The recent release of Live At The Carousel Ballroom 1968 from Big Brother And The Holding Company is notable for (at least) two reasons.
First, read the cover – right up at the very top where it says Bear’s Sonic Journals Presents. “Bear” would be the late Owsley “Bear” Stanley, folks – sonic genius, amongst many other things – and one can only hope that there’s more to be shared where these tapes came from. (Do your part to support the Stanley family’s effort to restore Bear’s archives: check out http://www.owsleystanleyfoundation.org for more details.)
Secondly, the performances captured on this album may very well be some of the best examples of the band Big Brother And The Holding Company (guitarists Sam Andrew and the late James Gurley; drummer Dave Getz; bassist Peter Albin; and, of course, Janis Joplin on vocals), rather than a powerhouse vocalist and her hot backup group. They come out of the blocks sounding like a psychedelic soul revue (the pounding, churning “Combination Of The Two”) and take you home in the arms of “Call On Me”, swaddled in bluesy sweetness. And in between, they soar; they roar; they bring it down to the dull hum of the amps and then let it fly as far as it wants to go; they pull off reckless jams and turn-on-a-dime arrangements. And none of this takes one watt of spotlight off of Janis Joplin – it simply acknowledges all the talents contained within the walls of Big Brother.
Jambands.com recently had the honor of chatting with guitarist Sam Andrew about the Carousel recordings, the challenges of playing live in 1968 – and even played a short round of “What If?”
Ladies and gentlemen; boys and girls; children of all ages – we present Big Brother And The Holding Company’s Sam Andrew.
BR: Sam, I know we have some official work to do here, as we’re meant to be talking about the new Live From The Carousel Ballroom release, but first – and I’m sure you hear this all the time – I just want to say thank you for all the great music over the years.
SA: You’re welcome, Brian. We always love to hear it. (laughs) I’m sure you get a lot of compliments on what you’re doing.
BR: (laughs) No, but it tickles me to know that the words mean something to someone now and then. One thing I wanted to ask you right off the bat: the original tapes from the Carousel shows really were working tapes that Owsley made for his own use; to review after the fact, right?
SA: That’s right. Owsley was brilliant – a genius – but slightly mad (laughs), as were many people at the time … including those of us in Big Brother, possibly …
BR: Possibly … (laughter)
SA: And he recorded us, the Dead, and others to … well … I don’t know what his end view for those tapes was. I guess he simply wanted to get the raw material and hear what was happening.
BR: So when did you first know that this recording existed?
SA: Well, we knew back when we played at the Carousel in 1968 that he was recording – whenever Owsley was around, we knew we were being taped. (laughs)
I think it was maybe five years ago – maybe a little longer; maybe a little less – that he called and said, “Hey, I’m in Berkeley at the Meyers Sound Lab and I’d like you to come over and listen to this recording I’ve got of you at the Carousel Ballroom.” That was the first time we actually heard the recording.
A lot of people made tapes back in the day, but it was a long time ago and who knows what happened to them, you know?
BR: Uh-huh; it’s not like they necessarily went right into laboratory-like conditions for storage.
SA: (laughs) No – maybe they went into somebody’s basement … or garage. So the three of us went over to listen – Peter Albin, Dave Getz, and myself.
BR: What was it like to hear the show all these years later?
SA: Well, to tell you the truth … (laughs)
BR: Oh? (laughter)
SA: Well … there are two aspects about a recording. There’s how well it was recorded, and how the people performed when they were doing it, you know? It’s just like having a photograph taken of yourself – the photographer can be great and they can have a really expensive camera and have taken the best shot of their life, but if you didn’t look that good … (laughter) Or maybe you were really shining that day, but they had a crappy camera. (laughter)
So when we went over to Berkeley, we were impressed with the quality of Owsley’s recording – it was amazing. But I don’t think we thought it was our greatest performance that first listen.
BR: But now?
SA: You know, listening to it now, we sounded fine. (laughs) We were pretty good! (laughter)
BR: I got a kick out of the liner notes, which explain how the album sounds just the way Owsley recorded the shows – the vocals and the drums are in one channel and everything else is in the other. The liner notes suggest that you might want to reposition your home stereo speakers …. push them closer together, perhaps. I have to tell you: my wife and I found that all you have to do is turn it up.
