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Avg: 4.0 (165 ratings)
- Date Released: August 1, 1968
- Genre: Rock/Pop
- Style: Rock
- Label: Columbia/Legacy
- Copyright: Originally recorded 1968, Originally Released 1968 (P) 1999 SONY BMG MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT
An elegy and celebration of Big Brother at its '68 solstice
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We Say...
"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 John Simon. The sessions proved stormy, partially because of the increasing attention centered on Janis, the band's own sense of live dynamics, and the rather stoooned nature of the proceedings. Many of the cuts, including "Combination of the Two" and the epic "Ball and Chain" are, in fact, taken from concert performances. Even Janis' take on Erma Franklin's "Piece of My Heart" bristles with the electricity and interplay of Big Brother on stage. A bonus track to the original Cheap Thrills, "Roadblock" shows the band at its most tearaway; I had the pleasure of seeing them perform this song at the Avalon in August of 1967, and the image of Sam Andrews picking up and hugging his Fender amplifier to his guitar as he roamed the stage, feedback on full, only to open his arms at the final chord, the amp bouncing off the floor in a reverb crash, is one of my most cherished rock and roll memories.
Big Brother and Janis well-suited each other in ways that were not realized at the time, and when the band and she parted ways four months after Cheap Thrills was released, spending eight weeks atop the charts, it was then regarded as a professional step upwards for Joplin. Yet in aspiring to be a more traditional soul singer, first in the Kozmik Blues Band, and later the Full-Tilt Boogie Band, the freewheeling sense of precipice that Big Brother — especially guitarist James Gurley, he of the monstrous tone and sustain — gave her and her music a sense of unexpected thrill that hardly came cheap. It was a parting that perhaps didn't serve either as well as hoped, leaving "Summertime," with its guitar arabesques and searing shred of Janis' larynx, both a mournful elegy and a celebration of that season when all the world went to San Francisco and this classic line-up of Big Brother and the Holding Company arrived at its solstice. -
They Say...
Cheap Thrills, the major-label debut of Janis Joplin, was one of the most eagerly anticipated, and one of the most successful, albums of 1968. Joplin and her band Big Brother & the Holding Company had earned extensive press notice ever since they played the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967, but for a year after that their only recorded work was a poorly produced, self-titled album that they'd done early in their history for Mainstream Records; and it took the band and the best legal minds at Columbia Records seven months to extricate them from their Mainstream contract, so that they could sign with Columbia. All the while, demand continued to build, and they still faced the problem of actually delivering something worthy of the press they'd been getting -- Columbia even tried to record them live on-stage on the tour they were in the midst of when the new contract was signed, but somehow the concert tapes from early March of 1968 didn't capture the full depth of their work. So they spent March, April, and May in the studio with producer John Simon and, miraculously, emerged with something that was as exciting as anything they'd done on-stage. When Cheap Thrills appeared in August 1968 -- sporting a Robert Crumb cover on its gatefold jacket that constituted the most elaborate album design ever lavished on a rock album from Columbia Records, as well as a pop-art classic rivaling the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's jacket -- it shot into the charts, reaching number one and going gold within a couple of months, and "Piece of My Heart" became a Top 40 hit and helped to propel the LP to over a million sales. Joplin, with her ear- (and vocal cord-) shredding voice, was the obvious standout. Nobody had ever heard singing as emotional, as desperate, as determined, or as loud as Joplin's, and Cheap Thrills was her greatest moment. Not that everything was done full out -- there were relatively quiet moments on the album that were as compelling as the high-wattage showcases; her rendition of George Gershwin's "Summertime" was the finest rock reinterpretation of a standard done by anybody up to that time (though, in an incident recalled in his autobiography Clive, when Columbia Records president Clive Davis played it to Richard Rodgers to give him an example of some of the sounds that younger audiences of the late '60s were listening to, the 66-year-old Rodgers stomped out of the Columbia corporate offices in fury, vowing never to write another song); and Joplin's own "Turtle Blues" showed that she and the band could turn down and do credible acoustic blues, in something like an authentic period Bessie Smith (or, more properly, Memphis Minnie) sound. Big Brother's backup, typical of the guitar-dominated sound of San Francisco psychedelia, made up in enthusiasm what it lacked in precision. But everybody knew who the real star was, and Joplin played her last gig with Big Brother while the album was still on top of the charts. Neither she nor the band would ever equal it. Heard today, Cheap Thrills is a musical time capsule and remains a showcase for one of rock's most distinctive singers.
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| 01. |  |
Combination Of The Two |
5:47 |
|
| 02. | |
I Need A Man To Love |
4:53 |
|
| 03. | |
Summertime |
3:58 |
|
| 04. | |
Piece Of My Heart |
4:13 |
|
| 05. | |
Turtle Blues |
4:22 |
|
| 06. | |
Oh, Sweet Mary |
4:14 |
|
| 07. | |
Ball And Chain |
9:27 |
|
| 08. | |
Roadblock |
5:31 |
|
| 09. | |
Flower In The Sun |
3:04 |
|
| 10. | |
Catch Me Daddy |
5:32 |
|
| 11. | |
Magic Of Love |
3:58 |
|
11 Total Tracks, 54:59 Total Length
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