Artist description [FRED GERLACH] My first and foremost stylistic influence musically is my uncle the legendary great twelve string guitarist singer Fred Gerlach. His album "Gallows Pole and other Folk Songs for the Twelve String Guitar." was released in 1956. I played that album every day for seven years. I became, musically, that album. Fred's style of right hand finger picking was the thing that set me apart from lots of guitar players who are flat pick strummers. [RY COODER] My second influence was Ry Cooder, a fingerpicking and slide guitarist who studied with Fred Gerlach and with whom I studied. Ry Cooder also was in the Rising Sons. [TAJ MAHAL] When I left California and arrived on the Boston folk scene in 1964 I was playing everything I learned on Fred's album. This led me to Taj Mahal who was my third influence mainly from our playing together for two years from 1964-1966, both as a duo and with our band The Rising Sons who recorded for Columbia Records in 1965. Taj Mahal also was a fingerpicker. [VICENTE GOMEZ] Right hand technique was prevalent in Vicente Gomez, my first classical guitar teacher. Playing classical guitar I received a scholorship to attend California Institute of the Arts. [MORRIS MIZRAHI] My fourth influence was classical guitarist Morris Mizrahi. We were students at Cal Arts and later professional performers. We played Renaissance music for lutes and guitars. [MILES DAVIS] My fifth influence was Miles Davis becaue of "Kind of Blue" which I heard in high school. Alhough I couldn't play it I aspired to. Jazz is a complex music. It's taken me the whole time to learn it. I started learning trumpet and tenor saxophone two years ago. I play trumpet in the Corte Madera Town Band and play saxophone on a few tunes at gigs. I still listen to Miles Davis.Jesse Kincaid In Flew In Sez Singing SongwritingSingers Frank Sinatra, Belafonte, Fred Gerlach, Little Richard, Don & Dewey, Elvis, Robert Johnson, Om Kalsoum, StingSongwriters Lennon-McCartney, Bob Dylan, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Hoagy Carmichael, Dorothy Fields

Music Style Pop

Musical Influences Fred Gerlach, Ry Cooder, Taj Mahal, Vicente Gomez, Morris Mizrahi, Miles Davis

