Big Brother and the Holding Company

Description

Big Brother-along with bands like The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service- is considered one of the original, first wave of great psychedelic bands that came out of San Francisco in the summer of 1965. The embryo that was to become Big brother and the Holding Co began when Peter Albin, a 21 year old, aspiring Folk Blues guitarist, who had been a part of South Bay Roots’ music scene that also gave us Jerry Garcia, Robert Hunter and the Grateful Dead met Sam Andrew, a 23 year old guitarist who’d been in bands since his teens in Okinawa and had studied languages and philosophy at University of SF and the Sorbonne. Sam and Peter began jamming together in the basement/ballroom of an old Victorian mansion in the Haight –Ashbury district. With the help of their friend, future manager and concert promoter Chet Helms (The Family Dog, Avalon Ballroom), Big Brother and The Holding Co was born. Big Brother and the Holding Co, like many of the great bands of the era (The Beatles, The Rolling Stones) were about something; it had had its own ‘persona’. For the followers of the music scene, the people who danced and listened at the Fillmore and the Avalon, Big Brother and the Holding Co were greater than the sum of its parts. The Monterey Pop Festival in the summer of 1967 was the first great international rock festival and it was the moment when Big Brother and its lead singer Janis Joplin blew open the collective mind of the audience and rose to the top of the Rock music hierarchy. It was also the moment in which that same audience discovered Jimi Hendrix, Otis Redding and several other artists that were destined to take rock music to the next level. In 1968 Big Brother signed with Columbia Records and Albert Grossman (Bob Dylan, Peter Paul and Mary, etc) became their manager. They went into the recording studio and produced the album that many consider their masterpiece and one of the greatest albums of all time: ‘Cheap Thrills”. The album quickly rose to #1 on the charts and stayed there for eight weeks. The songs from Cheap Thrills and their first Mainstream album are now a part of Rock Music history. Their legacy as one of the great bands of the 1960s is secure. In their shows they perform all of their legendary songs; “Piece of My Heart”, “Summertime”, “Ball and Chain”, “Bye Bye Baby” as only the original creators of this music can. And to show that Big Brother is still a living, creative band they throw in a taste of new, original material that embodies the same signature, Big Brother ideas and energy.