Guitarist of Big Brother's Janis Joplin dies

LOS ANGELES - James Gurley, guitar innovators who have helped shape the psychedelic rock of the complex, sometimes thunderous noise as a member of Big Brother and the Holding Company, the group that died Janis Joplin fame driven, from a heart attack. He was 69 Gurley was pronounced dead Sunday at a hospital in Palm Springs, two days before his 70th Birthday, gave the group on its website. One of the guitarists of the result many in the psychedelic music scene of San Francisco in the mid-1960s - some were the Grateful Dead Jerry Garcia, Jefferson Airplane's Jorma Kaukonen and Barry Melton of Country Joe & the Fish - Gurley was seen by many as the original innovator of the sound. "I would say that all of my guitar-playing contemporaries tried to have their own sound, but I think James has a great influence on us all, because he is not afraid to break the boundaries of music classics," Melton said Thursday . "What kind of music is to think, there you go, if the pace is simply assumed, and everything is transported to another place, and James is the guy who started it." Doing things like using an electric vibrator as a slide show on his guitar and pick up the amp and shaking during performances, Gurley will create a sound that was highly esoteric, the driving force behind the voice of Joplin on classic songs like "Ball and Chain" "Piece of My Heart" and "Summertime". Some innovations are the result of the fact that he is a kind of Music, where progressive bluegrass strangeness has been promoted, "said Peter Albin, bassist of the group. One of the few rock guitarists to use a finger instead of a flat pick picks Gurley had learned to play by listening to old blues records Lightnin 'Hopkins in his youth. He plays acoustic guitar in a coffee shop in San Francisco in 1965, when the disadvantages of the legendary Chet Helms, the founder divided the family dog is it shows the other members of the group. While Joplin would become the public face of the group when she joined in 1966, recalled Albin Gurley as the true force of nature, the members of other alternative lifestyles, drugs and psychedelic musical innovation set up. "He was very influential for the whole band from the beginning, and even later, although he had played a man of strange tastes and guitar, in a very strange," said Albin, The Associated Press. The first time he met Gurley , Albin said, the guitarist who lived in a walk-in closet, with his wife and young son and told him that before he lived in a house on the California coast and cardboard with indigenous peoples in the mountains of Mexico, where he is in religious Ceremonies hallucinogens. After Joplin left Big Brother in 1968, the group has since disbanded, but reformed and continues today. Gurley, however, has left for good in late 1990 after a dispute with other members. Born in 1939 in Detroit, was the son Gurley one stunt car drivers and look on the website of the group sometimes referred to as "hood ornament of man" as his father, a car drove through a wall of flames act plywood.'s After leaving Big Brother, he was living quietly in Palm Desert, sometimes working on solo projects. He released the album "Pipe Dreams" in 2000. He is survived by his wife Margaret and Hongo and his son Django. The members of the band plan to hold a memorial next month in San Francisco.