Artist History JESSE KINCAID Discography “The Rising Sons featuring Taj Mahal, Ry Cooder” Sony/Columbia RecordsSongs “Baby, You Come Rollin Cross My Mind” Bryan Hyland Glenn Yarborough “Louise” Keith Allison Paul Revere & The Raiders “She Sang Hymns Out Of Tune” Hearts and Flowers Nillson “11th St. Overcrossing” “Flyin ‘ So High” “I Got A Little” “Spanish Lace Blues” “Sunny’s Dream” The Rising Sons Bibliography “The Unknown Legends of Rock and Roll” One Shot Was All They Got - The Rising Sons by Richie Unterberger INTRO I like all music. I used to think that if I learned something new every time I played I’d be acheiving something. I still think so. I’ve traveled around the world and everywhere I went people loved music. It was a common thread. BIRTHI was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1944. The family moved to Los Angeles in 1949 to work on a chicken ranch. When I was 12 years old my uncle, twelve string guitarist and folk singer Fred Gerlach, introduced me to guitar when he came to California from New York. My world went from grey to color and I went into my room to practice. My Mom used to be a singer on her own radio show in Detroit. After a few months playing folk style guitar Mom and I entered a TV talent show in Hollywood. We won that day and came back and won the weekly final. She sang and I played guitar. Our prize was a Packard Bell Hi-Fi set. We were real proud to bring it home. My folks came from Europe. My parents and my grandparents came first from the old country to New York, then Detroit. They settled in Los Angeles. EARLY MUSICWe really didn’t have much music in my house when I was a kid. I always love the stories about Elvis where he heard church music walking home and went down to Beale St in Memphis listening to Ike Turner play barrelhouse piano and stuff. My daddy was fresh out of the old country farm, a peasant as he liked to refer to himself, Even though Mom used to be a singer she wasn’t into going to hear music. They never took me to a concert. Maybe that’s a chip on my shoulder because I learned it all by myself because I wanted it so much. We didn’t have a record player until I was around 8 years old. Then we had a little portable record player and listened a lot to Disney records for kids, my first recollection of hearing music I liked. Matter of fact, we didn’t have a television until I was 12.UNCLE FREDMy uncle Fred Gerlach was the last to arrive in Los Angeles when I was 12. Fred gave me my first guitar. He introduced me to folk music and guitar playing, especially twelve string guitar. He had his own album out on the Folkways label called “Gallows Pole and other folk songs for the Twelve String Guitar”. Eventually I learned to play everything he did. My goal then and now is still the same - to do something new everytime I play. MOLLY AND HARRIET After a while Uncle Fred went back to New York becaude he liked to move around. So I got a pair of guitar teachers, Molly and Harriett. I went over to their house once a week and they taught me folk music. It was all songs with words and fingerpicking acconpaniment on the guitar. Kind of a Harry Belafonte thing. That was what was going on for guitar music. But I was into it. I learned it all from them. Then they moved away too after a few months. I started listening to radio, mostly Top 40 and tried to play what I heard.That pretty much ended my taking lessons for a good long time until way later in high school I took some lessons with Irving Ashby. He was Nat King Cole’s guitar player. He gave me a few things, mostly the exposure to Mickey Baker’s guitar books. He was Mickey in Mickey and Sylvia's “Love Is Strange”MOM AND THE TALENT SHOW My Mom used to be a singer on her own radio show in Detroit when she was real young. After a few months of my playing folk style guitar Mom decided that we should enter this TV talent show in Hollywood. It was called “The Make Believe Ballroom” She sang and I played guitar. We won that day and came back and won the weekly final. Our prize was a Packard Bell Hi-Fi set. We were real proud to bring it home. SCHOOLDAYS I kept playing guitar while I went to junior and high schools but I was usually the only guitar player around. Guitar had yet to become the omnipresent instrument it is today. I mostly played at home. I played drums in the junior high band but I didn’t have the interest for drums that I had for guitar. I joined my first band in junior high school. I was the only white boy in an all black instrumental band. We had no bass player so I played bass lines on my Fender Stratocaster which my Mom bought for me. She couldn’t afford it so she put it on layaway and I used to go to the music store in Inglewood just to play it sometimes until she paid it off and I brought it home. Then we realized that I needed an amplifier too. Somehow on a meager single mother salary she got that for me too. My folks had divorced about this time like so many post war couples. Times were changing.SIDNEY JAZZUp to this point I got most of my music from that folk stuff but I was listening a lot to rhythm n blues radio stations in LA. A lot of doo wop and slow dancing at parties, but also James Brown, Tina Turner, Ray Charles. We listened to Hunter Hancock on KGFJ, Huggy Boy and Wolfman Jack.In my first band we had a tenor player named Sidney Smith. We were friends throughout school and by high school Sidney was playing jazz, John Coltrane and MIles Davis. I used to go over to his house after school and he was ripping all up and down them Coltrane licks. I just said. “What is this?”