Nick Gravenites is cool. For his instinct for finding the moment, particularly back in the 1960s, I’d liken him to Neal Cassady,* the counter-culture icon who was taken into the beatnik fold in 1950s New York by Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg (the character Dean Moriarty in Kerouac’s On the Road was said to be based on him, and he also featured in several of Ginsberg’s poems) and later somehow found his way to the West Coast where he drove the bus for Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters in the 1960s.
Like Cassady, Gravenites managed to migrate from one avant-garde movement to another. After becoming enamored with the Chicago blues scene along with talented young white musicians like Paul Butterfield, Elvin Bishop, Michael Bloomfield, Charlie Musselwhite and Steve Miller while still a student at the University of Chicago in the early 1960s, Gravenites made his way to San Francisco, where he became familiar with the Haight-Ashbury scene and founded a band, Electric Flag with Bloomfield.
While in Chicago, Gravenites wrote “Born in Chicago,” which became a staple of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, and with Bloomfield penned “East-West,” the title tune of the Butterfield band’s second album. He collaborated frequently with Bloomfield before forming Electric Flag with him, as Bloomfield was seeking an edgier sound than the Butterfield band provided.
Throughout the late 1960s and 70s, Gravenites became a popular studio fixture and song writer, producing for such artists as Brewer & Shipley (“One Toke Over the Line”) and writing songs for the likes of Janis Joplin, Howlin’ Wolf, James Cotton, Roy Buchanan, Tracy Nelson, and Pure Prairie League. He has continued to play regionally in northern California.
Now, at 85, Gravenites is still making great music. Rogue Blues, which teams Gravenites up with Musselwhite, Pete Sears, Jimmy Vivino, Barry Sless, Wally Ingram and Lester Graham, is a stripped down, simple EP with six songs written by Gravenites and one by Howlin’ Wolf, “Poor Boy,” for which Gravenites wrote additional verses for Wolf’s London Howlin’ Wolf Sessions (which featured Eric Clapton. Steve Winwood and others). The picks of the litter, for me, are “Poor Boy” and “Blues Back Off of Me.” It’s a great EP to enjoy while riding the California Zephyr between Chicago and San Francisco – or maybe just on your morning drive to work.
*Note, in my 2011 review of John Prine’s The Singing Mailman Delivers, I posited that “if Mark Twain was a singer-songerwriter, he would have sounded something like John Prine.” That quote was picked up, and properly attributed, by the Prine Shrine, but, eventually, publications calling Prine the “Mark Twain of singer-songwriters” started popping up all over without crediting Twangville. Well, here’s my warning that if you describe Nick Gravenites as the Neal Cassady of blues-rock without crediting Twangville, nothing will happen to you at first. However, you’ll be consumed by guilt and, eventually, feel sad. Also, if you ever show yer face in these here parts, the posse will round you up and drive ya’ll out of town.
About the author: Bill Wilcox is a roots music enthusiast recently relocated from the Washington, DC area to Philadelphia, PA and back again.