Music on the Cusp: From Folk to Acid Rock in Portland Coffeehouses, 1967-1970

Abstract

VALERIE BROWN Music on the Cusp FromFolk to Acid Rock in PortlandCoffeehouses,1967-1970 The people withwhom you share the suffering of sudden growthare linked in magical ways, and these can be the people who really know you best. ? Jon Adams FROM THE SIDEWALK, ITLOOKS likenothing ? justa doorwith a little sign above it. You go down some stairs and pay somebody fiftycents to letyou into a low-ceilinged, murky room filled with about a dozen wooden wire-spool tables slathered with varathane. A homemade ceramic ashtray sits on each table. You go to the counter and get a bottomless cup of coffee for fifteen cents, then commandeer a table six feet away from the ten-by twelve-foot stage. The room fillsup with people and cigarette smoke blended with an occasional whiff ofmarijuana, incense, and burnt cheese. You hear the firstnotes on the guitar, the firstunpolished, good-natured singing and the sweet harmonies, and you forget the funkiness of your surroundings. The music isplaying, and you are right up close. During the Beat era of the late 1950s, coffeehouses across the country were the refuge of poets, leftisttheoreticians, and solo folksingers rendering traditional songs and new ones by such artists as Pete Seeger and Phil Ochs. Within a fewyears, coffeehouses were booking groups ? both acoustic and electric ? whose musical styles freely borrowed from genres such as surf music, theBritish Invasion, top 40, girl groups, and rhythm and blues; from jazz and "roots" styles such as Appalachian folk and Delta blues; and from protest songs in the Woody Guthrie tradition. Along with new incarnations ofthe blues and freshlyminted singer-songwriters, a new set of hybrid styles emerged ? folk-rock, acid rock, country rock, and jazz-rock. In Portland's own counterculture microcosm, a new generation ofmusicians embraced OHQ vol. 108, no. 2 ? 2007 Oregon Historical Society Courtesy of StevenRiihikoski Notary Sojac performsatAutzen Stadium, UniversityofOregon, in August 1970. The band included (fromleft):JimLowry,bass;Mark Mower, drums (hidden); Tom McMeekan, guitar; SteveKoski, guitar; andWill Herold, organ (outside ofphoto). these innovations wholeheartedly, using them to forge distinctive styles, develop sophisticated techniques, and invent their own compositions. Yet, for all its explosive energy, themusic of the 1960s counterculture, as itcame to be known, did not maintain itsoppositional power. By 1970, drugs and violence had dissolved the residual good feelings generated by Woodstock and the Summer of Love in 1967. The alternative music gradu ally became a new mainstream as themusic industry and other corporate enterprises absorbed the new artists and their styles. While some Portland coffeehouses continued to flourish into the 1970s, the end of the era was in sight by the early years of that decade. Musicians and their audiences were getting older, and theirmusic moved into bars and taverns.1The musicians who had been so closely connected in the late 1960s went their separate ways, most finding niches in specific genres such as country rock, bluegrass, jazz, and blues. By the late 1970s, eclecticism and eccentricity had fallen from favor,but the community ofmusicians who got their start in the 1960s heyday ofmusical pluralism went on to populate the Brown, Folk toAcid Rock inPortland Coffeehouses, 1967-1970 247 The Kingsmen (from left: Mike Mitchell, Barry Curtis,Dick Peterson,Lynn Easton, andNorm Sundholm) perfected thebrooding butwell-groomed look in this1964 photograph. club scene through themid-1980s. Their inventiveness and camaraderie has been integral toOregon's film, video, radio and television production, and music education into the twenty-firstcentury. The quest for inspiration and authenticity did not take place in a vacuum; rather, it was embedded in the transitional moment between the established way of doing things and the emergence of a new oppositional culture. Itwas also strongly influenced by geography. PORTLAND HAS ALWAYS been consideredsomethingof a cultural second fiddle to itsmore populous rivals, Seattle and San Francisco. Nev ertheless, Portland's position as amajor stop along the I-5 corridor between the two cities has long made itan attractive addition to performers' West Coast tours. From the first stirrings of the counterculture, Portland musi cians traveled to and from these larger cities, carrying values and ideas in both directions. There was an aesthetic ferment in the air, and Portland was inmany ways as...