Subject: The Grateful Dead and Quicksilver Messenger Service on the road, touring together with horns, bells and whistles although ‘there are no gems in this’ says techie Steve Sange of Jerry Abrams Head Lights. This tour was on the road after many co-created festivals both bands supported (click bus above) ~ it could have been a brand new day, yet is quite probably their last 'official' Northwest jaunt as a team. Star charts for Quicksilver and members of The Grateful Dead show dramatic adjustments at this juncture, with many sharp turns and pivotal notes already recorded by the late 60s. One of Quicksilver's signature signs, Virgo (the harvest, Earth drama/mystery plays) experienced a massive line up of transits; contracts changed, understandings dissolved, with the ultimate identity shape-shifting to follow.
Destiny Path Numbers 1 - 10 and Super Numbers 11, 22, 33

Listen to the best of Quicksilver from the vault ~ "Gold and Silver... additional tracks taken from various 1968 performances that BLOWS AWAY their live album "Happy Trails". And, we've added a BONUS DISC with rare soundtrack cuts, single-only sides and, yes, 8 UNRELEASED tracks, all of 'em dating from the prime, 1967-1968 years. Notes and pix accompany ... a Collectors' Choice Music psychedelexclusive!"
Some favorite rock & roll artists on a special page that includes star menu links. And now, from the rolling tape, the interview in progress:

Steve: It was on the tour that Grateful Dead and Quicksilver Messenger Service traveled together. It was called, ‘The Great Northwestern Tour’ and they traveled over - think it started in Eureka or Yreka ~ went to Yreka and went to Seattle, went to Portland. So I was working for the light show that was part of the package, Jerry Abrams Head Lights.

The Kove: What year was this?
S: Must have been about, at the latest ‘71, probably 70s anyway - no it was before that. It was in the 60s ~ ‘68-‘69.

K: So John Cipollina was still with Quicksilver Messenger Service?
S: Yes, Quicksilver was still a group. They were at the end. On this tour The Grateful Dead blew them away a number of times. There was just too much power to The Grateful Dead. They would make the stage shake. I remember watching the bass player (Phil Lesh) from The Dead, way in the back of this one auditorium, I think it was The Crystal Ballroom in Portland, going, "Wow! Wow!"
He was just going "WOW!" and The Grateful Dead were on the stage and thunderstorms of energy, lightning streaks shaking and tremendous energy was emanating from the band and the music. It was like watching… just an uncanny spectacle. These guys, stationary, standing still on the ground, on the stage, were doing this energy transformation and it was electric, totally electric. And I think it might have been after that gig or there were so many gigs - it was night after night after night almost …. John Cipollina was sitting at a table, smoking cigarette after cigarette - trying to seduce this woman, I guess was what was going on, and she was a pretty girl and he was just rapping to her. I stuck my 2 cents in somehow, and had something to say and kinda disturbed his approach I think. I thought I’d take advantage of his immersion in the rock star role. I guess I saw this all and said, "Well, I can do just as good or better." (Deep belly laughs) Arrogant fool that I was. Nothing came of it. That’s probably the only time I ever talked with John Cipollina.

K: What did he have to say?
S: I don’t remember what we talked about. It was nothing important. There was quite a bit that went on on that tour though. It was quite an interesting experience for me.

K: What do you remember about it - memories?
S: Well, we went to Kesey’s farm outside of Eugene. And I had charge of the movie projectors with which we were going to try and show footage of film that one of the Pranksters… well, all of The Grateful Dead film many, many of their activities. And performances had been filmed and they wanted to show some of that, using the light show projectors, so we had the projectors set up in the barn. And somehow or other, I think the films couldn’t be disentangled; they were totally disorganized or they couldn’t get the projector to work or something like that… but the films never went on or, if they went on, they went on only very briefly. Oh! No,. I remember. It was the space heater they couldn’t get lit. And it was a cold day. And so no one wanted to be in the place where the movies were being shown cause it was too cold, and the space heater wouldn’t work.

