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Big Brother and the Holding Company
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Big Brother and the Holding Company is an American rock band that formed in San Francisco in 1965 as part of the same psychedelic music scene that produced the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service and Jefferson Airplane. They are best known as the band that featured Janis Joplin as their lead singer. Their 1968 album Cheap Thrills is considered one of the masterpieces of the psychedelic sound of San Francisco; it reached number one on the Billboard charts, and was ranked number 338 in Rolling Stone's the 500 greatest albums of all time.
Roots in San Francisco
Leader Peter Albin (a country-blues guitarist who had played with future founders of the Grateful Dead Jerry Garcia and Ron McKernan) met Sam Andrew, who had a jazz and classical background and had played rock & roll professionally.
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Big Brother and the Holding Company is an American rock band that formed in San Francisco in 1965 as part of the same psychedelic music scene that produced the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service and Jefferson Airplane. They are best known as the band that featured Janis Joplin as their lead singer. Their 1968 album Cheap Thrills is considered one of the masterpieces of the psychedelic sound of San Francisco; it reached number one on the Billboard charts, and was ranked number 338 in Rolling Stone's the 500 greatest albums of all time.
Band History
Roots in San Francisco
Leader Peter Albin (a country-blues guitarist who had played with future founders of the Grateful Dead Jerry Garcia and Ron McKernan) met Sam Andrew, who had a jazz and classical background and had played rock & roll professionally. Both started to play together in Peter's house, and then Sam asked him to form a band. They approached James Gurley, and the three began playing open jam sessions hosted by entrepreneur Chet Helms in 1965. Helms encouraged them to form a group, found them a drummer, and set up their first gig, at the Trips Festival in January of 1966. In the festival audience was art historian and amateur musician David Getz, who soon replaced the original drummer, Chuck Jones. Big Brother and the Holding Company became the house band at the Avalon Ballroom, playing a progressive style of instrumental rock. Feeling a need for a strong vocalist, Helms contacted Janis Joplin in Austin, Texas. She travelled to San Francisco and joined the band in June of 1966.
Janis Joplin
Joplin sang for the first time with Big Brother in 1966. Years later, guitarist Sam Andrew described the band's first impressions of her:
"We were the established rock and roll band. We were heavy. We were like: all right, out of three or four bands in this city, we are one of them. We're in the newspapers all the time. We're working out. We are doing this woman a favor to even let her come and sing with us. She came in and she was dressed like a little Texan. She didn't look like a hippie, she looked like my mother, who is also from Texas. She sang real well but it wasn't like, "Oh we're bowled over." It was probably more like, our sound was really loud. It was probably bowling her over. I am sure we didn't turn down enough for her. She wrote letters home about how exotic all of us were. The names of the bands. That kind of thing. In other words, we weren't flattened by her and she wasn't flattened by us. It was probably a pretty equal meeting. She was a real intelligent, Janis was, and she always rose to the occasion. She sang the songs. It wasn't like this moment of revelation like you would like it to be. Like in a movie or something. It wasn't like, "Oh my God, now we have gone to heaven. We have got Janis Joplin." I mean she was good but she had to learn how to do that. It took her about a year to really learn how to sing with an electric band."
It took a while for some of the band's followers to accept the new singer. Her music was completely different from that which Big Brother was playing at that time. Big Brother had a very experimental and non-conventional sound, but when Janis joined, they became more conventional musicians, their songs adopted a more conventional structure, and the band started to increase its popularity in the underground San Francisco psychedelic scene.
Mainstream Album
At the end of 1966, Big Brother signed a contract with Mainstream Records. They recorded all the songs for the album Big Brother & the Holding Company for Mainstream at a studio in Chicago in three days; December 12 through 14th. Mainstream was known for its jazz records, and Big Brother was the first rock band to work with them. This may have influenced the final result, since the album sounded very different from what the band expected: acoustic and folk instead heavy acid rock. The first album's singles were Coo Coo and The Last Time. Both failed to chart, and Mainstream decided not to release the album for almost a year (in September of 1967) due to the bands national success after the Monterey Pop Festival. The album debuted on Billboard charts on 9/2/67, peaking at #60. It stayed on the charts for a total of 30 weeks. Down On Me debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 chart on 8/31/68, peaking at #43. It stayed on the charts for 8 weeks, Coo Coo peaked #84 on the same chart, staying there for 3 weeks.
Monterey Pop Festival
The band's historic performance at the Monterey Pop Festival in June of 1967 attracted national and international attention. The band was scheduled to play on Saturday afternoon, with a set which included Down on Me, Combination of The Two, Harry, Roadblock and Ball and Chain. However, the band decided not to allow Pennebaker's film crew to film and record them without paying them, and ordered the crew to turn its cameras off. The festival promoters thought the band performance was great, and ask them to play again the next evening in order to record it on film, but they played only two songs: Combination of The Two and a short version of Ball and Chain (without James Gurley's guitar solo). "I remember being amazed that this white woman was singing like Bessie Smith," said Michelle Philips once. "I was astounded". They signed a contract with Columbia Records that November, and Albert Grossman became their manager.
National success
Having received national recognition after the Monterey Pop Festival, Columbia booked engagements for them around the country. A well-known band on the West coast (especially in San Francisco), their first east-coast concert was in New York City on February 17th, 1968 at the Anderson Theater. Columbia's marketing department featured Janis Joplin as the star of the band; before that time, the band's audience regarded James Gurley as of equal or more importance to their sound than Janis was. In New York the press criticized the band for often playing out of tune and with the amplifiers nearly at maximum volume. They described Janis as a level above the rest of the band, however Big Brother itself was increasing in popularity. They were the first band to play in the legendary Fillmore East, in New York City.
