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BY VALERIE J. NELSON
Los Angeles Times Service
LOS ANGELES -- James Gurley, a virtuosic guitarist with Big Brother & the Holding Company, the psychedelic rock band that launched Janis Joplin to stardom, died Sunday, two days before his 70th birthday.
Gurley was pronounced dead at a Palm Springs hospital after having a heart attack at his Palm Desert home, according to the band.
``James was the spirit and the essence of the band in its early days,'' Sam Andrew, a Big Brother singer-guitarist, wrote on the band's website. ``James was the most unusual person I ever met, a pioneer, a real original. . . .''
In 1965, he was playing guitar on San Francisco's coffeehouse circuit when Chet Helms, Big Brother's manager, invited Gurley to jam with the nascent band. Gurley's spellbinding finger-picking on the electric guitar ``proved to be the missing component,'' according to a biography on the band's website, and he became the center of Big Brother's free-form style.
Many of his peers consider Gurley the fountainhead of psychedelic guitar-playing, which ``gets improvisational and goes out to this place where the beat is assumed,'' Barry Melton, lead guitarist for Country Joe & the Fish, told Guitar Player magazine in 1997.
``The music is kind of out there in space, and James Gurley was the first man in space! He's the Yuri Gagarin of psychedelic guitar,'' Melton said.
Gurley ``was the star of Big Brother,'' the group's drummer, Dave Getz, said on the band's website, ``and then Janis came along.''
As they played informal concerts in a basement ballroom of a San Francisco boardinghouse, Helms told the band, ``You need this chick I know in Austin,'' Dennis McNally, a historian for the Grateful Dead, said in a 2005 interview with the Los Angeles Times.
``The band went, `Right, right.' He sent a friend of his to Austin to bring Janis out here, and the rest is history,'' McNally said.
With Joplin joining the group from Texas as lead singer in 1966, Big Brother soon turned into one of the San Francisco Bay Area's leading attractions. Her fierce ``blues-soaked delivery provided the perfect foil to the unit's instrumental power,'' according to ``The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.''
Big Brother became a sensation with its 1968 Cheap Thrills album, which featured Gurley's intense, raw sound on such hits as Piece of My Heart and Ball and Chain.
After Joplin left the band in 1968 for a solo career, the group disbanded. She died of a heroin overdose in 1970.
Big Brother reconvened in 1969, with Gurley and Andrew in the lineup, but after releasing two more albums, they broke up again in 1972.
In 1987, the early members of Big Brother reunited. Gurley toured with them for a decade but left after a falling out.
Born Dec. 22, 1939, in Detroit, Gurley was the son of a stunt-car driver and learned at an early age to be adventurous. As a boy, he sometimes served as a ``human hood ornament'' by riding on the front of cars as his father drove through walls of fire and other obstructions, according to a biography on the band's website.
By 19, Gurley was teaching himself to play acoustic guitar, partly by listening to records by Lightnin' Hopkins, a country blues guitarist. He also was inspired by a 1963 performance by jazz saxophonist John Coltrane.
After Joplin joined Big Brother, she and Gurley had a brief affair that ended when his wife, Nancy, confronted them while holding the Gurleys' young son, according to the 2000 Joplin biography Scars of Sweet Paradise.
In addition to his son Hongo, Gurley's survivors include his second wife, Margaret, and another son, Django. The band is planning a public memorial early next year in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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James Gurley | Big Brother guitarist (Read 621 times)
