New York, New York
IN THE FIRST week of January I find a second-floor walk-up in North Beach. My pad-to-be is on Powell Street, on the west side of the block that houses Saints Peter and Paul Catholic Church, which presides grandly over Washington Square Park. The rent is $155 a month. It’s less than a ten-minute walk to the Committee Theater on Broadway, and handy to the Embarcadero Freeway for quick trips to Berkeley. I tell Signora Andoni, the rental agent, that I’ll move in at the end of the week.
How come you didn’t look in the Haight? Janis and the boys want to know, but they admit the Haight is changing. It’s overrun by runaways and would-be hippies and tour busses full of straight people who stop to gawk in front of the Grateful Dead’s house.
I have other reasons to prefer North Beach. I like the Italian grocery stores, full of olive oil and handmade pasta. On Columbus Avenue, a broad thoroughfare that separates Telegraph Hill from Russian Hill, I hear Chinese and Italian spoken within the same block. I like the lingering vibe of the Beats and the beatniks and the proximity to the Committee. I’m a beatnik, not a hippie, and settling here keeps me at a certain remove from the band. It preserves my independence.
Maybe this is what makes the band decide I’m not the right guy for them.
I’m dead asleep in my motel when Albert phones at midmorning. I had a late night, but he’s wide-awake on Eastern Time. He’s had a call from the band. “They don’t think it’s working,” he says. “Incompatible lifestyles,” is the complaint. This jolts me wide-awake. I have had no clue from anyone in Big Brother that they aren’t satisfied.
I tell Albert, “I’ll call you back.”
I phone every member of the band and reach four out of five, Janis and all the guys except James. “Meeting at the Warehouse,” I tell them. “Right now.” On the way across town I’m feeling betrayed and pissed off. If they’ve got a problem, how about talking to me before they call Albert?
The possibility of failure hasn’t crossed my mind. I might quit this job in six months if I find my own work to do, but I’m damned if I’ll lose it because my hair isn’t long enough. If they’ll just give me a chance, I’ll be the best damn road manager anybody ever saw. I like it here. What’s more, I like them. They’re interesting. In my wildest dreams, I couldn’t have come up with five more divergent personalities to stick in a rock-and-roll band, and yet they are truly a band. They’re united in the music and they believe in what they’re doing.
It occurs to me, as I park the car, that maybe Janis is behind the effort to get rid of me. What if the problem, at least on her part, is my refusal to yield to her sexual advances? Did she instigate the call to Albert as her way of getting back at me for not going to bed with her?
When we’re gathered in the rehearsal loft, seated around the table by the window, I ask them what’s the problem, as if I haven’t a clue. Well, you don’t hang out with us, Peter says. This is a family, and you don’t feel like one of the family, Janis says with a petulant edge.
This I can deal with. The band is put out because I didn’t rent an apartment in the Haight and outfit myself from the hippie clothing stores and I don’t drop by their pads on our days off to hang out and smoke dope. I respond with the short speech I rehearsed in my head on the way across town: If you want some long-haired fan to hang out day and night, to smoke dope with you, to fetch cigarettes and carry your guitars, we can hire a grateful hippie to do that for fifty bucks a week. But I’ve got a job to do.
“Well, what exactly is your job?” The question comes from Dave Getz, and I realize that they truly don’t know. They know I drive the rent-a-car and handle the plane tickets and register them at the motels, because they see all that. But they don’t see the rest of it, the dozens of phone calls on our days off, and what I do while they’re onstage. So I tell them about booking the travel and talking with the promoters beforehand, and I remind them about the gig in the Valley where the third roll of tickets was sold under the counter. My job is to spot that kind of shit, I tell them. I get you to the gig on time, I handle the logistics, I make sure you get paid. I keep the promoter happy. I make sure you don’t get ripped off. I try to make it possible for you to think about nothing but the music. While you’re onstage, I’m checking the box office and the ticket takers. I check the sound. I talk to the soundman if it needs adjusting. Then I check the doors again.
I’m fighting to save my new job and my new life, but I know it can’t sound like fighting or begging. I like getting stoned and hanging out as much as you do, I tell them. But when I’m stoned I can’t do the job. I lose my motivation. I remind them that I was a bluegrass musician for six years and made two record albums before Big Brother was formed. I loved the life of a beatnik bluegrass picker, but I gave it up to work for you, I tell them. With you, my job is to be the straight guy who keeps it all together.
I’m just a little older than them and I make it sound like more. By implication, I’m beyond being an adoring fan and hangout partner. I don’t tell them how blown away I am by their music and the whole San Francisco trip, how much I like the band and being on the road.
