Guitarist Robben Ford: A musician's musician

For a performer Musician magazine named one of the 100 greatest guitarists of the last century, Robben Ford isn't as famous as he has every right to be.

For whatever reason, he's one of those unsung musicians' musicians overshadowed by the likes of John Mayer and Eric Clapton, the top-hatted Slash and the other celebrity guitar slingers.

Along with Larry Carlton, though, Ford is the most talented and yet underrated jazz-rock fusion players in the business. A four-time Grammy nominee, he's played with some of music's heaviest hitters - Miles Davis and Joni Mitchell, for starters, plus George Harrison, blues giant Jimmy Witherspoon, Michael McDonald, and Marin's own Bonnie Raitt and Phil Lesh.

Audio: Robben Ford - Supernatural

I have a memory of him that has stuck in my mind for years. I was backstage at the San Francisco Blues Festival when I heard a guitarist playing the hell out of a slow blues tune. I didn't know who it was at first because I was unable to see the bandstand from where I was sitting.

Across from me, an older blues cat who obviously knew his stuff was as rapt as I was, swept away by what we later learned was a transporting Ford guitar solo. When the final tasteful note died out, we made eye contact, smiled and nodded in appreciation. We didn't have to say a word. We knew we'd just been taken to a place only a handful of musicians could have taken us.

Ford last played here in February on a bill with Jorma Kaukonen and Ruthie Foster in the 2,000-seat Marin Veterans Memorial Auditorium.

On June 13, he returns for a mostly acoustic show in the intimate 142 Throckmorton Theatre in Mill Valley. His wife, singer Anne Kerry Ford, opens.

"It's the perfect place for us to do something kind of unique," he said, speaking from his home in Ojai, a Southern California haven for musicians, artists and health enthusiasts.

The 57-year-old singer-songwriter-guitarist said the Mill Valley show will be "a little more jazz oriented and song oriented" than his straight-up blues or rock concerts with his power trio.

He'll be singing what he calls his "more subtle songs," namely "Don't Lose Your Faith in Me" and "If" from his 1999 album "Supernatural." It's all part of his campaign to mix music up, to keep it creative and eclectic.

Raised in Ukiah, Ford came of age during the era of the San Francisco Sound, admiring Marin blues guitarists Michael Bloomfield and Elvin Bishop from the Paul Butterfield Band.

"When I grew up, I used to see the most incredible combinations of bands at the Fillmore and Winterland in the '60s," he recalled. "You'd see a jazz act, then Ten Years After and then Iron Butterfly. No one minded that there was this diversity."

Ford is working on presenting a series of diverse shows like the ones Bill Graham used to put together in those freewheeling ballroom days.

"There are a lot of great artists who don't get heard because they're pigeonholed, and that's just nonsense," he said. "I'm irked by that. There are people in the music industry saying you can't do this or you can't do that. But I like doing a variety of things."

That's for sure. I asked him about some of the legends he's played with in his wide-ranging career.

Miles Davis: "That was a crowning moment. I played with Miles when I was 34 or 35, then I left the band. I could have stayed with him for God knows how long because he really liked me. He loved my playing and we got along well.

"But the situation around him was an unhealthy scene. I don't mean drugs, but it was a shame to feel the need to leave. It was incredible to make a connection with probably the most important figure in music, at least to me. I still listen to him more than any single artist. At first when I left, he was angry with me. But the last thing he said was, 'If you want to come back, come back.'"

Joni Mitchell: "She was at the peak of her powers when I played with her in the L.A. Express. The 'Court and Spark' record is insanely great, and 'The Hissing of Summer Lawns' leans more to the dark side. They're yin and yang records. And I got to be there for them, to tour with her and make a live record. It was a privilege to work with the greatest artist of the 20th century in pop music. But I split. I wanted to make my own records. I was young and stupid to think like that. But I did two tours with her and two records, and then everybody kind of moved on."

George Harrison: "It was a great experience to play with one of the Beatles. Who would have thought? I met him in London after a Joni Mitchell concert and he invited me to go on his 'Dark Horse' tour.

"But it was a strange situation. We were doing two shows a day sometimes and they were 31Ú2 hours long. We had a huge cast of characters with Ravi Shankar and a 16-piece Indian orchestra. We'd be in these enormous sports arenas for 16 hours a day. It was relentless. There were a lot of drugs around, so it wasn't the most pleasurable experience, but George was generous and sweet to me. It was the only tour he ever did with his band, but he didn't like being a bandleader. I saw him years later and he said, 'I think of you, Robin.' Wow, George Harrison thinking of me? That was the last time I saw him."

Shortly after the tour with Harrison, Ford took a much-needed break from the grind of the road and spent a year in Colorado, studying under the controversial Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa, known for the "crazy wisdom" he imparted on his Western followers.

While Ford has never lived in Marin, he should feel right at home in a county with the Spirit Rock Meditation Center and the Green Gulch Farm Zen Center.

"He (Trungpa) taught us to look at our own mind and not look at outside forces for our own personal happiness and well being," he explained. "All of us were trying to turn spirituality into a drug or a lover. But he was relentless in cutting through that kind of a view and getting people to be honest with themselves. It had a powerful impact on everyone in those days. And it still does."

Sweet Deal for Sweetwater?

I had the pleasure of speaking to a community group last week about Marin's rock history. Afterward, the first question from the audience was about Sweetwater. What's going on with the long-closed club in Mill Valley? Is one of Marin's rock 'n' roll institutions ever going to reopen?

Good question. The owners of Sweetwater have been vowing to reopen since they lost their lease and shut down the original club in September 2007 after 37 years on Throckmorton Avenue.

That was more than 1/2 years ago. It looked hopeful when a banner went up on the site of what was the proposed new Sweetwater, just around the corner on Miller Avenue from the old one.

It promised in big bold letters that Sweetwater would open there soon, in a former gift and home furnishings shop at 32 Miller Ave. But when months passed, times got tough and remodeling work stopped, someone crossed out the "soon" and wrote "when?" in green spray paint.

Lately, Sweetwater fans had a new reason to be alarmed when the banner disappeared entirely and a "for lease" sign appeared in the window of the partially refurbished storefront.

There were so many rumors and so much speculation flying around that the club's owners, Becky and Thom Steere, avoided going downtown so they wouldn't be barraged with questions and accusations.

As it happens, they blame the bad economy, government regulations and unanticipated cost overruns for the delays.

"We've mortagaged our house three times," Becky Steere said. "It's extremely hurtfiul to hear some of this stuff people are saying."

For everyone who has been as worried as I've been that Sweetwater may be gone forever, I'm happy to report that there's light at the end of the tunnel, and it isn't an oncoming train.

The good news is that the Steeres have been in serious discussions with Mill Valley Live Arts, the nonprofit organization that operates the popular 142 Throckmorton Theatre.

Under the new management concept they're discussing, Sweetwater would also become a nonprofit venue under Mill Valley Live Arts. In essence, Sweetwater and 142 Throckmorton would be sister entertainment operations under the same umbrella.

"The good thing is that 142 Throckmorton is already quite successful in its programming, and I think Sweetwater would add another venue for the community that's smaller and would allow us to present acts that wouldn't fit well into the larger venue," Larry Goldfarb, chair of Mill Valley Live Arts, said.

