The Oxford Circle

A NUGGET FROM THE GOLDEN STATE by Alec Palao

To the uninitiated, the name Oxford Circle may only be recognisable from a faded Fillmore or Avalon poster, where they once shared the bill with the Dead, Quicksilver or Big Brother. Amongst the cognoscenti, however, their name is mentioned in the hushed, awed tones reserved for only the truly great. Amazing to think that such immense repute stems from the outfit's sole recorded legacy, the $500-rated single Foolish Woman / Mind Destruction. But all it takes is one listen to this masterpiece of throbbing punk hysteria, and its demented, off-the wall flipside, to vindicate the legend of the Circle.

Contrary to public opinion, the Circle were not in fact a San Francisco band. Rather, they hailed from the university town of Davis, just outside state capital Sacramento. Gary Lee Yoder, Dehner Patten, Jim Keylor and Paul Whaley had been kingpins in the over-populated northern California teen scene ever since they got together in late 1964 as the Hide-Aways. One year later they had become the Oxford Circle, in deference to their trademarked interpretation of the blueswailing English punk sound. Patten tore off spiky, spindly leads with dexterity; bassist Keylor and drummer Whaley constituted one hell of a powerhouse rhythm section; and the Circle were fronted by the soulful, full-blooded warbling of Yoder, who was also not averse to writhing around the stage floor or coaxing ear-splitting electronic noises from his Gibson.

Sensing the constrictive nature of their immediate environs, the Circle frequently journeyed south to San Francisco. There, their tight and dynamic stage show quickly got them booked at the ballrooms, and the combo would regularly blow their more illustrious contemporaries off the boards. No further evidence is needed than LIVE AT THE AVALON 1966, where Family Dog honcho Bob Cohen's dynamic recordings capture the Circle at the peak of their powers. From the nine-minute improvised feedback assault of Mystic Eyes that opens the disc, via ripping takes on punk staples such as You're A Better Man Than I, Baby Please Don't Go and I'm A Man, through to Yoder's tuff originals like Soul On Fire and Since You've Been Away, LIVE AT THE AVALON firmly establishes the Circle as the pre-eminent psychedelic garage band, bar none. And it crystallises that brief but magic moment when punk fury took on an experimental zeal and mutated into something quite breathtaking indeed.

Avalon Ballroom
San Fran., Calif., 17. / 18. 2. 1967
Oxford Circle, Big Brother & The Holding Company, Quicksilver Messenger Service

The personnel may have graduated to projects more feted - Whaley to Blue Cheer, Yoder and Patten to Kak - but the Oxford Circle was its constituents' finest hour. LIVE AT THE AVALON tells the story of this fascinating band in an exhaustively annotated and lavishly illustrated package. In addition to the incredible live material, both sides of the crazy World United single are included, as well as a further two tracks from an aborted 1967 demo session held in Hollywood (and featuring Mac 'Dr John' Rebennack on organ).

A must-have for the aficionado, but essential too for any fan of well-recorded, kickass 1960s garage rock & roll. Check it out!

Time is on their side by Melanie Turner

Unbeknownst to many in town, local musician Gary Lee Yoder and his Davis band of the '60s are legendary among connoisseurs of psychedelic rock in England.
    The now laid-back, mellow Yoder played a mean feedback guitar and occasionally writhed on the stage floor at places like the Fillmore Auditorium and the Avalon Ballroom.
    It was there that four slim, long-haired young men from Davis shared the bill with groups like the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver and Big Brother & the Holding Company. Followers of the mid-1960s West Coast rock scene might have noticed the band, Oxford Circle, on an old Fillmore or Avalon poster.
    It's been more than 30 years since Oxford Circle was gaining fans throughout the Central Valley and Bay Area. But lately, these four are having a collective flashback.
    Since their short-lived but dynamic and powerful zenith, members of the band continued to perform with varying degrees of commercial success. The men kept loosely in touch, although their '60s band days were but a distant memory.
    Until, that is, 34-year-old Alec Palao's European infatuation -- obsession, rather -- with American pop culture made a connection with these four.
    "Among people of my generation, there's an absolute fascination with what was going on here in the '50s and '60s," Palao says.
    Palao, who grew up in Britain when punk rock was big, looks back not with nostalgia, but rather with envy to a time when the northern California teen scene exploded with bands.
    The band Oxford Circle -- also the name of a Davis street where Yoder and Jim Keylor, another member of the group, once lived -- is well known in England among aficionados of the '60s psych-pop era, Palao says.
    "It's kind of like great kick-ass rock 'n' roll," he says. "These guys were some of the great practitioners."
    Palao heard the group's only release, "Foolish Woman/Mind Destruction," on a bootleg compilation in the early '80s. This single, written by Yoder and Dehner Patten and sung by Yoder, played as one of most popular singles in northern California at the time.
    "It's a kick-butt tune," says Yoder, now 51.
    "It's an experimental, avant-garde kind of thing," Palao says. Oxford Circle's sole legacy has been rated a $500 collector's item.
    This past summer, he adds, the single was ranked No. 5 in the Top 100 best psychedelic tunes of all time in Mojo, a highly respected English magazine.
    But Palao says the live stuff captures the Circle at the "peak of their powers."

