Back in the Paleolithic era, I worked as front desk receptionist for concert promoter Bill Graham and had several encounters with members of the Grateful Dead family. Not that I knew who they were at the time: it was a big part of my identity as a modern music lover to not know, though I’ve come around to their sound and specifically to Jerry Garcia.
For the sake of a prequel and partial sequel to the business at hand, I accidentally experienced the Dead at a Day on the Green concert in 1976 when they co-headlined with The Who. At the time I didn’t know or care that the big events staged at Oakland’s stadium would became a kind of testing ground for the full scale festival tours we know today. It didn’t help I didn’t know “Scarlett Begonias” from “China Cat Sunflower” or to that to my unformed mind, experiencing the Dead was just a three hour endurance test before the Who hit the stage. I was not transformed, my consciousness was not altered by their music, as some members of the band and the people who love them claim, though today, I quite like most all of Garcia’s and lyricist Robert Hunter’s material. I like to think I have grown into it.
But even back when, I knew Jerry was Jerry, and later in my role as receptionist, I certainly knew enough about receiving office visitors that I was not to waylay people of his renown at the entrance with formalities like announcing their arrival. In the flash it took me to recognize a musician, he could walk past me, nod, and in Jerry’s case, with his cherubic smile, head bowed and hands jammed in his pockets, proceed without pause, into the open main office, then in the direction of Bill’s corner sanctum. Same went for Carlos. Santana. He and Jerry were of course legends by then, their reputations enshrined thanks to their inimitable, celestial guitar styles. I was less generous about their music then, but showed respect anyway: These were people born in the same decade as my parents. Then again, I can’t claim to have displayed anything resembling even courtesy the day an even older man dressed in a fur loin cloth and carrying a walking stick announced his arrival.
“Bear for Bill.” “Excuse me?” I couldn’t hide my contempt, buzzing over the line to Bill’s assistant. “Someone named Bear is here for Bill?” “Send him in.” The shock registered on my face compelled a co-worker witnessing the scene to whisper my way. “Bear is Owsley.” “And?” “He invented acid.” I get it now.
On another day, Mountain Girl announced herself. My lack of exposure to hippie culture was pitiable and the name drew a complete blank. I said something like, “Say what now?” I feel sorry for being just one more person to judge Carolyn Garcia based on her chosen name and hope she can forgive me. Perhaps we might even agree that Jerry would be “rolling in his grave” in connection with some of events of the last few weeks celebrating the 60th anniversary of the formation of the Grateful Dead.
Thirty years ago, on August 9, 1995, Jerry Garcia died. His diabetes raged, his heart gave out and his body failed him while detoxing from a lifetime of drug dependence. A few days later, his life was celebrated with a public memorial concert in Golden Gate Park. By that time, the Dead had been doing big business for some time, thanks to constant touring and their first top 40 hit, “A Touch of Gray.” Never mind then that Garcia’s health was down and his addictions were up: The show must go on as the Dead’s touring, merch and ticket sales were doing the kind of big boring business the music industry represents today.
The bands formed in Jerry’s wake include The Other Ones, The Dead, Further, Ratdog, Phil Lesh & Friends and the Rhythm Devils (there are more). But the extreme monetization of all things rock ’n’ roll, psychedelic and Dead had been well under way for several decades. The Grateful Dead as corporation was just another aspect of its long strangely quirky and contradictory trip.
Beginning in 2015, Dead members Bob Weir and Mickey Hart began billing themselves Dead & Company; by 2023, they played to bid goodbye to touring with their Fare Thee Well shows. Those dates, according to published accounts in music industry trade magazines and other media outlets, grossed $114.7 million over 28 shows, though they were hardly the end. In 2024, Weir, Hart and an amalgamation of musicians played a 30 show stand at the Sphere in Las Vegas and earned $130 million that year as Dead & Company. This year’s Dead & Company returned from the dead, again, for 18 shows at the Sphere and three in Golden Gate Park to mark the 60th anniversary of the formation of the Grateful Dead and 30 years since Jerry’s passing. The tour receipts for this year have not yet been published, though some fiscal facts are known.
Tickets for the Golden Gate Park weekend ranged from $600 for three days and went up to $7k for the VIP Package. The concerts brought $150 million to the city’s economy, $7 million into the Parks and Recreation Dept. according to local media, and some untold sum for promoter, Another Planet Entertainment, not to mention the band, its agents, managers and other profiteers. I don’t know much about the Grateful Dead but I’ve read the books and can tell you that profit was not a big motivator when the band was founded. Money and possessions were seemingly of little interest to Garcia.
To say it another way, Dead & Company do not embody the spirit of the Dead and its commitment to alternatives to commercialism and mainstream culture. That is if there is such a thing as a spirit of a band: In the Dead’s case, that bird has definitely flown. I can say more, much more, but won’t now except: In 1996 I spent six weeks on the road with the Further festival. It was unpleasant to say the least and I survived it by immersing myself in nightly sets by Los Lobos, a band I am certain has a spirit because I can feel it.
And yet, there are still some traces of Jerry’s spirit around if you are looking for it in the city that raised him. Whether its the makeshift shrines in the Haight, stenciled Jerry bears on sidewalks around town, or the annual Jerry Day free concert at McLaren Park, I could swear some days, especially in August which marks his birth and death, he hovers.