This potential breakthrough is being hailed as an exciting new development by everyone concerned, and it could result in the new Sweetwater opening again in a matter of a few months.

I proposed something along these lines for Sweetwater some time ago after visiting Passim's, a historic nonprofit nightclub in Cambridge, Mass. But ideas and reality are two different things. What matters in the end is that all the principals are behind it, including the investors, and they appear to be - at least in concept.

"Having the nonprofit behind us would be a nice thing instead of Thom and I busting our butts every month to make it work, to be able to pay the bills," Becky Steere told me. "It's a good model. It would be a nice community thing. I've never given up hope. And now It looks like it's going to happen."

According to her, fans of the old Sweetwater needn't worry about the club losing it's roots rock character. Under the agreement, she said, Sweetwater would continue to operate as a full bar with live music.

Billionaire Warren Hellman, who bankrolls the annual Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in San Francisco, is one of Sweetwater's investors.

"He, like many other investors and fans of Sweetwater, would love to see it reopen," said Lora Blum, Hellman's attorney. "And if a nonprofit organization like Mill Valley Live Arts can make that happen, he would definitely support that effort."

There are some legal complications and other negotiating hurdles, including agreements on financial terms. But Sweetwater has such cach and is of such cultural importance that money does not appear to be much of an object.

"If we could reach terms, we have donors in place who are pretty committed to giving or getting the money to accomplish this," Goldfarb said. "I think these donors have the financial resources to do so, and they have expressed their desire for it to happen."

One of the key people in all of this is Lucy Mercer, the founder and artistic director of the 142 Throckmorton Theatre. She has been instrumental in pulling people together in order to save something we all value while at the same time building a nonprofit cultural organization of which we can enjoy and be proud.

"It's not a done deal," she said. "There's still the paperwork to go through, but overall, it does create a win-win for everyone involved."

Contact Paul Liberatore via e-mail at liberatore@marinij.com; follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/LibLarge

The Dead Live Again: Finding Balance after Jerry Garcia

Fourteen years after Jerry Garcia's death, the four surviving members of the Grateful Dead have finally come together again as a band.

And the 20,000 Deadheads who sold out the Shoreline Amphitheater Sunday night for the band's homecoming show couldn't be happier about it.

The Shoreline concert, the first of two at the airy Mountain View venue, came at the end of the Dead's first national tour in five years.

"It's everything I could have hoped for," said 49-year-old Scott Bucey of Corte Madera, a member of the Marin Symphony board and a Deadhead since 1978. "It brings us back to where we were before Jerry died in 1995. I only wish that they had done this sooner."

Wearing a tie-dye T-shirt, Bucey was at the concert with his wife, Jennifer.

"The people in the audience are saying, 'This is it, finally,'" she said. "'It's taken 14 years, but this is it.'"

After they lost Garcia, the Grateful Dead's lead guitarist and charismatic paterfamilias, the four other founding members - guitarist-singer Bob Weir, bassist Phil Lesh and drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann - feuded over business and personal issues. The only thing they seemed to agree on was dropping "Grateful" from their name in honor of their fallen bandmate.

That's why this 20-plus-concert reunion tour has become such a milestone in the 40-year history of the Marin-based band.

And even in the worst economy since the Great Depression, the Dead remain a highly attractive touring act, playing

"We're selling 15,000 to 20,000 tickets every night," said Tim Jorstad of San Rafael, the Dead's business manager. "In this economy, that's really good. The guys are stoked."

Mickey Hart certainly was, standing backstage before the show with a lit cigar in one hand and a drumstick in the other.

"We really found each other on this tour," he said with his characteristic energy and enthusiasm. "We're renewing our friendship. We're starting to become a group again."

The man who has promised to reunite the country, President Barack Obama, also did his part in reuniting the Dead.

They came together for the first time at a Warfield fundraiser for Obama the night before the California primary. And a huge Obama benefit concert in Pennsylvania last year sealed the deal for this tour.

The president was so grateful for their support that he invited them to visit him in the Oval Office when the band played in Washington D.C.

Rolling Stone magazine ran a photo of him and the band under the headline "Deadhead in Chief."

And it turns out that several members of the president's staff, including senior advisers Pete Rouse and David Axelrod, are Dead fans. With other West Wingers,

That same night Hart invited Tipper Gore, a longtime friend, to sit in on drums on "Sugar Magnolia."

At Shoreline, the Dead started 45 minutes late, waiting for the jubilant crowd to file in from the vast parking lots, and played past the amphitheater's 11:30 p.m. curfew. Bolstered by lead guitarist Warren Haynes of the Allman Bros. Band and Government Mule, and keyboardist Jeff Chimenti from Weir's band Ratdog, the Dead played classics like "Sugaree," "Sugar Magnolia" and, to close the first set, an operatic rendition of "Uncle John's Band" with pipe organ harmonies.

The packed house seemed to move with the music like one giant undulating organism at a pot party. Balloons and beach balls floated above the crowd and occasionally bounced onto the stage.

The Dead, concentrating on their trademark improvisational rock, may disdain showmanship, but they know how to put on a show. During their traditional "Rhythm Devils" and "Space" numbers, a sexy group of five female fire dancers came out to add even more heat and light to the far-out proceedings.

The Dead seemed extra soulful on more introspective songs like "Unbroken Chain" and a 20-minute version of "Help on the Way." Because they are now among rock's senior citizens, choosing "Touch of Grey," their only Top 40 hit, as their final encore seemed symbolic.

Asked if they will tour again, Hart said, "We need to get through this tour first."

But the sense was that, as long as they remain healthy, this tour may be the beginning or a late career revival. Or not.

"Since Garcia died, everyone was unsettled musically and personally," said Hart's wife, Caryl. "It took a long time to find a new balance, and that's what you're seeing now."

The Dead play again at Shoreline on Thursday night. There's no telling when they may do that again. As someone close to the aging band said: "If you're a Deadhead, you don't want to sit this one out."

Photo Credits

1.The Dead bassist Phil Lesh (left) and guitarist Bob Weir (front) perform at the Shoreline Amphitheater. The Dead performed its first homecoming show at the end of their first tour in five years in front of a packed house of fans at the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View on Sunday. (Special to the IJ/Douglas Zimmerman)

2. The Dead drummer Mickey Hart address the crowd to be patient for the start of the concert because thousands of ticket holders were still outside the amphitheater at the scheduled start of the concert Sunday. (Special to the IJ/Douglas Zimmerman)

3. Huntington Beach resident Julie Postel (center) holds a Grateful Dead poster before the start of the concert. Her first Grateful Dead concert was in 1985. (Special to the IJ/Douglas Zimmerman)

4. The Dead fan Tahoe Jimbo 420 wears tie-dye shoes before the start of the concert. (Special to the IJ/Douglas Zimmerman)

Jai Uttal opens up to life, love on journey to sobriety

Jai Uttal, the world music star who has just released a transformational new album, "Thunder Love," was sitting on a plump couch the other day in a comfy corner of Open Secret, the San Rafael New Age bookstore, when strains of exotic music floated from the shop's sound system, causing him to bolt upright and his eyes to light up like an electric Buddha.

It was a song by the Bauls of Bengal, India's wandering street musicians, that shocked him into a reverie of recognition. When he was a young seeker entranced by Indian music and Eastern spirituality, he lived among them, traveled with them, communicating with them only through music.

