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Woodstock Music and Art Fair

Bassist Doug Metzner

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Bassist Doug Metzner

Doug played bass with Country Joe and the Fish at the Woodstock Music and Art Fair.

He has has a minuscule internet footprint. As far as his part at Woodstock, Wade Lawrence and Scott Parker write in their WoodTALK article on the band’s performance that drizzly Sunday evening: The group followed this with a short jam based around a Barry Melton guitar solo before moving gracefully back into “Rock and Soul Music,” this time taking the jam out to some length. This came close to falling apart when bassist Doug Metzner got completely turned around on the beat, forcing the group to fumble around for a few moments before righting the ship and bringing the main set to a powerful close.

Bassist Doug Metzner

CJ Fish

The first Fish album he appeared on was CJ Fish, which they recorded  in January 1970 at the Record Plant Studios in Los Angeles.

Bassist Doug Metzner

According to Brandon Budenz’s AllMusic review of CJ Fish: Country Joe and the Fish went through a personnel change for their fifth album, CJ Fish, adding Greg Dewey, Doug Metzner, and Mark Kapner in place of David Cohen and “Chicken” Hirsh. They retained, however, their primary composers Barry Melton and Country Joe MacDonald, keeping the sound and style of the original band. CJ Fish is not as strong as their other albums, but it does have a few highlights. The content is typical Country Joe and the Fish: more love, less war, and the tunes are only a little fresher than the ideas. On their previous release Here We Are Again, they experimented with various styles. On CJ Fish, they tried to recapture the sound of their previous success, but they “went back to the well” only to find there wasn’t much there. Most of the lyrics are thoughtful and bright; many are in rhyme as many of that time were. The overall timbre is interesting, being both joyful and sobering at the same time. Some bright spots in the material are “Hey Bobby,” “She’s a Bird,” and “Hang On,” which are delightfully Country Joe. Overall it’s not a bad album and no Country Joe and the Fish collection is complete without it.

I realize that that is a review of an album that bassist Doug Metzner was on, but not much about Doug himself.

I’m buying time, I guess, because I cannot find much about Doug.

ALLMUSIC doesn’t have much more. It indicates that Metzer was also on their 1971 albums, Quiet Days in Clichy and From Ashbury to Woodstock.

Also a 1981 compilation The Life and Times of Country Joe & the Fish and a 2009 compilation Woodstock 40 Years On: Back to Yasgur’s Farm, which is a Woodstock festival album, not a Country Joe & the Fish album.

Bassist Doug Metzner

Help

So other than what appears to have been a brief time with Country Joe, I cannot find any other references about life before Woodstock nor life since the Fish.

If anyone has something, please email or comment.

Bassist Doug Metzner

Group Image

And so some one did!  From Clint: apparently he was in a Manhattan hippie commune group called The Group Image- their song “Hiya”

The band was active in NYC around 1968, so I’m not sure when he (if it is he) left Group Image to join the Fish. In any case, from the Discogs site (I assume Doug is “Black Doug”):

Members: Sheila Darla, Freddy Knuckles, Professor Leon Luther Rix, Dr. Hok, Black Doug, William Guy Merrill

The group Image was a Manhattan, NYC group community enterprise that lasted some two years, and who recorded some album, after some years of park gigs and regular shows with nightime ballroom association. It might be so that in the time of 1968 when the record was recorded, that its project was at this stage, over its highlight, but I can imagine with tracks like the freaky wall of sound track “Hiya” what effect they could have had (-a shorter version of the album track was also featured on the Pebbles, Vol. 14 compilation-). They had some come and go participators, which had featured on its stage people like Tiny Tim, Wavy Gravy & Diggers, and they shared stages with the Grateful Dead.

Undeniably influenced by the West Coast psychedelia of The Jefferson Airplane, New York’s The Group Image released one album in 1968, A Mouth In The Clouds, that managed to go largely ignored by critics and rock fans. Despite having a wild stage show and a dynamic lead singer in Sheila Darla, the band received little national exposure.

“The Group Image played for two years in various locations in Manhattan, NYC, including its own productions / shows at the Palm Gardens, and the Cheetah Club, and shows with the Grateful Dead in Central Park and the Fillmore East, and other outdoor shows in parks such as Tompkins Square Park in the East Village.”

But…from the rateyourmusic site about the band with a Doug Metzler as opposed to a Doug Metzner.

Sheila Darla (vocals), Rick Kuntsler (guitar, vocals), Artie Schlackner (guitar, vocals), Paul (guitar, vocals), Doug Metzler (bass), Leon Luther Rix (drums)

Bassist Doug Metzner
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Bible Scholar Alan Cooper

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Bible Scholar Alan Cooper

Bible Scholar Alan Cooper

At the Hop

It should stop surprising me when I do a blog piece on a Sha Na Na band member and discover that they went on to do something very much different than recreating 1950s doo wop music. I must remind myself that all but one [Henry Gross] of the band members were attending Columbia University.

Alan Cooper was one of the original 12-member band and sang bass. He is featured in the Woodstock film when Sha Na Na continues their 30-minute set with a rousing  performance of  “At the Hop.”

He remembers that there was no water to drink, “…but plenty of champagne. The guys in Ten Years After had a camper and lots of food,
which they were happy to share with Cooper and his gang.”

Bible Scholar Alan Cooper

1970 Exodus

He would remain with the band until the spring of 1970, a time span that put him on both The Tonight Show and The Merv Griffin Show — no small feat.

