I met Bill many times and, during one interview, heard him talk about the two sides of being a concert producer, of the things he felt he had to do, and the things he loved to see. Here, from a piece I did for “The City” magazine, is Bill Graham:

If an artist was on stage, opening up, and they were yelling for the headliner, I would go on stage and say, “If you can’t wait, go downstairs and I’ll give you your money back.” If you were at the bar dealing, I’d threaten you with your life. I never wanted to make friends at the expense of people. I was very, very strong on those (principles), and sometimes, overly zealous.

Graham once made a deal with Leon Russell’s manager for a tour of large, outdoor concerts. For each show, Russell would get 85 percent after expenses; Graham’s company would get 15 percent.

Well, it turned out that the first date down in San Diego didn’t work out. We only had 29,000 to 30,000 people, and a tremendous expense. It was a loss of some $60,000 to $70,000. We come up to San Francisco, did a tremendous gig in Oakland. It was a good $100,000 after expenses. I was asked to come into the trailer, and I was told by the agent, “All right, we netted $100,000 and here’s your 15 percent.” I said, “Wait a minute, there’s the loss and all the bills down there.” He said, “Oh, no.” I said, “The most stupid man in the world wouldn’t accept that kind of deal.” They took me off the other dates, fired me from the rest of the tour because they had that one big loss.

I drove into San Francisco. I called Leon’s room. He knew I was in the lobby, but he refused to speak with me. The only time this man exists is if he’s in need of food or drink. Other than that he is not in my world. You have no right to do that. We were good in what we did. We didn’t draw what we thought we would do. We did a brilliant production, but there was a loss.

And then there was Sly Stone, who was notorious, late in his career, for no-shows at his concerts. And even when he did appear…

There was a situation at Fillmore East when the public had waited a half hour for him to come on. He finally came down the steps and headed on to his dressing room. Then he looked at his pants, and the crease wasn’t perfect, so he went back upstairs and had his pants pressed — another half hour.

Come on, you owe them. Part of owing isn’t making them wait for an hour.

“We’re in the dirtiest business,” Graham said. “The harshest word I can think of is ruthless… We all bend in relation to what we can get back. It’s the almighty dollar, and it’s fame, and it’s power.” So why did he stay in it?

There’s the other side. To stand in the wings and watch the audience getting off on Aretha Franklin, King Curtis, and Ray Charles is one of the genuine orgasms of my life.

What you go through to put that thing on, with Aretha asking for a color television set, fresh orange juice, pink towels, you wind up hating everybody. And then the show starts, and she comes out, and that audience is at a revival meeting. For the first time, I was able to do something that I’d always dreamt of — to have an audience, 50 percent black, 50 percent white. At the end of the night, Ray and Aretha are on stage, hand in hand, bouncing back and forth, and Curtis is playing and I look out in the audience… You can’t buy that. That’s why I’m in this business. It happens less and less. But it still happens…once in a while.

[Bill Graham: ‘It Still Happens’ is a post in From the Vault - The Wolfgang's Vault blog.]

Leon Russell

Now, here in October, we hear that Leon and Elton did an album together (The Union), and that, as part of the hype for it, there’s a Sirius XM channel, “Elton!” Unfortunately, the channel, which offered new and vintage Elton and Leon music, plus a Cameron Crowe interview of him and Leon, plus guest DJs (including Robert Downey Jr.; not sure why), had a shelf life of only a week, and the satellite network didn’t send out the news until a day before the launch, on October 15th.

So it’s gone, as of Friday night, October 23rd.

But there is that new album, produced by T Bone Burnett. It’s a long overdue reunion for the two (they shared a concert bill back in 1970), and it’s drawn raves. “The Union often feels like a conversation,” David Fricke writes in Rolling Stone. “The two trading sober and grateful reflections … on the costs and prizes of a life at the top.”

It was at the top that I met and interviewed Leon, back in 1970, for a Rolling Stone cover story. You could call it the big top, in fact. He’d completed his tour as the ringmaster of Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen tour, had produced hit albums with Cocker and Delaney & Bonnie, and issued his own first album, with help from Eric Clapton, George Harrison, Charlie Watts, Stevie Winwood, Ringo Starr and many others.

