Ace of Cups: The Best Rock Band You’ve Never Heard Of?

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The first time I ever heard the Ace of Cups, an all-woman rock band from San Francisco in the mid- to late-1960’s, was in 1968 when I saw a TV documentary on KQED, the San Francisco Bay Area’s public television station, called West Pole. Co-produced, written and narrated by Ralph J. Gleason, jazz and pop music critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, West Pole was an hour-long telecast devoted to Gleason’s insistence that the center of creative rock music in the late 1960’s was San Francisco.

Gleason’s advocacy of his city as the source of all rock creativity was way overstated. The San Francisco scene produced one great band, the Jefferson Airplane; one mediocre band that lucked into a fabulous singer, Big Brother and the Holding Company with Janis Joplin; one band that became an institution and created a cult following while most non-initiates considered them boring, the Grateful Dead; and other sporadically interesting groups who often made a great album or two, or just coasted on one memorable song. Among American rockers from the 1960’s, The Doors and Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention from L.A. and the Velvet Underground from New York (whom Gleason dismissed in a snippy, derisive review that called them “The Velvet Underpants”) hold up at least as well as the San Francisco bands.

But West Pole did showcase six major acts from San Francisco, four of them — the Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service and Steve Miller Band — in abstract films that were the ancestors of music videos. The other two were presented as up-and-coming performers and showcased in live performances in the KQED studios. One were the Sons of Champlin, an all-male jazz-rock band that were obviously following the same trend as Blood, Sweat and Tears or Chicago. They didn’t achieve the nationwide fame of these two, but they did score a major-label recording contract and sell well among their Bay Area fans. (Their leader, Bill Champlin, eventually got hired by Chicago — the band, not the city — as one of the replacements they tried out when their original lead singer and guitarist, Terry Kath, killed himself in an accident while cleaning his gun.)

The other were the Ace of Cups, who did three songs I found absolutely haunting. One, which opened the show, was an a cappella vocal-harmony ode to the power of music to get you over hard times. It was called simply “Music” and opened the West Pole show, though Gleason’s producing partner, director Robert Zagone, way overdirected it with psychedelic effects and negative film. Ace of Cups’ other two songs on the program came at its end, with the Sons of Champlin’s song sandwiched in between. One was a slow, moody piece called “Simplicity” that musically and lyrically was anything but simple. The other, which closed the piece, I assumed was called “Listen to Your Children” because that was its plaintive refrain: a plea to God (and, by inference, to authority figures in general) to listen to the rebellious youth of 1968 and support them.

I recorded the soundtrack to West Pole on reel-to-reel tape as I was watching it, played the tape fairly often and then it receded in my attention as the decades rolled on, I left my mother’s home, made my way through life as an adult and collected a lot more (and different kinds) of music. But somewhere in the back of my mind I had a vague recollection of those women who had sung that haunting song pleading with God and anyone else in charge of things, “Lord, oh Lord, won’t you listen to your children?” So imagine my surprise when I read in a British music magazine in late 2018 that the Ace of Cups, of all people, had come together, reunited and, in their 70’s, had made their first-ever studio album.

I went online and ordered it from amazon.com. When it arrived, I was so impressed I went back online and ordered It’s Bad for You, but Buy It, a 2003 collection of Ace of Cups demo tapes and live appearances, including the three songs they had sung on West Pole. (I found out that the official name of the song I had thought was called “Listen to Your Children” was “Gospel Song.”) I also found a DVD containing West Pole as well as another show about San Francisco rock Gleason and Zagone had produced for KQED, Go Ride the Music. So I got not only to listen to the Ace of Cups but also see them — and for the first time to see them in color, since when West Pole first aired my family had only had a black-and-white TV.

The Ace of Cups emerge from all this re-creation as potentially one of the greatest and most feverishly creative rock bands of all time. The demos on It’s Bad for You, but Buy It range over a wide gamut of musical styles that make one wonder what might have happened if they had got a record contract in the late 1960’s. They were a five-piece group, and the last member to join, Denise Kaufman (vocals, guitar and harmonica), became the band’s key figure as its sound evolved. The other members were Mary Ellen Simpson (lead guitar), Marla Hunt (keyboards), Mary Gannon (bass) and Diane Vitalich (drums). All five women sang with clear voices of bell-like clarity — though Kaufman could “rough it up” in songs that required it — and all but Vitalich took turns as lead singer.

The songs on It’s Bad for You, but Buy It fall pretty much in three styles. Some reached back to the vocal harmonies of the great non-playing girl groups of the early 1960’s. Others settled in the basic psychedelic-rock style that was the go-to sound for bands trying to break into the San Francisco scene, including the Jefferson Airplane and other “name” acts for whom the Ace of Cups opened. But some of the most interesting songs on the It’s Bad for You set are the ones like “Glue” (a bitter spoof of advertising that gave It’s Bad for You its title), “Stones,” “Circles,” and “Catch You Later,” uncannily anticipate the women-led punk bands of the late 1970’s — the Patti Smith Group, the Pretenders and Siouxsie and the Banshees in particular — that at least cracked, if they didn’t quite break, the glass ceiling against women (especially ones who played instruments and/or wrote songs as well as singing) becoming major rock stars. There’s also an audacious cover of Mongo Santamaria’s jazz instrumental “Afro-Blue” — most famous from the live version by John Coltrane — which begins slowly and softly, with beautiful vocal harmonies from the band members that goes into a faster, jazzier section that shows off drummer Vitalich’s free sense of rhythm.

