If you haven’t viewed “Marin’s Rock Art Scene” at MarinMOCA, you have plenty of time to do so because the show is up through November 8 (a live panel discussion with Jay Blakesberg, Paul Liberatore, Dave Getz, and Jonathan Korty is scheduled for September 30). A few of us from TRPS stopped by the other day; you should too!
For those of us who grew up in Marin, the exhibition of posters, photographs, and original art is sure to trigger a memory or two. In my case, none of my memories made it to the walls of MarinMOCA, but that’s really only because too much happened in Marin when I was a kid for any one exhibition to capture it all.
For example, I will never forget the first time I saw Big Brother and the Holding Company play on May 7, 1967, at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Terra Linda, or even the second time on October 28 later that year, when they performed outdoors with the Youngbloods and a few other groups at the beach club where my parents used to take us to swim and play tennis. That got me thinking about the Euphoria (before it was renamed Pepperland) and the show I saw in 1970 when Janis showed up to sing a few tunes with Pigpen a night or so before they hauled Owsley off to jail.
Cut to high school, which many of us spent at the Lion’s Share in San Anselmo. Was anyone else at that Clover show when Alex Call went to the mic after their first set to ask if we’d mind if Van Morrison and his band played a few tunes? No one minded, and so Morrison and company proceeded to play three-chord blues numbers for about an hour. And who saw Jorma and Jack perform electric Hot Tuna without a drummer at the same venue, playing so loud and ferociously that their precarious speaker stacks toppled over at least twice?
Oh wait, I almost forgot to mention the time a few of us were in Prune Music in Mill Valley checking out the guitars when John Cipollina wandered in. We put down our instruments as one of the true guitar gods of the psychedelic ’60s tried out a few, filling the store with his signature sound. Our private concert lasted only a few minutes before he wandered out again, but the memory has lasted all these years.
So yeah, check it out!
