I: "It was great music to float on while in the thrall of cannabis."

They were dubbed “eclectic electric” by influential critic Pete Welding in a 1968 concert review for Down Beat, and the adjective “eclectic” has stuck with Kaleidoscope ever since. No other band of the time commanded such a wide array of instruments—many of them exotic specimens never before seen or heard in rock music—or played so many kinds of music with such fearless authority. On the four albums and assorted singles they recorded in their four years on Epic Records they put the distinctive stamp of their collective musical intelligence on everything they touched.

Says Jac Holzman, founder of Elektra Records, “Kaleidoscope was a very emotional group, while still parading their eclecticism. They crafted their music from numerous threads (blues, folk, flamenco riffs, Middle Eastern, etc.), linking them together into something that was very fresh to my ears…It was great music to float on while in the thrall of cannabis.”

On stage the band could turn on a dime from precision ensemble playing in complex time signatures to passages of total freak-out abandon. “We were never a group for screaming teeny boppers,” says Solomon Feldthouse, whose musical connection with band founder David Lindley would form the nucleus of Kaleidoscope. “But you can bet your sweet ass every damn town we’d play in all the other professional musicians would show up to catch every last set we’d play.” Jimmy Page, then a member of the Yardbirds, saw them at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco, and the memory lingered with him. A few years later he said in an interview for the magazine Zigzag, “They’re my favorite band of all time—my ideal band.” How a bunch of folk, blues and jazz obsessives became such a band is one of the small wonders of the time.

David Lindley (b. March 21, 1944; Los Angeles, California) came from a family with some associations to the motion picture business. His father’s sister was the actress Loretta Young, mother of Moby Grape’s Peter Lewis, and actor Ricardo Montalban was “Uncle Ricardo.” Music was important in his San Marino household. His brother Patrick was a harpsichord prodigy, and his father’s record collection exposed him to esoteric sounds early on.

When he took up guitar, flamenco was his particular passion, and flamenco influence would be detectable in his playing on the many other stringed instruments he later tackled, particularly the banjo. Bowed instruments, such as the psaltery and viola da gamba, were another source of interest. The folk musical revival scene would expose him to yet more sounds.

There were three camps,” says Lindley of the major folk music energy centers in the Los Angeles area. “There was the Ash Grove, the Troubadour, and then there was The Cat’s Pajamas in Arcadia. Schools, I should say. The Ash Grove was a school.” Among the young aspirants who spent time at the Ash Grove were Taj Mahal, Ry Cooder and Al Wilson—as well as most of the future members of Kaleidoscope. Here Lindley was first exposed to traditional, “old-timey” music and its modern, driving variant, bluegrass.

Although Lindley learned to play most of the instruments in the folk music arsenal, it was on the banjo that he would concentrate most of his energy and earn his early reputation. He won the Topanga Canyon Banjo Contest several years in a row. As he’d later tell the magazine Comstock Lode, “I aimed for those contests…trying to improve upon what I had all the time. I was really young. I had the appetite to get better.” At the age of 17 he recorded two tracks for a banjo sampler LP on Horizon, an album that also featured a young Jim McGuinn.

While a student at La Salle High School in Pasadena, Lindley formed the Mad Mountain Ramblers. In the neighboring college town of Claremont was a like-minded string band called the Re-Organized Dry City Players, featuring Chris Darrow on mandolin and fiddle. One evening at The Cats Pajamas, Lindley approached Darrow about merging members of their two bands together into an “all star” band of sorts.

Chris Darrow (b. July 30, 1944; Sioux Falls, South Dakota) came from a musical household. His father, an art instructor, was a jazz aficionado who played clarinet and sax. Darrow himself played clarinet early on, liked music and listening to the radio, but was interested in athletics as much as anything else. It was the Kingston Trio who inspired him to first take up the guitar. As he would later tell Zigzag, “They made me consider the possibilities of playing, rather than just listening.” He began singing and playing parties with his friend Roger Palos, doing Everly Brothers tunes and the like. He was also hanging out at the Folk Music Center in Claremont. As owner Charles Chase would tell Zigzag, “He spent half his life in here, just playing instruments, browsing through the literature and listening to records.” Here Darrow fell in love with bluegrass and started the Re-Organized Dry City Players. After he began playing with the Mad Mountain Ramblers, Darrow kept his old band going for a while, before devoting himself to the new one.

