J. P. Pickens
Encyclopedia
Jean Paul Pickens (May 6, 1937 – July 6, 1973), was a leading force in the early North Beach, San Francisco, music scene, circa 1963, along with David Meltzer
and James Gurley
, defining the psychedelic rock
genre. J.P. played regularly at the Coffee Gallery on Grant Street in the early sixties, performing with Meltzer, Gurley and Peter Albin (who later formed Big Brother and the Holding Company
) and many others.
in 1966, and is played on radio stations all over the country.
This album, The Serpent Power, was named number 28 of 40 Essential Albums of 1967, by Rolling Stone Magazine in a special Summer of Love issue, 2007, honoring the 40th anniversary of the founding of the magazine, with a special mention of the song J.P. plays on, "Endless Tunnel."
A recent review of the album by forcedexposure.com states “…the epic 13-minute-long 'Endless Tunnel,' an Eastern-tinged acid jam spiced up with an electric banjo, is worth the price of admission alone.”
J.P.’s first album, “Intensifications,” recorded with Gene Estribou in the ballroom-turned-recording studio of Gene’s San Francisco Haight Ashbury mansion in 1965, was originally released on Henry Jacobs
' MEA label, and was recently re-issued by Locust Music
and has found an enthusiastic new audience.
J.P. and Mary Ann lived in the Los Angeles area early in their married life, and they became friends with Beat artists such as George Herms, Frank Stewart, Wallace Berman
and David and Tina Meltzer. J. P. loved music and the joy of creating it, and he loved all music: Ralph Stanley, Hank Williams, Lefty Frizzell, Billie Holiday, Doc Boggs, Mainer’s Mountaineers, Don Gibson, Jo Stafford, Lester Flatt & Earl Scruggs, The New Lost City Ramblers, Doc Watson, Charlie Parker, Lennie Tristano, Django Reinhardt, Mavis Staples, The HiLos, The Abyssinian Gospel Choir, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Jimi Hendrix, as well as Eddie Lang, Bix Beiderbecke, Robert Johnson, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Ray Charles and Howlin Wolf, just to name a few of the record albums he owned and listened to regularly. He had studied the piano and saxophone in a formal way, then picked up the guitar, finally settling on the banjo and learning to play bluegrass
, a genre that seemed to offer him joy and freedom.
J.P. was a complex, intelligent and highly creative individual, as well as a devoted family man, an artist and an accomplished musician, and was well-known for his fondness for collecting things. Anything and everything, wherever he went, he collected stuff. His obsession with collecting sprang from his belief that all objects were art, all objects have beauty and were worthy of standing alone as art or of disassembling and re-working to enhance the art inherent within. He had been inspired and influenced by his beatnik artist friends, and by the revolution in the art world earlier last century that produced the Dada/Anti-Art movement and the found-art philosophy of Marcel Duchamp
.
The family lived for a while in Topanga Canyon, and at the top of their driveway was a large garage, used by Frank Stewart as an art studio for his paintings, later becoming the site of a 1962 'Tap City Circus' art/ music party/happening, hosting a number of bluegrass and other musicians, who showed up, looked at the paintings and George Herms's junk art sculptures, drank wine and jammed all day.
J.P. also had a passion for the written word, and in 1958 he owned a bookstore in Portland, Oregon, “Days and Nights,” and carried many titles from Grove Press
, which was at that time embattled in court for distributing Henry Miller's works, among others. Later when he lived in Lagunitas
, (western Marin County) he worked at the Discovery bookstore in San Francisco. He loved to tell his friends about buying books from people who had just shoplifted them from the City Lights Bookstore
up the block.
J.P. embraced the philosophy put forth in Jan Yoor’s book, “The Gypsies.” That philosophy of total freedom of actions, of non-ownership of possessions, defined his adult life and was far more revolutionary than most people could deal with. His incredible generosity (he would give the shirt off his back if he saw the need, and did so frequently), his deep love for his family and friends, the heart-felt music he composed and played as naturally as he breathed, all speak of a man committed to his desire to live life fully and without restraints. J.P. had a rascally sense of humor, though; another story he loved to tell was of the Romany Gypsy family that lived in the flat above the Pickens in San Francisco in early 1963. The father of the family would go out at night with a crowbar and smash fenders on cars parked along the street, then come along the next morning to offer to do the bodywork repairs. J.P. thought this was hilarious and told the story often with great relish.
