10
James Gurley: “The Yuri Gagarin of Psychedelic Guitar”

Rhapsodic, cathartic, and stoned-out, psychedelic music came roaring into existence in the mid-1960s. The style’s guitar-centric, anything-goes approach ushered in the era of extended solos, wild effects, ringing eardrums, and an unprecedented merging of influences—from post-war American blues, jazz, folk, and rock to sounds culled from Africa, India, and other parts of the world. “Certainly drugs played a role—that’s way up front,” remembered Sam Andrew, who helped pioneer the style in San Francisco. “Psychedelic music was not powered by alcohol. In many ways, it was a reaction to the beat era that came right before, which was an era of cynicism and despair and the humor that comes from having given up. The beat movement was a cool jazz thing and very literate and verbal. This all melted into that ‘hippie’ thing, which was a derogatory term used by the beats for younger people hanging around trying to crash the beat scene, like I was. We were all younger and hopeful and hadn’t given up. That sense of possibility had a big influence on psychedelic music.”¹

Barry “The Fish” Melton may have been the first in the San Francisco area to play a psychedelic guitar solo on a commercially released record, Country Joe and The Fish’s 1965 EP featuring “Bass Strings” and “Section 43,” but he’s quick to credit another as the style’s creator: “James Gurley is the founder of psychedelic guitar because he was the first guy to play in the zone. He never really played straight all that well, but the thing that defines psychedelic guitar—because certainly the chord boxes are the same as folk—is that it gets improvisational and goes out to this place where the beat is assumed. 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.”²

The son of a stunt car driver, Gurley grew up in Detroit, where he began his entertainment career as a “human battering ram,” which required him to be hurled helmet-first through burning wood. Inspired by folk, blues, and a sense of self-preservation, he switched to performing music in his teens. His cross-country hitchhikes eventually landed him in San Francisco. Moving to the Haight-Ashbury district, Gurley would sometimes spend hours sitting in a closet, listening to his acoustic guitar through an attached stethoscope. He’d never played rock or owned an electric guitar before auditioning for Big Brother and the Holding Company in 1965. Sam Andrew, his co-guitarist in Big Brother, recalled that during the band’s earliest phase, he and James often listened to recordings of John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, and South Indian veena and sitar music. “Another musician we listened to a lot was Cecil Taylor,” Sam remembered. “We were consciously striving for that, and we would very often play one song an entire set, which is what Cecil would do. Big Brother was such an atypical band. A case could be made that we were the most psychedelic of the early bands, simply because we really hadn’t put in a lot of time in clubs.”³

Janis Joplin, who’d quietly been singing traditional blues songs in coffeehouses, completely transformed her style upon joining Big Brother in 1966. “The moment Janis heard the volume increase, she had it,” Sam explained. “It was like she switched a channel that brought out the power. And the music was louder by a quantum leap than what went before. It made everything different. It took away all the rules. And the velocity was something too—it would just shift into overdrive.”⁴ Weeks after Janis joined, Big Brother rushed into a studio to record their eponymous debut album for the short-lived Mainstream label, to little acclaim. Soon thereafter, though, their mind-blowing performance at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival brought them worldwide attention. A Columbia Records mega-deal led to the band’s landmark Cheap Thrills album. Janis’s voice was rightfully hailed as a force of nature, but many critics and listeners decried the band’s guitar playing as woefully out-of-tune. Fans, though, snapped up copies, and beginning in September 1968, Cheap Thrills spent eight weeks at #1 in the Billboard album charts.⁵ “Piece of My Heart” became the band’s highest-charting single, reaching #12. The song has endured as one of the psychedelic era’s defining singles and the finest example of James Gurley’s unfettered approach to lead guitar.

Big Brother’s ride to the top of the charts would be short-lived. After Cheap Thrills, Janis Joplin quit the band to pursue a solo career. Big Brother carried on for two more albums—Be a Brother and How Hard It Is—before disbanding. For a while Gurley performed around San Francisco with a band called Ruby. He then moved to Salt Lake City and finally settled in Palm Desert, California, where he attended the College of the Desert. Five years after Big Brother’s breakup, Chet Helms, the band’s original organizer, persuaded its original members—Gurley and Andrew, bassist Peter Albin, and drummer Dave Getz—to reunite for the Tribal Stomp concert held in Berkeley, California, on October 1, 1978. Helms invited photographer Jon Sievert and me to the band’s rehearsals in San Rafael the day before the show. When Jon and I arrived, we watched as Gurley and Andrew greeted each other for the first time since the band’s breakup five years earlier. James readily agreed to do an interview.

