Big Brother history, part nine, 1993 – 1994

pilot

 1993-1994       

manny's

a string player

sam_jynx_kerry

With Jynx Lynx and Kerry Kearney at Manny’s Car Wash.

Jynx-Lynx-157x300

dottie

mini me

12 January 1993     Sam Andrew Band Boulder Creek Brewery  Boulder Creek  California     This was one of the great gigs.

sylwia

James Gurley

amazigh

santa cruz mtns

surprise

anneke

Cinnamon Morgan        Cash Farrar

Anthea Sidiropoulos            Bill Laymon.

Bill Ganaye, good friend, a real brother to me.

antonio-casanova-y-estorach-spanish-1847-1896-seated-girl-with-guitar-1873_thumb

Joey Edelman, gifted player, fun to be with. When I go see a film I think of Joey because someone in his family is usually writing or performing the soundtrack.

scm

simona

scm women

pilota

22 January 1993        Phoenix Theatre      Petaluma     California

phoenix-theater

china mex

Greg Anton was on drums.

esperanza_spalding_natural_hair3

And then Steve Kimock played guitar. He always surprises me, always has a fresh idea.

circus

glenn

Glenn Walters was with us.  He was the principal singer with The Hoodoo Rhythm Devils and The Zasu Pitts Memorial Orchestra.

lyre guitar

28 January 1993     Pahoa       Pahoa is a special place, even for Hawaii.

asian nurse

Maximus

This is a large egg near Neuss, Germany.

10 March 1993    Stadthalle   Neuss   (rhymes with voice)

lagekarte

Neuss is across the Rhein (Rhine) from Düsseldorf.

Ach, du lieber Augustin, Bonnie Tyler is here in Neuss !   That is so neuss, I mean, nice.   I wonder if I will see her in Moscow when our bus arrives ?

It was great to play in the same band with James Gurley. He was funny, energetic and sharp.

There was only one James.

radio

17 April 1993   Big Brother and the Holding Company    JJ’s     San José

nurse va

23 April 1993    Big Brother and the Holding Company   Boulder Creek Brewery     Boulder Creek  California

Peter Albin

zeldan

24 April 1993     Sam Andrew Band   Caspar Inn

WhCaspar

Caspar, California, is between Fort Bragg and Mendocino.

woman winnowing

30 April-1 May 1993   Sam Andrew Band  Winthrop Washington

When we play here, we look out from the stage at a scene like this.

nemora

15 May 1993   Last Day Saloon  San Francisco     That’s John Wedemeyer on guitar, one of the best. John has a little trick of playing an arpeggio one half tone sharper than the target chord and then resolving it, which makes for a lot of tension and interest.

1940s_girls_in_bikinis

CH 94

Canned Heat, now we’re talking.

James Gurley singing All Is Loneliness.

Sam Gary Diane

19 May 1993   Sam Andrew Band    Horizons   Sausalito

Trident early 70s

This used to be The Trident, scene of some rather lubricious activities in the late 60s, early 70s.

Gorgeous place.

one_9883-Alcatraz_and_Trident_old_posts

David Crosby used to sail his yacht right up to the back, tie it up and come on in.

Janis used to hold court at The Trident and drink everyone under the table.

Trident ceiling

No, I mean literally. Under the table. You’d see people down there talking and carrying on, looking up at the ceiling.

Horizons is the new name for the Trident. I had a great band in there:  Gary Albright, Diane Dutra, Cash Farrar, Snooky Flowers, Bill Ganaye, Dave Getz, Bill Laymon, Cheryl Little Deer, Natalie Martel (above), Cinnamon Morgan, Kim Nomad

Kim Nomad   Anthea Sidiropoulos

My big star from Tokyo Shiho-san, Superfly, at the Trident (Horizons).

nurse oval

nonna

28 May 1993     Magnolia’s  Santa Rosa   California         I call it a laminate. My wife Elise calls it a lanyard. We’re both right, but she is more right.

icord-lanyard

The laminate is the laminated ticket or poster that identifies the particular event (here it is white), and the lanyard is string around your neck that holds the laminate.  On the East Coast, they call the whole thing a lanyard, and on the West Coast, they call the whole thing a laminate.

BBHC laminate sam

Above is a laminate, so called because it has a plastic covering on both sides. It’s laminated.

The  laminate is held by this lanyard. The word comes from 15th century French “lanière,” a thong strap apparatus that held any valuable object, such as a sword, close to the body.

In English, probably the closest equivalent is a “tether,” a way of attaching a valuable object so that it not be lost.  Lanière  became lanyard when it crossed the Channel.

In Germany, they call this die Pfeiffenschnur, the whistle cord. It’s a way of keeping a valuable and much used object close to hand. It’s a lanyard.

The poet Sydney Lanier’s name may have come from lanière.

This is my friend Joanne Lasnier (pronounced lanyé).  She may have a lanière or a lanyard hanging somewhere in the branches of her family tree.

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29 May 1993    Caspar Inn   Caspar     California     You don’t see “Caspar” spelled with an ‘a’ everyday, or maybe ever.

Martin 1881

James Gurley

miro

4 June 1993   Cedar Inn Tavern   Washington      Mark Riley (right) played guitar on this gig. He was so good.  Crosscut Saw.

lina

Lips was the bass player in the Sam Andrew Band, Texas Division.  Gary played guitar with us. We had fun. Can you tell ?

One of those hot nights in Houston.

17 June 1993    The Sam Andrew Band   Houston

the-parisian-redheads

This wouldn’t be where we were watching the television during sound check and saw OJ driving in his White Bronco, would it ?

J’Net Ward, one of the owners of Liberty Lunch in Austin when I played there.

Liberty Lunch seemed like a huge tent to me. It was like playing in the circus.

Cowboy jitterbug at Liberty Lunch.

24 June 1993  Liberty Lunch   Austin

rokyerickson4

Roky Erickson came down and walked around the place during sound check, and I was hoping he w0uld sit in, but he wandered off into the sunset.

Aging hippies?  We were young then.

SFN Hull

That was over twenty years ago.  You should see us now.

25 June 1993  Sam Andrew Band  Marble Falls  Texas    It’s true, I’m not big on nostalgia. To be nostalgic, you actually have to remember something.

One of the reasons I started writing this history, in fact, was so that I could actually begin to remember what has happened to us in the last half a century.

Ruby Bridges

James Gurley’s guitar… one of them anyway

Nina Herbie Even Dozen

b4b876e25cb3609b0a544d1016468715

I’ve always liked the word serendipity.

sinhalese-girl-from-ceylon-c1895

Serendip was the old name for Ceylon, which was the old name for Sri Lanka.

horace

Horace Walpole had the happy idea of coining the word serendipity for unexpected wondrous things that could happen.

The Sam Andrew Band does television:    Bill Ganaye, Dave Getz, Ed Earley, Bill Laymon, Kim Nomad.

zum

14 August 1994   Caspar Inn   Caspar  California

russian_women-musicians

6 September 1993   Sam Andrew Band opens for Big Brother and the Holding Company.   Hog Farm  Laytonville    California

Snooky Flowers   Sam Andrew   Kim Nomad   Peter Tork   Bill Laymon

Do you remember the band Spinal Tap? Harry Shearer, Christopher Guest and Michael McKean playing Derek Smalls, Nigel Tufnel and David St. Hubbins ? Well, Spinal Tap still tours and they play all those great songs like Sex Farm, Jazz Odyssey, Big Bottom, Hell Hole and let’s not forget Lick My Love Pump.

Mighty-Wind3

Spinal Tap’s support band when they tour is the Folksmen, played by Harry Shearer, Christopher Guest and Michael McKean.

Often, when the Folksmen are performing, the audience is yelling at them to get off so that Spinal Tap, the same guys, can come on.

Sam buscard obverse

I thought maybe this would happen to The Sam Andrew Band while we were opening for Big Brother, but our audiences were more polite or perhaps more stoned, or perhaps more enlightened ? Anyway, we had a couple of encores.

a set of women 28 Sept 2014

They liked us.

Imogene and Ansel 1975

19 September 1993   Greenpeace

ride

raimundo-de-madrazo-y-garreta-woman-playing-guitar-1342731865_b

1 and 2 October 1993   Smiley’s  Bolinas

Anthea Sidiropoulos at 19 Broadway Fairfax.

pig

We played all of these tunes.

With  Anthea Sidiropoulos and Snooky Flowers.

2 October  1993      Sam Andrew Band    19 Broadway   Fairfax     California

Anthea sings her song.

romolo

4 October 1993      The bedroom at the Landmark Hotel, room 105, Los Angeles  California.           Photo:  Howard Sounes.

JE

8 October 1993  Once again the Sam Andrew Band opens for Big Brother and the Holding Company.      Grant’s Pass    Oregon

familie nue

Michel Bastian

On this tour we stopped in at a radio station with one or two old friends to do some interviews.  Brian Auger, Peter Albin, Rich Kirch.

With Brian Auger and Rich Kirch

catina

20 October 1993   Sam Andrew Band   Last Day Saloon  San Francisco

I played Munchies in Houston with Detroit Dave, Lips and Gloria Meehan.

2 November 1993  Munchies    Houston

There he is again, playing my guitar, always with the pompadour. Richie Kirch, one of the great raconteurs of rock, played with John Lee Hooker for years. Rich has a swinging, relaxed blues style.

18 November 1993

8 December 1994   The Bruce Latimer Show   Pacifica   California    Bruce is a master of graveyard humor.

dead field

He has a droll, deadpan delivery that is sepulchral and silly.

guitars woman

Cash Farrar   Kim Nomad   Sam Andrew   Diane Dutra   Debi Romek

Fayette Pam

10 December 1993    Peri’s Silver Dollar    Fairfax     California

femmes turques

The Sam Andrew Band  December 1993   Snooky Flowers, Aviva, Peter Tork, Sam Andrew, Dave Getz, Kristina Kopriva, Ingo York, Joey Edelman.

11 December 1993   Sacramento    Aviva plays with soul and expertise.

Sacramento, are you ready, ’cause we’re going to tear this building down.

Thank you, Will Gunter. You did a lot of good for a lot of people.

camera

16 December 1993  Munchies  Houston  Hey! Beethoven’s birthday.  If you’re going to be born, don’t do it in December. Do it in May.

Clayton Dyess, real musician, he played guitar with Dizzy Gillespie.

Hazel Scott Playing Piano

Fraternizing, or is that sororizing?, with Lips who is a wonderful person and a sensational bass player.

17 December 1993      Hoi Polloi     Houston       Hoi Polloi is Greek for the many, the masses.  James Gurley used to use this phrase as a synonym for “the elite.”   He never really believed me when I pointed out that that polloi is like “poly” and means many, as in polygamous or polymorphously perverse.

Heather lips

Both of us were too lazy actually to walk across the room and look the phrase up in the dictionary (but I was right).

19 December 1993    The Boatyard  Houston       Nuri Nuri, DJ in Houston.  Nuri Nuri sat in with us on bass now and again and he did a good job.

pat and denise

23  December 1993  The Continental Club  Austin

marcia-ball-75

Marcia Ball came to see me at this one. I was too shy to ask her to sit in. Dammit.

NM

This didn’t happen, but it was fun talking about it.

singer-madeleine-peyroux-playing-guitar-woman

5 January 1994     19 Broadway    Fairfax   California

lute guitar

11 January 1994     Jazzed    San Rafael    California

9 February 1994   Last Day Saloon.

Pic

bezrukova--livanova--irina-vladimirovna-0

2 May 1994   Chet Helms Tribute

charcot-vintage-medical-photography-wild-history

canal

        

15 May 1994      Kristina Kopriva and George Michalski were the soundtrack for this Roast.

ISH

12 May to 11 June 1994      George Michalski, the Elton John of San Francisco, came with me on this crazy tour.

Pontiac showroom 1560 Van Ness

George Michalski                       Barbara Liu

brown-bros

PBR 3

Photo:   Polly Belinda Rendall

5 June 1994                       Vancouver                  British Columbia

botticelli

10 June 1994    Redwood Run    Willits    California

a vag

4 July 1994                    House of Blues

antonio

9 July 1994   Big Brother and the Holding Company     Pozo Saloon   Paso Robles   California

Alice Ramsay

3women1463

July 1994   Mercury Lounge        New York City      I liked this place. They were generous and smart here.

15 July 1994     Fez was downstairs from Time, a cool place. Charles Mingus played at Fez.

Lenny Kaye played with Patti Smith, Eric Ambel played with Joan Jett, and I played with Janis Joplin, so I wanted to call this concert The Submissive Dudes.

3 August 1994  Groove Fest Pinellas Parkway   Clearwater   Florida  Where I met the love of my life, Elise Wainani Piliwale.

At this event, Elise was playing violoncello and harp, but at home she played the piano. She is studying some arie antiche now and is trying to find a singer to perform them with.

a player

karmen

20 August 1994      Forestville        California

ambulance

27  August 1994     University of California at Davis  California

tree

15 September 1994      Sam Andrew Band   Manny’s Car Wash   New York City      I played here once a year for five years. Loved the place.

With Jynx Lynx, and I see Jym Fahey back there too.

kithara

20 September 1994        Visa for Russia.     They let a guy who looks like this in, so you know things had loosened up a bit.

Believe it or not, this is the way to handwrite Sam Andrew in the Cyrillic alphabet. The printed alphabet is quite close to Greek, but handwriting is something else. St. Cyril was Greek and when he wanted to translate the Bible into Russian he needed an alphabet so he created one from his native language with a few additions for the nonce. This is similar to how Modern German was principally the work of Martin Luther when he translated the Bible into German, and to how Modern English takes its departure from the King James version of the Bible.

