KayAnne Pickens Solem
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I am Jean Paul's eldest child. What I've learned about him gathering stories for a tribute book (which morphed into this website), is that he presented alarmingly diverse personalities to everyone he came in contact with. I gave up trying to find the "TRUTH" about our father, who died days before my 18th birthday. Instead I've come to treasure the many-faceted aspects of the man, even the dark or unfavorable. Without ALL his selves you wouldn't have J.P. Pickens. I can't ignore or edit out the speed-freak from the artist/ musician/ husband/ father.
The story I want to tell embraces the whole man. He became a father at ages 18, 19, and 22. He'd been raised in the San Fernando Valley of Southern California, moving there with his parents and older sister Barbara Sue in the early 1940's from Vernon, Texas. His father and mother worked hard to give their family a better life, but my dad has his own ideas early on, running with a hot-rod crowd, getting in trouble. Jean Paul met Mary-Ann Bielat just before they both turned 17. When my arrival became imminent, they went to Tijuana, Mexico and got married.
I know many of these facts; what eludes me is knowing when music and art became such passions for him. I remember as a young child going to meet 'Daddy's piano teacher', a loving old lady who made a big fuss over Jean Paul and his family. My mother, Mary-Ann, tells me J.P. had an upright piano crammed into his boyhood bedroom, where he'd brought his pregnant bride to live with my grandparents. He'd spend hours playing boogie-woogie tunes, as well as tooting on a saxophone, while I was in utero. Certain saxophone solos haunt me to this day, music from a dream.
Somewhere in Los Angeles he encountered the Beats, perhaps when my parents moved our growing family to Manhattan Beach. J.P. met George Herms about 1960 or so, who was the creator of an 'assemblage environment' in Hermosa Beach, which was a few miles south along the coast. Assemblage art is very often created with found, recyled or otherwise cast off objects, the resulting sculpture may be embellished with writing, paint, electric lights, etc. Called a "...Taoist junkman, a poet who sculpts the leftovers of a materialistic society...", Herms had a huge influence on our father's entire state of consciousness.
By 1959 J.P. and Mary-Ann had taken my baby sister, Cheryl Lynne, and I to Portland, Oregon where they briefly ran a bookstore called 'Days & Nights', and where my brother Paul was born, before returning to Southern California in 1961. We came back to live in Topanga Canyon, near George Herms and his wife Louise. They had a couple of small children and were the first family I knew to eat home-baked bread. My memories of that time are rich in color and sound, the beginning of J.P.'s getting to live out his dream of art as life. George Herms, Frank Stewart (painter), Wally Berman (assemblage artist among other pursuits), and David and Tina Meltzer (poet and singers) were among the artists who began to populate our home.
Jean Paul was playing lots of music; he'd switched to guitar, then settled on the banjo, jamming with various players in jazz, folk or bluegrass modes. Our house in Topanga Canyon, like many others, was a glorified shack. It stood at the bottom of a steep dirt driveway in a gully surrounded by cacti, century plants, scrub oak and manzanita. At the top of the driveway a large garage was used by Frank Stewart to paint in, later becoming the site of a 'Tap City Circus' art/ music party/happening. Bunches of people showed up to drink wine, look at paintings and assemblage sculpture, while J.P. and his friends wailed away on their banjos and guitars.
The 'totally permissive environments' George Herms set up outside Malibu, then later outside Healdsburg, in Northern California, acted as a set of blueprints for the kind of art integrated with family life our dad dreamed of having. We'd go to visit the Herms family compound and it was non-stop fun as far as I was concerned. We could run and play all day outside at the creek; music was always being played, and in the evenings films were shown, sometimes poetry readings, assemblage art put together, photographs taken. Remembering those days I've come to feel our family's move north from Southern California to San Francisco and ultimately, Lagunitas, Marin County, was largely prompted by the proximity of George Herms and his scene in Healdsburg.
Our father's dream of life was born under those oaks and bay laurels, as he picked his banjo, playing long improvisational pieces, getting high, watching us become blackberry-stained-and-scratched little savages. Leap frogging to south Bay communities like Palo Alto, then on to San Francisco, J.P. connected with the folk music/bluegrass community; meeting Joe Edmiston (Marilyn Milos's ex-husband), playing in different bands, following the pharmaceutical trail as L.S.D. leaked from Stanford into the hands and minds of the curious. (Later in Lagunitas a few psychedelic explorers accompanied J.P. and Mary-Ann on acid trips).
