Herb Greene Photography

Furthur on Down the Line for Herb Greene Photography

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 22:36:20 GMT

Further 1) (adv.) at or to a more advanced, successful, or desirable stage (see Grateful Dead); 2) (adj.) additional to what already exists or has already taken place, been done, or been accounted for; 3) relating or referring to figurative or abstract senses.

The embodiment of a concept, the next stage in the progression that is music, life and all things that matter most. We live, we try, we experience and then we learn. Some of us are in the thick of it; some of us have come through relatively unscathed. Either way, the honoring of the past must be infused with the simple marvel of where we are now. Furthur has taken what we all have known and loved and clutched close to our souls for so many years, and brought it forward. There is no greater trip than the amalgamation of that spirited, celebrated past of the Grateful Dead with today’s brilliance and talent.

Capturing the essence of a generational experience that exists only in our sentimentalities, there is an unparalleled ease and comfort emoted with every note. It’s a surreal experience, to be certain, being present in the moment and yet cast back to the simplicity and purity of memories that need no articulation beyond a content smile.

But the key here has always been to push the experience forward. The images you see sprawled across this amassed collection of captured moments remind us all of what once was. The experience provided by Furthur is a celebration of that past, while remaining rooted in this moment. You can feel Jerry and Ron and other voices lost along the way just off in the background. You know that those who lament that they are no longer with us have not allowed themselves the elated experience that can never die.

Life is an invitation of experience; we need only open ourselves up to the moments that are dancing beyond the horizon. We have to stop attempting to rationalize it and simply allow it to happen. The notes are out there, lingering like a fog before us, we need only stop asking questions and listen. You don’t have to have been there to feel what was felt. There is no age requirement, no minimum number of shows you need to have seen. The music plays interminably.

The rhythmical pattern of life is a wondrous thing. Reliving moments past while forging ahead with a worthy gathering of companions as eager for the ride as they are the destination—that is what it is all about. Whether you are in your room as emotions and memories wax-poetic by candlelight; or you are dancing balcony center to the music only your tape player had previously provided: the moment is equally pure, equally enriching. There is nothing but promise and possibility at the edge of the rainbow. We have so much further to travel while embracing from where we have come. And the music is the medium. So hold on to your stubs, ladies and gentlemen, and keep looking for that miracle. The serenity is out there, in abundance; we need only seek it out. And if you have come this far, let us implore you to travel onward with us. We cannot be certain where we are headed, but we will explore the unknown together. As the music evolves and transforms our very selves, so too will the music and the photography of Herb Greene bring you all that we have and strive to become. Forever pushing the experience further . . .

Flying Trans-Love Airways

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 22:32:05 GMT

In 1970, not long after my electric marriage ceremony to Spencer Dryden, the wildly innovative and bat-shit crazy drummer of Jefferson Airplane, I was enjoying the nanosecond of media attention that had come my way after I was featured in a Rolling Stone article on "Groupies and Other Women in Rock" and some other far more questionable publications (obviously, I considered myself a charter member of the "Other Women in Rock" coven), when I was interviewed by a reporter for Gentlemen's Quarterly (GQ) about the Airplane and my relationship with Spencer. One of the first questions he asked was how we had met. "Well," I said, as though it were the way every modern damsel with any degree of snap went about finding a prospective suitor, "I sold him a gram of killer coke after Paul Kantner suggested he might be a steady customer." The reporter paused for a beat and then quite reasonably replied, "We can't print that." And that just about sums up most of the really interesting stuff I have to say about the Airplane.

Even so, with the benefit of an expired statute of limitations and an especially egregious "Behind the Music" out of the way, I'm determined to credit these exceptional people who changed everything about my life forever, before I lose the ability to string words into vague semblances of sentences. Like so many other musicians whose intellects have been consistently underestimated (often with mortifying consequences for said underestimators and side-splitting hilarity for all others fortunate enough to find themselves in the underestimating environs), the members of the seminal Jefferson Airplane—Jack Casady, Jorma Kaukonen, Marty Balin, Paul Kantner, Grace Slick, and Spencer Dryden—are six of the most fiercely intelligent and fiendishly funny people who ever consumed oxygen (or nitrous for that matter, but that's a whole other chapter). None of them, at least the ones still living, suffer fools gladly—or really, at all—and for that reason alone, their continuing friendship after forty-five years means more to me than almost anything else that I treasure, including shoes.