"Do you hear that?" he asked me. "That music was very influential, very important to me. Those people

Audio: Jai Uttal - Bhavani Shankara

helped me find my voice and my style." His 1994 album with his Pagan Love Orchestra, "Beggars and Saints," was a tribute to the Bauls.

By then, though, he was already well known. In 1990, he broke through with his very first album, "Footprints," an innovative collaboration with the late jazz trumpeter Don Cherry and Indian singer Lakshmi Shankar that combined acoustic and sampled sounds from India, Turkey, Africa and the Middle East. It has since become a classic.

"With that album, I got famous," he said matter-of-factly.

He is quick to acknowledge another major musical debt, this one to Ali Akbar Khan, the famed North Indian maestro who founded San Rafael's Ali Akbar College of Music in 1967.

A New Yorker who retains a trace of an accent, Uttal came to Marin when he was 19 to study with Khan, taking lessons in voice and the sarod, the 25-stringed instrument of which Khan is the recognized master.

A multi-instrumentalist singer and songwriter, Uttal has produced a series of acclaimed albums over the past two decades, blending Indian music, Appalachian folk, psychedelic rock, hip-hop, jazz, you name it.

In 2002, his album "Mondo Rama" earned him his first New Age Grammy nomination.

At 57, Uttal, who lives with his family in San Anselmo, has short salt-and-pepper hair, speaks in a gentle voice and wears one gold earring and a necklace with a silver feather pendant. On the day of this interview, he had on a brown leather shirt jacket with western snaps and light green pants with a drawstring.

Until he was in his late 40s, his life and career looked pretty rose-colored from the outside. Then, as now, he earned a nice living traveling around the country leading workshops in kirtan yoga chanting and meditation, a practice that enthusiasts see as a way "to open the heart of infinite love."

Jack Kornfield, founder of Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, praised him as "one of the most extraordinary spiritual chanters and ecstatic singers of

But Uttal is the first to confess that he was living a lie. His heart was as slammed shut as a prison door. While his public image was one of an enlightened, spiritual musician who some fans even saw as a guru, the truth was that he was an alcoholic and drug user whose personal life was out of control.

"It was a dark period for me because my public persona and my internal experience were such a dichotomy," he admitted. "I never felt I was being phony or hypocritical, but I was so miserable inside that I didn't see my way out of it. Here I was performing chanting and devotional music that was about finding your way out of these dark holes. But somehow or other I had dug myself in so deep I couldn't get myself out.

"Part of it was the drugs and alcohol, but some part of me needed to take that tunnel as far down as it was going to go before I could come out and breathe again. I was very physically sick, but nobody knew it. I had no one to share how absolutely hopeless I felt inside of me. I felt really alone."

And then, when he was 49, he met his soul mate, Nubia Teixeira, a young Brazilian dancer and yoga teacher who is now his wife.

"Before I met her, I didn't believe in the concept of soul mates," he said. "I thought it was romantic wishful thinking. But when I met Nubia my whole internal landscape changed."

Not long after they were married, Nubia, now 36, gave birth to their son, Ezra Gopal, now 4, Uttal's first child.

"I didn't expect to have a child," he confided. "Ezra was born when I was 54 and totally out of that way of thinking. My wife thought she never wanted a child either. But we started feeling the energy of this being. At first we pushed it away, but then we stopped pushing away and everything changed - Ezra was born."

As a middle-aged husband who suddenly found himself a first-time father, Uttal realized that he had to make some major changes in his life.

"The primary one was getting sober," he said. "I was never a party animal or carouser, but I had consistently been taking drugs and drinking alcohol since I was a kid. Getting clean and sober was a big job. It didn't happen overnight."

But it happened. And the result of his transformation from the dark into the light is reflected in "Thunder Love."

"That goes right into what 'Thunder Love' is about - the opening to love and trust expressed through song," he explained. "It's why this album is different from all the others."

It's also different in that it focuses heavily on guitar and banjo and incorporates Brazilian instruments and rhythms for the first time in a significant way.

On this album, Uttal also sings more in English than he ever has, using Sanskrit only in the chants and choruses. Aside from the complex structure and length of several of the nine songs, it's a catchy, commercial record with lots of pop hooks and memorable melodies.

He says this album is about opening up to love and to life, at long last. That's patently evident on "Bolo Ram (Let the Spirits Sing)." As he sings in his fine clear voice, "Looking 'round my bedroom for some evidence that there's still reason to be alive / Not so long ago I lost my innocence simply trying to survive / Memories come and go but nothing stays / You know still I hold on tight / 'Cause without your love I could live a million days and never get it right."

At this mature point in Uttal's professional and personal life, he seems to have finally gotten it right.

Zakir Hussain --On his way to Carnegie Hall

This has already been a banner year for Marin's Ustad Zakir Hussain, and it's barely four months old.

At the 51st Grammy Awards in February, Zakir, the greatest tabla drummer of our time, took the contemporary world music album Grammy home with him to San Anselmo for his work on "Global Drum Project" with the Grateful Dead's Mickey Hart.

Beginning April 26, the 58-year-old master of Indian classical music curates a five-event "Perspectives" series at Carnegie Hall, celebrating the scope of his collaborative career with the likes of George Harrison, Van Morrison, Pharaoh Sanders, John McLaughlin and a pantheon of rock and jazz greats.

The series in his honor has him once again in the company of the finest players in contemporary

Audio: Hussain and Sharma - Drut Gat

music, among them banjo virtuoso Bela Fleck, genre-busting double-bassist Edgar Meyer and as one-third of an trio with drummer-pianist Eric Harland and jazz saxophonist/composer Charles Lloyd.

Of their trio, Lloyd says it "swings like a (expletive). You can hear the blues, and you can hear prayers, and it can put a smile on your face and a lift in your step."

Zakir kicks off the Carnegie Hall series, a partnership with the World Music Institute, performing an evening of Indian classical music with his childhood friend Pandit Shivkumar Sharma, the undisputed master of the santoor, an ancient stringed instrument considered the elder brother of the American hammered dulcimer.

And here's the cool part for those of us who aren't in a

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position to travel 3,000 miles to hear Zakir and Sharma in Carnegie Hall. We don't have to. They will be right here April 11, playing in the 2,000-seat Marin Veterans Memorial Auditorium, a stop on their "Maestros in Concert" tour.

"What's nice for me is that it's rare that Indian classical musicians get presented at Marin Center," Zakir told me by phone from Louisville, Ky., hours before his concert there, the fourth of the tour. "Ali Akbar Khan has played there, and maybe Ravi Shankar once or twice. But it's rare that it happens. I'm really looking forward to it."

Plus Marin is his home turf. Born in Mumbai, the son of the tabla immortal Ustad Alla Rakha, Zakir has lived in San Anselmo since he came to Marin in the fall of 1971 to teach at the Ali Akbar College of Music in San Rafael, now in its 42nd year.

"I love this place," he said. "Not to mention the fact that I ran into some fabulous musicians here. Mickey Hart is one of them."

Over the years, Zakir has recorded and toured with Hart aggregations, including Planet Drum, winning the first world music Grammy with that group in 1991.

