User:Redsky1951/sandbox/Sandy Troy

Sandy Troy is an attorney, author, musician and producer of films. Born in NYC he pursued the musical arts as a youth studying jazz guitar at the New School in NYC in the sixties with Paul Simon’s younger brother, Eddie Simon. During this time Troy went to numerous jazz concerts in Greenwich Village seeing such notables as Miles Davis, McCoy Tyner, Larry Coryell, and Pharaoh Sanders.

After graduating Hewlett High School he traveled to Bethel, New York to see the Woodstock Music and Arts Festival in August of !969. His best friend, Hughie White, convinced him to go a few days early to volunteer to help the festival organizers. Much to Troy’s delight they secured jobs working at the event. Troy was able to work security at the concert and ended up on stage during the majority of the 3 day concert hanging out with the likes of the Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Santana and a host of other bands. A rabid Airplane fan because of the hit songs “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love,” he hobnobbed on stage with Grace Slick and Paul Kantner prior to their performance in the wee hours of Saturday night. Troy became an avid Deadhead after seeing Jerry Garcia and company perform their magic that Saturday night, August 16, 1969. Traveling to San Francisco, Troy was able to soak up the cultural delights of the Haight-Ashbury and check out the local San Francisco music scene and the Beat scene in North Beach. Troy was a big fan of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road,” the seminal stream of consciousness manifesto chronicling the cross country travels of Kerouac and his buddy Neal Cassady, who became the iconic figure who drove Ken Kesey’s psychedelic bus “Furthur.” Kesey, who had written the best selling novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, used the money to purchase the bus, and finance a cross country trip with his band of Merry Pranksters including Ken Babbs and George Walker. Kesey returned to his digs in Stanford and began a series of gatherings called Acid Tests, which featured LSD, strobe lights and the music of the incipient Grateful Dead. Garcia noted that “The Acid Tests is where we learned our chops. We could play or not play, because it  wasn’t about us. We had the freedom to do whatever we wanted.” Phil Lesh”s jazz background melded perfectly with Garcia’s freeform meanderings and the Dead’s brand of improvisational music was born. The Acid Tests were chronicled in Tom Robbins book “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.” Troy, enamored with the eclectic journey of the Dead and the Pranksters began to imbibe in vitamin L himself and moved to California in the early seventies. Frequenting musical venues in San Francisco like the Keystone, Winterland and the Sweetwater, Troy saw many shows by the Grateful Dead and solo shows by Jerry Garcia, who performed with his own band and in collaboration with Merl Saunders as the Garcia and Saunders Band. The solo shows were often an intimate experience with only a handful of fans in attendance. Consequently, Troy was able to meet Jerry Garcia and connect with him on a personal level because of Troy’s background as a jazz aficionado in NYC.

This fortuitous meeting with Garcia encouraged Troy to become one of the original Deadhead tapers on the West Coast. As a result Troy became friends with Jerry Moore, a taper himself and the editor of the Dead fanzine, Dead Relix. This friendship enabled Troy to be a contributing writer to the magazine and submit several articles including a 3 hour interview with Jerry Garcia and Dan Healy, the Dead’s soundman, which appeared in two consecutive issues of the magazine in 1978.*1 Garcia was mightily impressed with the interview and opened the door for Troy to get backstage passes to Dead shows for years to come. It was that connection of Troy’s that enabled Dick Latvala, an avid taper collector himself, to move back to the Bay Area from Hawaii with his wife Carol, and start working for the Grateful Dead as a roadie in training. Eventually, Dick became their tape archivist, a dream of his since he was a fan in Berkeley in the mid-sixties. With open access to the Dead’s tape archives Dick began releasing classic shows in a series know as Dicks Picks.

