Big Brother & The Holding Company: The 1978 James Gurley Interview

A Rare Conversation with a Pioneer of Psychedelic Guitar

This 1967 Tribal Stomp poster features an iconic image of James Gurley. (Image courtesy Jon Sievert/The Art of Rock)

Note to readers: This is the first part of a three-part series.

Following their stunning performance at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, Big Brother & The Holding Company hit the top of the album charts with Cheap Thrills. This psychedelic masterwork featured the astounding vocals of Janis Joplin and the groundbreaking guitar work of James Gurley and Sam Andrew. “Piece of My Heart” remains one of the era’s defining singles. Many of those who were on the scene cite James Gurley as the father of psychedelic guitar in San Francisco.

Barry “The Fish” Melton, guitarist on San Francisco’s first commercially released psychedelic record, Country Joe & the Fish’s 1965 “Bass Strings” backed with “Section 43,” explained, “James 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 Yury Gagarin of psychedelic guitar.”

Big Brother’s ride to the top of the charts would be short-lived. After Cheap Thrills, Janis Joplin quit the band to go off on her own. Big Brother carried on for two more albums – Be a Brother and How Hard It Is – before disbanding around 1973. Five years later, Chet Helms, the band’s original organizer, persuaded its original members – Gurley and Andrew, bassist/acoustic guitarist Peter Albin, and drummer Dave Getz – to reunite for the Tribal Stomp concert, held in Berkeley, California, on October 1, 1978.

At the time, I was the newly hired editor at Guitar Player magazine. Helms invited staff photographer Jon Sievert and me to the band’s rehearsals in San Rafael the day before the show. When Jon and I arrived, we learned that the previous day was the first time James Gurley and Sam Andrew had seen each other in five years. Fans of Guitar Player magazine, both guitarists expressed interest in doing interviews. I spoke with James first, in the interview that follows. Later, over lunch, I interviewed Sam and James together; this will be posted as parts two and three. At the start of our initial conversation, James and I discovered that we’d both come from the same neighborhood in Detroit.

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Are you from Detroit?

Yeah. Born there.

Grow up there?

Yeah, unfortunately.

So did I.

You did?!

Moved to San Francisco a few months ago.

Oh, yeah! Bet you’re glad!

Yeah. I was living on the West Side.

Yeah, me too. Five Mile and Wyoming.

I lived at Six Mile and Hubbell.

Oh, yeah? Far out!

So you didn’t want to go back.

No. Hell no, man! We played there after they had those riots [1967], and all those places had machine-gun bullets in them. It’s too cold, anyway. I can’t stand the cold. I live down in the desert now [in Palm Desert], where it’s real hot.

What have you been doing since Big Brother?

Well, I wasted a lot of time up here, trying to get things together. Had a band for a while – it was called Ruby. But just personality conflicts, I guess, is what you’d call it. I played with Big Brother until about ’71, ’72. I had several bands, but none of them ever really got together enough to make it to the gig on time or anything. You know, one guy would drop out, and then another guy would join, and it just never really got together, except this one band, Ruby, which was together for about a year. And then I went to Salt Lake City for a year to try something else, try a whole different area. I’d always been fascinated by Salt Lake City. This was about ’74 or ’75. I broke my leg skiing, of course, right away, and I wound up for three months staring at the wall. Oh, God, it was awful, just awful. It was in the winter time too – freezing cold and broken leg and no way to get around. Anyways, I sold my house here and then moved down to the desert where I am now.

That was three years ago. I went to school for a couple of years at College of the Desert. They have one really good professor there, John Norman, who’s head of the Music Department. He’s really good. He has a lot of energy, and the guy was just amazing to take classes from. He enthused you so much about so many aspects of music – not only from just the technical points of view. He would get very emotional about some things. Certain things would strike him in a way, and he’d say, “Man! When I think of a Cmaj9th, I feel it right here in my hands, all up my arms. I feel it down here. It’s part of my nervous system.” The guy was really a turn-on to listen to. 8:00 in the morning was his class. I don’t know how he could do it – I could just barely make it there at that time. And there he was, just wailing away, every day. I took a bunch of courses there, but his was the best.

Why did you go to the desert?

Because I like the warmth. I can’t stand this cold and this fog. I came here [to San Francisco] to get away from Detroit. And now I’ve got to go to the desert to get away from the cold here. It’s too cold here. And it was a really great move, because it’s really beautiful. It’s good for my kids. They’ve got a real good scene together there. They’ve got their schools. One of my sons [Hongo] is trying to get a group. He plays drums. He’s been playing since he was about six months old – I mean literally. He’s twelve-and-a-half, and he’s been playing since six months, watching us.

We use to live all together in Lagunitas in this house, and we’d rehearse every day. We had a big giant living room where we could set up all the equipment and stuff, and we’d rehearsed there every day when he was born. That was the first thing that he could understand, I guess – you get this thing [a drum] and it makes noise. Guitars, he couldn’t understand electric stuff – you play here, and it comes out over there. But this thing he could understand. And he’s really a good drummer. All the drummers who come by show him licks, so he’s always picking up new stuff as he goes along. He’s trying to get a band together now, but he doesn’t know anybody else that can play as good as him. He can play better than everybody else around him, so he’s kind of out there by himself.

Do you play with him?

Yeah, yeah! Oh, he’s played with Big Brother onstage here. We played “Purple Haze” at the Lion’s Share, which is not there anymore, but used to be down the road here a piece. He was about six or seven when he did that. He’s used to being on stages all the time, since he was born.

Is that your only kid?

No, I’ve got two. My other son is eight years old. But he just moved in with me. He lived with his mother up until now.

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 Kelly 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.

This was for Big Brother?

Yeah. Well, it wasn’t Big Brother yet. It was unformed.

Was this 1965?

This was early ’65. Let’s see – maybe late ’65. No, it’d be early ’66 because my kid had just been born.

Who were the early members?

It was Peter and Sam and another drummer named Chuck. I can’t remember his last name – he wasn’t there too long – and then me. We went through drummer after drummer after drummer until we finally got Dave, and he’s been with it ever since.

James Gurley and Jas Obrecht during the interview, 1978. (Photo by Clara Erickson)

How did Janis Joplin came 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.