A blues devotee from Chicago, he tasted fame in the late 1960s with the Electric Flag, a band that made its debut at Monterey but proved short-lived.
Nick Gravenites, a Chicago-bred blues vocalist and guitarist who rose to prominence during the explosion of psychedelia in San Francisco in the 1960s as a founder of the hard-driving blues-rock band the Electric Flag and as a songwriter for Janis Joplin and others, died on Sept. 18 in Santa Rosa, Calif. He was 85.
His son Tim Gravenites said he died in an assisted-living facility, where he was being treated for dementia and diabetes.
Mr. Gravenites grew up on the South Side of Chicago, where he was part of a cadre of “white misfit kids,” as he put it on his website, who honed their craft watching Chicago blues masters like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf in local clubs. His colleagues included the singer and harmonica player Paul Butterfield and the guitarists Michael Bloomfield and Elvin Bishop; all four of them would go on to help fuel the white blues-rock boom that began in the 1960s.
“Being a ‘bluesman’ is the total blues life,” Mr. Gravenites said in a 2005 interview with Sound Waves, a Connecticut lifestyle magazine. “It has to do with philosophy.”
“The life in general doesn’t ask much from you in terms of personality,” he continued. “It doesn’t ask that you be a genius, or a saint.” Many bluesmen, he added, fell far short of sainthood: “They just ask that you be able to play the stuff. That’s all.”
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Source: Music - nytimes.com
