Maxfield Parrish

Maxfield Parrish was a band with a great degree of promise and inventiveness, born of the mores of the '60s counterculture and ultimately destroyed by the same energy that made them so unique. Drawing on influences as far back as Romantic poets like Lord Byron and Percy Shelley, and as contemporary (to them) as the Byrds and Grateful Dead, their unique style was much like the country-rock of the era with a transcendental sheen, termed "Western Gothic". The phrase was provided by Kaleidoscope's Chris Darrow, who acted as the band's producer, harmonizer, and sometime bassist on their only album, It's a Cinch to Give Legs to Old Hard-Boiled Eggs. Darrow was not the first inspirational musician in the band's career: singer/guitarist David Biasotti and banjoist Randy Groenke both took lessons on their respective instruments from a local Palo Alto instructor by the name of Jerry Garcia. Biasotti and Groenke were high school friends from the San Francisco Bay area, and both got heavily into bluegrass and Romantic poetry just as most of the San Franciscan musicians were heading in their own, non-traditional directions. Moving down to Claremont, CA for college in 1967, the duo met fellow student David Perrin Muir and, based on a mutual love of the Byrds, they formed the obviously titled Jim McGuinn Memorial Band with a younger local drummer named David McClellan. Biasotti and Muir quickly moved beyond the tributary affectations of their cover band and began a fruitful songwriting partnership. Basing their lyrics in the story-telling style of Child Ballads, and their music on the more pop-oriented, layered harmony approaches of the Beatles, the duo created a handful of memorable tunes that owed much to the directions being taken by the Band and the Byrds, but with a more cosmic...