"Combination of the Two," the track which leads off Big Brother and the Holding Company's second album, is a prescient title in more ways than one. The "four gentlemen," as Bill Graham introduces them, were a working San Francisco band before promoter Chet Flippo introduced the group to "one great, great broad" just up from Texas: the blues-wailing Janis Joplin. A pairing particularly heaven-sent, mixing the band's raw energy with Joplin's emotionally wrenching field holler, Big Brother and the Holding Company electrified San Francisco's homegrown ballroom scene, then achieving notoriety and attention as the soundtrack to the upcoming Summer of Love. In June 1967, when the group starred at the Monterey Pop Festival, it was Big Brother who created the grandest sense of expectation.

The only problem was that they had signed with a small Chicago label, Mainstream, the previous summer after a short residency at a club on Wells St. in the town's then-bohemian district, and had rush-released an album that mainly documented their live set at the time. Columbia signed the band, encouraged by the high-powered management of Albert Grossman, bought them out of their previous contract, and they commenced working in the spring of 1968 with producer… read more »