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Sun 26 Jun, 2005 08:31 pm
June 27, 2005
Hippie legend Chet Helms, 62
SAN FRANCISCO -- Chet Helms, the "father of the Summer of Love," who brought Janis Joplin to San Francisco, died Saturday from stroke complications at California Pacific Medical Center. He was 62. Helms was the founder and manager of Big Brother and the Holding Company with Joplin as its lead singer. He was a rock 'n' roll impresario who helped staged the free concerts and "Human Be-ins" at Golden Gate Park that became the backdrop for San Francisco's Summer of Love in 1967. He was the first producer of psychedelic light-show concerts at the Fillmore the Avalon Ballroom and was instrumental in helping to develop bands delivering the San Francisco sound
That was a time, all right. I hope he gets the obit he merits in the NY Times tomorrow...
Old hippies never die...they just go........further.
Cheap Thrills is one of my all time favorite albums.
"Cheap Thrills" is classic, all right. And the NY Times did come through with a nice obit for the man, including a photo...
Parallel Thread. I'm gonna miss him.
Nice KenKeyesian reference there, BVT.
Been there, done that. Sorta miss that, too.
Oh, well, getting older beats the alternative, I s'pose; nothing there to complain about.
Having lived in Eugene while Kesey lived nearby, I had the good fortune to run into him now and then. Once, he came into a record store I worked in to buy some Beatle cassettes. Wrote a check and asked if I wanted to see his ID. I told him it wouldn't be necessary...
I'da prolly paid for the cassettes myself, and kept the check as an autographed souvenir
Read once of somebody in England doing that with a Paul McCartney check ... gotta think that'd be a real keeper.
Funnily enough, it just occurred to me now, all these years later, that I could've done that. Back then, Kesey was around and we almost took him for granted...
You don't always know what you got until it's gone, sayeth Joni.
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