There is little doubt that Janis Joplin’s iconic voice and wild lifestyle in the midst of the counter cultural sixties opened up the playing field to female rock stars, but although there have been countless famous singer-songwriters in the Joni Mitchell-vein and divas such as Madonna, not nearly enough larger-than-life Queen-bee rock personalities have emerged. I’m thinking A-list names here, which unfortunately rules out the Riot Grrrl movement. Courtney Love and Amy Winehouse stand out like an open bottle of Jack at Sunday mass. Who else?

Share on Facebook

Here’s the complete list:
Rolling Stones/Let It Bleed (1969)
Led Zeppelin/’IV’ (1971)
David Bowie/The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars (1972)
Mike Oldfield/Tubular Bells (1973)
The Clash/London Calling (1979)
New Order/Power, Corruption and Lies (1983)
Primal Scream/Screamadelica (1991)
Pink Floyd/The Division Bell (1994)
Blur/Parklife (1994)
Coldplay/A Rush of Blood to the Head (2002)

Now, will the USPS please get on the bandwagon and release stamps along the same lines?

Share on Facebook

Born: September 8, 1945 in San Bruno, California
Died: March 8, 1973 in Corte Madera, California
Bands: Grateful Dead, The Warlocks, Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions

Pigpen was the only showman of the Grateful Dead, a hard drinkin’ bluesman whose improvised blues raps equaled Jerry Garcia’s electric hillbilly guitar licks. Pig was an integral part of the Dead’s early incarnations. Ron McKernan selected cover songs, wrote words, music, and played piano, organ, harmonica, and sang.

Unlike the rest of the Dead, Pig wasn’t down with LSD, but he was reportedly dosed on two occasions. In 1966, he had a summer fling with Janis Joplin and introduced her to Southern Comfort, which soon became her signature booze of choice. As the Grateful Dead’s long, strange trip continued with psychedelic jams, Pig, who was more of a blues and rocker, was sidelined. Years of hard boozing soon took its toll and after a long period of illness Pigpen’s liver gave out in 1973. His epitaph reads “Pigpen was and is now forever one of the Grateful Dead.”

Share on Facebook

Born: May 17, 1941, in Butte, Montana
Died: October 30, 1968, in Chicago, Illinois
Band: Spanky and Our Gang, The New Wine Singers

Thanks to Spanky And Our Gang’s ’67 hits “Sunday Will Never Be The Same” and “Lazy Day,” the group is remembered as a mid-sixties pop sensation in the same vein as The Mamas and the Papas, but that was only one of the many flavors this Chicago-based band could concoct. Our Gang was studio-polished yet put on an entertaining act in that old-timey way, all while dazzling audiences with its display of sublime musicianship.

Elaine “Spanky” McFarlane and Malcolm McHale, the group’s principal members, spent 1962-64 as The New Wine Singers, a fantastic quintet that mixed jug band, folk, barbershop a capella, show tunes, and Irish standards. “We were eclectic as hell and loved every minute of it,” Spanky says today. “We did anything we wanted and there was a lot of cornball comedy.” “Malcolm had charisma and a rubber face that never stopped, he was right in there,” she adds.

The New Wine Singers put out a few LPs, including two live recordings, which capture the ensemble’s entertaining live show. Once that band fizzled out they formed Spanky And Our Gang. “Malcolm was such an integral part of the group,” Spanky says. “Very talented, but totally underrated, well, almost not rated at all.” Malcolm Hale wrote and arranged most of the tunes, played lead guitar, trombone, and sang. Still, since Malcolm spent every sixth weekend with the Army Reserves, the rest of the group learned to play occasional gigs without him.

Over the course of 1967 and 1968 the group placed five singles on Billboard’s Top 40 and made coveted TV appearances on the Tonight Show, the Dick Cavett Show, Hollywood Palace, and so on. Spanky And Our Gang’s most notorious gig was The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour where they performed “Give A Damn,” which was banned in several states for its un-kosher title (never mind that the song had a positive message; to give a damn about “your fellow man”). CBS received a flood of complaints after the show, one of which purportedly came from Richard Nixon. See, “damn” was not an appropriate word during 1968’s “family viewing hours.”

