Berkeley. Site of the University of California. Home of thousands and thousands of young people who, for the most part, are exactly the same kind of young people you find on any campus — more specifically any California campus. It is possible to drive down Fraternity Row even this far into the Age of Aquarius and hear the old beer parties and gangbangs taking place, although those with strong olfactory abilities will also detect herbifumaceous activities — albeit covert ones — taking place in the immediate area.

There is a tremendous amount of energy in Berkeley, perhaps because of the youthfulness of its average residents, and thus events there can be seen to be invested with all manner of Deeper Significance. Because the energy is in large part free-floating, qauses come to be supported with uncommon zeal, and this has led many people to suppose that The Very Revolution has already started in Berkeley, little realizing that the bodies that put themselves on the line during demonstrations have their energies drained by court cases, long meetings at which ideology and even more

unreal matters are discussed, and the failure of the world to grant the demands Right Now. For every fifty bodies in a demonstration, probably only about ten are affected in any meaningful way by the whole thing.

There are many ways to use up this free-floating energy that have nothing (or little) to do with advancing the Revolution, though, and there is no campus in the country where so many of the more bizarre of these ways is more in evidence than Berkeley. Totalitarian religion (or pseudo-religion) is big on campus, and dancing to the veritable orchestra of conga drums in Sproul Plaza (but keep your clothes on) uses up incredible amounts of energy. Picking up beercans in the name of Ecology is quite tiring. And, of course, there is the usual gamut of campus bull-sessions, pot parties (does anybody still call them pot parties?), classes and exams and the rest.

Of course, the energy generated in Berkeley finds its expression in the acts of all of the town’s citizens. The Berkeley Panthers have been in the forefront for practically the life of the Party, the Berkeley Town Council

opposes left-wing-type ideas with incredible vigor, the liberals in town are so liberal that they might stand as prototypes for their kind all over the country, Berkeley cops are some of the nastiest in the world, and instead of approaching you with a meek “Spare change?”, the Berkeley street person will lay a rap on you about how he deserves ten bucks, mothafucka.

Now, Berkeley is right across the Bay Bridge from San Francisco, and you may remember that San Francisco, a while back, was the place where a whole lot of rock and roll happened, mainly in 1966, which led to the establishment of large rock ballrooms to hold all the people who were coming to see the shows, and pretty soon the whole shot mushroomed way outa shape and you had this whole fucked-up scene with overpriced entertainment of mediocre quality being presented in a large hall that was packed to about 175% of its legal capacity with all kinds of people openly using drugs and stealing purses, pushing and crowding the stage, fighting with each other and generally making it impossible to attend to the overpriced entertainment of mediocre quality. Let alone dance.

Well-’people who were hip to energy couldn’t take San Francisco anymore. Wotta energy drain just to hear the band! And you couldn’t dance at all, and if you live somewhere that’s not in the San Francisco area or you’re 18 Or under, you may find it incredible that anyone ever danced, but take it from me they did and there are still a lot of people who like to do it ' but they . can’t. do it at home,. because the needle of the record player won’t stay put when they do so they gotta go out and work it on out to a live band.

So these people started looking for alternatives, and the alternatives, basically boiled down to you got two sides of the Bay, and one side is Marin County, where everybody is so laid back that they don’t dance much because Marin just kinda sneaks up on you and stones you when you’re not looking, and the other Side is Berkeley (land Oakland and Richmond and so on, but that’s pretty unfriendly turf for the most part).. But since Berkeley Had all this free-floating energy anyway, it would seem to be a perfect spot for all this, and, in fact, there might even be bands there, bands that 'wouldn’t play the Fillmore because they were parasitic bands (not at.’all a bad term) who depended on a dancing audience as a host organism, feeding off their energy in’ order to produce the music to make the audience produce more energy to make the band go to its very outer limits to produce more energy so that the audience could go home exhausted, saying “whew, that sure was a good band — I danced till I dropped. Sure does feel good, though.” For this kind of expenditure of energy makes one strong and able to produce even more energy next time you need to.

Also, getting drunk has something to do with all this.

/ Now, marijuana, and its close cpusins hashish and kif, is all very well ahd good, and a good argument might be made (although I never seemed to be able to make one when I was trying) to the effect that if everybody ih the world smoked marijuana things itvould be all peaceluvnflahrs. True enough, but I got my suspicions that all the music would wind up sounding (ike all that Marin County acoustic stuff — pretty innocuous. On the other 'hand, we have alcohol. Unlike marijuana, which temporarily changes certain chemicals in the body’s makeup, alcohol is a form of poison. According to my Driver Training Handbook, it works on the central

nervous system, decreases reaction time, and dissolves the super-ego, which, in classic psychiatric terminology, is that part of, the personality that rides herd on the ego and keeps it in check. In other words, it releases inhibitions, allows one to cut loose, raise hell, and allow a pfetty much undifferentiated flow of desires and fantasies to stalk across the mind’s broad horizon. It fills one with an illusion of undiminished and undiminishing sources of energy inherent in oneself, and causes one to Shake One’s Thing with unaccustomed vehemence. All of this might be construed as the Life Force asserting itself over the body’s having been poisoned by the intake of . these awful alcohols and fusil oils (the impurities that give you hangovers). Or maybe not:

But one thing is certain. Bands that drink like to play for people who drink, and people who drink like to listen to or dance to bands that drink and play! The energy-exchange levels get pretty incredible in ' those dimly-lit halls — especially in Berkeley,

Now a bit of autobiography. I never barhopped. When I lived in New York, I spent a lot of time inveighing against people who drank, claiming that such people were unworthy of enlightenment, and even if they were to find enlightenment, they’d probably think it was something else. Drinkers were the Puerto Ricans on the block, who drank and had fierce knife-fights, instead of organizing to fight off the common oppressor. Unless, of course, they were addicted to amphetamines ^ in which case they were even lower than the drinkers. My girlfriends’s father would drink now and again, and I respected him, so I had to find a rationalization, which meant some rather tricky intellectual footwork. The rationalization (just for the record) was that he had certainly paid his dues (he admitted to having smoked pot once or twice, I believe, back in the ’30’s) and that he, unlike other people, got the same effect from liquor that the rest of us got from dope.

I was pretty young —just 18, and old enough for New York State, but too young to know a good thing when I had it (the same applied, it developed, to the girlfriend), and so my days in New York were not spent barhopping, or even excercising my legal rights to buy liquor. No, they were spent dissipating my energy into clouds of marijuana smoke, so much so that when I returned one day to find the apartment robbed, the most that I could do was shake in fear and say

“Far out.”

Anyway, from there I went to Ohio, to a small town where, even though there were two bars, you couldn’t barhop, because' you. were welcome at one (mainly black,' non-campus hip, and a small student minority), and not at the other (honky white!, non-campus non-hip, conservative students in large part;). One bar had Clifton Chenier and “Crawl Out Your Window” on the jukebox, the other had $tan Getz and Rosemary Clooney. Both bars had NO DANCING signs up, though. Dunno why, but you can’t dance, in Ohio barrooms.

. So when I moved out to San Francisco and discovered that you coUld have yer cake and drink it t.oo, I went wild. As it developed, the places where all this happened were in Berkeley (except for the ill-fated S:F, Troubador — a nice try, but everbody knew it was doomed when ham hocks appeared in the organic vegetarian soup), and there seemed to be a free-floating bunch of bands that played the Berkeley bar circuit, bands that, for the most part, I’d never heard of because they’d never played the Fillmore and didn’t have record labels.

I figured that with no label and no gigs at the big halls, they must not have been much good, but I noticed that among these bands was Commander Cody, so that theory fell through. No, these bands really didn’t want to play Graham’s Ghetto, they didn’t dig watching kids keel over from o.d.’s of reds. They wanted a live, alive audience, one which would feed them, whoop and holler, carry on, and provide the best possible feedback. They wanted an audience that could forgive a wrong note as long as the beat kept up, one that would dance because it couldn’t help itself.

Naturally, I fell in love with the whole scene. My fear of rock and roll’s imminent death faded as it became apparent that the patient had gotten his second wind. Northern Californian High Energy Rock And Roll hadn’t vanished — it’d just moved across the bay.

Of the clubs I’ve been to over there, my supreme favorite (and the favorite of most of the bands I know) is Mandrake’s. I haven’t the slightest idea who Mandrake is (the owner is one Mary Moore), but this club feels like home. It’s real easy to get to, in case you’re unfamiliar with the area — you just get off the freeway at the University Avenue exit, drive three blocks, and you’re there. You walk in, pass the bar, and you start to marvel at the way the tables are placed. In direct contrast to every single other club I’ve been in, the tables are big enough, there’s plenty of room, and you can see the stage from everywhere. One wall has a bunch of psychedelic-Op paintings and the other has old notices from past weekends. The entertainment at Mandrake’s is really diverse, running through blues from Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee to the Muddy Waters Band, jazz giants like Theolonius Monk *and Ornette Coleman, and of course, the usual assortment of East Bay bands, living and dead.

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Somehow, a gig at Mandrakes’s makes an artist really stretch out. The first time I went there, I saw Lightnin’ Hopkins. I wasn’t too enthused, because back in my New York folkie days I had seen him several times, and he seemed more intent on shucking the white audience than playing anthing. He’d mumble something into the mike and then chunk away at an E chord for about twenty minutes. We were all baffled, but we applauded because Sing Out! had told us that he was Authentic. But at Mandrak'e’s, Lightnin’ really turned it all on. To begin with, there was a sizeable

number of blacks from neighboring towns, mainly old blacks, because they’re the only ones who still listen to anything as old fashioned as blues. I had the luck to be seated next to a table with one of these couples at it, and every now and again the woman would go off to the bathroom, which is located just to the left of the stage, and when she* came out she’d hapg around the side of the stage, waving at Lightnin’. Her husband would then get up and bring her back, but he wasn’t mad at her at all — he was having J good time too. In between sets, we conversed. He was interested in why we liked the blues, and he was really pleased when we couldn’t explain it. His wife told us that Lightnin’ would be coming to the table real soon, she just knew it, because her sister had married his second cousin, and they were practically kinfolk. And sure enough, he did come over to the table, chatted with them awhile, and headed back towards the stage, saying “Having a good time boys?” as he passed the table I was at. It was a rhetorical juestion, requiring no answer, but at least it showed that Lightnin’ had learned to accept long hair at Berkeley. Once, back in 1965, he had dedicated his next song “to that pretty blonde in the front row,” which caused some mutual embarrasment — especially for Lightnin’ when he saw “her” mustache.

As is usually the case, I remembered very little of what Lightnin’ sang that night. I do remember that his fingers fairly flew over the guitar neck, and I remembered one of his raps. “I’m gonna join the police force,” he said, “and you’re gonna be drivin’ down the freeway when you see that light flashin’ in your rear view mirror, so you pull over to the side, and I come out of the cop car, and I say ’Lemme see your license and registration and — is that a bottle of wine over there on the seat?’ and you say ‘Oh, no, no,’ and I say ‘Well then you’re under arrest!”’

Of course, the stretching out, unloosening process that goes on with performers at Mandrake’s can be disastrous, as with one band that seems to play there pretty often, the Loading Zone. The Loading Zone is a “soul” band with an organ, bass, drums, guitar, and a 400-pound black chick singer named Linda Tillery. They had one egregious album out on RCA a few years back, and then Linda teamed up with A1 Kooper, who produced a solo album for her under the name of Sweet Linda Devine. Surely one of the loudest, dullest bands in existence, one must be truly dedicated to dancing and

drinking *aiid especially the latter) to survive one of their sets. Once when I was at Mandrake’s, there was a sign announcing COMING SOON — THE LOADING ZONE AND THE MANSON FAMILY. I dunno exactly what it meant, but it made sense nonetheless. The Crabs are another East Bay band that people tell me I’m lucky never to have seen. All I know is that they sure provoke a lot of debate on Mandrake’s bathroom walls.

