Colorado’s first jam band, Magic Music, plans reunion concert, film

By Quentin Young

Magic Music, more than any other band, set the tone for the Colorado hippie-music scene, with its back-to-the-earth ethos, long-haired men, natural women, abundant marijuana, DIY attitude, antiwar politics and sun-bright songs. In the early 1970s the band became well-known around Boulder, jamming at local venues and on the University of Colorado campus. The free-wheeling lifestyle of its members, who lived in school buses parked in the foothills, was the stuff of lore.

Everyone thought they’d become famous. But they never put out an album, and, though music professionals in the state often cite Magic Music as Colorado’s first jam band, many young music fans have never heard of them.

Lee Aronsohn is out to change that.

A successful TV producer who co-created “Two and a Half Men” and served as executive producer of “The Big Bang Theory,” Aronsohn was a political science major at CU in the early 1970s. The week this self-described “upper middle-class Jewish kid from White Plains, N.Y.” arrived on campus, he caught the Grateful Dead at CU’s Folsom Field, and the local music scene, especially in The Hill neighborhood, was at a peak, he said.

“Very soon after I arrived in Boulder, I ran into Magic Music playing on campus,” Aronsohn recalled. “It was love at first sight. They were everything I thought hippies in Colorado would be. Long hair, acoustic instruments, great harmonies, original songs that were just beautiful. And they talked about living up in the mountains in school buses. I just thought it was incredibly romantic and wonderful.”

He became, and remains, a devoted fan. Now retired from TV, Aronsohn is making a documentary film about Magic Music, tentatively titled “Everything is Floating.” As part of the project, he has organized a reunion concert for Nov. 22 at the Boulder Theater. The concert, to be filmed, will feature surviving members of Magic Music — founding member Lynn “Flatbush” Poyer died in 2011 — who haven’t played together in more than 40 years. They include Will Luckey on guitar, Chris “Spoons” Daniels on guitar, George “Tode” Cahill on flute, Kevin “CW” Milburn on percussion and Rob “Puna” Galloway on bass. Michael Wooten will play drums, and bassist Bill “Das” Makepeace also might make an appearance. The concert costs $9 — “1972 prices,” say promoters. Some of the proceeds will benefit the Rocky Mountain Chapter of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. (Daniels was diagnosed with acute myoloid leukemia in 2010.)

Some of the film, including interviews with band members and an informal Magic Music performance several months ago on the CU campus, has already been shot. When it’s completed, Aronsohn plans to get the movie, along with the Magic Music music that accompanies it, out to a wide audience.

“I would love to get it into festivals,” he said. “I want their music to be heard. Once their music is heard, there should be a good shot at getting some distribution for it.”

Magic Music was founded in 1970 by Poyer and Cahill, along with a bassist named Marty Trigg. The band’s first gig was at The Sink in Boulder, where they were hired by Chuck Morris, the now-legendary music promoter who heads AEG Live Rocky Mountains. Soon, Luckey and Galloway joined the band, and a couple of years later, Poyer was replaced by Daniels.

Of all the members, Daniels is the one most familiar to contemporary audiences. He and his band, The Kings, a horn-heavy funk and blues act, have been a staple of Front Range live music for more than 30 years, and he’s a Colorado Music Hall of Fame inductee. His involvement with Magic Music goes back to May 1970, when he met and jammed with Luckey at an antiwar rally known as Woodstock West on the University of Denver campus. Daniels recently learned that the moment was captured in a photograph, which shows Luckey and a shirt-less Daniels jamming on a slapdash stage. Luckey told Daniels that day that he should play guitar for a living — advice that Daniels continues to heed 45 years later.

“It’s weird to have somebody capture the moment in your life when your life changed,” Daniels said. “I’m sitting here talking with you because of that moment.”

Boulder in the early ’70s was a creatively vibrant place with musicians of various styles and a deep audience of listeners.

“Boulder was probably the one place where Magic Music could have happened, because it embraced everything from (Western swing band) Dusty Drapes & the Dusters to (surf rock band) The Astronauts, you know, and if you think about that, both of those are weird bands,” Daniels said. “We could get out there with two acoustic guitars, flute and tablas and everybody would get all blissed out, you know, and have a great time, and then (funk and soul band) Freddi-Henchi would come out in full gold lamé suits. It was the same audience, and that’s what Boulder allowed to happen.”

