[SACD-R][OF] Big Brother And The Holding Company - Cheap Thrills (Limited edition) - 1968/2016 (Blues rock; Acid rock)

MoFi:
Big Brother and the Holding Company Cheap Thrills on Numbered Edition Hybrid SACD
Quintessential 1968 Record a Potent Mix of Psychedelia, Blues, Folk, and Rock: Janis Joplin Delivers Cathartic Vocal Performance on Major-Label Debut That Includes Powerhouse "Piece of My Heart"
In many facets, Big Brother and the Holding Company's Cheap Thrills is the quintessential album to spring from the outcome of the Summer of Love. Best known as Janis Joplin's major-label debut, the 1968 set arrived when the countercultural movement was in full swing and before co-optation, drugs, and violence signaled the fall of the era. Ranked #338 on Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, it puts a female singer in the prominent position traditionally given to a male and showcases a band pouring a potent cocktail of fiery psychedelic, blues, and folk sounds that informed the unfettered creativity of the San Francisco scene. Produced by John Simon, Cheap Thrills also features one of the most iconic and elaborate album covers in history.
The iconic audiophile label's SACD reissue intensifies the quintet's storied sophomore effort, enhancing airiness, punch, energy, pacing, and dynamics. Joplin's hurricane-force singing reverberates with texture, grittiness, and volume. An arresting array of instrumental colors and tones comes on with clearer separation and depth. While previous pressings find the band and Joplin's voice in competition with one another for room, both emerge as distinct entities. Always noted for its rawness, Cheap Thrills sounds as close to live as it gets, an unadulterated portrait of nervy rock n' roll delivered with exuberant enthusiasm and all-out determination. This is music at is most visceral.
Having drawn national attention for their legendary performance at the Monterey International Pop Festival in 1967, Big Brother and Joplin faced huge expectations to deliver a studio set that would convey their onstage vibrancy and potency. Cheap Thrills does this and more, becoming one of 1968's most commercially successful releases that remained on the charts the week Joplin announced her separation from the ensemble. Contrary to popular belief, only one of the album's songs, "Ball and Chain," was recorded live. Everything else owes to the unhinged, spirit-elevating performances and true collaboration between vocalist and band that manifests itself throughout the record's 37-minute-plus running time. Merging biker-babe ruggedness with wounded-bird poignancy, Joplin's expressive belting, mega-watt moaning, and sensitive crooning take center stage. Yet her bandmates match every step with explosive rhythms, heavy guitar-driven blues, and assertive solos that take inspiration from free-form jazz.
Indeed, Cheap Thrills still exhilarates not only due to Joplin's almighty singing but because of boundary-shredding arrangements that reflect the period's anything-is-possible mindset. More so than any other musicians Joplin encountered, the members of Big Brother pushed limits on convention via soirees into acid-dipped psychedelia and its orbiting sonic galaxies. Together, they aim and achieve an aural mythos that makes a permanent connection between artist and audience by way of eliminating traditional divisions. Such communal power is evident on the mind-bending version of Big Mama Thornton's "Ball and Chain" and insistent, sinewy "I Need a Man to Love." It's also obvious during quieter moments, whether the tripped-out, twisted, and curvaceous contours of George and Ira Gershwin's "Summertime" or restrained, throwback acoustic blues of "Turtle Blues."
Yes, Joplin presents – and rallies against – loneliness and desperation in a cathartic language few had heard before or since. What's even more significant is the fearlessness, toughness, synergy, and sexual danger pulsing through every song, including the take-on-all-comers challenge "Piece of My Heart," which the collective attacks with career-making ferocity. Like Robert Crumb's daring pop-art illustrations that grace the cover, they simultaneously lure and dare the listener to enter a space where outsiders run free and where outlaws are heard above the mainstream din.
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Cheap Thrills is the second album from Big Brother and the Holding Company and their last album with Janis Joplin as primary lead vocalist.
Big Brother obtained a considerable amount of attention after their 1967 performance at the Monterey Pop Festival and had released their debut album soon after. Despite their newfound success, the album was a modest hit reaching only #60, though the single Down On Me nearly broke the Top 40. Columbia Records offered the band a new recording contract, but it took months to get through since they were still signed to Mainstream Records. The album features three cover songs (“Summertime”, “Piece of My Heart” and “Ball and Chain”). The album also features Bill Graham, who introduces the band at the beginning of “Combination of the Two”. “Combination of the Two”, “I Need a Man to Love” and “Ball and Chain” are the only live recordings. The album’s overall raw sound effectively captures the band’s energetic and lively concerts.
The album was released in the summer of 1968, one year after their debut album, and reached #1 on the Billboard charts in its eighth week in October. It kept the #1 spot for eight (nonconsecutive) weeks while the single, “Piece of My Heart”, also became a huge hit. By the end of the year it was the most successful album of 1968, having sold nearly a million copies. The success was short-lived however, as Joplin left the group for a solo career in December 1968. In 2003, the album was ranked number 338 on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. They previously ranked it #50 on their Top 100 Albums of the Past 20 Years list in 1987. It is often regarded as one of the key recordings of the late 1960’s. It is also listed in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die
All Music Review
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.