An Adieu (Until The 60th Anniversary) To The Summer Of Love, 1967    Under The Sign Of The Times When Women Played Rock And Roll For Keeps- The Music Of Bonnie Raitt

By Zack James

[The world of on-line editors and named bloggers is actually rather small when you consider what expansive infinite cyberspace can allow the average ingenious citizen to do. Or collective of citizens in this case, collective of people who in a previous age, maybe twenty years ago would be found writing for hard-copy publications like Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair and especially American Film Gazette and the Folk Music Review, the latter which actually covered more than folk music in its time, but its name reflected where it had come from. Now they are writing for on-line publications like this one and the on-line American Film Gazette which like a lot of hard copy operations had fallen on revenue hard times and to keep going had to flow with the times and go on-line. What this new technology has allowed me to do which otherwise would have been a good idea thrown in the office waste paper basket by any shrewd hard copy editor is to do a series highlighting some of the conversations between long-time music critic Seth Garth and some of his growing up in North Adamsville (that is in Massachusetts south of Boston) friends as he/they discuss various older CDs which reflect a certain period in their then young lives growing up in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

An important component of the series of sketches is based on information that Seth has provided me has come under the sign of the Summer of Love, 1967 out on the West Coast, especially in the San Francisco and Bay area. Two periods stand out in these conversations as far as the effect of musical trends among guys who came up in the Acre neighborhood of North Adamsville and saw some relief from their “from hunger” lives as Si Lannon, one of the corner boys put it. When hitting their teenage years the explosion best explained by the rise of rock and roll on their radios, and later at school and church dances, when the authorities, school and church, tried to put a cap on their energy and keep them away from hard sexual fantasies unleashed by the new dispensation. Above all the names of the king of kings, Elvis, mad hatter Chuck Berry, wild and wooly Jerry Lee Lewis stand out. The other, which is reflected in the title of this piece, is a second wave of rock and roll, slightly different after the first stage had been exhausted and had been replaced by what Seth called “bubble gum’ music very much connected with the 1967 Summer of Love which hit Seth and his crew like a lightning bolt. Hit so hard that through one means or another, one person or another, one personal intervention or another that it drove the crowd out to the West to “see what was going on.”  A million other kids, mostly high school and college kids, from places like Lima, Ohio, Bath Maine, Boise, Idaho and of course Peoria, Illinois broke loose for a while and did the same thing, looked for something new in “drug, sex, rock and roll” and whatever else anybody could come up with to stem the flush of youth nation alienation and angst. So guys like the Scribe, Seth, Si, Frank Jackman, and my oldest brother, Alex, rode the wave, went out to “edge city” (Alex’s expression picked up from somewhere), went “walking with the king” (an expression culled from Doctor Gonzo the late Hunter S. Thompson) and mostly lived to tell the tale. Their later Vietnam War experiences and returns to the “real world” would not be so gentle.       

      

I am a bit too young by about a decade to have had anything but a nodding acquaintance with the Summer of Love experience. That era’s music did not form the basis for my musical interests although I heard it around the house from older siblings but rather the music of the 1970s which when I get a little bored with book reviews or general cultural pieces I write about for various publications including this one I write some music reviews. Knowing that let me take a step back so that you will understand why I made that statement about the review world is really a small place.

As I said earlier I was a little too young to appreciate the music of the Summer of Love first- hand but my eldest brother Alex was not. Had in fact gone out to the West Coast from our growing up neighborhood the Acre section of North Adamsville that summer along with a bunch of other guys that he had hung around with since highs school. He wound up staying in that area, delving into every imaginable cultural experience from drugs to sex to music, for a couple of years before heading back to his big career expectations-the law, being a lawyer. The original idea to head west that summer was not his but that of his closest friend, the late Peter Paul Markin forever known in town and by me as the Scribe (how he got that is a long story and not germane to the Seth sage). The Scribe had dropped out of college in Boston earlier in 1967 when he sensed that what Alex said he had been yakking about weekly for years that a “new breeze,” his, the Scribe’s term, was going to take youth nation (and maybe the whole nation) by a storm and headed west. A couple of months later he came back and dragged Alex and about six others back west with him. And the rest is history.            