A restless, creative man, J.P. found it hard to settle down in any profession, and the family moved often. In 1963 they relocated to Lagunitas
, a small town located in western Marin County, California, into a house bought for the young family by J.P.’s parents. San Geronimo Valley was a sleepy, rural community, and in the late 1960s and early 1970s hippies and musicians were drawn to the beauty and lush charm of the area. For a short time both the Grateful Dead
and the band Big Brother and the Holding Company
lived in rustic summer houses or camps nearby. The Pickens house overflowed with hippies, visiting artists and musicians from the Quicksilver Messenger Service
, Electric Flag
and The Youngbloods
. The pastoral roads surrounding the house were filled with hippie families living in converted schoolbuses. Many of the young players in the local acid rock scene were fascinated with J.P.'s rapid fire banjo playing, fueled by his love for the east Indian music of Ravi Shankar
especially, and he would play raga-like extended compositions loosely based on old bluegrass
standards, on his banjo. Many jam sessions were held at the Lagunitas house, lost to posterity but still alive in the recorded psychedelic music of the time; David Meltzer has said his and J.P.'s attempts to fuse jazz, folk, bluegrass, east Indian and rock n roll were ahead of their time, helping to create a musical genre now highly prized, fondly called Marin County Raga Folk.
In February 1968 J.P. was set up by an acquaintance (who was looking to reduce his own jail sentence) to sell marijuana to an undercover police officer, and spent some time in jail. In 1969 their home in Lagunitas was lost to foreclosure when J.P.’s parents stopped paying the mortgage after J.P. refused to enter a mental health hospital for treatment for his addiction to methedrine. J.P. moved his family to the various houses of the commune of the Diggers/Free Family, which was highlighted in the popular book “Sleeping Where I Fall,” written by Peter Coyote
, published by Counterpoint in 1998.
J.P. died two days after falling out of a second story Tenderloin hotel window to escape the police coming in the hotel room door, intent on raiding an in-progress drug deal. The world lost a creative spirit on July 6, 1973.
As Peter Coyote
wrote in 1998, “It was not J.P.’s music, his adventurous spirit, his quest to live free and improvisationally, his fascination with “stuff”, nor mine, which exacted these exorbitant costs, it was drugs and our failures of character and will to refuse them. But we were young men, spending on credit, and the bill had not yet been presented, so, how were we to know?”
As David Meltzer
wrote of the friend whose loss he still mourns, “J.P. exuded such an abundance of the possible and succumbed to the impossibility of realizing it. He was a natural and gifted writer; a profound musician. Irregardless [sic] of the fuel, the drugs, they tapped into a core of creative energy that sought release, expression. We realize our prison only after we design it and move in.”
in 2004)
Serpent Power (Vanguard Records, 1968; reissued on CD in 1996)
Serpent Power "Ourobouros" (Locust Music
, 2007)
"When all else fails - do it the right way."
"Winds blowing through the grey day;
Clouds heavy, waiting for a chance to rain;
Dawn;
Mist off the canal, waters now still.
Will I find you there down among the reeds?
Are you waiting for me there in the still waters?
Are you glad to see me?
Sit down here beside me.
Let’s just listen to the music of the morning,
For soon we must be on our way."
-October, 1962
David Meltzer
David Meltzer is an American poet and musician of the Beat Generation and San Francisco Renaissance. Lawrence Ferlinghetti has described him as "one of the greats of post-World-War-Two San Francisco poets and musicians." Meltzer came to prominence with inclusion of his work in the anthology, The...
and James Gurley
James Gurley
James Gurley was an American musician. He is best known as the guitar player of Big Brother and the Holding Company, a psychedelic/acid rock band from San Francisco which was fronted by singer Janis Joplin from 1966 to 1968.-Early life:James Gurley was born in Detroit, Michigan on December 22, 1939...
, defining the psychedelic rock
Psychedelic rock
Psychedelic rock is a style of rock music that is inspired or influenced by psychedelic culture and attempts to replicate and enhance the mind-altering experiences of psychedelic drugs. It emerged during the mid 1960s among folk rock and blues rock bands in United States and the United Kingdom...
genre. J.P. played regularly at the Coffee Gallery on Grant Street in the early sixties, performing with Meltzer, Gurley and Peter Albin (who later formed Big Brother and the Holding Company
Big Brother and the Holding Company
Big Brother and the Holding Company is an American rock band that formed in San Francisco in 1965 as part of the same psychedelic music scene that produced the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service and Jefferson Airplane. They are best known as the band that featured Janis Joplin as their...
