Chester Leo "Chet" Helms (August 2, 1942 – June 25, 2005), often called the father of San Francisco's "1967 Summer of Love," was a music promoter and a cultural figure in San Francisco during its hippie period in the late Sixties.

Helms was the founder and manager of Big Brother and the Holding Company and recruited Janis Joplin as its lead singer. He was a producer and organizer, helping to stage free concerts and other cultural events at Golden Gate Park, the backdrop of San Francisco's Summer of Love in 1967, as well as at other venues, including the Avalon Ballroom.

He was the first producer of psychedelic light-show concerts at the Fillmore and the Avalon Ballroom and was instrumental in helping to develop bands that had the distinctive San Francisco Sound. Helms died June 25, 2005 of complications from hepatitis C. He was 62.

Chester Leo Helms was born in Santa Maria, California, the eldest of three sons. His parents were Chester and Novella Helms. Helms' father, a manager at a local sugarbeet mill, died when he was 9. His mother took the boys to Missouri and then to Texas.

Lydia Pense (born Lydia Jane Pense in San Francisco, California on December 14, 1947) is an American rock-soul-jazz singer who since 1969 has performed with the band Cold Blood. Her style has been compared to powerful singers including Janis Joplin (who recommended the band to Bill Graham for their first audition), Aretha Franklin and Teena Marie.

Pense's mother, the former Miss Ramos, was born in Madrid, Spain, while her father came from Nebraska, United States. While attending Sequoia High School in Redwood City, California at the age of 14, Pense started singing with a band called The Dimensions, with Guitarist Fred Tatman. She was a fan of Brenda Lee and was singing her songs , but the band , formed by Fred Tatman, Larry Hatch, and Kerry Yates encouraged her to sing R&B in the style of James Brown, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, and Ray Charles.

Lydia joined Cold Blood in 1968.

Their initial four albums, Cold Blood, Sisyphus, First Taste of Sin (produced by Donny Hathaway), and Thriller remain their best known work. The band continues to record and perform today. The band separated in the late 1970s, and Pense suspended her career in the 1980s to raise her daughter before re-forming the group.

James Gurley (December 22, 1939 – December 20, 2009) was an American musician. He is best known as the guitar player of Big Brother and the Holding Company, a psychedelic/acid rock band from San Francisco which was fronted by singer Janis Joplin from 1966 to 1968.

James Gurley was born in Detroit, Michigan on December 22, 1939. As a boy he sometimes worked with his father who was a stunt car driver. Occasionally this work entailed performing as a human hood ornament with a helmet as his father sped through a flaming plywood wall. The stunt was popular with crowds but not with James - particularly not the day he knocked out his two front teeth and singed his hair to the point where he had to shave his head completely.

At the age of nineteen James took up the guitar and began practicing long hours while listening to old Lightnin' Hopkins records. He never had a guitar lesson, preferring to learn by ear. He spent four years at Detroit's Catholic Brothers of the Holy Cross, studying to be a priest.

Janis Lyn Joplin (January 19, 1943 – October 4, 1970) was an American singer and songwriter from Port Arthur, Texas. As a youth Joplin was ridiculed by her fellow students due to her unconventional appearance and personal beliefs. She later sang about her experience at school through her song "Ego Rock". Early in her life, Joplin cultivated a rebellious and unconventional lifestyle, becoming a beatnik poet. She began her singing career as a folk and blues singer in San Francisco, playing clubs and bars with her guitar and auto-harp.

Joplin first rose to prominence in the late 1960s as the lead singer of the psychedelic-acid rock band Big Brother and the Holding Company, and later as a solo artist with her more soulful and bluesy backing groups, The Kozmic Blues Band and The Full Tilt Boogie Band. She was one of the more popular acts at the Monterey Pop Festival and later became one of the major attractions to the Woodstock festival and the Festival Express train tour.

Janis Joplin only charted five singles in her life but her hits and other popular songs from throughout her short four year career include "Down On Me", "Bye, Bye Baby", "Coo Coo", "Summertime", "Piece of My Heart", "Turtle Blues", "Ball 'n' Chain", "Try (Just A Little Bit Harder)", "Maybe", "To Love Somebody", "Kozmic Blues", "Work Me, Lord", "Move Over", "Cry Baby", "A Woman Left Lonely" "Get It While You Can", "My Baby", "Trust Me", "Mercedes Benz", "One Night Stand", "Raise Your Hand" and her only number one hit, "Me and Bobby McGee".

Paul Butterfield (17 December 1942 – 4 May 1987) was an American blues vocalist and harmonica player, who founded the Paul Butterfield Blues Band in the early 1960s and performed at the original Woodstock Festival. He died of drug-related heart failure.

The son of a lawyer, Paul Butterfield was born in Chicago, Illinois and raised in the city's Hyde Park neighborhood. He was born and raised Jewish. He attended the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, a private school associated with the University of Chicago. After studying classical flute with Walfrid Kujala of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra as a teenager, he developed a love for the blues harmonica, and hooked up with white, blues-loving, University of Chicago physics student Elvin Bishop. The pair started hanging around black blues musicians such as Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Little Walter and Otis Rush. Butterfield and Bishop soon formed a band with Jerome Arnold and Sam Lay, both hired away from the touring band of Howlin' Wolf. In 1963, the racially mixed quartet was made the house band at Big John's, a folk club in the Old Town district on Chicago's north side. Butterfield was still underage (as was guitarist Mike Bloomfield.)