Avalon Ballroom
San Fran., Calif., 16. / 17. 9. 1966
Oxford Circle, Grateful Dead

Avalon recording captures Circle

A consultant with Big Beat, a subsidiary of England's Ace Records, Palao contacted Family Dog partner Bob Cohen in San Francisco, to obtain unreleased recordings of "Live At The Avalon 1966." Avalon soundman Cohen taped certain bands at the time.
    "He told me he only taped the groups he liked," Palao says.
    Palao is developing a series of CDs called "Nuggets From The Golden State," an ongoing documentation of the inception and development of the 1960s West Coast rock 'n' roll revolution, spotlighting its "neglected yet no less worthy nooks and crannies."
    The Oxford Circle CD, due out later this month, is the latest in the series, at No. 12. It includes not only the live performance, but also four bonus cuts, including the legendary single and two demo cuts made in Hollywood. All but two songs are sung by Yoder, who has played in Davis clubs for more than 10 years.
    Palao considers his work archiving music from this time in American history a "service to humanity," as it saves the sounds for generations to come.
    "In 20 years' time, a lot of this information will be lost in the ages," he adds.
    Some of the guys from the band say they haven't heard the old songs in years.
    "Every guy in the band is just flipped out about this thing happening," Yoder says. "It's just something nobody would have imagined in his wildest dreams."
    "It's too funny," adds Patten, 53, reached at his home in Portland, Ore. "I guess if you live long enough, it'll all come back to you."
    Adds Keylor, 50, jokingly, "I can remember most of it, which is to say I didn't participate." Keylor now lives in San Francisco.
    In August, Oxford Circle was plugged in Billboard Magazine, in a listing of what's coming out in reissues during the next half of the year.
    Patten shares the sentiment of the other three band members -- Keylor, Yoder and Paul Whaley -- when he says they'd done better performances than what's featured on the recording.
    But, writes Palao, in a mailing about the release, " 'Live At The Avalon' firmly establishes the Circle as the pre-eminent psychedelic garage band, bar none. And it crystallizes that brief but magical moment when punk fury acquired an experimental zeal and mutated into something quite breathtaking indeed."
    Palao was pleased to find that the old reel-to-reel was of such great quality.
    "It's got as much guts and vitality as everything you hear and see today on MTV," he insists.
    Members of the band had really only been playing since their days at Davis High School. They graduated in the early '60s and got together in late 1964 as the Hide-Aways. A year later, they became Oxford Circle and began touring to The City, where their dynamic stage show quickly got them booked at the ballrooms.
    According to Palao, "The combo would regularly blow their more illustrious contemporaries off the boards."
    Growing up as a teen-ager in Britain, Palao, now a resident of El Cerrito, was captivated by the Bay Area cultural heritage.
    "But I got here and no one seemed to care," he says. "The interest in this in England has been incredible."
    Oxford Circle is especially fascinating, Palao explains, since it's been kind of a mystery band. There's been a lot of misinformation about the Circle. For instance, in "Fuzz, Acid & Flowers," a guide to rare albums released from '64-'75, Yoder is listed as the band's manager; it gives no mention he actually played.
    There's also that connection with Kak and Blue Cheer, other bands of the era. It was the late '60s when Patten and Yoder went on to help form Kak, and still later that Whaley and Yoder joined Blue Cheer.

