She Talked Him Into Leaving His Own Band — Then She Fired Him — Then They Had a Brief Love Affair D

In 1966, a guitarist named Sam Andrew was playing in a San Francisco band called Big Brother and the Holding Company. He had co-founded the band the year before. He was trained in jazz and classical music, had studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, had grown up as an Air Force brat living in places including Okinawa, Japan.

He was playing experimental unstructured music with his bandmates, set so loose that one of them once cooked bacon on a hot plate on top of an amplifier while the band played, and they stopped when the bacon was done. Then a girl from Texas walked in. He said, “I remember when she opened her mouth and started to sing, I thought, wow, that sounds really authentic.

It sounded like she was from the ’30s or ’40s, a real singer. Everything that followed began with that moment.” But the story of Sam Andrew and Janis Joplin is not just the story of a musician who recognized something extraordinary. It is the story of someone who went with her, was fired by her, loved her briefly, and spent the rest of his life playing her songs for audiences who would never see her again.

When Janis Joplin joined Big Brother and the Holding Company in 1966, Sam Andrew was already its co-founder. He had built the band, he had defined its sound, the experimental psychedelic blues that would become the foundation under her voice. He wrote songs for her, combination of the two, which opened their breakthrough performance at Monterey in June 1967.

He arranged their version of Summertime, the Gershwin standard that became one of her most celebrated recordings. He said, “I was participating, we were writing songs together. I was just like, I’m so privileged, this is really great. I have this person to write songs for and she’s this great singer.

It was a collaboration, a band, a team.” And then the team broke. In late 1968, Cheap Thrills was at number one. Janis Joplin was the most famous female rock singer in America, and the critics, while loving her, had been less kind to Big Brother. She wanted a soul band. She wanted session musicians.

She wanted something different from what Big Brother could give her. She decided to leave, and she talked Sam Andrew into leaving with her. He said years later, “It was a really stupid decision, but she talked me into it. I wish I had been stronger and said no.” He went. They both left the band he had founded and joined her new group, the Cosmic Blues Band. She wanted a soul band.

The Cosmic Blues Band was supposed to be that. It was not. The Cosmic Blues Band story is the story of an idea that did not work. The critics who had loved Janis with Big Brother found the new configuration unfocused, too produced, wrong. The reviews ranged from bad to worse. Sam Andrew was not wrong for the music, but the configuration as a whole was not finding its shape, and somewhere in the late summer of 1969, less than a year after they had left Big Brother together, Janis fired him.

He described it with the specific dry humor of someone who has had a long time to accept something. The Cosmic Blues Band was a constantly sinking ship. They started throwing things overboard, and I think I was the first large thing to go.” She fired him. He went back to Big Brother, the band he had left now reassembled around him.

His bandmates, Dave Getz, Peter Albin, James Gurley, had been continuing without either of them. They came back together, and then something unexpected happened. After the firing, after Sam Andrew had been thrown overboard from the sinking ship and returned to Big Brother, something shifted between them.

He said in a 2007 interview, “Probably something inside of me said, ‘Well, now she’s fired me, so we can have this relationship.’ It was very brief, but very sweet. Very brief, but very sweet. The guitarist and the singer. The man she had talked into leaving his own band. The man she had fired from the band she talked him into.

Whatever the professional relationship had prevented, whatever the hierarchy of band leader and musician had made impossible, the firing removed it. For a brief time, they were something else. Very brief, very sweet. And then that too was over. In February 1970, Janis went to Brazil.

She came back, formed the Full Tilt Boogie Band, began recording Pearl. Sam Andrew was in Marin County playing with the reformed Big Brother and the Holding Company. They had taken different roads. Hers going toward what would become her masterpiece, his going toward a continuation of the band that had made her possible.

They had been at Monterey together. They had founded the Cosmic Blues Band together, and she had fired him from it. They had had their brief, sweet thing. And on October 4th, 1970, he was in Marin County when her equipment manager called from Los Angeles. He said, “She was in Hollywood, which is where she died.

” And he told us she was dead. He heard it in Marin County, where the San Francisco world lived, where the whole thing had started. She died in Hollywood. He was in Marin. The call crossed the distance. Sam Andrew spent the rest of his life in the presence of Janis Joplin’s absence. He continued with Big Brother through 30 or 40 different singers, none of whom were her. None of them could be.

He said, “The tragedy of her not living was that she could have gone on and made an album of jazz standards that would have totally amazed people. What she did with Little Girl Blue and Summertime was where she started on that journey. She could have made a whole album of jazz standards. A lot of people who didn’t realize how talented Janis was would have sat up and taken notice.

He became the musical director of Love, Janis, the off-Broadway and touring show about her life. The man who had founded the band, who had gone with her, who had been fired, who had loved her briefly, who had heard the news in Marin County, now spending years presenting her story to audiences who had not been there.

He was the keeper of something he could not give up. Sam Andrew died on February 12, 2015. He was 73 years old. He had suffered a heart attack in early December 2014 and never fully recovered. He died in his wife Alise’s arms at UCSF Medical Center. His bandmates posted, “Yesterday, 10 weeks after his heart attack, Sam lost his gallant fight to hold on to the life he lived so well.

The life he lived so well.” He had made one decision he always regretted, leaving Big Brother when she talked him into it. He had been fired from the band that decision created. He had had a brief, sweet love affair with the person who fired him. He had gotten the call in Marin County.

He had spent decades playing her songs on stages where she should have been standing. “I was so privileged,” he said. “This is really great. I have this person to write songs for and she’s this great singer.” That was 1967. He carried it until 2015. Subscribe. The next story goes somewhere nobody has taken you before.