 

Coming from Detroit, how did you end up getting involved with Big Brother?

Through Chet Helms.

How did you run into him?

I was living at the Family Dog—this was before Chet was part of the Family Dog. The Family Dog was started by four other people as a group. Alton Kelley was one, the poster artist in the San Francisco days. They started the Family Dog, and then they gradually dropped out of it—I don’t know how it evolved from there, but gradually Chet took hold of it. Through them and through all this interaction, I met him. He said that he was trying to manage a band and was auditioning guitar players. I went and auditioned. I don’t know—I don’t think they really knew what to make of it at first, because I had been listening to a lot of John Coltrane and stuff before that. When I heard John Coltrane, I thought, “Jesus! If you could play a guitar like that, that would be really far out!” So I was trying to get a grip on something like that, but nobody could understand what I was trying to do, you know. I don’t know if I understood. So they auditioned a bunch of guys and chose me.

How did Janis Joplin come in?

We’d been gigging and playing. We were doing a lot of instrumentals—you know, real wild instrumental stuff—and we felt the need to expand more vocally. Peter and Sam both have pretty good, strong voices—pretty nice, deep voices. But we felt we wanted something else. Me and Peter had seen Janis at the Coffee Gallery in San Francisco a couple of years before this. See, we’d just been in there and saw her sing. She was doing a folk thing, a Bessie Smith kind of a thing. I think there’s some out—I’ve heard it on the radio, but I don’t know what it is. It’s just her playing guitar, and it’s real good. As a matter of fact, I think she did that best. It’s too bad that she didn’t get a chance to do something more like that before she died, because she could really do that with a lot of soul and power. It was really great. I thought that was her best stuff.

What was it like working with Janis?

Oh, she was temperamental. I mean, one day she’d be up, the next day she’d be down. You never knew what to expect. It was crazy days for everybody. That whole period, it just seemed like everything was happening at once. It was just all happening so fast, it was hard to keep track of things. At times she could be great to work with, because she was very intelligent. She was really smart, a very smart woman. Had a lot of understanding about things. But also she could just get real petty and bullshitty about something for seemingly no reason. I guess we all do that. We were all developing, and the band was just breaking out. Everybody’s going crazy with all this.

What did you think about the first album, the one on Mainstream?

I listened to it the other day to learn these songs over again, because I couldn’t remember them. I thought there was some pretty good energy on a couple of cuts, but I thought it was poorly recorded. I remember it was recorded at a four-track studio in L.A. I think we did it in two days. It was the first time we’d ever been in the studio. It surprised me—the sound of the thing is so trebly. You know, there’s no bottom to it. The way they cut it, there’s just no bottom to it at all. But Cheap Thrills—I like the whole first side of Cheap Thrills.

Did you learn to read music somewhere along the line?

I can read, but not sight-read. Like B. B. King says, “My reading is more like spelling.” [Laughs.] Because I learned by ear first. See, I’m ear-trained. I can learn a song faster by listening to it than I can by trying to read it, although I know what all the notes are and I can read the staff and everything. It’s just that I don’t have the discipline to sit around long enough to wade through all the books.

When did you first start playing? In Detroit?

Yeah. I was nineteen, I think it was, when I got started.

Did you start on electric guitar?

No. I went into a folkie kind of bag first. Blues—country rural blues. Lead Belly and Brownie McGhee and Lightnin’ Hopkins. I loved Lightnin’ Hopkins, man. As a matter of fact, I once hitchhiked to Houston. I was coming from Mexico and hitchhiked all the way to Houston to try to find Lightnin’ Hopkins. But I couldn’t find him, and I didn’t have any money. I was backpacking and sleeping under bridges.

Was Lightnin’ Hopkins your first major inspiration?

