Cheap Thrills Big Brother & The Holding Company

• 1Combination of the Two05:47
• 2I Need a Man to Love04:53
• 3Summertime03:58
• 4Piece of My Heart04:13
• 5Turtle Blues04:22
• 6Oh, Sweet Mary04:14
• 7Ball and Chain09:27
• 8Roadblock05:31
• 9Flower In the Sun03:04
• 10Catch Me Daddy05:20
• 11Magic of Love03:58
• Total Runtime54:47

Info for Cheap Thrills

After an appearance at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, Janis Joplin and Big Brother found themselves in the national limelight with a big-time manager and a recording contract with Columbia Records. Released in 1968, Cheap Thrills is the classic that became a #1 album and sold over a million copies. This is the album that cemented Janis Joplin's status as the first, true female rock superstar.

Crowned by its hit single, a churning remake of Erma Franklin's 'Piece of My Heart,' the album also contained Joplin's Monterey showstopper, her signature tune, 'Big Mama' Thornton's 'Ball and Chain,' as well as a raw and soulful recasting of the Gershwin jazz classic 'Summertime,' on which Joplin's always underappreciated band (especially guitarists Sam Andrews and James Gurley) match her vocal intensity with their own ferocious playing.

Cheap Thrills endures as the best showcase of Janis Joplin's extraordinary singing talent. Her amazing, spectacularly expressive vocals, channeling the agony and the ecstasy of love and life. It is really extraordinary how many artists have been inspired by her. Upon listening, one is convinced that Janis was and is a one-of-a-kind vocalist who can not only not be equaled but apparently cannot be imitated, either.

„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.“ (Bruce Eder, AMG)

Janis Joplin, vocals
Sam Andrew, lead guitar, bass, vocals
James Gurley, guitar
Peter Albin, bass, guitar
Dave Getz, drums

Recorded March 2 – May 20, 1968
Produced by John Simon

Digitally remastered

Cheap Thrills is considered one of the masterpieces of the psychedelic sound of San Francisco; it reached number one on the Billboard charts, and was ranked number 338 in Rolling Stone'​s the 500 greatest albums of all time. The album is also included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.

Please Note: We offer this album in its native sampling rate of 44.1 kHz, 24-bit. The provided 96 kHz version was up-sampled and offers no audible value!

Big Brother and the Holding Company
are primarily remembered as the group that gave Janis Joplin her start. There's no denying both that Joplin was by far the band's most striking asset, and that Big Brother would never have made a significant impression if they hadn't been fortunate enough to add her to their lineup shortly after forming. But Big Brother also occupies a significant place in the history of San Francisco psychedelic rock, as one of the bands that best captured the era's loosest, reckless, and indulgent qualities in its high-energy mutations of blues and folk-rock.

Big Brother were formed in 1965 in the Haight-Ashbury; by the time Joplin joined in mid-1966, the lineup was Sam Andrew and James Gurley on guitar, Peter Albin on bass, and David Getz on drums. Joplin, a recent arrival from Texas, entered the band at the instigation of Chet Helms, who (other than Bill Graham) was the most important San Francisco rock promoter. Big Brother, like the Grateful Dead and Quicksilver Messenger Service, were not great songwriters or singers. They didn't entirely welcome Joplin's presence at first, though, and Joplin did not dominate the group right away, sharing the lead vocals with other members.

It soon became evident to both band and audience that Joplin's fiery wail — mature and emotionally wrenching, even at that early stage — had to be spotlighted to make Big Brother a contender. But Big Brother weren't superfluous to the effort, interpreting folk and blues with an inventive (if sometimes sloppy) eclecticism that often gave way to distorted guitar jamming, and matching Joplin's passion with a high-spirited, anything-goes ethos of their own.

Big Brother catapulted themselves into national attention with their performance at the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967, particularly with Joplin's galvanizing interpretation of 'Ball and Chain' (which was a highlight of the film of the event). High-powered management and record label bids rolled in immediately, but unfortunately Big Brother had tied themselves up in a bad contract with the small Mainstream label, at a time when they were stranded on the road and needed cash. Their one Mainstream album (released in 1967) actually isn't bad at all, containing some of their stronger cuts, such as 'Down on Me' and 'Coo Coo.' It didn't fully capture the band's strengths, and with the help of new high-powered manager Albert Grossman (also handler of Bob Dylan, the Band, and Peter, Paul & Mary), they extricated themselves from the Mainstream deal and signed with Columbia.

The one Big Brother album for Columbia that featured Joplin, Cheap Thrills (1968), wasn't completed without problems of its own. John Simon found the band so difficult to work with that he withdrew his production credit from the final LP, which was assembled from both studio sessions and live material (recorded for an aborted concert album). Cheap Thrills nonetheless went to number one when it was finally released, and though it too was an erratic affair, it contained some of the best moments of acid rock's glory days, including 'Ball and Chain,' 'Summertime,' 'Combination of the Two,' and 'Piece of My Heart.'

Cheap Thrills made Big Brother superstars, a designation that was short-lived. By the end of 1968, Joplin had decided to go solo, a move from which neither she nor Big Brother ever fully recovered. That's putting matters too simply: Joplin never found a backing band as sympathetic, but did record some excellent material in the remaining two years of her life. Big Brother, on the other hand, had the wind totally knocked out of their sails. Although they did re-form for a while in the early '70s with different singers (indeed, they continued to perform in watered-down variations into the '90s), nothing would ever be the same.

This album contains no booklet.