He helped Mike Bloomfield and Barry Goldberg develop modern blues rock in the Electric Flag, but much of his best-known work was for other people.
bySteve Krakow
Since 2005 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place.
When a local musical hero passes away, the Secret History of Chicago Music considers it a duty to make sure they get the accolades they deserve. When blues-rock innovator Nick Gravenites died last month, I saw disappointingly few obituaries for this Chicago-born singer-songwriter and guitarist, mostly from outlets on the coasts—so here we are.
Nicholas George Gravenites, born on the south side of Chicago on October 2, 1938, is best known for his work in the late 60s and early 70s, playing in Electric Flag and the post–Janis Joplin version of Big Brother & the Holding Company. He was an important cross-pollinator of music scenes, a wizardly record producer, and a big, brawling personality who helped shape modern blues rock in its formative years.
Gravenites’s parents were first-generation Greek immigrants from the village of Palaiochori in the Arcadia region. When he was 11, his father passed, so to help the family make ends meet, Gravenites went to work in the candy store they ran. He was enrolled at St. John’s Military Academy west of Milwaukee but got thrown out for fighting shortly before graduation—a regimented school was a poor fit for a defiant kid into beatnik poetry.
All the same, Gravenites got into the University of Chicago, and the time he spent in Hyde Park in the mid-50s laid the groundwork for his career. He’d picked up the guitar around age 15, and while in college he met Michael Bloomfield, Elvin Bishop, and Paul Butterfield—three fellow misfit white kids into music. They were budding blues scholars and ace musicians, and they got an education hanging out at south-side clubs.
They befriended and shared drinks with their heroes, who were bemused by the kids’ love of their music. The youngsters learned at the feet of giants, among them Howlin’ Wolf, Buddy Guy, and Muddy Waters. A few years later, when Butterfield and Bishop started the groundbreaking Paul Butterfield Blues Band, they recruited Waters’s drummer at the time, Sam Lay, even before bringing Bloomfield aboard.
During this period, Gravenites started hitchhiking between Chicago and San Francisco. In Chicago, he worked at a steel mill and helped run a blues club. In the Bay Area, where he settled full-time in the mid-60s, he’d busk on the streets, meeting future stars such as Janis Joplin.
As best as I can tell, Gravenites’s first recorded work is the proto-psychedelic 1965 single “Drunken Boat” b/w “Whole Lotta Soul,” billed to Nick the Greek (a nickname he often used). The groundbreakingly strange record features harpsichord from Erwin Helfer, harmonica from Butterfield, and wild horns from Lester Bowie and Roscoe Mitchell, who’d soon form the Art Ensemble of Chicago.
That wasn’t Gravenites’s only heady tune. He cowrote the Butterfield Blues Band’s “East-West,” an Eastern-tinged journey around the musical world that appeared on their 1966 album of the same name. More important, he wrote “Born in Chicago,” which led off the band’s self-titled first LP in 1965. By the time it came out, they’d already backed Dylan for his infamous “Judas” set at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where he debuted his new electric sound onstage. The Paul Butterfield Blues Band bridged blues and rock in a new, urgent way whose importance can’t be overstated.
Gravenites gigged around Chicago with Bloomfield, harmonica player Charlie Musselwhite, and others, but eventually they all ended up in California, along with Windy City blues prodigies such as guitarist Harvey Mandel and keyboardist Barry Goldberg. In the Bay Area, they mingled with the burgeoning counterculture scene and found a wider audience for their forward-thinking roots-based sounds. Gravenites had been one of the first to arrive, and music critic Joel Selvin called him “the original San Francisco connection for the Chicago crowd.”
In 1967, Bloomfield and Goldberg started the supergroup the Electric Flag, recruiting former Dylan bassist Harvey Brooks, future Hendrix drummer Buddy Miles, saxophonist Peter Strazza, trumpeter Marcus Doubleday, and Gravenites. The band’s first album was the soundtrack to Roger Corman’s druggy cult film The Trip, and it’s probably my favorite of theirs—they experiment with Moog synth textures (still a relative novelty) and switch genres on a dime.
