Sam Andrew, Guitarist for Big Brother and the Holding Company, Dies at 73

[Fansome]

Sam Andrew, Guitarist for Big Brother and the Holding Company, Dies at 73
By PETER KEEPNEWSFEB. 16, 2015

Sam Andrew, who as a founder of the band Big Brother and the Holding Company was a mainstay of the fertile San Francisco rock scene of the 1960s and played a key role in Janis Joplin’s early career, died on Thursday in San Rafael, Calif. He was 73.

His death was announced on the band’s website, which said Mr. Andrew had a heart attack 10 weeks ago and underwent open-heart surgery. 

Big Brother and the Holding Company was among the first and most successful exponents of the so-called San Francisco sound, an adventurous mix of folk, blues and rock influences fueled by psychedelic drugs. (Others included the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead.)

Mr. Andrew, who founded Big Brother in 1965 with the bassist Peter Albin and shared lead guitar duties with James Gurley, referred to the band’s sound as a “progressive-regressive hurricane blues style.” 

Big Brother played its first show in Berkeley in January 1966, but did not begin attracting wide attention until a few months later, when, at the urging of their manager, Chet Helms, they added Ms. Joplin to their lineup. A young singer from Texas with a penchant for the blues, she brought a fiercely uninhibited style to the band.

The group gave a triumphant performance at the Monterey International Pop Festival in 1967, but its first album, hastily recorded for the small Mainstream label and released that year, was only a modest success. Big Brother’s real breakthrough came with its second album, “Cheap Thrills,” partly recorded in concert and featuring songs like “Piece of My Heart,” the Andrew composition “Combination of the Two” and Mr. Andrew’s arrangement of “Summertime.”

Released by Columbia in 1968, “Cheap Thrills” — which was also noteworthy for the cartoonist Robert Crumb’s wild cover art — was one of the best-selling albums of the year and remains among the most celebrated rock albums of its era.

When Ms. Joplin left Big Brother in late 1968 for a solo career, Mr. Andrew went with her as part of her Kozmic Blues Band, and Big Brother broke up. The band regrouped a few months later (without Ms. Joplin, who died of a drug overdose in 1970) but broke up again in 1972.

Mr. Andrew spent several years studying composition in New York but eventually returned to San Francisco, where Big Brother and the Holding Company reunited once again, in 1987. The group, with a mixture of new and original members, was still performing last year.

Mr. Andrew also performed with his own band and was the musical director of “Love, Janis,” a stage show based on Ms. Joplin’s life, which was staged at the Village Theater in Manhattan in 2001.

Sam Houston Andrew III was born in Taft, Calif., near Bakersfield, on Dec. 18, 1941. He became interested in rock ’n’ roll and the blues at an early age and had his own band by the time he was 15.

Survivors include his wife, Elise Piliwale, and a daughter, Mari Andrew.

Critics, even while praising Ms. Joplin’s singing, often dismissed Big Brother and the Holding Company in its late-1960s heyday as undisciplined and lacking technique. Mr. Andrew, not surprisingly, saw things differently.

“Big Brother and the Holding Company,” he once said, “was a prime example of a band where the chemistry was right, where the whole was greater than the sum of its parts. You cannot buy or manufacture the natural feeling that was in that band.”