How do you get your ticket punched for Woodstock? Many ways. For Bobby Torres it was to begin by growing up in New York City, the child of parents from Puerto Rico, and to love playing the congas.
OK, but what about becoming part of Joe Cocker’s Grease Band?
Percussionist Bobby Torres
Grease Band
Well, in 1969 [in an interview with Mike Walker] Bobby relates: I saw him in 1969 playing at Fillmore East, playing with Rod Stewart and the Faces. He had the hit “Feelin’ Alright,” which was recorded with a conga player, but when he played it live he didn’t have a conga player. So he was billed at the Fillmore East, and he went to Ungano’s where I was playing on a Monday night, and asked me if I could sit in. And I said, “Sure.””
Percussionist Bobby Torres
LA > Portland > Tom Jones
The Grease Band disbanded soon after Joe Cocker left them and Bobby Torres moved to Los Angeles for the 70s where he became a key session player and then in the 80s he moved to Portland, Oregon but was often on the road as part of singer Tom Jones’s band.
Percussionist Bobby Torres
Bobby Torres Ensemble
By the 90s, Bobby Torres was back full time in Portland and became in integral part of that city’s musical scene, both jazz and Latin, with his Bobby Torres Ensemble.
Mike Walker of Portland’s McMenamins Crystal Ballroom says that, “Bobby’s ensemble has been a monthly feature of the Crystal Ballroom’s Salsa con Sabor program, staged weekly in Lola’s Room on the building’s second floor. “
Percussionist Bobby Torres
Tito Puente
Bobby Torres wants everyone to know that his musical hero is musician, songwriter and record producer, the The King of Latin Music Tito Puente. Puente was based in New York City and Torres went to hear him play whenever given the chance.
Percussionist Bobby Torres
More recently
2009
inducted into the Oregon Music Hall of Fame
performed for Archbishop Desmond Tutu
Time Magazine published “Woodstock, How Does it Sound 40 Years Later?” an article which included a photo of Bobby in performance on stage with Joe Cocker at Woodstock
2015
Bobby performed with the Tadeschi Trucks band to a crowd of over 25,000 people at the Lockin’ Festival in Virginia. This concert was a tribute to Joe Cocker and featured many of the original members of Mad Dogs & Englishmen.
2016
Bobby was given the Jazz Journalist’s Association Jazz Hero Award. This award is given to advocates, altruists, activists, aiders and abettors of jazz who have had significant impact in their local communities.
In 1967, Rose Simpson was attending college and loved the outdoors. She liked hiking and mountain climbing so much, she was president of her college’s Mountaineering Club.
And she had learned to put up with the national Rock and Ice Club‘s misogynistic attitudes.
Returning after one wet day on a Scottish mountain, she saw the open door of Mary’Stewart (not the novelist) and her children’s Temple Cottage. A welcoming place of organized chaos that greeted all, including offbeat musicians.
The vision of hippies and the sounds their music made include a wide range of styles. The Incredible String Band’s style certainly fit within that range, albeit, at the edge.
The Incredible String Band did not make it into the Woodstock movie or onto the Woodstock triple album [it did make it onto the expanded 25th anniversary CD and finally onto Rhino’s 50th anniversary complete set]. If it had some exposure from the beginning, they, like other performers who did, would likely have enjoyed a bump in their popularity and benefited financially from increased album sales.
Having said that, I’m not sure that the ISB members ever intended to find a path to rock-stardom. Success, surely, but super-stardom?
ISR Rose Simpson
Rose Simpson
ISR had started as a trio: Williamson, Heron, and Clive Palmer, but became a duo. Gradually, Licorice began to join in their recording sessions and then after meeting Rose Simpson enlisted her as well. It was those four who belatedly performed at Woodstock.
From the Herald Scotland site: Simpson has mixed feelings about the biggest gig in her life. “We could have done better, “ she says. “It was a disaster, really. By the time we played on Saturday, the crowd wasn’t in the mood to hear contemplative songs. It is uncomfortable when you see you’re only getting through to one in a hundred.”
Simpson recalls that the Friday afternoon at Woodstock was “like a big party”. “We spent the afternoon eating strawberries and cream, talking and laughing, splashing in the creek,” she says. “It was lovely. But then the rain came, the atmosphere changed, the roads were blocked and we were trapped. We couldn’t get away to a hotel, the organisers threw tents at us. Before I met the String Band, I used to do a lot of winter climbing in Scotland, so I was used to discomfort. It was damp and miserable, like camping in the rain in Glencoe.”
A quick online search reveals a picture of Simpson from the time, wearing a floaty white diaphanous dress and nothing else. “There was a lot of nudity, but when I see the pictures of myself there’s a certain innocence about it,” she says. “It wasn’t a come-on, it wasn’t like many pop singers today – a lot of that is just porn. It was part of the thing at the time, that women could dress as we pleased. It wasn’t a sexual thing. We were saying we were free.”
Woodstock had a lifelong effect on Simpson, and left her feeling that nothing could ever rival the sensation. “It wasn’t our best performance, but it was still an amazing experience – the high of highs,” she recalls. “There is nothing like playing to a crowd that big. There is nothing else you can do in life that comes even close.”
And as Simpson said in an informative and lengthy Richie Unterberger pleasekillme.com interview: “I definitely think it would have been better to play on the previous night, even if it had only been M&R doing early stuff, e.g. from Hangman. They had always managed to hold audiences with that music, and Lic and I were more or less incidental to it. We could have been mainly decorative on that occasion, and I think we’d all have risen to the challenge if we’d known what it was. Obviously, we couldn’t know that.”
