worked together on arrangements for The Life Treasury Of Christmas Music, released as an LP in 1963. Los Angeles, 1963–68 Late in 1963, Byrd returned to the West Coast with Moskowitz. He enrolled in the musicology doctoral program at UCLA and studied music history, acoustics, psychology of music, and Indian music. He developed radical political views, and joined the Communist Party. At UCLA he formed the New Music Workshop with jazz trumpeter Don Ellis and others, where the first West Coast experiments in what would come to be called "performance art" and "concept art" would develop. On one occasion in 1965, as the concluding part of a series of concerts and events called "Steamed Spring Vegetable Pie" (a title taken at random from The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook), Byrd organized a blues band fronted by his friend Linda Ronstadt, to play during a "happening". Byrd said that "the realization that rock was an access to a larger public came out of that concert, and the idea of forming a band began taking shape." In the mid-1960s he also wrote for the Los Angeles Free Press, lectured at the Pasadena Art Museum and elsewhere, and wrote the liner notes for John Cage's LP of Variations IV. With Barbara Haskell he co-produced the first West Coast festival of experimental arts, before leaving UCLA in the summer of 1966 to create music full-time and produce "happenings." The United States of America Moskowitz returned to New York in 1966, but she and Byrd stayed in contact. In early 1967 Byrd approached Art Kunkin of the LA Free Press for financial help so he could start a rock group. Byrd stated that his aesthetic aims were to form "an avant-garde political/musical rock group with the idea of combining electronic sound (not electronic music)... musical/political radicalism... [and] performance art." When Moskowitz returned to California, she and Byrd started the United States of America, with another politically radical composer, Michael Agnello. Earlier collaborations had introduced Byrd to Tom Oberheim, who built ring modulators and other devices for them. Recruiting bassist Rand Forbes, electric violinist Gordon Marron and drummer Craig Woodson (another member of the New Music Workshop), the band undertook their first live performances in late 1967, at the Ash Grove in Los Angeles. Byrd was influenced by groups like The Red Crayola, Country Joe and the Fish, and Blue Cheer, and by the music of maverick