Hippies vs. Punks: Zephyr, Pt. 2, Going Back to Colorado

Nineteen-seventy was the high point of the Hippie revolution. Far enough away from the summer of love and the release of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) to allow for a good-sized "massification of bohemia" (Robert Christgau's phrase), 1970 was also the beginning of the end. The king and queen of the Hippies, Jimi and Janis, died in September and October, respectively. By the time Bill Graham films his vanity documentary, The Last Days of the Fillmore (1972), in the early summer of 1971, it is hard to imagine a more tired, rudderless group of shaggy-headed young people.

Anyhow, there is a huge Hippie push in 1969 and 1970. You can see it all over YouTube. Every Hippie band had a Hippie album in those years, or at least so it seems. It amazes me. I have become convinced over the last year of this "Hippies vs. Punks" project that the amount of music made then in those two years far exceeds what has been produced today in the last two years, even with all the ease that the digital revolution now affords us.

Nineteen-seventy was also a big protest year. A national student strike followed the May 4 Kent State shootings. It wasn't if the revolution was going to happen because the revolution was happening; it was when the government was going to collapse. While Nixon aide Chuck Colson hunkered down with the 82nd Airborne in the basement of the executive office building as 100,000 protesters converged on Washington D.C. on May 8, revolution was definitely something more than a stoned Hippie fantasy. The national student strike was real. In response to the national student strike Nixon approved the go-ahead of the Huston Plan, full implementation of which was blocked by J. Edgar Hoover. But Nixon kept a black ops group under the auspices of the White House. This is the Plumbers Unit of Watergate fame. And since Watergate is a cultural, political high-water mark in the United States, after which the neoliberal neoconservative counterrevolution begins, we must praise the Hippies for getting as close as they did to overturning the corrupt order of war and ill-gotten wealth; but we must also blame them for a great deal of naivete and showing no follow-through.

During this time, Zephyr, disappointed at how they had been treated by their recording company (Probe, a short-lived psychedelic, progressive rock specialty label of ABC Records), jumps ship to Warner Bros. Records. Here is how bass player and band leader David Givens describes the process in an excellent interview with Allan Vorda available on the Tommy Bolin Archives web site:

I met Jimmy Page in April 1970 when we shared the bill with Led Zeppelin at the Boston Tea Party in (oddly enough) Boston. They were in the middle of recording their second album for Atlantic, Led Zeppelin II. They were using Eddie Kramer as engineer/producer on some of the cuts and Page was really happy with his work. He recommended that I go see him in New York where he was supervising the construction of Hendrix’s new studio, Electric Lady, down in the Village on Eighth Street. Kramer, an expatriate South African, had worked with the Beatles, Rolling Stones, and all of Jimi Hendrix’s recordings as assistant engineer, engineer, or occasionally producer.

We were in New York a week later and Candy and I called Kramer and asked him if we could meet with him. I used Jimmy Page’s name and he said come on over. We found him in the midst of the construction mess, poking around looking for wires. He was very gracious and we made friends quickly. Kramer came to see us play when we got back to Boulder; we even had him come up and sit in with us. He liked what we were doing and decided he wanted to produce our next record. At that time, we still had a record deal with ABC/Probe and we were up for our next LP under our contract. The President of ABC Records, the parent of Probe called me and Candy into a meeting in L.A. where he told us that it had been decided to squash Probe and bring us onto the ABC label. He had Bill Szymczyk, who had just finished producing the soon to be released James Gang second LP, with him. He wanted Szymczyk to produce our next record. He played the as yet unreleased James Gang album for us. It sounded good (and was to make a star out of Joe Walsh), but we wanted Eddie Kramer. I told the President about Kramer and Szymczyk said that Kramer was “a hype” and that he took more credit than he deserved for Hendrix’s success. If it hadn’t been Jimmy Page who recommended Kramer, I probably wouldn’t have been stubborn about it, but I was. The ABC Pres was not a happy man. He said either we made the album with Syzmczyk or we were out. I said fine, get the release. Me and my big mouth.

