Psychedelic Retrospective Will Flash Back to the ‘60s

With tie-dye T-shirts and peace-sign earrings back in style, with the Grateful Dead back on the charts and the Jefferson Airplane rumored to be getting back together, it was bound to happen: A savvy promoter has assembled a touring revue of acid-rock also-rans under the banner, “The Sounds of San Francisco: A Celebration of the Psychedelic Summer of Love.”

One of the first stops on this long, strange trip back in time is in San Diego. Performing tonight at the Bacchanal nightclub in Kearny Mesa will be the Seeds, Love, and Big Brother and the Holding Company. Like the Dead and the Airplane, these bands were part of the West Coast acid-rock movement of the late 1960s--a movement ostensibly intended to musically re-create the “trips” induced by LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs.

The revue’s name is something of a misnomer. Two of the bands are actually from Los Angeles: the Seeds, best remembered for their 1967 garage-punk classic, “Pushin’ Too Hard,” and Love, which occasionally drifted out of the acid-rock genre to toy with such traditional styles as folk-rock (“Andmoreagain”) and Latin (“Alone Again Or”).

Only Big Brother and the Holding Company originated in San Francisco, playing a crude mix of blues and rock at such popular concert halls as the Avalon Ballroom and the Fillmore West. The group’s plunge into psychedelia came after they hooked up with a young singer from Texas named Janis Joplin, with whom they recorded one of the biggest hits of 1968, “Piece of My Heart.”

Also part of the package is the Kaleidoscope Light Show, without which no ‘60s acid-rock concert was complete. The show is a visual hodgepodge of slides, film clips, liquid and polarized projections, and interference patterns, all beamed onto a screen behind the stage in sync with the music.

Turn on, tune in, drop out.

The “Celebration of the Psychedelic Summer of Love” tour began last Thursday, on what would have been Joplin’s 46th birthday, in the late singer’s hometown of Port Arthur, Tex.

“It was great,” said guitarist Sam Andrews, one of four original members of Big Brother and the Holding Company who regrouped specifically for the tour. “We got to see all the places where she used to hang out, and we did all the old songs we used to do with her--right there, where she was from. That sure brought back some memories.”

Those memories, however, were not all good. Although Joplin’s June, 1967, performance with Big Brother at the Monterey Pop Festival catapulted her into the national spotlight, her tenure with the group was both brief and controversial. Critics railed that Joplin needed a more precise backing band, and at the end of 1968 she heeded their advice and split.

“In a lot of ways, what the critics were saying was true,” Andrews said. “Maybe we were a little too loud, a little out of tune. But that’s because we were creating an entirely new type of music, and, when success came, we weren’t fully prepared--we were still experimenting.

“You also have to keep in mind that, without us, there wouldn’t have been a Janis. We gave her a forum, a creative environment, to form in; we pushed her from being a folk singer into being an electric singer, and the musical ingredients we used had never been used before.”

After Joplin’s departure, Big Brother and the Holding Company’s commercial fortunes dimmed, and in 1972 the group broke up. “The inspiration stopped coming, and we were doing too many drugs,” Andrews recalled. “It was just a lot of things were running out of gas, all at once.”

Andrews moved to New York and spent the rest of the 1970s “doing studio work and going on the road with club bands up and down the Eastern sea coast,” he said.

A few years ago, Andrews said, he moved back to California and began teaching music at the Blue Bear School of Music in San Francisco.

“But then, sometime last year, I got a call from this promoter who wanted us to get back together for this tour,” Andrews said. “So, I contacted the other guys and pretty soon we were rehearsing in the studio with a new female singer, Michelle Bastian, and basically picking up where we left off.”

Is the Big Brother and the Holding Company reunion a permanent one?

“It very well could be,” Andrews said. “For one thing, everyone is sane and straight, and we’re getting along so well we’ve already made plans to do an album once the tour is over. And, for another, we’re having so much fun on the road, and getting such a wonderful reception, that I could see us doing this thing indefinitely.”

LINER NOTES: San Diego rockers will soon have the chance to see one of their own on the silver screen. In “Great Balls of Fire,” the upcoming motion picture about rock legend Jerry Lee Lewis, local talking bluesman Mojo Nixon portrays one of the Killer’s band members. The movie, which stars Dennis Quaid in the lead role, has just completed filming at Sun Studios in Memphis.

Tickets went on sale last Friday for Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians’ Feb. 21 appearance at Symphony Hall. By the time the box office closed for the day, more than 400 tickets had been sold.