Jean Paul "J.P." Pickens (May 6, 1937 – July 6, 1973), was a musician in the early North Beach, San Francisco, music scene, circa 1963, along with David Meltzer and James Gurley, defining the psychedelic rock genre.

J.P. played regularly at the Coffee Gallery on Grant Street in the early sixties, performing with Meltzer, Gurley and Peter Albin (who later formed Big Brother and the Holding Company) and many others.

J.P. and Mary Ann lived in the Los Angeles area early in their married life, and they became friends with Beat artists such as George Herms, Frank Stewart, Wallace Berman and David and Tina Meltzer.

J.P. loved music and the joy of creating it, and he loved all music: Ralph Stanley, Hank Williams, Lefty Frizzell, Billie Holiday, Doc Boggs, Mainer’s Mountaineers, Don Gibson, Jo Stafford, Lester Flatt & Earl Scruggs, The New Lost City Ramblers, Doc Watson, Charlie Parker, Lennie Tristano, Django Reinhardt, Mavis Staples, The HiLos, The Abyssinian Gospel Choir, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Jimi Hendrix, as well as Eddie Lang, Bix Beiderbecke, Robert Johnson, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Ray Charles and Howlin Wolf, just to name a few of the record albums he owned and listened to regularly.

He had studied the piano and saxophone in a formal way, then picked up the guitar, finally settling on the banjo and learning to play bluegrass, a genre that seemed to offer him joy and freedom.

He had been inspired and influenced by his beatnik artist friends, and by the revolution in the art world earlier last century that produced the Dada/Anti-Art movement and the found object philosophy of Marcel Duchamp.

He also had a passion for the written word, and in 1958 he owned a bookstore in Portland, Oregon, “Days and Nights,” and carried many titles from Grove Press, which was at that time embattled in court for distributing Henry Miller's works, among others.

His incredible generosity (he would give the shirt off his back if he saw the need, and did so frequently), his deep love for his family and friends, the heart-felt music he composed and played as naturally as he breathed, all speak of a man committed to his desire to live life fully and without restraints.

In 1969 their home in Lagunitas was lost to foreclosure when J.P.’s parents stopped paying the mortgage after J.P. refused to enter a mental health hospital for treatment for his addiction to methedrine.

As Peter Coyote wrote in 1998, “It was not J.P.’s music, his adventurous spirit, his quest to live free and improvisationally, his fascination with “stuff”, nor mine, which exacted these exorbitant costs, it was drugs and our failures of character and will to refuse them.