K: The space heater? (We both laugh.)
S Yeh! (Laughing louder)

K: Do you have any of the films?
S: They were in the garage at the farm. You’d have to ask Kesey that. Or Ken Babbs* or somebody connected with The Grateful Dead people up there. It’s Kesey’s brother’s farm, outside of Eugene.

K: So is Kesey likely to want to share that kind of in-progress material?
S: I don’t see why not. He seems very amiable and totally loose about his sense of exposure. He doesn’t hide much at all.

K: I used to go up to Kesey’s place (when he lived on the Star Route in La Honda) a lot and I know he’s taped a lot of things with Neal (Cassady) and some of his tapes have been stolen. I’ll write and ask him if he’s still working with Grateful Dead and Cassady footage…. Did you ever see the Dinosaurs play?
S: No, I never did. I often noted Cipollina’s name involved with come back musical situations. Maybe I did see them once. It never interested me much because {sigh} Cipollina didn’t knock me out as a musician**. But what can I say, you know, I’m a totally snobbish and (inaudible adjective) person about rock & roll and a whole lot of it is to me a momentary situation. … such a personal opinion that I have to say he’s a man who made a quite successful career out of it. So I’m only just another person in the audience. I mean, you know, who the hell am I?

K: You’re a witness, basically. Do you think JC was a team player who had good relationships with band members?
S: I can’t answer that… QMS had a working band so he must have been a team player. They had a GOOD working band. I think that the problem with QMS was um, that their lead singer Gary Duncan wasn’t doing enough of a magnetic performance to be on par with The Dead who were playing very, very good rock & roll. Quicksilver had an even more outrageous conception of rock and roll than The Dead in a way, because of their drummer, for one thing, and the spectacular set up that he had and the way that he played then. This was a moment in time… The Dead at the beginning of their situation… well, The Dead were tighter as a unit as it turned out… longevity couldn’t be judged at that time.

K: What’s the best Quicksilver Messenger Service album in your opinion? The most perfect musically?
S: I don’t know. I’m not totally familiar with their albums. I remember one with the Pony Express guy on the front (Happy Trails) but I don’t really have a place deep within my heart for what was on all those records. (laughing) I skipped a lot of things.

K: You did. So you must have had a very interesting career yourself!
S: I haven’t had a career yet… still trying to break into the music business.

K: How can I get a hold of Jerry Abrams Head Lights these days?
S: Look up Jerry Abrams name in the phone book. I don’t think Head Lights is in operation now. Jerry Abrams also made a living doing films so he was sort of independent… Is this going to be in a publication that I can pick up on now?

K: Publication about the popular rock groups and lead guitar artists, yes. The target subjects for publications featured talent like John Cipollina at work within various groups (such as guest appearances with The Grateful Dead) and not only Quicksilver. Maybe should do something on the drummer too since you seem to think…
S: I happened to be, at the time that I was witness (to all mentioned herein) a student of Jerry Granelli. Jerry Granelli is a world class drummer who was then teaching the Quicksilver Messenger Service drummer and that’s one of the reasons he was such a good drummer. I haven’t heard for a time, but I think he’s now in Boulder (Colorado) with a Buddhist group - its been a while since I’ve heard from him, but he’s definitely one of the reasons; that the drummer was doing well. I’m sure the drummer would agree with you there. He was quite a flamboyant, spectacular drummer and I do remember that he had that he pumped well!

K: Thank you so much. It’s been an inspiration!

* See Kesey’s ‘THE FURTHER INQUIRY’ Penguin Books, 1990 ~ NEAL: ‘That would have worked of course, EARlier.’ ~ STARK: ‘Earlier, yes, much earlier.’ ~ NEAL: ‘Well, I think we could make you a real hit.’ STARK: ‘Ah yes, a hit. We’re going to have a hit.’ NEAL: ‘Yessss. That’s what we’ll have to do.’ See also 'The Beat Goes On' feature Cassady/Kerouac/Kesey star charts.

