Today marks the 40ieth anniversary of bluesman Alan “Blind Owl” Wilson’s suicide in Topanga Canyon, California, on Bob Hite’s property. Blind Owl is an oft-forgotten member of the fabled 27 Club and his death marked the first of three 27s over the course of the fall of 1970; Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix were to follow.

Alan Wilson grew up in a Boston suburb and studied music at Boston University. From an early age he was, using a contemporary label, an ardent conservationist and environmentalist. Out of all the musicians who played Monterey in ’67 or Woodstock in ’69, Wilson truly held nature sacred, both in actions and in words. Canned Heat’s Future Blues record included a short plead in the gate-fold where Alan Wilson urged people to save his beloved California Redwoods from extinction. At the time, logging posed a huge threat to the last swaths of these primeval, majestic forests.

Instead of sleeping in hotels while on tour, Blind Owl preferred to roll out his sleeping bag in nearby fields and spend the early morning hours collecting samples that he’d stuff in a huge botany book that he liked to travel with.

When it came to playing music, Blind Owl’s chops on the harmonica and guitar, be it acoustic, electric or slide, was in a sense unrivaled. He possessed an in-depth knowledge of all forms of the blues and a true blues scholar. During the Hooker N Heat sessions, which took place shortly before his death, he proved seasoned enough to follow John Lee Hooker’s odd beats every step of the way. You can hear Hooker mutter in amazement that the pale, bespectacled kid always seemed to know where the old master was going. “You musta been listenin’ to my records all your life!” Hooker says. But Hooker was just one of many masters whose style Alan Wilson knew intimately. Six years earlier, in 1964, Wilson taught Son House, who had long retired from music, to play the songs House had recorded back in the 1930s.

While Alan Wilson’s chops were top-notch, he suffered with severe and chronic mental illness. His bandmates in Canned Heat provided support, but probably not the kind of stability someone like Wilson needed. He had already attempted suicide a couple of times before he did himself in with a handful of reds and a bottle of gin.

During the research for The 27s–The Greatest Myth of Rock & Roll, manager and friend Skip Taylor told us that when he discovered Alan’s body, the musician finally looked peaceful and happy.

Wilson’s songs and music live on through “On the Road Again” and “Up In the Country,” but his talent covers obviously much more than the famous hits. Seek out his work with John Fahey, the aforementioned Son House and John Lee Hooker, as well as “Five Owls” and “Raga Kafi” from Living the Blues‘s trippy “Parthenogenesis.” Yup, that’s Wilson on the hypnotic sitar.

Skip Taylor is currently shopping around a “solo” record that features released and unreleased Alan Wilson material with and without Canned Heat. We’re not holding our breath for this one, but hope it’ll be released sometime in the not-so-distant future.

Be sure to listen to the Stephen Stills clip below where he dedicates “Blues Man” to our tragic guitar hero.

While Willy Brown and his headstone is making headlines, there is a continual search to find physical evidence of the blues era’s men . There are no known photos of Willie, but it would make sense given the times, the vagabonding lifestyle these men lived and the likely chance anyone in the audience was carrying a Canon… that being said, the past few years have surprisingly brought to light 2 new photographs purported to be that of 27 Club founder, Robert Johnson.

The first was featured in the November 2008 issue of Vanity Fair magazine. An avid guitar collector, Zeke Schein, claims he now owns the third known photograph of Johnson, and that he bought it off of eBay.

The seller advertised the photo as that of a “young BB King” but Schein was convinced otherwise. $2200 had the item shipped and delivered. Upon closer scrutiny, Schein believed the man to the left of “Robert” to be, none other than that of Johnny Shines, well-known traveler and companion of Johnson during their heydays. The hands and facial features certainly suggest an affinity for Johnson’s own, but to date, the certainty is still less than 100%.

A second photo, eerily similar to the much heralded cigarette photo booth shot, came to light in early 2007 when the owner asked for a whopping $795,000 at opening auction. Crazy, right?!? Maybe not so when you figure this in… In the summer of 2006, what was dubbed, the “Holy Grail” of musical instruments popped up: the guitar said to be held by Robert Johnson in his infamous cross-legged portrait. For a mere $6 million, the guitar went up for grabs across the web. There was little proof other than some photo comparisons, but risk seems to be less important than an opportunity to own music history.

Whether or not these artifacts do in fact hold clues about the lives of Robert, Johnny, or even Willie does not really matter. The quest to authenticate Robert or Willie’s life will continue to enthuse and inspire music fans across the globe. And, who knows, maybe the ole’ thrift store down the road holds the proof of Willie’s mug, Robert’s additional threads or links in the chain to a history we can’t get enough of. Cheers!

Robert Johnson

Born: May 8, 1911, in Hazlehurst, Mississippi
Died: August 16, 1938, in Greenwood, Mississippi

Robert Johnson lived and died in relative obscurity. He was a rootless, restless, sly, street-smart, womanizing, whiskey-drinking hobo with a guitar and a gifted ability to pick up and synthesize the music he heard in juke joints and from records and radio. He played mills and barrooms and is only known to have recorded 29 tracks over two recording sessions, yet his music helped father rock & roll.

A 1961 release titled King of The Delta Blues Singers bore the painting of a faceless man hunched over his guitar—none of the two known photographs of Robert Johnson had surfaced (not until 1986 and 1989). Robert Johnson sounded primal, sang with lived passion about dark meetings at crossroads, love in vain and hellhounds on his trail, and died from poisoning under strange circumstances. Robert Johnson is an enigma and an amalgam elevated by white rockers to the pantheon as a mysterious folkloric hero. When alive, Robert Johnson was never the King of The Delta—just a talented minstrel—but his influence makes him the grandfather of rock.

An assorted collection of artists who have covered the songs of Robert Johnson include (in no particular order) The Rolling Stones, Canned Heat, Cream, the Blues Brothers Band, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Ry Cooder, Eric Clapton, Cowboy Junkies, John Hammond, Peter Green, Cassandra Wilson, the Radiators, Fleetwood Mac, ZZ Top, Freddie King, Elmore James, Asylum Street Spankers, George Thorogood & the Destroyers, Keb ‘Mo’, Walter Trout Band, Lucinda Williams, Rocky Lawrence, Rory Block, Pyeng Threadgill, John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, Chris Thomas King, the Jeff Healy Band, Pussy Galore, White Stripes, Foghat, Status Quo, Johnny Shines, Roy Rogers, Led Zeppelin, Muddy Waters, Bonnie Raitt, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Grateful Dead, and Widespread Panic.

Jimi Hendrix

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.

Alan C. Wilson (“Blind Owl”)

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