Chet Powers

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Chester William Powers, Jr. (7 October 1943–16 November 1994), better known as Dino Valente (or Valenti), and credited sometimes as Jesse Oris (or Orris) Farrow, was an American singer/songwriter.

He was born in New York City, and died in Santa Rosa, California.

In the early 1960s, while a member of the Greenwich Village folk scene, he wrote "Get Together," a quintessential 1960s love-and-peace anthem, later recorded by Jefferson Airplane, The Youngbloods, and many others. While in Greenwich Village, he played often with singer-songwriter Fred Neil. He was an original member of the Quicksilver Messenger Service, but his career was blighted by frequent drug busts.

Powers (or one of his pseudonyms) is sometimes erroneously credited as the author of the rock standard "Hey Joe" (q.v. for further information).

The following is written in the liner notes of the CD release of Dino's solo album Dino Valente, by Arthur Levy in January 1998...

In February 1968, Dino Valente entered the CBS Studios in Los Angeles to record his first (and what would be his only) solo album for Epic Records. Young CBS Records staff producer Bob Johnston was assigned the project, most likely because of his ability to navigate productively inside the studio with Bob Dylan, to whom every young singer-songwriter was compared in those years. His most recent studio albums, "Highway 61 Revisited" and "Blonde On Blonde," recorded with Johnston back in 1965-66, were still considered the 'standard' of a successful singer-songwriter production.

Of course Dino Valente's record, with its heavily reverbed 12-string guitar dominating nearly every track (and a vocal echo in "Everything Is Gonna Be OK" that must be heard to be believed), sounded not one bit like any record Dylan had ever done. If anything, Velente's level of wrenching emotional tension had more in common with one of Johnston's upcoming sessions, Leonard Cohen's "Songs From a Room," though certainly Dino made up in macho animal magnetism what he lacked of Cohen's scholarly, academic poesy.

There was an unsettling urgency in Valente's voice and especially his lyrics. Except for one mystery title, "Me and My Uncle," made into a Grateful Dead 'cowboy' staple a couple of years later (with John Phillips listed as its writer) - every single song on the Dino Velente album was specifically directed in the second person ("you") to some starry-eyed hippie chick, disappointed by the one she thought she loved, and now sitting in a lotus position at Dino's feet, as the incense wafted and she received his platonic consolation. Valente's supple tenor, redolent of Johnny Rivers one moment, Tim Buckley the next, had that kaleidoscopic dimension of simpatico which would find Dino a worldwide audience on "What About Me" with Quicksilver Messenger Service three years down the road. His Epic album was the wellspring of that sound.

"You tell me that they just bring you down babe," sings Dino, winning her confidence with a one-two reality check in "Something New," as good an example as any, "and that you don't even come around my love/Here is a tower, straight and tall, somewhere to run to when you fall/You don't have to cry babe, sing another song love, you may find you're trying something brand new..." Or: "Suddenly," he lets loose in "Time," before popping the big question, "these dreams are behind you/Ever falling like rain, changing again and again/Is there someone who loves you?/We may only be here one time for all anyone knows, and we already share one mind, baby what more could we ask for?" Or simply stated: "Listen to me girl and go find your mind..."

This highly un-self-conscious focus of attention made for an album that was a pure addiction for anyone who possessed it in 1968. "You better stop, take a look around, I'm sure somebody loves you," Dino reassures his latest day-glo painted, mescaline-addled nubile, "Ah come with me, take the lead, know you're mine/There's no time to weep for those you'll have to leave behind/Know, as rivers run, you are children of the sun, live for love and life alone, there's no time to own anybody..." 1967's Summer of Love reigns eternal the year after: "You tell me little one that you can't understand 'em," Valente empathizes with a clarity that cuts through the haze, "you can't see it clearly and you don't comprehend it/Why is it lately I been willin' to end it, it's time, baby I believe it is time/There's a new wind blowin' in my mind..."

If there was a beautifully naive quality to this Dino Valente record, at least some of the credit belongs to Bob Johnston, who basically let the singer do whatever he wanted in the studio. "There's no such thing as having too much freedom when you work with me," Johnston says nearly thrity years later, recalling the entourages of lovely young L.A. things who attended Dino Valente everyday in the studio, a virtual cult-like following. "He had about twenty or thirty girls in the studio," Johnston recalls, perhaps only exaggerating a bit, but making a point about Velente's loyal following. "People thought he was evil and that I was Satan for doing him. But he was absolutely a bright light. He said to me, 'Bob, I'll never do another record unless it's with you.' He could've been great if he had wanted to, God almighty."