Yeah. He was really my most impressionable. I really wanted to play like him most of anybody. I just loved his raw sound. And John Lee Hooker I liked. There’s this one song John Lee does called “Down Child.” Oh, God—it’ll raise the hair on your head, man. Oooh! I love that. That’s like a razor, that song. It’s really a fine song. And then from Texas, I hitchhiked to New Orleans. You won’t believe this—I’m walking down the street and I get arrested. The paddy wagon comes along, and they throw me in jail—for nothing. I was just walking down the street with my guitar. The paddy wagon was going down the street, and the guy would go [pointing], “This guy. This guy. This guy. This guy.” And they would just be stuffing them in, man. This was the late ’50s, early ’60s, and New Orleans seemed like a very brutal, totalitarian kind of police state. So anyways, they got me down to the police station and they were making out the papers and stuff. The guy says, “You play that thing, boy?” I says, “Yes, sir.” He said, “Well, whip it out and play that thing.” So I played a bunch of Elizabeth Cotten stuff—“Freight Train” and a few things like that. He says, “Damn, boy, you shouldn’t spend the weekend in jail.” I said, “Well, I don’t want to.” He said, “What were you gonna do?” I said, “Well, I was gonna leave town right away, sir, if you let me out of here.” He says, “Okay, I’ll let you out of here, but don’t you be in the county on Monday.” “Yes, sir!” Grabbed my guitar and split. I thought, “Wow, that was great—just like Lead Belly.”

Sang your way out of the jail.

Yeah! [Laughs.] But I got the hell out.

What kind of playing did you do up until 1965?

Mostly acoustic. It was folk stuff and country blues. I never played any rock and roll at all.

After you were listening to country blues music, what styles did you explore next?

After listening to rural blues kind of stuff, I was listening to a lot of classical guitar. I began trying to develop a sort of synthesis, putting different things together. I was playing some classical things on steel-string guitar, which really sounds nice sometimes.

When did you get your first electric?

The first electric was not until I joined this band. I didn’t even have an electric when I joined the band. I auditioned with an electric that they had there. I don’t even remember what it was or anything—it was real hard to play, I remember. My first electric was a Les Paul Junior—you know, the old flat, big, thick one with the double cutaway. Real nice guitar, man. That was a good one. That one got smashed up. I used that for about a year. I used it on the Mainstream album. On the second album, Cheap Thrills, I had to use the Gibson SG; it had two humbucking pickups on it.

Did it have any modifications on it?

No, not at that time. The Gibson Les Paul Junior, it got broken and I put it back together, and then I decided that since so much wood was missing—it really got smashed—that I was just gonna fill it up with woods that didn’t match. And then I just painted the whole thing so that you didn’t see the wood. I carved it and I did a lot of modifications on that. I installed a little fuzz tone from a box. See, I worked with a guitar maker, Tim Cameron, for about a year at one time—about ’64, I think it was. I worked about a year with him, making guitars, learning guitar repair and stuff. And now I do my own repairs—I don’t have anybody touch my guitars, hardly, for that stuff. Although if I had a really good acoustic with a split down it, maybe I would defer that to someone.

Did you use the SG on other albums after Cheap Thrills?

Well, on the other ones I played a lot of bass—on Be a Brother and How Hard It Is.

How Hard It Is is the last one?

Yeah, right. The last one.

What kind of effects were you using?

At that time I had a fuzz tone device—I can’t remember who made it. I don’t think I have it anymore. The Judson or Jason? They make amps too—it started with a J. I also had a Gibson fuzz tone that didn’t work out too well.

What kind of amps were you using?

In the Cheap Thrills period, since we were on Columbia Records and Fender was a subsidiary of Columbia Records, they sent a whole truckload of stuff. It was just beautiful. Two Dual Showmans apiece, plus a Twin Reverb apiece. I think they gave Dave a set of drums. They gave me and Sam guitars. They gave me a Strat, which later got stolen also. Well, they gave me a Tele first, and I turned that in for a Strat. Then the Strat got stolen.

But you stayed with the SG instead of the Strat.

Yeah. I couldn’t get a grip on ’em at first because the pickups aren’t as hot as Gibson’s. You got a Gibson, you got that nice sound. And I wasn’t used to that other kind of drier, less-driving kind of sound, so it was quite a change.

Your leads were a lot different from just about everybody else. What were you trying for?