I immediately called Eddie and told him what was happening. He said not to worry, he’d get us a deal with Reprise or Warner Brothers. He called the President of Reprise, Mo Ostin, and got us a deal over the phone. Barry [Fey] was a bit taken aback but went along; the rest of the band was very happy about this turn of events. Jimi Hendrix was the Master and to be working in his brand new, state-of-the-art studio was truly exciting. We’d all felt that our first album wasn’t up to the standard of our live performances at all, and it looked as though we had remedied all of the things that had held us up.

Givens was hopeful  that the man who had a hand in creating the sainted Hendrix soundscapes would successfully midwife the improvisational magic of Zephyr onto a record. But like Bill Halverson, Eddie Kramer turned out to be another recording legend with feet of clay. Let's go back to Allan Vorda's interview with David Givens:

We had only two problems. We didn’t know it yet, but these two problems were going to thwart us again. Problem number one was Carly Simon. She was making her first album since her folk days and she was having Eddie produce it. She was a very smart girl, and she deduced, correctly, that if she struck up a romance with Eddie, she would receive priority treatment. She was ever so right: even though we had made a Top 30 album and she had no track record at all, she began getting the better time slots and more of it. Eddie is not the most macho of men and I suppose that fucking a big horse of a woman like Carly did something wonderful for his ego. At any rate, he was distracted by her and we suffered for it. He tried to be good, even had me play on a couple of her tunes, but he didn’t live up to his promises to us. It wasn’t all that bad, and we started out doing some good work. We’d been there for a couple of weeks when problem number two came up: Jimi Hendrix died. It was Sunday, and he had been expected to return to New York the next day to finish up his Cry of Love LP. He still had some vocals and some guitar work to finish and the final decision about which songs to include still had to be made. When he died, it fell to Mitch Mitchell and Eddie Kramer to mix the album and to try and make it sound finished. Hendrix did most of the mixing himself and Eddie and Mitch did not have his vision. After a day or two of really black mourning, the studio had to get back to work, but Eddie’s heart wasn’t really in it and he felt the weight of trying to complete Hendrix’s album. He and Jimi had been good friends, sharing a very successful endeavor and Eddie was feeling the loss. We were pushed aside right when we needed him to help us. The album suffered. I think there are great moments, but there’s some real junk on there that spoils it. On one of Tommy’s songs, Kramer was so preoccupied when he was editing it, that he inadvertently left in a whole duplicate chorus. Rather than pulling closer together and saving ourselves, we drew further apart. The last few weeks we spent on that album were torture. Mitch Mitchell and Eddie were having a very tough go of it and wanted as much time in the studio as possible. Eddie began forcing us to use the much smaller (though equally expensive) Studio B with various assistant (read: inexperienced) engineers as “producers.” We had to mix in Studio A, however, and mixing is an inexact sort of thing that can take more time than you might expect. Many times, Mitchell and various Hendrix hangers-on would be crowding into the control room toward the end of our allotted time. Many times Candy and I were furious, but there was nothing we could do — we had no way to force Kramer to live up to his commitment to us and he didn’t. We needed his direction and best efforts. We paid him for his direction and best efforts. He flaked out on us. After this album bombed, our confidence as a band diminished past the point of possible recovery. Time was running out for us.

Tommy and Bobby left in early 1971.

Going Back to Colorado is an easy listening, light rock album. There are some good tracks. I enjoy "Night Fades Softly," with its Pharoah Sanders vibe. But there is nothing revolutionary here. It is Hippie elevator music, a sound appropriate for the fern bar. It is not unpleasant; on the contrary, Going to Back Colorado is essentially pleasant. I can listen to this album repeatedly at low volume. And therein is the trapdoor for the Hippies. A song like "See My People Come Together" can be played as background music. The revolution can be not only televised but commodified.

We'll return to this issue of Hippie commodification and Electric Lady Studios in a future post. And we're not quite done with Zephyr. David and Candy Givens would go back to Colorado and put together another band after Tommy Bolin and Bobby Berge departed. Their final album of the Hippie era, Sunset Ride (1972), received favorable reviews; but due to some bad luck (a recurring theme for Zephyr), they were not able to parlay Sunset Ride into another recording contract. A final Zephyr post will tell the story of band's demise, which illuminates the difficulties the Hippies had in adapting to the 1980s.