Avalon Ballroom
San Fran., Calif., 17. / 18. 6. 1966
Oxford Circle, Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band

Liberal hometown produces broad-minded approach

Band members say Davis fostered a free-thinking spirit that got them their start.
    "The fact that these guys could do their own thing and make a living kind of says a lot about Davis," Palao says.
    "The catalyst was all there," Yoder adds.
    Besides performing in San Francisco, the band also played at Sacramento clubs like the Trip Room, at 11th and J streets, where the dance floor was spring-loaded, and at Governor's Hall, at Broadway and Stockton.
    On Feb. 3, 1967, they played with the Animals at UC Davis' own Freeborn Hall.
    "We blew them off the stage," recalls Yoder. "We were the animals that day. We just ate them alive."
    Bay Area blues legend Joe Louis Walker did several gigs with Oxford Circle when guitarist Patten was incarcerated for 77 days following "Davis' first pot bust." Yoder says Patten was set up. Patten agrees; he "happened to be with a buddy who had a little on him."
    Yoder recalls a little trouble with the law, too, when Oxford Circle played at Davis' Central Park on Aug. 27, 1967. The Davis police came by to continuously harass them about the noise, and one officer claimed the chief had a decibel meter in his car.
    They had a permit, Yoder says, so finally, he said to the cop, "You don't own a decibel meter, do you? They said, 'That's right,' " Yoder recalls. "So I said, 'Turn it up, boys!' "
    Despite gaining some notoriety at the time, the band never forgot its roots.
    "One thing we'd insist on," Yoder says. "When they'd introduce us, they'd say we were from Sacramento. We'd say, 'No, from Davis.' "

Superfans East and West

The band had quite a following, but in particular there were two superfans, who called themselves East and West.
    "East and West were fanatical," Yoder says.
    At age 17 and 18, these two followed the band to San Francisco performances, as well as to Reno and other far-away gigs.
    West, now a Sacramento attorney, is "too embarrassed" to talk about the old days. East offered only her first name, Sheila. She's now an analyst for the state.
    "They had a battle of the bands in Sacramento," Sheila recalls. That was the first time she and her friends saw the band, then the Hide-Aways. Another band, the New Breed, won the competition; that band's bass player, Tim Schmidt, now plays with the Eagles.
    But Sheila and three friends fell in love with the Hide-Aways.
    "We were young and crazy, and you know how girls are."
    They called themselves North, South, East and West, although two sisters, North and South, dropped out of the scene early on.
    East and West went on to create many a gift package for members of the band. They'd leave baskets of flowers, cakes and cookies -- Yoder remembers bottles of their favorite booze -- and create crossword puzzles using the band members' names, or places they'd been.
    They usually left the gifts on their doorsteps.
    "They would hit the bell and run," Yoder recalls. "They were very shy, to say the least."
    "We didn't ring the bell even," Sheila adds.
    Once, they left Patten a chrome-plated, monogrammed kazoo. He sent them a thank-you note that they, or course, saved in a scrapbook of photos and posters and other memorabilia. In it, Patten says he would have thanked them personally, but they "split or something."
    "So here is a super-late thanks for the most outtasite, ultra-tough, double-wild, ingenious present I have ever received," Patten writes.
    By following Oxford Circle, East and West saw bands like Them, the Turtles and the Yardbirds.
    "We saw Jefferson Airplane the first night that Grace Slick stepped in," she says. "They kind of like opened doors for us."
    Back then, bands on one side of the Sacramento River played surf and the other side played British-style garage rock. But Oxford Circle was tough; they were pioneers. They played a harder, bluesy sound.
    "They explored more," Sheila says. "They were a step ahead."

An unbelievable era

Of the era, Yoder says "It was like the gold rush -- what was taking place in San Francisco. Everybody in the world, no matter where they were, wanted to be there. It was wild."
    "It was wide-open, as far as music," adds Patten. "Anything went."
    "It really was a brotherly kind of feeling," says Keylor. "Sort of us against them. We represented a danger to the establishment ... we definitely were considered weirdoes at the time, especially in the Central Valley."
    For Yoder, the new CD helps draw completion to his early career. He'd cut records with Kak and Blue Cheer, but never an album from those earliest days.
    "It's filled in all my musical blanks, if you will," he says.
    Adds Yoder, "Isn't it amazing, how much noise this band made for a bunch of little local kids out of Davis?"

Where are they today?