Like I said, when I joined the band, I’d been listening to a lot of John Coltrane. And I thought if you could play a guitar like he played the sax, it would really be far out. So that’s what I was trying to do. Of course, nobody understood it, especially me! [Laughs.]

Did you and Sam just naturally fall into which part of the song you were going to do?

Yeah, it came about pretty naturally. At that time I had no grounding in theory or anything at all. In fact, I learned a lot from Sam, because Sam is really well educated in theory and all that stuff. He really taught me a lot of things, because up until that time I was always just playing by ear. I was to the point where I was playing chords, but since I was only playing by myself, a lot of chords, I didn’t even know the names of ’em. I just knew where to put my fingers. Then when I got with Sam, since you had to communicate these things on a verbal level a lot of times, it saved time. So then I started learning.

My first musical experience that I can remember, teaching theory and all that stuff, was a music class I had when I was in about fourth or fifth grade, where the teacher was so horrible, man, she just turned you off to music. People like this should be shot. They’re on the taxpayer’s money, teaching. That woman! For years I wandered around saying, “If this is what learning music is like, I don’t want no part of it.” And then when I started playing by ear, it wasn’t the same thing as learning music, so I was okay. I had a definite aversion to even wanting to learn music theory and all the rest of it, from that early experience in my life. I think that had a lot of effect on me.

When you and Sam started playing together, how did you work out parts?

Our first method would be to just play the thing any way we could. We’d have a general idea of what we wanted to do, and we’d try it each man for himself. Just figure out what you want to do and jam it all together. We’d see what we had, and then we’d sort of take it apart and see what didn’t fit. Throw that out. The main thing was to approach it from a feeling standpoint, an emotional standpoint of what we were trying to do, and not get too involved with the nuts and bolts right at first. Get sort of an idea of what is there, and then you can shape it. Clean it up after you get a general mold of what’s there. Bring it into focus by leaving one chord out or putting another chord in, or whatever it was that was needed to make the song flow along.

Was there a lot of overdubbing on Cheap Thrills?

Yeah, a lot of overdubbing, and we used studios in New York and L.A.

Did you or Sam play more lead than the other, or was it pretty evenly divided?

It was always pretty close. Peter plays guitar too.

Did Peter play the acoustic guitar on “Turtle Blues”?

Yeah, that’s Peter playing that. That was my mahogany Martin, the one that got stolen and thrown out the window and got the neck broke.

Were you living together in the Haight?

No, but we were all very close to each other, just a few blocks apart. Janis was living on Lyon. I lived in Clayton, Sam lived on Fell.

It’s estimated that there were 1,500 bands in the San Francisco Bay Area at that time. When did you first realize that Big Brother was starting to happen?

I think Monterey Pop was the breaking point.

What were your impressions of Monterey?

To tell the truth, Jimi Hendrix, man. I’m still . . . [Shakes head.]

What did you think when you saw Jimi Hendrix at Monterey?

[With awe] Oh, I was blown away. Just totally blown away. I was just . . . oh, my brains were dribbling out my ears. I kid you not, man. I was right in the front row—we were in the performers’ section, right up close, and I was just . . . [Shakes head.]

Had you expected anything like it?

No. I had no expectations of anything like that—the whole sheer flamboyance. It was almost like a flow from the subconscious mind. I remember a time in New York when he played that club [Generations] with B. B. King. The same week we were there with B. B. King, Martin Luther King got shot. B. B. King really played his set to him, just really played beautifully. B. B. King played so beautifully and delicately that night for Martin Luther King. He was fantastic. But anyways, Hendrix came in every night that week and jammed. They stayed open all night. After the regular scheduled acts were over, they stayed open all night for jam sessions. And Hendrix came in every night, and he played everything under the sun! He played all the Beatles stuff, he played Bach, Beethoven—on the electric guitar. And not only that, he could play the guitar right-handed and left-handed. Either-handed!

You saw him do this?

Yeah! Upside-down. He played Sam’s guitar.

Did he flip it over to play it?

Either way! He could play right-handed guitar left-handed, left-handed guitar right-handed, right-handed guitar right-handed, and left-handed guitar left-handed. I could not tell any difference when I was listening to him play—we sat there all night for a whole week, every night, with him playing. And he played all night long.

With B. B.?

