Tag Archives: Woodstock Music and Art Fair

Birthdays, Music et al, Music of the 60s, Woodstock Music and Art Fair

Organist Gregg Alan Rolie

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Organist Gregg Alan Rolie

(top photo by Barry Z Levine)

Happy birthday June 17, 1947
Woodstock alum
2x Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
Organist Gregg Alan Rolie
photo from greggrolie.com by Barry Z Levine

Gregg Rolie’s organ slides in just before Carlos Santana’s guitar glides in. Percussion keeps us on track. We immediately recognize Santana’s “Black Magic Woman.”

So smooth.

The opening continues a little more and then Gregg Rolie tells us that he has a black magic woman who’s trying to make a devil out of him.

Organist Gregg Alan Rolie

Palo Alto

Gregg Rolie grew up in Palo Alto, California. Prior to Santana, Rolie played with a group called William Penn and his Pals while attending Cubberley High School in Palo Alto.

After graduating, he met Carlos Santana through a friend who’d heard Santana play at Bill Graham’s Fillmore in San Francisco on a “locals” night.  Rolie tells a story that the first time he and Santana played together they heard police arriving and ran out and hid in a tomato patch.

Such are some beginnings.

Organist Gregg Alan Rolie

Santana Blues Band

They formed the Santana Blues Band, later simply called Santana. The band’s appearance at Woodstock [at manager Bill Graham’s insistence], on the soundtrack, and in the movie lit the fuse that sent them into international orbit with all its enticements and dangers.

Rolie’s journey lasted only two more years. In 1971 he left the band. In his words, “It just got to everybody. But at the same time, the one thing that we had in common was the music and that drive for the music. We did not know each other all that well so when the music faltered, we didn’t know how to express to each other what was going on, going wrong, or why.” [from > Herald Paris interview]

Organist Gregg Alan Rolie

Life after Santana

In 1973 with Santana guitarist Neal Shon, Rolie joined the newly formed Journey. Rolie was the band’s keyboardist and regularly did vocals.

Rolie left Journey in 1980 and did solo work until 1991 when he formed The Storm. In 1998, Rolie and other former members of Santana, including Neal Schon, briefly reunited as Abraxas Pool.

Today Rolie has his Gregg Rolie Band.

Organist Gregg Alan Rolie

Double Hall of Famer

With Santana, Gregg Rolie was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1998. And he was inducted again in 2017 as a member of Journey.

Here is a video Santana’s induction. Rolie’s brief comments occur at 5:50 if you’d prefer.

Here is a link to a Keyboard Magazine interview with Rolie from April 5, 2017 about his second induction.

Organist Gregg Alan Rolie

According to his site, Gregg is a proponent of music education for children. In 2005, he signed on as an official supporter of Little Kids Rock, a nonprofit organization that provides free musical instruments and instruction to children in underserved public schools throughout the U.S.A. He sits on the organization’s Honorary Board of Directors.

Organist Gregg Alan Rolie
Anniversary, Music et al, Music of the 60s, Woodstock Music and Art Fair

Incredible String Band

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Incredible String Band

The first album by…
The Incredible String Band
Recorded May 22, 1966
Released in September 1966 (UK); April 1967 (US)
Mike Heron’s “How Happy I Am”

By June 1966, British influence on American pop musical tastes was firmly established and record labels had opened their recording studio doors to much more creativity.

The Incredible String Band was not the typical British Invasion band. In 1966 American radio stations were playing #1 songs by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Petula Clark, and the Troggs. Even the New Vaudeville Band’s “Winchester Cathedral” tickled our organs of Corti.

ISB, consisting originally of Mike Heron, Robin Williamson, and Clive Palmer, had recorded the album only the month before. Their style was acoustic and British folk.

Folk-rock > Psychedelic-folk

In the US, though folk music no longer enjoyed its heyday, the Byrds had become popular and their style had created the new rock genre:  “folk-rock.”

ISB planted their sound’s seeds in that soil.

Compared to their later albums (minus Palmer who left after the first album), Incredible String Band is simple. In fact, most of the songs are played solo by the person who wrote them. Palmer had only written one of the songs and thus minimized his presence: five by Williamson, three by Heron and the one by Palmer.

ISB would later compose more elaborate  songs resulting in yet another media label:  psychedelic folk. #ahwell

Heron & Williamson

It would be those more intricate pieces that attracted the band (now only Heron and Williamson with occasional others) to American FM alternate stations.

And it was that attraction that likely brought the band to the attention of Woodstock Ventures who booked them for the Festival on May 28, 1969 for $4,500.

Album

Here are the tracks for the album:

Side 1

  1. Maybe Someday
  2. October Song
  3. When the Music Starts to Play
  4. Schaeffer’s Jig
  5. Womankind
  6. the Tree
  7. Whistle Tune
  8. Dandelion Blues

Side 2

  1. How Happy I Am
  2. Empty Pocket Blues
  3. Smoke Shovelling Song
  4. Can’t Keep Me Here
  5. Good as Gone
  6. Footsteps on the Heron
  7. Niggertown
  8. Everything’s Fine Right Now

Birthdays, Woodstock Music and Art Fair

Brooklyn Barry Fish Melton

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Brooklyn Barry Fish Melton

Marijuana!
Country Joe and the Fish
Woodstock alum
From YouTube: “the psychedelic guitar of country joe and the fish legend ‘barry the fish melton rockin out at guitarman bar and live music venue in chiang mai,thailand”

Brooklyn Barry Fish Melton

Brooklyn Barry Fish Melton

Brooklyn bred 

Barry Melton was born in Brooklyn on June 14, 1947.