In the late seventies, Troy, who was firmly entrenched in the backstage scene of the Grateful Dead, met the band’s new keyboardist Brent Mydland. Brent was asked by Bob Weir to join the band to replace Keith Godcheaux. Troy and Mydland became fast friends hanging out in Concord at Brent’s abode and partying together on the road with the band. Due to his close relationship with Mydland, Troy published the first ever interview with Brent in Relix Magazine in 1979.*2 Troy’s natural talent for interviewing and writing was partially due to the fact that he was an experienced attorney who specialized in trial work. His ability to question and cross-examine witnesses proved to be a great asset for Troy’s rock journalism career. After Troy conducted numerous interviews with such sixties luminaries as Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia, Chet Helms, Rock Scully, Tom Constanten, John Dawson, Stanley Mouse and Tony Serra. After amassing a large number of celebrity interviews, Troy wrote the book “One More Saturday Night,” reflections with the Grateful Dead, Dead Family, and Dead Heads, with illustrations by sixties poster artist Stanley Mouse who designed the cover. The book was published by St. Martin’s Press in 1991 and included approximately 100 photos and other Mouse artwork throughout the book. Well accepted by the band, and Dead fans worldwide, Troy was encouraged to write another tome, which he immediately began work on after “One More Saturday Night”*3 was released. Troy’s best-selling book “Captain Trips, a biography of Jerry Garcia,”*4 was released in the fall of 1994 to rave reviews.*5 Published by Virgin Books in England, and Thunder’s Mouth Press in the United States, the book became a bestseller*6 when Garcia unexpectedly passed away on August 9, 1995 at the age of 53, and it was the only biography in existence at the time of his death.

Troy took some of his financial largess and produced the Chautauqua Tour featuring the New Riders of the Purple Sage, the David Nelson Band, Kingfish, and keyboardist Tom Constanten. The show also featured bedtime stories for Deadheads which was emcee’d by best-sellig author Troy, featuring David Nelson and Marmaduke of the NRPS telling tales of their adventures with Jerry Garcia who played pedal steel guitar with the New Riders when the band first started out. The tour included sold-out shows at the Belly-Up Tavern in Solana Beach, California, the Ventura Theatre in Ventura, California, and Moe’s Alley in Santa Cruz, California.

After the conclusion of the Chautauqua tour in late 1995, Troy began work on his highly lauded documentary “Summer of Love,”*7 which details the political and cultural impact of the hippies in Haight-Ashbury in 1966-1967. Produced by Troy’s film company, Red Sky Films, LLC, it documents through original interviews with Carolyn Garcia, Chet Helms, Paul Kantner, Allen Cohen, James Gurley, J.C. Juanis, Tony Serra, the psychedelic hippie period that was an outgrowth of the Beat Generation.

Finally, Troy was the founder of the improvisational rock band “Kerouac,” featuring Marie-Louise Clark on vocals, J.P. Mclain on bass (now of JGB with Melvin Seals), Dave Gantenbein on lead guitar, Denis Murphy on drums, and Sandy Troy on rhythm guitar. The band performed numerous live shows at various venues in the Bay Area.

Troy is currently working as CEO of Red Sky Films, LLC, a film company dedicated to creating movies that enhance public consciousness about significant cultural events that shaped our society from it’s transition from the conservative fifties to the iconic musings of the Beat Writers Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, the poetry and songs of Bob Dylan, the evolutionary music of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, the Beatles, the Grateful Dead, the Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service and Big Brother and the Holding Company featuring Janis Joplin.

Red Sky Films, LLC, currently has several projects in development: 1. a biopic of sixties musicians written by Randall Jahnson (writer of the Doors starring Val Kilmer) 2. a biopic of Ana Sandavol, an environmentalist who saved Cabo San Lucas from over-development; 3. a documentary about the New Orleans music scene featuring Mardi Gras musicians; 4. a distribution deal for the “Summer of Love,” a documentary chronicling the Summer of Love.

Jerry Garcia (Part 1) Relix Magazine Vol. 5 No. 3 The Soundman Sounds Off: An Interview With Dan Healy and Jerry Garcia (Part 2)
 * 1 Relix Magazine Vol. 5 No. 2 The Soundman Sounds Off: An Interview With Dan Healy and


 * 2 Relix Magazine Vol. 7 No. 2 The Relix Interview: Brent Mydland

Dead Family and Deadheads ISBN 0-312-07759-9
 * 3 St. Martin’s Press/New York One More Saturday Night: Reflections with the Grateful Dead,

Virgin Books/Great Britain Captain Trips, the Life and Fast Times of Jerry Garcia ISBN 0-86369-866-2
 * 4 Thunder’s Mouth Press Captain Trips, a biography of Jerry Garcia ISBN 1-56025-076-3

N.Y. Times Book Review March 12, 1995 Captain Trips, A Biography of Jerry Garcia
 * 5 L.A. Times Book Review January 19, 1995 Captain Trips, A Biography of Jerry Garcia

Washington Post Book Review Sept. 17, 1995 Captain Trips, A Biography of Jerry Garcia
 * 6 USA Today Book Review August 31, 1995 Captain Trips, A Biography of Jerry Garcia


 * 7 Red Sky Films, LLC (c) 2002 Summer of Love