In a photo by Bob Cato, photographer Bob Seidemann is seen holding a band member’s baby while talking with Big Brother’s road manager, David Richards. ![]() From that point on, through most of ’66 and ’67, we spent a lot of time together. We ended up getting in a huge car accident that night, which is a whole other story, but it was definitely a bonding moment. ![]() We were talking, and I mentioned that I had some pharmaceutical LSD and asked him if he want to do some with me. “One night,” Getz says, “Bob was hanging around after I had finished cleaning up. “LSD was an integral part of the scene in San Francisco in those days,” Seidemann says matter-of-factly. More often than not, those laughs were lubricated by drugs. ‘Hap’ would show us his latest cartoons with all these cats on them, and we’d have a laugh.” Sometimes Bob would bring in a friend of his named ‘Hap’ Kliban, who was a cartoonist. “I was a painter before I joined Big Brother,” Getz explains, “teaching two classes at the San Francisco Art Institute. Secreted within this old-world, somewhat surreal, atmosphere was a table in the kitchen, where Getz and assorted friends from the art world hung out. Even though I didn’t play an instrument, I wound up in the middle of that whole crowd.”ĭrummer Dave Getz discussing a song’s arrangement I loved that milieu, so I sought out the musicians. “It was the scene, you know? Getting stoned, having a good time, and getting stoned again. “To be honest with you, I wasn’t all that interested in the music,” he says. I can’t imagine doing that now.”īig Brother’s style, though, be it jazz or proto-punk, was not what drew Seidemann to this loud new world. The energy of Big Brother was like, ‘Let’s play it as fast and as hard as we can.’ I used to break sticks, I used to break drum heads. “Punk rock didn’t exist in those days,” Dave Getz told me, “but we were close to a punk-rock band in some ways. “We were more like a jazz band at that point,” Gurley told Spörke.Ī fast and furious jazz band, that is. According to James Gurley, who was interviewed before his death in 2009 for Living With the Myth of Janis Joplin: The History of Big Brother & the Holding Company, by Michael Spörke, the band’s early style was highly improvisational, with sets lasting an hour or two, unconstrained by setlists or even the verse-chorus structure of songs. I was just hanging out.”ĭuring those crucible days, Big Brother was big on experimentation. James Gurley joined the band in November of 1965 and Dave Getz followed in March of 1966. In fact, by the time Joplin took the stage with the rest of Big Brother at the Avalon Ballroom on June 24, 1966, Albin and Andrew had been playing with other musicians as Big Brother and the Holding Company since September of the previous year. Today, most people who have heard of Big Brother and the Holding Company assume it started out as Janis Joplin’s backup band. We know this from the unofficial historical record, but also from the photographs taken by the band’s unofficial photographer, Bob Seidemann-many of his candid shots of Big Brother rehearsing in their warehouse on Golden Gate and Van Ness avenues in San Francisco are being published here for the very first time.īig Brother and the Holding Company, circa 1967 Not bad for a bunch of hippies stoned to the gills on LSD.įoremost among these hardworking musicians were the members of Big Brother and the Holding Company, which performed 135 concerts during 1967, occasionally grinding out two or three gigs in a single day. Jefferson Airplane’s workload was just about the same, while the Grateful Dead logged almost 120 shows. Take Country Joe and the Fish: In 1967, the quintet played roughly 140 gigs. In particular, the bands that gave the psychedelic scene its soundtrack knew what it meant to earn a buck. ![]() Turns out that some of those utopian flower children were actually working pretty darned hard at the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. Here’s the thing, though, that you might not know about the Summer of Love. ![]() “I heard that a band called Big Brother and the Holding Company was playing at a place on Fillmore, so I went.” To avoid taking this bummer of a trip, steer clear of images of doe-eyed young people dressed in their Goodwill finest, blowing soap bubbles and smoking doobies in Golden Pate Park while flashing the peace sign beneath beatific halos of flowers and feathers braided into their long, flowing hair. The trigger will lurk in the coverage of this alleged cultural watershed by news organizations, magazines, and websites tripping over themselves to celebrate the 50th anniversary of what was, in fact, a marketing gimmick designed to capitalize on a scene that was already dead. Millions of Baby Boomers have been seized by the same disorienting flashback, in which they’ll be hurtled through time and space to San Francisco in 1967, at the height of the Summer of Love.
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