SA: Well, isn’t that what they usually say? “Play it loud!” (laughs)
BR: I look at all the on-stage sound equipment performers have now – individual in-the-ear monitors and all – and then I take it back 44 years ago when this album was recorded. How hard was it to hear yourself? And to hear Janis? I’m especially thinking about when you did those great harmony vocals with her.
SA: Of course, it depended a lot on where we were playing; a tiny club was obviously not a problem. But back then there weren’t any monitors – when you got on a bigger stage, you simply couldn’t hear yourself. You were doing it by sheer rote memory and hoping that everybody else reached the same point at the same time. (laughs)
BR: And a lot of your arrangements – whether they were covers or tunes that you’d written yourselves – weren’t simple songs, either. They were complex arrangements. It blows me away to listen to this and realize that you had to fly in formation without being able to hear yourselves properly or else it was going to be a … a …
SA: Yeah. (laughter) And sometimes it was. (laughter)
Janis and I would talk a lot driving to and from the gigs about arranging. We talked a whole lot about that: “What if the guitar came in here?” “Which guitar player should it be?” “Over here, the bass player could echo that part …” We did a lot of talking like that.
We lived here in Marin County about a mile from where I’m sitting and we rehearsed all day long – like, eight hours a day. We were young and we didn’t have anything else to think about: no lawyers, accountants or mortgages or anything like that – it was totally about the music.
But you’re right, Brian – even to this day, I listen to some of these songs and say to myself, “Oh, man … we must’ve had a lot of spare time to arrange that.” (laughter)
BR: Well, for instance – and I apologize if this is the millionth time you’ve been asked about this – take “Summertime”, which is so totally original, but true to the song’s vibe at the same time. You guys certainly didn’t give yourselves a lot of wiggle room for things to go wrong on that … and the result is beautiful.
SA: (laughs) Well, thank you very much – I appreciate that. Peter Albin and I worked up that arrangement. I’d actually first played that song in high school with my band. It’s one of those simple things … like Mozart – it’s real simple to play, but you have to play it right. We knew the song’s roots and where it came from; we knew it was a jazz standard and all that, but to us it was like a folk song. It was like “Nobody Knows The Trouble I’ve Seen” – that’s what Gershwin was trying for when he wrote it. There was this space in it … and I’d been playing a whole lot of J.S. Bach in a recorder quintet where we were doing all this 18th century stuff. And “Summertime” was like that – it had all this big space.
And then I heard Nina Simone’s version of “You’d Be So Nice To Come Home To”. She was a great singer, but she was also Julliard-trained on the piano; and she interwove these minor-keyed classical lines in and out of that song. That’s when the light bulb went off in my head: “Maybe we could do that in ‘Summertime’ …”
So I took this theme from Bach (scat sings): “Deh-da-dut-dut-dah; deh-da-dut-dut-dah; deh-da-dut-dut-deh-da-dah” – it was a real characteristic Bach theme that he used in a few places. I took that and used a descending minor line that I’d learned from a guy in the – literally – summertime of 1965. That’s the way Peter and I did that song before Janis. Neither one of us wanted to sing it … we had a long time to work on it. (laughs)
BR: The version on Live At The Carousel is a great example of the dynamics between you and the late James Gurley: two very different guitar styles – and tones – that weave and dance very well together.
SA: Well, thank you. The tension between James’ lead and what I played as a lead really worked in favor of that song, I think. If either one of us had had our own way with that tune completely, it wouldn’t have been half as good. There was a lot of tension between our two approaches and that kind of made it.
BR: Am I right in thinking that – for the most part – you’d usually play rhythm guitar in Big Brother on the tunes you wrote yourself? It seems like you were more likely to be playing lead on the songs written by others.
SA: That’s right. It was a very cold-blooded, political move on my part … (laughs) The whole idea being that if I wrote the song and I got someone else to play the lead on it, then when that song came up, they’d be more willing to do it … because they got to play on it.