In San Francisco we lived first in an early communal household on Sanchez St., which lost its novel charm for my mother, who found us our own flat around the corner on Elizabeth St. Our dad created a banjo workshop in the basement where he custom-built beautiful banjos. He was playing lots of music ('progressive bluegrass' which mutated into acid rock) with David and Tina Meltzer, along with Peter Albin, James Gurley, Janis Joplin (pre-Big Brother days) and others at the Coffee Gallery in North Beach, among other venues. He soon realized, however, that his wife and family needed a home of their own.
Jean Paul asked his parents for help and they came through with a down payment on a little bungalow on a wooded hill in Lagunitas, in the San Geronimo valley of West Marin. An old summer cottage built in 1940, we filled it rapidly, and soon it overflowed. Set on roughly 1/3 of an acre, we had one or two years of a regular yard, with grass, flowers, a swing set, cherry and pear trees. Our parents had an open door policy for many of their artist/ musician friends; we had several houseguests, a couple of different schoolbuses occupied by intense, longhaired men and women living in our backyard. (A common occurrence now, but something that freaked the neighbors in 1965). Jean Paul Pickens was a rebellious soul early in his life. He seemed predestined to clash with authority in all its forms. He was not interested in a suburban fiefdom, mowing the lawn on Saturdays.
Our Lagunitas home was an environment where things happened along some mysterious flow. Popular music, blues, jazz, folk, and rock'n'roll were all played at our house. Played over and over on the record player, which for a long time occupied a central place in the living room, set low on a big round oak tabletop, discussed by our folks with us and lots of other adults, played live on various instruments, danced to, played some more. Our tiny cottage bulged with visitors day and night, as our place got the reputation for being fun and loose.
Our dad had worked at the Discovery Bookshop in North Beach, amassing a huge collection of records while there. This stash was a living, magical repository of joy and information. All of the above musical styles were represented. including bluegrass and country, especially the great Hank Williams. Music was a bridge between the generations in my family. My grandparents could listen to Hank with our dad, and he'd play the Beatles and Bob Dylan with us. As Marilyn Milos so movingly recounts, J.P.'s reverence for each new l.p. was an authentic appreciation he shared with us. He acted on his radical belief that children were capable of enjoying art and music very young, always talking to us about it, taking us to jazz performances, bluegrass festivals and the rock dances at the Fillmore and Avalon Ballrooms.
We had Picasso prints next to posters for Woody Guthrie concerts and Kenneth Patchen broadsides on our walls. J.P.'s assemblages and collages were everywhere, inside and out. Our bookshelves held books from Grove Press by Henry Miller and William Burroughs; all available to us, though I confess I didn't understand 'Tropic of Cancer' till I re-read it as an adult! Books were so important to J.P. He had a job with Grove Press a short time, working in distribution. I have strong impressions of being taken to various bookshops on his route, and the wealth that he felt books symbolized. I still tremble with delight in bookstores and libraries, a legacy from my parents who got me my first library card when I was 5.
There was a point when the freewheeling open atmosphere in our house changed. Drugs presented a seductive challenge to J.P.: could he take a hard drug continuously and remain in control? Methamphetamine was the drug, cooked in a lab down a pastoral road not far from his shop, which started to be locked all the time. Once we'd had free access to his workspace, getting into his projects, borrowing his tools. Then he locked us out. He didn't want us to witness his transformation, from our laughing, music playing, always-creating dad to a paranoid wide awake teeth grinding tinkerer who'd holler at you if you let him fall asleep. As vividly described by Peter Coyote, our yard and environs became cluttered and covered over with J.P.'s growing collection of objects. Always a pack rat, he'd been dragging home all manner of stuff for his sculpture and building projects for years. As his speed habit progressed, the collecting became an obsession; I clearly recall being told M.Y.O.B. (mind your own business) when I'd ask where something came from.