Jerry Day was established in 2003 to celebrate the Excelsior District’s most famous son; this year a street there was named for him. But the future of Jerry Day is imperiled due to “lack of funding” and city support. How could this be in a city of 80 billionaires? How could this be in a city whose mayor is worth millions made from the profits of Levi Strauss, the jeans favored by hippies and punks and everyone else, you may ask and I will answer: We are a city that creates and then commodifies everything: From rock ’n’ roll, psychedelics, and cannabis, to the Grateful Dead, to mention but a fraction of what comes from Northern California. We even have a Counterculture Museum to keep the idea of an underground in place.
No, I don’t blame the latest generation who want to partake in their own rituals or a virtual tribal love rock musical: It’s the cost to play the game I can’t relate to. There’s also the carbon in/carbon out trucking and busing of staging and sound equipment on public park grounds, our much-needed oasis in a largely concrete residential neighborhood that’s hard to get your head around.
Jerry loved Golden Gate Park. It’s east to west world map of flora and fauna literally inspired his guitar playing. But following the three dates of Dead & Company there, the three-day Outside Lands festival and last week’s straight vanilla “alt-country” event, the concerts have trampled the landscape and turned the largely working class, Democratic voting blocks of the outer Richmond and outer Sunset neighborhoods into a parking lot. And we did nothing to prevent it. Oh sure, we voted to make the Great Highway a park, but we got very little in return for that either.
The highway, its nearby grid of avenues, and the park itself, were built on sand dunes. They were not designed with an in and out flow of 60,000 non-residents a day in mind. These neighborhoods of families, people with disabilities, seniors and people of all ages who speak more languages than in any other area of the city are boxed in. Many of us are in the work force and use the roads to travel to and from our jobs. There are hospitals and other services that bookend the park and people need access. And then there is the wildlife that has been displaced for a month by top volumes, distracting spotlights, and cyclone fencing not to mention the human footprints marring their paths home.
Jerry used the park himself to find peace and quiet: That’s where he was found one morning in his car in 1985 with a shit ton of drugs on him and in him (in 2025, concert goers in the park enjoy the brain freezing drug of nitrous oxide). Communing with nature takes many forms but the combination of numbing out in these times seems less like a tribute and more like a cop-out.
Granted, my distress is not about the disruption outside my window but is intertwined with the upheavals worldwide. If you’re reading this, you wake up screaming in some form or another, whether about detainment, displacement, about the genocides, dictatorships, rolled back rights and the current incompetence at most levels of leadership [release the files]. And yet these cries are signs of our human connection, our consciousness, the kind once encouraged by the Dead or psychedelics or a combination of the two.
Even though now it seems like no one is listening, those of us who are awake and alive are the miracles we are seeking. The shakedown, whether in the park, at the Dead & Company HQ or on the national stage is just another version of life in all its stages: good, bad, ugly and beautiful. So I keep doing what I do. Live my life accordingly. Sometimes I ask myself, what would Jerry do? And while I choose not to check out, I can’t deny we’re living in a blast furnace. Yet I see no choice but to play it through, and just keep truckin’ on.
This is your Earth Day long read: The story of how musician, composer and arranger Van Dyke Parks came to produce the 16-man steel pan band, Esso Trinidad, following the Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969. I interviewed Parks in 2009 for Crawdaddy! and since that time, this story has become the most-read on this site, receiving the top number of views daily from around the world. Thanks for your continued readership and for your stewardship of the earth today (Parks suggests planting milkweed, to save the Monarch butterflies).
When 80,000 barrels of oil spilled into the waters of the Santa Barbara Channel in January of 1969, the crude-splattered water, beaches, and birds along the California coast in its aftermath became the symbols of modern eco-disaster. While the ensuing public outcry helped hasten the formalization of the environmental movement as we now know it, for musician Van Dyke Parks, the spill and “the revelation of ecology,” as he calls it, was a very personal, life-altering occasion. “It changed my M.O. and changed my very reason for being,” he says. The Union Oil rig rupture in Santa Barbara made Parks go calypso.
“When I saw the Esso Trinidad Steel band, I saw myself in a Trojan Horse,” he says. “We were going to expose the oil industry. That’s what my agenda was. I felt it was absolutely essential.” From 1970 to 1975, Parks waged awareness of environmental and race matters through the music and culture of the West Indies, though in the end, “You don’t know whether to laugh or cry. That’s what makes Van Gogh go,” he says, “That’s what great art does.” Though Parks is referring directly to Esso Trinidad’s happy/sad steel drum sounds, he could just as easily be talking about his own experience during what we’ll dub the Calypso Years.
Over a five-year period, Parks produced albums by the Esso Trinidad Steel band (1971) and Bob Dylan favorite, the Mighty Sparrow (Hot and Sweet, 1974); he also recorded his own calypso-inspired works, Discover America (1972) and Clang of the Yankee Reaper (1976). Born from his passion for popular song and launched at a time when grassroots protest was at an all-time high, Parks had every reason to believe calypso consciousness would prevail. But he hadn’t factored in the complications of taking on big oil, nor of touring the US with a 28-man steel drum corps from the Caribbean. He was unable to predict that the sessions with Mighty Sparrow would be fraught with rage, and that his efforts would earn him the enmity of Bob Marley, whose production requests he ignored in favor of calypso. And yet, you get the feeling he’d agree in one hot minute to do it all over again the exact same way if given a chance to revisit this section of his checkered recording history.