Jon “Bowzer” Bauman replaced him though Alan would fill in a few times for Bauman due to illness]. Cooper  was graduated from Columbia with a BA in religious studies in 1971 and would go on for additional degrees, a Masters in Philosophy  from Yale University in 1974 a doctorate in Biblical Studies at Yale as well.

A 2016 article from Sha Na Na Tova begins:

Alan Cooper doesn’t look like someone who played at Woodstock. On a recent afternoon, one of those thick and sticky Manhattan days that make you yearn for winter, the 66-year-old JTS professor was sitting at a table in an Italian restaurant, in a yellow Oxford shirt that hung big on his thin frame, with a plain olive baseball cap pulled down over his bald head. He was talking about the younger sister he recently lost to pancreatic cancer: Her funeral was on a Friday afternoon, and because you can’t sit shiva on Shabbat, everything was thrown into flux. Suddenly we were discussing Judaism’s laws and their intent, which brought us to the Golden Calf. “It’s after that incident that the Jews get all their rigorous rules,” he said, between bites of pasta. “The lesson: Jews are bad at improvising, and they shouldn’t try it because if they do, well, you end up with a Golden Calf.”

Why Leave the Band?

He had always been drawn to Judaism, specifically its language and texts. As a kid, he’d fill out Hebrew grammar forms while riding the bus as child from his Long Island home to West Hempstead’s Hebrew Academy of Nassau County. Just before he turned 13, Cooper’s family moved to Livingston, New Jersey. He became involved in the local Conservative synagogue. He joined the choir and learned how to lead the prayer service.

Bible Scholar Alan Cooper

Dr Cooper

Nowadays [JTS site] Alan Cooper is the Elaine Ravich Professor of Jewish Studies. He joined the faculty in 1997 as a professor of Bible, and has served as director of publications chair of the Bible faculty, and, from 2007 to 2018, provost of JTS.

In 1998, he was appointed professor of Bible at the Union Theological Seminary, a nondenominational Christian seminary, becoming the first person to hold concurrent professorships at JTS and Union.

Previously, he was a professor of Bible at Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion, where for six years he was director of its School of Graduate Studies. He also taught religious studies for ten years at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.

From a South Coast Today article by David Briggs: “The experience of the divine, to know what God wants for the world, what God wants for me, is important to me,” he says.

And from the same Sha Na Na Tova article:

Here’s a passage from Cooper’s 2002 essay, “The Message of Lamentations”:

I have been intimating that there is no longer any intrinsic reason to read the book of Lamentations in the light of the biblical canon, or to fit it into the frame of some biblical theology. Despite the undeniable heuristic power of those intertexts, I find it equally plausible and illuminating to place Lamentations in a different discursive context—the popular lament literature of the ancient Near East, and the widespread “personal religion” that it manifests.

Jimi Hendrix had Purple Haze. Alan Cooper has that.

Quite a path!

Trivia

After renting costumes a few time and wanting to avoid the cost and inconvenience of renting, band member Rob Lenard‘s girlfriend made them.

Bible Scholar Alan Cooper

In 2023, the great Keep the Dream Flowing podcast, released an interview with Alan. He’s terrific as was the interview.  Have a listen:

https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-parker15/episodes/Episode-107–More-About-The-Early-Days-of-Sha-Na-Na-with-Alan-Cooper–part-one-e200es9/a-a9esvol

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Cornelius Snooky Flowers

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Cornelius Snooky Flowers

October 4, 1940 – March 9, 2020

A 2010 article by Candice Medina Skinner in the Leesville Daily Leader [Louisiana] opens with:  During a time when Rock and Roll reigned, Snooky Flowers, a saxophonist from Leesville, gave some of the most famous musicians in history some of his jazz flavor. He put together bands for Janis Joplin, worked with Mike Bloomfield, rehearsed with Jimi Hendrix, and brushed elbows with A-list musicians of the 1960s.

Cornelius Snooky Flowers

Chicago > Leesville

Flowers was born in Chicago, but soon moved to Leesville, Louisiana.  It was there that he found music and like many young musicians, began putting together bands.

120 miles away is Port Arthur, Texas where Flowers played regularly at the Jive at Five dance show on KPAC-TV which had “colored days” — meaning that blacks were allowed on the show.

Snooky had an army hitch from 1964 to 1966. He was discharged in  Oakland, CA and serendipitously found some of his Texas musician friends there.

Cornelius Snooky Flowers

Army > Oakland

After a brief return back to Leesville, he returned to Oakland and its music. He put together “Snooky and the Kosmic Flowers,” “Big Sambo and the House Wreckers,” “Snooky Flowers and the Headhunters” and several more that played in places like The Filmore Auditorium.

Along the way he met and joined Mike Bloomfield and in February 1969 became part of Bloomfield’s famed recording “Live at Bill Graham’s Fillmore West.”

Cornelius Snooky Flowers

Bloomfield > Joplin

Janis Joplin had left Big Brother and was forming another band. Mike Bloomfield was helping and he enlisted Snooky help form the band, too. Out of that came the Kozmic Blues Band.

Cornelius Snooky Flowers
Flowers on far right

On July 18, 1969, the band performed on the Dick Cavett Show.

Cornelius Snooky Flowers

Woodstock

Snooky was with the band at Woodstock and for the rest of Kozmic’s tour.

AllMusic shows that in addition to Joplin and Bloomfield, Snooky has also recorded with Elvin Bishop and Nick Gravenites.

He also appeared in the documentary films Janis Joplin and Her Group (1969), Janis: Little Girl Blue (2015) and American Masters (1985).

Flowers died on March 9, 2020.