GENE ESTRIBOU – A JACK OF ALL TRADES: FROM PRODUCING THE GRATEFUL DEAD TO INVENTING ALPHAPHONE

Rarely do we happen to hear the stories of people who were close to prominence but didn’t make it through. The “hip” decade in the life of Gene Estribou offers a story of the claim to fame for “almost” producing The Grateful Dead debut album (1966) and the invention of Alphaphone (1970). The latter could serve him with the title of a brainwave music pioneer and an inventor of a portable neurofeedback device designed for therapeutic, recreational, and creative purposes. As a scholar looking with suspicion at one-dimensional narratives of rise to success that offer no flipside, and as someone whose own upward trajectory suffered from disruptions, I think it’s important to highlight historical and present-day cases of considered-to-be brilliant people whose quick career advancement had been obstructed.

PART I, MUSIC CAREER

The story of Gene Estribou’s short-lived music, science, and entrepreneurial career reflects the Zeitgeist of counter-cultural late 60s-early 70s. Prior to making headlines with an Alphaphone, Estribou was known as the owner of Scorpio Studios next to Buena Vista Park in San Francisco. After releasing his debut album “Intensifications” (1965) in collaboration with Jean Paul Pickens, where Gene played songs with guitar sections on one side and J.P. played songs for banjo on the other, Estribou went on to almost become a producer of The Grateful Dead. [1] Introduced to the members by photographer Herb Greene in 1966, Estribou invited the group to his studio. Buena Vista Studios were located at 737 Buena Vista West, a few blocks from The Dead’s house at 710 Ashbury. At that time, about 24 years old Estribou shared a house with his wife Sara and their daughter. Members of The Grateful Dead didn’t enjoy the studio facility and didn’t find Estribou to be competent enough to produce their debut record. After two months of trial and error (June-July of 1966, so-called “Scorpio Sessions”), the group recorded two tracks (“Stealin,” “Don’t Ease Me In”) which were not mass distributed till early 2003, when the group released a collection called “Birth of the Dead.”  Past his failure to produce the first Grateful Dead record, Estribou pursued the path of an edgy inventor, a pioneer of biofeedback art. . .didnt he?

PART II, ALPHAPHONE INVENTION

The article by Ann Leslie published on Oct. 25th, 1970 in the Chicago Tribune introduced a new neurofeedback device in the following way:

“The Alphaphone is based on some of the most fascinating research now being conducted all over the world into the mysterious electrical activity of the brain.”[2]

Inventors Gene Estribou and Ken [Francis J. – AC] Keefe, who had just launched their business “startup,” “trained themselves to turn on large amounts of Alpha by wiring themselves to laboratory EEGs,” which led them to develop a handy yet revolutionary technology. As the device’s name suggested, its inventors fell victim to the so-called “Alpha hype” of the early 1970s. By design, Alphaphone discarded types of brain electrical activity found in EEG that were not associated with Alpha waves.

The “magical machine” of Estribou & Keefe had been explicitly advertised as an alternative to “getting high,” as a legal way to achieve relaxation. The “revolutionary new device,” “Aquarian” Alphaphone was designed with the noble purpose of helping ordinary people of no particular training to achieve emotional equilibrium attributed to the meditative state associated with, you guessed it, Alpha waves:

“Then we thought, wow! Wouldn’t it be great if we could get more people, you know, like whole communities, to turn on Alpha – it would have such a fantastic effect on their peace of mind and general level of sanity!

But, look, EEGs cost anything between $6,000 and $40,000 and they’re just not available to the general public. So we set about trying to compress that vast lab equipment into something relatively cheap and portable for people to turn themselves on with at home.”

Two inventors were introduced to a reader as “a musician and sometimes microbiologist” (Estribou) and a student of Joe Kamiya at Langley-Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute in San Francisco (Keefe). Deriving from his experience, Estribou made a connection between music practice and the self-control achieved by adherents of other disciplines:

“The thing that’s so great about the Alphaphone is that it teaches you to control your brain waves to get a kind of tranquilizing trip – just like singers can learn to control their breathing to reach particular notes easily.”

Yet, the device of Estribou and Keefe had been promoted less as a creative tool for music-making than as a handy commercial device for personal productivity improvement. As listed in the article, Gene’s partner Sara Estribou reported that 30 minutes with the device helped her to get ready for the day and to achieve better psychophysiological performance. The author, Ann Lesslie, ended her article prosaically: in sequence, she listed various future applications of Alphaphone – switching the light, opening a car’s door remotely, etc.

Estribou at his studio wearing Alphaphone, 1970; author is unknown

The same text had been re-published in the Philadelphia Inquirer about a month later with new photo material. [3]

Another article called “Cerebrations” from Nov. 1st, 1971 [4] clarified the “Aquarian”  component of Alphaphone. Publication featured photos and accounts of people using Alphaphone in a traditional Japanese Bath setting. The shared bathing was claimed to build unity between participants and stimulate people’s sensations. As inventors claimed, the device could be used around water safely. Yet, the interest of Estribou in the bathing component wasn’t all sourced from reading Joe Kamiya who referenced researchers from Tokyo University writing about Alpha waves in connection to traditional practices. Remember the Scorpio Studios? The name comes from the zodiac sign of Estribou, highlighted by his collaborator J.P. in the liner notes of 1965. There’s enough side evidence to assert that Estribou treated his “watery” sign seriously, ascribing some higher meaning to it. This mysticism influenced the promotion of the Alpha wave “therapy” enabled by Alphaphone.

Interestingly, while we don’t know about the background of Estribou’s origin and education, in the article of 1971 he’s referenced not as a producer but as a microbiologist. The same play of names and titles of self-taught inventors had been employed by other pioneers of biofeedback art.

In the article of discussion, Estribou introduced a technique of using Alphaphone with sonic stimuli. A photo of 3 young performers (two white males, and one white female) presented them sitting with a jumbo speaker behind their backs, which was intended to “put the performers in a mood.” According to his own account, at the time of the article Estribou had been working on playback of the brainwave recordings, testing sonification tools that would permit him to play back sonified alpha waves when all performers synchronized and play sound in headphones “quadrasonically.” Like other biofeedback art practitioners of that time, Estribou discarded Beta waves, often associated with stress, trying to cut the signal off when “Beta took over.” The grand idea behind this Alpha sync was establishing telepathic communication among Alphaphone users, which makes a reader wonder about the parascientific origins and connotations of brainwave music.

PART III, THE STORY OF NOT BECOMING. . .TWICE

Consider the sensationalist description of Estribou’s practice, referencing his countercultural roots and connection to science, add to it his visionary enterprise and the track record of using the invented device for music performance, and complete the recipe with his privileged socio-economic standing, the white young trying to look older with mustache charisma – what do we have? A double of the epigone of brainwave music. Yet, unlike the editor of “Biofeedback and the Arts,”[5] Estribou didn’t end up on a TV show wiring up Jerry Garcia. He and his invention were forgotten despite the fact he shared “a recipe for success” with those who are recognized in the master narrative. Why?

It’s not clear where Estribou’s life path turned after his invention of Alphaphone in the early 1970s. Around 1973, he and his then-wife Sara were listed in a newspaper as art collectors among other notable people in San Francisco. [6] No publicity follows. All I could find out is that these days Estribou resides in Washington State.

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