Big Brother: Interview (Part 1) [Side A]

  • [Interview Transcript from the book "Psychedelic Psounds"] BIG BROTHER AND THE HOLDING COMPANY: COMBINATION OF THE TWOBig Brother and the Holding Company coalesced during the mid-1960s from the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. The group, after replacing their original drummer, consisted of the following members: Sam Andrew (guitar); James Gurley (guitar); Peter Albin (bass); and David Getz (drums). Big Brother had attained an adequate following, but being just one of an estimated 1,500 rock bands in the Bay Area, they decided a female lead singer (like Grace Slick in Jefferson Airplane) would help set them apart. Chet Helm, the group's manager, suggested a girl who had returned to Texas to straighten out a drug problem: Janis Joplin. Rumor has it that while in Texas she had been invited to join Roky Erickson as co-lead singer for the legendary 13th Floor Elevators, but Joplin chose to return to San Francisco to become lead vocalist for Big Brother.Big Brother's first album for Mainstream Records was called Big Brother and the Holding Company and reached #60. The group then played a show stopping performance at the Monterrey Pop Festival during June 1967 which was highlighted by Joplin's frenetic singing. Columbia Records bought out the group's contract with Mainstream and released the album Cheap Thrills during August 1968. The album, after seven weeks on the charts, went to #1 in October where it stayed for two months. "Piece of My Heart" reached #12 while Mainstream capitalized on their fame by belatedly releasing "Down On Me" which reached #43.Unbelievably, Janis Joplin decided to leave Big Brother with her last appearance with them occurring on December 1, 1968. Part of the reason for her leaving Big Brother was attributed to the bad press the band received for not playing up to her level. Joplin played with the Kozmic Blues Band and later the Full-Tilt Boogie Band, but the chemistry seemed to be lacking from what she had with Big Brother. Her career appeared to be going nowhere when she died of a heroin overdose on October 4, 1971. The posthumously released album Pearl was #1 for nine weeks in early l971.Big Brother released two albums after Janis' departure from the group before breaking up. The song "Combination of the Two" seems prophetic in hindsight in that neither Big Brother nor Janis could attain the heights separately that they achieved when they were together.The following interview was conducted on 1/21/1989 with Sam Andrew and Peter Al bin during the Big Brother Twenty-Fifth Reunion Tour after performing in Port Arthur (Janis Joplin's home town) and Houston (at Rockefeller's). BIG BROTHER & THE HOLDING COMPANY:Combination of the TwoBy Allan Vorda
  • AV: What was the origin of the band?PA: It basically took place in San Francisco the summer of 1965 at 1090 Page Street which was a house my uncle owned. Chet Helm, who later became our manager, was involved in putting together Wednesday night jam sessions during that summer as part of a house band.SA: It was a beautiful, old Victorian house (near the Haight Asbury district) that was built in the l89Os and the basement was originally a ballroom. It was built before the earthquake for the Dorman family who was a big furniture retailer.PA: Incidentally, this house appeared in Life magazine during the 50s for an article about Irish-Americans because it had been an Irish boarding house. They had divided up a lot of the large rooms into smaller rooms. This house originally had six bedrooms and after it was divided up it had approximately twenty-five rooms.
  • AV: So the band evolved out of these house jam sessions?PA: Yes. Sam would come over and jam with me and a drummer named Chuck Jones who also lived at the house. The group was more or less organized by a guy named Paul Ferrers who considered himself a Bob Dylan-type singer and writer. Ferrers advertised for a guitar player and we got a young kid named Dave Eskison. Then we auditioned and played a few times with the name Blue Yard Hill including once at a bar on Clement Street. We found that we had problems with David in the band since he was way under twenty-one and he couldn't play in the bars. Chet Helm, at this point, was also getting involved in the band.
