The Transition Years: 1965-1966

5. The Transition Years: 1965-1966

Members of Jefferson Airplane holding a poster for the 1966 Berkeley Folk Music Festival, at which they performed. From left, Spencer Dryden, Paul Kantner, Jack Casady, Signe Toly Anderson, Jorma Kaukonen, and Marty Balin. Photo: Barry Olivier.

With great controversy, Bob Dylan “went electric” at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island; at Berkeley the former folkies in the psychedelic rock band Jefferson Airplane performed in 1966 with hardly a stir.
 
The Berkeley Folk Music Festival would, for the most part, remain a place of calm within the storms of the mid and late 1960s in Berkeley. This did not mean, however, that the larger forces of politics and culture during these years would not change Olivier’s sense of how to program the event. He began to take a more adventurous approach to folk music presentation.
 
Olivier did not abandon the goal of linking older music to Jet Age California in the booming 1960s, but in 1965 and 1966 he increasingly embraced a more eclectic approach to what counted as folk.
 
Whether it was presenting new topical singer-songwriters such as Tom Paxton or rock music emerging from across the bay in San Francisco, such as the folkies-turned-rockers Jefferson Airplane, Olivier incorporated new musical directions into the Berkeley Folk Music Festival alongside a fidelity to what he perceived as the deep river of American vernacular musical traditions. Sometimes this got him in trouble, but mostly his annual event flourished as it went through dramatic transformations.

1965

The 1965 Festival continued to bring together rural Southern styles, city folkie interpreters, and Scotch-Irish balladry, but it also added performers who were more in the mode of Bob Dylan, someone Olivier hoped to bring to Berkeley. “Bob Dylan, though not here in person, was certainly here in spirit,” Monroe Moen wrote in the Independent. He was thinking in particular of Tom Paxton, another topical singer-songwriter from the Greenwich Village folk music scene from which Dylan emerged.

Tom Paxton, 1965.

Paxton and Fred McDowell at the 1965 Berkeley Folk Music Festival.

Dancers including Tom Paxton on the floor at the Berkeley Folk Music Festival old-time barn dance in Pauley Ballroom at the 1965 Berkeley Folk Music Festival.

Paxton performing at the Berkeley Folk Music Festival fireside concert in the Greek Amphitheater at the 1965 Berkeley Folk Music Festival.

Paxton with pipe at a 1965 Berkeley Folk Music Festival workshop.

Mike Seeger, Merritt Herring, Tom Paxton, Bess Lomax Hawes, Alan Dundes, and Chris Strachwitz at a 1965 Berkeley Folk Music Festival panel.

Paxton at a 1965 Berkeley Folk Music Festival round-robin concert in Pauley Ballroom with Carol McComb, Kathy Larisch, Sam Hinton, and Gene Bluestein. Photo: Thomas Kumano.

Paxton and Charles O’Hegarty at the 1965 Berkeley Folk Music Festival. Photo: Thomas Kumano.

Traditional musicians did not disappear from the 1965 Berkeley Folk Music Festival. “Mississippi” Fred McDowell performed his fiercely beautiful take on the Mississippi blues. Chris Strachwitz of Arhoolie Records helped to bring the Hackberry Ramblers from Hackberry, Louisiana to the event. The group brought some of the first stirrings of the Cajun music revival out to the West Coast folk scene.

“Mississippi” Fred McDowell performing in the Greek Amphitheater at the 1965 Berkeley Folk Music Festival.

McDowell at the 1965 Berkeley Folk Music Festival.

Mike Seeger and Luderin Darbone of the Hackberry Ramblers play fiddles together at the 1965 Berkeley Folk Music Festival. Photo: Thomas Kumano.

The Hackberry Ramblers performing at a 1965 Berkeley Folk Music Festival workshop.

While it nodded to the new generation of topical singer-songwriters, the 1965 Festival also expanded the scholarly dimensions of the festival. On the bill were not just the ever-present Charles Seeger and Bess Lomax Hawes, but also Alan Dundes, Chris Strachwitz, Gene Bluestein, and David Dufty from Australia.

Other familiar names were back as performers too: Jean Ritchie, Jean Redpath, and Merritt Herring. Olivier was eager to add newcomers from the local scene as well: Kathy Larisch & Carol McComb, who performed as the duo Kathy and Carol. Charles O’Hegarty brought Irish music to the event as well.