** John Cipollina’s taped rehearsal/jam with Jimi Hendrix before the Monterey Pop Festival still boasts several high bids; I’ll refrain from reporting all the various and sundry body parts offered on the block for those tapes. Let’s say the bids have been considerable and out of the range of most interested persons. Nuff said.

 

 

 

 

The Phil Zone Inn Annex

An Interview With David Gans ~ Host of The Grateful Dead Hour

Introduction ~ KPFA Event

 

"The issue here is not simply disinformation… It’s whether we want to live in a free society or whether we want to live under what amounts to a form of self-imposed totalitarianism… and the choice that you have to face and the answer… is very much in the hands of people exactly like you and me."

Noam Chomsky,
Speaking on the Gulf Crisis,
Pacifica Radio Archive

”I got up early and since my radio was broken, I jumped in the car and drove around just so I could tune into KPFA. Whether it’s Amy Goodman, Edward Said, Arundhati Roy, or Noam Chomsky – I need those voices, analyses, perspectives – that information – I can find nowhere else. Pacifica is a lifeline.”

-Danny Glover

”The time had just come when I had been pushed as far as I can stand to be pushed, I suppose.”

-Rosa Parks, Pacifica Radio Archive

 

Click Audio button (top page 1) for info about Truth and Fun productions and new Gans CD ~ acoustic with excellent reviews from Grateful Dead fans. Cover photographed at Joshua Tree power site! Right, image on Grateful Dead Hour T-shirt

Kove: Could you say a little bit about how you got involved with KPFA initially?
David GANS: I don't remember exactly how I got involved. I was invited to help out with a fund raiser, a Grateful Dead fund raising marathon in 1986, and I had a great time. We were on the air for hours and hours and played a bunch of 60s music. It was very exciting because the people at the station were thrilled at the amount of money that was being raised from The Deadhead Community. And I guess that just hooked me ... 'cause it felt good doing something that I was happy to be doing anyway, having it be so effective and so rewarding to the station. So I've done one every year since. I do some programming at every fund raiser for KPFA.
I do a large marathon once a year and a few years back I decided, if we're going to do 12 hours, we might as well do 16 hours. So I go on the air at nine in the morning and usually plug until eleven or so, although sometimes we keep plugging until midnight - and the last hour is just solid music. So I think this'll be my 15th one coming up. {Example of this excellent selection of tunes are tapes 'from the wings' not heard since they were recorded for Ned Lagin's birthday 3/17/75: Ned Lagin, acoustic and electric piano; Jerry Garcia, electric guitar; David Crosby electric 12-string guitar; Phil Lesh, bass; Billy Kreutzmann, drums. John Cipollina, electric guitar (#2 only). Recorded 3/17/75 (Ned's birthday) at Bob Weir's studio (aka Ace's) For the list and acquisition info, click on 'AUDIO' above.} Along the way in 1990, I started doing a regular radio show on KPFA. It's great to be part of something that's so upstanding and so free of commercial idiocy.

K: What was the original concept of KPFA when it first started? Do you know the background of the station?

GANS: I'm not really that familiar with the history of it. I picked up things about the culture over the years. I've been involved. My involvement in the station has really been peripheral all along. I just come in and do my show. I mean I've been involved in political things ~ when the whole business went down. I was on the air the day Nicole was fired. When I came in and I saw a bunch of people I knew and cared about just sitting in the lobby looking very unhappy and I started to make a joke and Jim said, "Hey, this is no time for joking - here's what's happened." I was furious. I went on the air, said some pretty incendiary things at the time and then got really involved at that point in what was going on. My life takes me away from the Bay area for weeks at a time cause I'm a traveling musician, so its really hard to stay in the loop.
I'm not really up to speed as to what's happening at KPFA now. But I feel like I have a role to play there. I represent a community that is very generous in support of KPFA, and I'm happy to play that part and raise funds for KPFA and keep playing the music. I'm sorta the wrong guy to ask these days the details of what's going on.

