I decided to write this essay for UU Band of Writers in San Jose because I was so fascinated reading on wikipedia about some of the musicians that made our lives so special in that Magic Time of my youth. I don’t remember what moved me to look them up, but I have written about one of them already for Band of Writers when we wrote about the prompt "escape". Two of them are especially significant to the history of folk, folk-rock and psychedelic music and the culture of that time. They each are known especially for two famous signature songs from the sixties. Both of these songs feature the word "everybody". In one song this word happens in the refrain of only the most famous version of the song, and in the other song the word is found in the title. Although these two musicians and singer-songwriters are foundational to the whole sixties music culture, their names are not especially well known. So many people were involved in this subculture that it is impossible to know and remember most of them. Both of these two people were born a bit earlier than most of the famous creators of the sixties sound, and were mentors and models to many others. But their approach to life was youthful and adventurous and they traveled and lived mostly on both coasts of the country. Do you have any idea which two musicians I am talking about yet?

One of the most famous songs of the sixties is what wikipedia calls the "60’s quintessential love and peace anthem", "Get Together," also known as Let’s Get Together, most prominently recorded by the Youngbloods and sung by their leader Jesse Colin Young.
Hear Get Together by the Youngbloods
His melifluous, gentle, loveable voice and that friendly, softly-psychedelic guitar riff still resounds through our memory. "Come on people now, smile on your brother, everybody get together, try to love one another right now." I first heard it in the fall of 1966 because I listened to a wonderful weekly Sunday special on KFRC called the Transcendental Mustard Seed hosted by Allan Pierce, whose name was not mentioned. But he was a host on a religious station KFAX, but later became a DJ here on the San Jose progressive rock station KSJO, although this fact about him is apparently nowhere mentioned online. In 1967, as the flower children streamed into San Francisco, local AM radio there picked up Get Together as an album track, and then it was released as a single. It was high on my own weekly list of favorites, of course. But I didn’t quite like it enough to buy it, I guess. Later though, I got myself a copy. It’s now listed as #119 on my all time top 400-plus list. Allan said it was the outstanding song of his Mustard Seed program.

The first copy I bought of "Let’s Get Together" was on a used self-named 1967 album by the folk-psychedelic music group named after the horror story writer H.P. Lovecraft. In that more-lively and declarative version the phrases are reversed to say "come on people now, let’s get together, smile on your brother try and love one another right now, yeeeah". That album is part of the story linking these two songwriters together, too. I was most enthralled with their wistful, baroque psychedelic epic masterpiece The White Ship, #26 on my all time top 400, which wikipedia says was based on an actual story by the author after which the group named themselves. The music of the H.P. Lovecraft group was said to resemble that of the famous San Francisco psychedelic rock group Jefferson Airplane, who on their first album in the Spring of 1966 also did a version of "Let’s Get Together" that’s less lively but essentially the same, an album which I heard often but which I myself only acquired later on. What I didn’t know was that the Kingston Trio first performed the song in 1964, and that John Denver had replaced Chad Mitchell in the Chad Mitchell Trio and performed the song on their album "That’s the Way it’s Gonna Be" in 1965. You may recognize that folk song title from the 1966 Lee Mallory version that’s #7 on my all time top 400-plus list. Many dozens of cover versions have been made of Get Together through all the years since.

Let's Get Together by H.P. Lovecraft

What was strange is that none of these performers wrote the song, but it instead was credited to a mysterious person called C. Powers. When I later acquired the first album released in 1968 by another well-known San Francisco psychedelic group, Quicksilver Messenger Service, one of my favorite songs on it was a catchy, smooth number with lovely lyrics called "Dino’s Song", again credited to none of the performers in the group, but to one mysterious man called Dino Valenti. It turned out that Dino and C. Powers (that’s Chet or Chester Powers, 1937-1994) were the same person. He was the original founder of the Quicksilver band. He was also known as Jesse Farrow when he wrote and sang on many songs for Quicksilver a couple of years later, including their two most famous classic rock songs, "Fresh Air" and "What About Me"-- the latter most recognizable as "What 'cha gonna do about meeeeee". In that latter (protest) song he proudly declared that he smoked marijuana, and in Fresh Air the most memorable phrase is "Have another hit!" But, it was a hit of fresh air, love and California sunshine. Back in 1968 he couldn’t perform Dino’s Song on the first Quicksilver album because he was in jail for marijuana possession.
Dino’s Song
Fresh Air

Why did he change his name so often? Was it to avoid getting arrested for his lyrics? Was he afraid of being spied on? That would be strange since he was so open about his marijuana smoking in these other two later songs. I actually liked David Freiberg’s vocals on Dino’s Song better than his own rather strained style. Also strange is that the Youngbloods’ version of Get Together became a top nation-wide hit in 1969, the year of Woodstock, because it had been used in a radio public service announcement as a call for brotherhood by the National Conference of Christians and Jews But I never heard this announcement myself. I wasn’t watching much TV in my dorm room at San Jose State in 1969. But I did smoke marijuana there in 1968 at the same time Dino was in jail!