We met in Denver and went on and on about rock and roll, his past, his influences, his politics, his plans. But it always came back to rock & roll.

At one point, I reminded him that, when we met on the Mad Dogs tour, he’d said that his kind of rock music “was tribalization — to have the performers and audience together trading songs.” I asked, “Is that working?”

“It’s working throughout the country,” he said. “The audience is why they have rock and roll concerts, because that’s the only missing element in the tribal culture. An analogy to more primitive cultures would be “the only thing missing is the drummers.”

I recalled how energetic he was throughout the Mad Dogs tour. “It’s a circle,” he said. The only time you stop is when you die.”

“It sounds like some kind of addiction — a music addiction,” I remarked.

“Yes, it’s definitely an addiction. I just was talking to some people in the band, but at one point something happened on the stage, and the crowd just exploded, and they transformed their energy on stage, and I could actually feel it … I could see how it could get to be an addictive practice.”

Russell said he was into symbolism; his long hair was part of it. I asked about the basketball jerseys he liked to wear.

“It’s a few things,” he said. “It’s teams, it’s spectator activities, which I’m not convinced is the best sort of activity — voyeurs — but I’m willing to take the role of the musical football player until such time that people realize that they can make music themselves.”

But, I said, instead of a pro team, his shirts were emblazoned “Gil’s Barbershop” and “Holy Trinity.” “Makes people wonder,” I said.

“Well, that’s the hope,” he replied. “The wondering wanderer. That’s the whole bag — the songs, the performance, the whole lifestyle. Make people wonder. Make myself wonder, too. And it’s great.”

[Leon Russell: Still wondering, after all these years is a post in From the Vault - The Wolfgang's Vault blog.]

And I’m thinking back to 1989, when the media laughed at the Stones for seeing fit to go on the road again for the Steel Wheels tour. Mick and Keith were 46; Watts, an ancient 53.

And back in 1981, when I visited with Jagger for a magazine piece, Mick was all of 38, and age was already a hot topic in the media.

We met in Philadelphia, after the first concert of the tour, in his suite at the Barclay Hotel. Scattered about his room were a few items: a running outfit, a racquetball racquet, and a memo from an aide reminding Jagger of things to do, including “Exercise outdoors if possible.” Jagger was obviously following orders. He looked ridiculously healthy and as skinny as ever.

What are you, part Chinese? How do you keep looking so young?

Well, I think it’s what you’re born with. I was raised to be healthy. I bucked against it a lot in my teens and in my early twenties — but then you come back to it.

The last time around, in 1978, the press seemed interested in three subjects: Keith Richards’ bust and your reaction to punk rock…

You can see how different this tour is; they’re not interested in any of that.

This time, the hook seems to be “Are the Stones too old to rock? Is this the last time around?”

That’s an old perennial. I think it’s less around on this tour because they were so heavy on it last time, and then we do another one, so obviously they can’t make such fools of themselves, just to keep hopping on it. It’s a dead dog.

The tour is going to gross about $30 million. Has this passed…

…Yeah, everyone’s wildest dreams! We didn’t expect to do this kind of business.

Part of that is because you’re doing so many outdoor shows this time, which helps meet the demand for tickets and makes you more money, but you’ve said before that you didn’t like doing the stadium shows…

I have no misconceptions that I can play to a stadium in the same way we can play to an arena. I think we’re running on 15 percent efficiency in the stadium. I don’t think we’re pleasing the people enough.

Of course, for a lot of people, it’s not so much the concert as the experience of being there, in the same place as the Stones…

…With their friends, in their town or the surrounding areas, but yes, to be in the same place, and I think the music’s incidental a lot. It could be us or several others…

Maybe…

It helps to be us. But c’mon, we’re only an excuse; you might as well use us as anybody for them to have a good time. ‘Cause they can’t see from the back. I do the same thing. Those afternoons are quite like going to see a football game.

You have said that there’s nothing new any more in rock and roll. It’s all “recycled past.”

The thing about rock and roll — the influence of rock and roll is all pervasive in all other forms of music, as the other forms of music are on rock and roll. You’ve got these intertwinings, but the real rock and roll and excitement … if you have a new artist with a “new sound,” it tends to be what the old sound was. What people like is purity. Rock and roll is a traditional form now.