Considering how scant is the biographical information on him, it was all the more frustrating when the late Lillian Roxon closed her "Rock Encyclopedia" entry on Valente by quoting the late San Francisco FM deejay Tom Donahue: "If every chick Dino's ever known buys the record, it will be number one." Such is the apocryphal level of what we know about Valente, or what has survived down the years, starting with the legend that his parents were carnival performers and that he abandoned the carny road to settle in Greenwich Village as a folksinger at age 17 - a tale as ingenuous as Bob Dylan's own traveling carny claims. But the carnival story made its way into the late Ralph J Gleason's liner notes to the Epic album, and was expanded upon when Roxon made him into an ex-trapeze artist to boot. And just as Robert Alan Zimmerman had already turned into Bob Dylan by the time he arrived in Greenwich Village in 1960, Chester A Powers Jr., born October 7, 1943, in Danbury, Connecticut, had already become Dino Valente by the time he crossed the corner of Bleecker and MacDougal in 1960. He worked his way through the basket-houses and crash pads over the next couple of years and came closer than anyone to earning a rep as the "underground Dylan" (as characterized by Ben Fong-Torres in Rolling Stone years later). During this period he wrote a song called "Let's Get Together," published by "Chet Powers," that could have been his annuity for life but for unforeseen circumstances. (In later years there was a myth that "Hey Joe" was written by the same pen, but research shows that honor belongs to a Washington DC folksinger named Billy Roberts, circa 1958.)

The hassles (underground or otherwise) that prompted Valente to leave New York are lost to us now. There was a single for Elektra Records, "Birdses" which indicates that at least someone was listening to him in New York. But by 1963 he was in Los Angeles, where the folk-into-rock process had already begun to coalesce long before its East Coast counterpart. After working his way through the southland folk clubs, and making some strong connections among the musical cognoscenti there, Valente moved north to the San Francisco Bay area, where he began to record for Autumn Records, though no album was ever issued. Dino had been friendly with Jim McGuinn in Los Angeles and it is said that David Crosby discovered drummer Michael Clarke while he was playing in a band with Valente in Big Sur. At least three members of the Byrds have a connection to him, lending credence to the apocryphal footnote that he was offered a membership in that band but declined.

Valente did not decline the offer of a backup band, however, when the late John Cipollina (guitar), bassist David Freiberg, and Jim Murray (harmonica/vocals) all came under his wing in 1964. A solid friendship it was, with the three musicians looking up to Valente: he had a manager, had published songs, and had even been recorded. Dino was way ahead of his time with ideas like wearing weird outfits on-stage and playing with cordless guitars. Rehearsal time was booked but on the eve of the rehearsal, the trio's equipment car got lost. They tried searching again for Dino the next night but it was too late: he had been arrested for possession of marijuana while riding in a friend's car. To complicate matters, while awaiting trial he was picked up by the police after a gig on Grant Avenue. They shook him down and found some pot, then busted into his apartment and found amphetamines. He received a one-to-ten year sentence at Folsom State Penitentiary.

Cipollina, Freiberg and Murray kept the faith and decided to wait for their friend to be paroled. But by the middle of 1965, they had begun working with other musicians, two of whom were guitarist Gary Duncan and drummer Greg Elmore, from a band called the Brogues. By the end of the year they were ready to perform in public as Quicksilver Messenger Service, their name derived from the fact that four of them were Virgos, ruled by the planet Mercury. Whew!

Dino had been in jail much longer than they expected. According to one report, he was released on parole but was promptly arrested on another drug charge and was back in the pen within two days. It was 1966 and he was working the legal system for all it was worth but it was a costly defense. To raise money he sold the publishing rights for "Let's Get Together (song)" to the manager of the Kingston Trio, who had first recorded the song back in 1964.

So Dino battled the State of California while QMS - who played in 1967 at the first Human Be-In and at Monterey Pop, and were heard on the "Revolution" movie soundtrack - gained notoriety as the last of the original Bay area bands to hold out for a major label recording contract (after Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company with Janis Joplin, and the Charletans). Everyone attributed this to Quicksilver's general distrust of record company practices and almost no one connected it to the long vigil they maintained on Dino's behalf, in fact, it was his bad experiences that blackened Quicksilver's opinion of the nameless, faceless recording monoliths.

Ironically, Dino disliked what QMS had become - a psychedelic acid-rock band prone to half-hour guitar jams on Bo Diddley's "Who Do You Love." Was all that raging guitar noise a reaction to the way the system was shafting their friend? No matter, for Dino would not be looking to join (or rejoin) his old friends when he got cut loose, even though they included "Dino's Song" on their first album for Capitol Records. When Valente finally maneuvered his parole, it was predicated on the promise that he would be recording for Epic Records. The QMS debut was released in May 1968, and while it was praised for its guitar work, it was roundly criticized for the obvious absence of a strong lead singer. Dino's album, released in August, was all lead singer!