Parks is generally a well-mannered and affable Southern-born gent with a mildly mischievous streak. A one-time child prodigy on clarinet, he’s often mentioned in tandem with his Southern California work with Beach Boy Brian Wilson, who was reportedly too tripped-out to continue their Smile-era collaborations. A formidable freethinker and raconteur of psychedelic dimensions himself, you can hear the Parks imprint, curly-cuing through “Heroes and Villains” and “Sail On, Sailor”; songs that made a lasting impression on the Beach Boys sound. Rarely at a loss for bookings as a composer, arranger, musician, and producer (Parks would go on to work with artists from Harry Nilsson and Ringo Starr to Joanna Newsom and Rufus Wainwright), his song “High Coin” traded freely on the hippie covers market while he juggled sessions by psychedelic bands as well as singer-songwriters Randy Newman and Phil Ochs. It was following the critical success of his first solo work, Song Cycle, in 1968 and the oil spill in ’69, that Parks began in earnest his pursuit of the music of the West Indies—specifically calypso and steel drum (also known as steel pan). Initially played on instruments made from clankity household odds and ends, by the ’40s, steel drums were made from a surplus of oil barrels, washed ashore the islands of Trinidad and Tobago from the coast of Venezuela. “America pollutes its environment with oil: Little Trinidad makes beautiful music from the drums that you throwaway,” says pan player Godfrey Clarke in the Esso liner notes.
Serving as the accompaniment to Carnival (for which Trinidad is world-famous), calypso is also often accompanied by lyrically potent verses that alternately use breezy and nasty humor to signify its weighty concerns: Imperial oppression and the extreme poverty of the islands. Ideally, the counterculture audience could’ve dug this political/party music with its motives to create equality and earthly harmony. Surely younger folks could identify with the calypsonian struggle, more than say, Liberace’s audience in Las Vegas, which is where Parks found the Esso Trinidad Tripoli Steel band working in the late ’60s. “I saw them as enslaved in their relationship to Liberace; I thought it was a vulgarity. I wanted to save them from their trivialization.” What had begun as Parks’ desire to popularize calypso at that point became his crusade.
The Land of the Hummingbird
“I just love that performance of ‘Aquarium,’” Parks says of Esso’s album finale. “You see, it represents that eco-consciousness that the album should project. I’m just telling you why I did it: I devoted the album to Prince Bernhard, who was the head of the World Wildlife association. Everything was directed to making it a proper, political, green album.” Nearly 40 years later, the Bananastan label has issued newly-minted versions of the Parks-produced Esso and Sparrow’s Hot and Sweet. Not only are the calypsos strangely contemporary, I find I’m deeply moved by Esso’s environmentally-tuned music from the island officially nicknamed the Land of the Hummingbird. When Parks suggests we meet beside the Santa Monica Bay, I agree: There is no better place than under the sun for a talk about his rarely-discussed calypso intermezzo. “This has been a well-kept secret,” he begins with a whisper. “The promotion men were successful at that.”
Parks’ devotion to calypso puts him in the unique position of serving as the music’s chief 21st century stateside ambassador; as it is, his relationship to calypso predates his own childhood and runs in the family. According to Parks, his mother’s uncle was the founder of the University of Miami and a calypso devotee. “Of course, they were touched by calypso down there. He had been to Trinidad at the same time as FDR,” explains Parks. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1936 trip to Trinidad, documented in the song “FDR in Trinidad”, is among the first calypso standards. By the 1940s, “Rum and Coca-Cola”, as sung by the Andrews Sisters, had brought calypso music to the American masses. “Of course, everyone was aware of ‘Rum and Coca-Cola’, which was incidentally my mother’s favorite drink,” says Parks. Though, everyone was not necessarily aware that the jolly little song was also a critique of American military presence in Trinidad (nor would it be a truly great calypso without the double edge). But the Andrews Sisters’ vocal stylings would soon be outdone by authentic calypsonian Harry Belafonte’s ’50s success with the Jamaican folk song “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)”, calypso’s most enduring hit. In the early ’60s, Parks recalls he and his brother were “left in the dirt” on a bill they shared with calypso’s Andrew “Pan” de la Bastide. But it is in the music’s details rather than its broad overview where Parks gleans inspiration: The origins of the intensity of the music, the unparalleled musicianship of the pan players, the wordplay of the singers and their emotional extremes—from treachery to triumph—are the elements of interest to Parks.
“I was serious about serious music from an early age. Hardwired to a lot of music of dead white guys—very serious discipline—I had three brothers who played. We had this musical oleo in the house, from Bill Haley and the Comets to Les Paul and Mary Ford, Fats Waller, George Shearing, Paul Whiteman, the usual popular American diet, from 78s on. To me, calypso music was everything that the Memphis blues was, everything that Schubert and his sort were of the 19th century Romantic songwriters. Melody: Fantastic, like studying a novel with many subplots, seeing all of them resolved by the conclusion of the work. Lyrics: The scansion, the absolute art of phrasing, it had absorbed everything proper from the British Empire, so you find this incredible intelligence of mind. These are the scions of African nobility, the protectors of the musical and oral tradition. That’s what I think of calypso—the greatest pop music.”