Cheap Thrills and split with Joplin
Their first album with Columbia was due to be recorded the spring and summer of 1968, and released later that year. It was eagerly anticipated, after the first album had been largely ignored. Initially planned as a live album, the band played two concerts at Grande Ballroom in Detroit, but the recorded results did not satisfy the producer John Simon or the manager Albert Grossman. The live album project was canceled, and Columbia decided to record most of the songs in studio. (Down on Me and Piece of My Heart, taken from the Grande Ballroom concerts, were later released as part of Joplin's live album In Concert in 1972.) However, it was difficult adapting their raw sound and unorthodox work habits with the realities of a professional studio. The progress was slow, and the pressure from Grossman, Columbia, and the press increased. The band also believed that John Simon shouldn’t be the producer, since he was a keyboard player and didn't understand guitar performance and recording; that is what the band believed they were, a guitar band. . The album was initially named "Sex, Dope and Cheap Thrills", but Columbia asked them to change it to just "Cheap Thrills". The cover was initially a picture of the band members naked in a hotel room bed, but the band didn't liked it, and what was originally meant to be the back cover by cartoonist Robert Crumb became the classic cover of the album, the back cover featuring a black & white picture of Janis Joplin. Ball and Chain is the only song on the album recorded entirely live, and even though the cover credits assert that the live material was recorded at Bill Graham's Fillmore Auditorium, it was actually taken from a concert in Winterland Ballroom in 1968; the same version that appears on the album Live at Winterland '68, released in 1998. The album was released in the summer of 1968, one year after their debut album, and reached number one on the Billboard charts in its eighth week in October. It held the number one spot for eight (nonconsecutive) weeks, and the single Piece of My Heart also became a huge hit. By the end of the year it was one of the most successful album of 1968, having sold nearly a million copies. Even though the album was released with only seven songs, the other eight songs which were not included were released on subsequent albums. Catch me Daddy and Farewell Song were among their most popular songs, and their original outtakes were released in the 3-cd set "Janis" in 1993. It's a Deal and Easy Once you Know How were released in Joplin's "Box of Pearls" in 1999. Flower in The Sun and Roadblock were released on the Cheap Thrills reissue cd as bonus tracks.
At the end of the summer of 1968, just after appearing at the Palace of Fine Arts Festival in San Francisco, Joplin announced that she was leaving Big Brother in the fall of that year. The official reason given was her desire to go solo and form a soul music band. Sam Andrew also left the band to join Janis in her new project. Janis played with Big Brother until December 1st, 1968, at a Family Dog Benefit concert in San Francisco. Twenty days later she and Sam played in Memphis for the first time with her new band, later called Kosmic Blues Band.
1969-1972
The band reformed in 1969 with nearly the same line-up (except Joplin): Albin, Andrew, Getz and Gurley were joined by Nick Gravenites (vocals), Dave Schallock (guitar) and Kathi McDonald (vocals). Be a Brother was released in 1970, and was the first album without Janis Joplin. James Gurley has grasped the bass while Peter Albin became de second guitar player, and Sam Andrew the leader. They relesead their last studio album, How Hard It Is, in 1971. The band remained with this lineup until 1972, whem they disbanded after which the band performed together only once in 15 years.
1987-present
The latest incarnation began in 1987, and has been touring part-time ever since with most of its original members, including Sam Andrew, Peter Albin, Dave Getz, and James Gurley. James left in 1996 because he didn't support his colleagues' idea to hire a female singer to replace Joplin. He was replaced in 1997 by Tom Finch. Big Brother no longer has a fixed lead singer; Michel Bastian, Lisa Battle, Halley DeVestern, Lisa Mills, Andra Mitrovich, Kacee Clanton, Sophia Ramos, Mary Bridget Davies, Chloe Lowery, Jane Myrenget and Cathy Richardson are among the singers that have played in concerts with them. Ben Nieves is the present guitar player along with Sam Andrew.. In 1999 the band released the album "Do What Your Love", with Lisa Battle as the lead singer. The album contain some new versions of classic tunes like Women is Loser and a few new songs. Hold Me, with Sophia Ramos as lead singer and Chad Quist as guitar player, was recorded live in Germany in 2005, and released in 2006. In 2008 they released the two-cd set The Lost Tapes, with songs recorded at concerts between 1966 and 1967 in San Francisco, and featuring Janis Joplin as lead singer. Some songs had already been unofficial releases, but there are 12 never-before-released songs..
Controversy
In 2007, following the Cheap Thrills induction to Grammy Hall of Fame, former guitar player James Gurley, described Big Brother as the most maligned band ever, since they never get appreciation for all the arrangements they did and all the engineering tricks he came up with. Gurley also believed that Clive Davis told Janis to left the band and record her songs with studio musicians, who could play better. In the documentary Nine Hundred Nights, Peter Albin said that the manager Albert Grossman told Janis to left Big Brother and form her own band, with studio musicians, in order to spend less money with record sessions. Sam Andrew, sai later that Janis left due to artistic and financial reasons: Janis usually asked the band to have some heyboard or horns at least on some songs, but they used to say "No! You are going to change the Big Brother sound"; the band was also doing the same songs a lot, tree times a day sometimes, then she started feeling trapped and the band was splitting the money in five equal ways, leaving she could have all the money and just pay some employees and have a new band.
Discography
External links
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