My sister and Steven Tristano speak about J.P.'s philosophy of the Gypsy Way; how one acquired the goods was not important, keeping all items in the flow was. He believed stuff should circulate and he tried to redistribute much of his stash at the 'JunkFeast', an event the Diggers helped us put on in early 1969. A handbill invitation was mimeographed up and passed out all over the Bay Area and beyond. Huge tie dye banners proclaiming our location were hung up throughout Lagunitas. On the day of the JunkFeast it rained buckets. Hundreds of people came to our house, and, driven inside by the rain, watched a Digger 'NewsReal' 8mm film in our living room, pilfered my mom's hoarded 'inside' belongings, and ignored most of the junk outside. It was a bizarre day, near the end of our stay in Lagunitas. We were left to clean up and deal with all that STUFF.
Jean Paul Pickens' dream collapsed that day. Two months later we lost our home, repossessed by the bank. The Digger/Free Family took us under their wing, helping us move a semi truck full of goods off the property. After storing what precious personal things we could, we began rotating around the various houses, apartments and ranches of the far-flung communal tribe. This period of time, becoming involved with the Free Family, had its positive and negative impacts on us all; for me, ultimately, mostly positive, as there was a bigger family, a safety net. In the last four years of his life (he died July 6, 1973), our father burnt very bright, a supernova of amphetamine-fueled creativity, scrambling to find homes for his family, still playing music, going on runs involving various shady activities.
When I was 14 and 15 he took me along on many of his runs. The spooky ambience of speed-freak parlors draped in heavy velvets, bright with fluorescent lights bored me after awhile, long hours would drift by as J.P. and his partners would tinker endlessly. I had no interest in doing speed (ever), perhaps there was a method to his madness in exposing me to his drug life.
I've come to see our dad's life as performance art. I try to make sense of these fragments and memories, knowing that the portrait I paint is made from MY interpretations of his motives, actions, philosophies. Yet I still feel inspired to declare that he was making ART in some fashion every day of his too brief life. From the exciting early days of discovering rebel culture to J.P.'s death was a scant 18 years he made the most of. He charted his own course, without apologies, to live life as a flamboyant adventure.
David Meltzer says J.P. strived to realize himself as an artist. I hold dear the image of our Lagunitas homestead in its late glory, a local legend still spoken of with awe by some guys from the neighborhood I talked to in 1996. That house and yard personified a modern aesthetic, poor white culture transformed to a surreal stage setting, with J.P.'s spotlights alongside his basket chairs and shopping baskets strung up in the trees. The whole place was an anti-materialistic statement: Bring some in, take some away, what does it matter whose it is? It's all just STUFF!
KayAnne Pickens Solem, 1998.
The story I want to tell embraces the whole man. He became a father at ages 18, 19, and 22. He'd been raised in the San Fernando Valley of Southern California, moving there with his parents and older sister Barbara Sue in the early 1940's from Vernon, Texas. His father and mother worked hard to give their family a better life, but my dad has his own ideas early on, running with a hot-rod crowd, getting in trouble. Jean Paul met Mary-Ann Bielat just before they both turned 17. When my arrival became imminent, they went to Tijuana, Mexico and got married.
I know many of these facts; what eludes me is knowing when music and art became such passions for him. I remember as a young child going to meet 'Daddy's piano teacher', a loving old lady who made a big fuss over Jean Paul and his family. My mother, Mary-Ann, tells me J.P. had an upright piano crammed into his boyhood bedroom, where he'd brought his pregnant bride to live with my grandparents. He'd spend hours playing boogie-woogie tunes, as well as tooting on a saxophone, while I was in utero. Certain saxophone solos haunt me to this day, music from a dream.
Somewhere in Los Angeles he encountered the Beats, perhaps when my parents moved our growing family to Manhattan Beach. J.P. met George Herms about 1960 or so, who was the creator of an 'assemblage environment' in Hermosa Beach, which was a few miles south along the coast. Assemblage art is very often created with found, recyled or otherwise cast off objects, the resulting sculpture may be embellished with writing, paint, electric lights, etc. Called a "...Taoist junkman, a poet who sculpts the leftovers of a materialistic society...", Herms had a huge influence on our father's entire state of consciousness.
By 1959 J.P. and Mary-Ann had taken my baby sister, Cheryl Lynne, and I to Portland, Oregon where they briefly ran a bookstore called 'Days & Nights', and where my brother Paul was born, before returning to Southern California in 1961. We came back to live in Topanga Canyon, near George Herms and his wife Louise. They had a couple of small children and were the first family I knew to eat home-baked bread. My memories of that time are rich in color and sound, the beginning of J.P.'s getting to live out his dream of art as life. George Herms, Frank Stewart (painter), Wally Berman (assemblage artist among other pursuits), and David and Tina Meltzer (poet and singers) were among the artists who began to populate our home.
