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Big Brother and the Holding Company are an American rock band that was formed in San Francisco in 1965 as part of the same psychedelic music scene that produced the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and Jefferson Airplane. After some initial personnel changes, the band became well known with the lineup of vocalist Janis Joplin, guitarists Sam Andrew and James Gurley, bassist Peter Albin, and drummer Dave Getz. Their second album Cheap Thrills, released in 1968, is considered one of the masterpieces of the psychedelic sound of San Francisco; it reached number one on the Billboard charts, and was ranked number 338 in Rolling Stone's the 500 greatest albums of all time. The album is also listed in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.

Joplin left the band in 1968, following the recording of Cheap Thrills, for a successful solo career. The band recruited as new members Nick Gravenites, Kathi McDonald, and Dave Schallock to replace her, and released two more albums before breaking up in 1972. The classic lineup (minus Joplin, who had died in 1970) reunited in 1987. The band has continued to perform ever since, with a variety of different lead singers including Michel Bastian who was one of the earliest female vocalists that replaced Janis Joplin. She sang with Big Brother and The Holding Company from 1987 through 1996. James Gurley left for a solo career in 1997 and died in 2009. Sam Andrew died in 2015.

History

Roots in San Francisco

Peter Albin was a country and blues guitarist who had played with future Grateful Dead's founders Jerry Garcia and Ron McKernan. Albin met Sam Andrew, a professional rock guitarist with a jazz and classical background. After playing together at Albin's home, Andrew suggested they could form a band. The pair approached guitarist James Gurley, and the resulting trio played open jam sessions hosted by entrepreneur Chet Helms in 1965. Helms found them a drummer, Chuck Jones, and "Big Brother and the Holding Company" was formed at their first gig, the Trips Festival in January 1966. The audience included painter and jazz drummer David Getz, who soon replaced Jones.

Big Brother went on to become the house band at the Avalon Ballroom, playing a progressive style of instrumental rock. Feeling a need for a strong vocalist, Helms dispatched his friend Travis Rivers to Austin, Texas to invite Helms’ longtime friend Janis Joplin to join Big Brother. She was considering joining The 13th Floor Elevators to work with Roky Erickson; that band that was based in Austin. Instead, she traveled with Rivers from Austin to San Francisco and debuted with Big Brother at the Avalon on June 10, 1966.

Janis Joplin

Joplin sang for the first time with Big Brother in 1966. Years later, Andrew described the band's first impressions of her:

We were the established rock and roll band. We were heavy. We were like: all right, out of three or four bands in this city, we are one of them. We're in the newspapers all the time. We're working out. We are doing this woman a favor to even let her come and sing with us. She came in and she was dressed like a little Texan. She didn't look like a hippie, she looked like my mother, who is also from Texas. She sang real well but it wasn't like, "Oh we're bowled over." It was probably more like, our sound was really loud. It was probably bowling her over. I am sure we didn't turn down enough for her. She wrote letters home about how exotic all of us were. The names of the bands. That kind of thing. In other words, we weren't flattened by her and she wasn't flattened by us. It was probably a pretty equal meeting. She was real intelligent, Janis was, and she always rose to the occasion. She sang the songs. It wasn't like this moment of revelation like you would like it to be. Like in a movie or something. It wasn't like, "Oh my God, now we have gone to heaven. We have got Janis Joplin." I mean she was good but she had to learn how to do that. It took her about a year to really learn how to sing with an electric band.

It took a while for some of the band's followers to accept the new singer, whose musical style differed from the experimental and unconventional sound that Big Brother played at the time. With the addition of Joplin, they became more disciplined musicians, their songs adopted a more traditional structure, and the band started to increase its popularity in the San Francisco psychedelic scene.