in American music history were published in respected professional journals. As one reference book noted: Alan "was so accomplished a musician by age 20, that he was invited to play at Newport."
The friendship and common musical interests of the three became the nucleus of Canned Heat. At first, Alan and Bob had this idea to form a jug band, an eccentrically American combination that dates back to poor farm boys in the 19th century, making music with the odds and ends found around a barn. Some players blow across the tops of bottles or jugs--bigger ones producing deeper notes--while others scratch washboards with their nails or play an acoustic piano or guitar. Some included kazoos and Jew's harps. The jug band came and went quickly and was replaced by the idea of forming a blues band called Canned Heat.
Taken from a 1928 song by Tommy Johnson, "Canned Heat Blues", the name refers to a sort of jellied alcohol like Sterno that burns in its own small can when ignited; it's typically used for cooking on camping trips or to warm buffet dishes.
During Prohibition, when booze was illegal, many poor southern blacks bought the cheap canned fuel, dumped the jelly into a sock and wrung the liquid alcohol from it. This was mixed with Orange Crush or Coca Cola and the result was a strong potion that could put the drinker away for hours. It was also poisonous. No manufacturer ever put cognac in a fuel can. They used cheap industrial alcohol, which is chemically different from drinking alcohol. Many drinkers died or went blind from it.
That was a risk they often knew they were taking, making it the drink of the desperate. If you had to turn to canned heat for relief, you were deep in the blues.
According to Alan, the band held its first rehearsal on November 19, 1965. Two years later, he and Bob were the only original members left. The band went through two other drummers before Cook came in, two other bass players and two other lead guitars before bringing in Vestine, who The Bear knew was playing bar gigs in the San Fernando Valley.
Back in his record clerk days, Bob put together a list of rare records to be auctioned and Henry was one of the buyers. Although Henry's earliest claim to fame was getting bounced from Frank Zappa's famous "Mothers of Invention" for excessive drug use, he actually had acquired music research credentials that put him on common ground with Alan and The Bear. When he was 19, Henry set out on an expedition with acoustic guitar legend/scholar John Fahey and another young blues fanatic named Bill Barth to track down the legendary singer Skip James, who made a couple of records for Paramount in 1931 and later became a minister before disappearing.
They found him in a hospital in Tunica, Mississippi and talked the 62-year-old James back into playing and recording the blues after a 30-year absence. In what was later called "one of the greatest triumphs for classical blues that Newport has ever seen," James appeared at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, along with blues greats Mississippi John Hurt, Son House, and Robert Pete Williams.
Son House was re-discovered by Phil Spiro and Dick Waterman on a tip from Alan Wilson In 1964. House hadn't touched a guitar in years. Soon afterwards, producer John Hammond, Sr. asked Waterman if House would be willing to record for Columbia. By 1965, the Legend was a frail husk, his hands crippled by tremors, his memory clouded by years of alcoholism.
Alan was already an expert on House's repertoire, and was called in to sit down with House and literally show him how to play his own music, clearing the cobwebs out and paving the way for the "Father Of The Delta Blues" LP soon after. Alan was even featured on "Empire State Express" and "Levee Camp Moan" on guitar and harmonica. It was the student helping the master recall his trade; Alan Wilson taught Son House how to play Son House again.
Even with Henry in the band, Canned Heat was having little success. "In Los Angeles at least, there was no interest in blues, and an actual fear of blues music by club owners," Alan later told an interviewer. "We hardly got any work and folded up; one of the most ignominious economic failures of the year in the music business."
The next year, 1967, the band re-formed and attracted John Hartmann and Skip Taylor as managers. As Alan put it (and only Alan, of all the musicians in the world, would phrase it): "They knew enough about music to realize we were playing in an exceedingly specialized area, but they felt the band's personality--The Bear's shtick and all that stuff--would attract enough interest among the record buying public to overcome the relative unpopularity of the blues."
Shortly after Hartmann and Taylor signed on in February, Larry Taylor joined to play bass. When other kids his age were just starting to listen to rock records in the 1950s, Taylor was making them. A Brooklyn-born kid, he was on the road with Jerry Lee Lewis at 16. He performed with Teddy Randazzo, known for writing such best-selling songs as "Going Out of My Head" and "Hurt So Bad." He was a top session player and even made several hits with The Monkees.
By now, the band was getting known, for reasons good and bad. In the spring of 1967, it came out with its first Liberty album called "Canned Heat," which had an orange cover showing the band around a table littered with Sterno cans. It didn't contain any original material, relying on blues classics like Muddy Waters "Rollin' and Tumblin'," Willie Dixon's "Evil Is Going On," Elmore James' "Dust My Broom" and Sonny Boy Williamson's "Help Me." It wasn't a big seller but received rave reviews from authoritative critics like Pete Welding in Down Beat magazine.
In June, the band appeared at the Monterey Pop Festival, establishing the group as L.A.'s answer to Paul Butterfield's Blues Band in Chicago and England's Bluesbreakers, also pioneer white interpreters of black blues. The festival was small by today's standards, only about 35,000 spectators, but it established a new wave of bands as the standard bearers for a cultural revolution. Up there on the same stage with Alan and The Bear were Otis Redding, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, the Grateful Dead, the Animals and Jefferson Airplane.
"Down Beat" featured Canned Heat on the cover of its festival issue and the band took off. They appeared at the Avalon Ballroom, where owner Chet Helms had a helper, a quiet young Jewish guy who collected tickets and swept the floor. His name was Bill Graham and he went on to found a music empire based on the now-legendary Fillmore Ballrooms in San Francisco and New York, command posts of the '60s rock movement.
Helms booked Canned Heat into The Family Dog, his new place in Denver, setting the stage for a drama that gave the band one of its best known songs, but also saddling it with a financial burden that would have repercussions for decades afterward.
The Denver police hated the idea of a hippie haven in their city and had done all they could to stop the club from opening. Nothing worked. Helms was way too smooth for them and met all legal requirements. When the club finally opened, Helms and his people were subjected to a barrage of harassment and illegal searches. This prompted them to get a restraining order against John Grey, the rabidly anti-drug detective also known as the "Wyatt Earp of the West" for his promise: "I'm going to rid Denver of all long haired people."
It was Canned Heat's bad luck to show up just as the police figured they'd get one of the bands and the bad press and legal troubles would slop over on Helms. On Saturday night October 21, 1967, the police dispatched a stool-pigeon with some weed to Canned Heat's hotel to socialize a little and get the band high. The Bear swore that the band members (knowing the city's reputation) actually didn't have drugs with them that night.
It turned out the stool-pigeon was an old friend of Bob's--Bear grew up in Denver--so he trusted the guy, until he suddenly slid out the door and the cops came barging in to "discover" a lid of grass under the cushion of the chair where the "friend" had been sitting. They arrested everybody on charges of marijuana possession--still a big offense in those days.
Skip, the one guy who did have drugs, wasn't there. He was in his room with a girl, but the cops went to arrest him anyway.
"You with that band?" asked the cop who knocked on the door.
"Uh,
