Uploaded November 2022 | Updated September 2026, 5 days ago
Sopwith Camel at Tony Serra's Pier 5 Law Offices 41st Annual Halloween Bash, Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, October 31, 2015.
The earliest San Francisco bands, The Great Society (Grace Slick's first group), The Charlatans, and The Sopwith Camel, experimented with many musical styles -- pop and classical; Western and Non-Western. Here are some excerpts from an interview with the Camel's producer, Eric Jacobson, and Peter Kraemer, principal singer, lyricist and wind player:
"We'd formed around the same time as Big Brother & The Holding Company (pre-Janis)... in fact, we got together in the same room. It started out with me and Terry, who I'd met at a hangout called the Big Little Bookstore on Polk Street in San Francisco, writing songs together. So the Camel was evolving at a time when there was very little rock in the city. In 1964, I shared a house on Page and Masonic with a thespian called John McIntyre (later manager of the Grateful Dead). I lived at one end of the attic and a girl called Laurie had the other end... and I should guess there were less than a dozen longhairs in the whole of San Francisco.
"Then, one day, Chet Helms came to town; he'd just got out of El Paso jail, where he'd been held on suspicion of being involved in the assassination of President Kennedy! The only basis for his arrest had been the length of his hair... it's true!
"Anyway, that house was a sort of nucleus in the developing San Francisco psychedelic scene. The first rock dances were in the basement of 1090 Page, which was organized by Chet -- all the longhairs used to go there. It was an amazing experience for me, because I knew just about every single person in the place -- and there were three or four hundred people! There was such a spirit at those gigs... I can't tell you!
"Mind you, the San Francisco thing happened soon afterwards and eventually most of that core of 400 people moved out... I can walk around now and not know a soul."
"Artie Ripp, from Kama Sutra, who were putting out our records, came into the studio [in New York] the day that I had a temperature of 102. We were finishing up 'Postcard from Jamaica' (the only tune we managed to write at the Albert Hotel in New York), and I was having to use three microphone stands: two to support me as I sang in the general direction of the third. I had bronchitis, actually. Anyway, Artie, who came in to see how his boys were doing, thought I should go to the Luxor Uptown Men's Club sauna baths to get myself in shape. So at two in the morning, we left Bell Studios and Artie Ripp just leapt out in front of some limousine, flagged it down, and gave the guy 20 bucks to take us to this sauna bath . . . . "
Sopwith Camel at Tony Serra's Pier 5 Law Offices 41st Annual Halloween Bash, Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, October 31, 2015.
The earliest San Francisco bands, The Great Society (Grace Slick's first group), The Charlatans, and The Sopwith Camel, experimented with many musical styles -- pop and classical; Western and Non-Western. Here are some excerpts from an interview with the Camel's producer, Eric Jacobson, and Peter Kraemer, principal singer, lyricist and wind player:
"We'd formed around the same time as Big Brother & The Holding Company (pre-Janis)... in fact, we got together in the same room. It started out with me and Terry, who I'd met at a hangout called the Big Little Bookstore on Polk Street in San Francisco, writing songs together. So the Camel was evolving at a time when there was very little rock in the city. In 1964, I shared a house on Page and Masonic with a thespian called John McIntyre (later manager of the Grateful Dead). I lived at one end of the attic and a girl called Laurie had the other end... and I should guess there were less than a dozen longhairs in the whole of San Francisco.
"Then, one day, Chet Helms came to town; he'd just got out of El Paso jail, where he'd been held on suspicion of being involved in the assassination of President Kennedy! The only basis for his arrest had been the length of his hair... it's true!
"Anyway, that house was a sort of nucleus in the developing San Francisco psychedelic scene. The first rock dances were in the basement of 1090 Page, which was organized by Chet -- all the longhairs used to go there. It was an amazing experience for me, because I knew just about every single person in the place -- and there were three or four hundred people! There was such a spirit at those gigs... I can't tell you!
"Mind you, the San Francisco thing happened soon afterwards and eventually most of that core of 400 people moved out... I can walk around now and not know a soul."
"Artie Ripp, from Kama Sutra, who were putting out our records, came into the studio [in New York] the day that I had a temperature of 102. We were finishing up 'Postcard from Jamaica' (the only tune we managed to write at the Albert Hotel in New York), and I was having to use three microphone stands: two to support me as I sang in the general direction of the third. I had bronchitis, actually. Anyway, Artie, who came in to see how his boys were doing, thought I should go to the Luxor Uptown Men's Club sauna baths to get myself in shape. So at two in the morning, we left Bell Studios and Artie Ripp just leapt out in front of some limousine, flagged it down, and gave the guy 20 bucks to take us to this sauna bath . . . . "
![Jörg Herchet, Komposition 1 für zwei Violinen, Viola und Violoncello [1980] - ii.](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/EJ3Ezo_1GYs/mqdefault.jpg "Jörg Herchet, Komposition 1 für zwei Violinen, Viola und Violoncello [1980] - ii.
The subject of Jörg Herchets thesis while studying in East Berlin was The Theoretical Writings of Arnold Schönberg and Their Significance for the Teaching of Composition. Herchet argued the need for a teaching method setting out from Schönberg and leading to Pierre Boulez. This line of thought was anathema to the school administrators, who felt that the teaching of composition should lead to Hanns Eisler [ironically, a student of Schönberg, and a fine composer in our opinion]. After failing to complete his degree Herchet worked for a year in Dresden as a temporary employee in the bookdealers trade. In 1970 Paul Dessau was able to have the young composer accepted as his special pupil at the Akademie der Künste in East Berlin even though he lacked a degree. In Dessau, Herchet found a teacher who could accept and further his own approach to composition.
Jörg Herchets Composition 1 for Two Violins, Viola and Violoncello was written in 1980 and is dedicated to Paul Dessau in veneration and gratitude. Herchets two-movement string quartet is based on a specific dramaturgical conception. The second movement starts out with scraps of material and motifs from the preceding movement. The texture becomes more compressed, and for a moment we hear once again the arpeggiated passage of chromatic saturation, this time built of all-interval chords. Then, in rigid and regular repetition, all-interval chords march past en masse in a wide variety of transpositions. The motor-like thrust of the rhythm, however, soon dissolves once again into a dense polyphony in which striking particles of melody occasionally rise to the surface. At the very end, clearly divided into dynamically activated chordal blocks, we hear mirror-reflections and inversions of the pure all-interval chord vanishing in pianissimo. A state of stability seems to have been reached.
The only supra-musical dimension that Herchet allows his works to assume is expressed in the phrased soli Deo gloria [to the glory of Gold alone] found at the end of each of his compositions since 1984. Herchet sees himself entirely as a composer of religious and sacred music. His understanding of religion, however, cannot be easily conveyed on words. Parts of it are alluded to in such concepts as veneration of the all-encompassing, the holistic, the common substance of man. He regards his music to as a yearning for God. The important thing for me is first to unify all the different areas and then the most important thing in all of my music to proceed from that unity.")
