372. Big Brother and the Holding Company, "Cheap Thrills"

 

When people say "acid rock," this is what they're talking about, that combination of blues and pointless, too-long guitar solos.  The music itself is fine ("It was hard to get the band to play in tune and in time. They just weren't very good musicians," the engineer later said), but the obvious star here is Janis Joplin.  It's fascinating listening to her right after yesterday's Hot Buttered Soul, since the centerpiece of both records is an unforgettable, magnetic voice, and those voices could not be more different.  Where Hayes rumbles with powerful, oaky sureness, Janis shrieks and wails and somehow stays on key the whole time.  It's really an amazing performance.

The songs the band wrote themselves are really nothing interesting.  "Turtle Blues," which Janis wrote, is just straight-ahead blues.  "Combination of the Two," which kicks off with a Bill Graham intro to make it sound live (although it wasn't), kind of meanders and only really shines when Janis is singing.  It's the covers where the album really pops.  There's the iconic cover of the Gershwin brothers' "Summertime," and "Piece of My Heart," originally sung by Aretha Franklin's sister, which would go on to become Janis' signature song.

The band lived and worked in San Francisco, where I too live and work, and I lived in the Haight for years and remember that at almost every house party someone would claim that "Janis stayed in this very apartment for a while in the 60's."  Probably none of them were right.  I think her place was actually in the Western Addition somewhere?  Somebody knows better than I do.  I did live on Belvedere for a while, next door to the building where Rudolf Nureyev got busted for disturbing the peace and being in a house where marijuana was found in 1967.