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.

Where Monsters Dwell #17

The resumption of the Cold War that began in February with the fascist putsch of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych has tossed me off my game here. Normally on Friday I post on "Hippies vs. Punks." That hasn't happened since Valentine's Day. Last we heard from "Hippies vs. Punks," the Boulder, CO band Zephyr had recorded their debut LP in Los Angeles, a remarkable album that was nonetheless botched by producer and recording legend Bill Halvorsen. In part two, we were going to explore the victimization of Zephyr by another record industry giant, producer Eddie Kramer. For more than a month then we have been suspended between the summer of 1969 and the late summer/early fall of 1970, when Zephyr's second album, Going Back to Colorado (1971), was recorded at Jimi Hendrix's Electric Lady Studios during the time of his death.

Another regular feature of this page that has been put on the back burner because of the new Cold War is the project of working through issues of the Marvel Comics Bronze Age reprint series, Where Monsters Dwell.

Currently we are at Where Monsters Dwell #17 (September 1972). A thoroughly unremarkable collection of four stories -- though Steve Ditko's "The World Beyond" (scans three and four below), which is reprinted from Strange Tales #82 (March 1961), is worth checking out; Ditko captures the last gasps of the early 1960s post-war High Modernism better than anyone -- Where Monsters Dwell #17 is noteworthy for a nice Gil Kane original cover; also, two of the four stories -- "If the Coat Fits" and "The Hidden Vampires," both reprinted from Journey Into Mystery #11 (August 1953) -- are examples of pre-Comics Code Authority Marvel horror.

Below are scans of the cover and all the splash pages (as well as one beautiful interior page from Ditko's "The World Beyond'). All the stories in Where Monsters Dwell #17, probably compiled by Editor-in-Chief Roy Thomas, deal with disappearance.

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.