Big Brother And The Holding Company, Cheap Thrills

"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.