THE GREATEST SONGS OF THE 1960s THAT NO ONE HAS EVER HEARD
1,023) Tina & David Meltzer — “Pure White Place”
We got the beat! Well, at least we got the greatest 60’s beat(nik) musicians — Tina & David Meltzer (see #873, 874) — giving us a “truly great” song from an album [Poet Song] filled with “excellent, psych-tinged moody folk” (Patrick Lundborg, The Acid Archives, 2nd ed.) It “does have some great songs, my favorite being the haunting ‘Pure White Place.’ For anyone who is enamored of that point in the 60s when anything seemed possible, and all forms of music and poetry could be combined into a glorious hybrid, this release will be appreciated in a major way.” (Poetic Psychedelia, https://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/B0002WTK1G)
Of Poet Song, Richie Unterberger writes:
Tina & David Meltzer’s late-’60s album is a pleasing, though not great, entry in the large field of San Francisco Bay Area psych-folk-rock. Naturally there are similarities to the 1967 album by the Serpent Power [see #873], which the Meltzers fronted. But the mood here is more subdued, folky, and occasionally orchestrated, with some violins, cello, mandolin, French horns, clarinet, and sax in addition to the folk-rock guitars. The cops from the likes of Country Joe & the Fish and the Jefferson Airplane are toned way down, and the music is broken up by a half-dozen spoken poems by David Meltzer with gentle guitar backup. Tina Meltzer takes the lead vocals more often than David Meltzer on the purely musical selections — a wise choice as she has the better voice, her rich and clear tones and phrasing suitable for the contemplative, wistful mood of the songs. . . . It’s a good record for sunny, solitary mornings.
https://www.allmusic.com/artist/tina-david-meltzer-mn0001629632#discography
John McMurtrie wrote of David Meltzer upon his death that:
Fellow Bay Area Beat poet Diane di Prima called Mr. Meltzer “one of the secret treasures on our planet. Great poet, musician, comic; mystic unsurpassed, performer with few peers.” His friends Greg and Keiko Levasseur wrote . . . that “We have lost a great poet, scholar, musician, and jazz historian.[“] . . . Mr. Meltzer wrote more than 40 volumes of poetry . . . . Lawrence Ferlinghetti . . . wrote that Mr. Meltzer was “one of the greats of post-World War II San Francisco poets and musicians. He brought music to poetry and poetry to music!”
Raised in Brooklyn, N.Y., Mr. Meltzer got an early start as an artist; he entered a competition at age 11 with a poem about the New York subway system. “I owe my own fluency with language to Brooklyn,” Mr. Meltzer said . . . . “Everyone talked about everything, from the Dodgers to the revolution.” . . . Pushed into exile in California,” as he put it, living “as an alienated teen in L.A.,” Mr. Meltzer met artists who fueled his creativity. By age 20, he was recording poetry with jazz musicians in Los Angeles . . . .[He] was the youngest poet to be featured in Donald Allen’s anthology “The New American Poetry, 1945-1960.” He also wrote fiction. “I wrote 10 novels for a company run by gangsters,” Mr. Meltzer told The Chronicle. “The books were pornographic and political, too. I call them ‘agit-smut.’ . . . From 1977 to 2007, he taught in the Humanities and Graduate Poetics programs at the New College of California in San Francisco.
https://www.chron.com/books/article/David-Meltzer-Beat-Generation-poet-and-musician-10830409.php
Live from the ’68 Berkeley Folk Festival (“Pure White Place” is the first song):
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Oh yeah, takes me right back to that scene, Haight-Ashbury and all that!
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