Pop Culture Press

BIG BROTHER REMEMBERS

An Interview with PETER ALBIN of Big Brother and the Holding Company

By Frank Gutch

On August 16, 2007, PCP contributor Frank Gutch conducted an interview with Peter Albin, bassist, songwriter, and original vocalist of Big Brother and the Holding Company, the Bay Area group that launched Janis Joplin into rock superstardom after a performance at the Monterey Pop Festival forty years ago in June, 1967. Albin shares his memories of the San Francisco scene and the band’s short but incendiary career.

Pop Culture Press: In 1965, when you ran into [Big Brother guitarist] Sam Andrews and started piecing the band together with the original four guys, did you consider yourself a full-fledged band at that time?
Peter Albin: Yeah, we did. It was still in the formative stages, but we considered ourselves a band. We actually worked -- I don't think we worked more than once during '65. We were rehearsing all the time. That gig was at a place called The Dirty Bird on Clement Street, and we hadn't named ourselves Big Brother yet. It was still Blue Yard Hill. That was the first name. It lasted for only a very short time, but that was who we were when we played our first gig. The problem at that time was that our guitar player, who was playing rhythm -- and sometimes lead -- a fellow named Dave Espeson -- he was only eighteen years old, so we couldn't play a lot of bars. That's what we started to do, but it didn't last very long. We let him go and then Chet Helms, who started taking over the management of the group, brought in [guitarist] James Gurley.

PCP: The experiences with Helms were good?
PA: Oh, yeah. Definitely. Chet directed us in a pretty good way. He brought in not only James Gurley, but also helped to find Janis Joplin. Some of us had seen Janis perform before and had performed along with her at some gigs -- particularly myself, during the folk music era. So after we got James Gurley and started playing some at the Avalon Ballroom, which Chet Helms had started running -- we were the house band -- we were pretty comfortable, as far as jobs go. You can look at the posters, and we were working almost every weekend, either at the Avalon or at the others venues around town. Not at The Fillmore, because Chet and Bill Graham were competitors and Graham wouldn't hire us until we severed managerial relations with Helms. We continued to work at the Avalon Ballroom and for the Family Dog after we let Chet go in the summer of '66. Then, we started working for Bill Graham a lot.

PCP: Was that about the time you signed with Albert Grossman?
PA: No. It was way before that. It was right after we got Janis, which was in June of '66.

PCP: Why the split with Chet? Was he just too busy with other things?
PA: He was just too busy with the Avalon Ballroom and the Family Dog. Right after we got Janis, we went through a couple of other managers. After we split with Chet, we went to Chicago for a month, worked a place called Mother Blues, signed a record deal with Mainstream Records. When we came back (to SF), we started looking for management and got a fellow named Julius Carpin who was a friend of Ron Polte who was the manager for Quicksilver Messenger Service. Carpin lasted until after the Monterey Pop Festival, which was June of '67. After that, we started talking with Albert Grossman and he became our manager. We met Grossman at the Monterey Pop Festival. He was managing about three groups who were there.

PCP: While you were playing Mother Blues in Chicago, was it there that Mainstream approached you?
PA: They had actually approached us in San Francisco a couple of months before and nothing was really talked about. Supposedly, Chet Helms had talked a little bit to the owner of the label, but it turned him off or tried to make a deal that the guy didn't want. Anyway, when we got to Chicago, Mainstream's owner, Bob Shad, came by the club and talked to us. We talked to an attorney and signed a deal and started recording, actually, while we were in Chicago. There are about three or four tracks on the Mainstream record which were recorded at Universal Studios in Chicago. Then we recorded additional material at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles in December of that year, I think it was.

PCP: Were you happy with Mainstream?
PA: No, not at all. No support and their concept was, we'll continue to put out singles until something happens, then we'll put out an album.

PCP: That's why it took a year?
PA: Yeah. And it was only after the Monterey Pop Festival, when we started getting some notoriety and made the national press, that Bob Shad released the self-titled album. It came out, I think, in September or October of that year. We wanted to go back into the studio and re-record things. But you know, in retrospect, that record is one of my favorite records. It shows Janis in -- I want to say in a plaintive or a naïve state of mind and state of voice. She didn't press things, she wasn't drinking like crazy. She has kind of a folk blues voice on most of the songs. There are a couple of songs there that I sing lead on. It was a pretty good representation of the time. Before Janis joined the group, I did most of the singing.