3-10 October 1994   Steps To Parnassus   Moscow

Aeroflot… lots of Russian men standing around on the plane chain smoking and drinking glasses of vodka straight down.

Moscow !   We met many musicians from all over Europe, great performers.  This was something like Russian Idol, only not as cheesy, because Rupert Murdoch didn’t have anything to do with it.

visconti

Russians are highly intelligent and they know how to party.

See those great looking guys in the back ? They are Bulgarians, Communists. This is what Communists looked like in 1994. They were Communists about as much as we were Capitalists.

We made some good friends in Moscow.

Margarita Perova.

stairs

There’s Bonnie Tyler.    I thought she might show up here.

Thank you for the post card. I never dreamed about receiving it. It makes me feel glad. I hope that when you come to Russia you will be in Moscow and it will be possible to see you on the concerts. But if you are going to visit Russia in winter you must take cold weather into consideration. Much snow, ice, so take many warm clothes.

Pravda… Truth.              (All those letters are Greek as well as Russian.  The forms are slightly different.)

Friends and lovers.     Thank you, Russia.

girl child

My name C3M in Russian sounds like Sem or even Syem. They palatalize everything. “Not” is “nyet.”

sally

The name of this event, Steps To Parnassus, gave me quite a start when I first heard it. It’s a very meaningful phrase to me.

I talked about this before in part seven of this history. Steps To Parnassus. Gradus ad Parnassum.

This is the title page to my first counterpoint book, a classic. Gradus ad Parnassum means Steps to Parnassus, the name of our event in Moscow.

Palestrina was the master of counterpoint in the sixteenth century, and we have been following him ever since.

Beethoven made many notes in his copy of Gradus ad Parnassum, notes that are still lucid and useful.

dare

Everyone who plays or writes music uses counterpoint whether consciously or not. It’s rather like the man in Molière who was astonished to find out he had been speaking prose all of his life.

The formal study of counterpoint, like that of perspective, is endlessly fascinating.

Haydn, Beethoven and Mozart used the same counterpoint textbook that I did, Gradus ad Parnassum.

So, we are in Moscow at an event that honors Johann Joseph Fux by using the title of his book.

I brought my Gradus ad Parnassum with me to Russia.

hand oscura

When we drove in from the airport to downtown Moscow, James, who was from Detroit, said, “Hey, they have cars here !”

a troika

Maybe he was expecting troikas ?

VW bus

20 November 1994              The Fillmore

hat camera

Everything but the kitchen sink… oh, wait, no, that’s there too.

asia life

16 December 1994      The first of many beautiful letters from Alan Wilson, genius polymath residing in Kyoto.

buddha

18 December 1994              Veterans Memorial            Santa Rosa

sylwia

irie

25 December 1994      Love letters and advice from Russia.

Croton on Hudson   Tom Finch, Bernard Purdy, Halley de Vestern.

decophile

Bernard Purdy, master drummer on so many 60′s, 70s sessions, came to see us in Croton, but we were too intimidated to ask him to sit in.

Charlotte Heather

31 December 1994       Eastlake Zoo     Seattle         Happy New Year !

Sam China Camp Lasnier

Sam Andrew                  Photo:   Joanne Lasnier

_________________________________________________________

Big Brother and the Holding Company, part eight. 1990-1992

1990-1992         Riches Untold, Wealth Beyond The Dreams of Avarice.     

I had to find a place to hide all my money.

You’re not going to take that seriously, are you ?   OK, here’s a joke:   Did you hear about the musician who won the lottery ?  She played gigs until the money ran out.

More truth than poetry in that one.

Michel Bastian and I did a lot of gigs together in Big Brother and also in The Sam Andrew Band.

24 May 1990   Chi Chi Club   San Francisco

Elise Piliwale.

 

John Cipollina  Nick Gravenites  Pete Sears       Ed Pearlstein took this photograph.

25 May 1990       River Theatre      Guerneville  California

James always called me “mon jumeau malveillant,” or, when he spoke English, “my evil twin.”

Der Übelzwilling.

Geminus maleficus papae.

El gemelo malvado.

La cattiva gemella.

James very modestly called himself Saint James.

In the 1960s, he called himself The Archfiend of the Universe, a much more interesting appellation, not more accurate, just more interesting.

Joe Tate and Maggie Catfish.

26-27 May 1990      Caspar Inn      Caspar     California

28 May 1990   Live Wire  Grass Valley  California

14 February 1991    Sam Andrew Band    Paramount Theatre    Seattle   This is a beautiful old theatre.

Our guitar player on this gig was Mick Taylor, and he did a great job. Veronica Vitti came and sang beautifully.

The stupendous Rob Moitoza played bass and Chris Leighton was on drums.

When Chris plays, I always feel like a Klieg light went on somewhere. It’s like, “OK, we’re in the big time now.”

23 March 1991

23 April 1991   I-Beam   San Francisco

Kristina Kopriva, marevelous violinist, singer

21 May 1991

1 June 1991              The Cannery              San Francisco

20 July 1991                  I-Beam                  San Francisco

2 August 1991    Anna Bananas   Honolulu

Elise’s aunt Shirley Piliwale’s stage name was Varoa Tiki.  She was a very good singer and she played every instrument.

Silver Piliwale is Elise’s grandfather. Many places in Hawaii are named Piliwale after him.

27 September 1991           The Queens of Denial            Seattle

Icepack Jackson and David Cohen.     Icepack, you’re looking good.  What is that ?  A G 9 suspended ?

24 October 1991      Rock and Roll Hall of Fame   Cleveland    Ohio

Janis.

Nothing like misspelling a performer’s name on a poster.  It does make it extra collectible, I suppose.

I once saw John Cipollina’s name misspelled on a PROMO photograph.

25 October 1991

Todd Bolton.

7 November 1991    I-Beam    San Francisco

In Tacoma with Chad Quist who did some beautiful playing with us, especially on the Hold Me CD.

Cheryl Little Deer made this business card.

Elise Piliwale with Sheba.

13 April 1992   Sam Andrew Band     White Rabbit    Austin

16 April 1992

23 April 1992

5 May 1992        Michel Bastian

12 May 1992

9 October 1992

One Family Festival    Golden Gate Park   San Francisco

28 November 1992         An invitation.

4 December 1992          Linda, an old friend of ours, introduced us to her husband at this event.

So, to celebrate the occasion, I threw a party at The Troubadour.

Adolfito de la Parra was the drummer.    Goio Villanueva took this photograph.

Larry Taylor played bass.

Mark Riley.    And just to show you that he’s not always that serious, he also plays with hairstyles.

Our old road manager John Byrne Cooke came back for this one, and he made everything run smoothly.

John’s friend Debbie Green, seen here with Eric Anderson, invited us to stay at her house. I hope to do some playing with Debbie one of these days.

Lotus Mahon was with me this weekend which made everything extra special.

Linda and David LaFlamme came to the party. Elise and I were once at the Fillmore with some friends of ours, Marion and Christo, both physicians, and when It’s a Beautiful Day began their set, Marion started to cry. Their music meant so much to her.

Lester Chambers was there with his brothers.

Deborah Morrison sang back up with us.

Robby Krieger played.

Carl Gottlieb was there…

… and Howard Hessman.

And a cast of thousands.

Willie Chambers.

Darby Slick was there. Hey, he wrote a book and a song.

And she sang it.

Peter Albin playing my guitar.    John Byrne Cooke took this photograph.

31 December 1992   Pescadero   California    This was a fun gig. We had Peter on bass and Spencer Dryden on drums.

Rich Kirch played guitar.

Peter Albin and James St. Pell.

They weren’t there. Well, maybe in spirit, because a lot of their friends were there.

A lot of her friends were there also, asking the eternal question:    Can a blue man sing the whites ?

Kathi McDonald.

Thank you and I’ll see you next week.

__________________________________________________________________________

Big Brother history, part eight, 1990 – 1992

nn3

Watching

janis arms raised explaining

1990 – 1992

RushmoreBMW2

hermosa

de Young 1895

This is the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park 1895.  The Museum still looked a lot like this when I first visited there in 1960.

addio_giovinezza_1927

SF plate

1990-1992    

janis not janis  

hawaii madeiran       

f85764ddbb9f38606c19f5239f1d913e

Spreckels_Lake_Golden_Gate_Park_c1904-6_San_Francsico_CA

Young Ethel Waters Wearing White

Michel Bastian and I did a lot of gigs together in Big Brother and also in The Sam Andrew Band.

chi chi club

ElizabethGeyer

24 May 1990   Chi Chi Club   San Francisco

Elise Wainani Piliwale.

25 May 1990       River Theatre      Guerneville  California

James Gurley always called me mon jumeau malveillant, or, when he spoke English, my evil twin.   When he broke out into German, I became der Übelzwilling.

James very modestly called himself Saint James.

In the 1960s, he called himself The Archfiend of the Universe, a much more interesting appellation, not necessarily more accurate, just more interesting.

26-27 May 1990      Caspar Inn      Caspar     California

avatar

hawaii flower

Photo:   Polly Belinda Rendall

304

28 May 1990   Live Wire  Grass Valley  California

Tara Coyote-Finch

Tara Coyote-Finch

CS

linda

Peter Albin

14 February 1991    Sam Andrew Band    Paramount Theatre    Seattle   This is a beautiful old theatre.

Our guitar player on this gig was Mick Taylor, and he did a great job. Veronica Vitti came and sang beautifully.

The always inventive Rob Moitoza played bass and Chris Leighton was on drums.

When Chris plays, I always feel like a Klieg light went on somewhere. It’s like, “OK, we’re in the big time now.”

Grauman's Chinese Theater

BL

23 March 1991

med span maura

family

Ggate woman

Kowboy

23 April 1991   I-Beam   San Francisco

parking lot band

21 May 1991

duffybishopbandPromoRE

eric burdon

Once when we were playing Piece of My Heart (Pizza My Heart?) in Lake Arrowhead, California, Eric Burdon came in, sat in the front row and ordered a pizza to be delivered. Here he is talking to an old friend of mine.

Vallejo Mason Taylor

1 June 1991              The Cannery              San Francisco

LM

20 July 1991                  I-Beam                  San Francisco

IMG_2849

hula hula

2 August 1991    Anna Bananas   Honolulu

honolulu theatre

honolulu-hawaii-1940s-honeymoon

Elise’s aunt Shirley Piliwale’s stage name was Varoa Tiki.  She was a very good singer and she played every instrument.

Silver Piliwale is Elise’s grandfather. Many places in Hawaii are named Piliwale after him.

AM

The Queen of the Nile

27 September 1991           The Queens of Denial            Seattle

black-rose

blues

deena

24 October 1991      Rock and Roll Hall of Fame   Cleveland    Ohio

LAB

Nothing like misspelling a performer’s name on a poster.  It does make it extra collectible, I suppose.

Dusty Springfield Ronnie Spector

Dusty Springfield and Ronnie Spector

sam andrew coca cola

How many Cokes have you drunk in your life?  Can you imagine anything worse for you? Loaded with sugar and other harmful ingredients. Empty calories.

Janis?  Tom Weir

25 October 1991

bonnie

Todd Bolton.

PH

7 November 1991    I-Beam    San Francisco

chad sanjaya's mom

In Tacoma with Chad Quist who did some beautiful playing with us.

Hold Me cd

Especially on the Hold Me CD.

Chad Quist_0003

Cheryl Little Deer made this business card.

Elise Piliwale with Sheba.

leighton-meester-troubadour

13 April 1992   Sam Andrew Band     White Rabbit    Austin

christmas-on-sixth-street-austin

band lake

haim-2012-troubadour_photo-by-quinn-tivey-thumbnail-334x334

16 April 1992

teensy

23 April 1992

PV

crouch

sab all star utah

12 May 1992

chrissy

Blancanieves_poster

rock quarry different

big hat

bandshell

9 October 1992     One Family Festival    Golden Gate Park   San Francisco

Gollum

Golden_Gate_Park_SF_CA_Buffalo_Herd_PC_002

28 November 1992         An invitation.

ellen

troub

The Little Willies

4 December 1992          Linda, an old friend of ours, introduced us to her husband at this event.

So, to celebrate the occasion, I threw a party at The Troubadour.

Adolfito de la Parra was the drummer.

Larry Taylor played bass.

Mark Riley played guitar.    And just to show you that he’s not always that serious, he also plays with hairstyles.

Our old road manager John Byrne Cooke came back for this one, and he made everything run smoothly.

Lotus Mahon was with me this weekend which made everything extra special.

Linda and David LaFlamme came to the party.

houseband1

Lester Chambers was there with his brothers.

Deborah Morrison sang back up with us.

Robby Krieger played.

Carl Gottlieb was there…

… and Howard Hessman.

And a cast of thousands.

Willie Chambers.

Darby Slick was there. Hey, he wrote a book and a song.  Well, many songs actually.

Peter Albin playing my guitar.    John Byrne Cooke took this photograph.

chris

31 December 1992   Pescadero   California    This was a fun gig. We had Peter Albin on bass and Spencer Dryden on drums.

Rich Kirch played guitar.

Peter Albin and James St. Pell.

syl

with Kathi McDonald.    Can a blue man sing the whites ?