) and many others.
Music
J.P.’s electrified banjo playing on the raga-rock epic “The Endless Tunnel,” from David and Tina Meltzer’s album The Serpent Power, featuring their band of the same name, is a rare glimpse of an inspired creative force, and the album has become a collector’s item. 'The Serpent Power' was released on Vanguard RecordsVanguard Records
Vanguard Records is a record label set up in 1950 by brothers Maynard and Seymour Solomon in New York. It started as a classical label, but is perhaps best known for its catalogue of recordings by a number of pivotal folk and blues artists from the 1960s; the Bach Guild was a subsidiary...
in 1966, and is played on radio stations all over the country.
This album, The Serpent Power, was named number 28 of 40 Essential Albums of 1967, by Rolling Stone Magazine in a special Summer of Love issue, 2007, honoring the 40th anniversary of the founding of the magazine, with a special mention of the song J.P. plays on, "Endless Tunnel."
A recent review of the album by forcedexposure.com states “…the epic 13-minute-long 'Endless Tunnel,' an Eastern-tinged acid jam spiced up with an electric banjo, is worth the price of admission alone.”
J.P.’s first album, “Intensifications,” recorded with Gene Estribou in the ballroom-turned-recording studio of Gene’s San Francisco Haight Ashbury mansion in 1965, was originally released on Henry Jacobs
Henry Jacobs
Henry Sandy Jacobs is an American sound artist and humorist.Jacobs was born in Chicago, Illinois. After a tour in the Air Corps - during which time he acquired some broadcast experience, and graduation from the University of Chicago, he moved to Mexico City...
' MEA label, and was recently re-issued by Locust Music
Locust Music
Locust Music is a Chicago-based independent record label founded in 2001....
and has found an enthusiastic new audience.
Life
J.P. was born in Vernon, Texas, the only son of Paul Desmond and Lula Muriel Pickens. Barbara Sue, his older sister, was born in 1934. In 1948 the family moved to Los Angeles, California, where J.P. met his future wife, Mary Ann Bielat. J.P. and Mary Ann married in January 1955 and had three children, Kay Anne, born July 21, 1955 in Los Angeles, California, Cheryl Lynne, born December 29, 1956 in Los Angeles, California, and Paul Desmond, born August 10, 1959 in Portland,Oregon.J.P. and Mary Ann lived in the Los Angeles area early in their married life, and they became friends with Beat artists such as George Herms, Frank Stewart, Wallace Berman
Wallace Berman
Wallace Berman was an American visual and assemblage artist. He has been called the "father" of assemblage art and a "crucial figure in the history of postwar California art".-Personal life and education:...
and David and Tina Meltzer. J. P. loved music and the joy of creating it, and he loved all music: Ralph Stanley, Hank Williams, Lefty Frizzell, Billie Holiday, Doc Boggs, Mainer’s Mountaineers, Don Gibson, Jo Stafford, Lester Flatt & Earl Scruggs, The New Lost City Ramblers, Doc Watson, Charlie Parker, Lennie Tristano, Django Reinhardt, Mavis Staples, The HiLos, The Abyssinian Gospel Choir, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Jimi Hendrix, as well as Eddie Lang, Bix Beiderbecke, Robert Johnson, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Ray Charles and Howlin Wolf, just to name a few of the record albums he owned and listened to regularly. He had studied the piano and saxophone in a formal way, then picked up the guitar, finally settling on the banjo and learning to play bluegrass
Bluegrass music
Bluegrass music is a form of American roots music, and a sub-genre of country music. It has mixed roots in Scottish, English, Welsh and Irish traditional music...
, a genre that seemed to offer him joy and freedom.
J.P. was a complex, intelligent and highly creative individual, as well as a devoted family man, an artist and an accomplished musician, and was well-known for his fondness for collecting things. Anything and everything, wherever he went, he collected stuff. His obsession with collecting sprang from his belief that all objects were art, all objects have beauty and were worthy of standing alone as art or of disassembling and re-working to enhance the art inherent within. He had been inspired and influenced by his beatnik artist friends, and by the revolution in the art world earlier last century that produced the Dada/Anti-Art movement and the found-art philosophy of Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Considered by some to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century, Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art...
.