He and Joe McDonald formed the Instant Action Jug Band in San Francisco in 1965 . Acoustic was simpler than electric. Jug band music was fun. Gigs could be found.

Even when young, simple living requires some money and electric music was the more likely way to earn some. Melton and McDonald’s band evolved into Country Joe and the Fish.

Brooklyn Barry Fish Melton

Nearly dead

In February 1966, Melton and a few other nascent fish were living together and hosted the Rev Gary Davis who was going to play. They were very good hosts to the Rev who partook in the many hospitable offerings. Perhaps all involved were too hospitable.

As he got older and his hosts respectfully less-restrained, the Rev’s shows could be classically great or abysmally poor depending on his state at the time. And the mornings after could be dangerous.

According to Melton, he had to get something from the room that Davis was sleeping in. “I got whatever it was and I was headed toward the door when I heard a commanding voice, ‘Don’t move or you’re dead!’ I turned around to see Rev with a .38 revolver in his hand pointed in my general direction.”

After sincerely pleading and reassuring Davis that he was only one of the guys in the house, the Rev put down the gun. [story from the excellent Davis biography by Ian Zack, Say No To The Devil.

Brooklyn Barry Fish Melton

San Francisco scene

The Fish became part of the San Francisco scene and a jewel in its psychedelic crown. In 1967 they released their first album, Electric Music for the Mind and Body. 

Later that same year they released I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die.

This was not AM-radio music. This was not American Bandstand music. FM “underground” stations were burgeoning and the Fish’s music found a home there.

Melton rode that wave all over the United States with the other San Francisco icons such as the Dead and the Airplane.

Brooklyn Barry Fish Melton

Woodstock

The movie, Woodstock, propelled many bands into a national limelight. And even though Barry Melton and the Fish were not part of it, Country Joe’s solo performance that sunny Saturday afternoon in Bethel, NY, particularly his “I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag” and the “Fish Cheer” helped the whole band.

Brooklyn Barry Fish Melton
Melton at Woodstock

The band Country Joe and the Fish did not perform until that dreary post-summer downpour Sunday evening. The cataract had finally passed (“No rain no rain no rain no rain no rain…”), thousands of wet, tired, hungry, white suburban kids had begun to sludge their way back to their parents’ cars, gratefully found them there, and headed home hoping to be back to get to work on Monday on time.

Brooklyn Barry Fish Melton

Meanwhile…

The band didn’t last much longer after Country Joe went solo. Barry Melton helped keep it together for a few years with personnel coming and going.

Brooklyn Barry Fish Melton

Various bands

From Allmusic: Working as Barry “The Fish” Melton, he continued as a solo act through the 1970s and into the 1980s, also fronting the Barry “The Fish” Melton Band.

He also “…continued to play music…including a long stint with Dinosaurs, a band of 60s veterans that at various times included Peter Albin and David Getz ( Big Brother and the Holding Company), John Cipollina and Greg Elmore (Quicksilver Messenger Service), Papa John Creech (Hot Tuna and Jefferson Starship), Spencer Dryden (Jefferson Airplane and New Riders of the Purple Sage), Robert Hunter (Grateful Dead lyricist), David LaFlamme (It’s a Beautiful Day), Jerry Miller (Moby Grape) and the incomparable Merl Saunders on keyboards.”

Barry also wrote the soundtrack for the Roger Corman film, “GAS-S-S”. He had brief appearances in “The Omega Man” (1971) and “More American Graffiti” (1979).

Brooklyn Barry Fish Melton

Esquire

While the law may seem like an unlikely career for any Woodstock alum, it was what Melton chose and he has been practicing law since 1982.

According to his site, “I am primarily a criminal defense lawyer. I also provide representation in quasi-criminal matters, such as license revocation proceedings. I have a broad range of experience in general legal matters. I am and have been a musician all of my adult life, and I have always helped other artists and musicians with legal issues.”

And he continues to occasionally play in public.

Brooklyn Barry Fish Melton

Barbara Joy

From Barry’s FB page with the comment: “I was once a happy man, with the love of my life by my side. I miss you, Barbara Joy Langer!”

Melton posted the following on his Facebook page: …my angel …passed at 7:40 this Saturday morning, February 15, 2020. My lover, my wife, the mother of my children, my teacher — my everything. Thanks to all and each of you who loved her, too. Barbara Joy Langer, 3/27/1946 – 2/15/2020.

Brooklyn Barry Fish Melton

2021

Brooklyn Barry Fish MeltonHe wrote “On Monday, 2/15/21 marks the one-year anniversary of my sweet Barbara’s passing. I love this picture from Golden Gate Park during our earliest years in San Francisco. Happy Valentine’s Day, and President’s Day weekend, to you all…”

Brooklyn Barry Fish Melton