PCP: When she first joined the group, she was quite a different person, then?
PA: Yeah, she was more of a folk blues type of singer. I mean, she could sing anything. I heard her sound just like Joan Baez one time. It fooled me, as a matter of fact. I thought someone was playing a Joan Baez record and I walk into another room and there she is with her guitar singing “Silver Dagger” or something like that.

PCP: She played guitar?
PA: Oh yeah. And she also played autoharp. And she played bass, occasionally, but only in rehearsal.

PCP: That's odd. You never see pictures of her with an instrument.
PA: There is one photo out there that has been printed that has her with a guitar. She never used a guitar on stage.

PCP: When she joined the band, was it organic folding her automatically into the group?
PA: Oh yeah, it was easy. It was obvious. We had auditioned a couple of other singers before Janis and we passed on them, though they were good. But when Janis came in, it was fairly obvious -- well, it was more than just obvious! When we finished playing a couple of songs with her, we said, ‘well, our next gig is Saturday at the Avalon Ballroom. Be there at 7:30.’ That was it. At that point, she was a member of the band. From the first, she fit right in.

PCP: Did it change the chemistry of the band?
PA: It changed the music of the band. We had been playing longer songs with a lot of improvisation, a lot of themes which were being explored which weren't blues themes....

PCP: So you were playing heavier psychedelic stuff?
PA: Yeah. You could say that. The songs would last from five to ten minutes. One song, as an example, was a version of “In the Hall of the Mountain King” from The Peer Gynt Suite by Edvard Grieg. That was one of our more popular ones. I think it's on record, some compilation we did or something, but there isn't much singing to it. It is basically just instrumental.

PCP: Well, you did the Mainstream album. I assume that most of those tracks were originals, right?
PA: No. A lot of them were folk songs or spiritual. Like “Down On Me” and “Blind Man” were songs we'd gotten from the Alan Lomax collection ... Songs of America, I think it was called. Some of the others were our own songs. “Bye Bye Baby” was written by Powell St. John, who was a friend of Janis's [one of the folks who came out to the Bay Area from Austin, Texas, alongside Helms and Joplin. Wrote and played with the Elevators and Mother Earth, too – ed.].

PCP: Did you sign with Columbia before the Mainstream album was released?
PA: No. After that album was released -- and like I said, we didn't really want that album released. We wanted to go back into the studio and re-record because Shad's concept of recording was you work up to the twelfth take and you don't go beyond that because that would be the thirteenth take and it would be unlucky. So you kept everything up to the thirteenth take and then try to work with those recordings. here was this song called “Light Is Faster Than Sound,” which a lot of people liked but we didn't particularly care for. When it was recorded, we sped the song up. It is obvious that the tempo races during certain parts of the song, so we wanted to go back, but he said ‘no, we'll just keep it that way.’ He was in full control. We had no control over it. And we played basically live in the studio. There was some baffling, but the only parts that were re-recorded or overdubbed was Janis's voice.

PCP: Did you use Mother Blues as a place to rehearse before going into the studio?
PA: Kind of. We were playing three sets a night there, so we kind of fine tuned some of the songs. It was kind of a rehearsal, but we worked five nights a week.

PCP: Did you go back to Chicago as Big Brother?
PA: Yeah. At Mother Blues, maybe there were twenty people a night, at best.

PCP: Sounds like a bad night at The Matrix.
PA: It was even worse than The Matrix! People thought we were crazy -- crazy long-haired freaks from San Francisco. We weren't blues musicians and that was what was happening in that part of the town -- in Old Town -- and Welch Street had a couple of famous blues clubs and even though it was called Mother Blues, we were definitely not a blues band. People would just shake their heads and say, those San Francisco weirdos, you know, and walk up the street to Big John's and see Howlin' Wolf or Muddy Waters. They could have cared less about us, even with the white chick who would become the best white female blues vocalist ever, you know.

PCP: Did people recognize that at the time?
PA: No, not at all.

PCP: So people came in and just made a snap judgment?
PA: Sometimes they left. (laughs)

PCP: That must have been disconcerting.
PA: (still laughing) It was, yeah.