The family lived for a while in Topanga Canyon, and at the top of their driveway was a large garage, used by Frank Stewart as an art studio for his paintings, later becoming the site of a 1962 'Tap City Circus' art/ music party/happening, hosting a number of bluegrass and other musicians, who showed up, looked at the paintings and George Herms's junk art sculptures, drank wine and jammed all day.
J.P. also had a passion for the written word, and in 1958 he owned a bookstore in Portland, Oregon, “Days and Nights,” and carried many titles from Grove Press
Grove Press
Grove Press is an American publishing imprint that was founded in 1951. Imprints include: Black Cat, Evergreen, Venus Library, Zebra. Barney Rosset purchased the company in 1951 and turned it into an alternative book press in the United States. The Atlantic Monthly Press, under the aegis of its...
, which was at that time embattled in court for distributing Henry Miller's works, among others. Later when he lived in Lagunitas
Lagunitas, California
Lagunitas is an unincorporated community in Marin County, California. It is located southwest of Novato, at an elevation of 217 feet . For census purposes, Lagunitas is aggregated with Forest Knolls into the census-designated place Lagunitas-Forest Knolls.The first post office at Lagunitas opened...
, (western Marin County) he worked at the Discovery bookstore in San Francisco. He loved to tell his friends about buying books from people who had just shoplifted them from the City Lights Bookstore
City Lights Bookstore
City Lights is an independent bookstore-publisher combination that specializes in world literature, the arts, and progressive politics. It also houses the nonprofit City Lights Foundation, which publishes selected titles related to San Francisco culture. It was founded in 1953 by poet Lawrence...
up the block.
J.P. embraced the philosophy put forth in Jan Yoor’s book, “The Gypsies.” That philosophy of total freedom of actions, of non-ownership of possessions, defined his adult life and was far more revolutionary than most people could deal with. His incredible generosity (he would give the shirt off his back if he saw the need, and did so frequently), his deep love for his family and friends, the heart-felt music he composed and played as naturally as he breathed, all speak of a man committed to his desire to live life fully and without restraints. J.P. had a rascally sense of humor, though; another story he loved to tell was of the Romany Gypsy family that lived in the flat above the Pickens in San Francisco in early 1963. The father of the family would go out at night with a crowbar and smash fenders on cars parked along the street, then come along the next morning to offer to do the bodywork repairs. J.P. thought this was hilarious and told the story often with great relish.
A restless, creative man, J.P. found it hard to settle down in any profession, and the family moved often. In 1963 they relocated to Lagunitas
Lagunitas, California
Lagunitas is an unincorporated community in Marin County, California. It is located southwest of Novato, at an elevation of 217 feet . For census purposes, Lagunitas is aggregated with Forest Knolls into the census-designated place Lagunitas-Forest Knolls.The first post office at Lagunitas opened...
, a small town located in western Marin County, California, into a house bought for the young family by J.P.’s parents. San Geronimo Valley was a sleepy, rural community, and in the late 1960s and early 1970s hippies and musicians were drawn to the beauty and lush charm of the area. For a short time both the Grateful Dead
Grateful Dead
The Grateful Dead was an American rock band formed in 1965 in the San Francisco Bay Area. The band was known for its unique and eclectic style, which fused elements of rock, folk, bluegrass, blues, reggae, country, improvisational jazz, psychedelia, and space rock, and for live performances of long...
and the band Big Brother and the Holding Company
Big Brother and the Holding Company
Big Brother and the Holding Company is an American rock band that formed in San Francisco in 1965 as part of the same psychedelic music scene that produced the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service and Jefferson Airplane. They are best known as the band that featured Janis Joplin as their...
lived in rustic summer houses or camps nearby. The Pickens house overflowed with hippies, visiting artists and musicians from the Quicksilver Messenger Service
Quicksilver Messenger Service
Quicksilver Messenger Service is an American psychedelic rock band, formed in 1965 in San Francisco.-Introduction:Quicksilver Messenger Service gained wide popularity in the Bay Area and, through their recordings, with psychedelic rock enthusiasts around the globe and several of their albums ranked...
, Electric Flag
Electric Flag
The Electric Flag was a blues rock soul group, led by guitarist Mike Bloomfield, keyboardist Barry Goldberg and drummer Buddy Miles, and featuring other well-known musicians such as vocalist Nick Gravenites and bassist Harvey Brooks. Bloomfield formed the Electric Flag in 1967, following his stint...
and The Youngbloods
The Youngbloods
The Youngbloods was an American folk rock band consisting of Jesse Colin Young , Jerry Corbitt , Lowell Levinger, nicknamed "Banana," , and Joe Bauer . Despite receiving critical acclaim, they never achieved widespread popularity. Their only U.S. Top 40 entry was "Get Together".-Background and...