Jean Redpath singing in the Greek Amphitheater at the 1965 Berkeley Folk Music Festival Jubilee Concert.

Bess Lomax Hawes singing at the barbeque and campfire concert at the 1965 Berkeley Folk Music Festival.

Mike Seeger, Merritt Herring, Tom Paxton, Bess Lomax Hawes, Alan Dundes, and Chris Strachwitz at a 1965 Berkeley Folk Music Festival panel discussion.

Charles Seeger at the 1965 Berkeley Folk Music Festival. Photo: Robert Krones.

Charles O’Hegarty at the 1965 Berkeley Folk Music Festival. Photo: Thomas Kumano.

Kathy and Carol (Kathleen Larisch and Carol McComb) performing at a 1965 Berkeley Folk Music Festival workshop.

Charles Seeger, Jean Redpath, Gene Bluestein, Bess Lomax Hawes, and Alan Dundes at a 1965 Berkeley Folk Music Festival workshop.

Jean Ritchie at the 1965 Berkeley Folk Music Festival Children’s concert in the University of California, Berkeley Faculty Glade.

Mike Seeger, sans the New Lost City Ramblers, had a headline spot at the 1965 Berkeley Folk Music Festival. Olivier hoped Seeger could bring Dylanish star power to the event, but the musician was more of a quiet, stern interpreter of traditional folk material than a crossover star with pop appeal. Dylan himself thought as much in his memoir Chronicles, Volume One:

Mike was unprecedented. He was like a duke, the knight errant. As for being a folk musician, he was the supreme archetype. He could push a stake through Dracula’s black heart. He was the romantic, egalitarian, and revolutionary type all at once—had chivalry in his blood. Like some figure from a restored monarchy, he had come to purify the church. You couldn’t imagine him making a big deal about anything….

Mike Seeger performing on mandolin with Edwin Duhon of the Hackberry Ramblers on upright bass at the 1965 Berkeley Folk Music Festival old-time barn dance in Pauley Ballroom.

Seeger playing banjo at the 1965 Berkeley Folk Music Festival children’s concert.

Seeger playing autoharp at the 1965 Berkeley Folk Music Festival children’s concert.

Seeger and Kathy and Carol (Kathleen Larisch and Carol McComb) performing at the 1965 Berkeley Folk Music Festival Jubilee Concert.

Olivier also tried to branch out what counted as folk performance, especially for children. Since the Berkeley Festival’s inception, he had organized a children’s concert each year, hosted by Sam Hinton. In 1965, not only musicians, but also a magician, Dan X. Solo (also a renowned typographical artist in the Bay Area),  and the puppeteers Luman & Mary Coad performed.

One would think that drawing close to 20,000 participants the previous year would provide financial stability, but in fact the larger format of the 1965 Berkeley Folk Music Festival meant increased expenses. This produced vulnerability for Olivier to money problems if even one performance at the Festival did not sell well. He always tried to pay participants handsomely, if not at the rates of mainstream commercial music promotion. He also hired a large staff of students and assistants to make sure the Festival took place successfully. Behind the casual tone Olivier established was an enormous amount of labor, effort, and expense.

After the 1965 Berkeley Folk Music Festival was over, Olivier realized he faced financial challenges in his arrangement with the University of California for producing the now epic event. “We had a magnificent festival,” Olivier explained of the 1965 Festival to Forrest Tregea, director of the Associated Students of the University of California (ASUC), which had helped to fund and put on the Berkeley Folk Music Festival since its inception. “It made all the others look like ‘horse-and-buggy’ models by comparison.”

Now, however, Olivier was in the hole for $5,000. He blamed the stock market downturn that year, Vietnam War worries, the increasingly crowded music festival circuit, and the ongoing internecine squabbles of the folk revival itself. Whatever the cause, the effort to create a bigger Berkeley Folk Music Festival was economically fraught. Olivier pledged to Tregea that he would keep the following year’s budget lower and solve the budget problems. “I don’t like people worrying about the Festival or me personally,” he explained.

1966

Olivier came roaring back in 1966 with an event that cracked open the boundary between the traditionalists and the fans of more contemporary music. “This year,” he wrote to topical songwriter Phil Ochs, who would perform at the event, “we hope to shake loose a few old shackles, broaden our festival viewpoint, and try to help interpret the beauty and meaning of folk music and the new music springing from traditional music and traditional forms.”

