As the drummer for the legacy band Big Brother and the Holding Company, Dave Getz played on one of the greatest rock albums of all time, “Cheap Thrills,” a No. 1 record in 1968 that made a superstar of a little-known Texas blues singer named Janis Joplin.
Nearly 60 years later, “Piece of My Heart,” the hit single from that breakout album, still gets 150 million streams a month on Spotify and other platforms, an astonishing number. Gratefully, Getz still gets royalties from it.
Related Articles
The Kooks ready to rock Bay Area fans with All Over the World Tour Brian Wilson, visionary leader of the Beach Boys, dies at age 82 One of the greatest Bay Area musicians of all time has died at 82 ‘Sinners’ star headlines big blues festival over Father’s Day weekend Brilliant Cowboy Junkies return to NorCal for 3 big showsAt 85, he’s winding down his performing career after touring the world with various iterations of Big Brother for most of his adult life. With nothing to prove, he could easily rest on his classic rock bona fides, secure in his place in rock ‘n’ roll history. Instead, he’s just released the best album I’ve heard in ages, “Anthems, Themes & Little Stories,” a 13-track instrumental masterwork of genre-defying original compositions.
“I’m kind of a late bloomer — ridiculously late,” said Getz one recent afternoon in his Fairfax home studio, a creative jumble of art supplies and musical instruments. “But this is probably the best thing I’ve ever made in terms of total conception and quality. I can think of it as a total work of art, and I don’t think I had that capacity at an earlier age. You can listen to every song for a long time and still find something new to enjoy about it.”
A compactly built octogenarian with a neatly trimmed gray goatee, Getz composed the themes and melodies for the album on piano over the past 15 years. He began recording them eight months ago in the Fairfax studio of guitarist Tom Finch, who plays guitar, bass and mandolin on the album and collaborated on four of the tunes.
Finch, who’s 55 and has toured with Getz and Big Brother for 28 years, is well known as a rock guitar virtuoso who can shred with the best of them. But this project, which he describes as a “soundscape,” called for him to dig deeper as a musician, contributing melodic lines that weave like bright threads through the tapestry of the music.
“I really tried to serve the songs,” he said. “It’s not like, ‘Look at our chops.’ Dave would tell me not to play too many notes, to play in between, to have a conversation.”
Getz played a MIDI keyboard on the album that gave him an expansive palette of instrumental sounds to go along with his acoustic drums and percussion. He features the balafon, a gourd-resonated xylophone from West Africa, on a couple of tracks, including my favorite song on the album, “Love Is the Open Door.”
The balafon isn’t the only exotic instrument in the mix. Charles Moselle plays saxophone on two pieces as well as bansuri, a bamboo flute from India. Keyboardist John Varn solos on piano on four of the tunes.
Before he began working on the album, Getz recovered from a serious accident that could have ended his life, let alone his career. Three years ago, he hurtled down a steep hillside in a runaway tram outside his home that ended up throwing him 25 feet into the side of a parked car. He suffered broken ribs, a collapsed lung and cracked vertebrae. He was hospitalized and in rehab for weeks. Finch raised more than $16,000 from community members and fans to help pay for his recovery and medical expenses. Showing extraordinary resilience for someone in his 80s, he was back performing with Big Brother three months later.
He and bassist Peter Albin, who celebrated his 81st birthday this month, are the only surviving original members of Big Brother. Guitarists James Gurley and Sam Andrew died in 2009 and 2015, respectively.
A visual artist as well as a musician, Getz created the art on the CD’s cover and jacket. In 1966, he had earned a master’s degree in fine art and was teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute when he left that all behind to take a chance at rock stardom as the drummer for Big Brother and the Holding Company, a huge risk that paid off when Joplin joined the group.
“When I transitioned from being a teacher at the art institute to being in a rock band, I lost a lot of friends at the art institute,” he said. “There were people there who cut me off because, for those guys, art was a commitment, and you don’t go on any sidetracks. I had gone psychedelic, and they were disdainful of the hippies.”
At the height of her success with Big Brother, Joplin notoriously left the band to form a soul group that she was recording with when she died of a heroin overdose in 1970 at age 27. While her departure from Big Brother was viewed as a betrayal in some quarters, Getz is graciously understanding of her motives.
“She knew she had to move on, and she couldn’t do what she wanted to do in the context of Big Brother and the Holding Company,” he said. “That’s just the reality of the music business.”
Big Brother would continue on without her, hiring dozens of different female singers over the decades to cover her songs. It’s remarkable that 55 years after she left the planet, her myth and legend lives on, a reality that Getz still deals with more often than you might think.
Not long ago, he approached a woman who was standing out in the street, looking up at his house, thinking that Joplin once lived there.
When he told her that was not the case, she actually argued with him about it for a moment before he told her who he was and that he and his jazz singer wife, Joan, have lived there since 1985, but Joplin never did. And he should know.
“She wasn’t happy to hear that story and went away,” said Getz with a smile.
There are no singers, female or otherwise, to deal with on “Anthems, Themes & Little Stories.” Now that the all-instrumental album is finished, Getz faces the task of getting people to hear it, not an easy thing to do in today’s fragmented music market.
“There are 22 genres on Spotify,” he points out, “and this record doesn’t fit in any of them.”
Another way to look at it is that it fits in lots of them, with elements of jazz, rock, Latin music, world music, chamber music, you name it. Finch calls it “a genre mash.” However it’s classified, it’s a credit to Getz that he still has the creative passion and drive to record his music and send it out into the world.
“I can’t play drums anymore like I could when I was 27, but there’s part of me that’s still the same as when I was that age,” he said. “The artist part gets better and broader with more wisdom as you get older. The attitude of wanting to make art, the creative part, doesn’t get old.”
Details: “Anthems, Themes & Little Stories” is available on Spotify and other streaming platforms. To buy the physical CD ($20 to $40), go to bbhc.com.
Contact Paul Liberatore at p.liberatore@comcast.net
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Legendary Bay Area musician still creative after all these years )
Also on site :