Well, B. B. maybe sat in—I don’t remember. It was just like a jam session. People would get up, some people would sit down, and then another guy would get up and play.

You know, New York guys who were really hot. Jimi played all the Beatles stuff, all the Stones stuff. It just seemed to go on and on and on, without ever stopping! And he was very good at directing things, when he felt like a change or something, getting everybody tuned to another thing without breaking the flow. He could go through all these different changes. Play “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “Three Blind Mice.” I mean, it was just incredible! It just came pouring out, a constant flow, a stream of consciousness of music. It was almost everything that you ever heard in your life. It was amazing.

How well did you know Jimi Hendrix as an individual?

He was very sweet and rather more shy and unassuming than you would suppose someone of that flamboyance to be. I mean, offstage you would talk to him, and he was a very gentle cat. Just the sweetest guy. He babysat one of my kids while I went onstage at Winterland one time. There was nobody around, and he said, “Okay, I’ll stay back here and take care of the kid,” just like that. He’d sit back there and take care of my kid—you know, what a guy. We saw each other a lot. We played quite a bit on the same bill.

How did the first initial rush of success strike you?

It was a thrill of a lifetime, the whole experience.

How’d you find being on the road?

That was hard. It’s hard being on the road.

When did you reach your highest point as a band? What was your best moment in terms of the music or overall experience?

’68. I think after Janis announced to us that she was gonna split. I think that really reduced the tensions a lot. There was a lot of tensions between her and us, because she wanted to go more soul and have more horns— back-East stuff. They wanted to make her Barbra Streisand or something.

Did she think you were the wrong backup band?

Right, right. That’s the trouble: it was a backup band. See, we were not a backup band. We were a band before she joined the band, we were a band after she left the band, and would still be a band if we wanted to. I think we played a lot better for the last six months we were together there. Well, it wasn’t that long—it was maybe three months. It was in the summertime. We were in New York, in August of ’68, I think it was, when she said she wanted to split and was gonna stay with it for a few more months. I think we played up until about November of ’68. So between that time, those three or four months there, it was real nice because the tension was off, and we played really well, I thought.

Do you feel you got burned?

Yes! In one word, yes. By the managers—the people who managed us—by the lawyers that we were paying to do our business.

Did you see a lot of money from Cheap Thrills?

Not to what we could have. Not what you would think. You would think that we’d all be rich, but we’re not. Barely middle class—in those days, lower middle class.

What can you do to avoid getting burned?

Know what some of the tricks are. Education. Until you’ve been burned and gone through all these things, you don’t know. We didn’t know. They serve you all these papers that got so much of all this legalese that you can’t figure out. And you go, “Well, I’m paying these guys to work for me—I’ll just trust their judgment.” That’s one thing they gotta learn: you can’t trust ’em.

At the very least, you should have your own attorney and not use the company’s lawyers.

Right. Our own lawyer, we feel, was working in collusion with Columbia Records. The lawyer for the band. If you read our contract and said, “Who wrote this for whose benefit?” you would say, “Columbia Records wrote this for their own benefit.” It’s obvious in every paragraph. Recording costs was one thing—we had to pay all recording costs, plus all production costs. Plus we had to pay for the records to be pressed, the labels to be printed, the photographer to shoot the picture. Out of the royalties! So that’s $100,000-$200,000 right there. So they’ve got a free business, right? We pay for everything—they pay for nothing. We have to pay for it all, we give them the tape—we don’t even own it—and they go out and sell it and just reap all the profits.

That album made a lot of money.

Yeah! It was gold. It was #1 for six weeks when it first came out. You can’t even hardly trust the guys you got working for you. You’ve got to watch them like a hawk. You can’t assume that just because you’re paying them to do the job for you that he’s actually going to be doing it for you. He’s gonna be doing it for himself. You need to have lawyers to watch your lawyers.

In retrospect, was the experience of being in the band more positive than negative? Did the good outweigh the bad?

For sure.

What do you think is the place of Big Brother in music?

It’s hard to assess. Collectively, the whole thing was a movement, if you will.

Would you go so far as to say that period produced a Renaissance of the arts?

More like a Renaissance of spirit. A spirit of goodwill, of good vibes, if you will.

Was there really a “Summer of Love”?

Oh, yeah! There was. Yeah. It was real.

