Hippies vs. Punks: Zephyr, Pt. 1, the ABC/Probe Records Eponymous Debut

The only evidence that I can find that Zephyr, the Boulder, Colorado psychedelic jazz-blues-rock'n'roll fusion band, performed at the Cincinnati Summer Pop Festival in 1970 is from the handbill:

That, and bass player David Givens, in listing the bands that Zephyr performed with, mentions a number of groups -- Alice Cooper, Ten Years After, Traffic -- that appeared that June day at Crosley Field. My conclusion is that Zephyr was there. The video tape that recorded the entire event was probably recycled. So we are left with the 90 minutes of Grand Funk Rail Road, Mountain, The Stooges, Alice Cooper and Traffic that was broadcast nationally as Midsummer Rock August 1970. But maybe some day additional footage will turn up

In listening to and reading about Zephyr the last two weeks I have been captivated by the extent to which Zephyr's particular hard-luck story is the story of the Hippies as a whole -- huge potential powered by a supercharged creativity that was short-circuited by a combination of run-of-the-mill predatory greed, naivete, narcissism and drugs.

There is an amazing source document for Zephyr's tale of woe, Allan Vorda's lengthy interview with David Givens, which is available on the superb Tommy Bolin Archives. Of all the material I've read since I've been doing these Hippies vs. Punks posts (today marks one year), the David Givens interview is the best, better even than David Aguilar's history of Chocolate Watchband.

Zephyr came together in early 1969 as Candy and David Givens left their band, Brown Sugar, and joined Tommy Bolin's and John Faris' Ethereal Zephyr, adding drummer Robbie Chamberlin and dropping "Ethereal" from the band's name.

They were quickly gobbled up by the odious Barry Fey and sold to ABC Records, which was starting up a specialty Hippie label, Probe Records. ABC offered the most money up front; and even though Zephyr received bids from Atlantic and Columbia, that is what Fey wanted. Here is how David Givens describes it:

Our first away-from-home performance was at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco with a soon-to-disband Moby Grape and an equally unhappy Love. It was the first time we got nervous. We tried too hard and the magic didn’t happen. Candy carried the rest of us, but she blew her voice out in the process. She only had two days to recover before we were to play for the Music Industry Biggies at the Whiskey in L.A. She didn’t make it. She managed one early set but couldn’t answer the bell for the second one. In spite of this, Atlantic, Columbia, ABC, and possibly some other companies, made bids for us on the strength of this performance and a demo tape we had recorded in a little studio in Denver. Atlantic’s bid was $40,000 in advance, Columbia’s was similar and ABC, who was organizing a new label Probe, made an offer of $110,000 for a shorter term contract. Barry didn’t know beans about record companies, but he could count and he took the ABC offer. ABC/Probe gave us tacky promotion, no guidance, no nothing. The deal was made, it turned out later, because our new “Business Manager” was in bed with the President of ABC’s new little label Probe. The Pres was getting a kickback from our management. Cute. Meanwhile Barry turned down the labels whose rosters included a large share of everybody who was anything to anybody, because the advances weren’t high enough. Remember that one dollar in 1969 was worth almost four 1988 dollars. Hmmmm.

Fey lined up a few producers for the band to interview. They decided on the (now legendary) Bill Halverson  based on his work recording Cream's Goodbye (1969) as well as Crosby, Stills & Nash (1969), both seminal Hippie documents. Halverson sold himself as a producer of those albums when he was just a Wally Heider Studios engineer; he proceeded to fuck everything up according to David Givens:

Anyway, Barry brought in a couple of producers from L.A. for us to interview. The first one was a nice guy, but he stuttered so badly that we couldn’t take him seriously. For years, Candy and I could make each other laugh by calling a studio a “stoo-oo-ooooo-di-o’’ in honor of this unfortunate man. I recall John Faris remarking that the studio bills would be seriously inflated because we’d be waiting while the man tried to talk to us. The second one was a guy by the name of Bill Halverson. He’d been the engineer on some of Cream’s stuff and on the Crosby, Stills and Nash first album. He presented himself to us as the producer of those sessions, but in truth he was just an engineer. We didn’t know that, though, and we were impressed. He seemed so sincere. He had no idea of how to deal with us. Later, after he had thoroughly messed us up and I was having an argument with him I asked him why he had wanted to work with us. He said he thought we’d be “another Cream.” Great, as if being another anything was a good idea. This idiot’s idea of production was to play tapes he’d recorded of Tom Jones jamming with some L.A. studio musicians for us, hoping we’d catch on. He was a fat slob ex-trombone player who hated Miles Davis and Jimi Hendrix, two of our unqualified heroes. When we went to L.A. to record, we had a guy with us whose job was to watch out for us. Tommy was 18, Robbie was 19, I was 20, John was 21, and Candy was 22. None of us had any experience recording. We were at the mercy of this “producer” except for Bernard Heidtman, who at 28 was a smart guy who had been around and it was his job to watch out for us. Bernard had been the drummer in our first little band in Aspen, and Candy and I trusted him completely. 

