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, yeah," said Skip, who was wrapped in a blanket from the bed. His girl was in a sheet.
Sitting on his nightstand, wrapped in tin foil, was a flat chunk of rich, dark brown Afghani hashish; it looked like a Hershey bar.
"You're going to have to come with us and the rest of the band." The cop said. As they left, the cop said to the girl: "Sorry to bother you with this, ma'am, but you'll have to finish that chocolate bar all alone."
The only real dope in the place--except him--and he missed it.
The band was hauled off to jail after the search. A judge was not available to set bail until Monday, so the boys spent the weekend in the can. Larry--who never got high--was thrown in a tank with 50 drunks and no sleeping facilities. The bust was immortalized in "My Crime," which tells the story best.
I went to Denver late last fall
I went to do my job; I didn't break any law
We worked a hippie place
Like many in our land
They couldn't bust the place, and so they got the band
'Cause the police in Denver
No they don't want long hairs hanging around
And that's the reason why
They want to tear Canned Heat's reputation down.
To a reporter at the time, The Bear said: "To sing the blues, you have to be an outlaw. Blacks are born outlaws, but we white people have to work for that distinction."
Being led away in handcuffs kicked off the band's image as the bad boys of rock; heavy-duty incorrigibles, which eventually led to our becoming a favorite band of the Hells Angels and other outlaw biker clubs.
At the moment, the band was on the downside of the outlaw life. Skip was desperate. He had a band that was far from a sure thing but was suddenly hot. Unless they could follow up, they might get cold just as quickly. Unfortunately, they couldn't play anywhere if they were looking at possible jail time.
In a gin rummy game in Los Angeles with Al Bennett, President of Liberty Records, Skip mentioned that he needed $10,000 right away for legal fees to fight the bust. Bennett, a shrewd businessman, offered him that much for the publishing rights to the band's works and Skip grabbed at it. He had no choice.
Skip hired a brilliant, connected Denver attorney who sprung the band, but at the price of publishing rights that would be worth millions in the years to come. It was the start of a chain of events that created a band that rode a powerful wave of popularity in the rock explosion of the late '60s, but was always just one gig away from being broke. It was only six months later that the "Boogie with Canned Heat" album hit the stores with "On The Road Again," which became a worldwide hit.
To this day, the band has not received a penny of the publishing rights for that song, a song that shows up regularly in TV commercials as a way of instantly creating the aura of the vanished '60s.
This