Photo by David Marks, Hidden Years Music Archive Project, University of Stellenbosch, Cape South Aftrica www.3rdearmusic.com
According to the band’s manager, Joe Boyd, “The day Robin proposed that Christina Licorice Mckechnie join the group, Mike went out and bought Rose an electric bass. ‘Learn this,’ he said, ‘you’re in the group now, too.'” That may be a hazy recollection, but it is true that Simpson didn’t know how to play a bass when she became the band’s bassist.
In 2020, Rose published the wornderful and well-written Muse, Odalisque, Handmaiden: A Girl’s Life in the Incredible String Band and according to Rose, herself, ““When Licorice decided she wanted to be a stage performer as well as a disembodied voice, my presence redressed the balance. There were no discussions or arguments, decisions or arrangements made between the four of us—none that I know of, anyway, or that [producer] Joe Boyd remembers. There were no rehearsals, either, beyond the usual casual playing together in the latest rented flats Joe had found us.”
She writes that she left the band when “it clear that I must join them in their commitment [to Scientology]… I walked out of all of it, on my home…on my future with ISB and on my friendships of the moment.”
She also left professional music after that and settled in Wales where at one point she was the Lady Mayoress of Aberystwyth.
Out of the limited limelight that she was in, Rose continues to live in Wales.
ISR Rose Simpson
ISR Rose Simpson, ISR Rose Simpson, ISR Rose Simpson, ISR Rose Simpson, ISR Rose Simpson,
In 2017 when I first created this post, I wrote that “Once again a person one would think that information about someone who played in a well-known band–Paul Butterfield Blues Band–and played at what many think is the most famous festival of all time–the Woodstock Music and Art Fair—-would be easy to find.”
That has both fortunately and unfortunately changed. In 2022, I gave the internet another chance and sadly found Johnson’s obituaryfrom a May 27, 2021 article in The Register-Guard out of Eugene, OR.
Much of the other information came from the wonderful AllMusic site which so often rescues inquisitive music fans as well as Annie Painter, whom you, too, will discover in a moment.
Trumpeter Keith Johnson
Musician Keith Johnson
The opening lines of the Guard’s obituary by Matthew Denis was: Oregon native and trumpeter Keith Johnson, who died of cancer, leaves behind a musical legacy as a jazz mentor and longtime sideman playing with musicians such as Paul Butterfield, Martha Velez, Etta James and Van Morrison.
Born in Vancouver, British Columbia Johnson found love in jazz, art and life with his companion, Annie Painter. He died April 6 in Portland. He was 80.
His dad was a lumberman and was sent to Oregon, thus his living there from age four until he left as a 20-something to hit the musician’s road. He attended the University of Oregon for a bit, but left to become a teamster.
Annie Painter and Keith Johnson, were married and then divorced in their youth. In 2016 they rekindled their relationship. Photo by Annie Painter
Keith Johnson was mainly a trumpeter, but as so often happens on the musician’s path, other instruments come into play. Jazz was his niche.
And at 6’5″ he might have been the tallest performer at Woodstock!
He became part of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band in time to perform with them a the Monterey International Pop Festival in June 1967. Released in December 1968, The Resurrection of Pigboy Crabshaw was the first Butterfield album Keith appeared on.
He stayed with the band for their next two albums: In My Own Dream (1967) (an album cover I stared at for many hours) and Keep on Moving (1969).
A team player, at times Johnson played organ, but the trumpet was always his first and best instrument.
Despite the success of “horn” bands such as Blood, Sweat and Tears and Chicago, the Butterfield band did not enjoy the same success.
Johnson left the group in 1970 to make a living as a roving sideman. Over the years, he played with Elephant’s Memory, on Mark “Moogy” Klingman’s first solo album “Moogy,” Van Morrison’s “His Band and the Street Choir” [Johnson call Van, Leprechaun]. The song “Domino” is Johnson’s horn chart.
He also played on Martha Velez’s “Hypnotized. A bit of trivia: Johnson married Velez and Martha’s brother was Jerry Velez, the same Jerry Velez who played with Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock!
He also became the musical director for Etta James in her L.A. studio and on the road. He played with her from 1975 to about 1983.
Here’s a YouTube link for Etta James performing Lovesick Blues. And as an example of Keith’s musical versatility, he plays piano on this cut.
Trumpeter Keith Johnson
Annie Painter
Before joining Paul Butterfield, Johnson was the DJ for a jazz show on KFMY, Eugene’s first FM radio station and in 1961 he married Annie Painter while attending the University of Oregon. They lived a settled life for 10 years before he landed the Butterfield gig. Keith hit the tour road, but the separation led to their divorce. Painter became a school principal.
She remarried and after the death of her second husband in 2016, she reconnected with Keith.
They would have, as Painter described, “the best years of our lives—the last five we were together again until his death.”
George D. Green
Johnson met neighbor and abstract illusionist painter George D. Green and the two hit it off.
Johnson would go on to write music soundtracks for several Green paintings. Matthew Denis describes the suites as…”a strange, hypnotic blend, emblematic of a man satisfied with his journey, looking to give just a little more beauty back to the world.”
Marooned Music by Keith Johnson for George D Green
Again from the Denis article: At the end, Johnson accepted life and death with an equanimity indicative of a melodious life. Speaking to a friend just days before he died, Johnson knew he would be leaving the world soon.
“But he said, ‘Hey, man, what are you going to do? This is what happens,’ “ Painter said. “I thought, bless his heart. I hope we can all be that way.”
Keep the Dream Flowing
Keep the Dream Flowing is a great podcast that has interviewed dozens of people who were part of Woodstock, both organizers and performers.
Here is a link to the first of the three podcasts they did with Keith Johnson.
Not Professor Keith Johnson
At one point it seemed that the Butterfield Keith Johnson as also a Professor Keith Johnson and taught at the college level, including the University of North Texas. Not so.
Trumpeter Keith Johnson
What's so funny about peace, love, art, and activism?
