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Patty Parsons

The year was 1967 and she had wanderlust. It was also the Summer of Love. Among the bands that spent their infancy in San Francisco were Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and the Steve Miller Blues Band.

They were heady days. A new psychedelic form of rock ’n’ roll was everywhere. It was a time of anti- war marches and flower power. Line-ups of dream bands at famed venues such as the Fillmore West, the Carousel Ballroom, Winterland and Haight Theatre were ubiquitous. “When I moved there it was the right time,” Parsons recalls. “But I was the most abnormal of hippies, I never was cool.”

Cool or not, she snagged a singing job at the Drinking Gourd, where Marty Balin and Paul Kanter, of Jefferson Airplane, met and decided to form a band. Other musicians performed there, and the Smothers Brothers used its tiny stage to work on their comedy act. Located in the heart of San Francisco’s Cow Hollow section, “It was the hippest coffee shop,” she says. Parsons’ first song was Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne, which she performed a cappella.

On her second night, a guitarist, with very long hair, sat in with her. “I got 10 bucks and all I could eat or drink. They were all hippies. I wanted to be one so bad, but I didn’t know what it was. I still wore a pointed, padded bra. They told me ‘you’ve got to burn your bra,’ and I did.

As more people heard the lovely and vivacious Parsons, more musicians joined her. Eventually they formed a band called AnExchange. Jack Schaeffer joined the band. He was notorious for playing five different horns, wearing leather shorts and thigh high boots.

“He was the hippie of all hippies,” Parsons says. There were two guitars, horns, and then, as rock became more folk oriented, they added drums, a bass and piano.

By then the band was based in Marin County, just north of San Francisco. Parsons lived in Sausalito and swore she’d never leave. Press clippings from the day inevitably referred to her as “lovely and talented.”

In its peak year of 1972, AnExchange opened for Ike and Tina Turner at the Circle Star Theatre in San Francisco. Ike was late, he and Tina were fighting, the microphone power failed. A San Francisco Examiner reviewer called the Ike and Tina Turner Revue “sloppy.” He added that AnExchange, which was forced to play extra numbers while the Turners carried on backstage, “sounded beautiful. Singer Patty Parsons is a talented beauty with an impressive voice.”

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