Marin is also where he met his wife, kathak dancer and teacher Antonia Minnecola. They have two daughters, Anisa, 27, a film producer whose movie "Splinterhead" just premiered at the South by Southwest Music Festival in Austin; and 24-year-old Isabella, who teaches ballet and modern dance at Dance Theater 7 in Fairfax.

Zakir tours constantly with McLaughlin, with Hart's various aggregations and with his own groups. He's just gotten back from India, where he performed during the country's annual concert season, which began in November and ended in March.

Now he's back on the road with Sharma, playing 20 shows across the country through mid-April.

"I miss home," he confessed. "In fact I was so homesick the day before yesterday that, after finishing a concert in Ann Arbor, Mich., I flew home to be with my wife and daughters for about 18 hours. It was very nice to see them. I took the red-eye back last night and arrived here in Louisville two hours ago."

Zakir is famous for his work with rock, pop and jazz stars, but he hasn't forgotten his roots in Indian classical music, and he doesn't want it to be lost in the conflation of the traditional with the contemporary.

"Every other year I do a countrywide tour of Indian classical music featuring one of the maestros in a straight duo," he explained. "This year it's with Shivkumar Sharma. I worry that with so much musical interaction, with fusion, with world music, with whatever you want to call it, the traditional art forms may not survive. The idea of this tour is to make sure that people don't forget what the source is."

By performing in Marin, Zakir hopes to call attention to the Ali Akbar College, founded in 1967 by the ailing master, Ali Akbar Khan, known to his students and disciples as Khansahib.

"This month is his 87th birthday," Zakir noted. "He's on dialysis three days a week, and it's very difficult for him to get up and teach. He still attempts to teach for an hour or so a week and we're all praying that he'll make it, that he teaches some more, but the future of the college needs to be decided so that even after him it will continue. We are hoping if major Indian music shows start happening in Marin that will help in some way."

The Art of Knowing Proust

With more than 200 reproductions of artwork such as Johannes Vermeer, Bolinas artist Eric Karpeles has brought the works referenced in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time to life for readers.
Not many people dare to read Proust, that most intimidating of writers, let alone a high school kid.

But Bolinas artist Eric Karpeles scaled Proust's 3,000-page mountain of a novel, "In Search of Lost Time," more commonly known as "Remembrance of Things Past," when he was a teenager.

"I was fortunate to have a very perceptive teacher when I was in high school," he said. "He knew that I was a reader, that I should be exposed to the first volume of the novel. It was such a remarkable experience, I went on to read the whole book."

Since then, the 54-year-old painter, who lived in France in the 1970s, studying on fellowships at la Cite des Arts in Paris and the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, has read the great French writer's epic about art and memory once a decade.

To help less-courageous readers of all ages, he spent four years writing "Paintings in Proust: A Visual Companion to 'In Search of Lost Time,'" published last year by Thames & Hudson, a prestigious British company.

At the 28th annual Northern California Book Awards on April 19 in San Francisco, he was honored with a special recognition award for his efforts.

An esoteric hit, the first printing of 6,500 sold out in seven weeks at $45 a copy, and private sellers on Amazon.com have been asking as much as $285 for a first edition book. A second printing at the original price will be available this month.

Illustrated by more than 200 reproductions accompanied by the passage that references the painting, Karpeles' book is an easy reading coffee table guide to the artists and the works that Proust referred to in his long and winding narrative.

The New York Times said "it fills a long-standing gap in the huge shelf of books É devoted to navigating and understanding the novel."

In its review, the Wall Street Journal wrote that "anyone who has devoted any time to reading 'In Search of Lost Time' will be grateful for the chance, at last, to look closely at the painterly sources of so many allusions. But there is no need to know the novel or its characters to admire the prose or the visual display, or to grasp the interpenetration of the two É each made vivid by Mr. Karpeles' matchings of text and art."

A reader reviewer on Amazon.com wondered "why nobody had the idea before."

Karpeles asked himself the same question, and found that, for whatever reason, such a book didn't exist.

While rereading "In Search of Lost Time" after turning 50, he decided that he was as qualified as anyone to write the book, filling the void between the intersection of Proust's literature and his novel's visual aesthetics.

"I started at the beginning of the book, and every time I came across a reference to a painting or a painter, I made a note of it," he explained. "When I was done, I had over 300 slips of paper in my book. Half of them were paintings I knew, and half I didn't know. I'm somebody who spends my life in museums and I'm a painter myself, so I figured that if I didn't know all of them, other people aren't likely to know them either."

It wasn't practical or affordable for Karpeles to travel all over Europe, tracking down paintings so he could look at the originals. So he did most of his research and detective work online.

"It's the kind of book that would probably not be doable before the Internet without a huge allocation of funds for travel," he said. "A lot of this stuff is in France and Italy.

"But it's interesting to note that Proust didn't see all the original paintings he was writing about, either. He wrote this at a time (1909 through 1922) when art journals and monographs were first coming into print. So he benefited enormously from reproductions."

Probably the most famous example of that is in the love story between the tortured character Charles Swann, who falls for the faithless courtesan Odette de Crecy because she resembles a woman in a Botticelli fresco.

"That fresco is in the Vatican, but Proust never went to Rome, so he never saw it," Karpeles noted. "So here's a painting Proust knew by reproduction only. And just as I wasn't able to see every painting in the book, nor did he see every one. He was writing 100 years when there was enormous technological change in the world, just as we're going through now."

Karpeles recently gave a talk on "Paintings in Proust" for 150 people at the Dance Palace in Point Reyes Station, sparking the formation of a Proust reading group.

"The feedback I get on the book from so many people is that they never expected to read Proust, but my book breaks Proust down into a digestible format, so that you begin to see what it's all about," he said. "And if you really like what you're reading, it might prompt you to read the whole thing. As an advocate of reading Proust, that's a great secondary effect."

TAKING ON PROUST

For more information on the Proust reading group,e-mail Arianne Dar at ariannezd@aol.com

Contact Paul Liberatore via e-mail at liberatore@marinij.com

Lisa Kokin : Ex Libro Exhibition Catalog by Paul Liberatore

Lisa Kokin : Ex Libro, Paul Liberatore Catalog Essay

Lisa Kokin once called one of her exhibitions Relative Obscurity. While she is charmingly self-effacing, she was referring to the pieces she created for that show out of family photos she'd found in flea markets, not to herself.

At this mature point in her career, the 54-year-old Bay Area artist has achieved a level of prominence in the contemporary art world that invites comparisons in aesthetics, content and use of materials to Louise Bourgeois and Kiki Smith. For the past two decades, Kokin has been in the forefront of an emerging new art form: the artist’s book, hence the title of the exhibition at Donna Seager Gallery: Ex Libro, meaning not only "from the book," but in Lisa Kokin's mischievous world of layered puns, "formerly a book."

“Lisa Kokin alters books and text through a complex system of destruction and preservation,” Seager says. “There is as much meaning in what has been taken away as in what remains. The look and feel of books, papers, texts, and photographs blend to form a unified structure, whole unto itself even before you begin to mine it for the rich content.”

Since artists’ books have been recognized as a distinct genre only since the early 1970s, even the most ardent art lovers can be forgiven for not knowing exactly what they are. They are not books about artists or books depicting artists' work. In the absence of a better description, they have been defined by Stephen Bury, head of European and American collections at the British Library, as “books or book-like objects whose appearance is determined by the artist.” In other words, the book itself, in its altered form, is the work of art. Kokin calls hers “reassembled books.”

