Tag Archives: Woodstock Music and Art Fair

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Drummer Maury Baker

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Drummer Maury Baker

Happy birthday
December 25
Drummer Maury Baker
Janis and Maury on the Dick Cavett Show

Broken wrist

Many are the paths that lead to becoming a musician. Maury Baker’s family was filled with musicians and that certainly set up his entrance, but falling and breaking his left wrist was the catalyst.

His father, Herbert (an Emmy Award winning writer with the Flip Wilson Show and the Danny Kaye Show) suggested to his son that the best way to recover his wrist’s strength was to drum.

Before he knew it, “I had my union card” is how Maury jokes.

I suppose it also helped to have Buddy Rich as a neighbor even though they only met a couple of time.

Baker said that the drummer that was his biggest influence was Max Roach –the “most musical drummer I ever heard ” as well as other jazz drummers.

Drummer Maury Baker

Ars Nova

In 1967, while attending the Mannes Conservatory in New York,  Elektra Records signed Ars Nova, a band he’d helped form and played percussion as well as organ. Elektra producer Paul A. Rothchild called them “the most exciting thing since the Doors.”

Ars Nova was promoted by Life Magazine with a profile, but ironically by the time the article appeared, the band had broken up.

Drummer Maury Baker

Janis

He became part of Janis Joplin’s Kozmic Blues Band in 1969. He had been playing with Judy Collins and John Byrne Cook, her road manager, suggested the audition to Baker. He wasn’t a part of the whole album being recorded (I Got Dem Ol’ Kozmic Blues Again Mama!), but was part of the single Try from the album.

One of his fondest memories of playing with Janis was performing Try with her on the Dick Cavett Show in July 1969

He went on the road and that road led to Bethel, NY and the Woodstock Music and Art Fair. His biggest memory of the event is flying in a Sikorsky helicopter over the field. He said that the size of the crowd worried Janis, but he reassured her that it would not matter. That once she got up on the stage,  she’d just do her thing.

Drummer Maury Baker

Others

Being part of Janis’s inner circle gave Maury the opportunity to play with other names of those times, perhaps the most famous being Jimi Hendrix, who stopped by one night to jam with Zoot Money‘s band.

On November 27, 1969, he performed with Janis at Madison Square Garden in NYC. It was the last time.

Of course there are a “few” others listed at his site: Frank Zappa, Carlos Santana, George Duke, Ron Carter, David Benoit, Jimmy Haslip, Bunny Bunel, Johnny and Edgar Winter, Tom Jones, Jackson Browne, Steve Stills, Van Morrison, Seals & Croft, Judy Collins, Phil Ochs, Bobbie Gentry, Trini Lopez, R. B. Greaves, Albert Lee, Big Brother & The Holding Company, Robert E. Luna, Booker T. Jones, Tom Paxton, Bobbie Gentry, Theodore Bikel, Zoot Money, Dr. John, Scott LaFaro, Pepper Adams, David Amram, Lee Michaels, Miroslav Vitous, Henry Franklin, Theo Saunders, Nick Mancini, Michael Saucier, Otmaro Ruiz, Leslie King, Barbara Morrison, Leddie Garcia, Austin Peralta, Zane Musa, and many others.

He also composed music for film, TV, video games, and the Internet.

Drummer Maury Baker

Nowadays

Recently, Baker has worked with Opera NEO. It’s Facebook page states that, “Opera NEO strives to unlock the full potential of young singers while nurturing each individual’s artistic qualities and personality to help them develop into independent artists. We encourage individual thinking and creative decision making that will lead to professional and personal fulfillment.”

There are pictures of him working with NEO at his own Facebook page.

The header picture for this post is, according to Maury, “This was taken at a rehearsal with the Bach Collegium San Diego, a few years ago. Baroque meets the 60’s…”

And in 2020, he organized Baker’s Brew: …an experimental music ensemble dedicated to total improvisation as its method of performance. The result is a brew of jazz, Latin, funk, contemporary chamber music and electronica. Baker’s Brew is the realization of his long-standing goal of channeling his eclectic experiences into an electro-acoustic ensemble that is entirely improvisational. 

The other band members are, Daniel Coffeng, Carl Royce, and Jim Goetsch.

Drummer Maury Baker

Here’s a nice interview with Maury from 2020.

Drummer Maury Baker
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
Peace Love Art and Activism

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