Wounds to Bind

The dawn of folk rock comes to life in Jerry Burgan’s unforgettable memoir of the pre-psychedelic 1960s and the summer that changed everything.

As a naïve folksinger from Pomona, California, Burgan was thrust to the forefront of the counterculture and its aftermath. The Byrds, the Rolling Stones, the Mamas and Papas, Barry McGuire, Bo Diddley and many others make appearances in this 50th Anniversary reminiscence by the surviving cofounder of WE FIVE, the San Francisco electro-folk ensemble whose million-seller, "You Were On My Mind,” entered the world two months before Bob Dylan plugged in an electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival. Vying with the Byrds to record the first folk-rock hit, Burgan and his lifelong friend Mike Stewart embarked on a road they thought well paved by the latter's older brother, Kingston Trio member John Stewart. Little did they realize that they would join the largest-ever American generation in an ecstatic, sometimes tortured, journey of invention and disillusion.

Wounds to Bind bears witness to a lost and hopeful convergence in American history—that missing link between the folk and rock eras—when Bob Dylan and Sammy Davis Jr. were played on the same radio station in the same hour. A survivor of the human realignments, tragedies and triumphs that followed, Burgan tracks down the demons that drove the genius of We Five cofounder Mike Stewart and sheds light on the 40-year enigma of what became of the band’s reclusive lead singer, Beverly Bivens, a forerunner of Grace Slick, Linda Ronstadt, and Stevie Nicks.

When not performing with We Five, the 1960s folk-rock group that bridged the gulf between Peter, Paul & Mary and The Jefferson Airplane, Jerry Burgan and his wife, Debbie, appear in Folk Songs & Stories, a show built on the Americana that shaped him, blended with anecdotes about how the music of the past evolved into the forms we know today. His first solo CD, Jerry Burgan: Reflections, Songs & Stories, on the Global Recording Artists label, is based on material from his show. Jerry is available for classroom and community appearances and may be contacted through the website www.woundstobind.com.

Alan Rifkin is a former contributing editor to Details and L.A. Weekly and has written for The Los Angeles Times, Premiere, The San Francisco Bay Guardian and Black Clock. His short-story collection, Signal Hill (City Lights), was a finalist for the Southern California Booksellers Award in Fiction. He teaches creative writing at California State University, Long Beach.