Shows/Berkeley Folk Music Festival 1967

July 2-4, 1967
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City	Berkeley, CA
Tour
Event	Berkeley Folk Music Festival
Billing

Background

• Live 1967

Mayo Thompson, 2015

We were invited to the Berkeley Folk Festival because I was standing around the University of St. Thomas one day outside the gallery there. Dr. MacAgy was long gone by that time. But Mrs. [Dominique] de Menil was running the joint, more or less, and there was a show up, I can’t remember what, a painting maybe. She put on some killer shows. Anyway, Kurt von Meier, professor of art history out here at UCLA [University of California, Los Angeles] at the time, he was in town and he was a friend of the de Menils. We met and he was writing a book of the history of rock-and-roll so naturally I got chatting with him, one thing and another and he said, “What are y’all doing?” By this time we had made our first album [The Parable of Arable Land]; we then made Coconut Hotel. I don’t know if you know this record, this is the abstract record, a hundred percent absolute music. He went, “Uh, if I got you in the Berkeley Folk Festival, would you play that? What would you play?” We said, “Oh, something like that, along those lines.” He went [clicks tongue] and he called his friend Barry [Olivier], the organizer of the festival at Berkeley. They tried to get us into Monterey [International Pop Festival, California] as well, but that was a business gig all the way. Lou Adler, record companies. Fair enough.

So we went to the top like a rocket and pow, exploded, and that was the end of it. We got to Berkeley, they asked us would there be anybody we’d like to meet in California. We were hanging around with [Eugene] Ed Denson and we said, “John Fahey.” So John showed up at Berkeley where we were. We had a freak-out conference and then he sat in with us and played, and that’s as close as I have to a hero as far as music is concerned. Amazing dude.

Frederick Barthelme, 2007

[...] We were the bad boys of Houston music for about half a minute then, and later, when we played in California in the Summer of Love, we were the evil, whack-job, what-the-fuck-are-they-doing? guys at the Berkeley Folk Festival, where the headliners were Richie Havens, Steve Miller Blues Band, Country Joe and the Fish, and the like.

Friday, June 30, 1967

• AM: Red Crayola arrive

Workshop: "The Aesthetics of Freakout Music"

• 4pm
• Listed as "Toward a Totally New Concept of Music"
• East Madrone

Reviews

Remi Barclay, 1967

[...] A day of the Festival was long and full. Each morning at 10 am, I dragged to one of several small workshops to be stirred by such music-talk-topics as "The Aesthetics of Freakout Music" with Kurt Von Meier of UCLA and Houston's Red Crayola [...] It was obvious that few artists either like or are able to talk about their music. But surely it is blessed to try communication on the common level. The workshops and panels say the desperate attempts of non-artists to pull out explanations of why and how music comes to be through the individual musicians. [...]

Sunday, July 2, 1967

Concert

• Evening
• "Dust" (recording: 27:46)

Reviews

Barry Olivier, 1974

[...] at least one third of the Pauley Ballroom audience left the room, although many simply listened at a greater (safer) distance from the lobby. Their screeching, eerie music had something of the supernatural to it.

Laurie Lewis, 2021

I saw a black lab in the audience for Red Crayola. The band was so loud that the dog was trembling and appeared frozen in place. That's mostly what I remember.

Mayo Thompson, 2015

[...] When we played the Berkeley Folk Festival, I came out and leaned my guitar against my amp and walked off, and it started feeding back and everything, and we went from there, down, and everybody said we killed a dog this night, that kind of stuff. [...]

Monday, July 3, 1967

Panel: "Rock-and-Roll As a Means of Expression?"

• Pauley Ballroom
• 12:00 to 1:30pm (scheduled for 3pm)
• Interviewer: Ralph J. Gleason
• Panelists:
  • Country Joe & The Fish
  • Kaleidoscope
  • Crome Syrcus
  • Red Crayola

Reviews

Mayo Thompson, 2015

[...] The next day there was Ralph [J.] Gleason and we had a press conference. [Joseph Allen] Joe [McDonald] of Country Joe and the Fish and all of us were sitting on the stage and Ralph Gleason says, “Well, I guess we have to start with what happened last night. What was that you were doing?” I went, “I don’t know. We’re just doing what we’re doing.” They went, “Oh, okay,” and then they all tried to explain it.