. But I didn’t try to play this stuff. It was a whole other direction from the folk guitar thing I’d developed. I just listened. The record that ended up making the most impression on me in high school was Kind of Blue by Miles Davis. Man, I listened to that record front to back then back to front and every which other way. My girlfriend Wilma and I used it as our make out music. Man, the smell of that perfume she had laying up on her mama’s couch with the red light on in the lamp late at night feelin’ good with Miles Coltrane and Cannonball up in our heads. That was some good stuff. LOS ANGELES CITY COLLEGE AND REV GARY DAVIS By the time I got into college, 1962 folk music was real popular on the radio. Elvis had changed the music world and the Beatles were about to do it again. I really got into the folk scene and started hanging out at McCabes Guitar Shop and The Ash Grove, two places where folk music was happening. It was at the Ash Grove where I met visiting performer Reverand Gary Davis who was playing the Ash Grove and the UCLA folk festival. I’d heard his records and thought he was an amazing fingerpicker. Well, Gary didn’t have anyplace to stay in LA so I just invited him to come on and stay with me. So he did. I drove him to all his gigs for two weeks. At night we would sit up playing guitar and he would show me all those complicated things he did in guitar.NEW YORK When he went back home to New York he invited me out there. I just couldn’t get that idea out of my mind, so in April, 1964 I first left home at age 20. I drove all the way across the United States on Route 66. That was quite a trip. I saw first hand how big the country was. I had Fred’s very own twelve string guitar with me when I arrived in Greenwich Village, New York. I stayed with Reverand Gary and again drove him to his shows. It was on of these trips driving Gary that I first came to Cambridge, Massachusetts. CAMBRIDGE AND FIRST GIGS In Cambridge at this time the folk scene had exploded Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Jim Kweskin and the Jug Band were all performing in the folk clubs. All the suburban kids were listening to Mississippi blues songs and funky old southern guitar music. In the folk music clubs I played open mikes, called hoots then. I was playing all of Uncle Fred’s twelve string tunes. I had my own style. People liked it.It was fun playing in the folk clubs with everyone else singing and playing. The music was guitar stuff and all kinds of folk songs as well as traditional folk music. Jug bands, fiddles, mandolins, were popular. I had some opening gigs for Ian & Sylvia and a few solo spots. TAJ MAHAL It was at the Club 47 where I first saw and heard Taj Mahal. He was playing acoustic guitar in that thumping style and singing with that gritty voice he has. He stood out from the white boys who were trying to sing the blues. Taj really was singing the blues. The girls got excited when he took off his jacket, too. I started living in the same house with Taj through an acquaintance who offered me a couch on one of my arrivals in Cambridge driving from the west coast From the couch I graduated to renting a room and like this I lived in the same house where Taj Mahal and Maud, his girlfriend, were living. One night he and I sat down to playing and singing. He was doing some Mississippi style blues stuff and I fell into a syncopated guitar thing that just worked real well with what he was playing. We played a whole lot that night and then he asked me to go to Philadelphia the next day and play with him on his 2 week gig at The Second Fret, a folk club. Taj was in a place where right back there at the beginning he was getting headliner gigs. I was a newcomer and really not as strong all around as Taj. But I could play that guitar. That was the beginning of our music thing. From Philadelphia we traveled working as a duo on the east coast in Montreal, Boston, Detroit, Cambridge, Boston, Rhode Island. Taj had the gigs . He was handled by agent Manny Greenhill who handled Joan Baez . For six months we played clubs concerts and colleges. When winter came and the weather got down to freezing I thought it would be a good idea to head back to Los Angeles. This was Taj’s first trip west. Here we were, a black guy and a white guy driving across the country dressed in matching knee high boots. There were a couple of restaurants in Oklahoma that we chose not to go into.LA LA was a trip through the looking glass. Everything changed. We hit LA just as the sixties music scene was catching on fire. Folk rock was on the way in and we were right in the middle of it all. Right away we went to the Ash Grove to play. Right away we were hired to play our own shows. Man, everyone dug what we had going. We were singing in real tight Don & Dewey style and Taj was playing that bottleneck guitar and playing that blues harmonica against my syncopated guitar. We went over to