  • AV: What was Helm's role?SA: Bible-dealing dope dealer! He was a student from the University of Texas and he was a natural born wheeler-dealer and guru. There was some kind of spiritual influence that he had where he could see things ahead that would coalesce. He had very well developed commercial instincts way before we did.PA: He came from the Haight-Ashbury area and was one of those---and I should say an exception---long-haired freaks who sold nefarious items. He was also friends with the Family Dog people that lived over on Pine Street and he later did some lights for them at Longshoremen's Hall during that summer of 1965. Chet saw himself as an entrepreneur and managed the band along with Paul until Paul basically disappeared. Then Chet brought in James Gurley who was living at Pine Street which was called the Dog House. Gurley basically lived in a large walk-in closet.
  • AV: It has been rumored and subsequently stated that Al bin played with Jerry Garcia before the Grateful Dead, that Sam Andrew was a jazz guitarist with classical training, and that Gurley learned to play guitar during acid trips in the California desert. Is this true?PA: No. I did not play with the Dead or Garcia. I grew up in the peninsula and was very involved in the folk music scene in the early 60s. The only time I played with Jerry Garcia was at a Guitar Workshop at a college folk music festival, but it was done separately even though it was part of the same social milieu.SA: Actually, I was a real rock and roll guitarist. When I was fourteen I had only been in a band for about three months before I had made money. I did play in a band in high school called the Cool Notes in Okinawa. It wasn't spelled with a "K" because we weren't that hip! We got to play every Saturday on a TV show because the island was small and it enabled the kids to do things adults would do elsewhere. Then I came to the U.S. to go to college and I forgot about music for about a year and a half. I did play jazz and classical music, but it was only at home. I also played saxophone for a month for a Marin County band that John Cipollina (Quicksilver Messenger Service) played in briefly.
  • AV: What about Gurley learning to play guitar on acid in the California desert?SA: That's not true either. It's part of the romance and people want to believe in the romance.PA: James did a lot of different and interesting things, but those rumors come from bits and pieces of different stories. He did spend a lot of time in Mexico eating mushrooms and communing with the Indians. I'm sure he learned a lot on those acid and peyote trips, but he basically learned to play guitar in Detroit where he would lock himself in his room for three or four days while playing along with Lightin' Hopkins' records.
  • AV: Was it true that Gurley's father used him as a "human hood ornament" in a daredevil Thrill Show?PA: James only did that a couple of times. He thought the wall of flames was straw, but it really was burning wood!SA: He hasn't been the same since.
  • AV: So how did the band progress from Blue Yard Hill to Big Brother?PA: Chet Helm had brought in James and one of my first images of him is with this brown guitar. It had a pick-up that was scotched taped with some pennies to prop it up. I had seen James once before in San Francisco two years earlier. He had his head shaved and was playing progressive bluegrass with the J.P. Pickens and the Progressive Bluegrass Boys. It was some weird shit!SA: He was finger-picking. He didn't play with a straight pick which was real unusual at the time with an electrified guitar. James did that for the whole time through Cheap Thrills. Now he plays with a flat pick, but for the most part it was just finger-picking.PA: Our first promotional photograph of the band --- it is hard to get and I have only one copy --- shows Chuck Jones, Sam, James, myself and Chet Helm. Helm was just the manager, but he wanted to be part of the whole scene. The photo was taken at the Cable Car house with the big wheels whirring in the background.We started working with Ramone Sender and the Tape Music Center which was down the street. This was for the Trips Festival during January, 1966. Some really strange things were being done with synthesizers and reverse tapes. They had a Bochlabox Machine, named after Don Bochla I believe, and we were going to play through this box. When we got to the center Ramone put James and Sam through it. It was kind of a ring modulator. Very early form of synthesizers as well as pianos and tuning forks. You could touch this tuning fork where you could put your finger on it and it would alter the signal you were putting through it. Some real strange sounds.SA: We were going to be featured along with the Tape Music Center at the Trips Festival, but we ended up doing a straight rock set. We got to do a lot of unusual projects like that because we didn't have a lead singer. It was very experimental.
