Janis Joplin's Blog

Article of the Day:

Big Brother & the Holding Company....

Greg Shaw, Mojo Navigator, September 1966....

GS: Can you tell us about your recent visit to Chicago?....

Peter: Alright; after arriving at the airport, we drove down this immense freeway, which seemed to be just smokestacks and smog...

Janis: It’s a dirty town.....

Peter:...and all that kind of crap.....

Janis: A very dirty town.....

Peter: OK, yeah, it was filthy.....

Janis: There’s no air there.....

Peter: You know, you walk down the street and you can hardly see the sides of the buildings. Anyway, we drove to this place called Mother Blues, where we were going to play; it’s a kind of high class folk place...they used to have people like Judy Henske and Chad Mitchell.......

Janis:...and Bob Gibson – you know, it used to have a real adult folk music type audience, but they were losing money, so they decided to go folk-rock.....

Were you the first group they had?....

Peter: No, they had the Jefferson Airplane before us, and they got a good response, so they booked us – for four weeks. For about the first two weeks it was fairly good...some of the audience didn’t know who we were; they were just regulars who always used to go there. After ten o’clock, all the teenagers had to leave, because from eight until ten was for teenagers, and they didn’t serve drinks. At ten o’clock they started to serve drinks and the older crowd would come in, and like they’re white-collar drunks and all...a bad scene.....

Janis: Yeah, but we finally unearthed some hippies in Chicago, and they started coming...they were there for about the last week and a half.....

Peter: When they first heard us they didn’t understand the music, couldn’t dig it at all....hated it, in fact. Then, after a couple of times, they started to dig it. You see, what’s happening in Chicago is this; they have all the teenage nightclubs, the ones that open from about 7 til 11, in the suburbs. In the city itself, there’s a curfew, so teenage nightclubs aren’t too profitable...there are only about three on Wells Street, which is like a Broadway scene, and the rest of the places are like jazz, Dixieland, rock and roll, and a couple of semi-topless things. The rock’n’roll bands that were playing in these places were just like mimic bands – didn’t do any original material, though we heard about some groups, like The Shadows of Knight, the Little Boy Blues, and Saturday’s Children, who did play their own stuff.....

Janis: They’re really blues oriented in Chicago, you know–even the young bands don’t do any folk rock..none at all.....

So the white kids go to hear groups like the Shadows of Knight, and then move towards the blues....they start going to see the bluesmen?....

Peter: They’re too young....and there isn’t anywhere for them to go now. The place to go to used to be Big John’s on North Wells Street, where they used to have Muddy Waters, Otis Rush, Jimmy Cotton, Howlin' Wolf, and so on, but they closed it down. You had to be over 21 to get in, but it was about the only blues club in the Old Town area. The only other blues clubs are in the South Side, and like you just don’t go down there unless you have a spade friend with you. So the teenies stick mostly to the clubs in the suburbs – I didn’t get to any, but my cousin was in a Chicago group and he used to play at some of them....like the Pit and the Cellar, and they have good music for a low price.....

Has anyone tried to take Howl in Wolf and Otis Rush and put them into the teenage clubs yet?....

Janis: Not that I know of.....

How were you promoted?....

Janis: Ugh.....

Peter: We weren’t....they just had one notice in the window. There were some reviews in the papers, but the reporters mainly talked about the night life of the place. The only review of the music wasn’t the most beautiful that I’ve seen.......

Janis: They said we were ugly.....

Peter: They said we were an ugly group; exciting but very ugly, and that the drummer had corny legs.....

David: Can’t argue with that.....

Janis: They said we weren’t as ugly as the Grateful Dead, but that we were still pretty ugly.....

Have the Dead been out there yet?....

Peter: No, they’ve only heard about them – but they’re going there soon. We were trying to discourage them....Pigpen was horrified – he doesn’t want to go.....

Janis: I don’t think they’ll go.....

Peter: Oh, they’re going – they’ve got the contracts.....

Janis: No shit? They are? I can’t see it coming off.....

Didn’t anybody there really listen to your music?....

Peter: Well, like I said, it was mostly white collar people who came because they always used to go there....we got lots of the "is it a boy or a girl?" sort of crap.....

Janis: Some people were pretty appreciative and kept coming back, and the last week was really surprising. One guy, called Darnell, came in every single night.....

Peter: Yeah, and at the end, he told us he’d come in to steal our material........

Janis: Yeah, a lot of people from local rock bands came in because we were doing original stuff and no-one in the area had heard material like it before.....

Peter: There was a dancefloor there, but the teenagers wouldn’t dance or hoot or holler or cheer or anything....they just sat back and clapped.....

James: Nobody gets stoned – it was like they were watching television or something thing.....

Janis: Yeah – they don’t get stoned. Nobody was having any fun, man, they were all just drunk. Strange town....it’s really the Mid West.....

What about the recording you did for Mainstream?....

Peter: Yes, we recorded four tracks at this session, two of which are going to come out as a single on October 10th. We don’t know which’ll be the A side, but the songs are ‘All is Loneliness’, a Moondog song, and ‘Blind Man’, which is folk-rock.....

How did Big Brother start? What’s the history behind the group?....

Peter: Well, let’s see; we started at 1090 Page Street (a club in San Francisco) during one of their jam-session kind of evenings. We started out with a guy called Paul Beck, who’s now in Chicago, who got the group together with Sam, a guy called Dave, Chuck Jones, and me. Paul played harmonica and he was ok, but his songs weren’t very good. Anyway, he went when we got our new manager, Chet Helms, and we got rid of Dave what-d'ya-ma-callim – I can’t even remember his last name – on lead guitar because he was too young, and the drummer, Chuck Jones.....

David: Jim started in November (1965), I started in March, and Janis came in June.....

Janis: I was a blues singer before that, a folk-singer, folk blues singer.... and Jim hadn’t played an electric guitar until last December.....

What do you think of the local scene? Do you prefer the Avalon or Fillmore, or the clubs?....

Janis: I like the Avalon for its acoustics.....

Peter: Yeah, I like the acoustics there, and the audiences too. We played the Fillmore about two months ago and the audience was pretty poor – there were a lot of people, but they weren’t very receptive........

Janis: They weren’t really into the music too much – they just walked around trying to pick each other up.....

I saw you at the Avalon on Friday, and that was good.....

Janis: Yeah, I enjoyed it a lot....it was really good to play there again. No shit, it was fun.....

What if the single doesn’t click, and the scene more or less stays static in San Francisco? Will you just continue playing and see what happens or what?....

Janis: Something’s gonna happen....it isn’t just going to carry on like this. Something’s gonna happen....either we are all going to go broke and split up, or else we’ll get rich and famous.....

Peter: If the record makes it, then the people’ll start digging what we’re doing, and then we’ll lay it on them thick, with some freak rock things. I dunno, it’s always good to drop new things on people.....

David: Thee are a lot of rock bands coming up all over the country, and they’re really good – and at the same time, the audience is getting bigger and bigger. If it keeps going at this rate, there’s no limit to how big it could become in this country.....

I read somewhere that there are about 2000 bands in the Bay area.....which of the bands round here do you find interesting?....

David: Let me think for a second...the Dead are good; they’re really very good. And Quicksilver too, for certain reasons – they turn me on really heavy sometimes...their songs are so nice.....

Sam, what’s your comment for the interview – you haven’t spoken yet? In last month’s with the Dead, Pigpen only made one remark throughout.....

Sam: What was that?....

He said "fuck it".....

Janis: He’s a good blues singer, but he has a terrible taste in wine.....

© Greg Shaw, 1966....