The music of the West Indies was begotten from a 19th century slave history. “Barbados, adjacent to Trinidad, is direct in line of the slave trade that unfortunately plagues us all,” says Parks. But while European settlers imposed customs and traditions on the islands’ people, the indigenous population and those whose origins were African engaged in their own forms of expression. It’s that combination of sound, from two hemispheres and at least three continents, that make up the basics of calypso. Working with the large ensemble steel band, “I took it as an incredible opportunity… from a standpoint of my very American identity,” says Parks. “This group presented such a great opportunity in testing my ethics.” Though were the ethical challenge not combined with the band’s esthetic of extreme musicianship, individually and as a collective, Parks probably wouldn’t have traveled the distance he did with Esso.
“It was really a profound experience to me, to hear the small fish that run by quickly in the ear during Saint-Saëns’ ‘Aquarium’ from The Carnival of the Animals. Those fast notes that shimmer through the piece, they are 32nd/10th notes, there are 10 in a figure, and these guys memorized this thing in a matter of two days and they did an incredible job.” The band was led, as it were, by Hugh Borde. “He was their captain, there was no leader,” explains Parks, though for those two days in the studio he passed his captain’s hat to Parks and pan man Kenrick Headley, who led the group through versions of songs like “Apeman” by the Kinks, “I Want You Back” by the Jackson Five, and Simon and Garfunkel’s “Cecilia.” The Rev. Fr. John Sewell, an Episcopalian missionary who served transcribing the ultimately jaw-dropping versions of the playful classical and orchestral pieces in Esso’s repertoire, also assisted the group. “They were the first to do it,” says Parks of Esso’s classical works on pan, “and it became a requirement for all steel bands to have a classical test piece. So they might do ‘Waltz of the Flowers’ by Tchaikovsky or ‘Unto Us a Child Is Born’ from Handel’s Messiah.” For the recording, they chose the aforementioned Saint-Saëns and the frantic “Sabre Dance.” The steel band also cut a Parks favorite, “Erasmus B. Black”, a wordplay tune penned by the Mighty Sparrow in which an innocently christened baby ends up with an unfortunate double entendre of a name. “I thought there was a great deal of theater and comedy in the group. I’ve never enjoyed myself so much, almost understanding what was going on!”
Keep Your Eye on the Mighty Sparrow
Steel band players gain entry into the prestigious ensembles through a highly competitive audition process. The spirit of musical competition and excellence is rooted in poverty, though it’s a celebratory event, staged each year at Carnival, the annual pre-Lenten festival that finds pan players and wordsmithing calypsonians performing for cash and crowns. The annual Carnival Road March is a calypso competition at its fiercest and reigning supreme eight times was the Mighty Sparrow—his wins rivaled only by contemporary calypso’s Super Blue and Sparrow’s friend and competitor, Lord Kitchener. While Sparrow had traveled to the US seeking help from Belafonte at the height of calypso’s popularity, Kitchener was making a name for himself in England. Upon their respective returns to the islands, Kitchener and Sparrow spent the rest of the decade and into the early ’70s duking out the Road March and Calypso Monarch crowns.
“I wanted very much to do Lord Kitchener,” admits Parks. “Lord Kitchener, to me, is the greatest of all the calypso singers, but Sparrow was absolutely rhapsodic.” In his liner notes to Biograph,Bob Dylan wrote of the Sparrow: “… as far as concept and intelligence and warring with words, Mighty Sparrow was and probably still is the king.” “I thought he would be more difficult to sell than Kitchener,” says Parks. “Sparrow would show up with a cape; Kitchener would’ve shown up in a fedora.” Perhaps Sparrow could sense Parks’ preference for Kitchener upon his arrival at Miami’s famed Criteria Studios. Or maybe it was a hurricane, just about to make its way to land, that turned the session into a perfect storm. “We got to Miami. Phil Ochs appears,” begins Parks, referring to his friend and fellow traditional music enthusiast, famous for folk-singing and a notorious unraveling that had already begun. “Phil is somewhat deranged. The rain starts to whip against the wall absolutely horizontally. We are near the eye of the hurricane. It’s a big one. The studio owner Mack Emerman wondered if we should airboat the whole thing to Barbados.” In a world without Pro Tools, the crew obtained remote power from their own generator and hunkered down as the hurricane passed. “What you hear, we did in two days. Sparrow would step up to the piano and go pht pht—pht pht. You notice that’s irregular,” explains Parks, pounding on the picnic table before us for emphasis. “It’s not pht, pht, pht, pht. You know, it’s said that irregular beat is something that started in Curaçao as the natives imitated the Dutch governor, Peter Stuyvesant… he had a lame leg and so he would pht pht—pht pht. That’s what I heard… it’s the rhythm that Sparrow played for two bars before the piece begins. And then the band came in. This didn’t take a producer. This didn’t take an efficiency expert. This was incredible.”
Rather than arriving at the studio with a finished set of lyrics, Sparrow came with phrases. “Sparrow knows exactly where he’s going… he knows how to get the cat out of the tree, get the cat down; he’s got the chorus solved. He’s very able. There is nothing false about his incredible musical skill. That he can ideate phraseology with such powers of deception is a very good quality of his work. It’s the very same power of deception that I see in Schubert, that also likes to take you out somewhere, then puts you somewhere subtly that is surprising and refreshing.” Of the songs he compiled for Hot and Sweet, Parks cites two standouts: “More Cock” (“I asked for it. I know, it’s my fault”) and “Maria.” “My favorite. As Ted Turner said… ‘it only looks easy.’ To me, it’s as good as anything I’ve heard out of Allen Toussaint. It’s tight.”