But if the music’s just going around in circles, where does your own continuing interest in it come from? Is it just what you do, or is there still something that the music does?

Well, I think that I still live in hope that rock and roll will turn a corner and doesn’t just keep reverting. I think it will eventually. Hope I’ll be around when it does.

[A chat with Mick about the ever-Rolling Stones is a post in From the Vault - The Wolfgang's Vault blog.]

Jimi Hendrix 1969

Can it be? September 18th is the 40th anniversary of Jimi Hendrix’s death. Thanks to albums (including the recently released Valleys of Neptune), books, rock museums and, especially, film footage, he remains vivid in the minds of all who experienced him first hand.

I was one of them; another was Steven Roby, who was 15 when he caught his first Hendrix concert — “the first show at Berkeley Community Theater. Right outside was the National Guard. (Then-Governor) Reagan had called them in because of the People’s Park riots. There was tear gas and marijuana in the air. A strange experience for a 15 year-old.” But the show remains his favorite (both the early and late evening concerts are in the Vault, by the way).

Roby never got over Hendrix; he has published a Jimi fanzine, “Experience Hendrix,” wrote Black Gold: The Lost Archives of Jimi Hendrix, and, now, has published Becoming Jimi Hendrix: From Southern Crossroads to Psychedelic London, the Untold Story of a Musical Genius (Da Capo Press).

Working with co-author Brad Schreiber, Roby has uncovered a wealth of little-known stories and facts about the younger Jimi. Some of the most amusing are upfront, in the preface:

• He was born Johnny Allen Hendrix, but when his father, Al, returned from World War II and saw his son from the first time, he renamed him James Marshall Hendrix.
• In his Seattle band the Rocking Kings, his innocent face and quiet demeanor made others call him “Cupcake.”
• Because he slept with his guitar and brought it everywhere he went, other band members in Nashville referred to him as “Marbles,” as if he had lost his.
• Singer Etta James called him “Egg Foo Yung,” because this is what he ate every night in Harlem.

Jimi Hendrix in Nashville? He went there in 1962, straight out of the Army, where he’d been a paratrooper. “He was trying to be an R&B guitarist,” Roby told me. “Along comes a promoter from New York, who’s got a band on the chitlin circuit. He invited Jimi to go with him to New York.” Then, after landing in Harlem and sharing a room with the promoter in the Hotel Theresa, “Jimi realizes he’s a female impersonator and he’s got other intentions for him.” In the book, Roby and Schreiber explain how Hendrix got out of the relationship. Hint: It involved another woman.

As for Hendrix on stage, Roby recounts lessons learned from the likes of B.B. King, Albert King and Albert Collins. The flashy business — the playing of a guitar behind  his back; picking strings with his teeth — came from his knowledge of pioneers like the Delta blues musician Charlie Patton and, out of Texas, Aaron “T-Bone” Walker. “Jimi just brought it to a new audience,” said Roby.

Becoming Jimi Hendrix is a well-researched book, loaded with great stories. It’ll take you back to Jimi at the Fillmore East, at Winterland, in Berkeley and Monterey, in New York and London, and way farther back, to when he was, believe it or not, “Cupcake.”

[Editor's note: The Jimi Hendrix archives within Wolfgang's Vault include his earliest performance agreements, from the time when Hendrix signed his name Jimmy Hendrix.  The files of his performance advertising art show a hard-working artist with engagements almost every single day of his cut-short career.  Jefferson Airplane manager Bill Thompson remembers a meeting with Paul McCartney in San Francisco in 1966 when Bill Graham and Bill Thompson would ask what is going on musically in London? McCartney replied:  Jimi Hendrix.  Graham promptly booked him to open for Jefferson Airplane at the Fillmore Auditorium — shows that would go down in rock and roll history.]

[How James Marshall Hendrix became Jimi is a post in From the Vault - The Wolfgang's Vault blog.]

Knockin' On Dylan's Door

I saw where Wolfie (as I sometimes refer to Wolfgang’s Vault) put up a recording of Bob Dylan’s concert from February 11, 1974, in Oakland, near the end of his big tour with The Band.

