Live 1967 (Red Krayola album)

Live 1967 is a live performance album by the experimental rock band Red Krayola.^[1][2] It was released in 1998 by Drag City.^[3] The two-disc set comprises the band's performance at the Angry Arts Festival in Los Angeles as well as their sets from various shows at the Berkeley Folk Festival during summer 1967.^[4] Like all the music played at the festivals, it is dedicated to the troops positioned in Vietnam.^[5]

The performances were recorded by Mayo Thompson with contact microphones. In the 1990s, the band signed to Drag City which led to them releasing the recordings.

Kurt Von Meier, a University of California art-history professor, became interested in the band after he heard tapes containing Coconut Hotel, Red Krayola's rejected second album. He was intrigued by the band's experimental and free-form music and invited them to perform at Angry Arts Folk Festival in Berkeley and the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles in June and July.^[5] Meier also pushed to get the band to play in the Monterey Pop Festival, but was turned down by the festival's organizers.^[6][7]

The music played by the Red Crayola during their sets was completely instrumental and consisted of drone, noise music and free improvisation, comparable to early Velvet Underground.^[4] The first disc contains the band's performance at the Angry Arts Festival on June 6, 1967. The second disc is made up of three separate performances which took place in the evenings between June 27 to July 4. During the festival, the band met the folk guitarist John Fahey, who accompanied the band onstage for an improvisation session.^[8][9] On the 4th, the announcer mistook the Red Krayola's music for an equipment malfunction and continued to talk several minutes into the band's set.

After the Red Krayola's performance with John Fahey, they performed at a venue where the band where paid to stop performing.^[10] They later recorded a collaborative album together, however, the band's label International Artists demanded Thompson hand over the tapes due to the recording breaching their contract.^[11][12][13] Thompson remarked he had not examined the contract and that the recordings were handed over before duplicates could be made.^[13] He stated:^[11]

Our record company went through the ceiling over this. They threatened not to bring us back from California, even though they had used our publishing royalties to fly us out here in the first place, which is illegal, I have subsequently found out.  But they threatened not to bring us back. So Rick and Steve said, "You go to Frisco and get the tapes, and we're going back to Texas."  So it became my job to do this, because I had started the band.  So I came back up here and picked up the tapes, which were reluctantly handed over.  We intended to try to do something with them.  And then I had to take these tapes back to Texas, give them to the record company, and then bust up, that was the end of that. 

These performances received a lukewarm response from audience and critics alike. Berkeley's underground newspaper, the Berkeley Barb, dismissed the band as being the "bummer of the festival." Some of audience accused the music of being so abrasive that it was the direct cause of a dog's death during the festival.^[6]

In reviewing the two-disc release, the music critic Richie Unterberger noted his admiration of the band's dedication to experimenting in-front of an audience who expected more conventional music. He gave the album two out of five stars, writing, "The Velvet Underground and Pink Floyd, however, rarely stuck with this kind of inaccessible freakiness for more than a few minutes at a time on record, even at their most willfully obscure. This is all inaccessible freakiness."^[4]

On October 24, 2019, Lisson Gallery New York hosted a night of performance, discussion and music inspired by the pioneering work of Art & Language and their 40-year collaboration with the Red Krayola, at the event J. Spaceman and John Coxon covered the entirety of Live 1967 and released as J. Spaceman, John Coxon – Play The Red Krayola Live 1967 in 2021.^[15]