Free On the Road with Janis Joplin by John Byrne Cooke

mute electric bass player who resembles a short, purple Superman.
    A few days later, we play the opening night of the tenth annual Berkeley Folk Festival. The festival’s director, Barry Olivier, is keeping up with the times. Last year, his inclusion of Jefferson Airplane must have been something of a surprise to Pete Seeger and Phil Ochsand the Greenbriar Boys. This year, the Charles River Valley Boys share the opening-night bill with the Reverend Gary Davis, Janis Ian, an oral storyteller, and Kaleidoscope, an electrified band from L.A. that has brought Middle Eastern influences into the psychedelic mix. There’s patchouli and pot in the air, and the colorful clothing worn by many in the audience evokes memories of the midway at Monterey.
    In the course of the five-day festival, the dazzling guitar work of Doc Watson and the passionate singing of Richie Havens are interspersed with electric explorations and blues that boogie from Crome Syrcus, Red Crayola, the James Cotton Blues Band, and Country Joe and the Fish, which is a Berkeley band. The Steve Miller Blues Band commutes between the folk festival and the Fillmore, where they’re playing nights with Chuck Berry and Eric Burdon and the Animals.
    The mix of sounds on the Berkeley stages makes visible for me what was groundbreaking about the Pop Festival at Monterey. It was the first festival of the sixties that was
not
organized around acoustic folk music. For almost a decade, since the folk revival kicked into high gear, the model has been festivals with “folk” in the title, from Newport and Indian Neck and Philadelphia to Berkeley and Big Sur, each presenting many of the same artists who travel the summer circuit, featuring English ballads and Scotch-Irish fiddle tunes and American work songs and union songs and songs of the westward migration, a songwriter or two like Dylan, Tim Hardin and Tom Paxton, along with bluegrass and old-time music, and the greatest American form, the blues.
    The folk revival scorned pop music. In Cambridge, we put down the commercial folk acts, the guy duos and trios, the brother groups that smoothed out the mountain harmonies and rewrote traditional English and Appalachian ballads so the lines rhymed where the originals didn’t. The early rockers got our attention—the Everly Brothers, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Carl Perkins, and, ofcourse, Elvis—but they were from somewhere else; they weren’t
us
, and their music wasn’t ours.
    Now, with the transition from folk to folk-rock and the rise of the San Francisco bands, pop music has become Us. Janis Joplin’s Monterey sensation, “Ball and Chain,” is grounded in the twelve-bar blues, but the San Francisco Sound of Big Brother and Quicksilver and the Airplane and the Dead represents a leap that transcends gradual evolution. In logic, a sudden advance based more on intuition, or faith, than logic, is called the inductive leap. In music maybe we can call it the psychedelic leap.
    On the Fourth of July, the Charles River Valley Boys follow Country Joe and the Fish and precede Doc Watson in the Berkeley Folk Festival’s grand finale, which is held at UC’s Greek Theater, up in the hills. The order of performance may be purely serendipitous, or maybe Barry Olivier sees the CRVB’s bluegrass-style Beatles tunes as an appropriate bridge between Country Joe’s far-out music of the present moment and Doc Watson’s traditional roots.
    The last whistle stop on our California ramble is L.A., where we play five days at the Ash Grove. Founded in 1958, the same year as the Club 47 in Cambridge, the Ash Grove has served a similar role as a focal point for the folk boom. It feels friendly and familiar, but our L.A. crash pad is a far cry from the funky folkie houses in Berkeley and the rustic cabins of Big Sur.
    Purple Man’s father and stepmother have a house on the beach in Malibu. Better still, they’re out of town. Peter clears it with the folks, and we settle down