By Groovy Duke Lewis
Who is the one lone, lovely, brown-eyed pussycat who’s been singing, playing, traveling and tripping out with that bunch of hardrock musical wildcats for more than two years? Who feeds their male egos when they feel lonely, rejected and cast down? Who mothers them when they are tired, bored or bugged? Who nurses them through their ills and aches and cools out their temperamental tantrums?
Who? Grace Slick, that’s who!
Gracie’s woman’s touch is one reason Jefferson Airplane survives all the tear-apart tensions and remains one of the most successful U.S. music teams of the era. Her big, belting, blues voice is what gives the group much of its go-go-go power. She and Marty Balin share vocal honors in live performance and recording studio.
“Living so close to a gang of dudes is a weird way of life,” she admits. “Each guy has his own trip. One buries himself in a mental cave for twenty days to see if he can make it and where his head is when he gets out. Then another gets screwed up and freaks out for awhile, and a fickle chick blows another guy’s mind. It would be disaster if everyone flaked out at the same time. It hasn’t happened yet.”
“Man, what cool!” fans gasped.
A few minutes before curtain time at Simon and Garfunkel’s UCLA concert they saw Simon sauntering down the middle aisle, saying hello to bunch of friends, kissing a girl or two, waving his fingers in the peace salute and creating a stir in the gaping audience.
As the curtain began to lift, Simon took a seat and sunk out of sight in a sea of heads. And now, in front of 10,000 puzzled eyeballs, Simon and Garfunkel in the flesh began their stage stint, tickling the guitar strings and vibrating their tonsils.
Q. Which one was the real Simon? A. Both. On stage was Paul Simon, in the audience was his twin brother.
Super-Simon, the songwriting man, last winter suffered one of those stupefying scary sterile bummers which sometimes hits creative geniuses when they are drained out by high pressures, low vitality, personal hangups or whatever.
The scary part is you can’t explain those barren cycles of non-creativity and you don’t know how long they’ll continue. You begin to fear you’re washed up forever. All’s well with Paul now and he’s bursting with energy and creative force.
Barely out of his teen years, shaggy-headed, trumpet-voiced Steve Winwood is sitting on top of his world. Already gorgeous as Adonis, Steve will certainly be rich, famous and the spoiled darling of the fair sex before 22 catches up to him.
What Stevie is, is vocalist, piano and organ player, harmonicat, guitar man and top dog of the Traffic, the English quartet who rated unanimously glowing raves from the greatest music pros. He and brother Muff were Spencer Davis originals. This year he returned to America with his own aggregation, The Traffic, comprising himself and two buddies from his hometown Birmingham, England.
Traffic’s first LP, Heaven Is In Your Mind, produced by Jimmy Miller, was such a blast that Mick Jagger asked Jimmy to do the next Rolling Stones album.
The Their Satanic Majesties, produced by the Jagger, was the first and only dud for the Stones, thus ending Mick’s ambitions to produce records. The Stones are also looking for a new manager to replace the one they fired, Andrew Loog Oldham.
What music you hear most depends on where you live maybe. Geography can dictate tune tastes. Radio stations in many parts of the Old South play nothing but country-hillbilly-mountain music. Eddy Arnold, Hank Williams, Jr., Sons of the Pioneers and Buck Owens with his Buckaroos hog the radio air there.
Big city pop stations often concentrate so heavily on Top 40 chart-grabbers that new groovy groups and songs are aced out of the playlists, a snobbery which is a pain to many listeners and singer-musicians who don’t conform to the rigid rules of commercialism.
Readers write us that listeners in huge hunks of territory of the eastern and north central states get to hear only the sounds out of the soul-rhythm-blues bag. Soul is something else when performed by greats like Aretha Franklin, Dionne Warwick, Lou Rawls and the late lamented dearly beloved Otis Redding. Many shouty soulers, we think, make more din and noise than lyrical melody. A solid sound-alike soul diet, perpetrated every hour of every day via jabbering deejays, lays on a monotony that can result in uncool headaches.
It happened in Portland, Oregon, where hardly anything ever happens.
Cheery multi-colored neon lights shone from a Scandinavian restaurant near the Portland hotel where the Union Gap were staying. Kerry Chater, bass, and Gary Withem, piano-woodwinds, pressed their noses against the plate glass window and viewed a huge table groaning under mountains of Swedish smorgasbord goodies. They went in, mouths watering. A checkgirl grabbed their coats. A hostess, lips curling at the sight of their seamy Levis, sat them in an obscure table and handed them poster-size menus. Wow, what prices: $6 for a shrimp cocktail, $2.50 for a napkin of French fries, etc.