- Jim Keylor, bass, now lives in San Francisco, where he restores old Victorian houses, is a partner in a recording studio and plays quite a bit. His mother, in her 90s, still lives in Davis.
    He's known to some in town as the "fearsome", infamous slugger, Jimmy Keylor, referred to in Bob Dunning's favorite Fourth-of-July column as "the most dangerous Little Leaguer in the history of the game."
- Dehner Patten, lead guitar, lives in Portland, Ore., where he still plays all the time, and has done so for many years. For a time, his band, "The Checker Brothers," was the hottest in Portland.
    His father, Gordon Patten, was chair of the physics department at UC Davis for more than 10 years. Dehner recalls when G Street was a dirt road.
- Paul Whaley, drums, was later Blue Cheer's drummer. Says Yoder, "Time Magazine at one point called him the best drummer in America; he was that good." Whaley grew up in Winters and transferred to Davis High School.
    Whaley also is still an active musician. He's the only one of the bunch who now is married with a 3-year-old daughter, living in Germany, Yoder says.
- Gary Lee Yoder, lead vocal, rhythm guitar and harmonica, still plays the local circuit and lives in Davis.
    At DHS, Yoder was a basketball and track star. DHS football coach Dave Whitmire is a close friend. They were in the same class. Says Whitmire, "Don't let that long hair fool ya ... he was a great basketball player, a great shot from the sideline over in the corner."

Round Trip: Oxford Circle by David Barton (Bee Staff Writer, March 9, 1998)

