cage on pedal steel, Johnny Markowski on drums, and Michael Falzarano on guitar; Falzarano used to play with Jorma. Having seen Richard Thompson twice so far this year and melted through the floor both times, he has another gig coming up in December; it's a "requests from the audience" solo show, and I'm requesting "The Ghost of You Walks." I plan to hit the DNF show in Santa Rosa on 16 November. I'm bummed because I'm missing Moonalice's Boston show by a week.

I'll end with two things I haven't mentioned. One is that, when Roger McNamee wanted to get his guitar chops together, he spent a month with Jorma, learning the craft. Second, a historical tidbit: when Fairport Convention first began, in the days of Richard Thompson and Sandy Denny, the band they reportedly emulated was the Jefferson Airplane.

Gotcher unbroken circle, right here.
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