ilovefuzz.com

Every time Ball and Chain shuffles through, I always stop and say "What the fuck was that?"

After the opening, skip to the solo at 4:36
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIGCk6JcVLk[/youtube]

Am I just out of the loop or is James Gurley hugely underrated? When I think of Janis Joplin, I expect some lame hippie blues stuff but this is crazy noisy fuzzy greatness.

Another good one at 3:28
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LALqJzmjnaA[/youtube]

James Gurley was a sick motherfucker of a guitar player, and has always been grossly underrated, as was the entire original Big Brother and the Holding Company band. they got horribly slagged for being out-of-tune--which they were...it was 1967-68, and the state of the art in vibratos, tuners, and strings was atrocious--and sloppy/amateurish, and Janis' manager Albert Grossman levered her away from them as soon as he could, but her music lost 80% of its charm without their loopy support. to me he's almost Hendrix-like in the way he used the fuzz box as an instrument, playing with the subtleties of its response to long sustained notes; his weird guitar, which appears in other videos to be a Les Paul Junior with a dogear P90 at the bridge and a Gretsch SuperTron added at the neck, no doubt contributes to this.

there's a very underrated strain of fuzz racket running through the early (which is to say late 60s) San Francisco bands which was inspired by the surf and rock 'n' roll instrumental guitarists like Link Wray, Duane Eddy, and Dick Dale. if you enjoy this, you'll LOVE the first two Quicksilver Messenger Service albums.

dubkitty, I hoped you'd weigh in.
I'll check out that Quicksilver Messenger Service stuff.