Nick Gravenites

by Richard SkellyUnless you're familiar with Chicago blues of the 1960s, or from the San Francisco Bay area, the name Nick Gravenites may not be a familiar one. That's because Gravenites has been an important and unfortunately sparsely recorded behind-the-scenes blues player for many years. More people are likely to know Gravenites for the dozens of great songs he wrote: "Born in Chicago" (Paul Butterfield), "Buried Alive in the Blues" (Janis Joplin), "East-West," "Work Me Lord," "Groovin' Is Easy," "Bad Talkin' Bluesman," and literally hundreds of others. Gravenites' compositions have been recorded by Butterfield, Joplin, the Electric Flag, Elvin Bishop, Charlie Musselwhite, Big Brother and the Holding Company, James Cotton, Otis Rush, Jimmy Witherspoon, David Crosby, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Tracy Nelson, Blue Gravy, Howlin' Wolf, Roy Buchanan, Pure Prairie League, and others. He's also made quite a name for himself as a producer, working on albums by Otis Rush, James Cotton, Michael Bloomfield, Janis Joplin and others. Gravenites' sessionography is extensive; he's performed on more than 45 albums as a singer, guitarist, songwriter, or bandleader. Gravenites, the son of first-generation Greek immigrants, grew up on Chicago's South Side and entered the University of Chicago in 1956. He began to play guitar in college, was immediately drawn to the university's large folk music club, and shortly thereafter began hanging out in the blues clubs. He met Paul Butterfield, who was still in high school, through the university's folk music club, though Butterfield never attended the University of Chicago. They began playing acoustic blues and folk songs together at campus-area coffeehouses. Also in the late 1950s, he became friends with other black and white blues players then hanging out in the Chicago blues clubs, musicians like Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Mike Bloomfield and Charlie Musselwhite. In the late 1950s, he began making periodic trips to San Francisco, and spent nearly ten years commuting between Chicago and San Francisco before finally settling in northern California in the mid-1960s. Gravenites was a key player and impresario on both the Chicago blues scene and the emerging blues-rock and psychedelic rock scene in San Francisco. In 1967, he formed a short-lived but legendary band, the Electric Flag, with guitarist Bloomfield, organist Barry Goldberg, bassist Harvey Brooks and drummer Buddy Miles. The Electric Flag made their first performance at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, and their first album, A Long Time Comin', made the Top 40; the group continued to record into the mid-'70s. Gravenites' solo albums include My Labors (CBS, 1969), Steel Yard Blues (Liberty, 1973), Junkyard In Malibu (Line, 1980), and Blue Star (Line, 1980). A mid-1990s album with his group Animal Mind, titled Don't Feed the Animals, and is available on Taxon Records. Gravenites continued to perform through the 1970s and '80s around San Francisco and northern California, filling his live shows with raw, burning, very economical guitar playing and soulful singing. Most recently, Gravenites joined Bob Margolin and others in a Kennedy Center tribute concert to bluesman Muddy Waters, taped in the fall of 1997 for eventual airing on PBS.