Get Together

You are locked into The Zoo, the station that still believes a record can change the temperature in a room, and the cut spinning under this voice is the one that proved it. “Get Together,” by The Youngbloods, from the 1967 debut album that carried the band’s own name on the RCA Victor label. If you only know the chorus, you already know the whole argument. Come on, people now, smile on your brother, everybody get together, try to love one another right now. It sounds simple. It was not simple to get it onto the radio, and it was not simple to write.

The man who wrote it was not a Youngblood. Chester Powers Jr., known around the folk rooms as Chet Powers and later, once he joined Quicksilver Messenger Service, as Dino Valenti, put the song down in the early 1960s. Powers had come out of the Air Force and into the coffeehouse circuit with a reputation that did not match the lyric. People who knew him said he was hard-charging, restless, the opposite of a sermon. And yet the song he handed the decade is an argument between love and fear, sung as if the choice were still open. The Kingston Trio cut it. The We Five took “Let’s Get Together” to number 31 in 1965, riding the coattails of “You Were on My Mind.” Jefferson Airplane put a version on the 1966 debut Jefferson Airplane Takes Off, before Grace Slick arrived. H.P. Lovecraft recorded it. The Sunshine Company tried it. None of them owned it. The Youngbloods did, and they did it by slowing the thing down until the plea had room to breathe.

Jesse Colin Young found the song the way a lot of the best album-rock material was found in that era, by walking into the wrong room at the right moment. He was Perry Miller then in the legal sense, born November 22, 1941, in Queens, New York, the son of a violinist mother with perfect pitch and a Harvard-educated father who loved classical music. He had already made two solo folk records, The Soul of a City Boy in 1964 and Young Blood in 1965, and he was building a band out of mavericks. One day he stepped into the Cafe Au Go Go in Greenwich Village expecting a dark room and a chance to rehearse. Buzzy Linhart was on the stage singing Powers’s song. Young went backstage and asked Linhart to write the words out. He told interviewers later that the song struck him in a deep and spiritual way, and that he knew it would stay with him for the rest of his life. The first two lines did the damage. Love is but a song we sing. Fear’s the way we die. In a year when the draft made every decision feel like life and death, those lines were not decoration.

The band that cut it had come together in 1965, named for Young’s second album. Young and Jerry Corbitt, a guitarist and harmony singer out of Tifton, Georgia, by way of the Cambridge folk rooms, started as a duo on the Canadian circuit. Lowell Levinger, called Banana, came in on guitar and electric piano. He had been a bluegrass kid in Boston, mentored around the Charles River Valley Boys and Bill Keith, playing coffeehouses under the billing Banana and the Bunch. Joe Bauer, a jazz drummer, completed the quartet. They became the house band at the Cafe Au Go Go. Because the group already had two guitarists, Young moved to bass and kept the lead voice, a clear, unforced tenor that never begged the lyric to be important. It already was.

Felix Pappalardi produced the debut. The same year he was in the room with Cream, and a little later he would be the bass player and producer inside Mountain. The Youngbloods sessions went down at RCA Victor Studio B in New York. Pappalardi did not dress the track up. Banana’s electric piano sits in the middle of the arrangement like a front porch. The tempo is unhurried. Young sings as if he is talking to one person, not a movement. The album, The Youngbloods, reached only about number 131. The single, issued in July 1967 with “All My Dreams Blue” on the flip, stalled at number 62. It was a hit in San Francisco and Seattle and a rumor everywhere else. The Summer of Love had the song and did not quite know it.

Then the country caught up with the record. In 1969 the National Conference of Christians and Jews used the Youngbloods’ cut under a public-service announcement calling for brotherhood. Listeners heard it and called radio stations asking what it was. Augie Blume, the head of promotion at RCA, went to his bosses and told them to put the single out again. They told him the company did not do that. He told them they would re-release it or he was gone. He was too valuable to lose. They put it out again. “Get Together” climbed to number 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 and number 37 on the adult-contemporary chart. A flop from 1967 became the peace-and-love record people still mean when they talk about the era. Richie Havens sang the song in his opening set at Woodstock. The Youngbloods had already left New York for Marin County, after a June 1967 date at the Avalon Ballroom convinced them the West Coast room was full of people who looked like Banana.

The rest of the catalog is the part album radio was built to protect. Earth Music followed the debut. Elephant Mountain, recorded in 1969 with Charlie Daniels in the producer’s chair for much of it, is the deep one. Jerry Corbitt had left, and the band was a trio. Young wrote “Darkness, Darkness” out of a bad trip and a harder thought about friends in Vietnam. One friend in the Coast Guard had been killed when a boat was blown up. Young sat in a kitchen and tried to put himself there. Robert Plant covered “Darkness, Darkness” decades later and took a Grammy nomination for best male rock performance in 2002. “Sunlight” was another Young song from that period, later cut by Three Dog Night. The group started its own label, Raccoon, and kept working until 1972, with a brief reunion in the mid-1980s. Joe Bauer, Jerry Corbitt, and later bassist Michael Kane are gone. Banana is not. Lowell Levinger still plays, still tells the stories, and still keeps a home on the web for the music.

Young’s solo life is the second half of the bio, and it is not a footnote. After the band split he built a studio on a ridge in the Bay Area and made Song for Juli, which stayed on the Billboard 200 for the better part of a year, then Light Shine and the Top 40 album Songbird. He opened for Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young on the 1974 stadium run and sang “Get Together” at the No Nukes shows with that crowd. A 1995 fire took the Inverness house and the label. The family went to Hawaii with what they could carry. Lyme disease later took him off the road. He came back. Dreamers arrived in 2019. Highway Troubadour followed. In 2020 he cut a new “Get Together” with Steve Miller and violinist Charles Yang as a benefit for WhyHunger. Jesse Colin Young died on March 16, 2025, at home in Aiken, South Carolina. He was 83. The chorus did not retire with him.

That is the cut. Not a slogan, not a costume. A folk song written by a restless man, overheard in a Village club, slowed down by a quartet that trusted the lyric, ignored for two years, and then handed back to the country by a promotion man who threatened to walk. On The Zoo we play the record, not the costume. Come on, people now.

The Youngbloods live on the web at theyoungbloods.com, and Jesse Colin Young’s official site is still kept at jessecolinyoung.com. The Facebook page is facebook.com/jessecolinyoung, Instagram is instagram.com/jessecolinyoung, and X is x.com/jessecolinyoung. Banana’s own site, the place for the other half of the band, is lowelllevinger.com. Songfacts keeps a solid page on the single at songfacts.com/facts/the-youngbloods/get-together. This is The Zoo, listener-supported and commercial-free, at thezoorocks.com. Smile on your brother. The record is still in the rack.