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Grateful Dead Ron Pigpen McKernan

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Grateful Dead Ron Pigpen McKernan

September 8, 1945 – March 8, 1973

“Bring Me My Shotgun” @ Family Dog At The Great Highway, San Francisco, CA, April 18, 1970
Grateful Dead Ron Pigpen McKernan

Grateful Dead Ron Pigpen McKernan

Blues roots

The Grateful Dead with Pigpen were a different band than without. Of course, the Dead went through several personnel and style changes over its time. The Dead themselves were not always the instigators of those changes. The blues-based approach Pigpen brought to the band gave it much more a rock and roll feel than any  of the band’s other incarnations.

Unlike most other of the young musicians of the 1960s, Pigpen came to the blues mainly through his father. Phil a blues enthusiast himself and a DJ on station KDIA, a black radio station.

Grateful Dead Ron Pigpen McKernan

Self taught

Rod taught himself piano, guitar and harmonica. When he moved with his family to Palo Alto, California he befriended  Jerry Garcia.  Rod also collected a huge number of blues 78 recordings which also led him to befriend John Fahey and future Canned Heat singer Bob “Bear” Hite.

Along the way Rod McKernan became Pigpen. How depends on who you ask, but answers are many offered lovingly. Pigpen entered Jerry Garcia’s musical orbit and became part of that orbits named permutations: the Zodiacs, Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions, the Warlock, and finally the Grateful Dead.

Perhaps a much an indictment of the other members’ weak vocals as a compliment of his, Pigpen became the Dead’s main vocalist. For fans like me, his renditions of Buddy Holly’s  “Not Fade Away” or his half-hour plus “Turn On Your Love Light” will always be his songs.

Beverages not blotters

Unlike the other members of the group, Pigpen’s drug choice was alcohol. That choice also endeared him to Janis Joplin who preferred beverages to blotters.

As the Dead moved into more extended jams that relied less on keyboards, Pigpen’s place in the band diminished, though his reliance on alcohol did not.

Health

Pigpen’s health declined and he had to leave the band to recover. His hiatus was between August and December 1971. For a band that seemed to be always on the road, he missed many shows.

Health issues again forced him to leave the band. His last show with them was on June 17, 1972, at the Hollywood Bowl, in Los Angeles.

On March 8, 1973, aged 27 he was found dead of a gastrointestinal hemorrhage. A sad addition to the 27 Club.

Grateful Dead Ron Pigpen McKernan

Next time you have 33 minutes and 41 seconds, give Pigpen a listen (again).

Grateful Dead Ron Pigpen McKernan
Feminism

New York Radical Women 1968

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New York Radical Women 1968

September 7, 1968

Miss America Pageant, Atlantic City, NJ

New York Radical Women 1968

Second-wave Feminism

Time’s passage allows society to mistakenly think that something is new when it is not. The feminism of the 1960s may have seemed like a new movement, but of course 19th and early 20th century Suffragists such as Lucy Burns had in many ways a more difficult time (see Suffragists Tortured).

That era is known as the first wave of US feminism. [see Four Waves of Feminism article]

By the early 1960s, alongside the civil rights movement, women again marched and raised their voices to demand equality in the face of hypocrisy.

That “all men [and women] are created equal.”

New York Radical Women 1968

Boomer moms and their daughters

New York Radical Women 1968

As had happened during World War I and more so in World War II, many women realized that while being a homemaker was an acceptable choice, so were all the other occupations.

More and more women entered college and not just to get their MRS. You can see by the chart below that while the number of men and women with a Bachelor’s degree continued to increase for both sexes, it was in the 1960s that woman began to outnumber men.

New York Radical Women 1968

New York Radical Women 1968

NYRM

Robin Morgan, Carol Hanisch, Shulamith Firestone, and Pam Allen founded New York Radical Women in the fall of 1967 in New York City. The women viewed the hierarchy of protest groups to be male-dominated and that that hierarchy kept women in subservient positions rather than allowing them to have positions of power.

The NYRM’s first action was on January 15, 1968 with in led a protest event, a “burial of traditional womanhood.” held in Arlington National Cemetery.

The action was also a counter-protest to the  Jeannette Rankin Brigade peace march in Washington D.C. That march was a gathering of women’s groups protesting the Vietnam War as grieving wives, mothers, and daughters. The Radical Women rejected the protest. It said it was simply a reaction to those who governed the male-dominated society.