The Electric Flag made their live debut in 1967 at the era-defining Monterey International Pop Festival, and in 1968 they released their first proper LP, Long Time Comin’, a well-loved platter that combines funk, jazz, soul, and acid rock. The much-hyped band burned out quickly, though, due to drug habits, aesthetic differences, and lineup changes, and they’d all but fallen apart by the end of that year.
Gravenites continued to contribute to the Bay Area scene as a support player. He and his wife at the time, Linda, had befriended Joplin, and he encouraged her to start the Kozmik Blues Band after she left Big Brother & the Holding Company at the end of 1968. He wrote a few tunes for the hard-living diva, including “Work Me, Lord” and “As Good as You’ve Been to This World” (both of which she performed at Woodstock) and “Buried Alive in the Blues” (which appeared on her posthumous 1971 LP, Pearl). He also ended up replacing her in Big Brother, lending the group his burly blues pipes during their harder-rocking period from 1969 till 1972.
Gravenites also collaborated with another group crucial to the Bay Area hippie scene, Quicksilver Messenger Service (the Grateful Dead’s main jam-band competition). He contributed production work or songwriting to a couple of their seminal early albums, and for decades to come he played consistently with their guitarist, John Cipollina (one of my faves), in Thunder & Lightning, the Nick Gravenites–John Cipollina Band, and other projects.
In 1969, Gravenites cut his first LP under his own name, My Labors, with Bloomfield shredding on acid-blues blazers such as “Killing My Love.” In the 70s, he formed a short-lived band called Blue Gravy, whose lone album is a 1973 live recording that features Butterfield as a guest. More famously, he produced Brewer & Shipley’s stoner smash “One Toke Over the Line,” which hit number ten on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1971.
Gravenites worked on the score for the underrated 1973 Donald Sutherland film Steelyard Blues, along with Bloomfield and several other folks. He also helped run the sessions for Otis Rush’s 1976 LP Right Place, Wrong Time. He continued writing songs too, including for Pure Prairie League, Roy Buchanan, Howlin’ Wolf, and James Cotton.
In the early 80s, Gravenites settled in Sonoma County, north of the Bay. In 1982, he and Cipollina released the album Monkey Medicine on the German label Line, then toured Europe together to support it. Gravenites was also part of a loose supergroup called the Usual Suspects, which put out one self-titled LP in ’81. The personnel, which changed from song to song, included Bloomfield, bluegrass picker Peter Rowan, polymorphous bluesman Taj Mahal, and top-shelf session pianist Pete Sears.
Sears and Gravenites were frequent collaborators too. On Earth Day in 1990, the two of them played to a huge crowd at Crissy Field in San Francisco, and they later toured Greece together. Gravenites played a one-off show with a new Electric Flag lineup in 2007, and he toured and recorded with Goldberg, Mandel, harpist Corky Siegel, and others in the Chicago Blues Reunion (a band I was lucky enough to see) on and off in the 2000s and 2010s.
Gravenites appears in the documentary Born in Chicago, which tells the story of the relationships he and his white friends built with Black bluesmen in the 1950s; originally released in 2013, it became available digitally in 2020. He released his final album in 2024, though by then he was living with diabetes and dementia. It’s an earthy duo record with Sears called Rogue Blues, and it features guest appearances from old chum Musselwhite, Lester Chambers of the Chambers Brothers, and others.
After a period of declining health, Gravenites died at age 85 in Santa Rosa, California, on September 18, 2024. With a CV like his, he should be remembered in his hometown and the world over.
The radio version of the Secret History of Chicago Music airs onOutside the Loopon WGN Radio 720 AM, Saturdays at 5 AM with host Mike Stephen. Past shows arearchived here.
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