Gary James' Interview With Geoff Levin Of
People!



People! was a group formed in the mid-1960s in California. Their claim to fame is a song called "I Love You", which was actually written by Zombies' member Chris White. "I Love You" went to #14 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in June of 1968. It went all the way to number one in Japan, Israel, Australia, Italy, South Africa and the Philippines. Geoff Levin of People! spoke with us about the group's Rock 'n' Roll journey.

Q - Geoff, you refer to yourself as a "Flower Child." You were born in San Francisco, but you grew up in San Jose. In one interview you said there was no music scene in San Jose in 1963. So, that would make you what, 18 in that year? So, where would you go to hear "live" music?

A - In '63 is when the Folk clubs started in San Jose. So, there was "live" music in '63. That's when I was able to see a lot of these music artists.

Q - Were you in a band with Jerry Garcia?

A - Yeah. I was a member for a short period of time in one of his groups, The Black Mountain Boys. You could say I was a substitute bass player. So, I played with them. I'm not even sure how many times that I did play with him.

Q - Did you ever think to yourself this guy is going to go on to bigger and better things?

A - Nobody thought about what they were doing in my opinion. All they knew is they were able to perform because Folk music was becoming more popular. It was being made popular by people like The Kingston Trio, The Limelighters. And then earlier The Weavers and Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan, who was considered a Folk singer, modern day Folk singer. Nobody thought, "Where is this going to go?" Nobody was thinking that. They were just thinking we get to perform. People are interested in Folk music because it's become very popularized on the radio and on TV. Radio started playing Folk music as Pop music. In other words, it was what was being played on the Top 40

Q - And there was a Saturday night Hootenanny Show.

A - Yeah. There were a few shows. Tennessee Ernie Ford was a crossover. He was kind of Folk, but he was kind of Religious-Folk you could say. So, all of this was coming down and I got into music in '62 because Folk music was getting so popular and I was really getting involved in listening to it, each Folk artist, and really getting excited about the music. I wasn't a musician at that point, but I was very excited. I had built my own FM radio 'cause I couldn't afford to buy one. So, I built it. They had kits in those days. You could get a good quality FM radio with a kit. I was listening to FM in San Francisco. They had some really good stations. Some of the clubs in San Francisco were The Bitter End. They were hosting some of the Folk musicians. The Bay Area took to it very strongly. If you wanted to see something "live" at the time, you could go to Palo Alto to a club called The Tangent. You had the college crowd there. And then there were two clubs in San Jose. One was called The Shelter, which was really tiny. It wasn't very big, and then the other one, which became more well-known, was The Offstage. So, the Rock musicians that were at The Offstage were The Allman Brothers, Big Brother And The Holding Company and Janis Joplin. Jorma Kaukonen rolls in. He was famous in Europe. He was from Sweden. At the time he was called Jerry Kaukonen, not Jorma Kaukonen. He was a Blues singer and a fine Blues guitar player in the traditional style. Paul Kantner would perform there. Then Jerry Garcia and The Black Mountain Boys, they performed there. I remember The Offstage was still around and another intermediate group performed there before The Grateful Dead. The name escapes me right now. That was when he had Pigpen. (Ron "Pigpen" McKernan)

Q - Did you ever cross paths with Janis Joplin?

A - I did, but later. She also hung around The Offstage, but I didn't pay any attention to her because she wasn't one of the main Folk singers at the time. We ran across Janis because we opened for her at the San Jose County Fairgrounds.

Q - What year was that?

A - That was probably '67. I think I have a poster on that. I don't think it gives dates necessarily. At the time she came onto my brother. Offered him her bottle of Jack Daniels and threw up on our drummer and his drums before they went on. Those were the two stories. I was leader of the group, so I was doing other things. I wasn't interfacing with her like those other band leaders did, like Denny Fridken, who was our drummer, and Robbie Levin, the bass player, one of the cutest guys in the group. So, she came on to him I think.

Q - She offered him liquor, but what else did she offer him? Her body?

A - I don't know. I'm just telling you she came on to him. That's what he said.

Q - He didn't get into details then?