Co-produced with Andy Wickham, the session with Sparrow was not without incident. Parks describes British Wickham as “right wing” and in thrall to “Country and western and super-America, Buck Owens and Merle Haggard.” Parks says, “I remember he was ecstatic with ‘Okie from Muskogee,’” Haggard’s toast to redneckism. And yet, like Parks, Wickham loved calypso. “He came to realize how much the butt [of the jokes] the British were.” Wickham could also appreciate the melodies (“He loved Wagner, secretly,” says Parks) and the lyrics (“Very good turn of phrase,” he’d say). But it was sport that bound Wickham to the calypsonians. “He knew all the West Indian super heroes of cricket,” says Parks; however, that did not make him the boss of Mighty Sparrow.
Sparrow was not one to take studio direction. “Which is a big mistake. Every bullet counts on a record,” says Parks. “It was hard. It was a bumpy ride. It was occasionally filled with rage and great hostility. And blackberry brandy; I think the record was a four quarts of blackberry brandy record.” The necessary lubricant relieved some of the tension courtesy of the elephant in the room: The British Empire. “Well, the British were leading the decolonized African freeman, and I was right in the middle of all that. The Sparrow is filled with bravado and severe opinions that aren’t always convenient… There were moments that you hoped the guy in the cape wasn’t going to show up at dinnertime to protest his individuality to everyone.”
By the time Parks was finishing with Sparrow, calypso’s rhythmic energy was in the process of being subsumed by disco, while the war on poverty was being fought by reggae, the Caribbean’s other music. “Calypso was feeling very disco-ed, which is funny because they wanted to feel disco-ed, and yet, they were bothered by the fact that disco was calypso. It was a dead ringer,” Parks says, once again sounding out beats at the picnic table. “They were mad as hell about that. And then reggae hit the fan—in a big way—and I was delighted.” This is when Parks received his call from Bob Marley.
Clang of the Yankee Reaper
“‘Let’s face it, Mr. Parks, the white man is finished in the Caribbean,’” said Marley to Parks. “I thought that was a rather harsh thing to say. He was so pissed at me, because I didn’t have time to work for him because I was so trying to get 28 toothbrushes… I was just too busy and he took it as a slight.” Though, what may’ve been a missed opportunity with Marley, Parks made up for it by recording with his contemporary, Jimmy Cliff. “Jimmy Cliff was a big deal to me,” he says. Believing Cliff’s melodies often prevailed over Marley’s “rhythm machine,” Parks helped the singer secure his publishing and played keyboards on Cliff’s 1976 album, Follow My Mind. “I honestly think that the Jamaicans showed a greater power of adaptability against ‘guns, germs, and steel’ than calypso. Trinidad is more removed—it’s a different world…”
Following the Sparrow production gig and Parks’ own Clang of the Yankee Reaper (a good half of its material bearing the earmarks of calypso), by the end of the ’70s, Parks was back in the bosom of the California singer-songwriter scene, working with Lowell George, Nicolette Larson, and again with Harry Nilsson. So what then of calypso, his first Caribbean love?
“Calypsonians were an uncapturable lot, really, and I’ll tell you why… They never had any regard in an engagement in copyright. Maybe it’s an uncommon modesty of sorts.” Matters of contractual arrangement were a formality that, according to Parks, was of no interest to calypsonians. “It finally dawned on me there is an undeniably vulgar aspect to contract agreements because they’re built to check coercion and that’s a sad way to approach any mutual trust. These songs are for a moment’s discovery, born of such a highly extemporaneous, unanticipated purpose. A solution to a problem is what it’s all about.”
Artistically, he was satisfied by the calypso interlude. “Those two recordings were made at the apex of analog. Such a phenomenon of sound and so nuanced… small notes that all make up the way it feels in the bones,” he said.
Environmentally, the idea to link calypso or any music to the earth’s wellness was visionary on Parks’ behalf; the frontiers of such thought combined with activism are yet to be fully explored. Although at one time he’d hoped to deliver his message directly to consumers at the pump as a “premium gift” with fill-up (the idea was a sound sheet of the Esso Trinidad Steel Band singing “White Christmas” with Bing Crosby), his dream of harmony, enlightenment, and environmental healing through steel band music was too far-reaching. Idealistically, Park could not fulfill his full vision with Esso.
“I was in the crosshairs of the racial divide with these gentlemen who had no idea about such things,” explained Parks. “A guy shot at us—a farmer up on a hill with a shotgun—when the bus broke down on the road in the South. The culture collision was probably among the top five benchmark psychological events of my life, for so many reasons.” Esso’s US tour ground to a halt for good when their aforementioned bus crashed. Several men were hospitalized and one was laid up at the Parks household for four months. “I came up as quickly as I could with another record about calypso to keep the focus on the medium. I put a Greyhound bus and a Continental Trailways bus on the front cover, just to get these men out of bed.” The Parks album Discover America contains interpretations of “FDR in Trinidad”, “The Four Mills Brothers”, and “Bing Crosby”, among others from the calypso canon. Parks’ time with the steel band was drawing to a close, though not before one last act in which he finessed a potentially sticky situation with Standard Oil of New Jersey that ultimately okayed the Trinidad Steel Band to retain the use of Esso in its name, without an injunction.
He still stands by a statement he made of Esso, those years ago: “The greatest group I’ve ever had the privilege to produce.” Like his calypso brethren, Parks may’ve been bloodied, but his confidence in the art of calypso is unyielding. “All of the bravado of such poverty—poor people speaking plainly, representing the disenfranchised—is what calypso is all about,” he states. “It’s not only topical songs that are optimally crafted, both lyrically and melody—it’s that they do things: They move mountains. It’s a life force.”
