the hum / By Bob Doran

Father Yod’s Band

Plus: Too much to do on a Friday and a gift idea

(Dec. 11, 2008)  The epic story begins on the Fourth of July, goes to Hollywood, on to Hawaii, expands from there with chapters here and there including a chapter unwritten that takes place in Arcata next Wednesday, Dec. 17, as a proto-psychedelic band called YaHoWha 13 comes to town for a show at Humboldt Brews.

On July 4, 1922 a man named Jim Baker was born. No, not Tammy’s husband the televangelist (two Ks there). This Jim B. was a decorated WW II Marine, then in the ’50s became a Vedantic monk. He came to L.A. looking for a movie job, studied yoga with Yogi Bhajan and hung out on L.A. beaches with Gypsy Boots and the Nature Boys. Eventually he became a successful entrepreneur running a series of SoCal vegetarian restaurants, most famously, one in Hollywood called The Source.

GALLERY >

In the psychedelic ’60s he became Father Yod, bearded patriarch of a hippie clan whose members renounced their possessions to work at The Source. The family lived communally in a Hollywood Hills mansion where they practiced yoga and tantric sex and, at times, made music together, wild experimental music often with Father Yod supplying chanted vocals and playing tympani or gong. The band was called YaHoWha 13, a name steeped with meaning.

“It was the dawning of the Age of Aquarius,” as one of Father Yod’s many wives sang when she was in a production of Hair at the Aquarius Theater in L.A. And the family took that literally, adopting the name Aquarian, as Djin Aquarian, guitarist for YaHoWha 13 explained when he called from Mt. Shasta where he currently teaches Kabbalah and earns his living as a carpenter.

“Every day, every morning Father led us through [yoga] practices,” Djin recalled. “He was remaking us. Health was our main focus at the beginning; health and doing everything as naturally as possible … We made music after we did our morning regime: getting our vibrations set, doing our calisthenics and our yoga and breathing. We tuned into the spirit first, then when the music came, it was in a sense a ceremonial, symbolic way of presenting the energies of that day. Over a couple of years we recorded about 65 albums on tape.”

The music is hard to pigeonhole: spacy, experimental, definitely psychedelic, but not like the blues/rock-based psyche-jams of the time.

“All the music we made with Father and the YaHoWha 13 band is channeled,” said Djin. “We don’t call it jamming. We’re more sensitized to something coming through us: pauses, changes, up and downs, ins and outs, different moods and feelings.”

Between 1973 and ’74, nine records came out of the sessions in The Source’s garage/music studio. They were DIY affairs, pressed in editions of 500 or 1,000 and sold at a bookstore associated with The Source. Decades later they would become sought-after collectors’ items.

1 2 3 NEXT PAGE >SHARE