“My definition of an artist’s book is open-ended, a freedom that may in many ways be attributed to my lack of formal book art training,” she explains. “I am blissfully unaware of all the rules I am breaking as I go about my routine of sewing, stapling, riveting and otherwise reconstituting objects to transform them.” Kokin left out shredding and pulping and gluing and mashing. Her studio looks like a depot where books go to die, only to be magically reborn as pieces of art that are wonderfully fascinating and endlessly varied in their imagination and creativity.

On a recent visit to her studio before the exhibition, shredded pages in mounds on a table immediately brought to mind images of Monet's haystacks. She explained how she takes each and every one of these shredded pages and painstakingly pulps and molds them with white glue ­into balls of various sizes, from bonbons to boulders. “It's very difficult physically,” she says with a slight grimace. “There's a lot of repetitive motion.”

In one corner of the floor was a cluster of what appeared to be stones, the smooth, round ones found on river bottoms. She'd molded them from pulped self-help books. Their colors are watery reds, earthy greens, browns and grays, and on many of them you can glimpse the titles: Fit for Life, How to Live on Your Income, Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office. Arranged together on the gallery floor, they form an installation she calls Room for Improvement.

“Through her process of art making, she explores cultural and personal issues of conformity and gender, the ambiguities of society and human behavior,” Seager says, referring to Kokin's frequent investigations of her bisexuality, her Jewish heritage, her devotion to universal struggles for social justice and against censorship. “Her aesthetic in these meanderings is consistently refined and appealing.”

And, in this show, funny. The woman has a sense of humor to go along with her social conscience. “It's very important that people laugh,” she says with a sly smile.

Like a Native American using every part of an animal, wasting nothing, Kokin has taken the variously-colored spines from the self-help rocks and fashioned them with burlap and twine into what looks like a Venetian blind. She calls the piece Treatment, a play on both psychotherapy and window coverings. In this context, the titles are as risible as they are readable: Eat More, Weigh Less, How to Clean Everything, How to Manage Your Mother, The Simple Abundance Journal of Gratitude, and the presciently ironic The 401(k) Millionaire.

“I like to work within limitations,” she says. “I ask myself, ‘How can I take a book and make it look completely different, but only use the materials from the book and very little else? Those are the parameters of my challenge. I sometimes use thread or wire, but I don't want to use extra color or doodads or tchotchkes.’” Kokin has several reassembled dictionaries in this collection. Her favorite, Abridged, has recently been featured in Banned and Recovered, an exhibit sponsored by the San Francisco Center for the Book and the African American Museum and Library at Oakland.

“Each artist was asked to pick a book that had been banned,” Kokin recalls. “I originally thought to do a gay-themed book, but when I searched the Internet for banned books and found that the American Heritage Dictionary had been banned in at least two states, I thought, 'That's my book.'” It struck her as beyond the pale that anyone would ban a dictionary because some bluenose found 39 “objectionable” words in it. But there's no underestimating the dictatorial righteousness of the Texas Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution, who were “shocked” by “debasing” words like “brain” (denotes violence), “bucket” (slang for buttocks) and “across-the-board,” (betting on horse racing in Texas is illegal).

“I pulped each page and saved only the banned words,” Kokin explains. “I then reconstituted the pages and pressed the 'bad' words into their respective pages. Then I baked the book to darken the pages and give them a burnt aroma. The pages are held together by a strap made from the spine of the dictionary, with an anagram for “American Heritage” (“Ream Again Heretic”) sewn onto the bottom. I used the entire dictionary except for the covers, with only glue, snaps and thread to hold it together.”

Like many of her baby boom generation, Kokin was taught to wash her hands when handling books, to treat them with the utmost respect. So she’s had to wrestle with conflicted feelings about her sometimes ruthless artistic process. “Every time I take my X-Acto blade to the tender page of a book, I see my long deceased grandfather's face before me,” she says. “He is not happy. I am committing the Jewish equivalent of a mortal sin, and, believe me, I feel guilty. So powerful is my drive to rearrange and juxtapose, however, that I am willing to risk the wrath of my ancestors to accomplish my mission.” It was especially painful when she was faced with a handsome atlas that had been in the Indian Consulate library in the 1950s.

“It was such a beautiful book,” she sighs. “The maps were just gorgeous. It hurt to have to pulp them, but I did.” The result is a striking piece that consists of pyramids of pulped pages stacked symmetrically in colorful balls between the book's covers. The old atlas ended up exacting its own bit of good-humored revenge. After she’d pulped all the pages, she discovered that there weren't quite enough to finish the piece, hence the title, Four Balls Short. “I had to take some pages from another book,” she admits.

Conversely, Kokin made the most of a tragedy, salvaging a priceless first edition of Uncle Tom's Cabin, subtitled, Or, Life Among the Lowly. “A friend gave it to me after her friend’s dog chewed it up,” she says. In its new form, the pulped balls grow like Topsy on twisted wire out of the remains of the book. All that was left of the title was Un Life, which is what Kokin decided to call it.

She has always been a political artist, from her beginnings making batiks to protest the Vietnam War and to support solidarity movements in Chile and Latin America. Later, she designed posters for leftwing causes in a graphics collective and built apartment houses in Cuba. While studying at California College of the Arts, she began working with found materials: photographs, buttons and other common objects from flea markets that used to belong to real people, and now only represent their discarded memories.

“My work is about memory and history, both personal and collective, and the areas where the two intersect,” she says. “I'm interested in representing the human condition by using the objects we leave behind.” Some of her most powerful work deals with the horrors of the Holocaust and the plight of marginalized people everywhere. She has never been afraid to tackle the largest socio-political issues: racism, censorship, violence, genocide.

On a recent search at a recycling center, Kokin came upon a batch of Western novels, Louis Lamour-style macho tales with titles like Blood Reckoning and Night of Vengeance. In the past, she would not have been attracted to this kind of book, but she saw them as particularly relevant now, at the end of two terms under the swaggering George W. Bush.

“For the Ex Libro exhibition, she shredded these shoot-'em-up novels to create two long, quilt-like pieces she calls Shroud. They hang in the gallery as both a death knell for the past and victory banners for the future. “It's about the end of an era,” she says. “I see it as a comment on the last eight years. Now that I'm older, I still have political consciousness, but my work is not as black and white as it was when I was in my twenties. I had very strong opinions then, and I still do, but they have grown more subtle.”

“I believe in Lisa Kokin’s work,” says Seager, “She has an individual approach to her materials and medium. With humor, content, unerring instincts and meticulous craftsmanship she is able to deliver a unique aesthetic sensibility. When I see her work, I am reminded of the first time I saw an exhibition by Eva Hesse in which my idea of art was instantly expanded and I was able to imagine new forms of self-expression.”

With this extraordinary show, we’re seeing an artist at the height of her powers, serious in purpose but light in touch. She presents her view of the world with the
consummate skill of an artist whose work will be remembered, and whose contributions are destined to take their place in the history of art in the new millennium.

