Nick Gravenites reminisces about Janis Joplin, Michael Bloomfield and the Chicago blues migration to San Francisco

In the green room before Los Lobos’ Memorial Day concert at West Marin’s Rancho Nicasio, everyone’s attention was focused on the band’s guest for the day: 84-year-old bluesman Nick Gravenites.

Wearing his signature Greek fisherman’s cap, Gravenites sat at the end of a couch with his cane by his side, signing copies of his albums and chatting with members of the band, who peppered him with questions about his life and the famous people he’d met and worked with along the way.

Singer-songwriter-guitarist Cesar Rosas wanted to know if Gravenites had met Bob Dylan in New York.

“Nah,” Gravenites replied. “New York wasn’t a blues town. It was a folk music town.”

But he quickly segued into a story about Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman, wanting Dylan to renegotiate his original Columbia Records contract because he was underage when he signed it.

“Bob said no,” Gravenites said. “He told Grossman that he signed that contract with John Hammond (the respected producer and civil rights activist) in good faith and he was going to honor it. Bob’s a straight shooter. He’s a good guy.”

There was an air of deference and respect in the room as Gravenites spoke. He had never achieved the kind of success and fame that the Grammy-winning East Los Angeles rockers had in their long career, but among students of roots music, he holds a kind of legendary status in the White blues-rock pantheon.

Gravenites is best known for writing “Born in Chicago,” the opening song on the first Paul Butterfield Blues Band album in 1965, which exposed White rock and pop audiences to Black electric blues. As a songwriter, he penned “Buried Alive in the Blues” and “Work Me Lord” for Janis Joplin.

In 1967, the Summer of Love, he was a founding member and lead singer of the Electric Flag, a powerhouse but short-lived blues-rock-soul band that featured Bloomfield on guitar and Buddy Miles on drums. Before making their debut at the Monterey Pop Festival, band members lived together and had their first rehearsals in a big communal house that Gravenites rented in Marin’s Tam Valley.

In 1967, Gravenites wrote the score for the “The Trip,” a movie about the LSD experience written by Jack Nicholson and starring Peter Fonda. He also produced the music for the 1973 film “Steelyard Blues” and produced the No. 10 Billboard hit, 1970’s “One Toke Over the Line,” by Brewer & Shipley.

Before their Rancho gig, the members of Los Lobos had no idea that this seminal figure in the history of blues was still alive and singing. So they were pleasantly surprised when his musician friend and helpmate, drummer Gary Silva, called the leader of Los Lobos, singer-guitarist David Hidalgo, a longtime acquaintance of his, and told him he’d happily bring the octogenarian bluesman to their show, a late afternoon outdoor barbecue on the roadhouse’s back lawn.

“David said, ‘You can bring Nick Gravenites?’” Silva recalls. “’It would be amazing if he would sit in. I’m going to call the guys in the band right now and let them know.’”

When it was time for his guest appearance midway through the band’s set, Gravenites, frail and unsteady on his feet, had to be helped onto a chair on the stage. People held their breath, not expecting much, hoping they weren’t about to witness a train wreck. But when he picked up the mic and started to sing, the years fell away and he was rejuvenated, his voice sounding incongruously young and strong and soulful, like it was coming from some place deep inside him.

A sense of astonishment swept over the sold-out crowd. After three rousing blues tunes, the highlight being Gravenites’ signature “Born in Chicago,” he was awarded with a standing ovation.

Many memories

A few days later, Silva helped me set up an interview with Gravenites at his rustic home in Sonoma County. He shares a big, barnlike house with his wife, Marcia, in a forest of coastal redwoods on a ridge above the quaint little town of Occidental, where he’s lived for 30 years. For 14 of those years, he played the blues every Friday night at Negri’s, one of Occidental’s long-running Italian family-style restaurants.