Folk-rock ruled the airwaves, Bob Dylan had become a pop superstar, and the psychedelic sounds of the San Francisco rock scene were beginning to surface in 1966. Olivier decided to continuine mixing traditionalists with topical songwriters, but he also added a new element: the Jefferson Airplane playing electric instruments. As with so many of the new San Francisco bands, the members of the Airplane were mostly former folkies. Inspired by the Beatles, they had traded in their banjos for electrification and a back beat. New hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD added an interest in more experimental forms to their pop too. Nonetheless, there were plenty of folk traces. The band’s very name came from a playful twist on the name of Texas bluesman Blind Lemon Jefferson.

Olivier was very excited to explore the links between traditional music and the new pop sounds developing in San Francisco. When the Jefferson Airplane’s manager, Matthew Katz, threatened to pull the band for a more lucrative gig in Seattle, Olivier urged him to keep the band at Berkeley. “I feel that at the Festival this year, we have the opportunity to make the first major statement, as it were, on the relationship of folk music and contemporary rock music,” Olivier wrote. He managed to retain the Airplane for their Berkeley Festival engagement.

Once again in a non-performing role, another folkie-turned-rocker, Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead, made an appearance at the Berkeley Festival. Having turned up Zelig-like at the 1962 Winter Folk Festival, Garcia appears in backstage photos at the Jubilee Concert in 1966 as well. Perhaps he came to the Berkeley Festival as a guest of the Jefferson Airplane since soon he would be helping the band record the album that would become Surrealistic Pillow. Olivier would try to book the Dead the following year and at the final 1970 Berkeley Folk Music Festival but the arrangements did not work out.

Jefferson Airplane performs in the Hearst Greek Amphitheater at the 1966 Berkeley Folk Music Festival.

Jefferson Airplane performing in the Pauley Ballroom at the 1966 Berkeley Folk Music Festival.

Jefferson Airplane, 1966. Photo: Barry Olivier.

Jerry Garcia, backstage at the Hearst Greek Amphitheater with the Jefferson Airplane at the 1966 Berkeley Folk Music Festival.

Unlike the controversy over Dylan going electric at the Newport Folk Festival one year earlier in 1965, the Jefferson Airplane appeared at Berkeley with little opposition and much acceptance. Pete Seeger, who had supposedly (probably apocryphally) threatened to take an ax to the electric cable during Dylan’s noisy set at Newport one year earlier, appeared at the 1966 Berkeley Folk Music Festival alongside the Airplane without any fuss. Phil Ochs made his debut. So did the bluesman Robert Pete Williams. Alice Stuart was back to perform. Sam Hinton, as always, emceed the event.

 

Pete Seeger at the Hearst Greek Amphitheater during the 1966 Berkeley Folk Music Festival Jubilee Concert.

Robert Pete Williams, ca. 1966.

Pete Seeger performing at the University of California Faculty Glade during the 1966 Berkeley Folk Music Festival.

Pete Seeger at the Hearst Greek Amphitheater during the 1966 Berkeley Folk Music Festival Jubilee Concert.

Phil Ochs performing in the Hearst Greek Amphitheater during the 1966 Berkeley Folk Music Festival Jubilee Concert. Photo: John Groper.

Alice Stuart at the 1966 Berkeley Folk Music Festival Children’s Concert.

Alice Stuart at the 1966 Berkeley Folk Music Festival.

Phil Ochs playing guitar in Berkeley, California, April 29 1966. Photo: Robert Krones.

Singing cowboy Charley Marshall and the ecstatic Jewish folksinger Shlomo Carlebach were new to the Berkeley Festival. The young virtuoso guitarist John Fahey presented his mystical, instrumental versions of traditional songs mingled with new, almost classical suites of composed material.

Also at the Festival was local songwriter Malvina Reynolds, most famous for her stinging critique of postwar consumer society “Little Boxes.” Reynolds wrote the song after observing the new housing tracts built in Daly City, south of San Francisco. Her song, which Pete Seeger often performed, imagined postwar America as an alienating place of sameness, with houses as “little boxes made of ticky tacky” in which “the people in the houses / All went to the university / Where they were put in boxes / And they came out all the same.”

John Fahey, circa 1966. Photo: Barry Olivier.

