They turned their crash pad and rehearsal space into a commune and printed their recycled LP covers at their kitchen table.
Since 2005 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who've been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place.
Chicago gets short shrift in tales of the counterculture of the late 60s and early 70s, but our city nurtured its own underground scene full of political activists, hippie communes, mind-expanding newspapers, revolutionary causes, and hallucinogenic music. Some local bands, operating in the mold of the MC5 in Detroit, were more entrenched than others in the revolution. Yama & the Karma Dusters were among them, and the Secret History of Chicago Music got the group's whole hairy story from founding member Al Goldberg.
Goldberg was born in Lawndale and raised in west suburban Bellwood in the 50s. As a kid he met singer-songwriter Howard Berkman, a transplant to the burbs from Albany Park. Berkman had formed garage band the Knaves (a previous Secret History subject) with bassist Neal Pollack (no relation to the former Reader staff writer), and both of them would figure into the Karma Dusters story.
Goldberg attended the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he formed the band Somebody Groovy. They merged with future local heroes the Finchley Boys to become Brownfield Wood, who called it quits at the end of the Summer of Love in 1967. At that point, Goldberg realized he hadn't registered for more classes and split for home.
After moving back in with his parents, Goldberg transferred to the University of Illinois Chicago, where he had an appointment with destiny at the student union. "There were all these couches all around the room, and all the hippies hung out on one right by the entrance on the second floor, and we called it 'the couch.' That bunch was our crowd, like Cynthia Plaster Caster and Gerry Field."
By this time, a loose collective of musicians overlapping with this one-off studio group had started to play protests at UIC (including a big one after the Kent State massacre) and off-campus events (including the first Earth Day, held at Daley Plaza in 1970).
Goldberg had graduated from UIC with a degree in business administration, so even though he was driving a cab, his friends Kenn Gorz and Lincoln Zimmanck consulted him about an ambitious venture: founding a company to do live sound for rock shows. Gorz and Zimmanck had lost their jobs at the Kinetic Playground in November 1969, after the building caught fire between acts during a run of shows by Iron Butterfly, Poco, and King Crimson. Club owner Aaron Russo declared the venue a total loss (it would reopen briefly under new management in 1972), and he told Gorz and Zimmanck they could salvage whatever they wanted. "They're asking me all these questions," Goldberg says. "I said, 'Well, why don't I become a partner?' We pulled up with a truck and took speaker cabinets, amplifiers, cables, microphones, and mike stands to Wacker Drive."
Goldberg was renting loft space in the Great Lakes Building at 180 N. Wacker, and they put all the gear in the basement. They named their company Euphoria Blimp Works, and their first gig was at a show Russo had booked at the Aragon with jazzy Los Angeles psych-rock band Spirit. In Goldberg's telling, Russo found this more than a little ironic: "I can't believe I'm paying you guys to rent my own equipment," he said.
The musicians associated with this rock sound company (one of the city's earliest) began to be billed as the Euphoria Blimp Works Band. Percussionist Lewis Favors joined by starting to play with the group uninvited at a UIC protest. One of the bassists who passed through the lineup, Joel Schlofsky, would go on to greater fame as guitarist Djin Aquarian of the Source Family band Ya Ho Wha 13.
The Wacker space that housed Euphoria Blimp Works (they'd move to 8 W. Tooker Place in mid-1970) became a commune more or less by accident. The sound crew would crash there after gigs, and friends, partners, and hangers-on tended to join them. After a local news station taped a spot at the loft, things suddenly got a lot busier.
"They were doing a special on alternatives to marriage," Goldberg says. "Hours of tape got edited down to 30 or 60 seconds or something -- they had, like, two seconds of the band -- but they had this one gal sitting on Lewis Favors's lap, some hot girl who was married to one of the sound engineers, and some comments about free love. That's what they put on TV, and all of a sudden, we had tons of people wanting to come and join the commune, because they called us a commune. It wasn't, exactly -- we just had nowhere else to crash. We figured, OK, that's what it is, a commune. Go with the flow."
Blind Al Rosenfeld, a friend of the Blimp Works Band who dabbled in music PR and worked for underground newspaper the Seed, got them a gig at Wise Fools Pub. Rosenfeld also convinced a hip Chicago Tribune writer to review the show. That night, Berkman inadvertently christened the band. "Howard's got a mouth, and he just blabs and stuff," Goldberg says, laughing. "Just out of the blue, he said, 'This incarnation is Yama & the Karma Dusters.'" The review used the name, and it stuck. It appears on the group's only LP, 1971's Up From the Sewers (beneath the words "Euphoria Blimp Works Presents").
Yama & the Karma Dusters opened for acts as diverse as Howlin' Wolf (who called Berkman "the Nookie Man"), Wilderness Road, and an avant-garde jazz ensemble connected to the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, and they consistently got a good reception. But shortly after bringing aboard Pollack's permanent replacement on bass, Vince Blakey, the band ran out of steam. By the end of 1972, they'd dissolved.
Some key members of the Karma crew are gone -- Favors and Berkman have passed. Field went on to run a violin shop in Highland Park, and Tafejian lives in Carbondale, Colorado, where she teaches piano, plays in a band, and works as a part-time firefighter. In the 70s, she, Berkman, and Pollack all lived in Carbondale, and Berkman later moved to nearby Paonia, where a bandstand in a public park bears his name.
If there were any justice in the world, Yama & the Karma Dusters would have something named after them in Chicago. This insurgent musical collective broke the rock-band mold and gave the finger to the establishment, and their homespun album carries the legacy of the hippie counterculture into the ages.