Ken Frankel was a veteran musician by the time he decided to attend MIT as a biophysics graduate student. He played rock and roll in high school then folk music with the likes of Jerry Garcia in Hart Valley Drifters. At MIT, he returned to rock music forming a band with fellow graduate student Carey Mann.
Over the course of the band's early life, they settled on a name and a style that echoed the mix of folk, jazz, garage rock and psychedelia brewed in San Francisco. Like the Bay bands, Ill Wind were skilled musicians and brought a different kind of psychedelia with their unique and dreamy amplifications. But their version of the San Francisco Sound lacked grit or much complexity, smoothed down to be shapeless and inoffensive and, as a result, forgettable. They released their only album Flashes in 1968 on ABC Records before departures led to Ill Wind's eventual abatement.
"...all sorts of people were in and out of there all the time, because they had heard about it, like the local beats—that term was still used—a bunch of kids from a pad called the Chateau, a wild-haired kid named Jerry Garcia and the Cadaverous Cowboy, Page Browning." — excerpt from Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
Despite attracting a number of curious cats while at Perry Lane, Ken Kesey and his early entourage turned away a number of seekers that didn't mesh including the likes of Jerry Garcia. Jerry and his future band would, ironically, go on to become the electric sound of the Acid Tests, Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco and the hippie movement but before The Beatles touched down in America, Jerry Garcia was a banjo-playing folkie.
In the early sixties, Jerry Garcia was ever-present on the Bay Area's radio stations playing live folk music—seemingly, every time with new accompaniment and a new band name. From the start, Jerry is personable with his bandmates and the audience with a knack for bringing everyone in the room together. He is also largely irreverent towards the folk music he plays. He respects the songs but warmly mocks the history and songwriters from which he learned them and, in doing so, pleasantly mocks himself. Folk is nothing to take too seriously because, to Jerry Garcia at least, they are more of a vehicle for his pursuit of chops. Jerry never recorded an album with these early folk groups but many transcriptions of his radio performances do survive. The album Folk Time consisting of a 1962 performance with the Hart Valley Drifters is our anchoring tour stop today. It is warm, off-the-cuff, mistake-riddled and filled with some mighty fine playing... an experience that Jerry Garcia would eventually master.
Note: Again, 1962 is not the year the album was released but the year the session was recorded.
Here is the Hart Valley Drifters discography:
Folk Time
Before the Dead (compilation album by Jerry Garcia and friends)
"Salt Creek" by Black Mountain Boys
"Deep Elem Blues" by Jerry Garcia and Sara Garcia
"Legend of the Johnson Boys" by Sleepy Hollow Hog Stompers
"One Way Ticket (A Classic)" by Ken Kesey & The Merry Pranksters
"At last Kesey returns with the last to be rescued, Mary Microgram, looking like a countryside after a long and fierce war, and Kesey says let's haul ass out of here." -- excerpt from Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
Before Denise Kaufman was an Ace of Cup, she was Merry Prankster Mary Microgram read above having survived a Beatles concert. The Merry Pranksters were not a musical group but were rather a mix of post-Beat and proto-hippie disciples, followers, hangers-on of author Ken Kesey, a best-selling author who had turned his back on the literary world to spread the gospel of the casual use of mind-expanding drugs (mostly LSD) and, more generally, a greater freedom. After a criss-cross of the United States by The Merry Pranksters in the DayGlo painted school bus Furthur, the Pranksters put on happenings known as Acid Tests where communal drug-taking was supplemented with light shows, live music, film projections and any other component of a multimedia event.
The Merry Pranksters were self-sufficient amateurs. They were their own mechanics, sound engineers, event organizers, publicists, publishers, printers, artists, navigators, musicians, circus performers, drug-takers, trip guides, nurses, fugitives, cinematographers, zealots, drivers, recruiters and doom spellers. Their amateurism was the point (Kesey referred to himself as the "non-navigator") and their naivete had a regional influence on art, music, film, sexual mores, drug taking and concert-going of the late-sixties and a national influence on the greater story of 60s America. Kesey released The Acid Test in 1966 on the single-use Sound City label. The (non-)record chronicles The Sound City Acid Test and the kind of atmospheric sound collages, feedback, "music", monologues and raps that would characterize a Prankster event as the collective pursued the ultimate LSD experience.
Here is Ken Kesey (and The Merry Pranksters's) discography:
