When Jesse Colin Young first recorded “Get Together” with The Youngbloods in the late ’60s, the country was tearing itself apart. Civil rights protests, Vietnam, generational divides — you know the drill. So maybe it’s no surprise that more than 50 years later, the song still feels depressingly relevant.
Young, now 78 and still with that easy-soul tenor, recently re-recorded the track — this time with longtime friend Steve Miller — and released it on Juneteenth, of all days. The reissue benefits SongAid and WhyHunger, turning every single stream into a donation to fight food insecurity. “You just have to listen,” Young said. “Stream it ten times, tell your friends — it feeds people.”
It’s a simple ask for a deceptively complex song. “Get Together” has always straddled the line between flower-child idealism and cultural call-to-arms. “I didn’t choose this Juneteenth date,” Young notes. “We didn’t know what would happen in the world when we picked the release. But it just happened — and it couldn’t have been more perfect.”
The idea to bring Miller in came after years of friendship. Both migrated to San Francisco in ’67, the epicenter of the psychedelic folk-rock boom, and Young had previously opened shows for Miller back in the early 2000s. “We reconnected again when he moved to New York, and we started seeing each other more,” Young explained. “When I told him I had a beautiful track of ‘Get Together’ with a young band, he was like, ‘I’m in.’ And he meant it.”
That young band was no accident. The recording, which predates the new release, had been tracked during sessions for 2019’s Dreamers, a collaborative album between Young and a group of Berkeley College of Music grads—one of whom happens to be his son. “They loved ‘Get Together,’ so I wanted a professional recording of it. We didn’t include it on Dreamers because we wanted all new material, but I knew we’d find the right moment.”
The moment, as it turns out, is now — with the country once again spiraling in cultural chaos, and hunger statistics looking bleak. “There were 40 million food-insecure people going into COVID,” Young says. “You know that number’s doubled. It shouldn’t be happening — not here.”
But Young isn’t just repackaging nostalgia. He’s still creating. Still evolving. And still writing about the world as it is. Dreamers reflects on immigration and unity through personal experience — Young traces five different streams of immigrant ancestry through his family line. The album’s title track even name-drops DACA recipients. “Don’t turn your back on the dreamer,” he sings. “Dreams make our country strong.”
His collaboration with younger musicians wasn’t a marketing stunt or a late-career reinvention. It was curiosity. “I went to my son’s senior recital at Berkeley,” he recalled. “I’d been sick with Lyme disease for years — couldn’t tour, couldn’t do much. But I saw him playing with these incredible young musicians, and I said, ‘I want a band like this.’ And he said, ‘Dad, you know how much work that is?’ And I said, ‘Yes. I want a band like this.’”
So they built one. And it didn’t take long before Young realized something special was happening. “After maybe five gigs, I knew we had to record. They were just... geniuses. Young geniuses.”
During the pandemic lockdown, Young didn’t sit idle. He launched what he calls his “song quilt” on Facebook — intimate videos filmed by his wife Connie of him performing solo from his home studio. “That’s how I stay connected,” he said. “Some people grow food. I grow music. It feeds the soul rather than the body — and we need both.”
As for what’s next? “I’m gonna keep at it,” he says with a smile that you can practically hear. He may have started his career telling people to “smile on your brother,” but he’s still here, half a century later, reminding us that unity isn’t passé — it’s essential.
And if all you have to do is press play to help someone eat? That’s a protest song worth streaming.
Listen to the full interview above and then check out the video below.
