I dedicate this site to my good and long time friends in the Sopwith Camel. They, along with myself, survived one of the most unusual cultural movements of the century. What began like a pebble thrown into a quiet pond, rippling across the water in meditation, became a tidal wave of creative energies affecting every level of popular culture and questioned, for a time, the deeper matters of civilization. By the latter part of 1967, the wonder and beauty of the psychedelic experience was packaged and sold like a vacation. The dance halls became like a vacuum, routine and vibeless.

The early years are what the Camel exemplified best. By no means professional musicians nor completely mature men, we managed to live day by day, sharing apartments, food, money and spending all our time on the music, and going somewhere in the Bay Area to play it. Our rise and fall was the prototype of every band that sustained the San Francisco experience into the '70s. Ours was just faster. Our music expressed the fun and experimentation of 1965/67.

Excerpts from my Autobiography

by Norm Mayell

CHICAGO

I began playing the drums or should I say drum and cymbal in the basement of my house in Elgin, Il in 1958. I used to listen to Chicago blues stations like the Big Bill Hill Show and Rock with Rick that were on late at night. They played the strange urban message that white kids like myself couldn't resist. My favorite was a guy that would create the illusion on his radio show that he was going downstairs to the basement with some tasty BQ chicken. In the background was some great, slow, soulful harmonica. Turning on a blue light and settling down to eat he would begin to play the Blues. Then all hell would break loose and on would come Muddy Waters singing about black cat bones and mojos. Wow!

My first band was the Vesteens (we wore vests) and I was the primitive. The other 3 musicians could play each others instruments and played dixeland and knew all the standards. I brought the rock and roll and R&B tunes to their attention. We played in pubs by the Fox River, for Elgin High School dances and in basements for our girl friends parties. After high school I went to Hawaii and studied Philosophy and History in 1960. In a couple of years I returned home and went to Chicago and started making sandals at John Browns sandal shop in Old Town. There I met Mike Bloomfield in a night club on Wells Street, talking to Big Joe Williams. I had no idea that he was already a player emerging out of the folk era and had been written up in Sing Out Magazine. He asked me to get some drums and help start a band. And so we became the first all white blues band in Chicago in 1963/64. Known as "The Group" we played hot and primitive Chicago Blues in a packed club called Big Johns for more than a half a year. Charlie Musselwhite played harp and sometimes Mark Naflin sat in. John Hammond Sr. from Columbia Records came to see us and booked time in a studio. That session was finally released in 1997 on the Michael Bloomfield "Essential Blues" CD. John Hammond didn't know what he had; white guys high on dope playing blues while the Rolling Stones were waiting in the wings across the Pond. The story of the "Group" was written by Jan Mark Wolkin and Bill Keenom; entitled "Michael Bloomfield-If You Love These Blues-An Oral Hustory"in the year 2000.

HAWAII

I returned to Hawaii and Michael joined Paul Butterfield. I surfed alot and in 1964 dropped acid with a guy from the Tim Leary group who had left the East Coast and was selling on campus. My first trip was in Manoa Valley listening to Charley Mingus singing "Don't drop it, Bebop it, Don't let them drop that atom bomb on me.", while the walls were billowing outward and the air was orchid scented and filled with prism colored particles from other galaxies. There was a very small scene of acid heads that smoked reefer and took peyote in Hawaii. Just before I left, I was living with a girl in Waikiki, making Gods Eyes. Our neighbor wore a cape and was from Venus. He maintained that fiction all the time.

SAN FRANCISCO

When I came to San Francisco in 1965 I was barefoot and had a paper bag of belongings. I found the young girl I was told would put me up. She lived on Hyde Street just off of California Street in a three story Vic with an unused theater in the basement called the Orb Theatre. Her room was draped out in Middle Eastern clutter. Marijuana was piled on the table and from a broken record player, playing from the middle out and therefore backwards, came the music of Jimmy Smith's "Who's Afraid of Virgina Wolf." I knew the recording inside-out, I quess.

The only space in the house was a large closet on the first floor next to a pay phone and, well, I only had a paper bag. I managed a set of drums and set them up on the stage downstairs and began playing again. Everynight after midnight a stripper from North Beach that lived in a room behind the stage would come home with someone from the Beat generation. She would begin dancing up the aisles onto the stage, around the drums, say goodnight and exit through the back. I vaguely remember auditioning with the Quicksilver quitar players and a young girl (Denise Kaufman) who later played with the Ace of Cups. She introduced me to the Ken Kesey crowd in La Honda. One day Peter Kraemer and Terry MacNeil who lived two blocks away near Polk Street came to my stage looking for a drumer and I soon left my small theater.

When in college at University of Hawaii I met and lived with William Sievers. He played folk quitar in the Travis picking style and was now living in San Francisco a few blocks from the Firehouse Theatre on Sacramento Street. He bought a 12 string Framus electric guitar and I brought him to meet Peter and Terry. Sometime after that I called Martin Beard after reading his classified ad. He had the same Hofner bass as Paul McCartney and was in fact from England. No question, he was in the band.

So, we rehearsed in the Firehouse Theatre upstairs for one month and played downstairs on Lincolns birthday February 12th, 1966 for the first time in public. We were pretty good and had a few songs that sounded like hits. We played a few cover tunes from folkrock to blues like every other band did and we had our own brand of improvisational music. It was psychedelic/rock noise on the one hand and an attempt to rock classical style passages on the other hand. Then there was the old time stride style of music that was part of Peter's Virginia City experience, my dixeland band days and Terry's knowlege of piano standards. The psychedelic music was ignored by Eric Jacobsen and Kama Sutra Records and so the world remembers us for the old timey sound.

The period after our debut at the firehouse was frantic. We played the Matrix, we played the ballrooms and we played any political benefit we were asked to. We used a VW bus and then an ambulance to take equipement around. It seemed that in less than 6 months time we were offered a record contract from Kama Sutra Records and asked to go to New York to travel with the Lovin Spoonful. Before we left out 3 story Vic in the Fillmore, I did a Tarot reading with Batman bubble gum cards. It told the story of how Batman and Robin would be kidnapped in a dark and forboding Gotham night by Mafia looking characters. They would use us as a musical front for evil, like running numbers in Manhattan and selling our records out of the trunks of their Cadillacs in order to avoid proper accounting procedures. It all came true!

NEW YORK

We arrived in the Village on the corner of McDougal and Bleeker in front of the Night Owl Cafe, Allen Ginsburg and one of the Fugs, greeted us with hugs and kisses. I bet that didn't happen to many bands. We were the first hippie band out of the Bay Area. We opened at the Night Owl Cafe with Lothar and the Hand People. It was to get weirder as we toured the coast playing second bill to the Spoonful and promoting our hit record "Hello-Hello".

more forthcomung..........