Hippies vs. Punks: The Ace of Cups

To keep with the San Francisco theme of last week's Hippies vs. Punks post I decided to return to an exploration of one the bands that appeared in the seminal but little known Aquarian Family Festival. This free multi-day rock concert at San Jose State in May of 1969 is important because it preceded and provided something of a template for the super-historical Woodstock. Most of the bands that performed at the Aquarian Family Festival were San Francisco psychedelic Hippie groups.

The Ace of Cups was an all-women five-piece rock 'n' roll band with a perfect Hippie pedigree; their first big gig was at The Panhandle in Haight-Ashbury warming up for Jimi Hendrix in early 1967 (a few months after the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park) and principal songwriter and singer Denise Kaufman (shown in the Ralph Gleason West Pole documentary) was conked on the head and severely injured by a flying beer bottle during the Hell's Angels riot at Altamont, an event widely accepted to have signaled the demise of the Hippie.

The Ace of Cups never recorded an album. Close to being signed on more than one occasion by a major label, offers were spurned by the band's management in hopes of a more lucrative deal down the line. The big payday never materialized and the band broke up. Denise Kaufman moved to Hawaii. But in 2003 Big Beat Records released the superb compilation  It's Bad for You But Buy It!, which is mostly live material.

I have been listening to It's Bad for You But Buy It! non-stop all week. It is an incredible document. (Ignore rock historian Richie Unterburger's condescending review of the album.) Of the many stellar tracks, my favorite is "Taste of One" by Denise Kaufman:

Patrick Lundborg's "Denise Kaufman & The Ace of Cups" is a must-read introduction to the band.

Another tremendous cut from It's Bad for You But Buy It! is the rock rendition of Mongo Santamaria's "Afro Blue":

Quicksilver Messenger Service is the band most often cited as an influence for The Ace of Cups. The bands were friendly with one another. (You can certainly hear the John Cipollina guitar sound on Mary Ellen Simpson's solo in the West Pole video at the top of the post.) Lead guitarist Simpson penned the excellent "Pretty Boy":

The Ace of Cups remind me of a psychedelic proto-L7. Strong women being women, equal to any group of men. It is a tragedy that they never produced a record back in the Hippie heyday. At least we have It's Bad for You But Buy It!, a line from the band's feminist, anti-consumerist, anti-marketing manifesto, "Glue":

You are the one (yeah yeah) You are the one Well you can’t have the glue until you buy A model too now baby, yeah (I love glue!) No you can’t have the glue until you buy A model too yeah baby (at Madison Avenue) And the model is nine to five Too many bees in one big hive

You are the one You are the one Have you read the society paper today now I’m telling you just what to feel You are the one that must find your way I say that you have the key, yeah

You can’t have the glue until you buy A model too now baby, yeah (I love glue!) No you can’t have the glue until you buy A model too yeah baby (I love glue!) And the model is nine to fiveToo many bees in one big hive

You are the one (yeah yeah) You are the one that must buy

Buy it, buy it, it’s bad for you but buy it. Buy it, buy it, it’s bad for you but buy it.

Hello ladies, how are you feeling today? Are you feeling unloved, unwanted and miserable? Is this because no-one loves you? If this is so, it’s because you do not have our new improved product. For if you’d have our product, everyone would love you. Are you tired of being the dull drab, uninteresting self that you are? Would you like to be transformed into the new exciting, mystical alluring essence of your being? If so you had better buy our product.You’d be amazed at what our product can do for you!

Buy it, buy it, it’s bad for you but buy it You’ve got to Buy it! You buy it. Bad! Buy! Why! Better buy that!

You are the oneYou are the one

Well you can’t have the glue until you buy A model too yeah, now (I love glue!) No you can’t have the glue until you buy A model too yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, yeah, yeah And the model is nine to five Too many bees in one big hive

You are the oneYou are the one that must buy

Hippies vs. Punks: The Chocolate Watchband

My parents met and married at San Jose State. Skip Spence, who was the subject of last week's Hippies vs. Punks post, relocated as a child from Canada to San Jose. The Moby Grape founder spent the last decades of his life shuttling between San Jose and Santa Cruz, struggling with alcohol, drugs and mental illness. I might have passed him on the street. I grew up around San Jose and Santa Cruz. My sisters, nieces, nephews and an uncle live there still.