Pentatonic-tab

Some people have made a career out of playing nothing but the pentatonic scale.

jenda

kelley

Alton Kelley, square deal, always real.

black sax

LR

Thank you and I’ll see you next week.

sam andrew janis joplin by gilar

____________________________________________________________

Big Brother and the Holding Company, part seven. 1978-1989

 1978-1989             The Crash Test Dummy Goes Into Research and Development.

Big Brother crashed in 1972 or 1973. I was the only original member in it for a long time, and finally Kathi and I decided that it was time for a break.

My girlfriend Carol Cavallon decided to move back to the East Coast and attend Windham College in Putney, Vermont.

I went with her and we lived in a little cabin in Grafton, near where this schoolhouse stands.

We ultimately decided to live in Manhattan, first on the Upper East Side with her parents who were wonderful people.

Later, Carol and I moved to 278 West 11th Street between West 4th and Bleecker Streets. I lived in that apartment longer than I have lived anywhere else. The loudest sound I heard all day long was children playing in the gardens out in back, which was good because it was time for some serious study.

8 April 1973   Pablo Picasso died after a long lifetime of reinventing himself.

I went to the New School for Social Research over on Twelfth Street. I had always read music, but I mainly played by ear and wrote music intuitively. Now I wanted to study composition formally.

Frank Wigglesworth, winner of the Prix de Rome, taught me counterpoint, the art of putting two or more independent melodies together so that you can hear them all at the same time. James Gurley and I had done this by trial and error, of course, notably on Summertime and Hall of the Mountain King, but generally throughout our playing.

The top line is the fixed song, the cantus firmus, the original melody, and then you learn how to put a second melody with the first, one note against one note.

Then, you move on to two notes against one…   (I see a “mistake” here, but this is just an example.)

Then you learn to put four notes against one and so on until you arrive at a fugue with complex rhythms and four or five voices.

I used two classic works to learn counterpoint:  One was Fux’ 1725 treatment Gradus ad Parnassum. (In 1994, Big Brother was to go to Moscow to play an event called Steps To Parnassus, a translation of this title.) Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and many other composers used Fux’ book in their contrapuntal practice.

The second book I profited from in the study of counterpoint was by Knud Jeppeson who interpreted Fux and put him in a historical context. Just looking at this book takes me back to that intense time of study. I wrote hundreds of exercises in this discipline. This was a lot of fun and very educational. Something like three dimensional chess perhaps. Or four dimensional, because time, rhythm is also an essential part of this technique.

The rules for counterpoint are like the rules of perspective in art. They can be a principal or an ancillary study. Some artists, some composers, will make counterpoint and perspective their main focus. Two of those come to mind: J.S. Bach and M.C. Escher.

In 1975, I met Laura Gomez and my motto that year became “Alive in ’75.”   I love Laura. She is a very interesting person.

And I wish I would have been a better person for her.                 Laura and her daughter.

I was writing a lot of cereal music at this point, inventions, fugues, string quartets, a symphony that I heard performed exactly once. (Too bad it wasn’t in the Royal Albert Hall where I could have at least heard it twice.) Sometimes it was cereal music, sometimes it was serial music and sometimes it was traditional music. Snap, crackle, pop.

4 February 1974    Café Wha ?   Hey, I’m on the same bill with Richie and Yoko.    David Amram, serious composer, showed up and played flute on this gig.

Recording at Atlantic.

1975     Dickie and Donnie.   Can you feel the love ?  Donnie was known as Rumstud during the early reign of George W. Bush, that is, until he was made a nonperson after the reëlection.  Dickie is still with us, commenting on all the ways that everyone else is screwing up now, after he had done so well in his time. Smirking, shirking, jerking.

4 July 1976     The tall ships came sailing into the Hudson and I was there on a pier mere blocks from my apartment enjoying the spectacle along with thousands of other people. This was such a great Bicentennial.

I talked to Ahmet Ertegun about joining Atlantic but Big Brother was in limbo at this time.

25 July 1977      There was a blackout in New York City.  I walked the streets enjoying the silence. I could actually hear conversations four or five floors above me. It made me feel as if I were living a hundred years earlier. There was a camaraderie during this emergency, despite all the alarmist stories one hears.

17 September 1978   Mstislav Rostropovich performed at The White House.  The violoncello is such a great instrument, tremendous range and a beautiful sound and he played it so well.

1 October 1978   Tribal Stomp    Greek Theatre     Berkeley

Judy Davis and Patrisha Vestey worked hard on this event.

Look at that phone. You did something called “dialing” with it.,

The Tribal Stomp was a big deal. I had been living in New York for ten years. Now I was coming home.

Big Brother and the Holding Company would start playing again.

We could work with Kathi McDonald and Nick Gravenites and continue some of the good ideas we began after Janis left.

So, imagine my surprise when everyone said good bye and so long after the gig.

They were all going back to their private lives.

James was going back to the desert.   Peter was going back to his model shop.

There was no interest in doing Big Brother again.

I had finished my life and left my apartment on the East Coast. Now what to do ?

I had to learn how to paint, sculpt, play the saxophone and do a variety of other activities to keep busy for the next eight years.    Keith Haring did this painting.

19 April 1980           Snooky Flowers and I formed a band with a gay man Joey Amoroso who called himself Pearl.

Pearl had more than a little in common with Louis XIV.

19 April 1980       Pearl Heart        Oakland Auditorium

Playing with Frank Alsing from the Pearl band.

Pearl, who was very flamboyant, sang Janis’ songs in the same key that Janis did, something that very few of the Big Brother singers have achieved since.

1980    We played the Gay Day Parade at the Civic Center.  I played clarinet in one of the gay day parades up in Seattle, but this one in San Francisco was a whole other thing.

We played on a stage right in front of City Hall.

July 1980    I also performed with a band called Little Bumps Garden at The Haight Street Fair.         Jym Fahey    Lenny Kobiela

16 February 1981         Homesick for the Apple thinking about those lox, er, locks, and that love.

November 1981         Bringing home the pumpkin.

Sculpting some very large heads.

1982   Release of a new coin in the United Kingdom.   Obverse of the Half Sovereign valued at £ 100-150.   Beautiful design, isn’t it ?

And the reverse.

I was practicing the saxophone wherever I could. You have to play saxophone loud to learn it. With almost every other instrument there are ways to play quietly. With an electric guitar you can simply leave it unplugged and practice to your heart’s content. Even with a trumpet, you can mute it. Drummers can work with practice pads. Not saxophone. You can stuff a sock in the bell, but that’s about it and it won’t make it much quieter. You simply have to blow into it with passion and dedication for it to work. So saxophonists are notorious for playing in some strange places.

Sonny Rollins practiced on the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s perfect because the traffic seems to filter out the mistakes, and no one is complaining about the noise. It’s a bit like singing in the shower.

Trying, and usually failing, to take some decent photographs.

Playing saxophone seriously, scales, arpeggios, memorizing Charlie Parker solos.

This was a long saxophone meditation and it introduced me to some great players besides the masters whom I knew well.

Players like Joe Henderson, Jack Montrose, Dexter Gordon, James Moody, Mel Martin and Cannonball Adderly who played with technical proficiency and intense emotion.

1985.

I started making assemblages and hope to get back to that some day.

I decided to form a group of musicians to play some of these three or four hundred ballads and jump tunes from the 1920s, 30s, 40s that I was memorizing on the saxophone.

In time, this became The Sam Andrew Quartet and we played small clubs all over the Bay Area.

I had the opportunity to hire musicians who were a lot better than I was, good experience for similar activity later with Big Brother.

I learned that if you get the gig, you can get the musicians and the audience.

1985   Meanwhile, in the Netherlands, Theo van den Boogaard was doing some amazing graphic work and I became a fan.

The Sam Andrew Quartet slowly morphed into The Sam Andrew Band and I switched between saxophone and guitar for a while. We played all over the USA, including many places where Big Brother would later play.

People seemed to like what we were doing.

Snooky Flowers, Peter Walsh, Robin Sylvester, Scott Matthews. This was a good outfit. Snooky and I had been playing together since The Kozmic Blues Band.

1985     They’re ALL cults, aren’t they ?       Even television.     Television seems like the biggest cult of all.

Now THIS, this is a cult.

I was still sculpting, painting and photographing.

I depicted everything in sight, and some things out of sight.

.

Not “finding myself,” but creating myself.

I have to give a hand to George Bernard Shaw for the insight that one can take hold and change one’s life and not merely accept a given destiny.

21 March 1985      There began to be rumblings of a coming change.

Let’s see, how can I get Big Brother and the Holding Company together again?

I know. I’ll build a rehearsal studio.

They’ll get a good laugh out of that.

1986   Then it happened. An agent called and asked if we would like to play again. The occasion was a special anniversary, the Summer of Love.

The Summer of Love was always a rather suspect phrase.

They used to sell Love Burgers on Haight Street. I wonder how the cows felt about that. Did they feel all that Love ?

1986       Michel Bastian with Peter and James.

20 August 1987      Cotati Cabaret     Cotati    California

27 August 1987   New George’s     San Rafael     California

I loved her singing, and her mom’s, and her aunt’s.  In fact, I used to rehearse down the hall from Dionne Warwick in New York.

29 August 1987     Fillmore Auditorium    San Francisco       Our new singer’s name is Michel. That’s the name she likes and that she was born with.

Rehearsing for the Fillmore.   Yes, once upon a time we actually rehearsed. Well, most of us anyway.

2 September 1987    WOW Hall      Eugene    Oregon      I told her that Michel was French for Michael, so she changed it to Michelle for a while.

3 Septembeer 1987    Pine Street Theatre     Portland   Oregon         But she is Michel Bastian. She has a warm gospel voice right out of Oakland.

4 September 1987     Seattle Center Exhibition Hall    Seattle

5-6 September 1987    Alaska State Fair     Borealis Theatre

9 September 1987     Parker’s    Seattle

12 September 1987   Twentieth Anniversary Summer of Love  Polo Fields    San Francisco

 

24 September 1987     Sweetwater      Mill Valley      California

17 October 1987       The OMNI     Oakland     California

I was once playing saxophone in this club with a cordless set up and I wandered off the stage out into the traffic at this intersection, blowing away. That was fun.

20 October 1987  The Church San Francisco    Sam Andrew Band, Texas division. Lips played bass. Gloria Meehan sang backing vocals. Good band.

9 December 1987    Palace of Fine Arts    San Francisco

12 December 1987      Cotati Cabaret      Cotati     California

1988     With my brother Dan in Austin.

19 February 1988       Catalyst       Santa Cruz

21 May 1988      Golden Gate Park       San Francisco

8-19 June 1988      I wish I could have been in Bologna for this event.

22 July 1988        The Backstage       Seattle

23 July 1988      Pine Street Theatre    Portland    Oregon

7 August 1988      Molson Park    Barrie      Ontario

8 September 1988  Alice’s Champagne Palace   Homer  Alaska   The Kenai Peninsula is a beautiful, beautiful place.

18 November 1988     “Living in Seattle is like being married to a beautiful woman who is sick all the time.”    Herb liked that.

19 January 1989         Port Arthur     Texas

20 January 1989   Rockefeller’s     Houston

27 January 1989   Psychedelic Summer of Love  Universal Amphitheatre  Universal City California   I was trying to chat up Debbie Harry at this gig and a very persistent fan came between us. The moment was lost.

April 1989    Luther Burbank Center for the Arts    Santa Rosa    California

23 April 1989    IBeam    San Francisco       Michael Dolgushkin did this poster.

22 April 1989      Club Lingerie     Hollywood        Vala Cupp      Michel Bastian

Sam Andrew Band     Washington chapter     KK Ryder    Mark Riley   Todd Zimberg

7 June 1989        Rexville Grange     Washington

Bainbridge Island        Washington

27 July 1989       Great American Music Hall     San Francisco

1989    In Beijing, momentous changes were occurring. The “Gate of Heavenly Peace,” Tienanmen, was an odd name for that place, that day.

18-19 August 1989        Wetlands       New York City

4 October 1989

26 November 1989       Earthquake Benefit    Kaiser Auditorium    Oakland

Downstairs at The Fez under Time, New York City, with David Peel, Dorothy Rothschild and Lenny Kaye.

The Four Stooges at four in the morning.      New York City

See you next week.      Sam Andrew.

 

Big Brother and the Holding Company.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Big Brother history, part seven, 1972 to 1989

 1972-1989             

johnmuk.jpg.png

I only have eyes for you.

Big Brother crashed in 1972 or 1973. I was the only original member in it for a long time, and finally Kathi McDonald and I decided that it was time for a break.

VF

Some of the grim events of the late sixties began to be repeated in a minor key in the seventies. In 1968, there were those horrible assassinations. In the 1970s, Lynette Squeaky Fromme (Manson family) and Sara Jane Moore (SLA)  make an attempt on Gerald Ford. Instead of Viet Nam, there’s the failed Mayaguez rescue operation. In place of the Moratorium to End the War, we had Chevy Chase on Weekend Update.

0416-titia-du-cavallon

My girlfriend Carol Cavallon decided to move back to the East Coast and attend Windham College in Putney, Vermont.

cornet-band

I went with her and we lived in a little cabin in Grafton, near where this schoolhouse stands.

grafton

SD nat

Later, we moved to Manhattan, first on the Upper East Side with her parents who were wonderful people.

nyc flatiron

Later, Carol and I moved to 278 West 11th Street between West 4th and Bleecker Streets. I lived in that apartment longer than I have lived anywhere else in my life.

nyc bldg dress

The loudest sound I heard all day long was children playing in the gardens out in back, which was good because the time had come for serious study.

