Guitarist James Gurley, a founding member of San Francisco psychedelic blues band Big Brother & the Holding Company, passed away on Sunday, December 20th, 2009 from a heart attack. Gurley was 69 years old at the time of his death and is survived by his wife and two sons.
Born and raised in Detroit as the son of a notable stunt driver, Gurley moved to the San Francisco Bay area during the early 1960s to pursue music. Gurley hooked up with fellow guitarists Sam Andrews and Pete Albin and formed Big Brother & the Holding Company in 1965 (with Albin moving over to bass). Self-taught on his instrument by listening to Lightnin' Hopkins records, Gurley brought a degree of musical virtuosity to the band's otherwise sloppy sound.
Fusing folk, rock, and blues into a loose-knit template, Big Brother followed a late-60s "anything goes" mentality that often resulted in the sort of extended, and sometimes off-the-wall instrumental jams that characterized the psychedelic era. At their manager's insistence, the band added vocalist Janis Joplin to the mix in mid-1966, and they quickly found a degree of fame, if not fortune.
The band released a self-titled album on the small jazz label Mainstream Records in 1966, but Big Brother's appearance at the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967, with Joplin at the forefront, earned them a deal with Columbia Records. After getting out of a cockeyed Mainstream contract, the band recorded 1968's classic Cheap Thrills album (with its Robert Crumb cover artwork). Cheap Thrills would hit #1 on the Billboard albums chart, and yield a #12 single with "Piece Of My Heart." However, Joplin felt that she could do better than Big Brother, and left the band by the end of 1968 to pursue a solo career.
Gurley and the rest of Big Brother carried on into the early 1970s, adding and subtracting members, most notably singer and guitarist Nick Gravenites, and releasing two blues-rock oriented albums - Be A Brother in 1970, and How Hard It Is in 1971. The band broke-up in 1972, but reunited fifteen years later around the core of Gurley, Albin, and Andrew to tour and record sporadically. Gurley left the re-formed Big Brother in 1996 over the issue of adding a Joplinesque female singer to the aging blues-rock band.
In interviews, Gurley often expressed that Big Brother & the Holding Company were unfairly dismissed as merely Joplin's backing band when, in reality, the magical chemistry between the singer and Big Brother's members is something that Joplin would never again quite achieve during her brief career. The last straw came in 1982 when Columbia released Joplin's Farewell Song; a collection of odds-and-ends from the Big Brother era of the singer's career, studio musicians were used to record over Gurley and the other's performances without permission. Gurley would later apologize to fans that bought the album expecting to hear Big Brother & the Holding Company.
Photos courtesy Sony Music
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