A - No. He didn't give details 'cause we were working. It was very brief. We were about to go on and she had to do her sound check before we went on and so there was interaction between them. My brother, at the time, was over eighteen. He was three years younger than me. When we started our band People! he was still in high school.

Q - If your manager Mikel Hunter had not been the Program Director for KLIV Radio would the world have heard of People!?

A - I consider over the years that I'm grateful for the opportunity that I had. I don't believe in luck. I do believe in opportunity. If I hadn't met him, maybe we would have been helped by or discovered by somebody else. There's a good chance that nothing would've happened to the band. The band would have been popular within San Jose and it wouldn't have gone any further. I was a guitar teacher for a music store called Mayer Music. I was in college. This had to be '63, '64. I needed to earn money. So, I actually was teaching at two stores at once. I was friends with another music store owner. My main teaching was downtown. So, I would go to San Jose Stage and then right next to it was a music store in town, the central part of the city. I would teach like three or four times a week. So, I became one of the go-to teachers, because I was a contemporary teacher teaching Rock and Folk, not Jazz or Mel Bay. With Mel Bay you learn to read music and it's really pedantic. It doesn't necessarily give the students what they want. At the time, the students wanted to learn Rock. They wanted to learn, Pop, Folk, Blues. As a promotion, Mayer Music gave free lessons to Mikel Hunter. They were advertising on KLIV. So, it's a crash promotion in special advertising to help them sell more guitars and band instruments. So, here's what's happening. I'm teaching guitar to a lot of students and then Mikel is taking guitar lessons from me. He didn't know me. I was a college student, probably 18, 19 years old, and we hit it off. So he said, "What are you doing? What else do you do?" I said, "Well, I have a band called People!" Because he liked me, he almost automatically just started promoting the band. He said, "Well, I should come see your band before I do anything." He came to see the band and at the time the band was my brother Robbie, Albert Ribisi, my brother's friend, John Riolo, another friend of Albert Ribisi, and me. John Riolo was the drummer at the time. So, Robbie on bass, John Riolo on drums, Albert Ribisi on keyboards, me on guitar and David Anderson, who was a Folk musician who I met earlier and had mentored me, was the lead singer, when he was a Folk singer, not a Rock singer. So we would do some kind of Folk / Rock stuff and doing pretty well with that. That separated us from all the other bands that were coming up as being unique. David was limited in what he could do vocally. So Mike came to see us and then we had a meeting and he said, "You have to get rid of the the lead singer." That was the first thing he said. "I like your band, but you have to get rid of the lead singer." So there I am. I'd never been responsible for anything really, any kind of group before. I was just a kid in my opinion. Now, I'm having to fire him. I knew what Mikel was talking about because Mikel wanted us to do a certain path in order to get us working and performing a lot. He wanted us to do more cover material. So, he didn't feel David could do that. And so then I had to go out and find a new lead singer immediately because the band was practicing every weekend and now we had Mikel, to some degree, taking on the managerial duties. So at that point I did find a new lead singer. With Mikel we had a real "in" on what was going on. He knew what was going on with all the high schools and all the events of the high schools and all the proms and all the dances. He kept us working every weekend. We were working because of Mikel.

Q - Program Directors were powerful in the 1960s.

A - You're correct. Program Directors had a ton of power at that time, in the '60s. They were the guys that the A&R men from all the record companies who also had a lot of power, were all connected to the Program Director. If you wanted your song to break, if you wanted a hit record, you were going to the Program Director. So, it was all interconnected at the time.

Q - Zombies' bassist Chris White wrote "I Love You".

A - Yeah.

Q - Did The Zombies ever record that song?

A - We had a fan base and I was smarter and more savvy about the band. One of the things I realized is the band needs material. We need material if we were going to have a hit record. We need material that has not been covered. Either we have to write it or I have to find it. So, I was always in search of interesting music that I thought might be a potential for performing and recording. One of our fans came to me, or came to one of the band members, I can't remember, but I'm the one who ended up making the decision. This fan said, "Hey, this is a good song. I think it sounds like you guys." Now, this is after we had changed lead singers. Now we had two lead singers and one of the lead singers had a high voice like The Zombies' singer. One of the fans thought, "Okay, this could be a good song for you." So, they gave us the single, the 45. I listened to it and I said, "Okay. That could be released. That could be interesting." We learned it and started performing it "live" long before we recorded it and we would get a good response from it.

