Sounds like old times
Pioneering all-female band Ace of Cups keeps rocking
What would a ’60s San Francisco psychedelic band have to say if it stepped into the present day? The answer is in “Made for Love,” a new single by the Ace of Cups — a pioneering all-female band that formed in 1967 and made its first album (with four of the five original members) a mere 51 years later.
Even without the history, “Made for Love” would be a good song, with its echoes of gentle psychedelia and a bit of surprise rap influence. But the message seems especially hopeful nowadays, which was the band’s intent.
“It’s always timely to point out that we are all connected as humanity,” said Denise Kaufman, the singer, bassist and guitarist. “If we could feel that, we’d take better care of each other than we do. We were going to release the song because of COVID, but now there’s another level of meaning.”
Adding their voices to the song are Jackson Browne, the Dead’s Bob Weir and Quicksilver’s David Freiberg, all of whom figure into Ace of Cups’ history.
“Jackson’s just a little younger than we are, and he used to stand outside when we would practice in Sausalito. He told us later that he was too shy to introduce himself.”
As for Weir, they’ve known him since 1965, when he and the other Dead members rode the now-legendary Furthur bus with writer Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters.
“I was one of them myself, my Prankster name was Mary Microgram. I got on the bus in June of 1965, and the Grateful Dead showed up that month. And I met the Ace of Cups just after Kesey got busted.”
So why haven’t you heard of this group? Bad luck is a large part of the answer: They were well respected by their musical peers; Jimi Hendrix called them “groovy” and invited them to open a UK tour. They also appeared at a historic show in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic convention. But record labels were less hip about signing an all-female band, especially one that played a few different styles. They broke up in 1972, but stayed connected in the decades that followed.
“I moved to Kauai as did Mary (guitarist Mary Gannon), and not everyone here knew about the Bay Area in the ’60s. But none of us ever stopped playing, and sometimes two or three of us would get together. And we’d always fall into harmony, the way families do. Sometimes people would know our history — they’d say, ‘First all-woman band, that’s cool.’ But because we never got our songs out, we didn’t get to share out souls.”
The group finally got attention in 2003, when an English label released a CD of rehearsals and demo tapes. Then they played a reunion show in 2011, at the 75th birthday show of ’60s figure Wavy Gravy. A U.S. label, High Moon, signed them afterward and their first proper album came out in 2018. They’ve since gotten mainstream attention (playing TV’s ‘Today Show’ last November), and recorded a followup album, “Sing Your
Dreams,” for release this fall. They also hope to play Boston, for the first time ever, once touring can resume.
“We have a song called ‘Lucky Stars’ and that’s what it’s about, thanking our lucky stars that we’re here,” Kaufman said. “We would love to have done this at any point we could, but as we became mothers and eventually grandmothers, nobody was in a position to take time off. Now that the label has given us the chance, we just want to keep playing together.”