That October Malcolm Hale didn’t show up for a gig in Boise, Idaho, but the band set up his guitar amplifier on stage; they figured he might show up a little later. Mid-set, the amp screeched uncontrollably, disrupting the set. As soon as the band walked off stage they learned that Malcolm Hale was dead. The 27-year-old multi-instrumentalist had gone to bed drunk at a girlfriend’s place in Chicago (Spanky says he was quite the multi-dater), and even though the band called her to rouse him up, she refused to do so. After 28 hours of “sleep” the girlfriend discovered that he was dead. Malcolm Hale died of monoxide poisoning due to a faulty space heater. Spanky And Our Gang played the rest of the year to fulfill their obligations and called it quits. “I was devastated and cried every day for a year,” Spanky says.

The group’s hits keep popping up on various CD box sets, most recently on the three-disc Summer of Love: The Hits of 1967. To really figure them out you’ve gotta seek out their records. “It’s not about the hits. It’s about the album cuts and we had that going,” McFarlane adds.

Share on Facebook

Born: June 13, 1943, in Buffalo, New York
Died: March 13, 1971, in Phoenix, Arizona
Bands: Dyke & the Blazers, The O’Jays

Dyke grew up in a rough part of Buffalo, New York, and learned to be street wise at an early age. He played bass and sang backing vocals for the O’Jays and in 1965 he found himself stranded with half the band in Phoenix. Not one to stay put, Dyke stepped up to the microphone, hired a few local musicians, and began playing James Brown-style soul as Dyke and the Blazers. Dyke and the Blazers’ 1966 record “Funky Broadway” became a hit (but an even bigger hit for Wilson Pickett who covered it the following year). The band played the legendary Apollo in NYC and James Brown stopped by their dressing room to say hi.

“Funky Broadway” was the first song to have the word funk in the title and after it funk as a musical genre became synonymous with the syncopated rhythm pioneered by Dyke and the Blazers. Arlester Christian was shot several times while sitting in his car in down town Phoenix and died leaving a powerful albeit little known legacy. Listen to old James Brown, then pull out his 1967 “Cold Sweat” single and you’ll hear Dyke’s influence.

Share on Facebook

Born: November 27, 1942, in Seattle, Washington
Died: September 18, 1970, in a London hotel room
Bands: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Band of Gypsys

The guitar was an extension of Jimi, a fifth limb he relied on as much as others would a leg or an arm. He played during set breaks or on the bus, recorded or jammed after shows, played along to Bob Dylan records during interviews and slept with the guitar at the edge of the bed.

Hendrix was born in Seattle by a teenage mom while his much older dad was stationed in the south. Jimi’s parents were both poor and alcoholic and they moved around a lot, living out of flop houses, cheap hotels and with friends and relatives, never staying too long in any place. With an upbringing marked by uncertainty, hunger, the death of his mother and belt whippings by his dad, Jimi became shy and introverted. One of his few joys was playing guitar on a broom along to old blues records. Somebody talked his dad into buying him a guitar and he spent his teenage years playing in a band around Seattle, including the premier club in the Northwest, the Spanish Castle. It didn’t take “half a day to get there,” as he later sang in “Spanish Castle Magic,” but traveling in beat-up cars sometimes led to unpleasant delays.

After a brief stint as a parachuter with 101st Airborne Jimi left the army guitarless, wearing issued clothes and $300 in his pocket. He walked into a jazz joint and spent all but $16. Unable to afford the Greyhound back to Seattle, he snuck back on the base and begged to get his guitar back from the guy he’d pawned it to. After recovering the axe, he spent the next three years priming his chops as a hired gun on the Chitlin’ Circuit—juke joints, cafes, dances and parties from Virginia to Florida, in the Delta and over to Texas—not unlike Robert Johnson had before him. Jimi’s knowledge of R&B, soul and rock hits of the day led to backing jobs for the stars of the day—Little Richard, Ike and Tina Turner and many others—but he kept getting fired for being too flashy. Otis Burke traded Jimi like a baseball card on the tour bus to Otis Redding for two horn players. He was fired a week later and left on the side of the road, but the penniless guitarist simply waited till another tour rolled through town for job.

