You can do jazz, classical, blues, opera, country until you’re 150, but rap and rock and roll are really a way for young people to get that anger out, it’s silly to perform a song that has no relevance to the present or expresses feelings you no longer have. Grace Slick
We went to see Big Brother and the Holding Company and The Jefferson Starship the other night. They were billed as being part of the fifty-year celebration of Woodstock (although when we got there the announcer said it was part of a Women in Music series). It was fun and I’m glad we went, but it was also sort of strange. When Michele mentioned it, I said: “Uh, OK.” not really thinking it through. About halfway through the first set, it occurred to me that most of the band was younger than they should be. Obviously, the lead singer was new – it turns out that, over the years, nineteen different women have sung Joplin’s part? role? including a woman, Shiho Ochi, from the Japanese band Superfly – and this Joplin looked to be under forty. The band should be my age, maybe even a year or two older – and two were, the drummer, Dave Getz and the bass player, Pete Albin – but most of these performers seemed younger than me, way younger. Still, the music sounded pretty much the same. OK, I was much more aware of how bluesy it was but I think that is because I’ve listened to so much blues in the interim and there was an electric violinist, Kate Ruso, who was terrific. Still, sitting there, I began to realize that I was watching a kind of Möbius performance wherein a cover band named Big Brother and the Holding Company playing music from the original Big Brother and the Holding Company.
It sort of makes me wonder, What is Big Brother and the Holding Company? What is any big name band? Is it just a branding company? I vaguely knew that old swing bands like the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra continued playing the same sound with a variety of players but it never occurred to me that rock bands were doing the same thing.
The feature act was The Jefferson Starship and I went through the same process, thinking at first that the Grace Slick part was played by Grace Slick but, of course, the singer was only channeling Grace Slick. Her name is Cathy Richardson, she was quite good, and she really seemed to carry the band, just like Grace Slick used to do. The strange thing that I found out when I got home is that Cathy Richardson sometimes plays the Janis Joplin parts for Big Brother and the Holding Company. There was one original Starship player, David Freiberg – with the white hair and grey sweatsuit in Michele’s picture above – who had returned after being away for twenty years.
The concert and I don’t know what else to call it, was in the Marin Veterans’ Memorial Auditorium and we sat in typical theater seats (pleasantly clapping after good solos). These were two outlaw bands, they came into being during the “don’t trust anybody over 30” 60s and they almost defined the counterculture. But this was almost like going to a Classical concert, nobody was dancing in the aisles and the youngest attendees were very close to 60. It was surreal, but surreal in a fun way.