It’s kind of embarrassing … (laughs) I’m kind of ashamed of it … (laughter)
At least artistically it made for variety; it added to the collaborative effect. It was good.
BR: Yes, I think it was all right. You shouldn’t feel guilty. (laughter) I’d love to talk gear with you, but I’ll hold myself to a single guitar question. At the time of the Carousel shows, you and James were both primarily Gibson players, weren’t you?
SA: At that point, yes. After that, we signed with Columbia Records – they’re now Sony – who was owned by CBS. And CBS also owned Fender, so all of a sudden we got a lot of Fender equipment – guitars and amps. But at the time of the Carousel shows, we were still playing SG Standards.
BR: The Carousel recordings were made just about two years after Janis joined Big Brother And The Holding Company. I think one thing that some folks might not be aware of is that you were already an established band when she arrived on the scene in ‘66. It took the relationship a while to gel, didn’t it?
SA: Yeah, it did. We were already well-known locally – in San Francisco – so Janis was joining this group that had a modicum of success and she was conscious of that.
When Janis came in, she was a coffee house-style singer. She was really, really good, but we were making this whole different style of music with these long jams. But Janis rose to the occasion; she was a real artist and really creative and happy to go along with what we were doing.
Janis was easy to work with; she had a lot of great virtues that you really appreciated in a band situation. You know when you have a co-worker that you really appreciate working with? That was Janis. She’d always do what she said she was going to do – which is rare anywhere in the music business … (laughs)
So we were creating this music together as a group – Janis was never on that prima donna thing where she was the singer and she was out front, which was great. We all really appreciated that, you know?
BR: That’s the sound of this album; that’s what I wrote in my early listening notes: “This is the sound of a band.” It wasn’t Janis and her backup group.
You mentioned the jams and that was one of the things I wanted to ask: was there any one of you in particular that would usually take the wheel and lead the way back out of the jams?
SA: We would try to rehearse for that. In other words, something that you might not hear – say, the bass player does a set of notes signaling that we’re going back into the ensemble playing now rather than the insane playing. (laughs) “Time to get out of the bath now and dry off.” We’d try to build that in during rehearsals.
Peter Albin is a great signaler to this day, both with what he’s playing and visual movements. He really was the de facto leader at the time; everything with Peter was real definite – beginnings, endings, transitions.
BR: Well, you all had to be good formation flyers.
SA: Practicing a lot helped. There were a lot of train wrecks, as well … (laughs) … and still are. (laughter)
BR: Well, up here in Maine I’ve always heard it said that the only guy that never ran aground never left the dock, so I guess if you don’t take the chances … (laughter)
SA: That’s a song title right there. Let me write that down. (laughs)
BR: Big Brother And The Holding Company is still alive and well and playing these days, of course – but do you think about what Janis would be doing now if she were still with us?
SA: Oh, sure – I think about that a lot.
Two of her best songs were “Summertime” and “Little Girl Blue” that she did with the Kozmic Blues band. If Janis had lived, I can see her doing, for instance, an album of jazz standards and doing them really well. And I think at some point she would have called up and said (laughs), “Hey, boys – you want to try another tour; try another album?” It wouldn’t have been a permanent step – just another step along the way – and that would’ve been fun.
I think Janis would have had a long and great career; she’d only used two of about seven separate voices that she had. I can imagine her maybe doing an album of gospel stuff … that would’ve been perfect. I would have loved to produce something like that with her.
If she ever comes back, I have some great ideas for her. (laughter)
BR: Well, you never know.
SA: No, you never know. (laughs)
BR: Sam, I do know that it’s time to let you go. Thank you for the last 30 minutes – and thanks for the last 45 years or so, man.
SA: Well, thank you – it was fun talking with you, Brian. Now, tell me again: “If you’ve never …” How did that go?
BR: Basically, “If you’ve never run aground, you’ve never left the dock.”
SA: (laughs) There’s a song there; you need to write that song.
BR: We’ll collaborate, Sam, how about that?
SA: It’s a deal. (laughter)