Jean Paul was playing lots of music; he'd switched to guitar, then settled on the banjo, jamming with various players in jazz, folk or bluegrass modes. Our house in Topanga Canyon, like many others, was a glorified shack. It stood at the bottom of a steep dirt driveway in a gully surrounded by cacti, century plants, scrub oak and manzanita. At the top of the driveway a large garage was used by Frank Stewart to paint in, later becoming the site of a 'Tap City Circus' art/ music party/happening. Bunches of people showed up to drink wine, look at paintings and assemblage sculpture, while J.P. and his friends wailed away on their banjos and guitars.
The 'totally permissive environments' George Herms set up outside Malibu, then later outside Healdsburg, in Northern California, acted as a set of blueprints for the kind of art integrated with family life our dad dreamed of having. We'd go to visit the Herms family compound and it was non-stop fun as far as I was concerned. We could run and play all day outside at the creek; music was always being played, and in the evenings films were shown, sometimes poetry readings, assemblage art put together, photographs taken. Remembering those days I've come to feel our family's move north from Southern California to San Francisco and ultimately, Lagunitas, Marin County, was largely prompted by the proximity of George Herms and his scene in Healdsburg.
Our father's dream of life was born under those oaks and bay laurels, as he picked his banjo, playing long improvisational pieces, getting high, watching us become blackberry-stained-and-scratched little savages. Leap frogging to south Bay communities like Palo Alto, then on to San Francisco, J.P. connected with the folk music/bluegrass community; meeting Joe Edmiston (Marilyn Milos's ex-husband), playing in different bands, following the pharmaceutical trail as L.S.D. leaked from Stanford into the hands and minds of the curious. (Later in Lagunitas a few psychedelic explorers accompanied J.P. and Mary-Ann on acid trips).
In San Francisco we lived first in an early communal household on Sanchez St., which lost its novel charm for my mother, who found us our own flat around the corner on Elizabeth St. Our dad created a banjo workshop in the basement where he custom-built beautiful banjos. He was playing lots of music ('progressive bluegrass' which mutated into acid rock) with David and Tina Meltzer, along with Peter Albin, James Gurley, Janis Joplin (pre-Big Brother days) and others at the Coffee Gallery in North Beach, among other venues. He soon realized, however, that his wife and family needed a home of their own.
Jean Paul asked his parents for help and they came through with a down payment on a little bungalow on a wooded hill in Lagunitas, in the San Geronimo valley of West Marin. An old summer cottage built in 1940, we filled it rapidly, and soon it overflowed. Set on roughly 1/3 of an acre, we had one or two years of a regular yard, with grass, flowers, a swing set, cherry and pear trees. Our parents had an open door policy for many of their artist/ musician friends; we had several houseguests, a couple of different schoolbuses occupied by intense, longhaired men and women living in our backyard. (A common occurrence now, but something that freaked the neighbors in 1965). Jean Paul Pickens was a rebellious soul early in his life. He seemed predestined to clash with authority in all its forms. He was not interested in a suburban fiefdom, mowing the lawn on Saturdays.
Our Lagunitas home was an environment where things happened along some mysterious flow. Popular music, blues, jazz, folk, and rock'n'roll were all played at our house. Played over and over on the record player, which for a long time occupied a central place in the living room, set low on a big round oak tabletop, discussed by our folks with us and lots of other adults, played live on various instruments, danced to, played some more. Our tiny cottage bulged with visitors day and night, as our place got the reputation for being fun and loose.
Our dad had worked at the Discovery Bookshop in North Beach, amassing a huge collection of records while there. This stash was a living, magical repository of joy and information. All of the above musical styles were represented. including bluegrass and country, especially the great Hank Williams. Music was a bridge between the generations in my family. My grandparents could listen to Hank with our dad, and he'd play the Beatles and Bob Dylan with us. As Marilyn Milos so movingly recounts, J.P.'s reverence for each new l.p. was an authentic appreciation he shared with us. He acted on his radical belief that children were capable of enjoying art and music very young, always talking to us about it, taking us to jazz performances, bluegrass festivals and the rock dances at the Fillmore and Avalon Ballrooms.