  • AV: How did you select the group's name?PA: We selected the group's name around August or September of 1965. We had a list of names that we arrived at through a rap session where we wrote down a bunch of names---Tom Swift's Electric Grandmother, the Joy Boy, and a lot of others. Big Brother was one name and the Holding Company was down the list. We picked out Big Brother and also the Holding Company as our favorites. Then Chet Helm said he would be Big Brother and the group was the Holding Company. That's how we got the name even though we didn't have any official gigs under that name in 1965. The first poster that listed us as Big Brother and the Holding Company was at the Oakland Theatre in Berkeley. The Trips Festival came later that same month.
  • AV: Is it true that David Getz replaced Chuck Jones as your drummer after he heard the band at the Trips Festival and asked to be in the band?PA: No. I was still working during the day at a silkscreen factory in San Francisco. I would go over to a luncheonette every day and hear this drumming. I knew we needed another drummer because Chuck Jones had polio in his leg and he just didn't have a good kickdrum. He also had a style more reminiscent of surfer music. The problem was more style than his disability.Anyway, David Getz was upstairs in this studio loft above the luncheonette. I went up and introduced myself and he said he had heard about the band. He might have seen us at the Tribal Stomping at the Fillmore during February (1966) right after Chet Helm had taken over the Family Dog name from the Pine Street Dog People.
  • AV: I find this really amazing. We've discussed several so-called facts that are just rumors. These incidents are totally different from what I've read about the group in such books as The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Rock and Roll and from The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock and Roll.SA: This whole thing we've found to be a media graduate course. It is interesting how some of these stories began, but it also has helped develop a mythology about Big Brother.PA: One of the problems in getting everything accurate in rock and roll history is that even we (i.e., Big Brother) don't have the greatest memories. So we get a lot of things screwed up.
  • AV: Big Brother was the house band at the Avalon before Janis joined the group. How did this come about?SA: Chet Helm had an arrangement with the Avalon. He didn't own it, but he rented it and it was his concept as part of the production company for Family Dog.PA: Actually, you need to talk to Larry Castelle and some other people about Family Dog. Chet Helm absconded with the name and never really had permission to use it. Chet did use the name Family Dog and put dances on originally at the Fillmore. He actually alternated with Graham until he found the Avalon Ballroom.
  • AV: Who was doing the vocals at this time?PA: I was doing a lot of the vocals and some were done by Sam. We also did a lot of instrumentals. For that period of six months or so we realized I couldn't handle the vocal job and we were not in the same league as some of our local contemporaries.
  • AV: How did Janis Joplin get with the band?PA: James Gurley and I had seen Janis in San Francisco around 1963-64 when she sang with a duet of Larry Hanks and Roger Perkins. She was mostly a transient performer who hung around for a year and half. She got strung out on various chemicals and wasn't having that good of a time so she went back to Texas.We decided we could use a girl singer and auditioned a couple. One was a girl named Mary Ellen, who played with the Ace of Cups, and the other was Lynn Hughes, who had worked with the Charlatans, and had a great voice and was very attractive. Anyway, Janis' name came up because Chet Helm was originally from Texas and he said he had a friend who could convince her to come back to San Francisco. Consequently, Chet contacted Travis Rivers (who later became the manager of Tracy Nelson and Mother Earth which also included a bunch of Texans) who was instructed to "romance" her back. The story goes that Travis physically romanced her on every hill on the way back. Perhaps that is another untruth, but that's how rumor has it. When they finally arrived in San Francisco Travis went his own way and Janis started working with the band.SA: The first rehearsals took place at an old firehouse on Henry Street which was kind of a studio for the poster artists Mouse and Kelley. It was a really nice old building where the sunlight would cut across the rafters in a sort of cathedral-like atmosphere. We could play as loud as we wanted to.PA: The first jams we had were kind of funny because we were trying to play our own stuff, yet we knew what she had done in the past ---Bessie Smith-type blues or folk blues such as "I Know You Rider"---and tried to incorporate it into our music.SA: Janis had a very high shrilly-type voice in the beginning. I think it was a lot higher then because I think it dropped down later on. She also had a real country influence. I was reminded of this recently when I heard some old tapes of us when we played at the Electric Factory in Philadelphia.