Janis reveals no hint of having a stake in the outcome beyond the concerns that she and the guys have expressed. It’s all about their gig and my gig, and what’s best for the band. She gives no sign of a hidden agenda.
They hear me out and they don’t argue. Fine, they say. We’ll try it a little longer.
“You were very distant. The impression, mine and the band’s, especially when you first came on board, you know: patrician, East Coaster, snobbish, removed, no fun. . . . As time went on, everybody saw that you had a good sense of humor, weren’t judgmental, especially, were interested in keeping things together on the road, which was what your job was. We all could let our jobs slide a little bit. There was a lot of sloppiness in the musicians’ job, a lot of sloppiness in my job, we could get away with a lot. You really couldn’t get away with very much in having to keep track of seven or eight or ten people like that. That describes you to an extent, especially when you were working. You gotta get these eight freaks out of there.”
Mark Braunstein
I have survived the first crisis. And, as it turns out, the only one that ever threatens my employment. I’ve done it by trusting my instincts about how to handle it, which encourages me to believe that maybe I really am cut out for this job. Back at the motel, I call Albert and tell him everything is under control. I try to sound cool about it, but my relief is my high for the day, and it’s probably audible through the cross-country phone line.
—
I PUT A foam mattress on the bedroom floor at 1856 Powell Street. I build some bookshelves out of bricks and planks; I buy a few pieces of furniture at secondhand stores. I spend a week’s pay on a big Scandinavian rug, all dark greens and blues. I buy a compact KLH FM-stereo record player that packs up into a suitcase, and my new home is open for business.
I go down to Monterey and buy back the white Volvo sedan I sold to an architect there two years before. I shipped the car back from Europe in ’62 and later drove it to California in pursuit of the Wrong Girl. I worked for the Monterey architect as a carpenter while waiting in vain for her to realize I was the love of her life. Having the Volvo back now connects my past to the future. It pleases me to think that by selling the car to the architect when I bailed out of that futile quest I was stashing it, keeping it in reserve against my eventual return to the coast. Now I’m back. I’ve got wheels. I’m a California resident. I’m ready for the next summer of love.
With the road-managing crisis behind us, Janis and the boys accept me more fully, and there appear to be no lingering concerns. Janis, in particular, takes a new interest in me. This isn’t renewed flirting to see if she can lure me into bed. She has learned that the Wrong Girl I was pursuing a couple of years ago in Carmel is a girl named Kim whom Janis knows from Haight Street, where Kim’s San Francisco lover, Peggy Caserta, runs a hip clothing store called Mnasidika. This discovery intrigues Janis, because her perception of me up to this point hasn’t included the possibility that I could ever be with a girl like Kim. This seems to open the door for more curiosity and a new level of friendship.
In Janis’s talk about Peggy and Kim, I get an inkling that there may have been something between Janis and Peggy. There’s a gleam in her eye when she talks about Kim too. Maybe . . . ? Janis doesn’t say anything explicit, but in our conversations among the band she has revealed in a matter-of-fact way that she has had affairs with women. She has also made it plain that her active interest is focused on men. On the road, I haven’t seen her light up over a woman the way she lights up nightly about the wealth of what she likes to call male “talent” in the audience.
At the heart of Janis’s justification for doing whatever feels good, and polite behavior be damned, is her belief that our parents lied to us about pretty much everything and so we have to decide for ourselves what’s right and what’s wrong. This isn’t something she has picked up in San Francisco. It comes from personal conviction that she reveals when she talks about growing up in Texas. As a teenager in Port Arthur in the fifties, she felt the imposition of a concept of propriety that she found stifling. Girls behave a certain way. Nice girls don’t get drunk. Nice girls don’t have sex. Sex is dangerous. The social strictures included a Southern attitude about Negroes that Janis decided was wrong even before she experienced life beyond her hometown. From her Kerouacian rambles in the early sixties, and all the more since she was accepted by Big Brother and San Francisco itself, she has looked back on the guidelines that were laid down in her youth and she feels that she was deceived. “They lied to us about dope, they lied to us about black people, they lied to us about sex, man, they lied to us about everything,” more or less sums it up. Taking drugs, getting drunk, exploring bisexuality and adopting black music as her own is Janis’s natural reaction.
