Big Brother drummer on the times that slipped away
I’m not one of those nostalgia-soaked geezers who think rock ’n’ roll died with the Beatles’ breakup, or Altamont or the Last Waltz. No, I think it died the day Kurt Cobain killed himself. But I didn’t gather you here today to mourn the past; I want to relive some of its glorious highs — before corporate greed, superstar pathology and digital piracy killed the music.
Last Saturday afternoon, I lunched with Dave Getz, the drummer who rode to rock immortality with Big Brother and the Holding Company.
Since it’s the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love (in case you missed the memo), our conversation naturally drifted in that direction. At 77, Getz defies the old adage that if you remember the ’60s, you weren’t there. He was there, and he still has a photographic recall of much of it. But his most evocative memories are of the earlier bohemian days in San Francisco, before the media-branded Summer of Love.
Getz arrived here in 1960 from New York, where he had grown up in a crowded Flatbush apartment with his Jewish immigrant grandmother, parents and two sisters. “I slept in the same bed as one of my sisters until she went off to college,” he recalled. “My father owned a diner and was a bookie on the side. He’d be smoking a big cigar and crouching over
his bets when I came home. I hated it.”
Getz fled to the West Coast as a 20-year-old budding painter to attend the San Francisco Art Institute. For a while he crashed in a Fillmore apartment building with Beat artists like Jay DeFeo, who was laboring over what would become her 1-ton masterpiece, “The Rose,” now installed at New York’s Whitney Museum.
Getz studied under masters like Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bischoff. Some of his art professors moonlighted in a Dixieland jazz band. Getz himself was a jazz drummer who had played gigs in the Catskills, but he decided against a music career because in those days musicians were treated like the help, forced to enter venues through the service entrance and forbidden to mingle with the guests.
But something new was bubbling in San Francisco in the early ’60s, with music and art colliding and converging in the underground scene.
It was the concert posters, not the music, that first attracted Getz. He particularly liked the artwork being done for a new band called Big Brother and the Holding Company.
One day he found himself trying out for the band, after their drummer made the unfortunate career move of leaving Big Brother for Sopwith Camel, which had just scored its one hit, “Hello, Hello.” They asked him if he knew “2120 South Michigan Avenue,” and Getz clicked right away with the band as they kicked into the bluesy instrumental Rolling Stones song.
“It’s hard for me to listen today to some of Big Brother’s music from those days,” Getz said. “I had the most experience in the band, and our music wasn’t precise. Sometimes the guitars were out of tune. But we were like a punk band; we had incredible energy. I just wanted to play as hard and fast as I could. I would come offstage completely soaked.”
When Janis Joplin joined the band, it was like being strapped to an even more powerful rocket. “At the start, Janis wasn’t a great blues singer, but she absorbed things much quicker. It was inevitable that she would leave the band someday.
“I was the first one in the band to get to know her. I’d pick her up for rehearsals in my twotone ’56 Chevy Bel Air and she’d tell me everything about her life. When I took her home, we’d make out in her car. We were like puppies. But it never got serious between us.”
It was the easy camaraderie between San Francisco’s young musicians — they became rock stars — that Getz remembers most fondly. “When I first heard the Jefferson Airplane, I thought they were just so powerful. I decided to drop by their house on Fulton Street one day. (Bass player) Jack Casady was there. I said, ‘Hi, I’m Dave Getz from Big Brother.’ ”
Getz particularly enjoyed dropping in to see Jerry Garcia at the Grateful Dead house on Ashbury Street, and later at Garcia’s home in Marin. “One day I came by with my drumsticks and drum pad and Jerry and I smoked a joint and played together as we watched TV. You could talk to him about anything. He was a truly great guy — a laidback, quiet, honest and forthright person.”
In 1966 and early ’67, before the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967 shot performers like Joplin on their fateful trajectory toward stardom and addiction, they were just friends and fellow musicians.
They played for free in the Panhandle and Golden Gate Park, they strolled together through the Haight unmolested by hordes of fans, they sought pleasure and comfort in each other’s arms. And they inspired and pushed each other toward a collective greatness that the San Francisco music scene has not since equaled.
If you want to get a sense of these early, formative days of the cultural revolution that shook San Francisco, and then the world, you must be sure to see the splendid “On the Road to the Summer of Love” exhibit, which opens May 12 at the California Historical Society.
Then take yourself to the basement of City Hall to enjoy a San Francisco Arts Commission exhibit on 1967 San Francisco featuring the work of the late photographer Jim Marshall, a mad genius in his own right who was embedded in the local music scene.
The color photograph that concludes the mostly black-and-white exhibit — a sort of all-star team picture taken in Golden Gate Park featuring the members of all five leading San Francisco bands at the time ( Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Big Brother, Quicksilver Messenger Service and the Charlatans) — captures this fleeting moment in our city’s history before these young men and women took off into the heavens, leaving the rest of us mortals stuck here on planet Earth.