Problem: Big Brother and the Holding Company is an American rock band that formed in San Francisco in 1965 as part of the same psychedelic music scene that produced the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and Jefferson Airplane. They are best known as the band that featured Janis Joplin as their lead singer. Their 1968 album Cheap Thrills is considered one of the masterpieces of the psychedelic sound of San Francisco; it reached number one on the Billboard charts, and was ranked number 338 in Rolling Stone's the 500 greatest albums of all time. The album is also included in the book 1001 Albums

In September 1966, with no money to return to San Francisco, Big Brother signed a contract with Mainstream Records. They recorded four of the songs for the album Big Brother & the Holding Company in a studio in Chicago at the end of their four-week stint at Mother Blues on Wells Street. The club had paid them for only the first two weeks.' The remainder of the record was recorded in Los Angeles on December 12-14. Mainstream was known for its jazz records, and Big Brother was the first rock band to appear on the label. This may have influenced the final result, since the album sounded very different from what the band expected: acoustic and folk instead of heavy acid rock. The first single released was "Blind Man" b/w "All Is Loneliness," both from the album sessions, in July 1967. It was popular in the San Francisco Bay Area, but did not garner much national attention. A second single, "Down on Me" b/w "Call On Me" was released along with their self-titled debut album in August 1967, following the band's national success after the Monterey Pop Festival. The album debuted on Billboard charts on 9/2/67, peaking at No. 60. It stayed on the charts for a total of 30 weeks.  The Pop Chronicles criticized the record as difficult to find and "technically disappointing". "Down On Me" had a long gestation in the marketplace and finally debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 chart on 8/31/68, peaking at No. 43. It stayed on the charts for 8 weeks. Other singles from the album were released through the end of 1967 and 1968. One final Mainstream single, "Coo Coo" b/w "The Last Time," was released after the band's second album was issued by Columbia Records in November, 1968. These last songs were from the original album sessions, but were not included on the LP until Columbia acquired all of the band's Mainstream recordings and reissued the album in the 1970s.  The band then moved to Lagunitas, in Marin County, California, to a communal house. Later in 1967 they put an ad in the San Francisco Oracle with the apparent intention of moving back to the "City". The ad read: "Big Brother is returning to the city. Need rehearsal hall and a place to live. Write to B.B.& the H.C. at Box 94 Lagunitas."

Did they tour?

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Problem: Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 - July 2, 1961) was an American novelist, short story writer, and journalist. His economical and understated style--which he termed the Iceberg Theory--had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his adventurous lifestyle and his public image brought him admiration from later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. He published seven novels, six short-story collections, and two non-fiction works.

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. His father, Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, was a physician, and his mother, Grace Hall Hemingway, was a musician. Both were well-educated and well-respected in Oak Park, a conservative community about which resident Frank Lloyd Wright said, "So many churches for so many good people to go to". For a short period after their marriage, Clarence and Grace Hemingway lived at first with Grace's father, Ernest Hall, their first son's namesake. Later, Ernest Hemingway would say that he disliked his name, which he "associated with the naive, even foolish hero of Oscar Wilde's play The Importance of Being Earnest". The family eventually moved into a seven-bedroom home in a respectable neighborhood with a music studio for Grace and a medical office for Clarence.  Hemingway's mother frequently performed in concerts around the village. As an adult, Hemingway professed to hate his mother, although biographer Michael S. Reynolds points out that Hemingway mirrored her energy and enthusiasm. Her insistence that he learn to play the cello became a "source of conflict", but he later admitted the music lessons were useful to his writing, as is evident in the "contrapuntal structure" of For Whom the Bell Tolls. The family spent summers at Windemere on Walloon Lake, near Petoskey, Michigan. Hemingway's father taught him to hunt, fish, and camp in the woods and lakes of Northern Michigan as a young boy, early experiences in nature that instilled a passion for outdoor adventure and living in remote or isolated areas.  From 1913 until 1917, Hemingway attended Oak Park and River Forest High School. He took part in a number of sports--boxing, track and field, water polo, and football. He excelled in English classes, and with his sister Marcelline, performed in the school orchestra for two years. During his junior year he had a journalism class, structured "as though the classroom were a newspaper office", with better writers submitting pieces to the school newspaper, The Trapeze. Hemingway and Marcelline both had pieces submitted; Hemingway's first piece, published in January 1916, was about a local performance by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He edited the Trapeze and the Tabula (the yearbook), imitating the language of sportswriters, taking the pen name Ring Lardner, Jr.--a nod to Ring Lardner of the Chicago Tribune whose byline was "Line O'Type".  Like Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis, Hemingway was a journalist before becoming a novelist; after leaving high school he went to work for The Kansas City Star as a cub reporter. Although he stayed there for only six months, he relied on the Star's style guide as a foundation for his writing: "Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative."

Did he have any others?

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