The Ramblers landed a regular gig playing in Frontierland at Disneyland, a job later inherited by Chris Hillman and his Scottsville Squirrel Barkers. Sometime after the Ramblers went their separate ways, Lindley and Darrow formed a new group, the Dry City Scat Band, featuring the phenomenal young fiddler, Richard Greene. This group, shortly after Darrow’s departure, contributed two songs to Elektra’s 1965 String Band Project and recorded a limited release EP of their own, called Sounds.

Though pop music of the early ‘60s had held little charm for Darrow, hearing the Beatles changed everything. Says Darrow of his initial reaction to them, "'Oh, I get it, Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, bluegrass harmonies with a beat.' Suddenly, rock’n’roll had a purpose and a sound we could rally around.” Darrow started his own rock group, The Floggs, with old bluegrass band mates Roger Palos and Bill Stamps, along with Hugh Kohler on organ and Tommy Salisbury on drums. Their sound modeled on British Invasion groups like Them and the Animals, they did the teen clubs and band battles, playing a mix of covers and Darrow originals. (A number of songs Darrow wrote for the Floggs would later appear, somewhat altered, on the first Kaleidoscope album.) With financial help from a friend they recorded seven songs, but the tape was shopped around without success and the band eventually dissolved. Darrow enrolled in art classes at Claremont Graduate School. “I thought that was ‘it’ for me,” he says.

Of his own eventual decision to go electric, Lindley says, “Everyone was doing it…You’d go to see Taj Mahal and the Rising Sons…Jesse Ed Davis, Ry Cooder. Everybody kind of launched into it…The real transitional band in Los Angeles was the Chambers Brothers…Those guys were bona fide cool…That was the big transitional band for me.”

Lindley’s first electric group included Mark Feedman, Brian Monsour on keyboard bass, and a singer-guitarist named Tom—Lindley forgets his last name. A turning point came when Solomon Feldthouse was brought in. Says Lindley, “The first time I ran into Sol he played a gig at the Pasadena City College and the Dry City Scat Band was on the bill. He played flamenco and saz and all kinds of things. I made a mental note of his playing and singing. A bit later I decided that I wanted to put something together with Solomon, so I went down to his house and sat with him and listened to him play the saz. It was really a mind-blower.”

Solomon Feldthouse (b. January 20, 1940; Pingry, Idaho) moved with his family to Izmit, Turkey, when he was about ten. Says Feldthouse, “I started playing while I was over there…Greek, Turkish and Persian music, ‘coz that’s what I heard every day.” He also fell in love with flamenco music. As he remembers it, “My mama used to like to go to Istanbul on the weekends sometimes…She ran into this gal from Spain that worked there [the singer Pepita Lerma] who was half gypsy, from Madrid…She gave my mother some records to give to me and I went berserk. We went to visit her in Madrid and she bought me my first guitar and showed me some of the stuff…I got a terminal disease from that.” After about six years in Turkey, Feldthouse returned to the U.S. He’d been gigging around for some time both as a solo and with flamenco and belly dance groups when Lindley approached him about getting something together.

While the nascent electric band was continuing to form, Lindley and Feldthouse also began playing as a duo, calling themselves at times David and Solomon, the Kings of Israel. It was around then that future Kaleidoscope member Chester Crill first met them. “I was vacationing in Berkeley with my wife,” Crill remembers. “Solomon and David were upstairs rehearsing. They were both playing violin…After about two days of that I just went upstairs and said, 'Listen, I’m better than you guys.'" This somewhat inauspicious encounter eventually resulted in Crill being hired on to play bass.

In his younger years Chester Crill (b. Oklahoma City, Oklahoma) had spent quite a bit of time on the road with his parents. Says Crill, “We played religious, tent meeting-type things.” His family settled in Pasadena. There his father, “a heroic tenor in the Wagnerian strain,” worked as a voice teacher, while his mother taught piano. Crill studied piano as a child, before moving on to clarinet, then violin. Although he didn’t harbor any dreams of making a living musically, in his teenage years he did fall into playing violin for a few different jug band-type aggregations, including Cowboy Ramar and the Bongo Bompers. He also became proficient in blues harmonica, and took a master class from Sonny Terry at the Ash Grove, along with fellow students Taj Mahal and Al Wilson. He was working in a bookstore when Lindley asked him about joining his band. According to Crill, “Lindley said, ‘Quit your job and I’ll guarantee you ten thousand bucks this year.’”

next: "There's a high hyena factor in that band."