In the winter of 1965–1966, when Big Brother was formed, and later, when Chet Helms brought Janis up from Texas to join the band, I was just 120 miles away, in Carmel. I visited the city with Kim. I even went to the Avalon and the Fillmore once or twice. If I had connected to the burgeoning San Francisco scene back then, everything might have turned out differently. But then I might have missed connecting to Pennebaker and Monterey and I wouldn’t be here now, road-managing Big Brother.
Maybe everything really does happen the way it’s supposed to.
Our worlds overlap again when I learn that Janis has another connection to my Cambridge companions through the Cabale coffeehouse in Berkeley, which was founded by Debbie Green, a girl I’ve known since we were both in the Putney School, a progressive coed boarding school in Vermont. Debbie was the most beautiful girl in my class. Maybe in the whole school. She was one of the handful of students who got in early on the folk revival and introduced her fellow students, including me, to the folk repertoire. Her guitar playing and her songs were part of my motivation to get a guitar, while I was still at Putney, and to begin learning those songs.
Like me, Debbie was Boston bound after our Putney graduation. She met Joan Baez on opening day at Boston University. Before long they both dropped out and migrated to the nascent folk music scene in Cambridge. It was Debbie who taught Joan to play the guitar beyond the simple strums she already knew, and it was from Debbie that Joan appropriated much of her early repertoire. By the time of Janis’s first trip to the Bay Area, Debbie had moved to California, and with two partners she established the Cabale as Berkeley’s equivalent to the Club 47.
Janis heard about the Cabale through the grapevine and called up to ask if she could audition. It was Debbie who received Janis when she came by on the appointed afternoon, driving a Vespa motor scooter. Janis strummed the guitar and sang an earthy blues; it took only that much to impress Debbie, who is not easily impressed. Hearing Janis sing blew her away. “Oh, man!” she said. “We’ve got to find you a band! Of course you can play here, but first we’ve got to find you a band.” When Janis left the Cabale that afternoon, she fired up her Vespa, pulled out into the street, and was hit by a car. Debbie ran out to help her, only to find Janis laughing hysterically. Somehow the driver of the car doesn’t figure in the rest of the story. Janis was limping slightly, still laughing, only a little the worse for wear, but she agreed to let Debbie take her to an emergency room to get checked out. Debbie thought having a man along might make it go easier, so she called her boyfriend at the time, who was none other than Bob Neuwirth. The three of them spent hours in the ER waiting room, and they got along like old friends. Eventually a doctor examined Janis, told her she had a sprained ankle, wrapped it in an Ace bandage, and sent her on her way.
Debbie tried to follow up on the idea of getting Janis booked into the Cabale with a backup band, but Janis was hard to reach by phone, and her rambles took her away from San Francisco before the Cabale could be added to her list of solo venues.
Learning of Janis’s connections to Kim and the Committee and Cambridge and Berkeley makes me wonder that we haven’t met long before now.
On January 19, 1968, which is Janis’s twenty-fifth birthday, Big Brother is playing in Kaleidoscope, a club in L.A. When we arrive that evening, we find that the club’s manager has arranged three dozen roses on the stage. There are two dozen more in the dressing room, which I ordered, from the band, a dozen from friends in San Francisco, and another dozen from Peter Tork, of the Monkees. Janis fairly swoons. Conspiring with the boys in Big Brother, I have arranged to have champagne and cake appear after the show. Janis clasps her hands to her heart and sighs and smiles and laughs, and drinks champagne from the bottle.
During Big Brother’s stand at Kaleidoscope, Janis doesn’t make a brazen play for any of the good-looking guys in the audience, or even comment on the wealth of available talent. Her usual style of coming on to members of the opposite sex is like a man’s in a way that vanishingly few women will risk. In a club or bar her eyes scan the room. If she spots a likely prospect she’ll lean closer to me or one of the boys and say, with a conspiratorial leer, “Oh, my God, I think I’m in love.” Backstage at a gig, she’ll show up in the band’s dressing room all atwitter and report on her sightings just as a guy would report to his partners in lechery, but this is a girl who talks about the pretty boys she’s seen, and she’s reporting to us. In displaying her interest in the opposite sex, as in her style of hanging out among friends in bars and pool halls and pretty much anywhere she’s comfortable, Janis is one of the guys. Which makes her behavior at Kaleidoscope all the more out of character.
After the gig, Janis doesn’t fly back to San Francisco with the rest of us. When she does come home, she takes to her bed for more than a week with what she says is a case of the flu. We have to cancel three days at the Fillmore, which costs Big Brother $8,000.