I mean that “rest is history” part literally since earlier this year (2017) Alex, now for many years a big high-priced lawyer after sowing his wild oats and get “smartened up” as he called it once the bloom of the counter-culture they were trying to create faded had gone to a business conference out in San Francisco and while there had seen on a passing bus an advertisement for something called the Summer of Love Experience at the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park. He flipped out, maybe some latent recoil from those long- ago drugs and spend one “hooky” afternoon mesmerized by the exhibit of poster art, hippie clothing, photographs and music. That was not all though. When he got back to Boston he contacted all the old neighborhood guys still standing who had gone out there in 1967 to put a small memoir book together. One night they all agreed to do the project, do the project in honor of the late Scribe who had pushed them out there in some cases kicking and screaming (not Alex at the time). That is when Alex, knowing that I have had plenty of experience doing such projects contacted me to edit and get the thing published. Which I did without too much trouble.   

The publication and distribution of that book while not extensive got around to plenty of people who were involved in the Summer of Love, or who knew the Scribe. And that is where Seth Garth comes in. While he was not an integral part of the Summer of Love experience, having stayed out there only through the summer, he did drift out west after college to break with his Riverdale growing up home in the early 1970s. As a writer he looked for work among the various alternative presses out there and wound up working first as a free-lancer and then as staff as a music critic for the now long defunct The Eye which operated out of Oakland then. Guess who also was working as a free-lancer there as well after he got out of the Army. Yes, the Scribe who was doing a series of articles on guys like him who had come back from Vietnam and couldn’t relate to the “real world” and had established what amounted to alternative communities along the railroad tracks and under the bridges of Southern California. So yeah it is a small world in the writing for money racket. Here is what Seth has to say right now. Zack James]    

A lot of the musical switch-over from what is now termed classic rock and the later, let’s for convenience sake, call it acid rock although that is too narrow a term for what really went on was a shift in the role of women in the latter scene, as lead singers and as instrumentalists in their own right. In the earlier period women’s rock, girl music as it was called then centered on doo wop, do lang harmony of small groups of three or four women, many black but certainly not exclusively so. Somebody from mystical Tin Pan Alley would write the music and lyrics and the doo wop would flow. Mostly girl/teen anguish/alienation and boy trouble stuff. Great now in re-hearing according to Seth and the guys but then iffy. The point Seth made was that latter gals like Alcie Frye, Grace Slick, Harley Devine, Janis Joplin, and many others broke into the hard male world of rock and roll on their own terms-mainly. Led groups, featured, played instruments and made it safer for women to crack that crazy doped-up world.         

The subject of this piece, Bonny Raitt, fit that same mold even if she did not lead any famous bands like Jefferson Airplane or Big Brother and the Holding Company. She honed her craft, learned to play slide guitar under the tutelage of one Mississippi Fred McDowell the max daddy    

of country blues where it counted down in the Jim Crow Delta country. Learned how to keep the crowd interested, how to go through her paces, hang onto the quest for the high white note every musician dreams big dreams at night about. Seth had met her at Jack’s over in Cambridge just after he had gotten back from San Francisco and saw what potential she had, saw how she could work like seven dervishes just like the guys. Sat and watched her, sat and drank hard whiskies with her and saw the rising star up close and personal. A little later he would be backstage on the Boston Common, the year 1968, when she broke through in a concert series the City of Boston was running to keep a lid, or try to keep a lid on, the new age of rock and roll which they totally could not comprehend having stopped their rock around Elvis before the Army time. What more needs to be said fifty years later she still rocks.

(By the way as is the way with these old time North Adamsville corner boys including my brother they still like to tout the “big score,” the sexual conquest really related to this or that event. In the case of the Bonnie Raitt concert he was able to bring his new girlfriend of the time backstage with him and she was so thrilled that later that night she let him have his way with her, no sweat. Whether that was true or not since most corner boys lied like crazy about sexual conquests I don’t know but I am passing this on as information from Seth)