Janis Joplin - Kozmic Blues and great beer

I was in Anchor Brewing a few years ago for work when I spotted some photographs hanging on the wall in the tasting room. They showed Janis Joplin and the rest of Big Brother and the Holding Company drinking beer during their own brewery tour. They all were smiling as they held their beer. I'm usually smiling too when I'm holding one of their beers. I'm particularly fond of Old Foghorn, their barley wine.

Janis was known for her drinking, but it wasn't beer that she developed a reputation for drinking, it was Jack Daniels. Unfortunately for her, it was her taste for other forms of intoxicants along with an over fondness of  whiskey that led to her early demise.  She was always pretty much a loner in life. She was an outcast at her high school in Port Arthur and eventually began attending the University of Texas, where she was voted the "Ugliest Man on Campus". It was little wonder she ditched school and Texas and hitched to the Bay area and wound up singing in coffee shops and other locations around town before she would up fronting Big Brother and had a beer at the Anchor brewery. That loneliness was probably a big reason for her drinking too much.

After she left Big Brother, she formed a new band she called the Kozmic Blues Band, which had more of an R&B flavor. By then she was deeply into heroin and had a $200 dollar a day habit. They did a tour of Europe in the spring of 1969 and among the stops was Amsterdam.




Janis Joplin managed to get off drugs, at least for a time but she was still a very heavy drinker. The last thing she ever recorded was a version of "Happy Trails" which she sent to John Lennon for his birthday. She was dead by the time the recording was delivered to Lennon. Joplin was 27 years old when she died.

ZZ Top - Beer Drinkers and Hell Raisers

I have a great recording of a ZZ Top show I want to share with you in a minute, but first I've got to tell you when I started thinking about what I was going to write, I realized I didn't know a whole lot about the band. I started listening to them beginning with their second album entitled Rio Grande Mud. I'd thought that was their first until I saw ZZ Top's First Album in the record bins.

While I was doing some reading about them, I was pretty amazed by the history of the band, how they met each other, who they started out warming up for, and was surprised to see that Jimi Hendrix said on the Tonight Show that Billy Gibbons was going to be the next hot guitarist after himself.

I also ran into a video interview of Billy Gibbons that you'll find next that tells the story of ZZ Top much better than I am able to. I'll stop about here so you can watch the interview and afterward, listen to the show.


Musician Billy Gibbons from Texas Monthly Talks on Vimeo.

And now the concert. I left the short beer commercial in, because hey, it's beer!