It takes an extraordinary effort to write a book and see it through to completion. That might seem like an obvious and plain thing to say, but it’s true: Though many folks like to think they can do it or try to, fewer actually do. Perhaps that is why publication day and month is most always a big deal for writers: Congratulations cards, flowers and gifts are in order! Short of those things, I’ve got a couple of articles I wrote about two very different writers with two very different books celebrating mutual publication dates to share with you.
“Sexy Life, Hello!” is the first book for Michelle Kircherer. Her debut novella is also the premiere release of her independent publishing venture, Banana Pitch Press. Kicherer is an ambitious performer, writing coach and instructor and has a big vision for her multimedia venture, without any of the yuckiness associated with the big three publishing houses. She will be reading from her book and discussing it at Green Apple on the Park in San Francisco on March 6 and at Clio’s in Oakland on March 8. You can read more about Michelle in my profile of her for the San Francisco Chronicle.
“The Mansion” (Gnashing Teeth Publishing) is the tenth collection of poems by Dee Allen. A performance poet, Dee has been writing and performing his work in San Francisco, Oakland and beyond for over 20 years. I had the good fortune to first hear him read in 2012, or maybe it was 2013 — at any rate, that was several books ago for Dee. I try never to miss his publications and readings, but they are coming so fast and furious, I accidentally skipped 2024’s collection “Discovery.” It’s time to catch up and that’s exactly what we’ll be doing during a live-streamed conversation from Bird and Beckett Books and Records on Sunday March 9 at 10 a.m. A sneak preview of what’s likely to come up is in this profile forBay City News, published today.
Congratulations to Michelle and Dee on their respective new publications. Though writing is its own reward, sometimes it helps to know there are those of us reading and appreciating the work, respecting what goes into the process and identifying with it. Thanks to this pair of authors for making our Bay Area literary community particularly unique, for making my job reporting on them easy, and for helping to keep the spirit of independent publishing alive in these unreal times.
This week San Francisco’s literary festival, Litquake, celebrates 25 years of supporting writers, publishers, bookstores and the literary arts here in the Bay Area.
Running October 10-26, Litquake is the big event of the year for the Bay Area’s literary community. The mostly free readings and panels during Litquake and Litcrawl have become starting places for some of our writers and remain a testing and resting ground for those with more experience in need of a little recharge. These days, I mostly write about books, but when the festival rolls around, it’s a chance to remind myself, I too am a writer of books.
The festival’s co-founders, Jack Boulware and Jane Ganahl are my kind of people: Journalists and authors by trade, they dared to dream beyond the newsroom and share their love of the writing life with their immediate community. As their cohort of writers grew to include novelists, memoirists, biographers, sexperts, technologists and performance poets, the festival grew and grew, blossoming into its current incarnation as year round foundation and a 10+ day fest, culminating with an evening LItcrawl. Boulware and Ganahl have since stepped down as directors and as of this year, the organization welcomes its new director, Norah Piehl. Litquake is also powered by a small staff and tons of volunteers.
Though the years, I’ve been lucky to participate in the annual festival as a reader. Litquake has always been a place to try out new ideas and styles and as a writer I’ve test run biography, memoir and poetry, to get a feel for how the work sits with an audience of listeners. Litquake month has also served as a time of the year to create new work, to reset and reclaim one’s writing life, and affirm, that we are still readers and writers, no matter where the day or our lives may take us.
In more recent years, I’ve volunteer-organized and curated readings at Litquake in support of independent bookstores, particularly during San Francisco’s gentrification crisis. In 2014 we celebrated 55 years of Marcus Books. In 2015 and 2016, we honored the Mission District booksellers Modern Times Bookstore Collective, Alley Cat, Dog Eared and Adobe Books with standing-room-only events at the Make Out Room as fundraisers for Litquake and the grassroots United Booksellers (UBSF has since disbanded, but not before publishing a series of chapbooks, The City Is Already Speakingin collaboration with poet laureate Kim Shuck and featuring contributions by Tongo Eisen-Martin, Alejandro Murguía and other Bay Area poets). This year, the festival honors bookstores citywide at its opening night fundraiser, the Bookseller’s Ball. We are lucky to have so many bookstores here in San Francisco (my go-to is Bird & Beckett Books and Records). Despite digitization, the pandemic, extreme rent and operating costs (like insurance), San Francisco’s independent bookstores are strong and thriving.
It was at Bird and Beckett in 2019, that we hosted a full house for a comeback discussion with author David Talbot on Between Heaven and Hell: The Story of My Stroke, which he survived in 2017 and lived to write about. Talbot, a longtime supporter of independent booksellers and up and coming authors, has since survived a second stroke. You may offer financial support to him and his family by linking here.
As a literary community, I like to think we are mindful of supporting authors in need, as well as our elder writers and readers. For the last five years, I’ve been associated with Litquake as a teaching artist with The Elder Project, a community writing program offered to older adults. Facilitating these groups, meeting writers and hearing their stories has been an unexpected source of inspiration. The program continues to grow and each season we welcome new writers at all levels of their practice. It’s a great joy and privilege to carry on the work, conceived by poet, Jessie Scrimager Galloway, with our participants and my fellow teaching artists.
