RIP James Gurley
Do You Speak Robbycabalese?
RIP James Gurley
Group: alt.discuss.clubs.public.music.real-audio.hotchic38 Date: Thu,
Dec 24, 2009, 2:23pm (EST-3) From: Bill...@webtv.net
(Do�You�Speak�Robbycabalese?)
James Gurley, Joplin band guitarist, dies Musician hailed as innovator
of psychedelic sound out of San Francisco The Associated Press
LOS ANGELES - James Gurley, the innovative guitarist who helped shape
psychedelic rock's multilayered, sometimes thundering sounds as a
member of Big Brother and the Holding Company, the band that propelled
Janis Joplin to fame, has died of a heart attack. He was 69. Gurley
was pronounced dead Sunday at a Palm Springs hospital, two days before
his 70th birthday, the band announced on its Web site. One of many
prominent guitarists to emerge from San Francisco's psychedelic music
scene in the mid-1960s �" others included the Grateful Dead's Jerry
Garcia, Jefferson Airplane's Jorma Kaukonen and Barry Melton of
Country Joe and the Fish �" Gurley was hailed by many as the original
innovator of the sound. "I would say all of my guitar-playing
contemporaries strived to have their own sound, but I think James was
a huge influence on all of us because he wasn't afraid to break the
boundaries of conventional music," Melton said Thursday. "What one
thinks of that genre of music is that place that it takes you to where
the beat is just assumed and the whole thing is transported to another
place, and James is the guy who started that."
Doing things like using an electric vibrator as a slide on his guitar,
and picking up amplifiers and shaking them during performances, Gurley
created a loud, esoteric sound that was the driving force behind
Joplin's voice on such classic songs as "Ball and Chain," "Piece of My
Heart" and "Summertime."
"Some of the innovations were the result of the fact he came from kind
of a progressive bluegrass school of music where weirdness was
encouraged," said Peter Albin, the group's bass player. One of the few
rock guitarists to use finger picks rather than a flat pick, Gurley
had taught himself to play by listening to old Lightnin' Hopkins blues
records as a teenager.
He was playing acoustic guitar in a coffee house in San Francisco in
1965 when legendary counterculture figure Chet Helms, founder of the
Family Dog commune, introduced him to the other band members. Although
Joplin would become the public face of the band when she joined in
1966, Albin recalled Gurley as being the true force of nature who
introduced the other members to alternative lifestyles, psychedelic
drugs and musical innovation.
"He was very influential to the whole band early on, and even later,
just by being a guy who had strange tastes and played guitar in a very
bizarre manner," Albin told The Associated Press. When he first met
Gurley, Albin said, the guitarist was living in a walk-in closet with
his wife and young son and told him that before that he'd lived in a
cardboard house along the California coast and with indigenous people
in the mountains of Mexico, where he had taken part in hallucinogenic
religious ceremonies.
After Joplin left Big Brother in 1968, the group disbanded but has
since reformed and continues to perform to this day. Gurley, however,
left for good in the late 1990s after a falling out with the other
members. Born in Detroit in 1939, Gurley was the son of a stunt-car
driver and, according to the band's Web site, would sometimes perform
as a "human hood ornament" when his father drove a car through a
flaming plywood wall.
After leaving Big Brother, he lived quietly in Palm Desert,
occasionally working on solo projects. He released the album "Pipe
Dreams" in 2000. He is survived by his wife, Margaret, and sons Hongo
and Django. Band members plan to hold a memorial sometime next month
in San Francisco.