Within a few months, Dino had spirited Gary Duncan away from Quicksilver. They went to New York in January 1969 to form a new band that would be called the Outlaws. In the wake of Duncan's departure, QMS issued the half-studio/half-live "Happy Trails" album in March, a stopgap LP that brought them their first charted single (What else? An edited version of "Who Do You Love"!) and that is generally regarded as one of the top two or three albums of the San Francisco 'golden era.' While Valente and Duncan were in New York, the late British keyboardist Nicky Hopkins took up the slack in the QMS lineup and recorded their third album, "Shady Grove" (December), featuring his immortal FM radio flash instrumental nugget, "Edward, the Mad Shirt Grinder."

The Outlaws expedition had come to naught, and so at the New Year's Eve concert, Duncan rejoined the QMS fold, along with Valente, who was finally at the helm of the band after nearly five years of being side-tracked. On the next album, "Just For Love" (August, 1970), eight of the nine songs, including "Fresh Air" and the title track, were written by Valente, six of them under to pseudonym of Jesse Oris Farrow for bizarre contractual reasons. They were able to squeeze out another album in December, "What About Me," with Mr. Farrow again credited as the primary songwriter.

Despite occasional personnel changes, the band maintained its pace through "Quicksilver" (1971) and "Comin' Thru" (1972) before calling it quits. While QMS enjoyed positive commercial success during its years with Dino Valente, there is also no question that the earliest die-hard '60s fans never forgave the band for forsaking its "attack of the killer guitars" base in favor of Valente's ballads, which were even augmented by horn sections on late albums. The 2-LP Anthology was issued in 1973, and a short-lived reunion tour and album, "Solid Silver," took them through 1975. Dino signed a deal with Warner Brothers in 1974, and if their archives contain any recordings, now would be a good time to license them out. To greater or lesser extent, only the bootleggers and hardcore fans have kept the Quicksilver legend alive these past two decades.

Sightings of Dino Valente grew more infrequent as the '70s turned into the '80s. At the end of the decade there was a report that he had undergone intensive surgery to alleviate a brain tumor, and had gone back to performing afterwards. But there were no new recordings. John Cipollina died on May 29, 1989 from chronic emphysema, and his death was a sad time for QMS fans, who gathered the following month in San Francisco at an all-star tribute concert for the Fillmore West.

Happily, John's brother Mario, an original member of Huey Lewis and the News, was there to carry the torch that night. Dino Valente died in Santa Rosa on November 16, 1994. He will always be missed.

The following is written in the liner notes of the LP release of Dino's solo album Dino Valente, by Ralph Gleason in 1968...

"You take this electrical power out of the wall and you send it through the guitar and you bend it and shape it and make it into something, like songs for people and that power is a wonderful thing."

Dino Valente is a philosopher as well as a poet ("I was writing poems before I wrote songs") and a performer with the power to move people and turn their heads by what he does.

"I've written songs, so many songs, more songs than I can remember. I've forgotten more songs than I sing. I want my songs to have a little madness in them. A little madness frees you and if there's a little taste, it holds you in there. They're sentimental songs, but that's cool and they pretty much speak for themselves. When you're up there before people and you're doing it, there's plenty of room. All the room you need."

What Dino is talking about is making love through music and with music and poetry and electricity and, to tell the truth, magic.

"I was raised on carnivals all along the East Coast and ran away to New York when I was 17. My parents were carnival people."

And since then, it's been Dino's voice and Dino's guitar engaged in that vital communication between performer and audience. "I know what I want to do and there's no one doing it."

For several years, Dino Valente has been part of that enigmatic musical underground in New York and Boston and San Francisco where his music has been the music other musicians spoke of. His songs fought their way out to the world - "Get Together" is one of the most recorded and popular of all contemporary pop music compositions in recent years.

His stance, rooted in the carnival mystique, has been that of the minstrel; him manner that of the magician on stage.

Watching him perform - playing and singing - is to watch magic at work in the way he can take the heads of the listeners and meld them all into one with his music. Very few solo performers in recent times have had the strength of personality to do this.

The nine songs on this album are the songs Dino has made part of the lives of his believers. "People would nver forgive me if I didn't do them." And they are a magical description of where he was when he wrote them and forged them into the consciousness of his people.

Where Dino will be tomorrow, in his next album, is now in the process of creation. "All I know is that I am evolving. I know where I want to go and what I want to sound like."

Whatever it will be, it will be, as the Dino in this album, unique and individual. Which is the way he is when you hear him in some Sausalito night club, at a San Francisco ballroom or in a North Beach late night club.

At the great San Francisco Be-In in Golden Gate park, Dino Valente popped up all over, running through the crowd, playing a flute, skipping in and out of the groups people like a minstrel from the Middle Ages thrown into modern America by a time-warp. You heard him and then he disappeared. Elusive. That's the word. Like magic.

And like magic, elusive in his appearances and in his impact, Dino Valente has finally been captured for nine songs in this album, the nine facts of where he was at in Nashville, Los Angeles and San Francisco when he made these tracks.

Right now, somewhere, he's making music, putting together the image of his next album, the next facets of his being, because when you live, breathe and sweat music as he does, everything you do in life is music.

That's what makes him the musical poet he is.