We were a live band. We didn’t work things out note for note except in a few parts. Our concept was to use worked out pieces as mileposts during any given song. Between the mileposts, we’d invent the music as we went along while remaining sensitive to the singer or the one playing lead. People who liked our music liked this concept. It was like sport — you never knew how it was going to turn out and you could take risks or not, you could work as a team or as a faction or as an individual, and it was very interesting and challenging and a lot of fun to watch if you liked that sort of thing. We had taken the real essence of jazz and put it in a new context. Unlike the jazz fusion bands that were to follow, we didn’t simply put rock beats to jazz “songs,” we took the idea of jazz and played it BIG. Bill Halverson, the trombonist, could no more understand this than he could force his fat slug-like physique to run a three minute mile. 

During the two days following our arrival in L.A, we recorded good versions of everything we knew. Halverson was an employee of Wally Heider Studio where we were recording and was about to disappoint his boss, Wally, to whom he had promised a fat recording bill. A couple of months earlier, we had recorded a three song demo tape for the record companies. We had taken first or second takes of each song. I think we spent maybe $250 on it. The local “underground” station in Denver had played the tape on the air. It was the most requested piece of music they had ever had at the station. Bernard knew this and was determined not to let Halverson destroy the music by taking it apart in the studio. Unfortunately for us, Bernard came down with hepatitis and was confined to his room for three weeks while we worked at Bill Halverson’s mercy. We trusted old Bill and so we threw out what we had recorded and started the harrowing experience of destroying ourselves. 

Halverson was working all day from eight or nine in the morning with studio customers, then bringing us in during the evenings, subject to the whims of Steve Stills or whatever other rock-god wanted to push us out. When he wasn’t speeding, he was so tired that on occasion he fell asleep at the console. One night he was so soundly asleep that Candy, Tommy, and I wheeled him up and down the hallways in his chair. We banged him into walls and he still never woke up. He was about 84” and about 250 pounds. We laughed so hard, we thought we were going to blow up. Little did we know the joke was on us... this album was not going to be good. We wanted to adapt our music to the studio environment, but we didn’t know how and neither did Halverson. For years, Bernard has said that if we had kept those first takes, the ones Halverson threw away, we’d have had it made. We were not competent studio musicians nor was Candy a studio singer. We could create magic, though, and we had proved it again and again in front of people and even once on tape, but not much got on our first album. 

To prove Givens' point, compare the demo versions of "Hard Chargin' Woman," "St. James Infirmary" and "Cross the River" to what appears on the eponymous Zephyr (1969). You will find that David Givens is right. The demos are superior.

Bill Halverson definitely botched Candy Givens' vocals. In the demos, her voice is rich, earthy and nowhere near as shrill. The biggest failing of Zephyr is the lead vocal performance; at points, Givens' screeching distracts the listener. Another failing, compared to the demos, is Zephyr doesn't really capture any of the cutting-edge inventiveness of Tommy Bolin's lead guitar. Where are all the cool, way-ahead-of-its-time Echoplex effects? (Definitely check out the demo of "Hard Chargin' Woman.")

Zephyr, nonetheless, is an amazing record (note Candy Givens' harmonica playing). David Givens says it was a Top 30 album.

Zephyr is built on a strong blues foundation; it taps into the San Francisco Sound alchemy of the jam where the ordinary suddenly reveals itself as sublime. I think it is a must-have.

Though it is hard to nail down exactly when Zephyr was recorded in Los Angeles, it must have been the summer of 1969, a time when the band might have crossed paths with a primed-to-launch-"Helter Skelter" Manson Family at a Hippie party or eatery or just traveling the LA freeways.

Ah, the tragedy of the Hippies.