I went to the New School for Social Research over on Twelfth Street. I had always read music, but I mainly played by ear and wrote music intuitively. Now I wanted to study composition formally.

elizabeth

Frank Wigglesworth, winner of the Prix de Rome, taught me counterpoint, the art of putting two or more independent melodies together so that you can hear them all at the same time.

James Sam television

James Gurley and I had often played two different melodies over the same harmonic background but we had done this by trial and error, of course, notably on Summertime and Hall of the Mountain King, but generally throughout our playing. I now began a classical study of this technique.

The top line is the fixed song, the cantus firmus, the original melody, and then you learn how to put a second melody with the first, one note against one note.

Then, you move on to two notes against one…   (I see a “mistake” here, but let it pass.)

Then you learn to put four notes against one and so on until you arrive at a fugue with complex rhythms and four or five voices.

I used two classic works to learn counterpoint:  One was Fux’ 1725 treatment Gradus ad Parnassum. (In 1994, Big Brother were to go to Moscow to play an event called Steps To Parnassus, a translation of this title.) Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and many other composers used Fux’ book in their contrapuntal practice.

The second book I profited from in the study of counterpoint was by Knud Jeppesen who interpreted Fux and put him in a historical context. Just looking at this book takes me back to that intense time of study. I wrote hundreds of exercises in this discipline.

knud jeppesen

knud nude

This was a lot of fun and very educational. Something like three dimensional chess perhaps. Or four dimensional, because time, rhythm, is also an essential part of this technique.

The rules for counterpoint are like the rules for perspective in art. They can be a principal or an ancillary study. Some artists, some composers, will make counterpoint and perspective their main focus.

escher

Two of these counterpoint/perspective masters come to mind: J.S. Bach and M.C. Escher.

In 1975, I met Laura Gomez and my motto that year became “Alive in ’75.”

Laura and her daughter.

I was writing a lot of music at this point, inventions, fugues, string quartets, a symphony that I heard performed exactly once. (Too bad it wasn’t in the Royal Albert Hall where I could have at least heard it twice.)

Crosby

Sometimes I wrote cereal music, sometimes it was serial music and sometimes it was traditional music. Snap, crackle, pop.

ronny

I knew a lot of characters in New York. Ronny Sunshine was one of them. Here he is photo bombing the Pope.

4 February 1974    Café Wha ?   Ronny put me on the same bill with Richie and Yoko.

amram

David Amram, serious composer, showed up at the Wha? and played flute with me on this gig.

bean

Recording at Atlantic.

KerouacDodyMullerAmramNYC1959small

4 July 1976     The tall ships came sailing into the Hudson and I was there on a pier mere blocks from my apartment enjoying the spectacle along with thousands of other people. This was such a great moment.

25 July 1977      There was a blackout in New York City.  I walked the streets enjoying the silence. I could actually hear conversations four or five floors above me. It made me feel as if I were living a hundred years earlier. There was a camaraderie during this emergency, despite all the alarmist stories one hears.  You don’t realize how noisy modern life is until the electricity goes out for some reason.

keseyhelms

1 October 1978   Tribal Stomp    Greek Theatre     Berkeley

Judy Davis and Patrisha Vestey worked hard on this event.

Look at that phone. You did something called “dialing” with it.  Patrisha Vestey.

The Tribal Stomp was a big deal. I had been living in New York for ten years. Now I was coming home.

butter and bloomers

cstompers

Big Brother and the Holding Company would start playing again.

Kathi Sam shot in the dark close

We could work with Kathi McDonald and continue some of the good ideas we began after Janis left.

So, imagine my surprise when everyone said good bye and so long after the gig.  They were all going back to their private lives.

James was going back to the desert.   Peter was going back to his model shop.

There was no interest in doing Big Brother again.

TOM JONES BIRTHDAY 1974

I had finished my New York life and left my apartment on the East Coast. Now what to do ?

I had to learn how to paint, sculpt, play the saxophone and do a variety of other activities to keep busy for the next eight years.

19 April 1980           Snooky Flowers and I formed a band with a gay man Joey Amoroso who called himself Pearl.

Pearl had more than a little in common with Louis XIV.

19 April 1980       Pearl Heart        Oakland Auditorium

Playing with Frank Alsing from the Pearl band.

Pearl was very flamboyant. He sang Janis’ songs in the same key that Janis did, something that very few of the Big Brother singers have done since. Pearl was a natural contralto.

1980    We played the Gay Day Parade at the Civic Center.

seattle gay

I played clarinet in one of the gay day parades up in Seattle, but this one in San Francisco was a whole other thing.  We played on a stage right in front of City Hall to thousands of people.

Anita 1915

July 1980    I also performed with a band called Little Bumps Garden at The Haight Street Fair.         Jym Fahey    Lenny Kobiela

coffee

I miss New York.

November 1981         Bringing home the pumpkin.

bedroom real

I begin to sculpt some very large heads.

royrog

I was practicing the saxophone wherever I could. You have to play saxophone loud to learn it. With almost every other instrument there are ways to play quietly. With an electric guitar you can simply leave it unplugged and practice to your heart’s content. Even with a trumpet, you can mute it. Drummers can work with practice pads. Not saxophone. You can stuff a sock in the bell, but that’s about it and it won’t make it much quieter. You simply have to blow into it with passion and dedication for it to work, so saxophonists are notorious for playing in some strange places.

bb sonny

Sonny Rollins practiced on the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s perfect because the traffic seems to filter out the mistakes, and no one is complaining about the noise. It’s a bit like singing in the shower. Only bigger, louder, freer, more spacious.

TinyParham_408f3

So, I practiced anywhere I could that wouldn’t bother anyone.

duo sax

Empty buildings were good.

santa clara

Lots of space, natural reverb, freedom.

c melody

Playing saxophone seriously, scales, arpeggios, memorizing Charlie Parker solos.

This was a long saxophone meditation and it introduced me to some great players.

Players like Joe Henderson, Jack Montrose, Dexter Gordon, James Moody, Mel Martin and Cannonball Adderly who played with technical proficiency and intense emotion.

sunnyvale

cann

I loved Cannonball, his technique, his sense of humor, his precision, his soulfulness, everything about him. Still love him.

I started making assemblages and hope to get back to that some day.

Sam-Andrew-90s-sax-212x300

I decided to form a group of musicians to play some of these three or four hundred ballads and jump tunes from the 1920s, 30s, 40s that I was memorizing on the saxophone.

I had the opportunity to hire musicians who were a lot better than I was.

I learned that if you get the gig, you can get the musicians and the audience.

The gig comes first and everything else will flow from that.  It took me a long time to learn this. I thought that if you practiced real hard and seriously, then the gigs would come to you. Uh, uh. You get the gig and practice on the gig.

The Sam Andrew Quartet slowly morphed into The Sam Andrew Band and I switched between saxophone and guitar for a while.

silv

We played all over the USA, including many places where Big Brother would later play.

People seemed to like what we were doing.

Snooky Flowers, Peter Walsh, Robin Sylvester, Scott Matthews.

This was a good outfit, maybe the best ever.

Relaxed, swinging, accurate, sympathetic vibrations. Great players.

I was still sculpting, painting and photographing.

.

Not “finding myself,” but creating myself.

Let’s see, how can I get Big Brother and the Holding Company together again?

I know. I’ll build a rehearsal studio.

They’ll get a good laugh out of that.

1986   Then it happened. An agent called and asked if we would like to play again.

summer of love

The occasion was a special anniversary, the Summer of Love.

1399683308132

The Summer of Love was always a rather suspect phrase.

sol

It smacked of commercialism.

love.burger.baron

They used to sell Love burgers on Haight Street as attested in this Baron Wolman shot.

sol int

Cows-HD-Photo-143d461

I wonder how the cows felt about those Love burgers. Did they feel all that Love ?

couple

Anyway, we decided not to play that Summer of Love gig, but it started us to thinking, Maybe we should get together again.

sc0015d5e0 copy

luk

Willa

cot

20 August 1987      Cotati Cabaret     Cotati    California

couple beau

27 August 1987   New George’s     San Rafael     California

I loved her singing, and her mom’s, and her aunt’s.  In fact, I used to rehearse down the hall from Dionne Warwick in New York.

29 August 1987     Fillmore Auditorium    San Francisco       Our new singer’s name is Michel. That’s the name she likes and that she was born with.

2 September 1987    WOW Hall      Eugene    Oregon

3 Septembeer 1987    Pine Street Theatre     Portland   Oregon        She is Michel Bastian. She has a warm gospel voice right out of Oakland.

4 September 1987     Seattle Center Exhibition Hall    Seattle

5-6 September 1987    Alaska State Fair     Borealis Theatre

9 September 1987     Parker’s    Seattle

polo field ggate

wom_01a_cof_then

12 September 1987   Twentieth Anniversary Summer of Love  Polo Field  Golden Gate Park    San Francisco

mv-hist-old-mill-n

24 September 1987     Sweetwater      Mill Valley      California

17 October 1987       The OMNI     Oakland     California

horn st

I was once playing saxophone in the Omni with a cordless set up and I wandered off the stage out into the traffic at this intersection, blowing away. That was fun.

Rhea

american-cities-049

ved

20 October 1987  The Church San Francisco

Sam Andrew Band, Texas division. Lips played bass. Gloria Meehan sang backing vocals. Good band.

old p of a

margaret

9 December 1987    Palace of Fine Arts    San Francisco

old p of a 1915

sarah

old p of a linaji

purv

palais

cotati_plaza_plaque_thumb

12 December 1987      Cotati Cabaret      Cotati     California

AustinTXCongressAveCapitolBldgTCPem2

austin

1988     With my brother Dan in Austin.

Packard 1

seaside

Badrina, Studentin beim Arbeitseinsatz

catalyst

schiele

1988-19-feb

19 February 1988       Catalyst       Santa Cruz

casinoandbeach-santacruz

dance_hippies

hippie hill

21 May 1988      Golden Gate Park       San Francisco

kezar_triangle_history-010

kezar_triangle_history-011

althea

kezar_triangle_history-012

alfa

22 July 1988        The Backstage       Seattle

gjoa-beached

flap

23 July 1988      Pine Street Theatre    Portland    Oregon

portland

beauty

contrast

7 August 1988      Molson Park    Barrie      Ontario

8 September 1988  Alice’s Champagne Palace   Homer  Alaska

kenai

The Kenai Peninsula is a beautiful, beautiful place.

a triangle

18 November 1988     “Living in Seattle is like being married to a beautiful woman who is sick all the time.”

herb

Herb liked that.

PAFD 1912

19 January 1989         Port Arthur     Texas

houston

20 January 1989   Rockefeller’s     Houston

Debbie-Harry-IV

27 January 1989   Psychedelic Summer of Love  Universal Amphitheatre  Universal City California   I was trying to chat up Debbie Harry at this gig and a very persistent fan came between us.

debbieharry

The moment was lost.

santa rosa

April 1989    Luther Burbank Center for the Arts    Santa Rosa    California

garconne

Sam Andrew  Joe Healey

With Joe Healey

gish

23 April 1989    IBeam    San Francisco

MDolgushkincropped

Michael Dolgushkin did that poster.

5134_0796e

brooks

noel-franklin-last-call-3-club-lingerie-11

loretta-young

22 April 1989      Club Lingerie     Hollywood        with Vala Cupp and Michel Bastian

loretta

Sam Andrew Band     Washington chapter     KK Ryder    Mark Riley   Todd Zimberg

rexville grange

7 June 1989        Rexville Grange     Washington

shoes

Bainbridge Island        Washington

Big Picture: woman cycling whilst holding an umbrella

GAMH

27 July 1989       Great American Music Hall     San Francisco

YangXiuqiong_2127_300dpi

viviane

wetlands

18-19 August 1989        Wetlands       New York City

Vivien

scalzino

lana

sbar

26 November 1989       Earthquake Benefit    Kaiser Auditorium    Oakland

fez_venue

Downstairs at The Fez under Time, New York City, with David Peel, Dorothy Rothschild and Lenny Kaye.

fez map

carole

fez-now-defunct

paule

The Four Stooges at four in the morning.      New York

Sam Andrew

_______________________________________________________________________

Big Brother and the Holding Company, part six. 1969-1972

1969 – 1972        The Long Slow Slide Down the Other Side.

2-3 February 1969

7 March 1969   Dale Burkhardt attends a Kozmic Blues Band show and snaps this one.

28 March 1969

The Kozmic Blues Band played at The Royal Albert Hall, so to celebrate, I took a bath.

Queen Victoria baptised the Royal Albert Hall in 1871.   And now we came to play here almost a hundred years later.

The Royal Albert Hall, or, as the London cabbies call it,  Halibut Oil (‘ albut o’l),  is in the north part of South Kensington.

We had a splendid time here which put me in a party mood.

The acoustics in this Hall were originally so bad that people said it was the only place where a British composer could be sure of hearing his work twice. Eric came to see us.

Bob Seidemann, old friend of ours, who did one of our album covers, plus the magnificent Blind Faith album, was there. He looks like this now. He didn’t then.

I thought about the people who had spoken and played in this space: Winston Churchill, Wagner, Verdi, Elgar, Rachmaninoff.

In 1969, engineers installed sound bafflings that were known as “mushrooms” or “flying saucers,” and the sound was vastly improved.

Suzy Creamcheese was so sweet to me in so many ways. She took me out to Hampton Court and gave me the royal tour. Suzy, thank you forever.