It was cool when I later learned that Dino aka Chet Powers also frequently performed with the other guy I'm talking about, Fred Neil, back in their Greenwich Village Days near the corner of Bleecker and McDougal where the club scene was headquartered. Fred and Dino would sometimes go out the back door of a club while singing and come back in the front door. Dino was such a charismatic and lively performer there that he always packed the house. "With his 12-string guitar and spectacularly deep baritone voice, Fred Neil was considered the King of the MacDougal Street /Greenwich Village folksingers", says wikipedia. He adopted his maternal grandmother’s last name. I think it’s because he cut his teeth, so to speak, as a musician with her help, and his mother's. When Bob Dylan came to the Village it was suggested he hook up with Fred Neil, who invited him up onstage with him and helped him get started. Bob Dylan also played with Dino. Fred was a pioneer in the singer-songwriter and folk rock genres. Besides Dylan, such folk-rock legends as John Sebastian, Joni Mitchell, David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Tim Hardin, Tim Buckley, Graham Parsons, Jerry Jeff Walker, Barry McGuire and Paul Kantner of Jefferson Airplane are listed as among his musical disciples and descendants. Jefferson Airplane, who you remember performed Dino’s song Let’s Get Together, said Fred Neil was one of their inspirations, and Fred visited them often at their 2400 Fulton Street house in Haight Ashbury. Grace Slick thought that he was like Winnie the Pooh. I don’t know why but Paul Kantner liked the idea, and wrote a hit song in 1967 to honor him called The Ballad of You and Me and Pooneil. "you sail on water as blue as air" he wrote. It’s listed near the bottom of my top 400-plus list.
lyrics

In 1965 Fred Neil released his first album Bleecker and McDougal, named after the streets on which were located the places where he performed. "I was standing on the corner of Bleecker and McDougal wondering which way to go", he crooned. But he also sang that he had "a woman down in Coconut Grove and she knows what to do". This was a very culturally-hip Miami neighborhood, and the woman was Linda Watson whom he married and had one child with. But he had several marriages and they never lasted too long. Fred was very fancy free and he always wanted to go home, away from the city. But where was home? In the ocean, it turned out. He ended up in the Florida Keys where he died in 2001. But I first heard the title track Bleecker and McDougal on the H.P. Lovecraft album, in a lively medley with "Country Boy", another song from Neil’s first album. Fred's self-deprecating song "That’s the Bag I’m In" was also on the Lovecraft album. I note that the stories of H.P. Lovecraft revolve around horrific-looking creatures from the sea which lure us to become like them and return to the sea too. It would seem appropriate that they would perform Fred Neil's songs, and long to sail away on that white ship.
Country Boy and Bleecker Street by H P Lovecraft

The original version of "That’s The Bag I’m In" was on Fred Neil's second self-titled album released in 1966, without which I would not be writing about him. It was on this album that he first performed his signature sixties escape song "Everybody’s Talkin", which Harry Nilsson and his backing orchestra performed so well in 1969 as the theme from the Oscar winning film "Midnight Cowboy" that it won a Grammy for Nilsson, and which I list as #86 on my list.
Everybody's Talkin by Nilsson
I bought the single for that one, and it was a hit too. "Everybody’s Talkin’ at me, I don’t hear a word they’re sayin’...I’m goin’ where the sun keeps shining, through the pourin’ rain... banking off of the northeast winds, sailin’ on summer breeze, and skipping over the ocean like a stone". But track 1 on side 1 was an even greater treasure of the time, also performed by many others, most notably Tim Buckley and Linda Ronstadt, called The Dolphins (#4 on my all-time list). Fred was just getting interested in dolphins at this time, and he sang that while he was out in the ocean which was his home, he was "searchin’ for the dolphins in the sea, and sometimes I wonder do you ever think of me". Fred Neil dedicated much of the rest of his life to the movement to save and protect them. And like Get Together, this was a peace anthem too. All the ways of war will never change the world, he sang, and peace will come when all hate is gone. Dino and Fred were truly two kindred spirits at the fount of the sixties culture.

My childhood and teenage friend Ed came to visit me at my dorm in 1969, and I didn’t know yet what this song was that I had recorded off the air that I was so enthralled with. He was a folk music oficionado, so I thought he might know. Maybe it was Tom Paxton or Tom Rush, he said. Even he didn’t know that Fred Neil was the mentor of his favorite artist, Bob Dylan.

As I mentioned, these two inspirational giants of the counter culture were born a few years before most of the hippies, Fred Neil in 1936 and Dino/Chet Powers in 1937. Knowing that Fred Neil was such a fish who loved to sail and swim in the ocean with the dolphins, I thought he must be a Pisces. Well, of course he was. Interesting too that the planetary alignment that signified the sixties, Uranus with Pluto in 1966, happened in the 16th degree of Virgo, and it was these pioneers that actually had Neptune, the mystic and god of the sea, right there in that degree when they were born. That made it a triple conjunction in 1966 of the transcendental planets of inspiration for them. This degree was also at the point of the soul, the Nadir angle, in my own horoscope. Dino/Chet Powers was born Oct 7 with Sun in Libra, ideally at least the sign of peace and love, and that’s my own sign since I was born October 5th, and the Sun on Oct 7th is just where Neptune in my chart is exactly aligned with his sun as well as closely to mine. So I guess I have some kind of cosmic soul connection with these soulfully significant song-makers. Of course, Pisces is a water sign, and Fred Neil had been in the navy, and Libra is a nice, fresh air sign, and Dino Valenti/Chet Powers had been in the air force. Also interesting, is that our friendly KSJO and Mustard Seed host Allan Pierce was born on Sept.21, 1937 just a couple of weeks before Dino. And, like Pooneil (Fred Neil), Paul Kantner was a Pisces, and (by the way) Paul had Libra rising.

My essays for the Band of Writers

Round Table Escape

What Floats My Boat why my awakening is our awakening (and Fred and Paul and Dino's)

Let's Get Together by Kingston Trio

Dino sings his great song, I don't know when

John Denver and the Mitchell Trio performs Get Together

Let's Get Together by Jefferson Airplane

Jesse Colin Young on the story behind Get Together

Let's Go Together by Paul Kantner and Jefferson Starship and the Pooh and you and me make three!

What About Me by Dino and Quicksilver Messenger Service

Fred Neil sings Bleecker and McDougal

Fred Neil sings Everybody's Talkin'

Tim Buckley sings The Dolphins

Me, Lee and That's the Way It's Gonna Be