See Lisa Kokin at www.donnaseagergallery.com

Bioneers: Chemicals = Cancer is a topic at Marin Conference

Scientist warns of cancer link
Paul Liberatore
Article Launched: 10/18/2008 10:46:15 PM PDT

Environmental scientist Sandra Steingraber, hailed by the Sierra Club as "the new Rachel Carson," spoke Saturday at the 19th Bioneers Conference in San Rafael on a subject of intense interest to Marin County women: the link between toxic chemicals in the environment and cancer.

Marin has one of the highest rates of breast cancer in the state, and organizations such as Zero Breast Cancer (formerly Marin Breast Cancer Watch) are calling for accelerated exploration into its possible causes, including environmental factors.

Steingraber's book, "Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment," won the Jenifer Altman Foundation award for "the inspiring and poetic use of science to elucidate the causes of cancer."

A senior research associate at Commonweal, the health and environmental research institute in Bolinas, Altman established the foundation shortly before her death of cancer in 1991.

In introducing Steingraber, an internationally recognized expert on the environmental links to cancer and reproductive health, Charlotte Brody, executive director of Commonweal, praised her ability to communicate scientific research through her literary talent.

"You learn the concepts," she said, "but your heart sings at the same time."

In an impassioned half hour talk to an overflow audience in the 2,000-seat Marin Veterans Memorial Auditorium, Steingraber told of being diagnosed with bladder cancer 30 years ago when she was 20.

Now a mother of two elementary school age children, she obviously recovered from her cancer and realized that hope, but she learned some things about her illness that have nothing to do with the high cancer rates in the family that raised her.

"Here's the punchline," she told her audience, "I was adopted."

But, she went on, "It didn't take long for me to learn that bladder cancer is considered a quintessential environmental cancer. We have more evidence for a link between toxic chemicals and bladder cancer risk than almost any other cancer."

Although the medical community ignored the connection between carcinogens and cancer in those days, she suspected that her cancer had something to do with the environment in the Illinois small town where she grew up.

Years later, while researching "Living Downstream," she discovered that she was right. Her hometown and its riverside environs "have statistically elevated cancer rates, three dozen different industries line the river, farmers practice pesticide-intensive agriculture, hazardous waste is imported from as far away as New Jersey and the drinking water wells contain traces of both farm chemicals and industrial chemicals, including those with demonstrable links to bladder cancer."

While decrying the lack of regulation of government oversight and regulation of chemical products in this country, she got a huge ovation when she called for the same kind of crisis-driven rescue of the environment that Congress just gave to the economy by bailing out Wall Street.

"We need a $700 billion bailout to invest in alternative energy and reform our chemical regulatory policies," she insisted. "If we don't take action, we don't know what will happen, but it will be terrible. Our ecology will tank."

Steingraber is currently a distinguished visiting scholar at Ithaca College in Ithaca, N.Y., and a sought-after public speaker.

During her address on Saturday, she referred to the words of her mentor, Rachel Carson, in "Silent Spring," that we are all exposed to "a changing kaleidoscope of chemicals over our lifetimes."

These chemicals are particularly hazardous to pregnant women, an issue she writes about in her follow-up book about her pregnancy with her first child, her daughter, Faith, 10.

In "Having Faith: An Ecologist's Journey to Motherhood," she reveals the alarming evidence of chemicals causing what scientists call "spontaneous abortion."

Seeing this as a problem that crosses political lines, she said she's interested in engaging the pro-life and pro-choice movements in a dialogue on this common ground issue.

"Maybe we can all agree, pro-life and pro-choice, that any chemical with the power to extinguish a human pregnancy has no rightful place in our economy," she said to thunderous applause.

Paul Liberatore can be reached at liberatore@marinij.com

Paul Liberatore: Hot Buttered Rum's Redner shakes up Vivaldi's classic

Just before violinist Aaron Redner was to go on stage the other night at the Fox Theatre in Boulder, Colo., with his band, Hot Buttered Rum, he was on his cell phone, talking excitedly about playing Vivaldi's "The Four Seasons" next week in Mill Valley.

"I find myself in a band that travels nonstop and has lots of followers, and that's great," he told me. "But I've been feeling a need to tap back into my classical roots."

By classical roots he means the master's degree in classical violin performance he earned from the New England Conservatory in Boston before joining Hot Buttered Rum, spending the past six years on the jam band circuit with groups such as Phish and String Cheese Incident and the Yonder Mountain String Band.

As a side project that will take advantage of his classical training, the 37-year-old Tam High grad has come up with an idea for a crossover concert at the 142 Throckmorton Theatre during a break in Hot Buttered Rum's busy touring schedule.

Next Thursday night he'll be joined by some of the finest young classical musicians in the North Bay in an interpretation of Antonio Vivaldi's "The Four Seasons," a timeless favorite that most people are familiar with in some form or another. We've all heard strains of it in movies and commercials and have probably hummed it in the shower without knowing it.

"That's why I picked this piece, because it's almost like pop music, " Redner explained. "I'm still going to play all the notes, but there's room
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for interpretation and improvisation more than there is in most classical music."

For this one-off gig, he's assembled a classical string quartet filled out by guitar, bass and harpsichord. He's enlisted the likes of Karen Shinozaki, who grew up in Terra Linda and performs with the San Francisco Opera Orchestra, and violinist Michelle Maruyama, who appeared at the Nano Mugen Festival in Japan recently with Third Eye Blind.

"I'm surrounding myself with huge talent and trying to stay relaxed in the middle of it," he said, noting that he's encouraging them to shed their classical music conformity, urging them "to think of themselves as a band."

During breaks between the movements in "The Four Seasons," various aggregations, including all the members of Hot Buttered Rum, are primed to jam on jazz, bluegrass and swing renditions of seasonal songs like "Autumn Leaves" and "Summertime." Making sure this doesn't resemble a traditional classical concert in any way shape or form, Redner's even got an interpretive dancer in the mix.

"People in the jam band world are saying how much they love this piece, which I didn't expect," he said, referring to the Vivaldi. "And classical music fans are going to hear some jazz standards in this show, and some swing and some bluegrass - music they might not go out of their way to hear normally."

During his college years, Redner was on track for a career with a chamber group or symphony orchestra. Then, as he put it, "I got kidnapped by this band, the Grateful Dead. And I decided I loved playing music that people could dance to in a communal atmosphere. That was lacking in my classical music experience."

Even six years later, though, his classical jones has been hard to kick. During Hot Buttered Rum shows, he's known for playing a Beethoven sonata in the middle of a bluegrass tune.

"I've been trying to do that more and more," he said. "Fans are starting to expect it."

With this concert, which Redner hopes will be the first of many, he joins a classical crossover movement pioneered by virtuosos like Edgar Meyer, Joshua Bell, Bela Fleck, Mark O'Connor, Chris Thile and Mike Marshall, who produced the last Hot Buttered Rum album.

"In order to do this kind of thing and not sound like a dilettante, you have to do your homework," he said.

As a resident of San Anselmo, he said there are a lot of beautiful places to do that.

"I go over the Bolinas-Fairfax Road, stop beside one of the lakes and practice my butt off," he said. "When I'm up on Mount Tam in the open air, I try to create music that fits that perfection. I don't want to be guilty of air pollution."

