Hippies vs. Punks: Tommy Bolin's Teaser + Private Eyes

At first for today's Hippies vs. Punks post I had planned on doing something on Phil Ochs, the political activist/folk singer who committed suicide in 1976, but then I shied away because of the scope involved. There is too much material with which I, like too many others, am not familiar. I'll have to punt on Ochs and return to him another day.

Then the plan became to resume working my way through the bands at the seminal Cincinnati Summer Pop Festival of June 1970. So far we have dealt with Fort Worth's Blood Rock, Cleveland's Damnation of Adam's Blessing, and Alice Cooper during the period the band was signed with Frank Zappa's Straight Records.

Next up is the Boulder, Colorado band Zephyr, reputed to be the equal of any band from Haight-Ashbury, but remembered mostly now because of the group's teenage lead guitarist, Tommy Bolin.

(Since I have been dealing with computer issues this week, I wasn't able to download all the Zephyr albums until yesterday. Look for the Zephyr post next Friday.)

But in the meantime I thought it would be fruitful to listen to Tommy Bolin's two solo releases, Teaser (1975) and Private Eyes (1976). Both are amazing sonic documents that chronicle the zenith of what the Hippie had become by the middle 1970s: a slick studio musician with amazing chops who could effortlessly glide between what Rolling Stone labeled as "jazz, white reggae, Latin rhythms and hard-grinding rock."

Tommy Bolin is the classic rock guitar hero, complete with the drug overdose death in a hotel room (the same year that Ochs took his own life). A Sioux City, Iowa high school dropout who refused to kowtow to school officials and cut his hair, he travels to Denver and eventually Boulder where he joins the band Zephyr. After two albums he leaves the group vowing never to perform again in a band that features a female lead singer. He starts his own group, Energy, a fusion of jazz and heavy metal which goes unsigned but he does manage to parlay the experience into a session gig for Billy Cobham and what turns out to be the enormously successful album Spectrum (1973). That is where most of us have probably encountered Tommy Bolin without knowing it:

From there Bolin joins James Gang for two albums, Bang (1973) and Miami (1974); cuts his first solo record, Teaser; does some session work on another seminal jazz fusion album, Alphonse Mouzon's Mind Transplant (1975); joins a post-Ritchie Blackmore Deep Purple long enough to record Come Taste the Band (1975); and then, signed by Columbia Records as the next Jimi Hendrix, puts together the Tommy Bolin Band and records Private Eyes.

Bolin was touring in support of Private Eyes when he OD's after warming up for Jeff Beck in Miami. Bolin's death occurs under questionable circumstances; it seems as if support staff, fearing a cancellation of the tour if they rushed Bolin to the hospital, preferred to see if he could ride out the poisoning in the privacy of his hotel room. Interestingly, Bolin dies at the same time the British tabloids are plastered with the Sex Pistols scatological appearance on Bill Grundy's Today show.

There are a lot of sources on the Internet for Tommy Bolin, foremost of which is a spectacular web site, Tommy Bolin Archives. There is also a good video biography available on YouTube: