Marin’s Rock Art Scene at Marin MOCA

Marin’s Rock Art Scene

If San Francisco, with Golden Gate Park and the Haight Ashbury district, epitomized the 1967 Summer of Love and the West Coast hippie scene, arguably that movement was in fact born a year earlier and farther north in Marin County. At least that is the premise of the current exhibition at the Marin MOCA in Novato. The exhibition was inspired by MOCA director Nancy Rehkopf’s photograph of Janis Joplin , a gift from photographer Herb Green. It captures Joplin in a playful mood wearing a top hat at a jaunty angle, dark jacket over paisley dress, a big grin on her face. This image seems the key to the whole exhibition, evoking the summer of 1966—a time when Janis was living in West Marin’s Lagunitas while writing songs for Big Brother and the Holding Company’s iconic “Cheap Thrills” album.

In conjunction with the exhibition, and adding some important background color, a virtual panel discussion was held hosted by Marin IJ’s longtime rock columnist Paul Liberatore, including recollections and thoughts from Dave Getz, Jay Blakesberg, and Jonathan Korty. Getz, Big Brother’s drummer, also has a maintained a commitment to his visual art practice over the years. Before joining the band, he not only painted but taught art at the San Francisco Art Institute. Getz brings the summer of 1966 to life with intimate details of communal life with Janis and Big Brother, how she not only “had the nicest room” in the former hunting cottage in Lagunitas, but that her decorating revealed “a feminine side, she put up little quilts and things like that.” He also recalls that she had a brief but touching love affair with Dead member Pigpen, who like Janis kept his sweet and vulnerable nature camouflaged behind a tough exterior. Getz’s large-scale black and white collage Why Love is Like a Ball and Chain (1999) captures Joplin in a variety of dramatic poses many of which reveal her darker side.

While Big Brother was tucked away in Lagunitas, the Grateful Dead, originally a Palo Alto band called The Warlocks, had migrated north to Novato. They rented a summer villa called Rancho Olompali, on the site of a former Miwok village. The seeds of the band’s enthusiastic, large, and fanatical following of Deadheads can be seen in a riveting group of six intimate photographs shot by Herb Greene. The photographer primary covered fashion shoots at the time, and almost hadn’t thought to bring a camera when invited to the party. Jerry Garcia at Rancho Olompali (1966) reveals a beardless, somewhat bleary Garcia sporting shaggy Prince Valiant hair, arms crossed, a lanyard on his bare torso. Party Goers at Olompali (1966) portrays scantily-clad revelers, a telling glimpse into this outdoor concert that presages Woodstock in it’s revolutionary combination of music, drugs, and nudity. The Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick reveals long hair, blotchy skin, and an intense look behind dramatically arched sunglasses. These candid images convey the newness of the experience, an optimism and innocence when free love and psychedelic drugs fueled a time of unbridled ecstasy and adventure for the nation’s counterculture youth…at least until it all went south with too many victims of drugs and other abuse ending with broken dreams.

Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelley, premier rock poster artists, also made their home in the county. A sweet image from 1965 features a sepia-toned Pooh and Piglet seen walking down a path to advertise an outdoor concert featuring Joan Baez, the Grateful Dead, and others. This image is found as you walk down the hall through a small section called “Women of Rock” paying homage to Joplin, Grace Slick, Bonnie Raitt, sisters Joan Baez and Mimi Farina, and others. Baez, who has given up touring and is now focusing her creative energy on painting, presents two images of her sister Farina, along with a spare and acerbic portrait of David Crosby.

Jay Blakesberg presents eleven photos, he captures the Grateful Dead in two black and white concert photos from 1978 and 79. In one, Bobby Weir struts his stuff while strumming the guitar, eyes closed in a blissful rapture as Micky Rourke on drums scowls. Blakesberg recounted early years of his “misspending his days on sex, drugs, and rock and roll” while honing his craft as a consummate rock photographer.

He also presents another of the most engaging images in the show, Sammy Hagar (1989). Marin’s Red Rocker, who was lead singer of Van Halen 1985-86. He captures the singer in mid-air, poised above a red mountain bike on a hillside overlooking Golden Gate Bridge, his prolific mane of hair flying straight up. Liberatore asked Blakesberg how he got Sammy to jump, he laughed and replied this was Sammy Hagar, you just had to say jump and he did it!” adding “nowadays you’d probably be arrested” for performing such a stunt on the fragile Marin Headlands.

Ashleigh Sumner’s I See No Changes (2018) mixed-media work featuring Tupac Shakur ties in to the current climate of social protest and the Black Lives Matter movement. Shakur, who attended Tam High, is seen bald and shirtless on a field of red rosebuds. Riot police menacing a protester, hooded klansmen, accompany text “NO ONE TAKING THE BLAME” Text runs vertically along Shakur’s body read “I just want you to know I can see through your masks.” Knowing the tragic end of Shakur’s life, a victim of gun violence, adds a very somber note to the work.

In the final room Poster Art of the 1960s captures a bit more of the colorful, hallucinatory flavor of Bay Area scene of that era. Visionary poster artists Stanley Mouse, Alton Kelley, Rick Griffin, Victor Moscoso, Wes Wilson, and Bonnie MacLean all called Marin home at one time or another. Wall text refers to a coded language in the psychedelic cryptic text—the interlocking text engages the viewer while breaking all the standard rules of good poster design, legibility from a distance being a key one.

Mouse and Kelley’s Skeleton and Rose (1966) print on vellum for a Grateful Dead concert poster is a highlight. The skeleton was inspired by illustration in 12^th century Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. This image later appears on the 1971 album “Grateful Dead” also known as the skulls and roses album. It remains one of the most iconic in the rock poster history.

David Singer’s New Year’s Eve-Bill Graham Presents (1970) presents stylized font in crimson red on sky blue advertising two New Year’s Eve shows in 1970. One was held at Filmore West, the other at Winterland. Tickets for either show were $5.00. The last time I bought a ticket for a live performance, the ticket fee alone was several times that amount.

We may all look at the hippie era, and the so-called Summer of Love, through rose-colored glasses, viewing it as an idyllic time when peace and love prevailed, and getting high and grooving on the scene were the order of the day. For many who were the right age and demographic, that was in fact the way things were, for a while. If racial and gender discrimination still prevailed, at least cracks had been etched into the walls of systemic racism and sexism. Like the music of the time, the counterculture movement borrowed from many traditions and cultures, blues with folk, acid rock with country or bluegrass. As Jonathan Korty, the youngest of those on the panel reflected, “it all came out of blues music…then they all took acid, and it turned into something else entirely.” The influx of drugs was intrinsic to the scene and the era, enhancing the magic and the highs of the spectacle and the sound. But for many, this idyllic journey was sadly derailed. Ultimately, “Marin’s Rock Art Scene” is a tightly focused blast from a psychedelic past, several gems of photographs and the iconic posters from the era making it a trip worth taking.

Barbara Morris

Last weekend for “Marin’s Rock Art Scene”! Open Saturday and Sunday Nov 7 and 8 11 am – 5 pm.

marinmoca.org