Born May 14, 1949 in Hollywood, California, to sculptor Verna Lebow, MFA, and surgeon Paul Kaufman, MD, Alicia grew up in a bi-lingual, intellectual, artistic, musical and politically active household.

A passionate follower of her muse since early childhood, Alicia was influenced and acknowledged by three major figures in art, music and literature by her mid-teens. Her multi-instrumental music studies lead her to learn open-tuned guitar improvisation from John Fahey, then married to Alicia’s cousin Janet Lebow.

A summer scholarship to Otis Art Institute enabled Alicia to study with Charles White in 1965. While working as a graphic layout artist at the infamous Los Angeles Free Press in 1966, Alicia submitted a piece of writing that Joan Didion selected as the quintessential example of alternative press writing for an article titled “Alicia and the Underground Press” in her Points West column in the Saturday Evening Post.

In 1966, at age seventeen, after six weeks at San Francisco State College, Alicia began a productive career as a free-lance artist/writer/musician. She sang and played guitar at coffee houses in the Bay Area, wrote songs, drew reams of line drawings, worked occasionally as a cook, and attended a semester at San Francisco Fashion Institute (long enough to learn pattern drafting).

In 1967 she moved to the houseboats off Sausalito where she adopted collage artist Jean Varda as a mentor. At eighteen, she worked out of her own art studio in the Industrial Center Building in Sausalito, where she began creating the 5’x8’ fiber art wall hanging currently displayed at the online Hippie Museum. She sold her handmade clothes at the San Rafael Renaissance Pleasure Faire.

At nineteen Alicia moved to the Wheeler Ranch Commune in Sonoma County, California and began writing, illustrating and designing Living On The Earth, a handwritten guide to bohemian country living illustrated with line drawings, initially conceived as an informational pamphlet to share with fellow commune dwellers, based on advice gathered from friends at Wheeler Ranch.

Published in 1970 by The Bookworks in Berkeley, the book sold out its first edition of 10,000 copies in two weeks, in part due to a rave review in the Whole Earth Catalog. Bennett Cerf, then president and co-founder of Random House, purchased the rights to publish it for Random House.

The 1971 Random House Vintage Books edition sold over 350,000 copies, becoming the first paperback book ever on the New York Times Bestseller List. It was favorably reviewed in Time, New York Times Review of Books, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Christian Science Monitor, Look, and dozens of other publications, and Alicia was recognized as a Woman of the Year in 1971 by Mademoiselle Magazine.

Over the next three years she created seven other illustrated books, five of which were published by Soshisha, Ltd. in Japan. (Living on the Earth has remained in print continuously in Japanese since 1972, and Being of the Sun was re-released by Soshisha in March 2007.) The ribbon surrounding the cover of Soshisha’s Living on the Earth bears these words from Japan’s poet laureate, Shuntaro Tanikawa: “I want to do everything in this book. If I cannot do everything in this book, then I want to dream about it, because if I do, I will become a better person to the marrow of my bones.”

In 1973, Alicia served as one of five judges in the Levi Strauss Denim Art Contest, along with fashion designer Rudi Gernreich, photographer Imogen Cunningham, fiber artist Candace Crockett and the curator of the De Young Museum in San Francisco.

In 1974, Alicia went on a speaking tour in Japan as the guest of her publisher, Soshisha, Ltd. On her way back, she stopped on Maui, and stayed to learn traditional Hawaiian slack key guitar.

Over her 30 year residence in Hawaii, Alicia studied Hawaiian music, worked as an underwater photographer, taught yoga, performed extensively as a vocalist/guitarist, had several one-woman art shows, taught art, music, writing and dance at two alternative schools, and illustrated books.

From 1988 to 1999, she produced over 3000 weddings as the owner/operator/founder of A Wedding Made In Paradise – Maui, where she also functioned as event and floral designer and wedding musician. The company was featured on Good Morning America in 1993, and in half a dozen books on weddings and Hawaii travel during the 1990s.