The reason for Janis’s restraint at Kaleidoscope was that she was pregnant at the time and had made plans to go to Mexico following the gig, for an abortion. Janis told her roommate, Linda Gravenites, that the culprit was the drummer from Blue Cheer, a San Francisco psychedelic blues-rock band. The drummer is one of Janis’s pretty boys. She goes for pretty boys or mountain men—hunky guys who emerge from the interior fastnesses of Marin and Sonoma counties in flannel shirts and work boots—and not much in between.
At the time, I take Janis’s flu at face value.
While she convalesces, during the break from touring, I follow the evening news and two stories that foreshadow great changes to come, both in domestic politics and in the war in Vietnam. On January 30, New York senator Robert F. Kennedy announces that “under no conceivable circumstances” will he follow Oregon senator Eugene McCarthy in challenging President Johnson for the Democratic nomination. McCarthy announced his candidacy back in November, on the day I arrived in San Francisco to take up the job with Big Brother. His focus is to oppose Johnson’s Vietnam policy and to urge the United States to find a way to end the conflict.
The second story will dominate the news for weeks. On the same day as Kennedy’s announcement, in Vietnam, the National Liberation Front attacks South Vietnamese units in the country’s northernmost province, along the border with North Vietnam, and in the Central Highlands. The next morning, they attack Saigon and more than thirty provincial capitals. In the days that follow, the attacks include American bases and over a hundred cities and towns across South Vietnam. Launched on the lunar new year, which the Vietnamese call Tet, the coordinated attacks become known as the Tet Offensive.
For much of 1967, my political awareness was quiescent. The starry-eyed high of the Summer of Love made it easy to believe, briefly, the promise of a new day to come. New York’s Easter Be-In in Central Park, held in response to San Francisco’s January gathering, followed by the Monterey Pop Festival and the CRVB’s California tour and—best of all—finding myself, at the year’s end, road manager for Big Brother and the Holding Company, encouraged in me a willful naïveté. During a year in which our troop strength in Vietnam increased by another ninety thousand, I turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to the war and, like many of my contemporaries, embraced a hope that music, love, and flowers could influence American politics and perhaps the world.
Before long Janis is up and around and we’re off for another gig in L.A., at the Cheetah this time, and one in San Diego. On our first few plane trips, I tried to keep the band together as we passed through the San Francisco airport to the departure gate, but herding musicians is like trying to herd cats. Now I just tell them the gate number and what time to be there (with a safety margin added), and they show up, which encourages me to believe that musicians can be trained to behave like grown-ups.
Not a moment too soon. When we return to San Francisco from San Diego we have a few days to say good-bye to friends and get serious about packing for two months away from home. The great adventure is at hand: It’s time for Big Brother’s East Coast debut.
FEB. 16, 1968: Palestra, Philadelphia
FEB. 17: Anderson Theater, NYC
FEB. 22–24: Psychedelic Supermarket, Boston
FEB. 25: The Reflectory, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence*
The first thing Janis and the boys notice about New York, even before we’re out of the airport, is that people here don’t make eye contact. In California, people look you in the eye. Often they’ll nod or smile in the street. Total strangers. Pretty girls acknowledge a guy’s appreciative glance, even if they’re with their boyfriends. Pretty girls in New York may risk giving a bunch of long-haired California rockers a fleeting smile, but the ordinary man and woman go on their way heads down against the February winds. I find the avoidance of eye contact disturbing, and I realize that I’m looking at my hometown like an outsider, which raises my spirits.
While we tour the eastern states, New York will be our home base. From here we will sally forth to show the San Francisco colors to the coastal metropolises and the unsuspecting hinterland. Dave Richards and Mark Braunstein have flown Big Brother’s stage equipment east. They will rent a truck to drive it from gig to gig.
The band’s lodgings in New York are at the Chelsea Hotel on West 23rd Street, renowned for the artistic pursuits of its short- and long-term residents and for being the place where Dylan Thomas died. Next door, and accessible through a door in the Chelsea’s lobby, is a restaurant and bar called El Quijote. The cuisine is Spanish, of a sort, but it is the bar that catches Janis’s immediate attention. She is delighted that she can enter El Quijote without having to brave the winter weather, and she has her first drink at the bar before she sets foot in her first room at the Chelsea.
I have decided to stay at my mother’s Upper East Side apartment, which I justify by pointing out how much money it will save the band, but once again I am removing myself from the off-hours action and any whimsical demands the band might put on me at odd times of the day and night. At 325 East 72nd Street, I can cook my own breakfast. As a practical matter, I can make phone calls without being subject to the notorious delays occasioned by the Chelsea’s switchboard. All the same, it is a decision I will later regret. A writer of my generation, especially one born in New York, should have some stories to tell about the Chelsea Hotel. I missed a lot by not staying in the Chelsea.