Why didn’t a band this good get a record contract when quite a few inferior male acts from the same time and place did? The sources differ, though no doubt sexism played a role. The Wikipedia page on the Ace of Cups notes that their initial manager was an astrologer, Ambrose Hollingsworth, who named them after a card in the Tarot deck. Later Hollingsworth took on a partner, Quicksilver Messenger Service co-manager Ron Polte, who shopped the Ace of Cups to record companies but didn’t get an offer lucrative enough for him to shop it to the band.

But one other possible problem was that the Ace of Cups members were all straight women, and they did the usual things straight women do — they dated men, fell in love, got married and started having kids. Kids were a problem for an up-and-coming band because any record company that signed the Ace of Cups would have expected them to tour in support of their album. With the social expectation, even in the supposedly sexually liberated hippie community, that men went out and worked while women stayed at home and raised the children, the Ace of Cups members were willing to get babysitters so they could do local gigs in the Bay Area and still get home in the early morning — but a big tour that would have taken them away from their families for months on end was out of the question.

So it wasn’t until 2018 that the Ace of Cups — four-fifths of them, anyway (Marla Hunt was the odd woman out) — finally, in their 70’s, got together to make a studio album, a two-CD set blending songs they’d written and performed in their heyday (such as it was) with new material. Though it has its disappointing aspects, for the most part Ace of Cups is an extraordinary album, not only an excursion into what-might-have-been but beautiful, moving, valid music in its own right.

Let’s discuss the big problem with this album first. Ace of Cups is no longer an all-woman band; all the keyboard lines are played by men, as are quite a few of the bass and drum parts. A number of guest artists, many of them veterans of the 1960’s San Francisco rock scene — lead guitarist Jorma Kaukonen and bassist Jack Casady of the Jefferson Airplane, singer and guitarist Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead, bassist Dave Freiberg of Quicksilver Messenger Service, and solo blues revivalist Taj Mahal — appear. That wouldn’t be so bad if they’d just contributed instrumentally, but Weir, Mahal and actor Peter Coyote sang on some of the numbers — and as good as they are (Coyote’s country-rock ballad “As the Rain” is actually one of the album’s highlights), the sound of men’s voices can’t help but break the mood so beautifully created by these women’s harmonies.

The biggest example of how the male guest stars send the Ace of Cups’ concept haywire is in one of the tracks on the Ace of Cups album that’s repeated from the It’s Bad for You CD. On It’s Bad for You it’s a medley of two original songs, “Life in Your Hands” — an ode to the baby-to-be one of the group members, Mary Gannon, was expecting — and “Thelina,” a beautiful song of welcome to the world Gannon wrote when her child, a daughter named Thelina, was born. When they redid the song for Ace of Cups, the band members made the horrible mistake of giving the lead vocal on “Life in Your Hands” to Taj Mahal — undercutting the beautiful message of the original that as much as we men like to think we’re in charge, it is women who carry our young in their bodies for nine months and bring them into the world. They also inserted the traditional Irish song “Macushla” into the middle of the original medley, which helps to restore a bit of the original mood after Taj Mahal’s good but wildly inappropriate vocal, before the Cupsters’ voices return on “Thelina” and reaffirm the feminist message of the original.

With that major miscalculation — and the aggravation that the hauntingly beautiful “Gospel Song,” a.k.a. “Listen to Your Children,” isn’t on the new album (you have to buy the download of It’s Bad for You to get what’s probably the Ace of Cups’ all-time greatest song) — the new studio album remains a major piece of work every fan of 1960’s rock ought to own. Indeed, though the song “Stones” remains as edgy as ever — perhaps edgier, in that Denise Kaufman rewrote the original lyric to reflect the day her illusions about the Rolling Stones died (on December 3, 1969 at the notorious Altamont Speedway concert, when she was hit in the face by a quart-sized beer bottle thrown by a Hell’s Angel, her skull was fractured, the on-side medics wanted to use the Stones’ helicopter to evacuate her, and the Stones refused) — much of the music has taken on a softer, more autumnal quality.

Indeed, the 2018 Ace of Cups sounds like what an Ace of Cups reunion album might have been if they’d had a more normal career trajectory — a record contract, a few albums sold, a community following built up before the usual strains and the frustration of not quite becoming superstars broke them up. The opening song, “Feel Good,” was one that didn’t survive even as a demo tape until the Cupsters received a CD dub of an old cassette recording someone in Seattle made by sneaking his recorder into a concert where they were opening for the Jefferson Airplane. They re-learned the song from that old record and brought in the Airplane’s bassist, Jack Casady, to lay down a powerful bass line that drove the song and brought it back to that night in 1969 when the two bands had shared the bill in Seattle.

There’s also more of a country feel to the new Ace of Cups album than would have been there if they’d recorded in 1969 when they should have. Taj Mahal contributes a banjo part on an “interlude” song called “Daydreamin’” (not a cover of the classic John Sebastian/Lovin’ Spoonful song “Daydream” but somewhat along similar lines), and the banjo keeps going on the next song, “On the Road,” which also features a country fiddle and pedal steel guitar. “Pepper in the Pot” features a guest appearance by 1960’s Native American Buffy Sainte-Marie, who as a woman fits considerably better with the Ace of Cups than the male guests, and her edgier voice, with its thick vibrato, adds a dash of, well, pepper into the Cupsters’ pot.

Overall, Ace of Cups is an enjoyable album, worth hearing not as the long overdue studio debut of one of the most enigmatic bands of the 1960’s but as a major work in its own right. To riff off the title of the previous 2003 compilation of their surviving demos and live tapes, the Ace of Cups album is good for you — so buy it!