The South Bay Area -- the Silicon Valley, the birthplace of our present digital dystopia -- has a climate that is pretty close to perfect. San Jose is memorialized as a kind of paradise in both Jack London's great dog novels, Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906). In Call of the Wild, the canine hero, a St. Bernard-Collie mix named Buck, is stolen from his idyllic Santa Clara Valley home and spirited away to work the Klondike goldfields never to return. White Fang is Call of the Wild in reverse. A wolf-dog named White Fang is rescued from the brutal Yukon Territory and ends up enjoying a relaxed life of bounty back in San Jose.

San Jose State was the location of the Aquarian Family Festival, the three-day non-stop free musical festival that took place in late May of 1969 and that served as a template for Woodstock later that summer.

I have been periodically exploring bands that performed at the Aquarian Family Festival -- Joy of Cooking, Moby Grape, Steve Miller Band et al. -- as a way to divine the spirit of the Hippie age. Tonight we'll take a look at the Chocolate Watchband, a San Jose band that played the Aquarian Family Festival.

All week, constantly, I've been listening to the first two Chocolate Watchband albums, No Way Out (1967) and The Inner Mystique (1968). They are smooth, tremendous recordings that can be heard over and over again without ever growing stale. Everyone in the band was a teenager except for rhythm guitarist Sean Tolby, who was in his early 20s. My Psychedelic Garage Punk immersion happens to coincide with the Tea Party-led Republican shutdown of the federal government. We are at an interesting and possibly catastrophic juncture. A neo-Dixiecrat rump in the House of Representatives is staging a sit-in of sorts, one that will melt down the global capitalist order if it lasts through October 17. The lily-white Tea Party Republicans want to return the country to the racially and socially homogeneous 1960s that is brilliantly depicted in Hippiexploitation pictures like Riot on Sunset Strip (1967) and The Love-Ins (1967), both of which the Chocolate Watchband appear in.

The Chocolate Watchband is a clear example of how the Hippie, born on the polo field of Golden Gate Park at the January, 1967 Human Be-In, owes part of his origin to the suburban garage of middle-'60s America.

Garage Rock -- a.k.a., Punk music -- precedes the Hippie, as the Hippie precedes the Punk of the middle-to-late 1970s. (Then, in my generation, the process repeats itself with the SST Records bands like Black Flag and the Minutemen giving way to the commercial excess of Grunge.)

Sounding most often like a flawless Rolling Stones and Yardbirds cover band, the Chocolate Watchband put out the aforementioned two albums with David Aguilar as lead singer. If you do anything, listen to the first two albums (No Way Out is at the top of this post) and go to the band's web site and read Aguilar's delicious history of the Watchband in ten parts. My commute on the train home this week flew by in a flash because I had printed out Aguilar's narrative; it makes for great reading. The writing is honest, sometimes embarrassingly so, and it transports the reader to another planet.

That planet is the South Bay Area of the 1960s: Campbell High School, Cupertino, Sunnyvale, Saratoga, Los Gatos, the Coconut Grove in Santa Cruz, the Continental Roller Rink, a time when junior colleges were sprouting up all over California and it seemed as if there was band on every neighborhood block. This is the world of Scooby-Doo where Daphne, Fred, Shaggy and Velma ride around in their psychedelic flower-power "Mystery Machine" van with their dog Scooby-Doo and play music in a rock 'n' roll band and solve crimes for the Squares. It's an innocent, prosperous world, a world of plentiful manufacturing jobs and easy sex and daytime reruns of Perry Mason. It's a white man's world. But the garage is where the kids are alright. Here's how Aguilar describes the garage of Watchband founder and lead guitarist Mark Loomis:

He led me past the kitchen, through the family room and out into the garage. In those days, the garage was where all good and bad bands ended up. Sometimes we had to share the space with gas leaking oil spilling lawnmowers, beat to shit permanently paralyzed cars, smelly flea hotel dog beds, overflowing garbage cans, cardboard boxes stuffed with old National Geographics stacked six feet high and messy workbenches with broken TV sets precariously perched on top of them where Ann Calvello and Georgie "Run Run" Jones jammed on roller derby every Saturday afternoon. Before you could play, you had to move things around, set up your equipment and then tear it down again when you were done. If you left it behind, a neighbor kid might try to chop firewood with your Telecaster. And, you always seemed to attract every pre-pubescent female living within fifteen miles of the house. I'm convinced that just before practice sessions, 60's rock bands secreted pheromones detectable from outer space by the underage female species of Homo erectus. But basically, we didn't care. We were in our element. This was Gods' country! 

