Big Brother and the Holding Company

While Big Brother and the Holding Company are remembered as Janis Joplin's band, they were active before Joplin joined them and after she left. Leader Peter Albin (a country-blues guitarist who had played with future founders of the Grateful Dead Jerry Garcia and Ron McKernan) met Sam Andrew, Big Brother's musical director, who had a jazz and classical background and had played rock & roll professionally. They approached James Gurley (who had taught himself to play guitar on hallucinogenic sojourns through the California desert), and the three began playing open jam sessions hosted by entrepreneur Chet Helms in 1965. Helms encouraged them to form a group, found them a drummer, and set up their first gig, at the Trips Festival of January 1966. In the festival audience was art historian and amateur musician David Getz, who soon replaced the original drummer. Big Brother and the Holding Company became the house band at the Avalon Ballroom, playing a progressive style of instrumental rock. Feeling a need for a strong vocalist, Helms recalled having heard Joplin before, and contacted her in Austin, Texas. She returned to San Francisco to join the band in June 1966.

The Holding Company was clearly blues influenced, and Joplin had listened intensively to Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and Big Mama Thornton. Joplin’s voice and presence, and the band’s devil-may-care intensity, made them a whole greater than the sum of its parts - and a Bay Area sensation. Their debut album spread their reputation, and their appearance at the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967 thrust them into the national spotlight. New manager Albert Grossman brought them to Columbia Records, which issued their legacy, Cheap Thrills. The album went to #1 with the help of “Piece of My Heart” (#12, 1968). Numerous observers convinced Joplin that she could use a more precise backing band, and at the end of 1968 she and Andrew left the group [see Janis Joplin entry]. After a year, Big Brother returned as a loose assemblage of four to eight musicians, which might include Gravenites (ex–Electric Flag), Kathy McDonald (a backup vocalist for Ike and Tina Turner, Joe Cocker, and Leon Russell), or no lead singer at all. Albin and Andrew were the only regular members (at times only Andrew). In 1972 Big Brother disbanded; the group re-formed in 1986. By the early ’90s they were recording and performing in Europe and on the West Coast. Do What You Love features vocalist Lisa Battle.

from The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll (Simon & Schuster, 2001)