Jimi eventually made it to New York City, playing with Curtis Knight—a pimp with a band—and his own, Jimmy James and the Blue Flames. Hendrix was finally in the spotlight, but his guitar reverberated nightly across an empty room at the Cheetah Club. Luckily, his dexterity caught the attention of Keith Richards’ girlfriend, Linda Keith, who kept bringing musicians and producers into the club until Chas Chandler of the Animals decided to fly Jimi to London. Finally, his career picked up speed. The day of Hendrix’ arrival, his guitantics wowed members of Britain’s musical cognoscenti and he found himself a girlfriend who had previously dated Brian Jones of The Rolling Stones and Keith Moon of the Who. Eric Burdon of the Animals who was present that night recalled later that, “It was haunting how good he was.” A week later Chandler brought Jimi to a Cream show so he could meet Clapton. Armed with his guitar he asked if he could jam—a request so ballsy that the guys were caught off guard. Nobody had ever asked to sit in with Cream before. Grafitti around London at the time proclaimed Clapton was God and here was this unknown, wild haired dude clutching a Fender Stratocaster. Jimi plugged in and played Howlin’ Wolf’s “Killing Floor” in triple speed. Eric’s jaw dropped. “I thought, ‘My god, this is like Buddy Guy on acid,’ ” he recalled later.

The years on the Chitlin’ Circuit finally paid off. Hendrix had learned how to entertain audiences from watching Little Richards, how to bend strings from Albert King, sat by the feet of B.B. and picked up techniques from an apt student of T-Bone Walker and Freddie King. The analytical musical cannibal had finally transformed into a virtuoso anxious to take on the world.

The Jimi Hendrix Experience shook the world with its innovative sounds and fierce electric assaults. He used amps and electronic effects as instruments as much as the guitar, creating dive-bombs, haunting feedback, wah-wah modulated melodies, the sound of a rapid-fire machine gun and Delta blues soaked with dripping washes from the uni-vibe. Jimi suddenly found himself as the celestial center of the psychedelic 60’s, embracing road sex and alterations from acid to speed. Although some women were more important to Jimi than others, he shied away from intimacy and commitment, perhaps ingrained from watching his parents. Off stage, Jimi remained polite, but shy and reserved. He kept few close friends and rarely ventured outside the realm of music, socializing almost exclusively with musicians, producers, groupies and hangers-on. That and an incessant tour schedule and recording dates taxed him.

Jimi Hendrix’ performances became erratic during the last two years of his life. He complained that fans came to hear his early hits and watch him play guitar with his teeth. One night he collapsed on stage. While vacationing in Morocco, most likely the only vacation of his life, an old fortune-teller with a Tarot deck drew the Death card. The card could also mean rebirth, but Jimi freaked out. A few weeks before his death, he told a Danish journalist, “I’m not sure I will live to be 28 years old. I mean, the moment I feel I have nothing more to give musically, I will not be around on this planet anymore.”

Before Hendrix went to bed for the last time, he gobbled nine sleeping pills that belonged to a girlfriend. The German pills were stronger than he was used to and sometime in the early morning hours he puked, suffocating himself in deep sleep. Before Jimi went out that last night of his life he had worked on a new lyric: “The story of life is quicker than the wink of an eye.” Jimi’s ended at 27.

Share on Facebook

Born: December 8, 1943, in Melbourne, Florida
Died: July 3, 1971, in Paris, France
Band: The Doors

A self-styled “erotic politician,” James Douglas Morrison was a creative soul, a loud drunk, and a fantastic entertainer who knew how to push the buttons of individuals, an audience, and society at large. The Doors worked hard at the Whiskey Go Go in Los Angeles. Jim’s early stage presence was poor, but as the band grew tighter he grew comfortable with the role.