Perhaps the most representative East Bay band is the Joy of Cooking. The individuals involved in it have been Berkeleyites for a long time. Vocalist/pianist Toni Brown has been singing locally for years, and with her almost-Bluegrass group, Crabgrass, got a space on a Folkways record some years back. Congaist (congist? conga player, at any rate) Ron Carter was a student of classical music at UC Berkeley, and the other members are as much a part of the town as the phallic Campanile, the bell-tower which dominates the campus. “We like to .think df Mandrake’s as our home,” said vocalist/guitarist Terri Garthwaite at the recent press party there to celebrate the release of their Capitol album, and it sure shows in the way they play there and the way the audience feeds back to them. The band played their first gig there, and not at People’s Park, as I had thought when I wrote the review of their album, but they did play at the dedicatory ceremonies at the Park, a gig which Carter still remembers as “one of our finest moments.” It must have been a fine performance, because when you see the Joy you realize that there are fine moments aplenty in their music. And, in the finest East Bay tradition, the Joy held out before signing a contract for the longest while — until they got a deal that would assure them that they’d get what they thought they deserved. In the end, it worked out just fine for all concerned, and they have a superlative record out now, which is getting all the push it can get from the record company, but the right kind of push, which is all too rare.

One great thing about the Joy of Cooking’s performances is that they never have to go through the seemingly obligatory routine of “This tune’s for dancing, so if anybody feels like it ...” On occasion, they might have to worry about all the frenzied dancers’ health, but if they do they never verbalize their concern. The Joy’s following is one of the largest and most devoted in the entire East Bay, and they have carefully nurtured this following by making plenty of appearences in parks and at benefits to show that they care (and they do — Toni, at least, has been involved in Berkeley causes since the early days of the FSM), and the people respond by paying to see the band when they want to have a good time. Yeah, when the Joy of Cooking is playing Mandrake’s, you better get there early if you want a seat. Not that you’ll be sitting in it long, but you gotta have a place to put your beer .

There is one band that has become a Berkeley favorite even though they’re from out of town — out of state, even

and that’s Commander Cody. Since they run theif affairs in much the same way, Cody’s boys and the Joy have become good friends, and together on a double bill their contrasting musical styles fit into a nice opposition. Cody has gotten tight - tighter than ever, in the past couple of months — and the Joy is loose and flowing. The Joy will build the energy up inside you, and leave the stage, at which time Cody will take it and make you let the energy out with a whoop. When you’re exhausted, Cody’s set will be over, and the process starts again.

I guess one of the reasons that Cody feels so good about Berkeley is that it is much the same in a lot of ways as Ann Arbor, where they started. The same people like the same music, they get just as incensed at outrageous ticket prices (admission at Mandrakes’s is seldom more than $2,50), and of course, both are huge college towns near a large city. Cody still isn’t quite your typical California band, though, a subject I discussed at some length a couple issues back, (Commander Cody in California, CREEM, Vol. 3, No. 4Ed.)

But what do you do on the nights when Mandrake’s is featuring a double bill of the Loading Zone and the Crabs? Well, there’s one more club in town that’s just as friendly (well, almost, anyway), and which offers more of the same kind of entertainment, with an emphasis on more unknown bands. Down on San Pablo Avenue, located across the street from a huge Cadillac dealership on a block with electronics warehouses and dry-cleaning joints, is the New Orleans House, Why they chose to call it that, I don’t know, although a former resident of New Orleans has conjectured that it might have something to do with a wrought-iron railing in front of it. Inside, it’s much bigger than Mandrake’s, and, unlike Mandrake’s, it offers food and a wide variety of non-alcoholic drinks in addition to the regular beer-and-wine fare. The dance floor is bigger, and the

acoustics are kind of weird, but all in all, it’s a pretty fine place.