I remember once, with guitars chords ricocheting off bare stud walls in a garage filled with marijuana smoke thicker than a July fog coming through the Golden Gate, we saw a flash of light from a badge in the window of the back door. When the door suddenly flew open, there stood a blue uniformed police officer. Before we could say "Oh Shit!" he took a deep breath and holding it in, said in a whispered voice, "could you turn the bass down a little guys? Somebody two blocks over complained that they couldn't hear their TV set". Then he exhaled and took in another big deep breath, held it and said, "Good song. Try a drum solo in the middle." Then, he closed the door and disappeared. It was a scene right out of a Cowen brother's movie. 

Mark's garage was awesome. No cars, no crap, just a garage with soundproof walls, carpet remnants on the cement floor and two little neighbor girls ages 11 and 12 with pimples on their chins sitting in lawn chairs with wide grins on their faces. It was time to rock and roll!

What is not clear from Aguilar's biography of the band is how quickly it all came apart. The Chocolate Watchband, the version of the group responsible for No Way Out and The Inner Mystique and the appearances in the Hippiexploitation films, was kaput before the Summer of Love had even run its course. They disbanded in mid-1967 due to drugs, women and creative differences. Mark Loomis wanted to pursue a more esoteric sound.

The Watchband would reform a couple more times in the '60s, absent David Aguilar, before breaking up a final time in 1970. They regrouped in 1999, with Aguilar once again as frontman, but no Loomis and no Tolby. Check out a 2005 performance of "Expo 2000" from the No Way Out album:

Hippies vs. Punks: Bloodrock 1970

Tonight Hippies vs. Punks returns once again to the year 1970.

The Ohio National Guard shootings on the campus of Kent State University took place in early May of 1970 and so did the reaction -- student strikes and campus shutdowns at over 800 colleges across the country. There was also the famous counter-riot, known as the Hard Hat Riot, of pro-war construction workers who attacked students protesting Kent State in lower Manhattan. The initial protests at Kent State that led to the Guard being called out were about Nixon's invasion of Cambodia.

The nation was at war with itself in 1970: the country was on fire, and youth were willing to fight.

In June of 1970, the Cincinnati Summer Pop Festival was staged at the home of the Reds, Crosley Field. Daylong or multi-day rock 'n' roll festivals were a big draw, despite Altamont, and promoters were always eager to cash in. The Cincinnati Summer Pop Festival is remembered because of the television film that was shot that day and then broadcast nationally in August; it featured the famous performance of The Stooges doing "T.V. Eye" where Iggy Pop goes crowd surfing. Other bands that appeared on television were Traffic, Alice Cooper, Mountain and Grand Funk Railroad.

But there were plenty of other bands performing that day who didn't make it on the Midsummer Rock broadcast. Several of these bands I had never heard of, such as the Fort Worth hard rockers Bloodrock.

The experiment I want to engage in periodically on Friday nights is to take a band from the undercard of either the 1970 Cincinnati Summer Pop Festival or the 1969 Aquarian Family Festival in San Jose or the 1976 100 Club Punk Special and, having immersed myself in their music during the work week, see if I can, with a beginner's mind, divine the time-spirit of Hippie vs. Punk. I took a stab at this with Joy of Cooking (1971), but it was really more a feint.

All week at work I listened with my ear buds to Bloodrock's first album, Bloodrock (1970), and I never tired of it. On a track here the band might sound a little too much like Blood, Sweat & Tears, and a track there you can hear Steppenwolf; other times, such as "Fantastic Piece of Architecture," Vanilla Fudge. But all in all Bloodrock sounds fresh and forceful. I particularly like the lead vocals of Jim Rutledge.