the New Balladeer, another blossoming folkie club and we just knocked the folks right out and got hired on the spot. John Kay, who later became the bad boy lead singer for Steppenwo, was washing dishes in the club that night. He was still a wannabe at that point. Jackie DeShannon was there that night too. RISING SONSSo we were gigging just like we had been back in the east coast. One night after our gig at the Ash Grove, Ry cooder, who was the around 18, came over and said he wanted to play with us. Now, I knew Ry because he has first of all been a student of my Uncle Fred’s for awhile and second of all I had taken some lessens with him for a while before he stopped teaching me. He said I’d learned all he knew but I hadn’t. He just stopped teaching me because he thought I was getting too good and getting all his stuff. So he had this deal where he was getting together music for a booth for Martin Guitars at the Teenage Fair at the Hollywood Palladium. Martin had heard he was a kid guitar wizard so they wanted him there playing Martin Guitars. Ry had this high school friend who played bass. His name was Gary Marker. So Ry decided he and Gary and Taj and I would all go play and use amplifiers. Since I’d already played some drums I borrowed a set and like this we became an electric band. At this Teenage Fair there wasn’t nothing but bands all dressed in matching suits playing stuff like Gloria. We were playing the blues were different from anyone else there. Faster that anyone realized we became a band. We knocked then out at the fair and then we got hired as a band to play the Ash Grove for 10 days. Since drums really weren’t my thing we got this friend of Gary’s to play drums, this cat named Cass Strangedrum, whose real name was Ed Cassidy. He was supposed to be the oldest drummer around back then and he had a shaved head which nobody had then. He later went on to be the drummer in Spirit and is in fact the oldest rock drummer around today. I thought up the name for the band. It was The Rising Sons, you know, guys rising up in music, sons of the blues type thing, spelled funny like all the bands did then and giving it two meanings, like the sun is coming up. That gig at the Ash grove was the beginning of us getting into pop music right in the middle of Hollywood hullabaloo right into the history books of folk rock music. The Byrds just had their hit with Mr. Tambourine Man, The Doors, the whole LA music scene was poppin like popcorn in a movie theater. We went from the Ash Grove to the Trip, It’s Boss, the Whiskey a Go Go, we played every club over and over sometimes headlining sometimes, and opening for the Temptations, Otis Redding, Martha and the Vandellas. And there was a bidding war from the record companies for us. We went with Columbia probably because we thought that being the biggest meant being the best.At our first recording session there were so many girl fans that they had to actually put in chairs for them all to sit and watch. We were popular. Me, I had no clue about how to handle the business end of this thing. I was caught up in it and making money. I was just playing guitar and singing and I’d begun writing songs which were pop compared to the blues thing we were into so that balanced our songs with a white bread appeal on top of the gritty blues thing.We got a managernamed Walter Camp who managed Mc Cabes but he was kind of out of his area. We got another manager who bought us all these new guitars and set up a deal to go endorse Vox amplifiers and guitars. Like this, the Rising Sons performed with the all Vox amps like the Beatles. We went out to the manufacturers in the valley and picked them out. I also got a Rickenbacker 12 string electric guitar like the guy in the Byrds to give us that sound as well. Man, we recorded endlessly, did maybe 50 tracks in a year and a half. We never had but one skinny old single released, that was "Candy Man" and "Devil's Got My Woman".It was weird that that was me singing on both sides of the record even though Taj was the featured vocalist. I wasn’t much of a singer yet so I don’t get that decision. Maybe it was to make us sound like white boys. Take the Taj out. Columbia jumped on the record as a hit to push and got us on a few TV spots, and we actually filmed a video at Newport Beach of what was our real best single but it never got released.That tune was “Take A giant Step” later to become Taj’s singature song. The tune was brought to us by Terry Melcher our producer, at a rehersal at our drummer, Kevin Kelley's house where we rehearsed every morning. We set out to give it our spin and went in to record. I really like my twin guitar lead on that cut. Ry being a bottleneck guy. a tradititonalist, was having a hard time finding something to play on the pop rock feel so I just went into the studio, took his red Gibson and spontaneoulsy, with the help of the studio fuzzbox created a bright, arpeggiated, interesting fresh part. Then I added a second part. It amazed everybody that I could do it when Ry couldn’t but I just had a feel for that pop style.

Group Members Nick Kincaid

Instruments Guitar, Violin, Mandolin, Keyboards

Location Mile Valley, California - USA

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