I happily ascended into the Airplane stratosphere in 1967 or so after Paul took a shine to me when I was trolling the Whiskey in L.A. for suitably deranged musicians to marry. As it turned out, Paul wasn't one of them, but he did introduce me to the absolute necessity of renovating each and every hotel room within three minutes of check-in by draping groovy paisley scarves over all the lampshades in the room. (Next on the Extreme Makeover Hotel Edition To-Do List: Stash the weed behind the metal Kleenex holder in the bathroom. Kudos to David Crosby for this excellent advice—it worked like a charm in New Orleans.) But I digress.

While the details are somewhat murky (I feel fairly certain that more transfers of illicit substances were involved), my Whiskey-trysts with Paul led me to the Court of the Finnish Overlord of All Stringed and Fretted Things, more commonly known as Jorma Kaukonen, and his lovely consort, Margareta, and on to Jack, whose day job seemed to consist entirely of giving me unremitting rafts of shit. (Thanks, Jack—you unwittingly prepared me for battling the barracuda that muck up the waters of the State Bar of Texas from time to mother-loving time.) Much to Margareta's eternal credit—probably predicated on innate Swedish sang-froid coupled with an abject disinterest in anything happening outside the Hieronymus Bosch Memorial Art Parlor-cum-Viper Den that served as her bedroom with Jorma, she did not throw me out on my ass when I trundled up to San Francisco from Los Angeles with Pandora, arriving unannounced on her doorstep and looking for her husband. Too bad I didn't pay closer attention—I could have used some of that nonchalance several years later when the trollops began traipsing across the countryside to poach on Spencer. But, again, I digress.

Whatever the flight pattern, I finally landed at 2400 Fulton Street in a fine circle of mayhem, maddening conflict, and mad psycho-love with Spencer, Grace, and Paul (among other regulars on the carnival circuit), where I immediately established permanent residency status. I did, indeed, telephone Spencer and ask if he wanted to buy some kick-ass coke, he immediately said "yes," and that was fucking that—as they say in the better romance novels. Except not exactly. First, I had to attend to the rather daunting challenge of sweeping up the embers left behind in Spencer's heart by my predecessor, the formidable Grace Slick—a task made appreciably easier by Grace's waning interest in Spencer and growing attraction to Paul, along with the fact that I had moved into the third floor of 2400 and was thus able to conduct my relentless campaign for Spencer's undying affection on his home turf, while Grace had to drive all the way in from Sausalito to suit up for the nightly love-fest and consumption orgy. (Spencer's former home with Grace, below Jorma and Margareta's place, had sadly burned to the ground–NOT due to the negligence of Spencer's "groupies" as has been incorrectly reported elsewhere—but to the dozy inattention of the late-60s version of Beavis and Butthead who were "watching" the place mid-toke while the band was on the road.)

The path to the Dryden-Mann nuptials might have been made a tad less tortuous by the rapidly-developing Kantner-Slick dynamic, but it sure wasn't simple—many nights at 2400 were complicated by dueling excitable egos and exceedingly restless natives—all fueled and fortified by Jack Daniels, various other refreshments, and whatever Kantner had asked me to cook for him that day. (I may have neglected to mention that, by this time, I had also been tapped to serve as the Airplane House cook. A typical weekday request from Paul: chateaubriand with béarnaise sauce—I kid you the fuck not.) And being a Texas girl, I am definitely not gifted with an over-abundance of Swedish sang-froid vis-à-vis my romantic rivals, no matter what the state of their entanglements may be, so there were more than a few angst-ridden nights, ramped up and amped up by sporadic drop-in appearances by Jorma, Jack, Marty, or whichever migrating musicians were in from out of town who wanted to sit in on a good freak show. (Fortunately, all of these people did not typically show up at the same time—even the hardiest nervous system can handle only so much over-stimulation.) No matter who was on set at any given time, we were all predictably egged on by Spin Master Spencer's newest and most happy acquisition: a video camera that captured all of our antics for posterity before the tapes were either lost or, more likely, destroyed by the act of a merciful God. In the interest of the stellar reputations of the parties involved, suffice it to say that I fought for my man-iac right up until the moment the indelible ink was dry on the vintage wedding certificate I had purchased months beforehand as a "hint" to Spencer. (I also may have neglected to mention that subtlety is not my strong suit. I don't know what my strong suit is exactly, but we have definitely crossed subtlety off the list.)