  • AV: There was also a rumor that during the summer of 1966 Janis almost joined the 13th Floor Elevators in Austin since the Elevators were thinking of using Janis as co-vocalist with Roky Erickson.SA: I think that's true. I also think Janis may have picked up some of Roky Erickson's vocal mannerisms since the vocal range and the projection of their voices are a lot alike. Fortunately, not just for us but maybe for her, she didn't join the Elevators. She got taken away from the country thing and put with us so the change was good.
  • AV: What was your first concert like with Janis?SA: I think it was the Avalon. I believe there was something we were aiming for that was going to happen in three weeks and we only brought her on for three numbers.
  • AV: How did your fans react to Janis?PA: Our die-hard fans told us to get rid of the chick! They said she was ruining the music and making us sound like the other San Francisco bands. The majority of our fans, however, liked her. The main thing was that we liked her. Subsequently, our audience started growing and we started changing. Our long songs became shorter.SA: You have to do that with a singer; otherwise, you would have her standing around while the four members are jamming. I always wonder what would have happened if we had remained a foursome.
  • AV: Didn't the band rent a house in Lagunitas for $300 a month?PA: Lagunitas is just north of San Francisco on Highway 101. The Grateful Dead had a place in that vicinity and we found a place that had a large house on a hill where there were hardly any houses around. The house overlooked the border of a state park and it had beautiful scenery.The house became a commune home. We had the five band members plus their old ladies. Sam had a girlfriend, James had a wife and a kid, I had my wife and first child, David was by himself, and Janis was by herself.We had a real nice landlady who was a little older than we were. Actually she was a lot older --- probably as old as we are now!SA: That's where we did these marathon rehearsals. We moved there shortly after we did a concert at California Hall. It was recorded on March 30, 1966 and recently released on Rhino Records. It really shows the early Big Brother with Janis.PA: I think we moved to Laguintas in July with a six-month lease. During that period of time we worked quite a bit at the Fillmore and the Avalon.
  • AV: How did you get signed with Mainstream?PA: Right after we moved to Lagunitas we did an audition with several other bands for a "record producer" from New York. It turned out to be Bob Shad who was with Mainstream Records. He talked with Chet, who was in the capacity as our manager, and later we learned they were trying to do something with the Family Dog. They didn't offer us anything, but they offered a group called the Final Solution a contract and a group called Wildflower a contract. think there was a compilation album that Mainstream put out that had a couple songs by each of these groups. We continued to play the Bay Area and later received an offer indirectly from Ron Polte of Quicksilver Messenger Service to play for four weeks in Chicago. We were also approached by Paul Roth- child, a producer for Electra, to do a record with him. As it turned out, the offer was just to Janis and not to the band. Janis told us they wanted to put her with Taj Mahal, Ry Cooder, and Stephen Grossman as a sort of super-group out of Los Angeles. They also promised her a Cadillac and a house in Beverly Hills. Janis was really upset. She was crying and didn't know what to do. She said things like, "All my life I've wanted to be somebody. Being a definite nobody from Texas where I was looked down upon, I want to get out of that situation. I want to be a star. How can I turn that down?"I told her we were family---which we were since we all lived together and played music together. I told her if she wanted to leave it was up to her, but she should give it a chance since we had this offer to go to Chicago. I suggested we go to Chicago to try and get our act together and to see what would happen, but if she wanted to do something afterwards then she could. Janis decided to stay.
  • [Interview continues at http://av.cah.utexas.edu/index.php/Vorda:Da_00097]