“Light My Fire” sealed the band’s success and Jim was lauded as a mysterious Greek god and featured in teeny magazines. Morrison quickly grew tired of the success and wanted to be viewed as a filmmaker and poet. His lyrics for the Doors touched on subjects such as the meaningless war in Vietnam (”Unknown Soldier”), ecology (”When The Music’s Over”), and sketches from his life and imagination (”LA Woman,” “The End,” “Riders on the Storm”)

In 1969, after a concert in Miami, Morrison was accused of exposing himself on stage. The charges were ridiculous, witnesses dubious, and the trail bore strong markings of a farce. He was eventually let go with a fine, but he was done with his leather clad show biz persona. Jim Morrison gained weight, grew a beard, wrote poetry, directed a movie, and moved to Paris. One morning his girlfriend Pamela found him dead in the bathtub of the Paris apartment they shared. The official cause of death was heart failure. Morrison apparently did heroin the night of his death, and there are several conspiracy theories surrounding his death (i.e. did he really OD in the bathroom at the Rock & Roll Circus?).

Crystal-Ship.com

Share on Facebook

Born: January 19, 1943, in Port Arthur, Texas
Died: October 4, 1970, in a Los Angeles hotel room
Bands: Big Brother and The Holding Company, The Kozmic Blues Band, The Full Tilt Boogie Band

After a miserable childhood as Port Arthur’s “freak,” “creep,” and “pig” she went to found a crew of like-minded people in Austin’s University district. Janis sang vocal jazz, blues, country, folk, and bluegrass. In 1963, she left for the West Coast and spent time as a bohemian in North Beach. She moved up the coast and connected with the thriving folk scene that spread across several coffee houses. She recorded several demos accompanied by Jorma Kaukonen (later of The Jefferson Airplane), but got caught up in the speed scene, left town for NYC, came back, and was urged stock, The Band, Buddy Guy, The Dooto dry up at home. Back in Port Arthur she shed her wild life style and cultivated a slow domestic life style. In San Francisco, Chet Helms, who knew Joplin from Austin, managed a new psychedelic band called The Holding Company, and he thought she would be perfect for the gig. He sent mutual friend who convinced Janis is was time to return.

With Janis Joplin on board with The Big Brother and The Holding Company it didn’t take long before the band was known for raw-energy live shows. During the summer of ’66 the group moved next to the Grateful Dead; Janis and Pigpen soon had a little summer fling going. Big Brother’s major breakthrough occurred the following summer at the Monterey Pop Festival, which was appeared in D. A. Pennebaker’s Monterey Pop film. Big Brother and The Holding Company’s eponymous debut followed a few weeks later. The media loved the Janis’ raw vocals and wild demeanor, both on and off stage, but the rest of the group wasn’t equally excited about her commanding place in the spotlight.

Janis Joplin came from Port Arthur, Texas, via Austin, to San Francisco.

Cheap Thrills followed in early ’68 and its single, “Piece of My Heart,” rose to the top of the Billboard chart. The continued to tour and Janis sunk deeper into her cravings for heroin. Columbia Records declined her suggested name for the album, yet it pretty much summed up where she was at: Sex, Dope and Cheap Thrills. Tensions mounted and Janis Joplin left Big Brother at the end of 1968, ready for her “own” band. Joplin sought help to assemble the Kozmic Blues Band in early 1969 and they soon recorded I Got Dem Ol’ Kozmic Blues Again Mama! The Kozmic Blues Band backed her up later that year at the fabled Woodstock festival, but critics urged her to disband, which she did only a year after its inception. Janis Joplin was much more involved in selecting her final band, which she named the Full Tilt Boogie Band. “It’s my band,” she raved to a journalist. “Finally it’s my band.” Joplin weaned herself off heroin, but filled the void with even heavier drinking.

During the 4th of July week in 1970, Janis and Full Tilt rode and performed on the Festival Express tour through Canada (other acts included Grateful Dead, Flying Burrito Brothers, The Band, Buddy Guy). She was drunk, but seemed happy. Unfortunately it didn’t last long. Over the course of that summer, Joplin was back on the needle.

In September 1970, she and the band started recording Pearl in Los Angeles with Paul Rothchild (who had previously produced The Doors). Janis Joplin sadly died of an overdose of heroin during the recordings on October 4, 1970. She was 27 years old and was scheduled to add vocals to “Buried Alive In The Blues” the following day.