And I thought: I was there. In my office, I have a framed two-page spread from Rolling Stone, both pages given over to one beautiful shot of Dylan, post-concert, bathed in blue lighting, reaching up to receive a bouquet of flowers from a fan. Tucked into the frame, lower left and lower right, are ticket stubs from February 11 … and from January 3rd — the very beginning of that tour, at Chicago Stadium.

What a time. I didn’t trail the entire tour; we had correspondents file dispatches from Atlanta and New York, and published an assessment from own Ralph J. Gleason. (Our coverage was packaged into a quickie paperback, which I titled Knockin’ on Dylan’s Door, but good luck finding it.) This was a big deal: his first tour since 1966, and since a serious motorcycle accident near his home in Woodstock.

I caught and reported on a bunch of the most exciting shows out of the 21-city, 39-show, 43-day tour, in Chicago, Philly, Toronto and Montreal — I think. Anyway, I noted that “Chicago saw a moving, 2 and a half hour show, carefully planned, if not yet rehearsed down pat, to show off the Band as more than Dylan’s backup… and to show Dylan as a healthy, confident man at ease with all the identities and roles he has created over the years: protest voice, radical poet, absurdist folk-rocker, romantic loser, country gentleman, family man.

“But Dylan, still refusing to play any role, did all the songs — folk, rock, country and pop — in one shocking strong voice, the songs mostly rearranged into what might be called basic Band rock, searing and soaring, unified and precise, on a bedrock of backwoods America. Excellent in itself; perfect as a support for Bob Dylan.”

Seven weeks later, they had to be exhausted as they performed in Oakland, with two final shows set for Los Angeles, at the Forum, where they’d had their rehearsals in late December.  The Band sounded tighter than ever, but Robbie Robertson and Rick Danko had lost their voices. Dylan, vocal cords intact, toyed with his phrasing, took bows amidst the ovations, and, at show’s end, brought Bill Graham  out to take one, too.

It was Graham who gave me my closing quote for my last report on the tour. I had taken note of faces in the audiences, paying rapt attention to the music. Bill had, too.

“It was the kind of thing … years from now you remember that picnic, that game where we beat Notre Dame…a very special cluster of events … If I don’t ever do anything again, I will have thought that I was a part of something very special.

“It’s those faces at the end. Those beautiful faces.”

[Knockin’ on Dylan’s Door is a post in From the Vault - The Wolfgang's Vault blog.]

Well, actually, it was because of my book, The Doors by the Doors. The book, which I did with the three surviving Doors about three years ago, has just been published in Brazil. (This is the third foreign language edition, following German and Italian versions.)

A publicist wrote to ask if I’d do an interview or three, and I said “Si.” But, I said, I’d like to keep the questions to five or six for each publication, seeing as how they’d be done by e-mail, and I do plenty of typing already.

So what happens? From one major newspaper, I get a list of eight questions. But each one contains three or four, and sometimes five questions. About 35, in all. I got a headache just reading them.

And, so, the crankiness. Even if I have to admit to having done the same thing in my time as an interviewer.

Anyway, I answered six of the questions, and the aching went away, for awhile.

Here are a couple of examples of what the Brazilian reporter wanted to know — I’ll leave his writing intact, rather than make corrections — and what I told him:

Q: Henry Rollins says The Doors made he understand that music could do something more than entertain. He tells us that Beatles and Rolling Stones didn’t make he think. And with The Doors the things were different, cause Jim, in particular, had a wild and danger mind. Why do you think people like Henry react this way? It is not a new thing says that Jim wasn’t just a band leader. On his lyrics and interviews we see always a natural thinker/philosopher… He writes and talks about life, existence, human nature with a peculiar point of view. Could you please comment on this fragment?

A: I can’t explain why Henry reacted the way he did to the Beatles, the Stones and the Doors.  All I can say is that Jim was a poet who’d studied the Beats as well as a guy who learned to sing and front a rock band, while the Beatles and Stones were ensembles that grew up wanting to play music — primarily what they’d heard from America, with the blues and R&B. Different folks; different strokes.

Q: A member of System of a Down says that The Doors open the routs to punk music, at the same time Scott Weiland says that the band opened the routs to art rock. Do you agree with these comments? Why could we consider these statements true? These are enough to point Jim as one of the most exciting artist of the century?