The first time I went to the New Orleans House was to see a band that I had first seen at Mandrake’s, where they Were auditioning, to be told never to come back because they were “too loud.” This was patent bullshit. The real reason was that they were from Sacramento. The band, Redwing, has been in the game a long time, from the time they were the New Breed (they even had an album out under that name back in ’66 or so) .doing psychedelic Sacramento interpretations of surfing music, and they were used to such treatment in the Big City. Part of the whole San Francisco chauvinism trip is that when it comes to bands, they’ll take care of their own, and if there’s any left over, why then outsiders pan take what they need. With such a limited number of places for decent exposure, though, the boys have done a whole lot of scuffling, but in the end. it's done them well, because they signed a huge lucrative contract with Fantasy Records, and by the time you read this, they may well be riding the charts in your very town with their killer first single. But when 1 went to see them, none of this good fortune had been, descended on their heads yet, and they were still very humble, pouring put their very best music for largely (at first) unappreciative audiences. It is to the credit of the New Orleans House that they’d hire Redwing when no one else would, because it was there that the Fantasy people finally decided they wanted them.

Redwing’s music is a lot like the Band’s, except it has a bit more gutsiness. One of their unique features is that they have a steel guitarist, but not a pedal steel. This instrument is like a table with two levels to it. each level having an eight^string neck. There are no left-foot pedals, but there is a volume pedal, and this is the kind of axe. that Hank Williams had in his band. The way Redwing's steel player plays it, though, it bears no resemblance to country music, but rather takes over the function of a super-sophisticated bottleneck or slide guitar. Anyway, they’re good, real good.

Another group that plays the New Orleans House is Grootna. Don't ask me where Grootna got it name, but it’s a decided improvement over Sky Blue, which was the band’s name before it reshuffled slightly. Sky Blue got to make musical history in the Last Bay a while back by lending some of its members to the Masked Marauders' recording session, which, by dint of

the energy needed to make it comie off well, could only have happened where it did — in Berkeley. Anyway, Sky Blue at one time had a lady drummer, so they made her the lead singer and she never quite made the grade. The latest breakup of Country Joe’s Fish left drummer Greg Dewey without a band, and when the reshuffle.was over and the dust cleared, there he was with Sky Blue, only now it was Grootna. Dewey came from Ohio with Mad River, a truly arcane rock band that was doomed from its inception, which I guess everybody in the band knew. Mad River would have been avante-garde if they’d had the technical ability, but they didn’t, so they would have been better off with the Dewey brand of funk that came out so well in "Revolution’s In My Pockets,” a song on their Last;album. Paradise Par and (trill,

Grootna is a very young band it started last last year — and they have a way to go, but it’s not a very long way. For one thing, Dewey is a super-fine drummer, tasteful, with the almostunheard-of ability to play the drums, rather than just bash them. Their lead singer, Anna Rizzo, is kind of a. grittier version of one of my favorite singers, Julie Driscoll, who kind of got overlooked way back when she was still recording. I’ll be curious to hear what their album sounds like — they’ve just signed with Atlantic, after living for awhile on front money from a friend of theirs who has bailed out of the aircraft he helped build after it got hijacked by some real bourgie elitist revolutionaries.

Of course. I haven't hit every club in town yet I've only been living out here a . year so there's still the New Monk, which 1 understand is. a plastic suburban discotheque, even though it features some killer entertainment on occasion, and Freight and Salvage, which is predominantly an acoustic folk club, featuring a band called Frontier which is supposed to be good (my old teenage idol Mark Spoelstra is in it) and there are probably a couple of other places I don’t even know about yet. live thing is. I happen to live in Marin (aunty, and I’m unaccustomed to (much as I like it, y 'unnerst.and) the Berkeley energy rush. But if there's one thing that the past twelvemonths have proven to me, it's that that good bid warm feeling 1 Used to get from rock and roll is still available if I want it (and 1 do! I do!), and if you've been feeling a need for it yourself, then, hopefully, this article has tolil'you where it's available. Of course, if you don't live on this coast, you still have a search ahead of you unless you move. But the search is part of the fun. right?