JanisJoplin.net

Share on Facebook

Born: July 3, 1943, near Boston, Massachusetts
Died: September 3, 1970, in Topanga Canyon, California
Bands and affiliations: Canned Heat, Son House, John Lee Hooker, John Fahey

The least glamorous of The 27s, Alan Wilson was more than anything a pure and frail human being, a blues scholar, a great harmonica player, and a guitar player with a solid foundation in Delta blues. Raised in Boston, Alan left for California to help John Fahey with his thesis. Fahey gave Alan the nickname “Blind Owl,” due to his coke-bottom glasses, and introduced him to Bob “The Bear” Hite, another record collector. Together with Henry Vestine, a Mothers of Invention alum, the trio formed Canned Heat in 1966.

Canned Heat started out as a purveyor of the Delta blues tradition, but got caught up with the psychedelic ’60s and added more of a contemporary spin to their boogie. The Bear had a gravelly voice, while Alan sang with a high-pitched, often tortured lilt. Although Canned Heat is now largely forgotten (the band still tours with one member from the golden age, Fito de la Parra) it was one of the more popular bands of the late 1960s. Canned Heat headlined both the Monterey Pop Festival and Woodstock and the group’s songs pop up in movie soundtracks and commercials.

Struggling with chronic depression, Alan Wilson overdosed in Bear’s backyard on the eve of departure for a German festival that also marked one of Jimi Hendrix’s last performances.

BlindOwl.net

Share on Facebook

Born: February 28, 1942, in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, England
Died: July 3, 1969, Hartfield, Sussex, England
Band: The Rolling Stones. Also recorded the Master Musicians of Joujouka

Brian was true rock royalty and in the early days, the only bad Rolling Stone. He basked with blonde babes and fathered enough offspring to fill a soccer team. But his thirst for the limelight quickly overshadowed his art, which led to his demise.

Brian Jones was born into a respectable family in Cheltenham, England, during a time when such families reprimanded their offspring using corporal punishment, even in public. His parents, Lewis and Louise, were more concerned about their family’s image than instilling happiness in Brian and his four-years-younger sister Barbara. Louise told her son that Pamela, another sister who had died of leukemia at the age of two, had been sent away for being naughty. They weren’t unusually cruel compared to other families, but years of verbal and physical abuse scarred Brian’s psyche for life.

Brian Jones’ boyhood was filled with altar service, depression, school pranks, chronic asthma and various nervous disorders. Despite of his nervousness he was capable of coaxing other boys in the schoolyard to do or believe things they’d regret later. The few who came back with clenched fists were met with meekness in Brian’s green eyes.

His mother taught him piano and he could practice clarinet at home, but listening to jazz and swing or practicing other instruments was done covertly and away from the house. Jones picked up an acoustic guitar and became infatuated with rural bluesmen such as Blind Lemon Jefferson, Lightning Hopkins, Ledbelly Leadbetter—and the mysterious Robert Johnson. In his teens, Brian became one of a handful young, amateur blues musicians playing on a scene dominated by scholarly trad. jazzers. He often sat in with various outfits and was capable of laying down decent jazz strums, but he was known to wander off stage if the band started playing numbers he felt were a bit too trad. The behavior garnered him off-stage attention, which he seemed to enjoy. Band members would often try to make him come back because his musical abilities helped the overall cohesiveness. Around this time, Brian became a father for the second time. His first, when he was 16, had been put up for adoption. This time was different. He took odd jobs to pay for his son and the mother, who eventually followed him to London after he moved there.

Brian Jones founded the Rolling Stones as a skiffle group in 1962. The band’s repertoire in the early days consisted of Chuck Berry numbers, Bo Diddley covers and a selection of other blues songs. Brian assumed leadership and his initial fortitude facilitated the band’s sudden success. He chose cover songs, hustled gigs, signed contracts and distributed proceeds (always skimming a little extra before disbursing the others). Women found the broad-shouldered sparkplug adorable. Brian was often nasty on stage and was known to egg on patches of the crowd for the sheer hell of it, but in between he’d turn those green beams in the direction of a special girl watching from the side of the stage and she’d melt. His charm lingered latently and he could be funny, jovial and cordial, his husked voice softly lisping underneath a blond mop top.