Q - I recall listening to the radio and hearing "I Love You", but it wasn't your version, which raises the question, did other bands cover that song?

A - If you heard it, you probably heard The Zombies' version. I know a Japanese band covered it. Nothing happened with that in the U.S.

Q - Did your version of "I Love You" come off an album you did?

A - No. It was a single and from that we recorded a whole album.

Q - I believe your music was recorded on eight-track machines and has stood the test of time. What does that tell you about the recording process?

A - We did it on a four-track machine I believe.

Q - Four track. That's even more impressive!

A - We recorded it in Berkeley. Much of it was "live". We decided to do everything "live". I have one picture of us in the studio. As an engineer, at the time I was doing recordings with a two-track machine. I think a stereo. But I started even earlier with a single track SONY. So I was familiar with doing rough recording. I had no experience in a recording studio. So, I didn't know what I was doing. We, as a band, had no experience. Unfortunately, Mikel Hunter was our producer and he had no experience. So when I listen to the recording now, at first I thought, "This is horrible." As I listen more I realize this is just the way things were. We were decent musicians. We weren't incredible musicians, but we had a sound. When I listen to it now I actually have grown to like all this rather than being hypercritical of it all. And I can be hyper critical because I literally engineered easily over a hundred albums. More than that. Probably a hundred and fifty albums. Now I appreciate the analog sound in the old equipment. There's just no way to get around it. That's why old analog equipment sells at a premium, if you get a hold of an old microphone. Newer electronic companies copy the old original electronics because of the sound. Sound wise it was hard to beat the way things were recorded in the '60s, and transistors started to change that when things became super transistorized.

Q - How far up the charts did "I Love You" get?

A - Number fourteen.

Q - On the Billboard chart?

A - On the Billboard chart. It probably would have got within the Top 5 except, because Mikel Hunter knew programming so well, he kept us informed of what happened. There were things called tip sheets in those days that certain radio programmers put out, who programmed for more than one radio station. Other programmers would read these tip sheets to get first dibs on new records. One of the tip sheets was called the Drake Report. He did program directing and his tip sheet was read by almost all of the radio people. Well, for some reason he hated our song. So that means his radio stations that he programmed would not play it. So we didn't get the coverage in certain areas because he absolutely refused to play it. His radio stations would not play the song, So we didn't get the kind of coverage we could have gotten, which would have pushed us even higher.

Q - Did the tip sheet ever report why they / he didn't like the song? Was he looking for a more Pop song?

A - I don't know. It was a very unusual song. It wasn't a typical Pop song. It just wasn't. It was a strange song. The reason I liked it was I was more eclectic. I loved the Pop groups, but I don't love Pop music. I loved the Rock groups that were more, in my opinion, more sincere about their music. I liked the Jefferson Airplane. I liked Big Brother. I liked The Who. We were huge fans of The Who. We were doing their songs. Cover bands were doing the Pop songs of the day, right? We were doing the Rock songs, the album songs of the day. So, we were doing Who stuff. We were doing Jefferson Airplane. We were doing, in our opinion, the more honest material that was being created, not just 'cause they wanted a hit record, but that was their creation. So, that's why I was always looking for interesting, different songs. Mikel was giving us hit songs to cover and we would do that because it satisfied the fact that we were performing every weekend for high schools and dances. And of course they wanted to hear some of the Pop songs as well. So, we were doing them, but our preference was Beatles, Rolling Stones, and a lot of the British groups, in my opinion, who were more interesting and more musical.

Q - People! opened for The Who in the summer of 1968.

A - That's correct.

Q - Did you ever open for The Doors? Did you ever cross paths with Jim Morrison?

A - We didn't cross paths with him, but we were on the same bill with him.

Q - Where would that have been?

A - That was in San Jose because they had a huge festival and one of the bands was The Doors.

