projects update 2
Jeff Beck; early coastal depravity; improv archives
From time to time I want to write about the projects that got me here (writing a blog) in the first place. Currently there are three active projects mainly in the research phase. Two are non-fiction history projects requiring lots of research. It's fun. Probably too much fun. I always find excuses to do more research and less writing. The third is an archive, or online museum, of the 1990’s improvised music scene in the SF Bay Area, to which I contributed as a producer of the first weekly series at a venue called Olive Oil’s.
For this archive project, I was recently entrusted with 3 boxes of material from someone who has been heavily involved in this scene for decades. He approached me a few years ago while we were both attending a show to ask me about my interest in creating this archive, but at the time I was just getting involved with the Gomelsky project and I was way more interested in talking to him about that, not to mention that I had little time to take on another big project. A couple of years went by and I saw on facebook that he was looking for a home for his archival material. My name started coming up, and I had completely forgotten about our conversation at the venue. I now had the time and was eager to take on this project. The facebook discussion that followed got me to investigate what this archive could be. I contacted 3 archive professionals who were kind enough to spend some time educating me on the details. The first was from the Stanford Music Archives which has an amazing collection of recorded music that I soon discovered already included some of the improvised music performers I was documenting. The next was from the SF Public Library which started an extensive collection on the early Punk music scene which has some overlap for my work. And last but certainly not least was the San Mateo County History Museum which had great advise on how to store material to last a very long time. I will also be using their resources extensively for my other project….
… which is on the history of my local live music bar Winter’s Tavern. I live in a small coastal town just south of SF, population about 40,000 spread over 7 miles. SF has over 800,000 residents also spread over about 7 miles of land. My town, Pacifica, spreads its population along a 7 mile strip north and south near the ocean coastline. SF spreads its 800,000 along a 7 mile boundary both east/west from bay to ocean, and north/south from the Golden Gate Bridge to nearly the northern edge of Pacifica. Today it takes me about 20 minutes to drive to a club in the Mission District of SF and see a show. I can walk to Winter’s in less time, but the walk home is a bitch because it’s uphill, so I usually make the quick drive. All this is made possible by the roads I have available to me today. It wasn’t always that way. The four lane highway I use today to get to and from SF didn’t exist until 1972. Of course the further back in time you go, the worse the roads get and the more isolated the existence for those living on the coast just south of SF. Jack London lived here when he was a kid and wrote about it briefly in his 1913 autobiographical novel John Barleycorn:
“Still farming, my family had moved to a ranch on the bleak sad coast of San Mateo County, south of San Francisco. It was a wild, primitive countryside in those days…”
The history I’m writing about Winter’s Tavern is by necessity also the history of other coastside bars, as well as the county politics and social scenes that existed with them over the years. The origin of Winter’s goes back to the early 1900’s. I haven’t figured out the exact date yet, but I’m working on it. My trips to the county records office were interrupted by the pandemic, and not everything is available online yet. To my surprise, many of the early newspapers of the time ARE available online. I’ve been reading these, as well as many local history books from my library, to try to get a feel for what life was like for the patrons of these establishments. As you can imagine, these early days could be pretty boring living in this isolation, punctuated by some wild and sometimes dangerous episodes. Prior to 1900 the entire peninsula south of SF was very sparsely populated, and the coastal area even more so. Roads were almost nonexistent, and the horses and stage coaches that provided what travel service there was had to contend with mud and fallen trees, not to mention bandits. It really was the wild west. Whatever law enforcement you could find was mostly in San Francisco. This meant the lawless often fled south were there was little enforcement and plenty of hiding places. What do you think life was like for the proprietor of one of these “road houses” south of SF? That’s what I’m researching now so that I can get a backdrop on the setting that created Winter’s Tavern. The book that I’m currently reading is called Hellacious California! Tales of Rascality! Revelry! Dissipation! And Depravity! And the Birth of the Golden State by Gary Noy. The very first quote in the book is this:
“It is my unbiased opinion that California can and does furnish the best bad things that are obtainable in America.” -- Hinton Rowan Helper, The Land of Gold: Reality versus Fiction, 1855
In my last “project update” I said I was waiting for two books on Jeff Beck to arrive from the library for my research on Giorgio Gomelsky during his time as manager/producer of The Yardbirds. I’m done with one book and have started on the other, and it’s clear to me that of the three superstar guitar players to come out of The Yardbirds, Jeff Beck is by far the most interesting in the Gomelsky story. Unfortunately, as with the Jimmy Page books, the few pages discussing Gomelsky don’t go into much detail on his working relationship with these players, and there is no comment from Beck (or Page) on what it was like working with Gomelsky as a producer. Of course in the case of Page he may not have worked in the studio with Gomelsky since he was fired by The Yardbirds prior to Page joining the band. But Page clearly knew Gomelsky pretty well before that. Gomelsky tried to hire him to replace Clapton, but Page recommended his good friend Beck instead.
The day after I wrote the above paragraph I got a message from a good friend with the following excerpt attached: 1977 Interview with Jimmy Page in Guitar Player Magazine.
Guitar Player: You thought the best period of the Yardbirds was when Beck was with them?
Page: I did. Giorgio Gomelsky was good for him because he got him thinking and attempting new things. That's when they started all sorts of departures.
Learning these details on how this music was created is fascinating to me, and I hope to impart that fascination to the readers of the Gomelsky book. The Yardbirds, of course, are just the beginning of this story. The next chapter finds Gomelsky going way beyond the “new things” he introduced with them. He links up with musician/shaman Daevid Allen and one of the first avant-rock bands is formed … The Soft Machine. The swinging 60’s are ending and the psychedelic movement is in overdrive. His partnership with Allen will find both of them trading London for France where Allen will form another avant band called Gong, and Gomelsky will set up a touring circuit around France that will eventually find him managing the band Magma. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I got a bit excited about the Daevid Allen connection today because another serendipitous event just happened right in my garage. You know those 3 boxes of archival material I mention up top? I started combing through the first box today, in my garage where the friend helping me and I could work in a covid-safe well ventilated place with the garage door open, and lo-and-behold look what I found…..
https://photos.app.goo.gl/tQfkM29a1jXqgtSJ9
This poster is from a Daevid Allen gig at a small club in San Francisco in 1999. Not sure why I missed this show especially since I was living not far from that venue at that time, but miss it I did. More info and a photo from that gig can be found here:
http://universityoferrors.com/annals.html
So I am now “stoked” (as we like to say in the beach towns of California) to wrap up my research on The Yardbirds, write that chapter of the book and get on to more research on Daevid Allen. As always, please contact me if you have info to share or comments on my writing, and thanks for reading.