K: Everyone loves to hear music that's from your current gig on the road...
GANS: Well, I'm having fun doing that. I started out to be a musician thirty years ago and sort of took a detour into some other lines of work for twenty years and decided I better get out there... if I ever wanted to do this I'm gonna do it before I'm too old, so in my middle age I'm a very happy, born again troubadour out there on tour!

K: Do you think the people who support KPFA through the Grateful Dead Community over the years have any opinion?

Gans: Oh, sure, lots of them do. But the Dead Community is hugely diverse. There are a lot of people who just like to listen to the music and are happy to make a donation at pledge time and don't care what else (any of this) is going on. There are a lot of people who are very seriously involved and interested and happy to help out. Couple of people I'm familiar with who live in Berkeley have been denouncing KPFA for the last several years. The first round of big changes that happened in 1995 was a pretty shocking event for a lot of people. A lot of familiar names and comfortable voices were taken off the air summarily and... although I believe that the station has to have the right to make those kind of changes, the way in which it was done was pretty unpleasant. A lot of people that I know have never forgiven KPFA for succombing to that kind of management practice.

K: Why did the management do it?
Gans: Drop-kicking people off the air? That's a long story that I'm not qualified to talk about. I think its the beginnings of the action that's been carried out to this day and what's being carried on to New York at WBAI. The people that run The Pacifica Foundation seem to have an (undisclosed agenda that is different) from the one that most of us believe it has been and should be, and (failed to be) forthright about their motives ~ and they have not announced any kind of a plan. From where I sit it seems absurd and irresponsible for The Pacifica Foundation to take steps to essentially fire the existing audience without any other plan. And the sort of boiler-plate of canards that they trot out about how the typical KPFA supporters over 50, white; its probably true if you look at the audience that's filtering into this room right now. Firstly, there's nothing wrong with that and secondly, if you don't have another community of funders to step up to pay the freight for the station its just plain suicide for the station to alienate the existing community.

K: Bad berries from the business viewpoint?
Gans: It makes no sense to alienate your principal funders if you have no other funders in place. It’s just a plain rotten thing to do. Ask Louis Sawyer - (Louis is preparing the room for the meeting about to start) He knows a lot more about this than me. We're going to start the program... (David Gans would be featured as both speaker and performer for this event, happily one of his selected tunes, 'Going Down To Eugene' is one of my favorites. I managed to wedge in just one more thought before things got rolling along.)

K: How do you plant the seeds for the shows you do? Where does that spring from?
Gans: Which? The music that I play? Just listen to music all the time and I get email from listeners telling me what shows that want to hear. It's like picking fruit off a very, very, very, very well loaded tree. There's a lot of great music there.

K: Requests are local or from listeners all over the country?
Gans: Most of my listeners are in the Bay Area. I have a national show too that’s not related to this one, but there are some people who listen to ‘Dead To The World’ and other KPFA programs on the web and I do hear from them. Got email from someone who was listening to me in Australia recently. I’ll take requests from any-body who’s got a good idea and do my best to listen to the music that they’re referring to, and if its good I’ll put it on the air. When they expanded my show to two hours in 1995, I said, "Okay I’ll do two hours, but don’t want to do two hours of Grateful Dead. I want to do free form for the second hour." They said, "Fine. Fine, no problem." So sometimes I’ll do two hours of Grateful Dead but sometimes I’ll do an hour of Grateful Dead, an hour of folk music, an hour of country music, what-ever I’m interested in, whatever is new, you know. It’s a great situation to be in for a creative and exploratory person because whatever is interesting, whatever passes in front of my nose at the beginning of the week ~ I can put the most interesting parts on the air.

K: There was a time in the Bay Area when free form was very popular.
Gans: Yeh, and I grew up on that and that formed my consciousness. Being able to listen to disc jockeys like Bonnie Simmons and Norman Davis and Thom O’hair, the late Thom O’hair - guys like that taught me that all music is - it’s like John Cage said, "Everything is music." So, to be dogmatic about limiting your repertoire to one particular style is not the way I want to do it.