At one end of the couple’s expansive, high-ceiling living room, picture windows frame a vertiginous view of the heavily wooded Sonoma Valley. On the walls are photos of fellow musicians and friends who have been important in his life and career, all of them long dead and gone: Joplin, Bloomfield, Butterfield, the soul singer Otis Redding. There’s a framed poster from the 1989 memorial concert at the Fillmore in San Francisco for Mill Valley’s John Cipollina, lead guitarist of the ’60s band Quicksilver Messenger Service. In a side room, Gravenites has a blown-up photo of Cipollina’s elaborate stage setup, now enshrined in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

He and Cipollina toured and performed under their own names and at times as “Thunder and Lightning.” The height of their partnership was a tour of Greece in 1967.

“He was a rocker and I was a bluesman,” he says, “but we were like soul brothers.”

After 60 years in the rough and tumble world of the music business, Gravenites has a reputation for occasional bouts of hard-earned cynicism and irascibility, but he was still riding high from his star turn with Los Lobos.

“Some of the people didn’t know who I was, but they found out by the time I was done singing,” says Gravenites, sitting in the sun on his front porch, his face shaded by a commemorative ball cap from the reunion of the Electric Flag in 1974. “I’ve been out of the picture and haven’t performed much for a long time, which is real bad because I have no money. But that day was fun.”

Chicago roots

Born and raised in a Greek-speaking family on Chicago’s South Side, he says he may have inherited his singing talent from his mother and his affinity for the blues from his ethnic roots.

“I’m a Greek, and Greeks have blues, too,” he says. “So I think I was born with a certain feeling.”

He tried his luck first as a folk singer in San Francisco’s North Beach in the early ‘60s, catching the tail end of the beatnik era as it gave way to the emerging hippie counterculture. He remembers having his mind blown by the first light show he’d ever seen, at the Coffee Gallery in North Beach in 1964.

In Chicago, as a self-described tough guy with an attitude and a .38 caliber pistol tucked into his belt, he frequented Black blues clubs where pioneering bluesmen like Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and Buddy Guy performed.

At the University of Chicago, he had been part of a circle of young White blues musicians that included Butterfield, Bloomfield, guitarist Elvin Bishop and keyboardist Mark Naftalin, all members of the Butterfield band. Naftalin and Bishop eventually settled in Marin County. Bishop still lives in the San Geronimo Valley.

Credited with playing a pivotal role in bringing Chicago blues to San Francisco in the era of psychedelic rock, Gravenites was once described by music journalist Joel Selvin as “the original San Francisco connection for the Chicago crowd.”

The Chicago blues musicians were drawn by several factors, primarily the chance to play at prestige venues like the Fillmore Auditorium and the Avalon Ballroom booked by promoters Chet Helms and Bill Graham, who presented blues bands alongside rock acts.

“Half the blues players in Chicago came to San Francisco in about 1968,” Bishop says. “They found out there was an opportunity to play someplace besides ghetto bars. The weather was good. You didn’t have to wear those damn continental suits and pointy-toed shoes. The girls were friendly. You didn’t have to watch your back like you did in the bars in Chicago. It was all win-win.”

Love for Janis

The photos in his home of Joplin, who died of a heroin overdose in a Los Angeles hotel room in 1970 at the age of 27, are evidence of their abiding friendship, the affection he still feels for her.

When she controversially left the psychedelic rock band Big Brother and the Holding Company after the breakout success of their second album, “Cheap Thrills,” the guys in the band were hurt, feeling, as many fans did, that she had betrayed them just when they were starting to make it. Gravenites had known her since his folk-singing days in North Beach, when she was an aspiring blues singer from Texas with a drug habit. At this critical juncture in her career, he stuck by her.

“She was a friend,” he says. “I knew her forever. Did I foresee the star she would become? No, I didn’t. I didn’t see it coming. People were against her for some reason.”

He helped her put together a new group, the Kozmic Blues Band, and he briefly took her place as Big Brother’s lead singer, an unenviable job that he admits was “impossible to do.”

