Guest post by Nathan Arizona

Those images of peace and love from Woodstock are engraved in our memory. Particularly vivid is the one where the Youngbloods sang their new good-vibes anthem “Get Together” – “Come on people/Smile on your brother” — as thousands of wet hippies hugged each other and sang along.

Except it never happened. The Youngbloods didn’t sing their new hippie anthem at Woodstock. They weren’t even close to the place.

The song wasn’t new, either. It was written in 1963 by Dino Valenti, who was soon to be jailed for drug offenses and later joined the Quicksilver Messenger Service. It later found some mild favor with San Francisco bands. The early Jefferson Airplane made it part of their act. A very young David Crosby recorded it as a demo. The We Five, who nobody ever confused with hippies, were the first to release it as a single, in 1965, but it didn’t turn many heads.

Then Greenwich Village folkie Jesse Colin Young heard “Get Together” in a New York club and the Youngbloods started playing it there, and then in California as part of a wave of East Coast folk singers who discovered rock and moved out west. The Lovin’ Spoonful also made that trip and were sometimes confused with the Youngbloods.

The Youngbloods released a recording of ”Get Together” in 1967, but it stalled low on the charts, and that finally seemed to be it for the song.

Then a few months before Woodstock, that noted promoter of rock music – the, uh, National Conference of Christians and Jews – used the Youngbloods’ version in a promotion. The ad got a lot of airplay. People started calling disc jockeys asking to hear it. “Get Together” was re-released in 1969, the same year as Woodstock, and this time it reached No. 5.

Woodstock had not booked the relatively obscure Youngbloods, though the slightly less obscure Richie Havens was alert enough to slip it into his set. We’ve been hearing it ever since.

Here are the Youngbloods. Looks like John Sebastian on harmonica, but you can’t hear him because the recorded version has been dubbed in.

Here’s an early version by the Jefferson Airplane.

Dave Alvin and Jimmie Dale Gilmore have performed the song since they began touring together, and included it on their 2018 LP, “Downey to Lubbock.” There’s a YouTube clip of them singing it at the World Cafe Live in Philadelphia, where they’re returning for a show next week.

Some obituaries for Maurice Williams, who died earlier this month at 86, called him a one-hit wonder. Yes, “Stay,” a No. 1 single in 1960, was his only hit with the Zodiacs, but it was just one of the tunes Williams wrote that reached Billboard’s Top 40.

In 1957, when his group was called the Gladiolas, they recorded the 17-year-old Williams’ composition “Little Darlin’.” Though it made the lower levels of the charts, their single was overshadowed by a better-produced cover by a group of white Canadians, the Diamonds, released just two weeks later. The Diamonds took it to No. 2, and that’s the version used in “American Graffiti.”

In 1965 Williams and the Zodiacs released “May I.” It failed to chart, but in 1969 a cover by Bill Deal & the Rhondells reached No. 39.

Still, “Stay,” written when Williams was just 15, is what he’s remembered for, in large part because it’s been covered by so many performers. In 1963 it was a No. 8 hit in the UK for the Hollies and a No. 16 hit in the U.S for the Four Seasons, a version Williams said he considered the best other than his own.

The song got even greater exposure on Jackson Browne’s 1977 “Running on Empty” album, which closed with a live medley of Browne’s “The Load-Out” and “Stay,” with lyrics altered to address an audience instead of a girlfriend. When the original was featured in the 1987 movie “Dirty Dancing,” the re-released single sold more copies than it had in 1960.

Williams attributed the song’s success in part to its brevity. At 1:36, it remains the shortest song ever to top the charts. “We wanted to make it short so it would get more airplay,” Williams said in a 2018 interview. “It worked.”

Here’s the Gladiolas’ version of “Little Darlin’,” credited here to the Zodiacs, with Williams on the lead vocal. If you’re accustomed to the Diamonds’ cover, it does sound underproduced.

On the other hand, the Zodiacs’ version of “May I” sounds more soulful than Bill Deal’s Carolina beach music cover, mostly because of Henry Gaston’s ethereal falsetto, the same secret ingredient that distinguished “Stay.”

Williams kept various lineups of the group active on the Carolina beach music circuit into the 2020s. He’s survived by his wife of 63 years.

Mondegreen isn’t the only music festival in the region this weekend. The Philadelphia Folk Festival, which runs through Sunday, closed last night’s bill with Gangstagrass, which might mark the first time rap has been represented among all that acoustic music.

Hip-hop/country crossovers have become increasingly common, but they mostly meld mainstream country with modern R&B. Gangstagrass, like its name implies, combines the more purist forms of rap and bluegrass. Most people think they’re diametric opposites.

