Jean Paul "J.P." Pickens (May 6, 1937 – July 6, 1973), was a musician in the early North Beach, San Francisco, music scene, circa 1963, along with David Meltzer and James Gurley, defining the psychedelic rock genre. J.P. played regularly at the Coffee Gallery on Grant Street in the early sixties, performing with Meltzer, Gurley and Peter Albin (who later formed Big Brother and the Holding Company) and many others.
Music
J.P.’s electrified banjo playing on the raga-rock epic “The Endless Tunnel,” from David and Tina Meltzer’s album The Serpent Power, featuring their band of the same name has become a collector’s item{ { Citation needed|date=July 2023}} . 'The Serpent Power' was released on Vanguard Records in 1966, and is played on radio stations all over the country.
The Serpent Power was ranked 28th on Rolling Stone Magazine's Essential Albums of 1967 in a 2007 Summer of Love issue. The issue honored the 40th anniversary of the founding of the magazine, and included a special mention of the song J.P. plays on, "Endless Tunnel." A recent review of the album by forcedexposure.com states, “…the epic 13-minute-long 'Endless Tunnel,' an Eastern-tinged acid jam spiced up with an electric banjo, is worth the price of admission alone.” { { Citation needed|date=July 2023}}
J.P.’s first album, “Intensifications,” recorded with Gene Estribou in the ballroom-turned-recording studio of Gene’s San Francisco Haight Ashbury mansion in 1965, was originally released on Henry Jacobs' MEA label, and was recently re-issued by Locust Music.
Life
J.P. was born in Vernon, Texas, the only son of Paul Desmond and Lula Muriel Pickens. Barbara Sue, his older sister, was born in 1934. In 1948 the family moved to Los Angeles, California, where J.P. met his future wife, Mary Ann Bielat. J.P. and Mary Ann married in January 1955 and had three children, Kay Anne, born July 21, 1955, in Los Angeles, California, Cheryl Lynne, born December 29, 1956, in Los Angeles, California, and Paul Desmond, born August 10, 1959, in Portland, Oregon.
J.P. and Mary Ann lived in the Los Angeles area early in their married life, and they became friends with Beat artists such as George Herms, Frank Stewart, Wallace Berman and David and Tina Meltzer. J.P. loved music and the joy of creating it, and he loved all music: Ralph Stanley, Hank Williams, Lefty Frizzell, Billie Holiday, Doc Boggs, Mainer’s Mountaineers, Don Gibson, Jo Stafford, Lester Flatt & Earl Scruggs, The New Lost City Ramblers, Doc Watson, Charlie Parker, Lennie Tristano, Django Reinhardt, Mavis Staples, The HiLos, The Abyssinian Gospel Choir, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Jimi Hendrix, as well as Eddie Lang, Bix Beiderbecke, Robert Johnson, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Ray Charles and Howlin Wolf, just to name a few of the record albums he owned and listened to regularly. He had studied the piano and saxophone in a formal way, then picked up the guitar, finally settling on the banjo and learning to play bluegrass, a genre that seemed to offer him joy and freedom.
J.P. was a complex, intelligent and highly creative individual, as well as a devoted family man, an artist and an accomplished musician, and was well known as an avid collector. His obsession with collecting sprang from his belief that all objects were art, all objects have beauty and were worthy of standing alone as art or of disassembling and re-working to enhance the art inherent within. He had been inspired and influenced by his beatnik artist friends, and by the revolution in the art world earlier last century that produced the Dada/Anti-Art movement and the found object philosophy of Marcel Duchamp.
The family lived for a while in Topanga Canyon, and at the top of their driveway was a large garage, used by Frank Stewart as an art studio for his paintings, later becoming the site of a 1962 'Tap City Circus' art/ music party/happening, hosting a number of bluegrass and other musicians, who showed up, looked at the paintings and George Herms's junk art sculptures, drank wine and jammed all day.
J.P. also had a passion for the written word, and in 1958 he owned a bookstore in Portland, Oregon, “Days and Nights,” and carried many titles from Grove Press, which was at that time embattled in court for distributing Henry Miller's works, among others. Later when he lived in Lagunitas, (western Marin County) he worked at the Discovery bookstore in San Francisco. He loved to tell his friends about buying books from people who had just shoplifted them from the City Lights Bookstore up the block.