Amazingly, Grace and I managed to work out the kinks (HAH!) of our respective relationships with Paul and Spencer over time without any fatalities that I can recall, and in January 1970, Spencer and I were married by the sonorous Tom Donahue at the Airplane House (née Tiffany Mansion), with Paul serving as Spencer's (shirtless and barefoot) Best Man, and Grace as my (shirted and shod) Maid/Matron/Goddess of Honor. In 1971, Spencer and I had a son, Jesse James, who fortunately looks just like his dad and is apparently determined to give him a run for his money in the wack department. (The jury is still out on this one–carting around Lather's DNA is not the easiest row to hoe, and I shudder to think what neurotoxins might be lurking in my own double helix.)

Despite Paul's innate ability to ace out all comers in the Misanthrope of the Millennium Pageant, he and Grace have done more selfless acts of kindness for me over the years than I could possibly recount—at least not without sodium pentothal—literally saving my life on several occasions with a generosity of spirit and tolerance for fuck-ups that is unsurpassed (and unsurpassable) in my experience. I cannot give Paul a bigger compliment than to say that he is simply the best and most consummate asshole I have ever known—a database that encompasses a broad spectrum of proctology. (When Paul turned 70 recently, his jersey was retired—the runner-up didn't even bother to show for the ceremony.) I love him with an entrenched resoluteness that I don't care to question or quantify.

Jorma looms so large in my rear-view mirror that he eclipses anyone else who ever picked up a guitar in my presence. (Author's note: Insert wildly witty quote here re "discretion something something valor" . . . oh, to hell with it—you get my drift.) What Jorma, Jack, Paul, and Spencer accomplished musically and rhythmically will likely never be matched for creativity, innovation, individual virtuosity, and sheer jump-off-the-cliff fearlessness in the operation of dangerous instrumentalities while under the influence of powerful performance-enhancing or –adulterating, substances—depending on your point of view about such things. (Caution: Professional musicians on a closed course. Do not attempt at home.) Best of all, they each were endowed with boatloads of that sine qua non of sex appeal: They were (and are) profoundly freaking hilarious—and you can't copy that no matter how long you practice your finger-picking.

And no one needs any testimony from me about Marty Balin's songwriting abilities and transcendental voice, but I will just echo the party line by pointing out that I love this man's music so much that I had his song "Coming Back to Me" performed at my second wedding to a NON-Airplane musician. (What can I say? The musician thing is apparently hardwired in the aforementioned DNA.)

Grace, being ate up with a trifecta of broad-spectrum talent, irritating overabundance of cool blue-eyed beauty, and freakishly prescient adaptability, continues to confound and astound me with the gift of her enduring friendship, loyalty, tolerance. Grace is, quite simply, ALL THAT. And if she and I can just hold on for a few more years, we will outlive the remaining three folks who claim to have actually witnessed our more unflatteringly profane stunts. If not, hey—that's rock and roll—get over it.

In a memo just issued by the Band Director in Rock and Roll Heaven, I was instructed to close this little ditty by mentioning that my wonderful and much-missed ex-husband could coax more astounding music out of his tiny jazz kit than most drummers can manage with a freaking dump truck full of percussion equipment—and look criminally handsome while doing it. (Okay, he didn't really say that last part, but it's true, and I consider myself something of an expert on good-looking musicians—dead or alive. I don't think you want to challenge me on this one.)

Thanks so much, guys, for the boarding pass and for flying first class all the way (well, most of the way, anyway. There was that unfortunate incident when . . . um . . . never mind.). I don't plan on coming down for a landing any time soon, or ever. And a special, special thanks to Herbie for his exquisite photographs of my friends, lovers, brothers, flight instructors, fellow passengers, combatants, comrades-in-arms, and, of course, my very own sweet-and-sour soul sister. I love you all more than the sky.