A: I’d say the Doors were among the bands that opened the doors to punk rock; not so much art rock. And, true or not, it wasn’t why Jim was one of the most interesting artists of his time. But the most exciting artist of the century?  Not as long as Elvis Presley existed in that same century.

Q: If you have to choose one part/speech to synthesize the book, and also one song to synthesize the legacy of the band, which one you would pick? And Why?

I couldn’t. They were a multifaceted band with four individual members. No one quote or song can speak to their legacy. But “Light My Fire” comes close. It had a rebellious spirit; it was based on classical and jazz music; it featured a great performance by Jim as well as the other band members, and it felt extemporaneous at the break, but was well thought out…

Q: Could you please tell me where are you and what are you doing while answering these questions?

A: I’m in San Francisco. I’m working on my Radio Waves column for the Sunday Chronicle. Today’s also my deadline for a blog on Wolfgang’s Vault, but I’ve turned it in already; a memory of my interview with Ray Charles. I’m also putting together a little one hour radio show for a friend in Michigan. I use a simple home studio, with a microphone and the Adobe Audition audio editing program. It’s just for fun. And today is take out the garbage day, so it’s very exciting.

[The Doors: Open and shut questions is a post in From the Vault - The Wolfgang's Vault blog.]

The fact that it’s out just a couple of months before the 40th anniversary of Janis’ death (October 4, 1970) is absolutely coincidental, he says.

If I’m a musician, and Janis Joplin (who wrote numerous songs with and after Big Brother, including “Move Over” and “Mercedes Benz”) left me some lyrics, I would’ve jumped on them long before four decades slipped by. Especially since, as he says in the liners, he started the song by creating a bluesy riff that became “C# Razzmatazz,” and, weeks later, she handed him the lyrics, written on the back of a flyer. They wound up in a box of memorabilia, largely forgotten.

But I’ll take Getz at his word — especially because he’s so good with the music. He brings the song to life with the help of Kathi McDonald, who was Big Brother’s first lead singer after Janis left in 1968. Like Joplin, McDonald is a blues shouter, a worthy Big Sister, and her reading sounds true to Janis’ words, about loneliness and pain. They were prophetic, says Getz: “Too much sadness in the world, so I’ll add my part. Take this lonely heart from one lonely girl,” Joplin wrote. “Reachin’ too high, babe, can’t help but get burned. 25 years of sorrow, you think by now I would have learned.”

“Can’t Be the Only One” is the only Janis song on the 11-track CD. (It’s done twice, once in a “kinda live” version, which I prefer.) But the CD is much more than a curiosity item. Getz is a crackerjack composer and player (drums and midi keyboards), teamed with some talented lyricists, and he gathered a bunch of talented musicians and singers for the CD. They amble from jazz to blues to rock, with McDonald handling the more energetic cuts. But vocalists like Lyn Asher, Andra Mitrovich and Sonny Walker hold their own. And Getz pays additional tribute to a fallen Big Brother with “Trail of Tears,” featuring James Gurley on guitar.

Big Brother, who continue to tour, were never given much credit as musicians. They always deserved more than they got.

(You can hear Big Brother at Winterland, from June, 1968, six months before Janis left, here on the Vault.)

[Janis remembered, in her own words is a post in From the Vault - The Wolfgang's Vault blog.]

Ben meets and greets the future Sir Paul on the road in 1976.

Loved the item in the San Francisco Chronicle about the recent Paul McCartney concert at AT&T Park (the Giants’ ballpark), about how, over the course of his three-hour show, the city’s Entertainment Commission got only three phone calls. “Two complaints came from the same guy, who called to say the music was too loud. The third came from a woman sitting on her deck – asking that the sound be turned up so she could hear it better.”

 Sure, ma’am. That’ll be $100, please.

McCartney & Co. got a rave review in The Chronicle. It was a three-hour love-me-do fest, apparently, and I’m sorry I missed it. I was across the Bay, in Berkeley, officiating a wedding. It would’ve been difficult telling the couple, “You do? OK, I pronounce you married. Gotta run!”

Weeks before he came to town, Paul was stirring up the masses. He’s good at doing that. The show, the ads said, marked the former Beatle’s first performance in San Francisco since 1966, when he played—with the Beatles, in what turned out to be their last concert—at Candlestick Park, former home of the Giants and 49ers.

