Jesse Colin Young, the folk-rock singer-songwriter best known for his recording of the hippie anthem “Get Together,” died Sunday. He was 83.
Born Perry Miller, he adopted his stage name when he started out in the Greenwich Village folk scene in the early ’60s. In 1966 he joined with guitarist Jerry Corbitt to start the folk-rock Youngbloods, who recorded the Dino Valenti-penned “Get Together” the next year. Corbitt wrote most of the band’s original material, but he left the band before the song re-emerged in 1969 and became a No. 5 hit.
Young became the group’s main songwriter, and while his only hit was that cover, he did reach the lower reaches of the Hot 100 in 1970 with his composition “Darkness, Darkness,” from the Youngbloods’ LP “Elephant Mountain.”
“Darkness, Darkness” has been covered fairly often since, in styles ranging from folk (Richie Havens, Richard Shindell) to hard rock (Golden Earring, Screaming Trees). It even reached the Modern Rock chart in 2002 when Robert Plant released his stylized arrangement on his album “Dreamland.”
As a minor-key evocation of insomnia, the song lends itself to the hard-rock milieu. Mott the Hoople gave it a good clean treatment back in 1971 on their “Brain Capers” album.