Union Gappers were starters then, picturesquely bent, busted and broke. The two guys snuck away and devoured dogs and cokes at a street stand. Back at the hotel they raved to their three mates about the smorgasbord feed.
“Man, all you can eat for $1.50 per plate” they cried. “Don’t even bother to look at the menu, just load up on the smorgasbord.”
Hungry General Gary Puckett, Dwight Bement and Paul Wheatbread jogged to the place at a furious pace. Watching from the parking lot, the two guys saw the three fill their plates, eat all and go for seconds. Puckett even treated himself to a highball.
Then the waitress presented the check—$43.42. The threesome’s total capital, $10.25.
The really riled manager held Dwight and Paul hostage while Gary went out to raise the balance due. This took hours.
“We never laughed so much in our lives,” Kerry Chater told us. “We were rolling around in the parking lot having fits.”
“Now we’re waiting for them to even the score,” Gary Withem said. “We’ll get it when we least expect it. The suspense is terrible.”
Competition between cities for musical renown is the bunk. Boston, Mass., is now being hyped by MGM Records as “Bosstown, the New Liverpool, U.S.A.” after the label inked three or four Boston groups, including Orpheus, Ultimate Spinach and Beacon Street Union. Eden’s Children is another heavy Bostown band. The hottest rockers ever to come out of that old town were the Remains who, however, received only piddlin’ publicity from their lame label.
Boston’s bid for musical recognition is hampered, we are told, by hard-nosed city fathers who hate rock music, psychedelic light shows, discotheques, hippies and youthful life, liberty and the pursuit of happenings.
A greater claim to music fame could be made by the Pacific Northwest, Washington, Oregon and Idaho, whence came Jimi Hendrix, Grace Slick, Don and the Good Times, Kingsmen, Paul Revere and the original Raiders, to name a few. Latest group to explode out of that territory is the wildly imaginative Hunger whose debut performances at the Kaleidoscope and Whiskee-a-Go-Go in L.A. were sensational.
“San Francisco, the Dowager City That Blows Its Mind,” to quote Los Angeles Magazine, rocks out with nearly 300 R&R bands, of which only four are nationally known: Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company, Grateful Dead and Blue Cheer.
Nashville means country-western, Detroit is soul, New York is nothing, Los Angeles, something of everything. Perhaps the next big hype will be the “Teaxs [sic] Sound,” starting with the Fever Tree, a band backed by Dallas-Houston bread.
What’s wrong with the Oscar, Emmy, and Grammy Awards by the movies, telley, and music industries is the creaky age of the academy members who vote, says Peggy Lipton, the tall cool blonde feminine lead of the new Mod Squad TV series starting in September.
“Imagine awarding Katharine Hepburn an Oscar for Best Performance by an Actress, and deliberately sinking as nominees, Michael J. Pollard, Dustin Hoffman, Katherine Ross, Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, who are popular with young theater-goers!”
In the Grammy Awards, three songs and singers made a clean sweep and most teenage hitsongs were ignored by mildewed members, Peggy recalls. Snubbed by both Oscar and Grammy voters was one super-song, The Look Of Love, writ by Burt Bachrach and Hal David, recorded by 47 top disc artists, including Dusty Springfield, Vanilla Fudge, Sergio Mendez, Andy Williams, Barbara Streisand, Paul Mauriat, Ray Charles, Ramsey Lewis and the Lettermen. Also omitted was Lulu’s two-million seller “To Sir With Love.”
Peggy just turned 21, is not only an actress but also a singer and songwriter. Lou Adler, mentor of many ace artists, is producing her first records and perhaps a later album.
Is the world ready for another set of Monkees? Screen Gems’ masterminds are talent-hunting for another musical group of more than four to launch on another network this fall, according to the Hollywood Reporter, trade mag. Screen Gems created the original Monkeemen and signed them to a Columbia movie when the teleseries folded. The Monkees will be making millions for years to come, no doubt, but the SG people can use a few more millions.
The Vanilla Fudge turns on or turns off concert audiences and there’s no in-between opinion. The Fudge uses so many electronic gadgets, movie and slide projectors, massive amps, tape recorders and lightshows on 360-degree screens that, according to Phil Basle, “the only thing that can stop us now is a blown fuse.”
Dack Rambo of Guns of Will Sonnett pulls more fan mail at ABC-TV than any other actor active on their network. Although he dates starlet Christine Ferrare more than any other doll in town, he says he’s not serious about her and he hopes there are no marriage notions rattling around in her pretty head.
BeeGees Robin Gibb’s word of advice: A bachelor should get tangled up with many chicks in order to avoid getting tangled up with one. How come, when a guy’s got nothing on earth to worry about, he goes off and gets married?