Malvina Reynolds, circa 1966.

Cowboy song singer Charley Marshall, 1966.

Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, circa 1966. Photo: Barry Olivier.

The Greenbriar Boys were back to perform their interpretations of bluegrass, but with the Tennessee native Frank Wakefield replacing Ralph Rinzler on mandolin. They were joined by another string band, playing a very different style of music: the Central Mexican group Los Halcones de Salitrillos. Chris Strachwitz of Arhoolie Records helped the band travel to Berkeley, where they performed songs about “Pancho Villa and the Mexican Revolution,” among other topics. Sam Hinton had a distinctive memory of how Pete Seeger found a way to deliver the meaning of the Spanish lyrics of Los Halcones de Salitrillos to English-speaking audiences:

I remember one year he had a wonderful group he got from Mexico, Los Halcones de Salitrillos, and they sang mostly old revolutionary songs. Pete Seeger was there one summer. We talked with these guys, because they were singing them all in Spanish. We were asking them what they meant in English and Pete got the great idea that the audience was missing a great deal of humor, and so he arranged to have slides made so that while these guys sang in Spanish, the English words were flashed on the proscenium. And it was such a great experience for these musicians, because here was this gringo audience laughing at the right time. They’d never experienced anything like that.

Olivier had often organized evening cabaret concerts in the Cal student union building. These featured a wide range of local folk musicians who were not in the official program. In 1966, among others the up-and-coming Berkeley High student Dev Singh performed, as did longtime San Francisco guitarist and singer Larry Hanks, who a few years earlier had backed a newcomer to the Bay Area from Texas, Janis Joplin, in various coffeehouses.

Dev Singh performing at the Bear’s Lair during the 1966 Berkeley Folk Music Festival cabaret.

Los Halcones de Salitrillo performing at the 1966 Berkeley Folk Music Festival Jubilee Concert.

The Greenbriar Boys (Bob Yellin, Frank Wakefield, and John Herald), circa 1966.

Larry Hanks performing at the Bear’s Lair during the 1966 Berkeley Folk Music Festival cabaret.

“Give me life"

A new face appeared as one of the guest scholars at the 1966 Berkeley Folk Music Festival, the San Francisco Chronicle music critic Ralph Gleason. Gleason was mainly a jazz fan, but he embraced the new, rock music sounds sweeping the Bay Area and would eventually help to found Rolling Stone magazine with a young Cal student, Jann Wenner.
 
Like Gleason, Olivier was opening up to what the Berkeley event might become: more spontaneous, more organic, more daring, less planned. After Carlebach led students dancing and singing late one night across the campus’s Sproul Plaza without a proper university permit, Olivier did not panic, but instead embraced the more unruly protest spirit of the times. “I am now finally in the unsafe camp,” he wrote to Gleason. “The hell with safety. Give me life,” Olivier decided. Like many at the time, Olivier felt the allure of the countercultural energies emerging with particular intensity in the Bay Area by 1966. As he looked to the 1967 Festival, he wanted to privilege freedom, spontaneity, and surprise over the stale rules of folk revival authenticity. And he felt that risk and discovery outweighed strict adherence to university guidelines of decorum. Olivier was ready to throw the cards in the air and, as he playfully put it, “let the Shlomos fall where they may.”
 
Little did he know what the late 1960s would bring to the Berkeley Folk Music Festival: a more adventurous sense of what counted as folk music, but also an increasingly fraught landscape. A rising tide of protest against the Vietnam War and continued anger over racism, sexism, and other injustices in the US meant that activists in Berkeley agitated for social change in ever more radical ways. At the same time, the new, conservative, Republican governor Ronald Reagan cracked down on them more harshly than prior administrations. Olivier carried on in this context, pushing the Berkeley Festival toward more colorful and countercultural attitudes yet never entirely losing the ethos of the Festival’s early days.
 
If anything, the Berkeley Folk Music Festival suggests the continuities in Northern California between the folk revival of the first half the decade and the countercultural turn toward the end of the 1960s. Whether with banjos and dulcimers or electric guitars and drums, the musicians out on the West Coast constituted communal settings in which personal transformations might arise from reconfigurations of the past under pressure of the present. Some continued to imitate the elders they admired. Others tried out wild new styles. Few entirely left behind the notion that they were, either directly or indirectly, playing folk music.

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