“Come on people now, smile on your brother, everybody get together, try to love one another right now …” – The Youngbloods
HSV: My sister always had your albums and I remember listening to “Song for Juli.” You definitely are in my DNA, childhood, growing up, into my teens. It’s an honor to speak to you all these years later. Here we are full circle.
JCY: Let’s talk about DNA for a second [laughter]. A couple years ago, I had just listened to the first lines of a song from the ‘50s — I can’t even remember the name of it — but I burst into tears and thought, “My god, this song is wired into me now, into my DNA.”
HSV: It’s a very spiritual thing, those moments when a song like “Get Together” really hits a nerve in some way.
JCY: In a wondrous way! I’m so surprised it’s lasted this long. We flew into San Francisco for the first time on June 15, 1967. “Get Together” was on the radio, that was the first time it was released and it was a hit in San Francisco and Seattle and that was about it, maybe Portland. But we had a record on the radio. We were starving in New York, and the music scene here was so different. It was so perfect.
We had a keyboard player that had a great big head of hair named Banana, and he was an anomaly on the East Coast. Every other guy at the gig that night in SF had big hair like him. [laughter] We walked into the middle of the Summer of Love. There’s fate and there’s destiny, and I was definitely destined to do this. Everything in my life was pointing toward it.
I was listening to a lecture recently where it was suggested that each one of us is here for a reason and that we all have the key to whatever genius — everyone has genius and we all have a key — to this huge “what the fuck is happening” puzzle, that is now our world. The best we can do is to figure out what our key is and use it.
HSV: If you shine your light then you’ll connect: “Look, there’s another light over there!” See each other amidst the darkness.
JCY: Yes, I feel that way. This is the way I serve my community, which extends from coast to coast and across the ocean and back again.
HSV: What would you like to say to the Haight-Ashbury community, let alone communities all over the world?
JCY: Don’t stop. Let your light shine. My batteries might be running down [laughter] but my heart is still in the same place that it was on June 15, 1967 when I played the Avalon Ballroom that first time and I discovered my new home in the Bay Area.