New York Radical Women 1968

1968 Miss America Pageant

No bras burned

The New York Radical Women’s held their most famous protest on September 7, 1968 at the Miss America contest in Atlantic City.

The group called the pageant a “cattle auction” and displayed a “Women’s Liberation” banner. Most famously, women placed into a trash can bras, girdles, Playboy magazines, mops, and other items representing their oppression.

They did not burn the items.

New York Radical Women 1968

Dissolution of NYRW

In 1969, ideological differences led Robin Morgan to leave and form Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (W.I.T.C.H.). Shulamith Firestone started Redstockings.

New York Radical Women 1968
Anniversary, Beat generation

Jack Kerouac Road Sal Paradise

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Jack Kerouac Road Sal Paradise

Happy anniversary

Published September 5, 1957

Jack Kerouac Road Sal Paradise

Did people hitchhike to Woodstock? Yes some definitely did.

Was there any literary inspiration to do that? Yes there was.

Jack Kerouac Road Sal Paradise

Paterson, NJ

As a New Jersey guy born and bred, it’s important to me that Sal Paradise (Jack Kerouac) began his first road trip from Paterson. It was there that Paradise had “…pour[ed] over maps of the United States…for months, even reading books about the pioneers and savoring names like Platte and Cimarron and so on, and on the road-map was one long red line called Route 6 that led from the tip of Cape Cod clear to Ely, Nevada, and there dipped down to Los Angeles.”

All but one of my father’s seven siblings left their NJ hometown and all but five moved out of state: Arizona, New Mexico. Oklahoma. A traveling salesman uncle found homes all over the Midwest. The US Navy stationed a nurse aunt all over the world.

When I was four my family traveled from NJ to visit those distant relatives. I grew up thinking I was a traveler.

Later, I was a Boy Scout who thought he was a camper.

And later still, I thought I was cool because I had a summer job in NYC.

Jack Kerouac Road Sal Paradise

Ripe for the “…Road”

By the time I was in college I was ripe for Kerouac. I don’t think I’d heard of him, but likely saw his name referenced in some Rolling Stone magazine articles.

Like thousands of other Boomers, we found an older brother to envy in Kerouac. A guy whose traveling stories awoke us to the soundtrack of the American history we’d nodded through in school.

Jack Kerouac Road Sal Paradise

Sex, drugs, and more jazz than rock and roll!

Some find On the Road enervating. An example of a wasted life. A life without purpose or goal.

Myth: Kerouac wrote the story on toilet paper. No. He created a continuous scroll from sheets of tracing paper sheets that he cut to size and taped together.

Like many things written, Kerouac had written dozens of notes during his travels in the late 1940s. Those notes eventually coalesced into the novel when in one three-week spurt Kerouac put the novel together as if writing a letter.

In response to a student’s letter, Kerouac wrote in 1961, “Dean and I were embarked on a journey through post-Whitman America to FIND that America and to FIND the inherent goodness in American man. It was really a story about 2 Catholic buddies roaming the country in search of God. And we found him.”

Jack Kerouac Road Sal Paradise

Jack Kerouac On the Road

Jack Kerouac On the Road

Most critics praised the book, particularly Gilbert Millstein of the New York Times who wrote, “its publication is a historic occasion in so far as the exposure of an authentic work of art is of any great moment in an age in which the attention is fragmented and the sensibilities are blunted by the superlatives of fashion”

Jack Kerouac On the Road

In the same paper, David Dempsey dismissed the novel as an “affectionate lark…[that depended]upon the bizarre and the offbeat for its creative stimulus”

Jack Kerouac Road Sal Paradise

Counterculture

Whatever the view, the story inspired a new generation to seek adventure on the road. Hitchhiking sometimes. Just hiking other times. Woodstock Venture’s idea of having a festival in the country, in an open space, where one could be free and roam around has some roots in Kerouac’s book.

The book was, even if unconsciously, part of the reason I went there. It was certainly part of the reason my wife, six children, and I took a cross-country trip to visit those many relatives. We called it the “Shoots Not Roots” tour. It even had it’s own t-shirt.

Jack Kerouac Road Sal Paradise
back of the tour t-shirt
Jack Kerouac Road Sal Paradise

The end…

So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.

Jack Kerouac Road Sal Paradise