On our first evening in town, Albert takes us all to Max’s Kansas City. We step in the door, and the song on the background music is Country Joe McDonald singing “Janis,” which he wrote for guess who. The cosmic DJ is on the job.
Like a Broadway show, Big Brother opens out of town, in Philadelphia. The following night, the band’s New York debut is underwhelming. It takes place in the Anderson Theater on Second Avenue, in the East Village. The neighborhood is dicey, the theater is kind of a dump, and the promoter is a sleazeball. If Janis and the boys were expecting gleaming limos coming and going and the eyes of the city focused on them, they’re disappointed, but they’re blown away to find that they’ve got top billing above B. B. King, who is second on the bill. The opening act is a band nobody’s heard of called the Aluminum Dream.
It’s an easy gig for me. Three thousand dollars flat, no percentage to figure, not much different, in terms of Big Brother’s income, from most of the shows in California. If it were a percentage gig, I wouldn’t trust the promoter, a dodgy type named Tony, as far as I could throw him. I would spend the whole evening checking the tickets, watching the door, watching the box office, trying to figure out how he was ripping us off.
As hard as it is to believe, New York City has no established venue for rock-and-roll shows. There’s no local equivalent for the Fillmore or the Avalon, no promoter who regularly books the top acts in pop music.
The Anderson gig is on a Saturday. We have to wait for Monday’s papers to read the reviews. The only one that matters is in the New York Times, and it’s enough to warm the hearts of a bunch of San Francisco hippies shivering in the New York winter.
Robert Shelton is New York’s Ralph Gleason, responsible for bringing Joan Baez and Bob Dylan into the music pages of the Times. Like Gleason, Shelton has graduated to rock music, and like Gleason he unlimbers the superlatives when he hears Janis. “Janis Joplin Is Climbing Fast in the Heady Rock Firmament,” proclaims the headline on Shelton’s review. He judges Janis “as remarkable a new pop-music talent as has surfaced in years.” He calls her “sparky, spunky,” and compares her to Aretha and Erma Franklin. “But comparisons wane,” Shelton writes, “for there are few voices of such power, flexibility and virtuosity in pop music anywhere. Occasionally, Miss Joplin appeared to be hitting two harmonizing notes.” Shelton waxes poetic as he describes Janis’s vocal dynamics: “Her voice shouted with ecstasy or anger one minute, trailed off into coquettish curlicues the next. It glided from soprano highs to chesty alto lows.”
Janis is in seventh heaven. Nor are the boys disappointed. All too often, print reviews, including those from Monterey, have focused mostly on Janis and mentioned the rest of the band in passing, if at all. Shelton, however, singles out the boys for special praise. The band, he says, “is inventive enough to be worthy of its star. Outstanding were its vocal style, which uses the smear and the yelp to startling effect, and arrangements that embroidered ‘The Cuckoo’ with modernistic lace and framed ‘Summertime’ with a pale metallic fugue.”*
With Shelton’s review clipped from several copies of the Monday Times, we grab a couple of cabs and head uptown to the Black Rock, Columbia’s headquarters on Sixth Avenue at 52nd Street, to sign Big Brother’s recording contract. Albert closed the deal in November, within weeks of signing Big Brother. Now, in the imposing building that says “CBS” on it in very big letters, in corporate offices twenty-six floors above the streets of New York, Janis and the boys pen their signatures on the contract and it becomes real for them. They are Columbia recording artists.
The advance Albert has negotiated for Big Brother is big news. The Airplane, the Dead, and Country Joe have signed earlier with RCA, Warner Brothers, and Vanguard, respectively, for advances, considered precedent-setting at the time, ranging from $25,000 to $50,000. For Big Brother and the Holding Company, Columbia has shelled out $150,000—of which the band will see not a penny, because it all goes to Bobby Shad to extricate them from their contract with Mainstream, together with an additional $100,000 that will come out of the band’s earnings. Shad demanded $250,000 to let Big Brother out of the contract and he is sitting in the catbird seat. Columbia and Big Brother have no choice but to swallow their pride and pay him. Janis and the boys are not happy that Shad has enriched himself at the band’s expense, but they’re free of Mainstream at last.