K: Tom Constanten said something on that line. He begins to think that ‘John Cage is more a philosopher than a musician,’ then he hears a musical composition from Cage* and feels like he’s been hit over the head with a frying pan… Cage is definitely a musician. Thank you very much, really appreciate it. (Curtain rising on the program.)
Gans: And sometimes it IS a frying pan! I suppose that’s more likely to turn up in Lou Harrison or Harry Partch! … My pleasure.

Check these CDs! Gans Acoustic & Stolen Roses ~~* Albums all together now: Pix Index
Just in from walk about? Catch up with posted feedback including Review by Tim Cullinane - Relix Aug-Sep 2001 and Tim Lynch for PauseRecord - links David Gans at Inkwell.vue

The Grateful Dead and Quicksilver Messenger Service on the road, touring together with horns, bells and whistles although ‘there are no gems in this’ says techie Steve Sange of Jerry Abrams Head Lights. From the rolling tape:
The Great Northwest Tour

 

 

 

Kesey page ‘further’ on yahoo tdn now history
highlighters from NEW AGE JOURNAL

KEN KESEY RAVES AGAIN
By Alan Reder
NEW AGE JOURNAL, November/December 1992

On the August day on which I begin reading Ken Kesey's new book, Sailor Song (Viking, 1992) - his first in nearly three decades - it's 107 degrees outside my southern Oregon home and I can see the withered patches in the nearby forest canopy, scars from an eight-year drought. In Portland and Seattle, they're rationing water. Meanwhile, this novel, by a man who was one of the true Buddhas of my generation, portrays a near future in which climatic catastrophes, ozone depletion, resource rape, and land development have advanced to the absolute precipice of irreversible apocalypse, and probably beyond. With typical Kesey magic, the marvelously bent characters climb right off the page and dance their whacked-out drama in front of me. But the future he augurs is too dismally believable and I'm shaken to my soles. Has Ken Kesey given up?

Ken Kesey, whose '60s novels One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion rang like great rock 'n' roll in my ears, in millions of our ears, while we were storming the barricades?

In my profession, you sometimes get to explore these things firsthand. A few weeks later, I've secured an interview with the '60s high-priest himself and I'm headed north on Interstate 5 to the Kesey farm just south of Eugene.

The landscape I'm rolling through, the Williamette Valley, is Kesey country all the way, and not just because marijuana has sometimes rivaled timber as an Oregon cash crop. Kesey's family moved here from Colorado when he was nine years old. He got his undergraduate degree at the University of Oregon in Eugene (he went on a wrestling scholarship), then moved south to enroll in Stanford University's creative writing program in 1958, where he studied with Larry McMurtry, Robert Stone, and Wendell Berry under mentors Wallace Stegner and Malcolm Cowley. After two novels, the legendary LSD-crazed cross-country bus trip with the Merry Pranksters 1964, and a marijuana bust for which he served time in 1967, Kesey came home to this valley to raise a family with his high school sweetheart, Faye.

I'm following Faye's directions now. They guide me off the freeway, down winding roads through sun-scorched pastureland, and past other farms until I reach the Kesey spread, a mostly flat, seventy-acre parcel where he writes, raises beef cattle, and launches occasional hell-raising excursions with old Prankster pals. On a telephone pole by the farm's entrance there's a yellow road sign with the black silhouette of a kangaroo and the words NEXT 5 KM. I decide this must be the place.

I've waited nearly a month for my spot along the Sailor Song publicity gauntlet, a long one because most media pundits doubted this writer had another novel in him. The spot is a narrow window between noon and 2:30 P.M., at which time Kesey has to disappear, so you can bet my heart sinks when - after my three-hour drive, the kind-faced man who greets me says my appointment is sleeping. But he reassures me - I am expected - and invites me in while he goes to rouse the subject matter.