Gary Lee Yoder, lead singer and songwriter for the Oxford Circle, lives in Davis and plays as a solo act.
    Round trip: Oxford Circle almost made it big in the psychedelic era. Now it's flashback time as the Davis band's music finally sees the light of day.
    There are stories of albums being delayed a long time -- Bob Dylan and The Band's "The Basement Tapes" sat in the vaults for seven years before its official release -- but this is one for the record books.
    The Oxford Circle was a Davis band that became a fixture on San Francisco's psychedelic ballroom circuit in 1966-67. There, it shared the stage with the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Janis Joplin.
    But unlike those now-legendary acts, which went from nowhere to fame (and on to infamy and ultimately sad ends), the Oxford Circle never made it out of obscurity.
    The band broke up in 1967 without ever having made a studio album. But now, 32 years after the fact, a two-track live recording made by the soundman at the Avalon Ballroom has been released as "The Oxford Circle Live at the Avalon 1966" on Big Beat/Ace Records.
    "I'm really thrilled that this thing is finally out," says Gary Lee Yoder, the band's lead singer and songwriter, who still lives in Davis. "It rounds things out, makes it all right somehow."
    What it makes all right is the sense of having gotten that close, and then faltered. Of having had a shot, and having blown it. Of seeing people you know, people you gigged and partied with, people who didn't have your musical chops, go on to become huge, while you remain invisible.
    Yoder is a big man and still a professional musician. At 52, he still plays solo as many as four or five nights a week, including Friday nights at Sudwerk Brewery and Grill in Sacramento.
    He talks about the old days with pleasure. After all, even though fame and fortune eluded him, he was lucky enough to have been there in one of rock music's most crucial and legendary moments: San Francisco in the Summer of Love, 1967.
    "It was an amazing time," he recalls in his home in Davis, where he grew up with the three other men -- boys, really -- who composed Oxford Circle: Dehner Patten, lead guitar; Jim Keylor, bass; and Paul Whaley, drums.
    "You could see everybody," he says. "Janis (Joplin), the Dead, the Airplane, the Youngbloods, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band -- those guys blew us away, made us want to get involved in the scene down there."
    His voice is raspy, recalling the strong, blues-influenced singing that he used on the band's selection of covers, which ranged from classic blues such as "I Got My Mojo Working" and "Hoochie Coochie Man" to covers of the British Invasion hits of the day: the Animals' "We Gotta Get Out of This Place", Them's "Mystic Eyes" and the Yardbirds' "You're a Better Man Than I."
    The band delivered those bluesy songs with a verve that recalled the "rave-ups" of the Yardbirds and the dancer-friendly extended grooves of the San Francisco bands of the time.
    Although the songs and performances sound dated now -- as do most recordings made in San Francisco at the time -- the quality of the recording, made in June 1966, is surprisingly good, considering it sat in a damp Oakland basement for three decades.
    The basement in question belongs to Bob Cohen, who did the sound at the Avalon, the Fillmore and hundreds of other concerts, including the Rolling Stones' infamous Altamont concert. He taped the Avalon shows, and hung onto the ones by the bands he really liked.
    "It was their energy," says Cohen of the Oxford Circle. "They were tight and they had good vocals. They actually had real musical abilities, unlike some of the bands that went from nothing to stardom while the musicians had only been playing an instrument for a few months. Moby Grape, for example -- a couple of those guys hadn't been playing for six months.
    "I saw a lot of bands, and what would impress me were the good musicians -- but musicianship and stardom seem to have nothing to do with each other. That's why I taped the show."
    Yoder agrees that their skills made his band different.
    "We liked the English bands because they were tight and polished," he says. "We were really a polished band as opposed to Big Brother or the Dead. We played with them all the time, they were more hippie-ish and spent a lot of time tuning between songs. We rehearsed all the time, we prided ourselves on being tight.
    "I can sing on key, and I fancy myself a damn good singer, and it was just awful to hear the Dead play, they were just pitiful," he says. "I liked them all as people, but I couldn't take their vocals. Of all those groups, the Airplane had the best vocals.
    "When we got down there, we were the fifth band on the scene -- Country Joe and the Fish and Steve Miller hadn't shown up. Joplin hadn't shown up."
    Their early bird status didn't help the group. Fame and fortune soon passed them by. But they did record and release one single, "Foolish Woman," in a small Sacramento recording studio, on a three-track tape machine. The song got some airplay around Northern California.
    Dennis Newhall remembers the song. He was a rock fan of about 15 at the time; he later became a disc jockey on KZAP, the underground FM station of the time. He heard "Foolish Woman" and liked it.
    "You'd hear Country Joe and the Fish and the Dead's "The Golden Road,' and that song fit right in with them," he says. "We didn't realize that it was a regional hit."
    But time and chance conspired against the Circle. Guitarist Patten was busted for pot by the Davis police and spent more than two months in jail. Whaley, their high-energy drummer, was recruited by the group Blue Cheer.
    The Oxford Circle had some other strikes against them, says Bob Cohen.
    "They were one of the Sacramento bands that used to come down," he says. Another was the New Breed, with future Eagle Timothy B. Schmit on bass. "They were nice guys, they played good, but they didn't have the magic, that click with an audience. They were from Sacramento, they weren't a San Francisco band, and that mattered then. They were like the Sir Douglass Quintet -- they were good, but they didn't quite have it."
    Yoder sighs when asked about the group's inability to get a record deal and, consequently, all the perks of rock stardom enjoyed by their sometime-peers.
    "Yeah, it was kinda tough on us not to be a part of that," he says. "But honest-to-God, when we broke up, we thought that was the way it was supposed to be. We just figured that when this band falls apart, the next one will be better because we'd learned so much. It was a rude awakening that no, it doesn't work that way."
    Still, Yoder kept at it. After playing a role in an edition of Blue Cheer, he moved to the musical community of Laurel Canyon in Los Angeles. He fell in with a local scene that introduced him to songwriter Fred Neil, Denny Doherty of the Mamas and Papas, and even the Doors' Jim Morrison.
    He recorded one single under his own name, and then an album for Epic Records under the group name Kak. It wasn't a hit, but it, too, remains a collector's item.
    "I had a call a couple of months ago from a guy in Pennsylvania who said he's been trying to reach me since 1985," says Yoder. "And I got a call in the middle of the night from a guy in Australia who said that he was a Kak fan, and knew I was in Davis, so he just gave it a shot. Amazing."
    The Oxford Circle's one single, "Foolish Woman," has gained in value in collector's circles. Newhall says he recently sold his copy for $150, half the price the dealer he sold it to expected to get for it.
    The live album has been hailed in the rock press, notably England's Mojo magazine and Record Collector magazine. The latter put the album in its Top 50 reissues of last year, ranking it No. 6. That puts it above reissues of Pink Floyd, Santana, and, yes, the Grateful Dead.
    Yoder is still playing on, squeezing a few of his own songs in between covers of the Eagles, Jimmy Buffett and the Allman Brothers that are the staples of his solo set. He says that if a promoter approached the members of the Oxford Circle to reunite, he would be interested.
    "It's funny," he says. "I didn't really choose music, it sort of chose me. It gets in the blood. I can't tell you how many times I'd be between bands, go back to college and a couple of buddies would come along and offer a gig paying $700 a week, and suddenly music was the reality and school was the fantasy. Then, I'd burn out and go back to school, and it would happen again.
    "Finally, I just decided to stick with music," he says. "It is my reality. Everything else is secondary."


Fillmore Auditorium San Fran., Calif. 6. 7. 1966 Oxford Circle The Turtles	Fillmore Auditorium San Fran., Calif. 9. / 10. 9. 1966 Oxford Circle The Mothers	Avalon Ballroom San Fran., Calif. 16. / 17. 9. 1966 Oxford Circle Grateful Dead	Avalon Ballroom San Fran., Calif. 4. / 5. 11. 1966 Oxford Circle Grateful Dead