Big Brother & The Holding Company: Cheap Thrills [LEGACY/COLUMBIA]

Why you'll love it

This Columbia / Legacy reissue presents the remastered stereo album on 180g vinyl. Cheap Thrills spent eight weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard chart in 1968 and was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2007.

This edition

• 180g vinyl
• Remastered

About the album

Plenty of listeners in 1968 thought they were hearing a live album. They weren't, mostly. Producer John Simon dropped crowd noise around the studio takes to capture the heat of Big Brother's San Francisco shows, and the trick worked so well that the record still feels like a sweaty night in a San Francisco ballroom. Bill Graham even introduces the band at the top of "Combination of the Two."

The fire, of course, is Janis Joplin. Her "Piece of My Heart" turns a soul cover into a howl that never quite stops ringing, "Summertime" slinks and aches, and "Ball and Chain," recorded at the Winterland Ballroom in April 1968, is the genuine live article and the album's towering finale. "Turtle Blues" and "Oh, Sweet Mary" show the band's looser, rougher side, all fuzz and swagger. Cheap Thrills followed the band's breakthrough at the Monterey Pop Festival, and it was Joplin's last album with them before she went solo.

Robert Crumb drew the cover after Columbia vetoed the band's own idea, and Rolling Stone ranks it among the 100 greatest album covers. Crumb refused payment for the job, which makes it the best bargain in the history of rock art, and the bargain bin has never quite recovered.

Also at Kops: more Big Brother & The Holding Company on vinyl · browse Rock

Tracklist

Listen

On Columbia / Legacy, a reissue of the 1968 album.