IF YOU GO

- What: Hot Buttered Rum's Aaron Redner's "The Four Seasons," acoustic

- When: 8 p.m. Oct. 23

- Where: 142 Throckmorton Theatre, 142 Throckmorton Ave., Mill Valley

- Tickets: $20, $15 students/seniors

- Information: 383-9600

Photo Info: Aaron Redner of Hot Buttered Rum leads a group of equally musical friends in an excursion into the classical world of Vivaldi, with surprisingly modern results. (Dave Fleischman)

Paul Liberatore can be reached at liberatore@marinij.com
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Santana Wows San Rafael Middle-Schoolers

Santana wows San Rafael middle-schoolers
By Paul Liberatore
Article Launched: 10/16/2008 10:04:28 PM PDT


Wearing an impeccable white suit and a black fedora, Carlos Santana, looking and sounding like the rock-superstar-cum-spiritual-figure he's become, was greeted Thursday morning by a gymnasium full of squealing, screaming, wildly cheering students at Davidson Middle School in San Rafael.

In honor of Spanish Heritage Month, Santana's highly orchestrated appearance was on behalf of the San Rafael-based Milagro ("miracle" in English) Foundation, the charitable organization he and his wife, Deborah, founded a decade ago. The organization works to improve the lives of disadvantaged children through tax-exempt donations to nonprofits such as Marin City-based Performing Stars of Marin.




"Milagro," Santana intoned in a video shown before his talk, "is the hand of God."

In an article headlined "Carlos' Cosmic Bummer" in the current issue of Rolling Stone magazine, he vowed to stop performing seven years from now, when he's 67, and become a preacher, "Like Little Richard," he said.

In his sermon-like talk to the Davidson students, the majority of them Hispanic, he seemed to be warming to that role, imploring them to pause for 10 seconds of silence in honor of "the holy ghost, for allowing us to come together in unity and harmony and trust and hope, to change the fear all around us on this planet right now."

Santana, a long-time San Rafael resident, instructed the children to "visit your own heart and touch your own light."

The respectful silence that followed in what
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had been a gym full of hundreds of squirming middle-schoolers was clear evidence that these kids were paying attention to a celebrity they can identify with, one who rose from an immigrant background similar to many of theirs to become a rock icon.

"It's important for each one of you, no matter where you come from or where you're going, to value yourself," he told them, in the next breath challenging the education system in California to introduce a new curriculum called "unconditional love" that would combat racism and promote self esteem.

"Just like we can teach history and arithmetic, it's important to teach unconditional love," he said, criticizing the state for spending more on prisons than on schools.

"Someone is making the wrong choices for you," he said, continuing his plea for "spiritual education" in public schools.

"Not necessarily about Jesus or Buddha or Krishna or Mohammed or Rama," he clarified, "but about being kind to one another, about being gentle to one another. It's the best spirituality we can share on this planet."

Deborah Santana, who has filed for divorce to end the Santanas' 34-year marriage, was conspicuous by her absence, but Carlos acknowledged her, thanking her for "helping me create this vision."

"Even though she's not here, she is here in my heart," he said. "She's with all of us because we want the same things for the same reasons."

During the event, Samsung Electronics America's Four Seasons of Hope program in association with Best Buy stores presented the Milagro Foundation with a check for $100,000. All the kids in the audience had on black Samsung Seasons of Hope T-shirts with Santana's image on them.

Sitting in the front row beside San Rafael Mayor Al Boro, Santana smiled appreciatively when youngsters from Performing Stars sang and danced to songs from his career-reviving 1999 album "Supernatural."

Forty years after his career began in San Francisco's Mission District, Santana and his music are so much a part of the popular culture that even 11-year-old Lizbeth Canche, a sixth-grader, said she learned to play "Oye Como Va," from Santana's classic 1970 album, "Abraxas," on the recorder in school.

"I've only seen him on TV," she said before the start of the program, "but my brother works in a car wash, and he came home and told me he saw him there."

Afterward, parent Armando Quintero said having a star of Santana's stature take an interest in a school with an overwhelmingly minority enrollment goes a long way in improving its image and the way its students feel about themselves.

"He didn't even play, but the kids were excited about seeing him," he said. "And they got it. They heard from him how important they are."

Contact Paul Liberatore via e-mail at liberatore@marinij.com

Mickey Hart Prepares for Reunion

Drummer Mickey Hart prepares for reunion, Hardly Strictly fest

Paul Liberatore

Article Launched: 10/02/2008 11:52:42 PM PDT

Mickey Hart's Global Drum Project is one of the reasons this weekend's Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival calls itself "hardly strictly."

The former Grateful Dead drummer's world groove percussion quartet, featuring Marin rhythm master Zakir Hussain, plays Saturday at the festival in Golden Gate Park, even though its sound is hardly bluegrass. But then it isn't strictly anything else, either.

As Hart himself says about his eclectic international aggregation, "There ain't nothin' like Global Drum."

That used to be what bumperstickers said about the Grateful Dead: "There ain't nothin' like a Grateful Dead concert."

But since Jerry Garcia's death in 1995, there haven't been many reunions of the four surviving members, who have feuded over business issues and musical direction. Their relationship was so poisonous at times that their iconic skeleton and roses could very well have been a skull and crossbones.

But now, as Hart puts it, "Love is in the air."

All four of the remaining bandmates - Hart, fellow drummer Bill Kreutzmann, singer/guitarist Bob Weir and bassist/vocalist Phil Lesh - have agreed to regroup as the Dead for an Oct. 13 benefit concert for Barack Obama at Penn State University's Bryce Jordan Center. They share the bill with the Allman Brothers.

"We found something really important to bring us together," Hart tells me. "It's funny that an Obama event would do that, but that's how important and critical this election is. The Dead are going to playin the swing state of Pennsylvania. It's our call to arms, or call to music, which is the way we arm ourselves.

Minus Kreutzmann, Hart and Weir joined Lesh at a Phil & Friends benefit show for Obama in February.

For this month's concert, Kreutzmann jumped on the bandwagon, making it an official Dead reunion.

"We rehearsed for three days at Bobby's studio in San Rafael, and we got along," Mickey reports. "It was great finding each other's rhythm again and it was very relaxed. We left the managers behind. Maybe that's one of the reasons we could all be in the room together. There was less baggage."

But they were so rusty that the old bandmates, famed for their one-mind improvisation, had to actually relearn some of their own songs.

"Sometimes we had to listen to the recordings to find out what the chord changes are," Hart reports. "But we were never over prepared, and that was part of the fun of Grateful Dead music. There are some chords and vocals that we've never agreed on. Phil has his own way of playing them. Bob has his own way. Then we as the Dead have our way. It was, 'Hey, which way do you want to do this, or is there a way?'"

As for rumors that this is a precursor to a full-blown Dead tour next year, Hart says: "We're all smiling and playing good and that's the first thing. It's like getting back together in a romantic relationship. And this one's really complex over many years. Everyone's got to find their own rhythm again. You've just got to take this kind of stuff step by step."

IF YOU HAVE RHYTHM

Mickey Hart's Global Drum Project, featuring Marin's Zakir Hussain, plays at 5:40 p.m. Saturday on the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Star Stage. The three-day festival, beginning Friday and ending Sunday, is a free event in Golden Gate Park's Speedway Meadow. Check www.hardlystrictlybluegrass.com for the complete lineup.