29 June 1969

20 July 1969          Snooky Flowers and I saw this event on television as it was happening.  The Chelsea Hotel, NYC.

8 August 1969       660 Great Highway        Tyrannosaurus Rex and Tongue and Groove.

December 1969   At a Stax/Volt party in Memphis with Janis Joplin, Carla Thomas, Rufus Thomas, Al Jackson, Jr., Steve Cropper, Duck Dunn and Booker T. Jones who is now a San Rafael resident. Duck Dunn died today, 13 May 2012, in his sleep in Tokyo. He was seventy.

25 August 1969

17 October 1969       Austin

18 October 1969   Hemisphere Arena  San Antonio        Sharrie Gomez and I doing a Macy’s ad.

24 October 1969       I’m listed as playing on this recording, but I’ve never heard it.

Talking god and the universe with Janis and Richard Kermode.

Richard came out of that Hammond B3 jazz scene in Buffalo. A lot of great players including him.

15 November 1969  This was a huge California demonstration against the war in Viet Nam.

19 November 1969   Fillmore West      Steve Miller had to cancel this show so Big Brother played it billed as Mumble, Fumble, Jumble and Dumble.

29 December 1969                  Geary Theatre               415 Geary Boulevard                 San Francisco

Janis said, “I don’t look good in this photo, so I’m putting it in just for you.”

Anthony Edman took this photograph of the Carol guitar.

7 February 1970     Encore Theatre    Burlingame  California

13 February 1970      Pepperland

20-21 February 1970   Great Highway   Rhythm Dukes       Jerry Miller          Bill Champlin

27 February 1970     Alaskaland Civic Center        Fairbanks   Alaska

5-7 March 1970        Keystone    San Francisco

They had some wonderful shows here, but the place was right next door to the police station in North Beach.

13-14 March 1970   New Orleans House   Berkeley         Horses in Tiburon.

20-22 March 1970    Family Dog at the Great Highway     Kaleidoscope       Devil’s Kitchen

28-29 March 1970      Lion’s Share        San Anselmo     California

4 April 1970   Fillmore West     Janis joins us for this one.                       James Gurley.

This photograph seems to be very heraldic of the 1970s. My overheated imagination sees mistrust here, matters gone awry, loss of faith, paranoia, alienation, loneliness. Am I being carried away ? Probably. Was it a weird time ?  It certainly was.   Richard Kermode  Linda Gravenites  Janis  George Ostrow  Bobby Neuwirth

7-9 April 1970                       Matrix

12 April 1970  Winterland        Kathi McDonald   Nick Gravenites   Mike Finnegan  David Shallock     We had a GOOD band.

23-24 April 1970  Inn of the Beginning  Cotati California            James Gurley.   He’s big, huge.

1 May 1970      Family Dog      Great Highway     San Francisco       I think this is a Randy Tuten poster.

8 May 1970    Merced Fairgrounds    Merced  California

15 May 1970     City Center    Kelowna    British Columbia

Kelowna is a vacation spot in British Columbia, on the east side of the Okanagan Valley.

16-17 May 1970   Strawberry Mountain Fair   Mission    British Columbia

20 May 1970    Pauley Ballroom   University of California      Berkeley

21 May 1970  Pepperland  Bermuda Palms   San Rafael   California       Full Tilt     Grateful Dead

With the amazing Meyer sound system.

The event is memorable for many reasons.

This is a Hells Angels party to begin with, so the money will be straight and the sound system excellent.

There will also be more drugs and alcohol than would seem to be prudent.

This will be the first time that Janis’ old band and her new band will be at the same venue, so everyone is a little on edge.

Not exactly a battle of the bands, but not exactly not one either.  Janis gets into a fight with an Angel and he punches her. She breaks a bottle over his head. This is the peace and love crowd.

22 May 1970    Keystone Korner    Berkeley

29 May 1970   Santa Monica Civic Auditorium

9 June 1970    Diamond Head Crater Festival                 Hawaii

8 June 1970    The Andrews Amphitheater   Hawaii   This place is used for commencement exercises for the University of Hawaii.  I was proud to play here.

My wife is Hawaiian. More Hawaiian blood, as a matter of fact, than most Hawaiians.  Here she is with Grant Jacobs, Richard Hundgen, and I wish I knew her name, she has a lovely smile.

The equipment managers that we had at that time, forty years ago, decided to jump ship and become Hawaiian. They are there still.

And of course our President was born there in the same hospital, Queens Hospital, as my wife. Either there or in Kenya, I forget which. Depends on whom you ask, someone who actually knows something, or someone who is incredibly ignorant and backward. President Obama went to Puniho High School, and so did Jonelle DeNike, here with her husband Howard in Paris, old friends from University of San Francisco days.

This proportion may surprise you. It did me, almost as difficult as realizing that the eyes are half way down the head instead of near the top where children draw them.

 

10 June 1970    Kahului Armory    Maui   Hawaii

Also called the Pu’unene Armory.

Maui is the island without a military base, so they just had to build an armory here.

My father was in the Air Force, and so I was raised in places like this. Still, it does seem like a rather Spinal Tap place to have a concert.

Remember in Spinal Tap when the lieutenant (Fred Willard), looking at his watch says, “I make it, oh, 1830 hours now, so why don’t you go on about 1900 ?”

And Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer) says, “You mean it’s seventy hours until we play ?”

Steve Keyser.

13-14 June 1970  Portland Music & Art Fair    Portland Oregon

17 June 1970    Convention Center    Las Vegas

19  June 1970   Terrace Ballroom    Salt Lake City   I have a cassette tape of this gig.  We actually played all that music.

26 June 1970   Junction Night Club    Kelker   Colorado

3-5 July 1970     Euphoria    San Rafael      California     Another Randy Tuten poster.

11 July 1970  Sports Arena  San Diego Full Tilt Boogie Band     I remember flying home with Janis, Nick Gravenites, Mike Bloomfield et alia from this one. Bloomers was on a roll. He was ranting in that special Bloomfieldian style about taping two baloons full of lukewarm water to a bathroom mirror and masturbating into the sink. You know, typical inflight conversation. It was something else to have Big Brother and Full Tilt in that same small tight space. Good thing we all loved each other. Of course, in those days you could smoke and the flight attendants wore miniskirts. If I remember correctly, there was even a piano bar upstairs. Seat belts were only for taking off and landing, and sometimes not even then.

17 July 1970  Love Valley Festival   Love Valley  North Carolina       There was a counterfeit Big Brother running around about this time. Maybe they played this one ?

I always thought, “Why in the world would anyone want to counterfeit us, when they could just go ahead and be themselves ?”

I mean, it couldn’t be for the money, because we weren’t making any, so how could they ?

Might as well be yourself, as Oscar Wilde noted, everyone else is taken.

31 July 1970  Phoenix Veterans Coliseum  Arizona

6 August 1970  Peace Festival   Shea Stadium  Flushing Meadows    New York

13-15 August 1970   Fillmore West    San Francisco   Commander Cody     George Frayne, one of my favorite people.  Good artist too.

18-19 August 1970    The Matrix      San Francisco      No, he wasn’t on the gig, but I love the way he sings, so here he is. Paul supposedly came to the Matrix to see us one time, but when we met him, we asked him about it and he said he wasn’t lucky enough to be there.

26 August 1970       Washoe County Fairgrounds

28 August 1970       Sing Auditorium    San Bernardino      Mary Swope took this photograph.

25 September 1970    Saginaw Auditorium      Michigan

3-5 October 1970               Euphoria            San Rafael           California

4 October 1970   The Landmark Motel  Hollywood        A British writer just interviewed me from the very room.  He mentioned all of the scrawlings on the bedroom closet wall.

Swimming in the pool, yelling up to the rooms, “Hey, come on down ! Bring Mary Jane with you, OK?”

6-7 October 1970    The  Matrix           Blues for an old friend.

23 October 1970    Basin Street West    Omigawd, we substituted for Sarah Vaughan ?    I wonder how that worked ?  I can’t remember, but I do know that Combination of the Two doesn’t sound a lot like Over The Rainbow.

26 October 1970   Lion’s Share     The Drinks Are On Pearl.

Janis left $ 2,500, a lot of money then, for us to have a party in her honor. We did it right.  Music and dancing all night.

27-29 October 1970   The Matrix

30 October 1970   46th Street Rock Palace     Brooklyn

2 November 1970   Harding Theatre   San Francisco

20-21  November 1970   Winterland     San Francisco

5 December 1970  The Birmingham Palladium    Detroit

We all signed this one.  I was with Carol Cavallon when I bought this guitar on 48th Street, Manhattan, across the street from Manny’s.

8-9 January 1971   Fillmore East    Buddy Miles    Sweetwater    I loved the way Buddy looked when he was on the drums.

17 January 1971     Syria Mosque       University of Pittsburgh

18-19 January 1971      Ungano’s       New York City

20 January 1971    Capitol Theatre   Port Chester   New York             Carol Cavallon    Putney  Vermont

29-30 January 1971      ”El Monte” always makes me think of Reuben and the Jets, Frank Zappa.

4 February 1971    Inn of the Beginning        Cotati            California

13 February 1971   Pepperland    737 East Francisco Boulevard   San Rafael   California

Whitey Litchfield, millionaire construction magnate, created Litchfield’s Bermuda Palms in the late 1940s. This was “California’s Las Vegas.” I mentioned before that I had played tenor saxophone in numerous big band rehearsals here, little dreaming at the time that Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Lionel Hampton and many other stars of the 1940s had played in that same room.

20-21 February 1971            Pepperland

23 February 1971    Broadcast of television series The Turned On Crisis including an episode with Big Brother: Why Can’t You Hear Through The Noise in Your Ear.

6 March 1971      Shasta College

12-13 March 1971  Friends and Relations Hall  Great Highway  San Francisco    Kathi McDonald.

Also on this gig:   Clover       I see    Alex Call   Huey Lewis     John McFee      Sean Hopper

25 March 1971        New Monk            Berkeley

The New Monk was in Berkeley where Shattuck and University make a T.   2119 University.  It was a funky place.  Freddie Herrera bought it in August of 1971, and it became the Keystone Berkeley in March 1972.   I think that this expression could fairly be called supercilious.   Or even supersillyious.

9-10 April 1971    Friends and Relations Hall     Kathi McDonald, one of the best singers ever… and the funniest.

15 April 1971     Inn of the Beginning   Cotati   California

19 April 1971      Friends and Relations Hall         Hubert Sumlin      Snooky Flowers    Rich Kirch   Freddie Roulette

22-23 April 1971    Bimbo’s    San Francisco

24 April 1971    Peace Rally   Golden Gate Park

Always a good idea.

26 April 1971  Sonoma    WELL !   We know when we’re not wanted.   We left in a huff.   (Actually, it was a Buick.)

7 May 1971   California Hall    San Francisco

17 May 1971       New Monk

21 May 1971   Keystone            Nick Gravenites

28 May 1971     Selland Arena   Fresno    California     B.B. King  Elvin Bishop    Elvin liked to play poker after a gig.

10 June 1971  Fox Theatre   Long Beach

9 July 1971        Harlingen    Texas

August 1971       Release of How Hard It Is

We had a great B3 player on this one, Mike Finnegan, who can sing as well as he can play. He recorded Buried Alive In The Blues with us and we should release that someday. It’s definitely the best version of that song.

Mike went on to play with everyone, including Joe Cocker  performing here on American Idol, another of Rupert Murdoch’s panderings to the lowest common denominator. But, as Mike says, “A gig is a gig.”    Hey, maybe Kacee Clanton was on this one too ?  I think she was.

9 October 1971   Monterey Fairgrounds     Clover        Jon Sievert took this one.

7 November 1971    Trying to guard Kathi.   Can you hear me barking ?

12 November 1971       Winterland

13 November 1971

9-11 December 1971      Inn of the Beginning          Cotati            California

31 December 1971    Many photographs of this guitar because she is gone now, playing the Hard Rock Café circuit.

1 January 1972

14 January 1972

30 January 1972   Curtis Hall    Tampa     Florida      Sam   Lee Bittner   Kathi McDonald   Mike Pendergrass   Peter Albin

 

13 February 1972      Mama Einstein’s    What do you want ?  I was the only one left.

15 February 1972   Valentine’s party    The Boathouse      Harding Road      San Francisco      You know, out by Lake Merced.

19 February 1972   University of Iowa  Iowa City    Allman Brothers    Vivid memories of partying with these guys. They had a couple of revolvers from the Civil War. Confederate, of course.

26 February 1972    American Legion Hall     Merced     California

19 March 1972    You have to watch these rock writers all the time.   Kathi was our new singer, not Elvin’s.

13 April 1972

22 or 23 April 1972     Dubuque & Court Street Party   Iowa City

Kathi and I went out partying in an old farmhouse, deserted, crackly, in the middle of a cornfield. It seemed as if we were there for days.

25 April 1972      Iowa Wesleyan   Fayetteville     Iowa

29 April 1972                  Upper Iowa             Mt. Pleasant

1-2 May 1972   Ace Beer Garden  Iowa City

June 1972      Pioneer High School    Whittier   California

2 June 1972       Fort Homer Hesterly Armory     Tampa

June 1972    Schererville     Illinois          Blue Oyster Cult.    These guys were great to hang with. Hysterical as a matter of fact.

June 1972     Catholic High School          Niles           Illinois

June 1972    Romeoville Roller Rink           Romeoville        Illinois

15 June 1972      Hersey High School       Arlington Heights     Illinois

June 1972     Grande Ballroom              Detroit

June/July 1972     Louisiana         Life becomes quite fuzzy along about now.   Note that there are often no specific dates for these events.