“You don’t replace Janis Joplin,” he says.

When she performed at Woodstock the year before she died, she ended her 2 a.m. set with Gravenites’s song “Work Me Lord,” praising him as “a fine songwriter.”

She sang herself into an impassioned frenzy on the song, a kind of prayer for the singer to be delivered from loneliness. Near the end, though, the band’s sound system was unexpectedly cut off, leaving her to finish a cappella. In the film footage of the performance, you can hear her say, “They haven’t turned me off yet.” But by then, her tortured voice was ragged and cracking, strained to a breaking point. She looked lonely and abandoned up there.

Some reviewers called the performance a raw masterpiece, the highlight of the set, but Gravenites is still incensed about it more than 65 years later.

“It was an insult,” says Gravenites, practically spitting the words out. “They put her on and they cut the music off. You don’t treat people that way. But there was a lot of weird stuff going on with Janis. People loved her, they hated her. They accused her of betraying her band, all kinds of weird stuff that a civilized human being shouldn’t have to put up with.”

The day she was found dead, she had been scheduled to go into the studio to record the vocals for his song “Buried Alive in the Blues.” On her posthumous album, “Pearl,” it’s the record’s only instrumental track. She had a new home in Larkspur’s Baltimore Canyon when she died.

“Janis died ugly, which is not good,” he says. “She died a junkie in a hotel room in L.A., which is the worst death. You can’t die worse than that. I was at home when I heard. It broke my heart.”

Another blow

His heart would be broken again by the inglorious death of his lifelong friend and bandmate in the Electric Flag, the brilliant but troubled guitarist Michael Bloomfield.

During one of their jams together, they had come up with the revolutionary sound that would become the title track of the second Butterfield Blues Band album, “East-West,” a groundbreaking instrumental blending blues with Indian ragas and modal jazz.

Like Joplin, Bloomfield had a drug problem, including heroin addiction, which he said he used to self-medicate for insomnia. In 1981, his body was found behind the wheel of his car on a San Francisco street. The medical examiner said he’d died of cocaine and methamphetamine poisoning. He was 37 years old and had been living in Mill Valley for years as a reluctant Marin County guitar hero. He was so down and out at the end of his life that Gravenites had to buy him a suit so he could attend his grandmother’s funeral.

“Michael was a genius, but he didn’t want to be out front or be a band leader,” Gravenites remembers. “He was crazy in a lot of ways. He didn’t care about the things that ordinary people care about.”

In the end, though, he adds, “It was the same thing as Janis. He died ugly.”

Gravenites and harmonica ace Paul Butterfield had been friends since Butterfield was a teenager at University High School in Chicago.

“In 1960, as Nick and Paul, we played Butterfield’s high school graduation party,” a smiling Gravenites remembers. “We both wore white tuxes.”

Butterfield, of course, would go on to great success and acclaim as a harmonica virtuoso, singer and leader of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. In his late 30s, his popularity waning, he had several surgical procedures for peritonitis, a painful inflammation of the intestines. Perhaps to ease the pain of his disease he, too, began using heroin. He was also dealing emotionally with the deaths of Bloomfield and his manager, Albert Grossman, who died in 1986 of a heart attack at age 59.

On May 4, 1987, Butterfield collapsed and died of an accidental drug overdose in his apartment in North Hollywood. He was 44.

“Paul got weird,” Gravenites recalls. “He got drunk and junked out. He had family problems. His life turned out to be a mess. There was nothing I could do about it.  You’ve got to do it yourself or forget about it.”

Heroin addiction had also played a role in the breakup of the Electric Flag, Gravenites laments, saying he was able to steer clear of the drug because in the Greek culture he grew up in, heroin was a taboo.

“From my early upbringing in the South Side of Chicago, you didn’t mess with heroin,” he says. “If someone became a junkie, their father and brothers would come after them. Heroin was on the other side of the street. There were always problems with it.”

Surviving the blues