"Live at the Belly Up" Presents 1960's Cover Band Back to the Garden

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, September 26) I watched a Live at the Belly Up episode on KPBS which attracted my attention not only because it was a new one featuring a band I hadn’t heard of, but the band was a group called Back to the Garden that does covers of 1960’s rock songs. It seemed odd that Live at the Belly Up was presenting a cover band, though the band’s Web site is rather defensive about their status. Their Facebook page insists, “This is not a ‘tribute band’ impersonating the looks/costumes of famous musicians. Instead, Back To The Garden puts their focus entirely on the music.” They also insist that they’re not just presenting the music but incorporating it as part of a “theatrical experience.” As such, one of their band members is a self-proclaimed “storyteller” named Robert John Hughes who delivers historical lectures between some of the songs to offer the context in which they were first created and performed. Maybe I’m a bit more hostile to the concept than someone younger than I who didn’t have living memories of these songs when they were new would be, but Hughes’s mini-lectures had the air of a “music appreciation” teacher speaking to a class between playing records of the original songs. The basic band lineup is a five-piece: Marc Intravaia and Jim Soldi, guitars and vocals; Sharon Whyte, keyboards and vocals; Rick Nash, bass; and Larry Grano, drums. To this performance they added a three-piece horn section – trumpeter Brad Steinway, trombonist Kevin Esposito, and a tenor saxophonist whose name I didn’t catch – along with guest vocalist Lauren Leigh. My husband Charles, who watched the show with me, and I have both heard her before as part of “Organism,” the ad hoc band that joins San Diego civic organist Raúl Prieto Ramírez for the annual rock tribute concerts that end the Summer Organ Festivals.

Leigh was enlisted any time the band was doing a song that involved a woman: Laura Nyro’s “Eli’s Comin’,” Janis Joplin’s “Ball and Chain” and “Piece of My Heart” (yes, I know she was not the original artist on either of those songs – “Ball and Chain” was introduced by the great woman blues singer who wrote it, Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton, and “Piece of My Heart” was written by white songwriters Bert Berns and Jerry Ragovoy and first recorded by Erma Franklin, Aretha’s sister), Grace Slick’s and the Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit,” and Sly Stone’s sister Rose Stone’s original part on the closing song, Sly and the Family Stone’s “I Want to Take You Higher.” (I’ve never found out why, when Sly Stone’s career was self-destructing over drug use and his blowing off concert dates, Rose Stone didn’t cut out and pursue the solo soul career she deserved. I always thought her contributions were the best aspect of “I Want to Take You Higher.”) Charles joked that he’d never heard of Laura Nyro (whose last name was pronounced “KNEE-row,” not “NYE-row” as I’d assumed for years). I remember Nyro mainly as a great songwriter who never had hits of her own but a lot of her songs did become hits for other artists: “Stoned Soul Picnic” and “Wedding Bell Blues” by the Fifth Dimension, “Eli’s Comin’” by Three Dog Night, and “And When I Die” by Blood, Sweat, and Tears. (In his first autobiography Clive Davis wrote of his frustration when he was running Columbia Records that Nyro’s records weren’t selling but other artists were raiding them and basically treating them as demos.)

The show began with Stephen Stills’s song “For What It’s Worth,” which was the result of a bet Stills and another songwriter had made. The other songwriter challenged him, “I’ll bet you can’t write a song called ‘For What It’s Worth.’” Stills stuck that title on a song he’d just finished, and when the other writer protested that the words “For What It’s Worth” didn’t appear anywhere in the song itself, Stills said, “You just said I had to write a song called ‘For What It’s Worth,’ which I did. You didn’t say that those words had to be in it!” Then they did “Eli’s Comin’,” prefaced by a long introduction by Hughes in his “storyteller” guise saying that when Nyro played the Monterey Pop Festival it was only her second “major” gig, but she went on to influence other songwriters including Elton John and Joni Mitchell. (He’d been playing coy about who he was talking about, and until he mentioned Mitchell as one of the artists his mystery woman had influenced, I’d assumed the “mystery artist” was Joni Mitchell.) The next song was a wretched cover of Otis Redding’s version of Harry Woods’s “Try a Little Tenderness.” The song was first written in 1932 and the most famous version before Redding’s was a ballad recording by Frank Sinatra for his 1946 album The Voice. Sinatra’s version was quiet and prayerful in the manner of most of his early ballads. In 1966 Otis Redding decided to revamp the song as gospel-soul, and though he made one change in the lyrics that sounds creepy today (he changed “Women do get weary” to “Young girls, they do get weary”), he created a wrenching masterpiece that was the highlight of his 1967 Live in Europe LP. Redding died in a private plane crash in late 1967 with most of his band, and in 1969 Three Dog Night covered Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness” on their first album. A critic for a rock magazine said, “It’s lifted straight from Otis. All the notes without any of the soul or magic.” That writer could easily have been describing Back to the Garden’s version!