How many bands like this -- how much great music -- lie buried in the past? (I searched in vain on Robert Christgau's web site for any indication that he ever reviewed a Bloodrock recording in his forty-plus years of criticism.) The guilelessness of Bloodrock is refreshing, even its poses and pretentiousness seem more honest than the pervading Punk "everything is shit" sentimentality.

True to the spirit of the time, the Cincinnati Summer Pop Festival ended with a midnight police riot rock and bottle melee. Seventy-four arrests were made and 12 concert-goers ended up in the hospital.

I remember the summer of 1970. I remember the black asphalt road that ran in front of our house throbbing in the sun. I remember my uncle's wood-paneled Hi-Fi that took up a length of the living room blasting "Back in the U.S.S.R." I remember my father sitting with me in front of said Hi-Fi and reverentially explaining how The Who's Pete Townshend swung his electric guitar over his head and then smashed it to pieces.

Hippies vs. Punks: Aquarian Family Festival 1969

Nineteen-sixty-nine. The year that Nixon assumes the throne. Johnson jets back to the LBJ Ranch with a load of White House toilet paper ( -- that nugget is from Ronald Kessler's Inside the White House: The Hidden Lives of the Modern Presidents and the Secrets of the World’s Most Powerful Institution). It's also the year of the Hippie's zenith. The summer of '69 sees the release of Easy Rider, the staging of Woodstock and the Tate-LaBianca murders. The year draws to a close with Altamont.

But what I'm interested in is the story of the Aquarian Family Festival -- the non-stop, three-day free rock concert held at the end of May, 1969 on the San Jose State football practice field across from Kelley Park. It was a masterwork of Hippie ingenuity and pluck and served as a model for Woodstock (though Woodstock's promoters sought to get rich and were forced after the fact to accept circumstances and open their "Aquarian Exposition" to all-comers free of charge).

Today I worked through lunch. It was a busy day. But on the train home I managed to jot down a few notes for tonight's Hippies vs. Punks post. As is my wont, I stopped off at the supermarket to get my grocery shopping done and out of the way for next week. When I was piling steak and chicken into my basket I saw a big tall  -- over six foot -- classy blonde woman. I looked her in the face. She looked back at me. I knew her. She was different. But I knew her. "Shelley!" It came up my throat and out of my mouth unbidden.

She replied with my name. And suddenly we were thrust into the maelstrom of an encounter with a former lover who has not been seen for almost a decade.

She looked good. She has a prestigious job. I was stuporous. I had just finished drinking a strawberry protein drink that I had grabbed out of the juice cooler. I probably had red foam in my mustache. We both wanted to escape, quickly. I felt ashamed, diminished. She seemed to tower over me. "Have I shrunk?"

"No, I'm wearing heels."

After a few more pleasantries, she said, "I have to run." I shook her hand and said goodbye and walked away to get yogurt. I felt old, completely absent of any mojo, a graybeard, a juiceless cypher. It's shocking when one looks himself full in the face and sees nothing attractive. And more shocking still is the acceptance and familiarity of this shock. I've dealt with it so many times over the last three-and-a-half years of burdened bachelorhood that I can't feel pity anymore for my pitifulness.

But the encounter did zap my will power for tonight's Hippies vs. Punks post on 1969 and the Aquarian Family Festival. I did, in preparation, immerse myself in the first album by Joy Of Cooking, the eponymous Joy Of Cooking (1971). Joy of Cooking was one of the bands that performed at the Aquarian Family Festival. They were a Berkeley fern bar boogie band, unusual in that they were led by two women -- piano player Toni Brown and guitarist Terry Garthwaite. There are a few tracks at the beginning of the album that haven't aged well. They remind one of the "Far out!" fatuousness of Hippies cavorting in the grass and getting freaky. But all in all it is a smooth, well-made, easy-to-listen-to recording. This is a live version, not the version on the first album, of "Brownsville/Mockingbird," which can be found on "Back to Your Heart": previously unreleased live and studio recordings 1968-1972 (available for order on the band's web site). It is a good example of Bay Area folk rock from the late '60s/early '70s. The video contains footage of People's Park 1969:

I'll be out of town next Friday night. We'll pick up Hippies vs. Punks on May 31.