Forty-four years since we saw him? That was true, technically. But, with Wings, he played the Cow Palace, which is in Daly City, a few yards outside the S.F. city limits, and he’s performed over the years in nearby Berkeley, Oakland and San Jose (in ’05). Still, the hype worked; the park was packed; people screamed; one lady asked to turn up the volume.

It always has worked for McCartney. When I think of Paul, and about covering the Wings tour in ’76 for Rolling Stone, and interviewing him on television, and then meeting up with him again after the murder of John Lennon, for an article for Parade, I think of a master of the media. He was always the most earnest and outgoing of the Beatles. He was engaging in more ways than one. From the start, he understood marketing and branding, decades before those became catchwords. Working with him as an interviewer, and observing him dealing with other writers and broadcasters, I was amazed at what a chameleon he was, adjusting his tone, his ‘tude, even his language to suit the job – or journalist – at hand. 

That was in the early ‘80s, and, so long as McCartney has had something to pitch, it’s never stopped. In my radio column in The Chronicle in early ’09, I noted how, to promote his Electric Arguments CD, he’d done interviews with Stephen Colbert and Howard Stern, among others.  With Stern, he ramped up the humor. Stern and Robin Quivers expressed open excitement at his visit. “I’ve got to just soak this in,” said Stern, “that I’m sitting here with you.” Said McCartney: “You’ve got to soak it in? What about me?” Howard tried to help the giddy Quivers get a date with McCartney (“Show Paul your breasts,” he advised), and asked him if he’d ever had an interracial date. Yes, said Sir Paul, “back in the day, before John fell in love with me.”

McCartney talked about the Beatles, revealing the original name for the Abbey Road album was “Mount Everest,” because the recording engineer smoked Everest cigarettes. When Stern asked why he used The Fireman instead of his own name for the new album, McCartney said, “I walk in the woods, and you make fires there. And my dad was a fireman…When you think about it, “Sgt. Pepper’s” was the Beatles hiding behind that, pretending we’re in another band.” 

Not that McCartney has ever been one to hide.

[Paul McCartney: It’s always ‘yeah, yeah, yeah’ is a post in From the Vault - The Wolfgang's Vault blog.]

Besides “Hound Dog,” which they wrote for “Big Mama,” and whose version they vastly preferred over the one by that young whippersnapper called Elvis, Leiber and Stoller wrote about 75 other major hits, including a bunch for Presley –  “Treat Me Nice,” “Jailhouse Rock,” “Don’t,” “You’re So Square (Baby I Don’t Care) – and the Coasters: “Yakety Yak,” “Charlie Brown,” “Poison Ivy.” And “Stand By Me,” “On Broadway,” “Kansas City,” “Love Potion #9,” “There Goes My Baby,” “Spanish Harlem” and “Ruby Baby.”

Oh, and, as composers and record producers, they taught Phil Spector a lot of what he came to know. But it was another producer who gave them one of their first breaks. One day in 1952, Johnny (“Willie and the Hand Jive”) Otis was looking for a song for “Big Mama” and summoned Jerry and Mike, a pair of teenaged wizards who’d scored a couple of R&B hits, including “Kansas City,” to his garage, where he was rehearsing wit his band and singers.

They listened to the brash Thornton, dressed, as usual, in coveralls and combat boots, and found her “a bit frightening,” according to Stoller. When Otis asked if they had a song for her, his partner replied, “We don’t now, but we will in a few minutes.”

Leiber writes: “We raced back to Mike’s house and knocked out a song in a matter of minutes … We knew, as they say in the south, that this dog would hunt. ‘Hound Dog’ had the right country-funky feel that the great lady embodied.”

They gave her the song, Mike Stoller began playing it on the piano, and Thornton began crooning it. Leiber broke in: “Big Mama, that ain’t the way it goes.”

OK. I have to break in here. In the Leiber and Stoller book, written with ace biographer David Ritz, Leiber says that Thornton retorted, “I know how it go,” and wagged her tongue at him.

But in the book Tell the Truth Until They Bleed, author Josh Alan Friedman, who profiled and spoke extensively with the two songwriters, reports that Thornton’s response to Leiber was: “White boy, don’t tell me how it go. I know how it go,” and then “flapped her tongue like a snake.”