July 1972      Miami            Spirit

22 July 1972   Marine World   Redwood City    California        I love mingling with wild life, marine or otherwise.

4 September 1972

17 September 1972   A slice of life in the 70s.   If you read between the lines, this pretty much says it all.

         

                          

9 October 1972   Berkeley Folk Music Festival     Big Mama Thornton     Earl Collins    Silver String Macedonian Band    Frontier

 

24 November 1972    Marin County Civic Center Auditorium   Quicksilver      Clover      Yogi Phlegm       A Cold Turkey Rock Party

Clover !     Johnny Ciambotti.   John McFee is there.   Mitch Howe.  Alex Call.   Huey Lewis.  Sean Hopper.  Good band.   Alex has a beautiful voice.

And, talking of Marin musicians, this is one who has been an inspiration to me for years: Terry Haggerty.

Somewhere in my personal effects I have a Local # Six Musicians’ Union directory from the 1950s. Terry’s father is in there along with Paul Desmond and many other noteworthy players from that era.

Terry and David Shallock came to my house in Fairfax one day, and they did a smokin’ version of Frosty, the Snowman. It was so great to hear that. Especially in August.

It’s the whole person, though, you know ? Terry is a great guitar player, one of the best, but it’s as a human being that he shines brightest.

Thank you for being here, and I’ll see you in a week.

Sam Andrew

Big Brother and the Holding Company

_________________________________________________________________________

Big Brother history, part six, 1969 to 1972

1969 to 1972

Animal Eyes

Big Brother is watching you.

1969-Stax-shopping-300x246

December 1968   At a Stax/Volt party in Memphis with Janis Joplin, Carla Thomas, Rufus Thomas, Al Jackson, Jr., Steve Cropper, Duck Dunn and Booker T. Jones who is now a San Rafael resident.  

collo   

victoria

2-3 February 1969

Franklin Pierce College Carnival 9 Feb 69

9 February 1969    Franklin Pierce College

7 March 1969   Dale Burkhardt attends a Kozmic Blues Band show and snaps this one.

28 March 1969

UK flags mural

J

The Kozmic Blues Band played at The Royal Albert Hall, so to celebrate, I took a bath.

Queen Victoria baptised the Royal Albert Hall in 1871.

The acoustics in this Hall were originally so bad that people said it was the only place where a British composer could be sure of hearing his work twice.

Eric came to see us.

I thought about the people who had spoken and played in this space: Winston Churchill, Wagner, Verdi, Elgar, Rachmaninoff.

Suzy Creamcheese took me out to Hampton Court and gave me the royal tour.

Je

placerville Tahoe

terrace

29 June 1969        Terrace Ballroom     Salt Lake City

Bartolotti

20 July 1969   Snooky Flowers and I watched this event live on television at the Chelsea Hotel, NYC.

vesuvio

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cast up by the sea

SF

Jes

SF street scene

8 August 1969       660 Great Highway        with Tyrannosaurus Rex and Tongue and Groove.

palace

The Palace Hotel still looks much like this.

Luisa Parrelli

airplane

Grace Jack Bill Woodstock

25 August 1969

Grace

27 Aug 1969

27 August 1969     Saratoga

17 October 1969       Austin

franco

On the road again.

18 October 1969   Hemisphere Arena  San Antonio

I’m listed as playing on this recording, but I’ve never heard it.

24 Oct 1969 Kansas

fiat

Airotciv

With Janis and Richard Kermode.

Richard came out of that Hammond B3 jazz scene in Buffalo. He was a good musician.

woman at table

15 November 1969  This was a huge California demonstration against the war in Viet Nam.

liberty dance

19 November 1969   Fillmore West      Steve Miller had to cancel this show so Big Brother played it billed as Mumble, Fumble, Jumble and Dumble.

saint ignatius back

Saint Ignatius Church, Fulton & Parker (Stanyan), San Francisco

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29 December 1969                  Geary Theatre               415 Geary Boulevard                 San Francisco

SF push the cable car

I’ve done this many times.  Turning the cable car around so it can head back up the hill.

Janis said, “I don’t look good in this photo, but I’m putting it on the album cover just for you.”

1970s

ball

And now begin the 1970s, which Gary Trudeau called “a kidney stone of a decade.”

I used the 1970s to go back to school and learn some technique, but there is no denying that those years were an intermission between the high flying 60s and the conservative, athletic, jingoistic 1980s.   Photo:  Anthony Edman

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7 February 1970     Encore Theatre    Burlingame  California

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Jennifer

13 February 1970      Pepperland      San Rafael    California

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20-21 February 1970   Great Highway   with the Rhythm Dukes       Jerry Miller          Bill Champlin

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27 February 1970     Alaskaland Civic Center        Fairbanks   Alaska

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a four little dude

5-7 March 1970        Keystone Korner    San Francisco

They had some wonderful shows at the Keystone, which was right across the alley from the North Beach police department.

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13-14 March 1970   New Orleans House   Berkeley

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20-22 March 1970    Family Dog at the Great Highway     Kaleidoscope       with the Devil’s Kitchen

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28-29 March 1970      Lion’s Share        San Anselmo     California

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clover195

Hey, there’s John McFee.

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Alex Call was the singer in this band. Huey Lewis was the harmonica player. I always liked John McFee who is now a Doobie Brother.

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The owner of the Lion’s Share, Mike Considine, didn’t like to advertise, so there are very few posters and handbills from this venue.

spaghetti

James Gurley

4 April 1970   Fillmore West     Janis joined us for this one.

My overheated imagination sees mistrust here, matters gone awry, loss of faith, paranoia, alienation, loneliness. Am I being carried away ? Probably. Was it a weird time ?  It certainly was.   Richard Kermode  Linda Gravenites  Janis  George Ostrow  Bobby Neuwirth

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7-9 April 1970                       Matrix

12 April 1970  Winterland        Kathi McDonald   Mike Finnegan  David Shallock  Nick Gravenites   We had a GOOD band.

cornholio

Greg ‘Cornholio’ Douglass

23-24 April 1970  Inn of the Beginning  Cotati California.

James Gurley.   He’s big, huge.

1 May 1970      Family Dog      Great Highway     San Francisco       I think this is a Randy Tuten poster.

Elise party

8 May 1970    Merced Fairgrounds    Merced  California

barto

The 1970s were a time of molting, of lying in wait. There didn’t seem to be any guiding theme, so I kept my head down and studied.

Where in the world

15 May 1970     City Center    Kelowna    British Columbia   Kelowna is a vacation spot in British Columbia, on the east side of the Okanagan Valley.

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airport sf

16-17 May 1970   Strawberry Mountain Fair   Mission    British Columbia

beach

20 May 1970    Pauley Ballroom   University of California      Berkeley

UC

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21 May 1970  Pepperland  Bermuda Palms   San Rafael   California    Big Brother   Full Tilt     Grateful Dead     With the amazing Meyer sound system.

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The event is memorable for many reasons.

motorcycle

This is a Hells Angels party to begin with, so the money will be straight and the sound system excellent. There will also be more drugs and alcohol than would seem to be prudent.

This will be the first time that Janis’ old band and her new band will be at the same venue, so everyone is a little on edge.

Not exactly a battle of the bands, but not exactly not one either.  Janis gets into a fight with an Angel and he punches her. She breaks a bottle over his head.

This is the peace and love crowd.

head

charles

SF_Haight_Ashbury_1_CA

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22, 23  May 1970    Keystone Korner    San Francisco

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sfv CHS-44632

audrey

29 May 1970   Santa Monica Civic Auditorium

9 June 1970    Diamond Head Crater Festival                 Hawaii

8 June 1970    The Andrews Amphitheater   Hawaii   This place is used for commencement exercises for the University of Hawaii.

Ha

My wife Elise Wainani Piliwale is Hawaiian. Here she is with Grant Jacobs, Richard Hundgen, and a photographer who has a lovely smile.

Colin and Wayne, the equipment managers that we had at that time, forty years ago, decided to jump ship and become Hawaiian. They are there still and doing very well.

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And of course our President was born in Honolulu in the same hospital, Queens Hospital, as my wife. Either there or in Kenya, I forget which. Depends on whom you ask, someone who actually knows something, or someone who is incredibly ignorant and backward… like Fox News.

punahou

President Obama went to Punahou High School.

Jonelle DeNike is Hawaiian and she went to a Catholic high school in Honolulu.

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10 June 1970    Kahului Armory    Maui   Hawaii

Also called the Pu’unene Armory.

Steve Keyser

13-14 June 1970  Portland Music & Art Fair    Portland Oregon

Back Camera

bookfruit

17 June 1970    Convention Center    Las Vegas

langford

19  June 1970   Terrace Ballroom    Salt Lake City   I have a cassette tape of this gig.  We played a lot of different songs. This was probably our most adventurous period for repertoire.

net

26 June 1970   Junction Night Club    Kelker   Colorado

cfiles49667

3-5 July 1970     Euphoria    San Rafael      California     Another Randy Tuten poster.

11 July 1970  Sports Arena  San Diego with the Full Tilt Boogie Band

It was something else to have Big Brother and Full Tilt in that same small airplane coming back from San Diego.

fa-sdut

The airlines used to lay off the flight attendants when they got married or reached a certain age. This was so they wouldn’t have to give them seniority and the pay that goes with it.

abigail

17 July 1970  Love Valley Festival   Love Valley  North Carolina

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31 July 1970  Phoenix Veterans Coliseum  Arizona

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BBHC 2 Aug 1970

2 August 1970      Lion’s Share      San Anselmo     California

alana

6 August 1970  Peace Festival   Shea Stadium  Flushing Meadows    New York

fish eyes

I need you, darling, like the fish needs the sea.  Please don’t take your sweet, sweet love from me.

George Frayne, one of my favorite people.  Good artist too.

13-15 August 1970   Fillmore West    San Francisco   Commander Cody

HP-SF-FLORAL-1

witches

18-19 August 1970    The Matrix      San Francisco

pool

26 August 1970       Washoe County Fairgrounds

28 August 1970       Sing Auditorium    San Bernardino      Mary Swope took this photograph.

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25 September 1970    Saginaw Auditorium      Michigan

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3-5 October 1970               Euphoria            San Rafael           California

4 October 1970   The Landmark Hotel  Hollywood        A British writer, Howard Sounes,  just interviewed me from the very room.  He mentioned all of the scrawlings on the bedroom closet wall.

6-7 October 1970    The  Matrix           Blues for an old friend.

SB

The 1970s began this way. The USA, up to this time a manufacturing giant, always expanding and growing, now became a service economy devoted to finance and collecting information, analyzing, digesting, contracting.  Self help books proliferated, the computer began to become important.

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American society turned inward after the tumultuous events of the 1960s.

23 October 1970    Basin Street West

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We substituted for Sarah Vaughan ?    I wonder how that worked ?  I can’t remember, but I do know that Combination of the Two doesn’t sound a lot like Over The Rainbow.

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Janis Invite 26 Oct 1970

26 October 1970   Lion’s Share     The Drinks Are On Pearl.  Janis left $ 2,500, a lot of money then, for us to have a party in her honor. We did it right.  Music and dancing all night.  Lots of stories of past glories.

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Margaret Gurley

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27-29 October 1970   The Matrix

With James Gurley, David Shallock, Nick Gravenites, Dave Getz and Peter Albin

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30 October 1970   46th Street Rock Palace     Brooklyn

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Photo:  Baron Wolman

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2 November 1970   Harding Theatre     Divisadero Street     San Francisco

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BBHC loft not that one

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6 November 1970

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20-21  November 1970   Winterland     San Francisco

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5 December 1970  The Birmingham Palladium    Detroit

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We looked everywhere for this white SG standard.

We all signed this one.  I was with Carol Cavallon when I bought this guitar on 48th Street across the street from Manny’s in New York. Photo: Anthony Edman

8-9 January 1971   Fillmore East    Buddy Miles    Sweetwater    I loved the way Buddy looked when he played the drums.

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All right, we’re heading into the rough waters of the 1970s now.

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Strange, hard, weird times.

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17 January 1971     Syria Mosque       University of Pittsburgh

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18-19 January 1971      Ungano’s

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20 January 1971    Capitol Theatre   Port Chester   New York

With Carol Cavallon in Putney  Vermont

29-30 January 1971      The names El Monte and El Segundo always make me think of Reuben and the Jets, Frank Zappa.

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4 February 1971    Inn of the Beginning        Cotati            California

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13 February 1971   Pepperland    737 East Francisco Boulevard   San Rafael   California

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Whitey Litchfield, millionaire construction magnate, created Litchfield’s Bermuda Palms in the late 1940s. This was California’s Las Vegas.

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I mentioned before that I had played tenor saxophone in numerous big band rehearsals here, little dreaming at the time that Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Lionel Hampton and many other stars of the 1940s had played in that very same room.

20-21 February 1971            Pepperland

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23 February 1971    Broadcast of television series The Turned On Crisis including an episode with Big Brother: Why Can’t You Hear Through The Noise in Your Ear.

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6 March 1971      Shasta College

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12-13 March 1971  Friends and Relations Hall  Great Highway  San Francisco    with Kathi McDonald.

Also on this gig:   Clover       I see    Alex Call   Huey Lewis     John McFee      Sean Hopper

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25 March 1971      The New Monk was in Berkeley where Shattuck and University make a T.   2119 University.  It was a funky place.  Freddie Herrera bought it in August of 1971, and it became the Keystone Berkeley in March 1972.

