Jimi Hendrix grabbed electric guitar by the neck and wrestled it into a new era. His feedback-heavy solos and hallucinogenic tunes helped define the psychedelic 1960s. With his band The Jimi Hendrix Experience he recorded the albums Are You Experienced? (1967), Axis: Bold as Love (also 1967), and Electric Ladyland (1968, including Hendrix's version of Bob Dylan's tune "All Along the Watchtower"). The single "Purple Haze" from Are You Experienced remains one of rock's touchstone classics. The band broke up in 1969 but Hendrix remained a star, playing later that year at the Woodstock music festival. Hendrix was only 27 when he suffocated in 1970 after ingesting wine and sleeping pills in a London hotel.
Jimi, like Paul Mccartney, was a left-handed guitar player... Hendrix's fuzz-guitar version of "The Star-Spangled Banner" at Woodstock has become a famous sound clip... He died two short weeks before another rock icon, Janis Joplin... A museum and interactive shrine to Hendrix, called the Experience Music Project, was built in Seattle by computer magnate Paul Allen.
Janis Joplin was born January 19th, 1943, in Port Arthur, Texas. Her father was an oil refinery worker and her mother was a registrar at a business college. Though her family was middle-class, as a teenager she showed signs of the unconventional woman she would become. She was something of a loner, and, unlike her siblings and neighbourhood peers, she listened to folk and blues music. Joplin's favourite artists included Odetta, Leadbelly, and Bessie Smith, and she was greatly influenced by them in her own vocal style. By the time she was seventeen, she had decided to become a singer, and left home.
At first, Joplin found work in country and western clubs in Houston and other Texas cities with the goal of saving enough money from her gigs for bus fare to California. She enrolled in several different colleges while singing folk songs for little money, but her attempts at continuing her education never lasted long. She also tried living in various communes, and eventually settled in San Francisco for a few years.
Ironically, Joplin went back to Texas in early 1966, right before a friend of hers, Chet Helms, became the manager of a new Rock group called "Big Brother and the Holding Company". The band needed a female vocalist, and Helms thought of Joplin. He contacted her and convinced her to return to San Francisco.
Though Joplin had not had much previous experience singing rock music, the combination of her gravely, bluesy voice with Big Brother's hard rock sound was a success. The group quickly became popular in the San Francisco area, and by the time the Monterey International Pop Festival took place in 1967 in Monterey, California, Big Brother and the Holding Company were a featured attraction, getting top billing over veterans, Booker T and the MGs and new comers, The Iron Butterfly. Joplin's performances at this festival and at Woodstock in 1969 are considered by many specialists in the music of the late 1960s to have been classic moments in the history of rock.