Magic Music’s school buses were parked at various times in Eldorado Canyon, Allenspark and a farm in Pagosa Springs. Sometimes they’d get chased off by a local sheriff, but the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle “didn’t suck,” Daniels said.

“But the only part of it that is a little romanticized is the reason we did all that is we were poor as church mice,” he said. “This is a true story — we played for $25 and a hundred pounds of beans … I can say we actually played for beans.”

Aronsohn was in awe of the band’s “hipness” and took every chance to see them perform, he said. He wasn’t alone.

“They were incredibly popular, I mean they would gather huge crowds,” Aronsohn said. “Everybody thought that they would be big. Everybody thought that it was just a matter of time before they’d be like the next Crosby, Stills & Nash or something.”

Magic Music was on the lineup of the second and third Telluride Bluegrass festivals. The band had record company offers, but, mostly out of naivete and idealism, they passed them up.

“We got offered some very good contracts, but at that time I don’t think any of us understood anything about the music business,” said Daniels, who besides continuing to perform with The Kings (their latest album, Funky to the Bone, has earned a first-round Grammy award nomination for best blues album), is an assistant professor at the University of Colorado Denver’s College of Arts & Media. He teaches the music business to help young artists avoid some of the mistakes Magic Music made, he said.

There might have been missed opportunities, but Daniels takes an everything-turned-out-right attitude.

“The lyrics and the music in some ways are almost frozen in time of the 1970s,” he said. “And that’s OK. It’s kind of magic — no pun intended.”

Some of the members started to have children, and it was mostly the demands of family that led to the band’s breakup, Daniels said. Aronsohn moved to Los Angeles in 1975.

“For the next 40 years I just had these songs in my head,” he said.

When his own children were young, he would sing them a Magic Music song called “Bring the Morning Down” as a lullabye: “Bring the morning down/Pretty mama, yeah, draw it all around …”

A couple of years ago he tried to find out what became of the band. He tracked down a reference online to Daniels and sent him an email.

“That’s how it started,” Aronsohn said. “It became my mission to try and put that back together again.”

Magic Music is the heart of the film, but Aronsohn wants it to convey a full-bodied narrative.

“Part of this story is not only what happened to them but what happened to Boulder,” Aronsohn said. He added, “It’s a story about an era, it’s a story about a generational journey, and it’s a story about the music.”

When Aronsohn came to film in Boulder this summer, it was the first time he had seen the city in 40 years.

“I was amazed at how much had changed. When I was there, Pearl Street wasn’t a mall. It was just a street,” he said.

He talked with local residents about what they think of the city’s evolution. The reviews were mixed.

“The gentrification is undeniable,” Aronsohn said “The fact that people who grew up there can’t afford to live there anymore is undeniable. The fact that Google is going to be expanding into a huge campus there was mentioned a number of times. The golden days were golden for some people, and they’re golden now for some people.”

The crew still is interested in talking with people who were connected to Magic Music or can offer perspectives on Boulder of the early 1970s. Aronsohn is particularly interested in tracking down video footage of the band, which has proved difficult. Those who can help are invited to write to Fleur Saville, a member of the production team, at fleuriscool@gmail.com.

The crew does have access to music recorded by the band in the 1970s, however, including a set of demos that Aronsohn said he’d like to put out on an album.

“I kind of envy the people who have never heard it, because they get to hear it for the first time,” Aronsohn said of Magic Music’s material.

In recent years, band manager Greg Sparr has hosted informal Magic Music jams at his mountain home, Daniels said, and members have recently recorded an album of their old material, expected to be released by next summer. It features guest appearances by such artists as the Doobie Brothers’ John McFee, Little Feat’s Bill Payne and Bob Dylan collaborator Scarlet Rivera, Daniels said. He and other members would welcome an opportunity to start performing as Magic Music again, he said.

“Music is a time machine,” Daniels said. “I didn’t know this when I started playing guitar. Nobody said, ‘Oh, yeah, this is Ponce de León, you know, this is the fountain of youth.’ You watch us when we’re playing and we close our eyes because we’re concentrating, but also, like everybody else, we all feel like we’re in our 20s inside.”

He continued. “All of sudden my eyes are closed and I’m 25 years old, and there’s a beautiful girl just, you know, spent the afternoon with me out chopping wood, and she’s gonna go down to some classes at CU and then meet me at the concert later, you know. That’s exactly how I feel. It’s a time machine.”

Quentin Young: quentin@dailycamera.com or twitter.com/qpyoungnews