Paul Liberatore can be reached at liberatore@marinij.com

Paul Liberatore: Grateful Dead's contributions to Slide Ranch subject of tribute dinner

Paul Liberatore
Article Launched: 10/03/2008 12:08:38 AM PDT

Every time I think I know a lot about the rock 'n' roll history of Marin County, something new comes to my attention that makes me think again.

That happened recently when I heard that Slide Ranch, the teaching farm on the Marin coast, is hosting a $750-a-couple dinner in honor of the Grateful Dead on Tuesday night at Fort Baker's tony new Cavallo Point Lodge.

The evening includes music by the Celtic jam band Wake the Dead, and a "silver trowel" presentation to former Grateful Dead guitarist/singer Bob Weir.

If you're like me, you may be wondering what in the world the Grateful Dead had to do with Slide Ranch. Surprisingly, a whole heckuva lot.

Executive director Charles Higgins has done considerable digging into the history of a ranch that was once a ruin and now gives 8,000 city kids per year a taste of life on a working, organic farm.

He tells us that:

Ed Washington, co-producer of "The Grateful Dead Movie" in 1977, was the ranch's first director.

Danny Rifkin, the Dead's first manager, had a lot to do with connecting inner-city kids to the bucolic 134-acre spread.

Jerry Garcia, the band's lead guitarist, was its first major donor, contributing $500 - a lot of money 40 years ago.

I was reminded that my colleague Nels Johnson and I attended a Saturday afternoon benefit concert for Slide at the Stinson Beach Community Center by Garcia's short-lived bluegrass band, Old & In the Way.

Over the years, the Grateful Dead's Rex Foundation came through

Originally a 19th century dairy farm owned by a Portuguese family, the ranch had degenerated into a haven for drug dealers and counterculture outlaws in the freewheeling 1960s.

In 1969, through the joint efforts of Marin attorney Doug Ferguson and the Nature Conservancy's Huey Johnson, Slide Ranch was purchased and protected from commercial development and cocaine cowboys.

Once the deal was done, Susie Washington-Smyth, who co-founded Slide with her husband, Ed, recalls bounding down the ranch's precarious driveway with Ferguson and Johnson only to be confronted by shotgun-wielding drug dealers on horseback.

"These guys had on cowboy hats and big duster coats and snarled at us, 'What the hell do you want here?'" she recalls. "Huey (Johnson) looked at them and yelled, 'I'm your new landlord and you've got 30 days to get out of here.' I was convinced they were going to shoot us. When they left, they just trashed the place."

The Washingtons and other members of the Grateful Dead extended family spent months cleaning up the ranch grounds and its falling-down outbuildings, constructing a Buckminster Fuller-inspired geodesic dome as a primary program area.

It became "the anti rock 'n' roll place," Higgins explains, for the folks, mostly women, who were into milking goats and going back to the land, providing a healthy environment for their children and for inner city kids to learn about the earth and how to take care of it.

Carolyn "Mountain Girl" Garcia, Jerry's wife, remembers coming out to the ranch from Stinson with her two young children, Sunshine Kesey, Ken Kesey's daughter, and Annabelle Garcia, Jerry's girl.

"The driveway was a nightmare," she recalls. "They didn't call it Slide Ranch for nothing. By the time it became an environmental center, everyone had put in so much work. There were tons of garbage. We had to break the foundation out from the old cow barn, which was crumbling old concrete, and that took months. Everybody we knew came out and participated."

Since those volunteer-driven beginnings in 1970, more than 175,000 people from diverse backgrounds and communities, most of them youngsters, have participated in Slide Ranch educational programs.

With an eight-person staff, the ranch offers family and group programs as well as summer day camp for 8,000 visitors a year. These are hands-on education activities on a working ranch with farm animals and organic gardens.

"Slide Ranch has always been a different kind of place," Washington-Smyth points out. "It's never been your mainstream summer camp. It's always been right on the edge of idealism and practicality. And that's one of the reason's it's been successful.

"When we started in 1969, it was with a wish and a prayer," she says. "One of the most surprising things to me is that 40 years later, Slide Ranch is still going on stronger than before."

IF YOU GO

- What: Slide Ranch and the Grateful Dead Silver Trowel Award Dinner

- Who: Special guests Bob Weir, Rob Wasserman, Jay Lane, Henry Kaiser, Dennis McNally, Rep. Lynn Woolsey, Brian O'Neill, Gary Fisher, Doug Ferguson

- When: 5 to 9 p.m. Tuesday

- Where: Cavallo Point Lodge at Fort Baker, 601 Murray Circle, Sausalito

- Tickets: $750 per couple

- Information: 381-8758, charles@slideranch.org

Paul Liberatore can be reached at liberatore@marinij.com.

Joan Baez: Still Stirring Emotions after 50 Years

Joan Baez is celebrating her 50th anniversary in the music business this year, and she's doing it in surprisingly fine style - with a hit record.

Her new album, "Day After Tomorrow," produced by Steve Earle, was No. 1 on Amazon's Singer-Songwriter chart this week, ahead of Jewel and Eva Cassidy. It was No. 2 in traditional folk and No. 3 in contemporary folk.

At age 67, looking lovely as ever, Joan happily finds herself with one of the hottest albums in the country, which she's dedicated to her 95-year-old mother.

"I told Mom that if I don't watch out, I'm going to be famous," she joked to my wife and me the other night over dinner at Greens in San Francisco.

Joan is a friend, and this was our chance to spend some time with her before she went back out on the road on her second world tour this year.

She'll be back in the Bay Area for a Nov. 15 concert at the Wells Fargo Center in Santa Rosa, followed by shows Nov. 18 and 19 at Herbst Theatre in San Francisco.

Months ago, in our living room in Mill Valley, she played us an unmixed version of the title track, a heartbreaking lament by Tom Waits about a soldier longing to come home from Iraq.

She sings it in her now burnished alto, accompanied only by her acoustic guitar. We were so emotionally moved that we suspected that this album would resonate with the reflective mood of the country at this critical time in our history.

I won't forget listening to the final product, sitting together at Joan's home one golden summer afternoon. With its literate, intelligent, compassionate songs of peace and hope and homecoming by Earle and Waits, Elvis Costello and T Bone Burnett, Eliza Gilkyson, Thea Gilmore, Diana Jones and Patty Griffin, the album touched us just as the title song had. And we were pretty sure we wouldn't be alone.

As one of the citizen reviewers wrote on Amazon: "Joan Baez, my hero. More songs of rebellion, coal miners, soldiers, God. I enjoyed this just this morning and I'm always happy to hear her voice."

Joan recorded "Day After Tomorrow" in Nashville with an acoustic string band that included Earle and bluegrass aces Tim O'Brien and Darryl Scott.

"It's going back to my roots, but with contemporary songs," she said. "It speaks to the essence of who I am in the same way as the songs that have been the enduring backbone of my repertoire for the past 50 years."

Joan was back in Nashville last night, where Earle presented her with the Spirit of Americana Free Speech Award at the Americana Music Association's seventh annual awards show.

Then she was off to the U.K., where she's a sought-after guest on radio and TV talk shows.

I asked her what the Europeans want to know. She said they always begin by asking her about Barack Obama, the first candidate she has ever endorsed for president, whether America is ready to elect an African American to head the country.

She said she tells them that it all boils down to whether America is smart or not. By the time she returns home in November, after the election, we'll know the answer to that.