The language of the Grateful Dead

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 22:22:51 GMT

The language spoken by the Grateful Dead went far beyond the heartfelt bellows of Ron Pigpen McKernan. There was more to it then the ingenious and far-reaching words of a truly gifted lyricist. There was an honesty in the way that Garcia could enrapture the audience by embodying any character of any lyric—becoming that highwayman that steals from the rich in “Whiskey in the Jar”. There was a trust between performer and spectator when Weir was clearly more than “Playing in the Band.” We struggle to articulate the deep and satisfying notes of Phil’s bass. There was something far beyond the looks and nods that they gave one another on stage or in the studio to queue a jam or to bring them all back into the melody.

They spoke to each other and to us all in half notes and eighth notes. They had dialogues with tone, had heart-to-hearts with harmony and communed with melodies. There was something otherworldly about the union that existed among them. There was something unspoken, inexpressible about the way they emoted day in and day out.

Whether the audience was the immediate community of the early days on Haight-Ashbury when all were fellow freaks and friends, vibing off the same scene and sharing in the same grooves; or whether it was the vast stadium audiences of the 1980’s that comprised of original heads and novices alike, the music meant something and it always will. To try to articulate just what that something was or continues to be is an act in futility. There are moments in our minds, snapshots of our collective pasts that capture, with unyielding truth and intimacy, just what each scene was really like. There are individual notes that still dance together in perfect polyphony and release endorphins into our bloodstreams like no other drug could possibly mirror.

There is, upon these pages, another portal into the whimsical moments that the Grateful Dead created nightly for all those willing to take a chance and allow themselves to soak in the music. The collected work of one Herb Greene dances upon these pages comprised in ones and zeroes in such a manifest as never before scene. The emotions, the moments, the good times and the hardships of a storied guild of brothers that put the music and those willing to respond to it before all other things. Herb Greene was there when the fellowship was spread across Palo Alto. He was there at the peak when they were at their best and most illustrious. He was there at the beginning when there were their subtlest and unostentatious. He captured the glory that sang from their lips and their instruments. And now, with a click and a turn of the page, you might share in the moments that struggle to burn bright in your mind’s eye. Allow the textures and simplicity of Herb’s eye, unfiltered and raw, before the wild days of commercialized exploitation attempted to take their commercial grips on a simple and youthful idea that free love and the music that accompanied it, was all we really needed. Those moments, those ideals, those images may now be but flickering embers among fading memories. Allow Herb Greene’s candid, frank embodiments of a band, an idea, a power unchallenged fan those embers into raging fires once more.

Hand Me My Old Guitar

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 00:53:06 GMT

They were otherworldly. They spoke to one another in tonalities and rhythms as often as with words and phrases. Their chief orator expressed the gamut of emotion and seemed to do so effortlessly. While the message was perhaps always there, the medium through which it was delivered was a progression of dedicated artistry. The sound stemmed from a voracious and vivacious consumption of musical casts. It satisfies, then, that the man’s guitars were built in an analogous tradition. By skillfully layering various bands of wood together, a rich depth of tonality emanates. They were more than guitars, far more the mere instruments. They were, in and of themselves, artful compositions. Their outward beauty remains a testament to the peerless joy their playing impressed upon generations. Welcome to “Hand Me My Old Gitar”, the latest gallery from Herb Greene celebrating the tools of genius, the instruments of the Grateful Dead.

I fell in love with San Francisco rock & roll thanks to a Herb Greene photo

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 00:50:36 GMT

It was Grace Slick’s eyes, staring out from the cover of the posthumous live album by her erstwhile combo, the Great! Society. Like some psychedelic siren, the bottomless well of her gaze pulled me in and I was hooked. A short while later, the sartorial elegance displayed by the Jefferson Airplane on the Surrealistic Pillow jacket had my friends and I scouring London’s flea markets for a striped shirt that had to be exactly like the one Jorma Kaukonen sported. With no emotional or nostalgic ties to the psychedelic era, our post-punk generation couldn’t help but view these images, and the accompanying music, as glimpses of a faraway, magical time and place. Innocent, tentative, but with a distinct gleam in the eye that indicated something was happening here, Mr Jones. Did we think that was cool? Boy, did we ever.

