NEW YORK, NY.- Nick Gravenites, a Chicago-bred blues vocalist and guitarist who rose to prominence during the explosion of psychedelia in San Francisco in the 1960s as a founder of hard-driving blues-rock band the Electric Flag and as a songwriter for Janis Joplin and others, died Sept. 18 in Santa Rosa, California. He was 85.
His son Tim Gravenites said he died in an assisted-living facility, where he was being treated for dementia and diabetes.
Nick Gravenites grew up on the South Side of Chicago, where he was part of a cadre of “white misfit kids,” as he put it on his website, who honed their craft watching Chicago blues masters like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf in local clubs. His colleagues included singer and harmonica player Paul Butterfield and guitarists Michael Bloomfield and Elvin Bishop; all four of them would go on to help fuel the white blues-rock boom that began in the 1960s.
“Being a ‘bluesman’ is the total blues life,” Gravenites said in a 2005 interview with Sound Waves, a Connecticut lifestyle magazine. “It has to do with philosophy.”
“The life in general doesn’t ask much from you in terms of personality,” he continued. “It doesn’t ask that you be a genius, or a saint.” Many bluesmen, he added, fell far short of sainthood: “They just ask that you be able to play the stuff. That’s all.”
A respected songwriter, Gravenites (pronounced grav-a-NIGHT-is) was considered a primary link between the music scenes of Chicago and San Francisco, where he settled in at the height of the flower power era. He wrote signature numbers, including “Born in Chicago,” for the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, which included Bloomfield and Bishop. He also wrote for bluesmen including Howlin’ Wolf, Otis Rush and James Cotton, and, in the rock sphere, for the likes of Joplin, her band Big Brother and the Holding Company, and Quicksilver Messenger Service.
Gravenites tasted fame of his own in 1967, the so-called Summer of Love, when he joined Bloomfield, a guitar hero of the 1960s, in founding the Electric Flag. Among the other members of that band was the drummer Buddy Miles, later known for his work with Jimi Hendrix.
The Electric Flag was short-lived. But while it lasted, it was known for its propulsive, high-wattage fusion of blues, rock, soul and jazz, and for its shimmering horn section.
The band established its acid-rock bona fides by providing the mind-melding soundtrack to “The Trip,” the 1967 cult film starring Peter Fonda as an LSD novice who embarks on a fun-house journey through Los Angeles as shapes morph and colors swirl.
When the band finally made its live debut, it was in the most auspicious setting possible: the watershed Monterey International Pop Festival, which marked a pyrotechnic new era for rock, as epitomized by the Who bashing their instruments onstage and Hendrix lighting his Fender Stratocaster on fire.
“I didn’t care about any of that stuff,” Gravenites said in a recent radio interview. “It just wasn’t my generation.”
Despite the band’s promising beginnings, the Electric Flag recorded just one non-soundtrack album with its original lineup, “A Long Time Comin’” (1968), which has earned mixed reviews over the years, but is considered by some to be a classic of its era.
Writing on the site Best Classic Bands, Jeff Tamarkin called the album “a stone gem” and praised Gravenites’ vocals on such songs as “Groovin’ Is Easy” and “Wine” as “alternately smooth and tough, cool and self-assured.”
“It was a good album,” Gravenites told Sound Waves. “I remember that some of the gigs we did were spectacular.”
But, he added, “there were a lot of personality conflicts, because we didn’t know each other as people, never mind as musicians. It was a mess. There were too many drug problems, too many career ambitions.
“The band really only lasted about nine months,” he added. “It was a little spark and then it was gone.”
Nicholas George Gravenites was born on Oct. 2, 1938, in Chicago, the son of Greek immigrants who helped run a family candy company and also had a corner fountain.
He started playing guitar when he was about 15, and before long he was venturing into clubs in Black neighborhoods, at a time when there was little mixing between races. He never felt out of place.
“Hey, I was like a hoodlum then,” he told Sound Waves. “I was armed most of the time. I was the original ‘Blues Brother,’ stoned, drunk, crazy, hanging around the ghetto. People left me alone.”
He and his fellow misfit blues lovers found it invaluable to mingle with the legends in their midst. “It wasn’t just listening to the records and learning how to play,” he said. “We dealt with them as people, shared a bottle of wine with them.”
Entranced by writers such as Jack Kerouac, Gravenites set out on beatnik journeys of his own to San Francisco, starting in the early 1960s. He was soon dividing his time between that city, where he busked for change and met Joplin, and Chicago, where he ran a blues club called the Burning Bush and worked in a steel mill.
His professional relationship with Joplin took off after he moved to San Francisco full time in 1966.
In 1969, Joplin performed his songs “As Good as You’ve Been to This World” and the soaring, gospel-tinged “Work Me, Lord” at Woodstock. Onstage in front of an audience of hundreds of thousands, she praised Gravenites as “such a fine songwriter.”
He also wrote the song “Buried Alive in the Blues,” which appeared on Joplin’s posthumously released 1971 album, “Pearl” — but as an instrumental, because she died of a drug overdose in a Hollywood hotel room the night before she was scheduled to record the vocal track.
Gravenites continued to perform and record for decades. In 1982 he released an album, “Monkey Medicine,” with guitarist John Cipollina of Quicksilver Messenger Service, with whom he had often performed during their 1960s heyday.
Gravenites had also produced Quicksilver Messenger Service’s debut album in 1968, and he continued to work behind the scenes.
His work as a producer included Brewer & Shipley’s Top 10 single “One Toke Over the Line.”
In addition to his son Tim, he is survived by his wife, Marcia Gravenites; a sister, Betty; another son, Steven Gravenites; and two grandchildren.
After the Electric Flag disbanded, Gravenites had another shot at fame in the psychedelic era. When Joplin left Big Brother and the Holding Company in 1968, the band brought in Gravenites as one of its two new singers and recorded two albums with him. It was not the same.
As he said in an interview last year with The Marin Independent Journal, a California newspaper, “You don’t replace Janis Joplin.”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