Q - Did you watch the groups perform?

A - No. We covered their songs because they were hits. Because they were an L.A. band we never gravitated towards them. They were an unusual band. It's just I never got into 'em. And so I never went to see them.

Q - Did you tour behind your record?

A - We were with William Morris at the time. They set up a tour which was partially with The Who and partially with other bands that we opened for. I think we opened for Mitch Ryder And The Detroit Wheels. I think we opened for Peter Noone of Herman's Hermits. Our primary tour was with The Who. The big problem for us and why we didn't take advantage of the tour; the tour could have also pushed our record higher and pushed our album, but here was the problem. Around February '68 or March '68, when the record was starting to move up the charts, four members of the group joined the cult of Scientology. I had been approached about Scientology by David Nelson from New Riders Of The Purple Sage, but he was also a good, close friend of Jerry Garcia. He was playing with Jerry Garcia in the Blues Band because he's a really good guitar player. So, I met David through the Folk connecting in '63, and David started to take me under his wing as the older mentor. He was probably three years older than me and he was my mentor. But that's the way it worked. And so, he and another guy named Rick Melrose sat me down one day, got me stoned for the first time on pot. This was '63 by the way, and then proceed to tell me about L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology. They were proselytizing is what they were doing, and I was receptive to it. So, that was my first contact with Scientology. I got a book which at the time was The Dynamics book that Hubbard wrote. I had it, but I wasn't really reading it. Then I mentioned it to my parents' good friend, Ruth Levy, and she went off. I didn't really trust her, although my parents were hanging out all the time with her and her husband. They were really close to 'em. So, what happened is, I just kind of shelved it because I was getting really busy with the band and my music with teaching and Glendale College. Anyway, in 1968 I hadn't thought about Scientology for years. I was wrangling cows. The rest of the band, except for the drummer, were in high school. They were kids. The two leaders, one of 'em was married. He was the one more mature, and Larry Norman, who went on to have a huge career as almost the founder of Christian Rock music, modern Christian Rock, they were pretty diverse personalities. So, I had to deal with all that and there was some conflict. Albert Ribisi came to the rehearsal and he had seen a bumper sticker and said, "Hey, this looks interesting." It said, "Call Us If You Need Help", or something like that. And so, boom! It resurfaced. I already knew about it. I had embraced the fundamental concept when they turned me on and told me that spiritual philosophy of Scientology. So, because I was the leader, I went down there, the drummer, my brother and the new drummer, Denny Fridkin, and the keyboard player. We listened to a lecture at the Scientology Mission. For me it was like, "Sign me up!" We became zealots. I certainly was, and I think the others were too. As the leader, I was most zealous I would say. Within a few weeks we were embracing the philosophy and started to disassociate from the people around us 'cause that's what happens in a cult.

Q - Are you still a member of Scientology?

A - I wouldn't be calling it a cult if I was still a member.

Q - That's true.

A - I'm super-outspoken because I lost my kids to it. I have two children and both have shunned me since 2018. My retirement money, money that I should have been putting away, easily half a million dollars 'cause I was making pretty good money, went to Scientology. Not to mention it has a high level of suicide and mental imbalance in people who joined it. So, I was one of those people. So, I'm diverting. When we went on the tour we had fired one of the lead singers. Our sound was two singers, Larry Norman and Gene Mason. It made us really unique to have a duo up there onstage and we were able to do any kind of sound because Larry was a tenor and Gene was more of a baritone. So, we had a great combination. Larry was convinced he was an antisocial personality. That's a term they use. He was a diva. He was difficult to work with. Was that justification for firing him right before we went on tour? We were jealous. He got fired very unjustly I think.

Q - Who fired him?

A - I did. I was the leader. Mikel was violently against us firing Larry. In fact, what Mikel said was, "You do that and I'm going to say goodbye because that's terrible judgment." Mikel was older, a little bit more conservative in some respects. He was starting to turn on to pot and now we're in Scientology and Scientology was violently against any hallucinogenic or drug. Anything. That's not a bad thing by itself, except everyone was turning on to pot and it wasn't a huge deal. But now we were disassociating from Mikel 'cause he was starting to turn on. And so, we were highly critical of Mikel, highly critical of everybody. We were now the elite. When we went on tour it was really horrible because we couldn't replicate our hit record. We're missing one of our lead singers. For me it was a nightmare.