9-10 April 1971    Friends and Relations Hall     Kathi McDonald, one of the best singers ever… and the funniest.

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15 April 1971     Inn of the Beginning   Cotati   California

19 April 1971      Friends and Relations Hall         Hubert Sumlin      Snooky Flowers    Rich Kirch   Freddie Roulette

22-23 April 1971    Bimbo’s    San Francisco

24 April 1971    Peace Rally   Golden Gate Park

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Think about some of the things that had happened to usher in the 1970s. The Watts riots in 1965, the Republican triumph in the 1966 midterms, the Newark riots, the 1968 campaign, the assassinations, Chicago, Nixon winning by the largest landslide ever in 1972, the Manson family, Kent State, the construction workers’ riot, George Romney, George Wallace, George McGovern, Nelson Rockefeller. The nation was exhausted, afraid and began to retrench and turn to the right.

Anna Fisher

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26 April 1971  Sonoma

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7 May 1971   California Hall    San Francisco

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17 May 1971       New Monk

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21 May 1971   Keystone Korner     San Francisco

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28 May 1971     Selland Arena   Fresno    California    with B.B. King and Elvin Bishop

10 June 1971  Fox Theatre   Long Beach

9 July 1971        Harlingen    Texas

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August 1971       Release of How Hard It Is.   The title is significant.

We had a great B3 player on this album, Mike Finnegan, who can sing as well as he can play. He recorded Buried Alive In The Blues with us and we should release that someday. It’s definitely the best version of that song.

Mike went on to play with everyone, including Joe Cocker  performing here on American Idol, another of Rupert Murdoch’s panderings to the lowest common denominator. But, as Mike says, “A gig is a gig.”

Lisa Ames

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9 October 1971   Monterey Fairgrounds     with Clover who were lucky enough to have John McFee on the guitar.

7 November 1971    Trying to guard Kathi.   Can you hear me barking ?

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12 November 1971       Winterland

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9-11 December 1971      Inn of the Beginning          Cotati            California

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30 January 1972   Curtis Hall    Tampa     Florida       with  Lee Bittner   Kathi McDonald   Mike Pendergrass   Peter Albin

13 February 1972      Mama Einstein’s    What do you want ?  I was the only one left.

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15 February 1972   Valentine’s party    The Boathouse      Harding Road      San Francisco      You know, out by Lake Merced.

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19 February 1972   University of Iowa  Iowa City    with the Allman Brothers    Vivid memories of partying with these guys. They had a couple of revolvers from the Civil War. Confederate, of course.

Hawaiians 1941-1945

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26 February 1972    American Legion Hall     Merced     California

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19 March 1972    You have to watch these rock writers all the time.   Kathi was our new singer, not Elvin’s.

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13 April 1972

Kathi and I went out partying in an old farmhouse, deserted, crackly, in the middle of a cornfield. It seemed as if we were there for days.

Tom Doyle and pals

25 April 1972      Iowa Wesleyan   Fayetteville     Iowa

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29 April 1972                  Upper Iowa             Mt. Pleasant

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1-2 May 1972   Ace Beer Garden  Iowa City

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June 1972      Pioneer High School    Whittier   California

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2 June 1972       Fort Homer Hesterly Armory     Tampa

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June 1972    Schererville     Illinois          with Blue Oyster Cult.    These guys were fun to hang with. They were hysterically funny.

June 1972     Catholic High School          Niles           Illinois

Penis Dick

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June 1972    Romeoville Roller Rink           Romeoville        Illinois

15 June 1972      Hersey High School       Arlington Heights     Illinois

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June 1972     Grande Ballroom              Detroit

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June/July 1972     Louisiana

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July 1972      Miami            Spirit

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22 July 1972   Marine World   Redwood City    California

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4 September 1972

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17 September 1972   A slice of life in the 70s.   If you read between the lines, this pretty much says it all.

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9 October 1972   Berkeley Folk Music Festival     with Big Mama Thornton     Earl Collins    Silver String Macedonian Band    Frontier

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24 November 1972    Marin County Civic Center Auditorium   Quicksilver      Clover      Yogi Phlegm       A Cold Turkey Rock Party

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Clover !     Johnny Ciambotti   John McFee is there.   Mitch Howe   Alex Call   Huey Lewis  Sean Hopper  Good band.   Alex has a beautiful voice and he writes great songs.

And, talking of Marin musicians, this is one who has been an inspiration to me for years:   Terry Haggerty.

Somewhere in my personal effects I have a Local # Six Musicians’ Union directory from the 1950s. Terry’s father is in there along with Paul Desmond and many other noteworthy players from that era. If I can ever find that directory, I’m going to give it to Terry.

Terry and David Shallock came to my house in Fairfax one day, and they did a smokin’ version of Frosty, the Snowman. It was so great to hear that. Especially in August.

It’s the whole person, though, you know ? Terry is a great guitar player, one of the best, but it’s as a human being that he shines brightest.

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pasticceria

See you next week?

Sam Andrew

__________________________________________________________

Big Brother and the Holding Company, part five. July-December 1968

July-December 1968                        The top of the mountain.

5 July 1968    Concord Coliseum     Concord    California

The Concord Coliseum began as a grocery store. Then it was a holy hall of music, and now it has become a Petco.

6 July 1968   Santa Rosa Fairgrounds    Santa Rosa    California       Balls and Chains.

7 July 1968    Golden Gate Park      San Francisco

10 July 1968      Provo Park      Berkeley

12-13 July 1968         Kaleidoscope   Los Angeles

16-18 July 1968   Fillmore   San Francisco

20 July 1968     Lagoon Opera House    Ogden Utah

I remember taking rides on these fast little cars that could turn on a dime.

A little hippy humor.

Backstage where the magic happens.

22 July 1968        Westbury Music Fair  Long Island

25 July 1968   Columbia Records Convention    San Juan Puerto Rico   Blood, Sweat and Tears were so good that night.

27 July 1968    Newport Folk Festival  Newport  Rhode Island     We had always dreamed about attending this event and now we’re playing it.

Baron Wolman took this one at Newport.

An ad for Cheap Thrills:   Notice the emphasis here on the nonverbal experience. Very interesting for an ad from a corporation. But, hey, it’s the 60s.

2-3 August 1968    Fillmore East with the Staple Singers.   Big thrill for us to be with the Staples.

4 August 1968    First Annual Newport Pop Festival   Orange County Fairgrounds   Costa Mesa  California      This was the first music event to attract more than 100,000 people. Trouble is, I can’t remember if we played there or not, and you would think I would remember something that big. Some of the books say we “may have played there,” but we aren’t on the posters.

We had just played Newport, Rhode Island, only a week before, so the two gigs may be conflated here.

Myra Friedman wrote the first important biography of Janis. She won a New York Times book prize for it.

Some Jewish high school kids in St. Louis, 1949.

Myra Friedman is in the first row left.

9 August 1968  Kiel Auditorium    St. Louis

10 August 1968       Forest Park                    St. Louis

14 August 1968      Indiana Beach     Monticello      Indiana

When my wife Elise first saw this photograph, she said, “You look mental. Is everything all right?”   (She’s a nurse, OK?, so it was a professional question.)

16-17 August 1968   Aragon-Cheetah     Chicago

18 August 1968     Tyrone Guthrie Theatre   Minneapolis

23 August 1968  Singer Bowl  Flushing   Queens     New York City

Singer Bowl  Flushing  Queens…   Now, could you make up a name like that ?

Jimi broke a string right on the first song. He said, “Don’t worry, I’m going to make it up to you in spades.”      He did too.

30 August 1968    Palace of Fine Arts  San Francisco

6 September 1968             Hollywood Bowl

10 September 1968

12-14 September 1968     Rick Griffin  Wes Wilson  Bonnie MacLean  Mouse and Kelley     Their art will last much longer than our music.

15 September 1968   Rose Bowl    Pasadena    We hopped in a limousine after the gig, and the fans piled on top. I was afraid we would be crushed.

22 September 1968   Del Mar Fairgrounds     San Diego

27 September 1968          University of California at Irvine

28 September 1968  San Diego      I got a ticket for driving a hundred miles an hour to this gig.

4 October 1968  Public Hall   Cleveland

Little did I realize then that Cleveland would loom large in the Big Brother legend. We will play in Italy in June 2012, and two of the band members will be from Cleveland. Cleveland was the first place where I was music director of Love, Janis in 1999, and I made a CD there in December 2011 with Mary Bridget Davies, Ben Nieves and Jim Wall, all Clevelanders. And of course the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is there, even if they won’t let us in.

5 October 1968    State University of New York    Buffalo

10 October 1968   Quaker City Rock Festival    Philadelphia

11 October 1968     War Memorial Auditorium     Syracuse

13 October 1968      Music Hall      Cincinnati

I kissed Susan Ammon, third from left, then, and was lucky enough to kiss her again on Earth Day, forty-four years later.

15 October 1968    Grande Ballroom       Detroit

Janis and Peter, all dressed up with everywhere to go.

18 October 1968     Penn State University   University Park

19 October 1968  The Spectrum  Philadelphia

20 October 1968   Alexandria Roller Rink     Alexandria   Virginia

Jeff Beck was supposed to be a terror to work with, the bad British blues boy. I found him to be good natured and polite. Plus, he played an SG as James and I did.

25 October 1968   Curry Hicks Cage    University of Massachusetts    Amherst

26 October 1968    Worcester Polytechnic institute    Worcester   Massachusetts

1-2 November 1968  Electric Factory Philadelphia    We met a man in a gorilla suit here who became the “big brother” in Big Brother and the Holding Company.

8 November 1968   Rocky Point   Warwick  Rhode Island

9 November 1968     Woolsey Hall    Yale University     New Haven   Connecticut

10 November 1968        White Plains     New York

Very characteristic view of John and Janis.   I can hear them talking.

11 November 1968   Ridge Tech Arena      Braintree     Massachusetts

12 November 1968  Jersey City  New Jersey     Hey, we finally got rid of that messy “Big Brother and the Holding Company” part altogether.

14 November 1968          Hartford     Connecticut

In Hartford, I visited Mark Twain’s very interesting home as I do every time I go there.

15 November 1968    Hunter College   New York City   I was seething with anticipation. I thought maybe Sparta, Corinth, Mycenae and Athens had decided to sponsor us.

But, then, I realized. Oh, it’s just Animal House, a lot of fraternities and sororities. Well, OK. It was a fun gig. I love Hunter College.

16 November 1968     State University of New York     Stony Brook

23 November 1968      Houston Music Hall    Houston   Texas

24 November 1968       Coliseum     Dallas

26 November 1968     Denver Auditorium        Denver

29 November 1968    Eagles Auditorium     Seattle

30 November 1968     Pacific Coliseum   Vancouver     British Columbia

1 December 1968  Family Dog Benefit      Avalon Ballroom      San Francisco

2 December 1968

Bobby Neuwirth, serious artist, good songwriter, fellow traveler, intelligent, witty court jester. He wrote Mercedes Benz with Janis and Michael McClure.

18 December 1968     One of the first, if not THE first, rehearsals of The Kozmic Blues Band with Michael Bloomfield and Nick Gravenites presiding.

Mike was a consummate musician, gifted and highly intelligent.

Next time you’re in a restaurant, turn over the salt or pepper shaker and take a look. Very often there’s a tiny B there, B for Bloomfield. Mike’s father was a multimillionaire.

Al Kooper and Mike had a great idea. They would make an album and hire Norman Rockwell to do the cover. I wish I would have thought of that.

Robert Crumb did our Cheap Thrills album cover, of course, but, then, for our other albums we could have had Mr. Rockwell do one, Al Hirschfeld (the line king) do another, and David Levine do a third. Well, maybe next time. Anyway, I loved working with Michael and Nick at those early Kozmic Blues Band rehearsals.

In fact, when I did the guitar part on Little Girl Blue at the Black Rock in New York, Michael was right by my side guiding me through the chord changes.

He was always helpful, lavish with praise and very supportive. Mike did the slide solo on One Good Man, but didn’t credit himself. Maybe because of contractual obligations elsewhere ?

When Dylan went electric at Newport, Michael Bloomfield was the main man. One of the great scholars of the guitar. What can I say ? I miss the guy.

In the 1950s, the Cedar Tavern in Manhattan was the artists’ watering hole.

The drinks were cheap and it was close to lofts and studios. Jackson Pollock was there. Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner, everybody from that abstract expressionist scene was there, really. I was in the Cedar Tavern once and said  the word “divisive,” rhyming it with “dismissive,” and the most beautiful woman whirled around on her stool and said, “That’s the first time I ever heard any one pronounce that correctly.” (To this day, I’m not sure how to pronounce “divisive” and say it differently each time, but each time, you may be sure, I think of that beautiful woman.)

Le Roi Jones, as he was known then, and Diane Di Prima, probably my favorite beat poet, in The Cedar Tavern.

Carl Solomon, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg, typical denizens of The Cedar Tavern.

Mickey Ruskin founded Max’s Kansas City at 213 Park Avenue South (Seventeenth Street) which, despite the higher prices and the greater distance from the painters’ lofts, became the artists’ locale for the 1960s as The Cedar Tavern was for the 1950s. Big Brother and the Holding Company went often to Max’s and I practically lived there in the 1970s, because I actually lived in a loft quite close by on Twentieth Street, just down the block from Danny Fields. Mickey cashed my checks and put up with a lot of nonsense from me. I used to sit at the bar and draw the sculptures. Here is Mickey Ruskin (right) with John Chamberlain.