We had Picasso prints next to posters for Woody Guthrie concerts and Kenneth Patchen broadsides on our walls. J.P.'s assemblages and collages were everywhere, inside and out. Our bookshelves held books from Grove Press by Henry Miller and William Burroughs; all available to us, though I confess I didn't understand 'Tropic of Cancer' till I re-read it as an adult! Books were so important to J.P. He had a job with Grove Press a short time, working in distribution. I have strong impressions of being taken to various bookshops on his route, and the wealth that he felt books symbolized. I still tremble with delight in bookstores and libraries, a legacy from my parents who got me my first library card when I was 5.
There was a point when the freewheeling open atmosphere in our house changed. Drugs presented a seductive challenge to J.P.: could he take a hard drug continuously and remain in control? Methamphetamine was the drug, cooked in a lab down a pastoral road not far from his shop, which started to be locked all the time. Once we'd had free access to his workspace, getting into his projects, borrowing his tools. Then he locked us out. He didn't want us to witness his transformation, from our laughing, music playing, always-creating dad to a paranoid wide awake teeth grinding tinkerer who'd holler at you if you let him fall asleep. As vividly described by Peter Coyote, our yard and environs became cluttered and covered over with J.P.'s growing collection of objects. Always a pack rat, he'd been dragging home all manner of stuff for his sculpture and building projects for years. As his speed habit progressed, the collecting became an obsession; I clearly recall being told M.Y.O.B. (mind your own business) when I'd ask where something came from.
My sister and Steven Tristano speak about J.P.'s philosophy of the Gypsy Way; how one acquired the goods was not important, keeping all items in the flow was. He believed stuff should circulate and he tried to redistribute much of his stash at the 'JunkFeast', an event the Diggers helped us put on in early 1969. A handbill invitation was mimeographed up and passed out all over the Bay Area and beyond. Huge tie dye banners proclaiming our location were hung up throughout Lagunitas. On the day of the JunkFeast it rained buckets. Hundreds of people came to our house, and, driven inside by the rain, watched a Digger 'NewsReal' 8mm film in our living room, pilfered my mom's hoarded 'inside' belongings, and ignored most of the junk outside. It was a bizarre day, near the end of our stay in Lagunitas. We were left to clean up and deal with all that STUFF.
Jean Paul Pickens' dream collapsed that day. Two months later we lost our home, repossessed by the bank. The Digger/Free Family took us under their wing, helping us move a semi truck full of goods off the property. After storing what precious personal things we could, we began rotating around the various houses, apartments and ranches of the far-flung communal tribe. This period of time, becoming involved with the Free Family, had its positive and negative impacts on us all; for me, ultimately, mostly positive, as there was a bigger family, a safety net. In the last four years of his life (he died July 6, 1973), our father burnt very bright, a supernova of amphetamine-fueled creativity, scrambling to find homes for his family, still playing music, going on runs involving various shady activities.
When I was 14 and 15 he took me along on many of his runs. The spooky ambience of speed-freak parlors draped in heavy velvets, bright with fluorescent lights bored me after awhile, long hours would drift by as J.P. and his partners would tinker endlessly. I had no interest in doing speed (ever), perhaps there was a method to his madness in exposing me to his drug life.
I've come to see our dad's life as performance art. I try to make sense of these fragments and memories, knowing that the portrait I paint is made from MY interpretations of his motives, actions, philosophies. Yet I still feel inspired to declare that he was making ART in some fashion every day of his too brief life. From the exciting early days of discovering rebel culture to J.P.'s death was a scant 18 years he made the most of. He charted his own course, without apologies, to live life as a flamboyant adventure.
David Meltzer says J.P. strived to realize himself as an artist. I hold dear the image of our Lagunitas homestead in its late glory, a local legend still spoken of with awe by some guys from the neighborhood I talked to in 1996. That house and yard personified a modern aesthetic, poor white culture transformed to a surreal stage setting, with J.P.'s spotlights alongside his basket chairs and shopping baskets strung up in the trees. The whole place was an anti-materialistic statement: Bring some in, take some away, what does it matter whose it is? It's all just STUFF!
KayAnne Pickens Solem, 1998.
KayAnne, Mary Ann, Cheryl Lynne
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Solems and Holtons
Jay Holton, grandson
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Erik Jean Solem, grandson
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