Do you feel like you still have the spirit?

Yeah. Yeah. It’s been modified a bit. Subsequently, the world has changed a lot since then. There were a lot of excesses. We did a lot of things then that we wouldn’t do now.

A lot of critics are now calling Janis Joplin the best female white blues singer.

In retrospect, I feel too much importance was given to Janis. It also was like the back-East mentality of the record companies and executives there who want you to be slick and commercial, you know. They think in terms of things that have happened. They can’t think of what’s going to happen or making something happen. We’re talking about creation. As much as she made us as a band, we made her as a singer. She had to sing the way that she did in order to sing with us. She had to sing that way. She just didn’t have any choice. If she was gonna sing with us, she had to sing that way. We didn’t say, “You have to sing like this,” but we said, “This is the way we’re gonna play. How are you gonna sing?” And she went, “Whoa! Okay. Here’s this. [Imitates Janis] Whaaaa!” It went on from there. She had a lot of power.

What was Janis’s role with the other members?

We had a very close relationship. I think success probably spoiled the relationship. I’m sure of it.

Where was Janis heading?

James Gurley and Jas Obrecht interview, September 30, 1978. (Clara Erickson; courtesy Jas Obrecht)

“Mercedes Benz.” Yeah, I think she would have got back to her country blues kind of thing. Eventually she would have recorded some, like her early stuff.

What did you think of the speculations that she committed suicide?

Just baloney. Oh, yeah! It was an accident. She sought relief. She was under a lot of strain.

How did you take to fame when it came to you?

I think it went totally to our heads. We became irresponsible in our personal conduct, shall we say. In other words, we drank too much, we used way too many drugs. You know, out too late, partying too much. Too many chicks running around. Which is all great fun—I mean, it was a blast at the time.

Did your musicianship suffer?

Oh, it certainly did! It certainly did. Yeah.

Was studying technique important during your time in Big Brother?

No. We tried to escape the confines of techniques, because you can become so conditioned that you want to try to break through your conditioning. But the point was to break through the conditioning. It wasn’t like we didn’t practice, but it wasn’t from an intellectual kind of approach. It was more energy, more feeling. “How does it feel?” “It feels good—let’s do it.” “Okay, here we go.”

What did you feel back when reviewers started panning your sound?

They were right, in terms of their expectations. They expected entertainers who are supposed to try to be slick and commercial and try to please them with stuff that they already know about. We were coming from a point of view of “Here’s something you ain’t never heard before. Try this.” They’re given too much importance, I think. What the hell do critics know?

Like a lot of records I get, I don’t like ’em the first time, but they grow on me. Like the Wailers—I really love the Wailers. I’ve been really heavy into reggae. For the last three years, that’s been my main passion, musically. The first time I listened to most Wailers records, I didn’t like them. But I’d say, “This is the Wailers. I gotta like it—I liked all the ones before it.” See? So then I play it again, and then I play it ten times, and pretty soon I’ll be liking it. It has a lot to do with your conditioning. If you’re not prepared to hear something, like if you haven’t heard Devo—there’s a perfect example. I would expect that record to get a lot of panning from critics. It really just comes out of left field. There’s some pretty weird stuff. Of course, I’ll suppose there will be critics who want to show how elite avant-garde they are and try to pick up on it. It’s a whole other kind of thing—they’re not just talking ordinary chord changes and stuff. There’s weird electronics and stuff that sounds like a factory going on, just all this weird stuff. The first time you hear it, it will make your hair stand on end. But I really like ’em.

What do most people ask you about when they learn you played in Big Brother?

“What was Janis like?” [Laughs.] That’s number one. “Did she really drink as much as they say?”—that’s number two.

What do you think is the heritage of the late 1960s for us today, especially as related to the counterculture?

Well, the heritage, I think, is that there’s a lot more individual freedom available to people now than there was before then. You know? We can have all kinds of hairstyles, we can have our hair any length we want. We can wear any kind of moustache, beard, whereas before, you didn’t really do that. I remember when I first grew my hair long, it was an outrage. People used to chase us on the streets—it was like scenes from Frankenstein movies—“Get the monster!” with flaming torches, you know. When we first went to Chicago from California, there was nothing like that in Chicago at all, like we were. Some people just didn’t know how to react to it at all. A lot of people reacted with hostility and hate and all kinds of things. Before 1965, the world was in black and white. You can see it. Now there’s more creative emphasis and a lot more freedoms, I guess. The ’60s were a breakthrough for a lot of things.