The Rolling Stones’s Cavern was a London club called Craw Daddy. Within months, Rolling Stones’ reputation made people stand in line for hours for an opportunity to sweat and shake in immobility. Girls with bouncing tops up front, gawking guys in the back. When the Beatles, who had already garnered reputation beyond Liverpool’s Cavern, listened in they were impressed enough to invite the band to one of their concerts as well as talking them up to potential producers and the press.

Brian Jones was never a songwriter, but what and how he played refined the overall sound. He doesn’t have a song to his name because he was constantly paranoid about letting others hear what he was working on. He wanted to stick with variations of the blues, while Keith and Mick were rockers. Ultimately, his failure to produce material made him irrelevant, so Mick and Keith moved into position as principal architects of the Stones’ direction. But that was in the studio and backstage. In public, Brian clung to the role as co-leader and bad-boy partier. His choices indicated that being a star was more important than playing music—he adored the spotlight. Skipping out on duties with the Stones, he flew to Monterey with Nico on his arm, so he could introduce Jimi’s Experience to the American audience.

In 1968, Brian spent time in Morocco recording tribal music, posthumously released as The Pipes of Pan at Joujouka. Brian’s leadership had already slipped, but his frequent escapades and propensity to avoid recording dates (he failed to show up during the recording of “Satisfaction”) rendered him persona non grata by his band mates. He would typically show up after Keith had recorded all the guitar tracks, leaving him to add other instruments. The trajectory of figuring out an arsenal of instruments led to a marked disinterest in the guitar, but Brian’s colorations added zest. “Paint it Black,” Rolling Stones’ third British number one single, sounded strangely haunted thanks to his sitar. Jones reached the apex of multi-instrumentation in 1966 on Aftermath and Between the Buttons. He played marimba on “Under My Thumb,” “Yesterday’s Papers” and “Out of Time;” dulcimer on “Lady Jane;” sitar on “Cool, Calm and Collected” and “Mother’s Little Helper;” trombone on “Something Happened To Me Yesterday” and flute on “All Sold Out.”

For fifteen months, Anita Pallenberg was his girlfriend, and she made him laugh and forget about his deficiencies. His persona became increasingly mysterious and some have talked about the couple’s kinkiness: sado-masochism and even coprophagy. But the bliss ended after he had to fly back to London from a road trip on the continent due to a bad case of asthma. With Linda alone in the backseat, it didn’t take long for Keith to win her over.

The Stones’ founder turned into an emotional train wreck and two drug busts from the police with subsequent court appearances furthered his condition. A psychoanalysis ordered by the court found him to have an IQ of 133, but “losing his grip on reality. He vacillates between a passive, dependent child with a confused image of an adult on one hand and an idol of pop culture on the other.” He was put on a diet of tranquillizers and moved out of London to Cotchford Farm, an estate previously owned by Winnie the Pooh author A.A. Milne. Brian looked pale, grew tubbier and was generally zonked from a combination of medicine, booze, depression, asthma and frail nerves. In early June, Mick, Keith and Charlie drove out to sever the ties between Brian and the band. It was a sense of relief for both parties and Brian was promised a golden handshake equivalent of $1.7 million.

July 3, 1969, was a hot day at Cotchford, the air filled with pollen, but news about the check from the Stones organization lifted Brian’s spirits. He drank heavily, sucked on his inhalator and popped tranquilizers. Although he was hardly fit for stable movement on land, he decided to take a dip in the deep blue swimming pool that night. Anna, the latest of his string of nursing girlfriends, and Frank, a brute of a foreman that was living in an annex while supervising a posse of cowboy builders employed by Mr. Jones, eventually got out to fetch cigarettes, leaving Brian alone. He must’ve felt a drowsy calmness while splashing alone in his pool, eventually sinking to the tile-covered bottom. Brian Jones was 27 years old.

Share on Facebook