Following the signing, Columbia throws a press reception for the band at a restaurant on 57th Street, presided over by president Clive Davis. There’s an open bar and lavish hors d’oeuvres. The minions of the Fourth Estate buzz around Janis like flies on honey, ignoring the boys. They feel left out, but 57th Street is a lot flashier than lower Second Avenue and they sense that the next phase of their career is truly launched.
—
(Promotional information provided by the band members, released to the press by Albert B. Grossman Management.)
MEET
BIG BROTHER AND THE HOLDING COMPANY
Janis Joplin
BORN: January 19, 1943
BIRTH SIGN: Capricorn
PLACE OF BIRTH: Port Arthur, Texas
INSTRUMENTS: Vocals, percussion
BACKGROUND: Dropped in and out of four colleges. Worked intermittently and collected unemployment. Sang country music and blues with an Austin, Texas, bluegrass band. Sang blues in folk clubs and bars in San Francisco. Joined Big Brother via Chet Helms, old friend, past manager of Big Brother and now the head of Family Dog.
MUSICAL INFLUENCES: Bessie Smith and Otis Redding (The King).
I’M A FAN OF: Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, Moby Grape, Electric Flag, Bob Dylan, Mother Earth, Tina Turner, Jimi Hendrix, Cream, Beatles, Quicksilver, the Dead.
FUTURE: Buy a bar and settle down.
Sam Andrew
BORN: December 18, 1941
BIRTH SIGN: Sagittarius
PLACE OF BIRTH: Taft, California
BACKGROUND: Started playing guitar at 14. Played in rock and roll bands until 18. Began classical guitar in 1962. Played tenor sax in 1963 in a rock and roll band. Played alto sax in a military band. Played jazz guitar at the Juke Box on Haight Street. Came with Big Brother in the summer of 1965.
MAJOR MUSICAL INFLUENCES: Chuck Berry, Chet Atkins, Webb Pierce, Andres Segovia, King Curtis, B. B. King, Albert Collins and Albert King.
I’M A FAN OF: Janis Joplin, Peter Albin, Dave Getz, James Gurley, Bob Mosley, Paul Butterfield, Mike Bloomfield and Jorma Kaukonen.
FUTURE: ?
James Martin Gurley
BIRTH SIGN: Capricorn
PLACE OF BIRTH: Detroit, Michigan
INSTRUMENTS: Guitar and Kelp horn
BACKGROUND AND INFLUENCES: Been bumming around, picking up on Coleman, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Broonzy, Bach, Vivaldi, Lord Buckley, Moondog, Big Sur, Mexico, Zen, Zap, Zonk, the usual.
LIKES: Currently dig all those doing their thing well.
FUTURE: Someday I hope to regain consciousness.
Peter S. Albin
BORN: June 6, 1944
BIRTH SIGN: Gemini
PLACE OF BIRTH: San Francisco
BACKGROUND: Got started in folk music, played bluegrass, old timey music and country blues. Got involved in electric blues and rock and roll during college. Went with Big Brother and the Holding Company in 1965.
MAJOR INFLUENCES: B. B. King, John Lee Hooker, Charlie Poole, Chuck Berry, Flatt and Scruggs, Moondog, Lenny Bruce, Captain Zero, Ali Akbar Khan, Otis Redding, Rolling Stones, Spike Jones, Leonard Bernstein, early Brubeck, Bobby Breen and Charley Mingus.
I’M A FAN OF: Otis Redding, Steve Miller Blues Band, John Chambers, Beatles, B. B. King, Dionne Warwick, Siegel-Schwall, Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Aretha Franklin and Pat Kilroy.
FUTURE: To continue moving people with music and musical entertainment. Producing and promoting.
David Getz
BORN: Yes
AGE: 28
INSTRUMENTS: Drums, piano, vocal
BACKGROUND: Started playing drums and drawing pictures at age 14. Became freak with no context. Lived in Brooklyn. Started art school (Cooper Union) at 17. Played with jazz groups, but mostly schlock weekend gigs for bread. Mostly painted. Went to Europe in 1959 with Dixieland band. Moved to San Francisco in 1960. Went to Art Institute. Didn’t play drums too much. Got B.F.A., M.F.A., and Fulbright Fellowship. Lived in Poland for one year. Stopped painting, started playing drums with numerous Polish jazz groups. Returned to San Francisco in 1965. Became art teacher and 2nd cook. Painted. Frustrated drummer. Met Peter Albin. Heard Big Brother and had to be the drummer again.
MUSICAL INFLUENCES: Roy Haynes, Max Roach, and lots of jazz drummers. Indian drummers (Sivarman). Rhythm and blues and soul musicians. Everything I’ve ever heard.