The immense iconographic significance of Herb Greene’s work can never be truly ascertained. To hundreds of thousands of people across the world since the mid-1960s, it is Herb’s photos that embody the San Francisco of that era. What numbered probably less than a couple of dozen of folkies, ex-beatniks and other itinerant personages, suddenly became via his lens, the court of some kind of hip, modern Camelot. The myths, legends and heady air of early psychedelia seem intimately woven into each of Greene’s portraits, like a celluloid tapestry. The youthful Warlocks captured running amok on Ocean Beach, quickly to mutate into the darker, more knowing Grateful Dead, caught by Herb hanging on the corner of Haight and Ashbury in a presage of acid-punk hip. Janis Joplin, resplendent in thrift-store chic, the battle-weary lines around the eyes belying her fresh-face grin. The Charlatans in the porch on Pine Street, all dressed up yet so nonchalantly posed in trepidation of the new frontier. Herb Greene thrust them all into rock royalty before anyone had heard a note.

His is probably the first rock portraiture to avoid the slick Bruno’s Of Hollywood airbrushed stereotype that had gone previously. Technically, Herb’s eye for detail is unparalleled. All his pictures have an indefinable texture. Images frozen in time like a turn-of-the-century daguerreotype and yet so real, one could almost run your hands over the rough background of his Baker Street apartment wall; appropriately covered in hieroglyphs, as if to imply the timeless quality of the subject matter it frames.

The music broadcast the message, the posters and art said a lot, but Herb’s photos were the first to give the nascent San Francisco rock scene a class and an intelligence that rock & roll had yet to achieve for itself, anywhere. It is significant that his best, and best-known, photos are from the halcyon days of 1966 and 1967, before the generics of tie-dye, “free love” and rampant drug abuse, before the media hype and the over-inflated egos and internecine bickering took over and destroyed everything. Greene’s street scenes of the early Haight Ashbury, his juxtaposition of the area’s original inhabitants with their new bright-eyed neighbors, make for some intriguing social documentary, as do the almost heartbreaking snapshots of young mid-America in pursuit of the dream on the streets of San Francisco.

“We were all post-adolescents playing at Cowboys and Indians” remembers the photographer. It may well have seemed like a game at the time, but Herb Greene captured an amazing, never to be repeated cultural moment and brought it to the rest of the world with a skill and passion that all rock photography has had to be measured by since.

Alec Palao
Ace Records UK
1300 Liberty Street
El Cerrito, CA 94530-2311
USA
510.237.1564
Fax 510.232.5625
palao@mindspring.com

First Encounter

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 00:48:31 GMT

It's been long; it’s been strange; and, man—what a trip! One night in 1964—or was it ’63? —I was wandering around North Beach in San Francisco looking for beatniks when I heard bluegrass music wafting out of a shop brimming with as much confusion as coffee. I sauntered in to behold the Sleepy Hollow Hog Stompers. At the close of the set, I ambled on to the small stage and had my first encounter with Jerry Garcia. My last would be in Portland, Oregon on his last tour with the band before his passing.

There was no way to know for sure the significance of such a happenstance; but somewhere amidst our introduction and our valediction was a series of brief encounters that were warm, personable and revealing. Some were photographic in nature. Others were musical. Some were no more than casual visits with family issues, love lives and the drag of aging as the order of the day.

Looking back at it all now I realize how fortunate I was to be able to have had him in my life, no matter how limited the duration. How I miss his speaking voice and his perfectly disarming chuckle....

I have been blessed to remain a friend and part of the Grateful Dead family and now still enjoy their trust and company. I have since moved to the East Coast from ground zero (Novato, CA.); but I have never stopped following the music: the Other Ones, Rat Dog, Phil and Friends and, of course, the Dead.

I have watched as the audience has grown from the children we were, to white-haired men we became. I have witnessed the synthesis of children, hungry for the same trip, with our aged selves. I have seen the resulting creation of a new, multi-generational phenomenon echoing the good old days of the Grateful Dead and culminating with Furthur—a band that Jer would have loved.

I will take this opportunity to thank you, as Phil would say, "for completing the circuit."

Herbie Greene
Maynard, MA