Faren Miller, 1967

Today Mom and I went to a panel discussion at the Berkeley Folk Festival and got a surprise treat as well. In the panel discussion were Country Joe McDonald, David (head of The Kaleidoscope), Mayo (leader of Red Crayola), and Ron (leader of Crome Syrcus). All four of these groups are electric bands, and the discussion was called 'Rock Music as a Means of Expression?'. This topic was soon discarded, after Joe had said it was an insult because of the question mark.

Joe was very sleepy at first (it was only noon) and sat with the blank stare of a child awakened from its nap. Dave of Kaleidoscope looked a lot like Paul McCartney—same eyes, nose mouth, chin! He was also quite intelligent and lucid. He and Joe were both excellent speakers, and moderator Ralph Gleason was left far behind, trapped in his preconceptions of proper group behavior. Joe said he thought of himself as an artist not an entertainer, and neither he nor the other group leaders felt obliged to conform to restrictions if they played 'at an Elks' Club Easter Dance' (Ralph's idea). Joe told the story of a gig at the San Francisco Hilton where he was stopped in the middle of 'Grace' because it 'wasn't a dance tune.' He said people first tried to twist, then waltz; then they tried to laugh. The group only took the gig because they were starving and needed the $50 promised. Joe was quite serious about his music and said of course he loved it—all groups dig their own music (or if they didn't, 'they should be playing something else!').

Dave said he liked both Turkish and Bluegrass music and added that C&W was 'the coming thing'. This led to a long discussion of whether there could be hippie C&W, climaxed by a record man's revelation that Flatt & Scruggs's next album would be folk rock. Joe looked delighted. He had been astonished when Mayo (from Houston) told him that the Country Joe & the Fish album was selling in Texas.

Joe commented on seeing Jimi Hendrix at the Monterey Pop Festival, demonstrating how he had been grooving along and then, when Jimi burned his guitar, his jaw dropped and his eyes bugged out. I'm not sure he really approved of the action, though afterward he said he did like having his mind blown ('my friends do it all the time'). Other bits from Joe: he's 25 and he has a 15 year old brother who is, at the moment, even less ready to compromise his ideals than Joe is. The panel discussion lasted from 12 to 1:30 and was great (except for Gleason inanities)

Barry Olivier took the following note:

"It's like building a large object that is very strange" Rick 7/3/67

Concert with John Fahey

• Afternoon (~3:00pm)
• "'Electric Bands Session with Festival and Guest Bands"
• Scheduled for 20-30 minutes (recording: 22:53)

Reviews

Faren Miller, 1967

[...] As for Red Crayola, some of the panel members had warned us about their 'awfulness' [tongue in cheek, I presume] but I enjoyed them. They are wildly electronic-music, but not the aimless noodling sort (despite their leader's nebulous non-philosophy). They created walls of organ/feedback/drums that sounded like music turned inside-out. They worked together beautifully, aided by John Fahey (of all people!).

John Fahey in a letter to Barry Olivier, 1967

[...] Thank you so much for the comps you gave to my wife + I. We enjoyed the festival very much. It was great fun playing w/ the Red Crayola.

Tuesday, July 4, 1967

Jubilee Concert

• Hearst Greek Theatre
• Scheduled for 12-15 minutes (recording 14:08)

• Filmed by KQED

Barry Olivier, 1974

[... The Red Crayola] played deafeningly loud music with no discernible structure (at the Greek Theatre, one of their 'instruments' was a block of ice suspended from a rope, which dripped upon another surface and caused electric impulses to be transmitted to the audience).

Barry Olivier

Dev Singh, Festival Committee member, reported to me 5/23/68 several facts which had not previously come to my attention about the 1967 Jubilee Concert:

During the Red Crayola's portion, somebody yelled aloud, quite audibly to the audience: "Barry Olivier is a punk!" and also there was profuse booing of the Crayola and also someone(s) threw cabbage(s) onto the stage at the Crayola. Groovy!

Exactly what we wanted—a reaction.

References

The Red Krayola Shows
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Live recordings