Dorothy Dean always sat by the door at Max’s. She was the guardian of the gates. She told me once or twice that she had danced The Tennessee Waltz in Tennessee with Tennessee Williams.

Dorothy was once a fact checker at The New Yorker, a fact that impressed me greatly. She hung out with a lot of gay men, but she hated the term “fag hag,” so called herself a fruit fly.

Dorothy was one of The Factory people and she was in several Warhol films. Here she is inspecting Norman Levine while being serenaded by Eric Anderson.

I liked the clientèle at Max’s, even the ones who weren’t as notorious as these characters below. Andy Warhol held court in the back room of the restaurant. Tim Buckley was a great guy, just like his son in many ways.

Debbie Harry, already quite beautiful, was frequently our waitress and she was a good one.

Lenny Kaye did his time at Max’s. He had roughly the same relationship with Patti Smith that I had with Janis Joplin.

Lenny is soulful, very intelligent, writes books, teaches at Rughers, I believe, and is just an all around good man.

Danny Fields, an “executive at Elektra,” as he is often billed, has been a kind of  PR man for Max’s since it opened. Danny brought Jim Morrison to the restaurant, and he introduced Iggy Pop to David Bowie there. Here Danny is with Tammy Faye Starlight.

And somewhat earlier with Nico from The Velvet Underground.

Many people at Max’s were quite well known and many were not, but all were interesting. It was quite a scene. Some of the people in this photograph are: David Bowie, Danny Fields (hey, Danny, where are you now?), Robert Mapplethorpe, Jim Morrison (peeing in a bottle), Lou Reed, Patti Smith. I’m there too. I think I see Lenny Kaye. We’re not posing. This is a typical Max’s scene out on the sidewalk on a summer night. David Bennett Cohen is there.

It’s funny what you remember about a place. I’ll bet that everyone who went to Max’s remembers the little bowls of dried garbanzo beans (chick peas). Everyone ate them like candy while they talked. Very salty, so of course they needed washing down with something.

And now a thank you to Donna Patterson and Anthony Edman for your help on this history. It is much appreciated. Donna is trying to be anonymous, so don’t remember her, OK?

Ant Knee, thank you always for being a good friend.

Part Six next week.         See you then.

Sam Andrew

Big Brother and the Holding Company

____________________________________________________________________

Big Brother history, part five, July to December 1968

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July-December 1968         Big Brother is watching you.

Watching you.

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Thinking about Chet Helms.

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5 July 1968    Concord Coliseum     Concord    California

The Concord Coliseum began as a grocery store. Then it was a holy hall of harmony,

and now it has become a Petco.     O tempora, O mores.

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6 July 1968   Santa Rosa Fairgrounds    Santa Rosa    California

La Combinación de los Dos

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7 July 1968    Golden Gate Park      San Francisco

San Francisco 1941 (2)

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10 July 1968      Provo Park      Berkeley

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12-13 July 1968         Kaleidoscope   Los Angeles

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16-18 July 1968   Fillmore   San Francisco

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20 July 1968     Lagoon Opera House    Ogden Utah

Combination of the Two

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I remember taking rides on these fast little cars that could turn on a dime.

Backstage where the magic happens.

K

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22 July 1968        Westbury Music Fair  Long Island

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Nam

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25 July 1968   Columbia Records Convention    San Juan Puerto Rico   Blood, Sweat and Tears were so good that night.

David Richards holding our attention with one of his great stories.  He painted my guitar and Janis’ Porsche.

27 July 1968    Newport Folk Festival  Newport  Rhode Island

John Byrne Cooke took this one at Newport.

1959

We had always dreamed about attending this event…

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…and now we’re playing it.

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An ad for Cheap Thrills:   Notice the emphasis here on the nonverbal experience. Very interesting for an ad from a corporation. But, hey, it’s the 60s.

JOAN BAEZ

2-3 August 1968    Fillmore East with the Staple Singers.   Big thrill for us to be with the Staples.

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Gerde’s Folk City

Cafe-Wha

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4 August 1968    First Annual Newport Pop Festival   Orange County Fairgrounds   Costa Mesa  California      This was the first music event to attract more than 100,000 people. Trouble is, I can’t remember if we played there or not, and you would think I would remember something that big.

Some of the books say we “may have played there,” but we aren’t on the posters.  We had just played Newport, Rhode Island, only a week before, so the two gigs may be conflated here.

Myra Friedman wrote the first important biography of Janis. She won a New York Times book prize for it.

Some Jewish high school kids in St. Louis, 1949.  Myra Friedman is in the first row left.

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One Stop Shopping:    Get your mind expanded and your check cashed.

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9 August 1968  Kiel Auditorium    St. Louis

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10 August 1968       Forest Park                    St. Louis

14 August 1968      Indiana Beach     Monticello      Indiana

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16-17 August 1968   Aragon-Cheetah     Chicago

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18 August 1968     Tyrone Guthrie Theatre   Minneapolis

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23 August 1968  Singer Bowl  Flushing   Queens     New York City       Singer Bowl  Flushing  Queens…   Now, could you make up a name like that ?

Jimi broke a string right on the first song. He said, “Don’t worry, I’m going to make it up to you in spades.”      He did too.

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30 August 1968    Palace of Fine Arts  San Francisco

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BBHC 6 Sept 1968 Hollywood Bowl

6 September 1968             Hollywood Bowl

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10 September 1968

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12-14 September 1968       Their art will last longer than what we did.  We see the aulos player on the Greek vase, but we don’t hear her music.

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After we played Pasadena, we hopped in a limousine, and the fans piled on top. I was afraid we would be crushed.

15 September 1968   Rose Bowl    Pasadena

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Henry Diltz’ photo of Sally Mann

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22 September 1968   Del Mar Fairgrounds     San Diego

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27 September 1968          University of California at Irvine

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28 September 1968  San Diego      I got a ticket for driving a hundred miles an hour to this gig.  ”The toils of the law,” is such a great way to phrase that.

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4 October 1968  Public Hall   Cleveland   Little did I realize then that Cleveland would loom large in the Big Brother legend.  Cleveland was the first place where I was music director of Love, Janis in 1999, and I made a CD there in December 2011 with Mary Bridget Davies, Ben Nieves and Jim Wall, all Clevelanders. And of course the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is there, even if they won’t let us in.

5 October 1968    State University of New York    Buffalo        Monsieur Gurley

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10 October 1968   Quaker City Rock Festival    Philadelphia

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11 October 1968     War Memorial Auditorium     Syracuse

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13 October 1968      Music Hall      Cincinnati

I kissed Susan Ammon, third from left, then, and was lucky enough to kiss her again on Earth Day, forty-four years later.

15 October 1968    Grande Ballroom       Detroit

18 October 1968     Penn State University   University Park

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19 October 1968  The Spectrum  Philadelphia

20 October 1968   Alexandria Roller Rink     Alexandria   Virginia

Jeff Beck was supposed to be a terror to work with, the bad British blues boy, but I found him to be good natured and polite. Plus, he played an SG as James and I did.

zoe

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25 October 1968   Curry Hicks Cage    University of Massachusetts    Amherst

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26 October 1968    Worcester Polytechnic institute    Worcester   Massachusetts

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1-2 November 1968  Electric Factory Philadelphia

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8 November 1968   Rocky Point   Warwick  Rhode Island

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9 November 1968     Woolsey Hall    Yale University     New Haven   Connecticut

10 November 1968        White Plains     New York

Very characteristic view of John and Janis.   I can hear them talking.

11 November 1968   Ridge Tech Arena      Braintree     Massachusetts

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12 November 1968  Jersey City  New Jersey     Hey, we finally got rid of that messy “Big Brother and the Holding Company” part altogether.

14 November 1968          Hartford     Connecticut       I visit Mark Twain’s very interesting home every time I go there.

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15 November 1968    Hunter College   New York City   I was seething with anticipation. I thought maybe Sparta, Corinth, Mycenae and Athens had decided to sponsor us at this Pan Hellenic event.

But, then, I realized. Oh, it’s just Animal House, a lot of fraternities and sororities. Well, OK. It was a fun gig. I love Hunter College.

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16 November 1968     State University of New York     Stony Brook

23 November 1968      Houston Music Hall    Houston   Texas

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24 November 1968       Coliseum     Dallas

26 November 1968     Denver Auditorium        Denver

29 November 1968    Eagles Auditorium     Seattle

30 November 1968     Pacific Coliseum   Vancouver     British Columbia

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1 December 1968  Family Dog Benefit      Avalon Ballroom      San Francisco

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2 December 1968

Bobby Neuwirth, serious artist, good songwriter, fellow traveler, intelligent, witty court jester. He wrote Mercedes Benz with Janis and Michael McClure.

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18 December 1968     One of the first, if not THE first rehearsal of The Kozmic Blues Band with Michael Bloomfield as music director.

Mike was a consummate musician, gifted and highly intelligent.

Al Kooper and Mike had an idea. They would make an album and hire Norman Rockwell to do the cover. I wish I would have thought of that, but I would have tried to come up with a story in the image, since that’s the way that Norman Rockwell works.  Al and Michael were just portrayed as a duo in the final cover. Rather static and not taking advantage of Rockwell’s brilliant narrative painting style. They should have tried for some kind of story.

Robert Crumb did our Cheap Thrills album cover, of course, but, then, for our other albums we could have had Mr. Rockwell do one, Al Hirschfeld (the line king) do another, and David Levine do a third. These guys were all for hire, just as I was/am.  They would have felt proud and connected to do a Big Brother cover, and we would have felt even more proud and connected to be associated with such great artists.

Well, maybe next time.  Anyway, I loved working with Michael at those early Kozmic Blues Band rehearsals.In fact, when I did the guitar part on Little Girl Blue at the Black Rock in New York, Michael was right by my side guiding me through the chord changes.

He was always helpful, lavish with praise and very supportive. Mike did the slide solo on One Good Man, but didn’t credit himself. Maybe because of contractual obligations elsewhere ?

When Dylan went electric at Newport, Michael Bloomfield was the Electric.

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In the 1950s, the Cedar Tavern in Manhattan was the artists’ watering hole. The drinks were cheap and it was close to the lofts and studios. Jackson Pollock was there. Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner, everybody from that abstract expressionist scene was there, really.

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I was in the Cedar Tavern one time and said  the word “divisive,” rhyming it with “dismissive,” and the most beautiful woman whirled around on her stool and said, “That’s the first time I ever heard any one pronounce that correctly.” (To this day, I’m not sure how to pronounce “divisive” and say it differently each time, but each time, you may be sure, I think of that beautiful woman.)

Le Roi Jones, as he was known then, and Diane Di Prima, probably my favorite beat poet, in The Cedar Tavern.

Carl Solomon, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg, typical denizens of The Cedar Tavern.

Mickey Ruskin founded Max’s Kansas City at 213 Park Avenue South (Seventeenth Street) which, despite the higher prices and the greater distance from the painters’ lofts, became the artists’ locale for the 1960s as The Cedar Tavern was for the 1950s. Big Brother and the Holding Company went often to Max’s and I practically lived there in the 1970s, because I had a loft quite close by on Twentieth Street, just down the block from Danny Fields. Mickey cashed my checks and put up with a lot of nonsense from me. I used to sit at the bar and draw the sculptures. Here is Mickey Ruskin (right) with John Chamberlain.

Dorothy Dean always sat by the door at Max’s. She was the guardian of the gates. She told me once or twice that she had danced The Tennessee Waltz in Tennessee with Tennessee Williams.  Too bad Tennessee Ernie Ford wasn’t involved, then they could have had a Tennessee to the fourth power.

Dorothy was once a fact checker at The New Yorker, a fact that impressed me greatly. She hung out with a lot of gay men, but she hated the term ‘fag hag,’ so called herself a ‘fruit fly.’

Dorothy was one of The Factory people and she was in several Warhol films. Here she is inspecting Norman Levine while being serenaded by Eric Anderson.

I liked the clientèle at Max’s, even the ones who weren’t as glorious as these characters. Andy Warhol held court in the back room of the restaurant. Tim Buckley was a great guy, just like his son in many ways.

Debbie Harry, already quite beautiful, was frequently our waitress and she was a good one.

Lenny Kaye did his time at Max’s. He had roughly the same relationship with Patti Smith that I had with Janis Joplin.

Lenny is soulful, very intelligent, writes books, teaches at Rutgers, I believe, and is just an all around good man.

Danny Fields, an “executive at Elektra,” as he is often billed, was a kind of  PR man for Max’s since it opened. Danny brought Jim Morrison to the restaurant, and he introduced Iggy Pop to David Bowie there. Here Danny is with Tammy Faye Starlight.

And somewhat earlier with Nico.

Many people at Max’s were quite well known and many were not, but all were interesting. It was quite a scene. Some of the people in this photograph are: David Bowie, Danny Fields (hey, Danny, where are you now?), Robert Mapplethorpe, Jim Morrison (peeing in a bottle), Lou Reed, Patti Smith. I’m there too. I think I see Lenny Kaye. We’re not posing. This is a typical Max’s scene out on the sidewalk on a summer night. David Bennett Cohen is there. We used to rush out on the sidewalk to see whose limousine was arriving.

It’s funny what you remember about a place. I’ll bet that everyone who went to Max’s remembers the little bowls of dried garbanzo beans (chick peas). Everyone ate them like candy while they talked.

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Very salty, so of course they needed washing down with something.

See you next week?

See you next week?

Sam Andrew    James Gurley   John Byrne Cooke

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