After that was Lauren Leigh doing her Janis Joplin impression on “Ball and Chain,” a song that has another weird backstory. Thornton wrote it in the early 1960’s and originally recorded it for a tiny San Francisco-based label called Bay-Tone. She made it as part of a four-song session but Bay-Tone never released it. Janis Joplin heard Thornton do the song “live” and learned it from that, then performed it at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival and on her second album (and first for a major label, Columbia), Cheap Thrills. Though they hadn’t released Thornton’s recording, Bay-Tone still claimed publishing rights on the song – frustrating Joplin, who wanted to make sure Thornton got royalties from her version as composer. The record usually cited as “Big Mama Thornton’s original ‘Ball and Chain’” was actually produced by Chris Stachwitz of Arhoolie Records in 1969, one year after Janis’s version came out. After “Ball and Chain” came a song that really surprised me: Johnny Rivers’s theme song “Secret Agent Man,” written for the U.S. release of the 1960’s British TV series starring Patrick McGoohan (third of the actors short-listed for the first James Bond movie, after Sean Connery and Roger Moore) in what was essentially a Bond knock-off. I hadn’t realized that Johnny Rivers had not only played at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival but had been one of the organizers, but his song – though it got one of the better performances of Back to the Garden’s show – seemed to have wandered in from a different musical world, that of the pop-rock of the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. Next up was the Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit,” sung effectively by Lauren Leigh even though her voice didn’t have the spooky power of Grace Slick’s. (Slick had actually written “White Rabbit” for The Great Society, a band she co-led with her then brother-in-law Darby Slick. A Great Society performance of “White Rabbit” was eventually released on Columbia Records prefaced with a John Coltrane-style sax solo by Darby Slick. Darby Slick also wrote the song “Somebody to Love” for The Great Society, and Grace took that with her when she joined the Airplane and those two songs became the Airplane’s biggest hits.)

Then the Woodstock portion of the band’s tribute concert began with Canned Heat’s “Goin’ Up the Country,” though I’m sure that song was a studio recording and not a live performance from the Woodstock Festival. (It was used as the theme song for the 1970 Woodstock movie.) The singer didn’t duplicate the hauntingly whiny voice of Alan Wilson, who sang on Canned Heat’s original record and was the first major 1960’s rock star to die young (in early 1969, before Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison), but the reed player did an excellent rendition of the original recording’s flute part. (At the time it was rare to hear a solo flute on a rock record; little did we know then that Ian Anderson of the British rock band Jethro Tull would not only play the flute but become a major rock star playing so non-rock an instrument.) Then they did a version of the Blood, Sweat, and Tears song “Spinning Wheel” (mostly the band did covers, but “Spinning Wheel” was an original by their lead vocalist, David Clayton-Thomas) and then Lauren Leigh came back for “Piece of My Heart.” (Incidentally Janis Joplin had thought her performance at Woodstock had been terrible – and the surviving recordings bear her out – and successfully made sure she was not included in the Woodstock movie. Later, after she was dead and therefore no longer able to stop it, she was included in later editions of the film.) After that the band did the Crosby, Stills, and Nash song “Helplessly Hoping” and did a remarkably good job of duplicating the original group’s vocal harmonies.

Then they played an absolutely wretched song I would dearly hope I would never have to hear again: The Beatles’ “With a Little Help from My Friends,” heard not in The Beatles’ original arrangement but in the ghastly 1968 cover version by Joe Cocker. I first heard this as part of the Woodstock movie in 1970 and hated it (I also hated Santana’s “Soul Sacrifice,” but that one has since grown on me while Cocker’s horrific assault on one of the Beatles’ best songs has not). I thought, “Ah, another white guy who thinks he’s Ray Charles,” and later when Charles and I watched the Woodstock movie together and Cocker got to the line, “I’ll try not to sing out of key,” Charles joked, “Try harder” – which really says it all. While I wouldn’t say Joe Cocker’s “A Little Help from My Friends” is the all-time worst Beatles cover by a major artist (if pressed, I’d have to say it was Elvis Presley’s live version of “Something,” featuring Kathy Westmoreland’s wordless “vapor voice” and a trombone part that sounded like a fart), it’s certainly right up there on the Dishonor Roll of Bad Beatles covers. Oddly, Charles and I had seen it performed at the last Monday night organ concert at Balboa Park in 2025; though the show was billed as a Beatles tribute to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Beatles’ concert at Balboa Stadium (the only time The Beatles played in San Diego; they didn’t sell out the venue and for 1966 they decided to bypass us), Raúl Prieto Ramírez and “Organism” likewise did the Cocker abomination of “With a Little Help from My Friends” instead of The Beatles’ original. Luckily they had one more song on their set list: “I Want to Take You Higher,” for which they caught all the different vocal registers of the original and played in the same infectious funk spirit. It was a good way to end a sometimes exalting, sometimes disheartening mini-concert!