Kaukonen, Gracie, Jerry, Geoff Muldaur, Jim Kweskin, David Barth, Laurie Simonnet, hundreds of other first hand accounts, letters, reviews in early counter culture rags, and many of my own experiences as I was living the same musical lifestyle on the east coast. Many of the same characters travelled back and forth, coast to coast and in between, and not just musicians. Artists, poets, and plain people enjoying themselves. The first time Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Clear Light, the Incredible String Band, all did their first show here together in NYC, at Flushing Meadow Park's NYS Pavilion (left over from the '63 World's Fair), promoted by Ron Delsner during the summer of 66, I was hired to take tickets at the gates. Only 500 people showed up, they and I had no idea who these bands were. I met them all for the first time. They took to me not because of me, but my aunt was a legend in the bohemian revival of Greenwich Village as a hostess in her apartment earlier in the 60's for the poets, philosophers, musicians and artists of that era who had inspired many of these people. It was a connection. And they all wanted to meet my grandmother who had fed so many of the people that these people evolved from artistically at my aunt's apartment, with her thick Hungarian accent, pastries and goulashes. They knew her from Ken Kesey, who swore by her cooking, and Jerry's adoration of my mother who looked like an earthy Liz Taylor, and he thought was the best cook of the bunch.
Additionally, I have tens of thousands photographs of many of these people and many others from the world of the arts, who visited, hung out, ate and slept at my Rhinebeck farm, vacation home, with my family and friends, taken by my wife. Yesterday, from one of my wife's photo albums (not just from the farm, but all over the world where she traveled as part of her work and encountered them all on tour), I showed my granddaughter photos of her father when he was 4, in the arms of Bob Dylan, accompanied by Rick Danko, Stevie Winwood and Bob Hite, all five with faces covered by honey cream icing from one of my grandmother's stolen cakes they devoured on my porch, and getting scolded by my grandmother, desperately trying to keep straight faces. Even tho she's performed covers of songs by all of them, she recognized none of them. She thought my grandmother was my mother, her father her much older cousin, and none of the other guys. She's heard of them all but couldn't make the visual connections. I wasn't there that day, working instead as an NYPD detective. Arriving later that evening, after dinner, playing my 12 string with all of them near our fireplace in the parlor, drinking ales and beers. The next evening Dylan and Pete Seeger got in a fist fight (neither could throw a punch) over the last dumpling of the night. My grandmother punished them both by making them do the dishes, mop up the dining room and kitchen. They couldn't stop laughing. Bob was the darling of the music world, Pete was Pete, two living legends and with no respect for either she had them in aprons mopping up. Of course when they finished, they stole cake. To me, it is all like yesterday and the day before. My life.
These days, I mostly listen to my grandkids and their friends, new friends drawn by the music, and tho I thoroughly enjoy the current generation, and previous generations for their own explorations and evolutions, I see another great generation of music coming our way. I hope we are all alive and open to enjoying it all.