In 1999 she sold the wedding company, produced a CD of her original psych folk songs from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, Music From Living on the Earth, and toured the USA for eight months with 75 performances of an original one-woman show featuring autobiographical comedy stories and original songs to promote both the CD and the 30th Anniversary (revised) Edition of Living on the Earth (Random House 2000). The CD garnered an Album Pick on allmusic.com.  (Random House has kept the second edition of Living on the Earth in print continuously since 1971 in a hardcover library edition as an historic document used for study at universities.)

 

In 2001, following the tour, she produced a second CD of original and historic Hawaiian songs, Living in Hawaii Style, toured in Hawaii and California, got airplay in both states, and headlined at the Big Island Slack Key Guitar Festival in 2002. Both CDs were released in Japan by EM Records in September 2005.

In 2003, Alicia was included as one of thirty representative Northern California authors in Jonah Raskin’s book of essays, Natives, Newcomers, Exiles and Fugitives.

In May 2006 Alicia released her third CD, What Living’s All About, 12 jazz and blues songs, ten of them original. The CD was one of 12 Editor’s DIY Picks in the May 2007 issue of Performing Songwriter Magazine, and the opening song, Floozy Tune, placed in the Top 20 Finalists in the Jazz Category of the 2007 Unisong International Songwriting Contest, then as 7th place in the International Division of the Indie International Songwriting contest, and then as a Finalist in the 100% Music Songwriting Contest.

Living on the Earth was published in its 4th Edition in 2003 by Gibbs Smith, Publisher and is still in print as of 2010.

In October 2006, Alicia toured Japan for a month as the guest of Kurkku, an environmental arts organization in Tokyo, performing eight concerts. Fashion designer Aya Noguchi created a line of clothing celebrating Living on the Earth for release in September 2007.

Alicia returned to Japan for a fifteen-concert tour from April 26 to June 19, 2007, which included being the subject of a television documentary on Asahi Broadcasting Station.

In 2008, Alicia returned to Japan for a highly successful gallery show of 30 of the original drawings from Living on the Earth, at Kurkku’s Jingumae Lab in Shibuya,Tokyo, and an eleven concert musical tour, from April 10 to June 2, 2008. Aya Noguchi released a second line of clothing featuring illustrations from Being of the Sun, which were displayed along with Alicia’s art at the gallery. A second, successful show of the Living on the Earth drawings at Mirai Garou, a gallery in the Roponggi Hills complex of Tokyo, ran from August 5 to 31, 2008, and a third show ran during May and June 2009 at the Birdo Flugas Gallery in Sendai, Japan.

 

Alicia performing at Yukotopia night club in Tokyo, June 2008

In August 2009 Alicia released her 4th CD, Beyond Living, a collection of Americana/world music songs, which she toured from September 15 to November 5, 2009, in Japan, with a series of eleven live performances plus her fourth gallery show of the Living on the Earth drawings, this time at Gallery Speak For, in the Daikanyama Fashion District of Tokyo.

In autumn 2009, Alicia created drawings for Banana Yoshimoto’s novel Another World, plus a set of drawings for the promotional pamphlet for Lee Jeans Japan’s organic cotton women’s jeans line in collaboration with Pre Organic Cotton, and a new set of drawings for Aya Noguchi’s summer 2010 fashion line.

All four of Alicia's music CDs will be re-released by Tokyo-based distributor, Real Music, in spring 2010. Her 5' x 8' patchwork wall-hanging, made between 1967 and 1974, has been chosen by the curator of the San Jose Textile Museum for a special exhibit in San Francisco in the autumn 2010.

Alicia is currently based in Los Angeles, but is always planning to go other places.

Tags: lote bio music hippie wlaa aliciabaylaurel art johnfahey writing japan commune livingontheearth wheelerranch slackkeyguitar ayanoguchi sausalito joandidion renaissancefaire charleswhite juliettedebairaclilevy beyondliving bananayoshimoto