PCP: So you go back to San Francisco, you hook up with Albert Grossman.
PA: After the Monterey Pop Festival, yeah, we get hooked up with him. And again, it was because there was a lot of national press. Albert didn't want to handle this local freak rock band. He saw, I think, in Janis, a chance to get national exposure for not only herself but the band and, of course, to make money. That was the name of the game for Albert Grossman. He didn't run a nonprofit agency. Let's put it that way.

PCP: The difference between Columbia and Mainstream was ... everything?
PA: Yeah, because we had a lot more control over our recording at Columbia. The deal that was made, and of course Grossman had a lot to do with it, was that (Columbia) would pay out $200,000 to Mainstream as a buyout, and 50% of that was going to come from our first royalties. A hundred thousand of those dollars was our money and not Columbia's. So the basic deal was signed and we headed into a studio and tried to record. And we tried to re-record some of the things as well. One of the songs which should have gone on for a longer time because we did it that way onstage was a song called “Coo Coo.” It was recorded and released by Mainstream, so we re-wrote it and called it “Oh, Sweet Mary.” It features me on guitar playing a solo and it's a little bit longer. It does what it was supposed to do which was get it to a feverish pitch with crazy guitar playing. Anyway, that was done in New York and Los Angeles during, I want to say, the early spring of '68.

PCP: So when the album was released, did you expect it to be a smash, right out of the box?
PA: You know, that's a good question. I don't know what I was expecting. But I do know, and I have proof of it, that Columbia really did a great job advertising Cheap Thrills. It might have even been too much, but it did sell well, it was on the Billboard charts almost immediately and went to #1 real quickly and stayed there for about six or seven weeks. I think what replaced us was either Jimi Hendrix or Iron Butterfly.

PCP: After the album was released, was there a big upswing in gigs?
PA: Sure, but we were actually working quite a bit before it was released. Because of Grossman, really. Right around the early part of the spring of '68, the band started working a lot of national tours and East Coast tours, which we hadn't done before. The only thing we had done east of California was the Mother Blues gig in Chicago.

PCP: Did you play up and down the West Coast before that?
PA: We had to play up and down the West Coast for a long time. And we thought we were more well known than we actually were. So when the press came out and talked about Janis after the Monterey Pop Festival, then we started working not only on the West Coast, but in the Midwest and on the East Coast. And that's where Grossman really helped us. He had his own agency, basically. Danny Weiner worked in his office as an agent. Danny Weiner is now head of Monterey Peninsula Artists. He's been doing that for years. He's a very talented agent. We went with Famous and a couple of other agencies. We were working all the time.

PCP: Looking back over the years from '65 to the time that Janis went solo, what is your most vivid memory?
PA: Whenever I think of that time, I get a picture of the Avalon Ballroom. That was the place we spent most of our time playing at, so it's hung in my memory for many years: the drapery on the walls, the drapery on the ceiling, the sprung wooden floor, the four foot stage, and being able to play a couple of sets a night with two other bands. That was incredible. And of course my memories of the Avalon lead to the bands that we worked with: Bo Diddley, Jim Kweskin, The Rising Sons, all of the San Francisco bands -- Country Joe, the Airplane, the Dead -- a lot of upcoming bands who later became well known: Sparrow, who later became Steppenwolf....

PCP: Did the bands really support each other at that time?
PA: Yes. Definitely. There was a lot of camaraderie among the bands, particularly the ones in the Bay Area. Now, there were bands that came up from L.A. and like Texas -- I remember the 13th Floor Elevators coming up and playing the Avalon Ballroom several times. Canned Heat, who were mostly out of L.A. It almost felt like they were a San Francisco band. Captain Beefheart. We played with them a couple of times. The Youngbloods.

PCP: So when these bands came in, they immediately made friends with you guys?
PA: Pretty much so. The only band I remember coming in and really leaving a bad taste in the mouths of most people was a band called Love. Even though we loved their music, they were assholes. They were just jerkasses from L.A. They were about the only group I can say that about. They borrowed people's equipment. They blew one amplifier out and wouldn't fix it, wouldn't give them any money.

PCP: Your favorite band to work with?
PA: Well, I have a lot of memories of working with the Grateful Dead. They were very much old friends and we got along well with them. Looking back, I can see us smoking doobies with them or drinking cheap wine with Ron McKernan. That was fun.