“One of the hurdles we face is if we say, ‘This is bluegrass hip-hop music,’ people immediately imagine something terrible and start running in the other direction,” said Rench, the Brooklyn producer who formed Gangstagrass in 2006 (he was born Oscar Owens). “But if people just hear it, they’re like, ‘Hey, this is cool. What is this?'” That was my reaction.

Gangstagrass reached a wider audience in 2010, when it was it was tapped to write the theme song for “Justified,” the FX drama about a U.S. Marshall in Harlan County, Ky., inspired by an Elmore Leonard novella.

Rench has collaborated with various MCs over the years. The most recent LP, “The Blackest Thing on the Menu,” features two he’s been working with for several years, Dolio The Sleuth and R-Son The Voice of Reason. They even made a video for the song that would, with a more commercial group, be the lead single.

WXPN in Philadelphia has been doing its Funky Friday for more than 30 years now, long enough that I automatically associate Fridays with soul and funk. One band I never hear on the show is Phish, despite their late-’90s foray into what Trey Anastasio labeled “cow funk.”

Phish can, and has, covered just about every kind of music (the less said about their dalliance with JayZ the better), but they embraced the funk with gusto in 1997, a favorite period for many fans. Granted, Anastasio himself says that what the band plays is more groove-based than funky, because “four white guys from Vermont” can’t credibly play funk.

I don’t know about that – six average white guys from Dundee, Scotland, made a pretty good career of it – but he’s got a point about his own band; they play too close to the beat for proper funk. But whatever you call them, their cow funk songs still make people want to dance. Okay, white people, but still.

The pandemic has killed off Dover’s Firefly music festival, but this year The Woodlands found a replacement: Phish’s four-day Mondegreen festival. There’s a big difference, though. Where Firefly hosted dozens of bands who drew a broader spectrum of fans, Phish is the only band playing Mondegreen – two shows each night – so much of the audience of 45,000 will be hardcore Phishheads.

The band, formed by four Vermont college students in 1983, gets compared to the Grateful Dead because it plays 20-minute jams and has a cultish, frequently drug-enhanced fan base that follows it around on tour. Musically, a closer fit might be Frank Zappa and the Mothers, who played a similar mix of rock, jazz, prog and funk in jokey concerts. But where Zappa got his laughs through cynical ribaldry, Phish’s humor is in the absurdist stoner vein. You can get a taste just by reading the band’s general information page for Mondegreen, where real information is sprinkled with lines like “The festival is all ages, except for age 53.”

The band has never had a hit single, and while some of their albums have made the top 10, even the band members say their studio work isn’t really the point. They’ve only sold about 7 million albums, because like the Dead they allow fans to freely circulate concert tapes. But they’ve also grossed $600 million in ticket sales over their history.

A recent Rolling Stone interviewer asked lead singer, guitarist and main songwriter Trey Anastasio what song he would like to end the band’s career with. He chose one of their earliest songs, “You Enjoy Myself,” a composition that shows their range and their roots in experimental and prog rock. Here’s a live version that, typically, segues into another song and ends 40 minutes later.

If you miss the shows, don’t worry. Those tapers will probably post them by the end of each night.

OK, so the election isn’t being held today and a lot can change in (checks watch) 82 days. But right now the Harris/Walz ticket looks poised to crush a certain orange someone, and I don’t mean Tony the Tiger. It will, however, be gr-r-reat!

Michael Stipe wasn’t referring to soda on this tune, released on 1988’s “Green” LP, but rather Agent Orange, the defoliant the U.S. Army used in Vietnam. Stipe, whose father served in the helicopter corps there, grew up around Army bases in Georgia when people were starting to realize the continuing health problems for GIs who had been exposed to it.

Stipe once said, “[It’s] about the Vietnam War and the impact on soldiers returning to a country that wrongly blamed them for the war,” but the lyrics are oblique enough that most people missed it. Bassist Mike Mills said, “Yes, there was some irony in the sweet deliciousness of the pop drink versus the horrible effects of this chemical. The ironic juxtaposition of those two terms was no accident.”

The song was never released commercially as a single, but nonetheless reached No. 1 on both the Mainstream and Modern Rock Tracks charts.

If whoever programmed “My Heart Will Go On” for the Trump rally is looking for more troll bait, might I suggest this as a theme song? It dates from 2006, when Louise Post was fronting the band herself after she and Nina Gordon split up in 1998. They had reunited by the time of this live appearance for DirectTV (‘memba them?) with a twist – Post was now the blonde and Gordon the brunette. It was released as a single, but neither it nor the LP could recapture their mid-’90s glory.