Piece of My Heart

Music was more than just music to my generation. It was the soundtrack of our days and our guiding light (and sound). More than film, more than literature, more than even politics -- at least after they killed Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, JFK, Martin Luther King Jr., Bobby Kennedy, Fred Hampton etc. (They changed the course of history through the barrel of a gun.) I was reminded of this while watching my brother Steve's documentary The Movement and The “Madman,” which showed Pete Seeger singing John Lennon's "Give Peace a Chance" (John himself was not permitted to stage his bed-in for peace in the U.S.) and Crosby, Stills & Nash singing to huge antiwar rallies in Washington DC and San Francisco.

But there was rock and folk music that was not explicitly political that was also part of our movement to change America (and the world). This came to mind when I stumbled across this early studio version of Big Brother & the Holding Company's "Piece of My Heart" (written by the great team Jerry Ragavoy and Bert Berns). A slower, rawer, more sinuous version.

What a powerful song! Maybe Big Brother drummer Dave Getz will tell us about how the song was recorded.

Speaking of Big Brother, I'm also reminded of the passage in my book Season of the Witch, in which Alex Reisman -- the younger brother of Nancy, who was married to band guitarist James Gurley -- heard the group play for the first time, at San Francisco's Avalon Ballroom:

Before the show, Alex went backstage with his new wife, Dorothy, and smoked dope with the band in their cramped dressing room. Janis (Joplin) was terrified -- she had never performed with a rock band before, only in coffeehouses with an acoustic guitar. Alex couldn't see what the buzz was all about. "I remember thinking that Janis was not that great looking, especially compared to someone like Grace Slick. Then she went onstage and opened her mouth and I thought, 'I get it.'"

Janis was blasted into air by the band's rocket of sound. "What a rush!" she felt. "A real drug rush. The music went boom, boom, boom and everyone was dancing, and I stood there and clutched the mike, and I got it."

We all got it.

Big Brother & the Holding Company