Oh, yes: Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller were white, Jewish kids who just happened to love blues, jazz and R&B music.

Otis, himself a white man who grew up loving and performing black music, became a mediator. He pacified Thornton and then turned to Leiber. “You sing it, Jerry,” he said. “You show ‘Big Mama’ how it goes.”

And he did. As Stoller recalls: “She heard the rough-and-tough of the song and, just as important, the implicit sexual humor. In short, she got it.” Her croon turned into a more appropriate growl.

The next day, she recorded  the song, which would go on to top the R&B charts, and the boys were at the session. “Listening to the playback,” says Leiber, “hearing how ‘Big Mama’ fulfilled our dream, we were the happiest teenagers in the United States of America.”

And that was before Elvis Presley got hold of it, in 1956, and took it to Number One on the pop charts.

By the way, in the “Comments” section for Thornton, one Vault listener writes: “Janis (Joplin) was the only one that called Big Mama to ask permission to sing one of her songs. She also made sure that Big Mama received royalties for that song, unlike Elvis.”

Actually, since Thornton didn’t compose the song, no such permission was needed. And royalties would also go to the writers. Any performance royalties “Big Mama” earned would be the responsibility of her record company, not fellow artists.

Anyway, “Big Mama” did just fine. In the matter of “Hound Dog,” she will always be the originator.

[Before Elvis, There Was ‘Big Mama’ is a post in From the Vault - The Wolfgang's Vault blog.]

And this weekend is pretty much the anniversary of the Monterey Pop Festival, which ran in mid-June of 1967 and signaled the hippie generation. Everybody who was anybody was there, except the Beatles, the Doors, and, come to think of it, Ray Davies. (The Stones didn’t play, but Brian Jones represented.)

I wasn’t there either, being a young, unconscious pup back then. But, thanks to a rewriting — or, more specifically, a repainting — of history, I am.

A few years ago, I went to a posh hotel to visit Grace Slick, who’d switched from singing to painting. She had a showing, and when I got to the table where she was receiving guests, she told me she had something for me. It turned out to be a new painting, called “Monterey,” a colorful rendering of the California fairgrounds, with a backdrop of concession stands, including on featuring Rolling Stone and Creem magazines. Up front was a coterie of recognizable artists up front: Jimi Hendrix, Jerry Garcia, David Crosby, Mama Cass, Otis Redding, Pete Townshend, Roger Daltrey, Keith Moon, Neil Young, various members of the Airplane, Ravi Shankar, and, for some reason, Ghandi and a white rabbit.

She pointed to a figure standing between Jimi and Brian Jones, in the lower right corner. “That’s you,” she said. “No, it’s not,” I replied. It was a bespectacled young man in a blue shirt. I wear glasses as well as the occasional blue shirt. But this guy had a curtain of black hair more befitting Crystal Gayle than me. “I never had long hair like that,” I said. “Yes, you did,” said Grace. “I remember.”

Actually, I didn’t, but, having just been presented with a lovely gift, I was not about to continue to argue, or to ask her who she thought, between the two of us, had more acid trips. (I had one, and it was more a stumble than a trip.)  As for the fact that I wasn’t there, and that Rolling Stone wouldn’t publish its first issue until later that year, she shrugged an artistic licensing kind of a shrug. “You should have been there,” she said, and she was right about that.

I have the painting displayed in my office and wanted to share it with you, but it’s too big to photocopy. So, of course, I found it online. Along with a photo of this 20-by-30-inch work of gliclee on canvas, the Limelight Agency offered a few words from Grace, in retrospect:

“Throughout history there have been delightful little blobs of collective hope,” she wrote. “For a couple of years in the late Sixties, no matter what was going on in the world, our generation happily assumed that with love and education we could change outdated social systems.

“One huge thing that we missed: Ninety percent of the population is genetically imbued with sub-mediocre reasoning skills. No matter how much you hug them or read to them, there’s no correcting stupid.

“Monterey — a celebration of youthful naiveté.”

Thank you, Grace. And a happy anniversary to all of us.

[Grace Slick plays – and paints – Monterey Pop is a post in From the Vault - The Wolfgang's Vault blog.]