What do you think of the music today as compared to ten years ago?

Oh, I think there’s a lot of great stuff going on. The level of musicianship is much higher than it was ten years ago, that’s for sure—especially the guitar playing. There was nobody around ten yours ago who could play like some of the guys around today. It’s just amazing, the incredible guitar players that are around now. There’s a definite increase in musical consciousness and musicianship as such. This has swung the other way: there’s a lot more emphasis on technique. At the same time, I see less individuality among players too. It’s like you can’t tell one guy from the next. One Eric Clapton lick from the next Eric Clapton lick, you know, a lot of times, which is one of the unique things about Hendrix. You always know it’s him. Just the tone of his guitar—you just know it’s him.

The attack.

The attack, right! It’s his signature. It’s just him, whereas today there are so many great guitar players from a technical sense, but they lack individuality, I think, so it’s hard to tell one from the other. Although there are some who do have a pretty identifiable sound, like Robin Trower. He’s pretty good—I like him a lot.

What has psychedelic music contributed to music in the 1970s?

It opened the mind to more involvement in general with music. People are much more involved with it. There are many more people playing nowadays, it seems. There’s a hell of a lot more information available in books. The music opened the door to new sounds and fresh, creative ways of going about it—sounds that just were never heard before.

Has the use of drugs by psychedelic bands in the 1960s been overemphasized or underemphasized?

It was a big part! It was a big part. I mean, everybody was involved with drugs.

Did they help the music?

It helped and it hurt, probably. I think it led a lot of people into creative blind alleys. In other ways it led people out of blind alleys.

Did they help you loosen up?

Yeah, that’s what I mean. It broke your conditioning so that you were able to step back from what you already knew to try to perceive something that you don’t know. Because all these things come from your subconscious—that’s the source of your creative endeavor, somehow. Sometimes when I’ll be falling asleep, I’ll hear something, almost like hear it in the air, and I’ll think I left the radio on in the other room. I’ll get up to turn it off, and I’ll realize it was just in my head. You can just feel it at that moment, like in the Twilight Zone of your mind. An auditory hallucination, maybe. Yeah.

Where does this come from?

From the workings of the subconscious mind. I’m sure the same thing must have happened to Bach—those kinds of feelings where it just becomes so real that it almost becomes physical in a sense.

Did you ever find drugs could help you tap this?

Sometimes, yeah. Other times, I would say no. They’ll change your perceptions. But what you’re gonna do about it, that still has to do with your personality and how you perceive yourself in the world. The ball is still in your lap, so to speak, although you have these fresh perceptions. I don’t think anyone should try to rely on drug experiences in order to be creative or feel that you have to have these things in order to create or play well or whatever. I couldn’t have talked about it like this ten years ago because I didn’t have this perspective on it that I do now. And it’s been assimilated throughout the culture. Like I heard an old lady at the supermarket the other day—something bad happen to her, and she said, “Well, I just have that kind of karma.” Just a perfectly straight old lady saying, “I just have that kind of karma,” which is an obvious influence from the ’60s psychedelic.

How do you view the period from 1965 to 1969 in terms of your whole life?

Probably the most important years of my life, maybe. Yeah. That was an experience that I’ll never forget, an experience of such an intensity that it has a long-range effect on my life. I mean, here it is ten years later, and you’re talking to us now. Why? Because of what happened then. It’s something that’s gonna stick with us.

CODA: Following this interview and the 1978 Tribal Stomp concert, it would be another nine years before the original lineup of Big Brother and the Holding Company would reunite. From 1987 through 1996, James Gurley occasionally toured and recorded with the band, but he devoted most of his time to raising his family. In 1999 he fulfilled his goal of recording an album of his own songs. Credited to Saint James, his Pipe Dreams featured his son Hongo on drums and percussion. The visionary guitarist did not make it out of his own sixties, dying of a heart attack on December 20, 2009, just two days shy of his seventieth birthday. Sam Andrew, who worked later in life as a music journalist, painter, and sculptor, passed away on February 12, 2015.