. The pastoral roads surrounding the house were filled with hippie families living in converted schoolbuses. Many of the young players in the local acid rock scene were fascinated with J.P.'s rapid fire banjo playing, fueled by his love for the east Indian music of Ravi Shankar
Ravi Shankar
Ravi Shankar , often referred to by the title Pandit, is an Indian musician and composer who plays the plucked string instrument sitar. He has been described as the best known contemporary Indian musician by Hans Neuhoff in Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart.Shankar was born in Varanasi and spent...
especially, and he would play raga-like extended compositions loosely based on old bluegrass
Bluegrass music
Bluegrass music is a form of American roots music, and a sub-genre of country music. It has mixed roots in Scottish, English, Welsh and Irish traditional music...
standards, on his banjo. Many jam sessions were held at the Lagunitas house, lost to posterity but still alive in the recorded psychedelic music of the time; David Meltzer has said his and J.P.'s attempts to fuse jazz, folk, bluegrass, east Indian and rock n roll were ahead of their time, helping to create a musical genre now highly prized, fondly called Marin County Raga Folk.
In February 1968 J.P. was set up by an acquaintance (who was looking to reduce his own jail sentence) to sell marijuana to an undercover police officer, and spent some time in jail. In 1969 their home in Lagunitas was lost to foreclosure when J.P.’s parents stopped paying the mortgage after J.P. refused to enter a mental health hospital for treatment for his addiction to methedrine. J.P. moved his family to the various houses of the commune of the Diggers/Free Family, which was highlighted in the popular book “Sleeping Where I Fall,” written by Peter Coyote
Peter Coyote
Peter Coyote is an American actor, author, director, screenwriter and narrator of films, theatre, television and audio books. His voice work includes narrating the opening ceremony of the 2002 Winter Olympics and Apple's iPad campaign. He has also served as on-camera co-host of the 2000 Oscar...
, published by Counterpoint in 1998.
J.P. died two days after falling out of a second story Tenderloin hotel window to escape the police coming in the hotel room door, intent on raiding an in-progress drug deal. The world lost a creative spirit on July 6, 1973.
As Peter Coyote
Peter Coyote
Peter Coyote is an American actor, author, director, screenwriter and narrator of films, theatre, television and audio books. His voice work includes narrating the opening ceremony of the 2002 Winter Olympics and Apple's iPad campaign. He has also served as on-camera co-host of the 2000 Oscar...
wrote in 1998, “It was not J.P.’s music, his adventurous spirit, his quest to live free and improvisationally, his fascination with “stuff”, nor mine, which exacted these exorbitant costs, it was drugs and our failures of character and will to refuse them. But we were young men, spending on credit, and the bill had not yet been presented, so, how were we to know?”
As David Meltzer
David Meltzer
David Meltzer is an American poet and musician of the Beat Generation and San Francisco Renaissance. Lawrence Ferlinghetti has described him as "one of the greats of post-World-War-Two San Francisco poets and musicians." Meltzer came to prominence with inclusion of his work in the anthology, The...
wrote of the friend whose loss he still mourns, “J.P. exuded such an abundance of the possible and succumbed to the impossibility of realizing it. He was a natural and gifted writer; a profound musician. Irregardless [sic] of the fuel, the drugs, they tapped into a core of creative energy that sought release, expression. We realize our prison only after we design it and move in.”
Recordings
Intensifications (MEA, 1965; reissued on CD by Locust MusicLocust Music
Locust Music is a Chicago-based independent record label founded in 2001....
in 2004)
Serpent Power (Vanguard Records, 1968; reissued on CD in 1996)
Serpent Power "Ourobouros" (Locust Music
Locust Music
Locust Music is a Chicago-based independent record label founded in 2001....
, 2007)
Quotes & Poems
“No man can speak to God for me, nor can he describe the joy I see….”"When all else fails - do it the right way."
"Winds blowing through the grey day;
Clouds heavy, waiting for a chance to rain;
Dawn;
Mist off the canal, waters now still.
Will I find you there down among the reeds?
Are you waiting for me there in the still waters?
Are you glad to see me?
Sit down here beside me.
Let’s just listen to the music of the morning,
For soon we must be on our way."
-October, 1962