I had hoped to return to this year’s festival to read from my new book, Len Chandler: Shadow Dream Chaser of Rainbows, along with some as yet unpublished work. Due to a conflict, I will not be reading as scheduled, though I hope to find an alternative venue to test drive the new writings. Stay tuned to this space for updates and until then, I will see you at the festival. As always, thanks for reading and for your support of this webpage.
Back when I wrote for the music press part time and worked at a small record label where it was also my job to answer the phone, I received a call from San Quentin. Immediately a recording played, stating the call was coming from a California correctional facility, though I was surprised to learn the call was for me. Though I did not know the person, he was seeking a member of the press to write about the sudden cessation of the prison’s writing program. He said it was imperative to get the word out so that some action could be taken to preserve the incarcerated population’s right to read. I listened to the plea, said I would do what little I could, and called a reporter, a friend of mine’s sister, who worked at the San Francisco Chronicle. I think the calls came a couple of more times, but there wasn’t much I could do. To my knowledge there was never a news story about conditions at the prison or its literacy programs. At the time, I didn’t realize there wasn’t any meaningful oversight of the state prison system and that “privileges” like food, exercise and activities were withheld at random, say, if a guard took a dislike to an incarcerated individual.
During the ’80s, the Reagan administration’s War on Drugs created the conditions that led to the over-incarceration we see today, particularly of Black and Latinx individuals. Scholars, like Michelle Alexander and Angela Davis among others, contend incarceration is a racist system of control that extends outside prison walls. There is plenty documented on the subject and I invite you to read more
Today there are over 2 million people living inside America’s prisons. According to the Sentencing Project, at the time I received the call from San Quentin, there were about 40,000 people in prison at the cost of approximately 6 billion dollars annually. Today the state spends over 60 billion on incarcerating its citizens. Two new books on the subject, mostly in the words of people who have done their time, suggest that prisons are a modern day form of slavery and that we abolish the prison nation.
When I received that phone call from San Quentin some years ago, I did not know that the prison population would increase by 500 percent over the next 40 years. Surely by now, most every American knows someone whose life or family has been impacted by the carceral system.
Writing and educational programs have been restored on and off in the California system, though mostly, they are off.
Over the years, I thought about that phone call, the lack of coverage of the prison system in the media, and lack of oversight behind prison walls. I became aware of the prison industrial complex — the relationship between businesses and institutions — as well as the basic human rights violations of incarcerated individuals, and corresponding mobilization efforts, inside and out, to raise awareness of the injustices and correct the abuses.
I am still learning about how we talk about the injustices of incarceration. Hearing stories from people who have lived the horror of America’s prisons seems to offer the most hope toward solutions. I recently viewed the documentary, The Strike, and learned more about the historic California State Prison hunger strike; I listen to Prison Radio, which broadcasts the voices of incarcerated, and look forward to the compact commentaries, often prophecies from Mumia Abu-Jamal. I read the San Francisco Bay View, one of the few publications that delivers firsthand coverage from incarcerated reporters; and I have spoken to San Franciscans who do what they can, using their time and talent to care for incarcerated loved ones and strangers.
Please take a moment today to consider the over 2 million Americans incarcerated. If interested, one action you can easily take is to support the Prison Literature Project: They send books to incarcerated individuals which is not as easy as it sounds — it’s a process and they are specialists. Thanks for reading today. Songs also contain information. Thanks for listening.
Earlier this year in San Francisco, there was a live, all-star tribute to 92-year-old folksinger, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. Making his way around the world in the ‘50s, and a friend of Woody Guthrie’s during the pivotal modern era of American folk music, the contemporary celebration of Elliott was also a benefit for Sweet Relief, the 30-year-old organization founded by Victoria Williams to assist musicians in need. Oddly, the show was mostly void of political content save for a few remarks by musical director Joe Henry, 64, and Jackson Browne, 75, nodding to Guthrie and the roots of American folk and topical song.
Showing up in Elliott’s honor were Joan Baez and Bob Weir, both 83, and Steve Earle and Rickie Lee Jones aged 69. Of course there were younger performers on the bill, but my eyes and ears weren’t trained on them as much as they were on the older adults onstage and in the house: I gleefully whispered to my husband that unusually, I was among the youngest in the room.
As anyone with their eyes on the prize knows, the 60th anniversary of the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was on August 28, 2023. Among those assembled to help Dr. King push forward his dream of racial harmony and economic justice was Len Chandler (often overlooked in the history of civil rights work), one of the voices in a trio that day which included Bob Dylan and Joan Baez (Chandler appears at about 17 minutes into the following clip, though the whole 25 minutes is worth your time). Unfortunately, I come here today with a heavy heart to belatedly report that Chandler died at home in Los Angeles, on August 28, 60 years to the day of the march.
It was a blessing to have interviewed Len on several occasions for the purpose of documenting his story. I was invited to the home he shared with his wife Olga James, to break bread with him, and to participate in several community functions and political gatherings where he was still singing for freedom in the 21st Century. My deepest condolences to all who loved him. I did not know him well, but his work has continued to move and motivate me, long after first making contact with him more than a decade ago.
It was hoped that Chandler and I would be visiting the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa this year, to deliver a panel on singing, songwriting, racial justice and voting rights, to coincide with the publication of my essay commissioned by the Center on Chandler. But none of that was to be. Timing, as it’s said, is everything. And racism is still very much alive, very much afoot in America, 2023.