Q - Did you have a follow-up record to "I Love You"?

A - We did, but it was not good. We did one more album with Gene called "Both Sides Of People!", and it was pretty unremarkable. The B-side of the album, the flip side of the album was a Rock opera. This was prior to "Tommy", called "The Epic". It wasn't the greatest premise, but it was a Rock opera. We used to perform it onstage, an original piece. I didn't get writing credit. I should have. At the time I was really ignorant regarding writing and credits. The writers were me, the drummer and Larry Norman, the lead singer.

Q - At one point you had your picture taken with Paul McCartney. How did that happen?

A - One of the things that was attached to me was a Polaroid. I got a Polaroid camera, which was a big deal when I was 13, and from that point on I was taking photos. I was taking my Polaroid everywhere. So, I had my Polaroid camera. That was 1968. Apple Records, which was the Beatles' record company, they were just getting started and being distributed by E.M.I. and Capitol Records in the United States. E.M.I. in Europe and the rest of the world. But it was a huge Illinois distribution event where all the Capitol people came to L.A. and then they would do seminars for like a week. Paul came out with a big distributor's conference. He was meeting everyone and promoting Apple Records. So, we were asked to perform for all those people. It was a cool thing, right?

Q - Right.

A - While we still had both lead singers. And so we performed and they really enjoyed us. This was a critical audience too. You can imagine, radio people we were performing to. And so we did well. After the performance Paul was hanging out in one of the foyer areas of Capitol and I think people were afraid to approach him. He was kind of by himself. I went up to him and introduced myself. Because I think he might have seen us, it wasn't like I was a nobody. He didn't know my name, but I was a performer. I talked to him because we were monstrous fans of The Beatles. And then I proceeded to ask him if I could proselytize and get him interested in Scientology. If you want to shoot me now, go ahead. I'm glad he didn't get interested.

Q - Besides Paul, were there any other Beatles in attendance or famous musicians?

A - No. It was just Paul. I don't remember any other musicians there. I just felt really lucky that they had us to perform there. But I was also very friendly with the A&R guys there. One of 'em in particular, Don Grierson was a famous A&R man for Capitol Records. A really incredible, positive and sweet guy. Really a nice guy. He was one of the guys who really supported and believed in the song "I Love You". All of those Capitol guys worked their asses off to get that record to be a hit. They knew they were up against the Drake franchise of radio stations. Even with that, they didn't care. They were all hell bent on making that a hit record at Capitol.

Q - Where did this name People! come from?

A - We needed a name for the band. The way it came about is, I think we brain stormed. I'm not sure who finally came up with it. I would say probably more me. David Anderson... my brother... I don't know. But I know I was the leader of the group and I had to pretty much take on responsibility of anything regarding that this is now an entity. It's a business. There's no other way to say it. It was a group that had all the pitfalls and issues that a group has, including you need a name. So, we were looking at what were successful group names. The Zombies. The Beatles. The Rolling Stones. We were looking at single names. The Hollies. Those were all British groups. The Animals. All those names were animals names. So, we thought nobody has just the People. There are no People. What about People? And that's how it came about. Nobody had the name and we thought, we'll be the People.

Q - With an exclamation point!

A - Yeah. Well, we added it to stand out. Without it, it's a ubiquitous word used all the time and we somehow had to separate that out. So, that's how the name came about.

Q - You mentioned earlier that William Morris was backing People! The Who, I believe were being booked by Frank Barsalona and Premier Talent, as well as Herman's Hermits. His agency came about because he didn't like the way traditional agencies were treating Rock 'n' Roll groups. So, how did William Morris treat you guys?

A - Well, they were good. I got more familiar with William Morris because I was in New York. So, I was hanging out at William Morris and they were pretty good.

Official Website: www.PeopleRockBand.com

© Gary James. All rights reserved.

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