As one might suspect, the house I enter varies somewhat from the traditional bucolic décor. The basic structure - an old red converted barn - is ordinary enough for these parts, but up where the hay loft used to be there's a big white star painted inside a blue circle that makes the building look like a fat cargo plane ready for takeoff. Inside, Kesey's home is appointed like a rustic version of Pee Wee's Playhouse. Across from the round wooden table where I take a seat, one living room wall is painted highway-construction-ahead fluorescent orange. Beneath several couches in the sitting room, the floor is covered in large swatches of primary colors, while a rainbow of Day-Glo hues coats the stairs at one end of the room. Only the kitchen wall of unfinished, aged lumber, and the pole-and-plaster ceiling mute the effect.

Call the décor Contemporary Kesey, by the man who also helped interior-decorate the craniums of much of my generation. I'm still trying to figure out just how to greet a living legend when it wanders out in a sleeveless tie-dyed shirt and loose-fitting white pants and offers me a meaty hand. Maybe six-foot-three, he has the heft and stature of an ex-tight end. Except for curly hair and sideburns that have gone white, Kesey at fifty-six looks much the same as he did in Prankster-era photos.

The previous six months have been so tumultuous, (Kesey says) largely because of local fears about invasion by the Great Unwashed - tens of thousands of migratory Grateful Dead fans. "The community [nearby Veneta] where [first proposed site of the original 'The Sea Lion' show] was going to happen tried to stop it," Kesey says in soft, measured tones, "and the way they talked about 'these people,' about these Deadheads, about all the problems they'll cause, and the theft that would happen and all the violence, they might have been Germans talking about gypsies." When Kesey shifted the location to his own farm, he persuaded folks that no security arrangements were necessary, and the crowd's behavior justified his confidence. People parked where they should, stayed away from the house, and kept their inebriant intake to manageable levels. "It was the same seedy, wild-looking bunch," he says, "but they understood."

Kesey asks a young couple passing through the kitchen if they'll favor him by throwing some hay at his cows, and then suggests that we go survey the site of Saturday's performances. A short walk from the house and we're in a grassy area big enough for a serious touch football game, surrounded on three sides by narrow stands of trees. And right here among these trees, its coat of many colors faded by time and weather, rests - and rusts - The Bus. The most famous '39 International Harvester ever, this vehicle had been christened Further [sic] by Kesey and the thirteen other neutrochemical astronauts who called themselves the Merry Pranksters.

"The Smithsonian called me about two weeks ago," Kesey reports as we pass it. "They still want it, the crazy fuckers. There's no way I'd move that." I'm confused, having heard on National Public Radio a couple of years ago that Kesey had restored the bus, loaded it with former Pranksters, and toured the country to promote A Further Inquiry, his nonfiction account of that fabled trip of trips. Clearly, this glorious automotive carcass hasn't touched asphalt in ages and probably never will again. "Oh, yeah," Kesey remarks casually, "NPR's still suspicious of us."

Kesey's got something to show me, he says, so we make our way toward a large lean-to outbuilding with hay for his cattle stacked against one side. Inside is a precise replica of the original Further, ready to roll, its LSD-peak paint job as bright and unblemished as if still wet. So THIS was the bus that toured. "Yeah," Kesey confirms, grinning.

 

Central Index

The Beat Goes On

 

 

[It is evident my memory of Quicksilver's peak power performances on the Avalon Ballroom stage were not enjoyed by Steve although he knew the group was very popular. Please take in stride any ‘timed out’ references extracted off my original tape. This '80s date precedes Cipollina’s ‘Man of A Thousand Bands’ tour de force of San Francisco Bay Area nightlife scene and the resurrection of QMS by Gary Duncan in the 90s. The Editor]

Some archived song lyrics

 

 

Go further to the bus * check in @ PhilZone Inn or head home again, home again, jiggidy jinn! ~~* Angels at work ~ Keep watching this space!

 

 

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