The following is a repost from my previous posts on Chandler
Chandler would march with Dr. King and travel throughout the South in the name of voter registration, informing rural Southerners of their polling rights, often at great risk to his own life. His poems were recognized by Langston Hughes, he wrote the folk standard “Green, Green Rocky Road” with poet Bob Kaufman, and recorded two albums for Columbia Records, but little is known about him or his life. I sought out Chandler when I wrote Keep on Pushing, my text that tracks the origins and evolution of freedom music, and its roots in African American resistance and liberation movement.
Originally from Akron, Ohio, and studying on scholarship at Columbia in the ’50s, Chandler made his way to Greenwich Village folk music by accident: Lured to the sounds of Washington Square Park by the downtown youths he was mentoring, he easily fell into the scene with his natural ear for songwriting and his familiarity with the songs of Lead Belly, Big Bill Broonzy, and Woody Guthrie. Following a performance at the popular Village coffeehouse, the Gaslight Cafe, Chandler landed a contract to go to Detroit, writing and performing topical songs for local television. A few months later, when he returned to New York, the folk thing was in full swing: Bob Dylan was the latest arrival to town and the pair started to trade ideas and songs.
“I hadn’t yet begun writing streams of songs like I would, but Len was, and everything around us looked absurd—there was a certain consciousness of madness at work,” wrote Dylan in his book Chronicles. Chandler remembers it like this in Keep on Pushing: “The first song I ever heard of Dylan’s was ‘Hey ho, Lead Belly, I just want to sing your name,’ stuff like that.” Dylan used Chandler’s melody for his song, “The Death of Emmett Till.” “Len didn’t seem to mind,” Dylan wrote.
Chandler went on to record two albums for Columbia: To Be a Man and The Loving People. He continued to work as a topical songwriter, a peace and civil rights advocate, and as a songwriting teacher; his tour of Pacific Rim bases with Donald Sutherland, Jane Fonda, Holly Near and Paul Mooney was documented in the Francine Parker film, FTA, a must-see for anyone interested in US history and anti-war efforts within military ranks. Catch a glimpse of Chandler at the end of this trailer for the film:
It was an extreme privilege (and I have since found out a rare opportunity) to meet one of the true unsung heroes of singing activism (as well as his wife Olga James, a pioneering performer in her own right), and have him tell his story to me. Though largely retired from performing, he remains well- informed on human rights, politics, and the arts and will step up and step out for civil rights. You can read a portion of our talks in Keep on Pushing, and someday I will post the complete unedited transcripts, though for now, enjoy the voice of Chandler from back in the day, when singing was a huge part of moving the movement forward.
Ann Mack was born into a family with a historic jazz lineage and sang with trios around her native Cleveland for most of her life. But it wasn’t until she moved to the West Coast less then 10 years ago that Mack fulfilled a long time coming, lifelong dream to sing the standards backed by a big band led by Jimmy McConnell. Most recently Mack has been singing her way through the Great American Songbook and Bay Area clubs like Geoffrey’s Inner Circle and Savanna Jazz, a welcome addition to very alive jazz circuit here that includes Yoshi’s, SFJazz, Mr. Tipples, The Black Cat, Bird and Beckett Books & Records, Keys, Sheba Piano Lounge and the Church of St. John Coltrane, among others. Read more about “The Macknificent” Ann Mack, her contribution to Bay Area jazz, and her family’s extraordinary history at Bay City City News.
Greetings fellow Friscans and those interested in the latest from our much maligned and beloved city. As readers know, I occasionally write about San Francisco’s people, poets, places and solutions to its problems for a project dubbed SF Lives. Its print/text version is in process of seeking a new home beyond this blog and the archives of the San Francisco Examiner. However, if you’re interested in keeping up with all the news that I see fit to report from my outpost at the edge of the world, our SF Lives/Lives Talks, is once again livestreaming conversations from Bird &Beckett Books and Records.
This month I interviewed Kelley Cutler, the human rights coordinator at the Coalition on Homelessness. Cutler is a 20-year veteran of providing services to our unhoused neighbors and has seen firsthand the way people’s lives change dramatically for the better when they are able to secure housing. But promised housing by the City of San Francisco and the supportive services to assist people in need have still not materialized: There are no beds available and a dysfunctional intake system continues to challenge and stymie the best efforts by outreach workers and the people living on our streets. In this conversation, Cutler helps us understand why the cycle of dysfunction persists. With much gratitude to her and the work she the Coalition do, I hope you will take an hour to hear why the mayor’s Tenderloin emergency plan and other efforts to house people are failing, why the city is in violation of people’s basic human rights, and why the work Cutler does is essential to all of our SFLives.
“If the Tao is a way of doing something in concert with its essential nature, David Meltzer’s ‘Rock Tao,’ a relic from the 1960s published for the first time this year by Lithic Press, is an aptly named guide. It’s a book as mysterious, ageless and full of contradiction as rock music itself.
Presented on the page as a textual collage in six parts, Meltzer alternates quotations from the I Ching with Greek philosophy and lyrics by the Supremes. He expounds on the teen appeal of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and touches on the artistry of Sam Cooke and showmanship of James Brown, among others. Weaving in and out of the music with scene-changing headlines, Meltzer chronicles, annotates, observes and critiques his times in “Rock Tao,” providing a portal into the mind of an insider.” Read the full story, my latest for Datebook in the San Francisco Chronicle
Denise Sullivan 