120. Big Brother and the Holding Company - Cheap Thrills (August 1968)

1. Combination of the Two*

2. I Need a Man to Love

3. Summertime

4. Piece of My Heart*

5. Turtle Blues

6. Oh, Sweet Mary*

7. Ball and Chain

C+

The cover art by Robert Crumb is easily the best thing about this album. It's funny and vibrant and seems to promise an incredible listening experience with lots of twist and turns through strange and exotic lands. Instead what Cheap Thrills is is a collection of mediocre blues-rock tunes (and one classic), which simultaneously foreground Janis Joplin's vocals and completely fail to put them to good use.

Now I've never been a huge fan of Joplin, but I do like some of her songs off the Pearl album. And "Piece of My Heart" is such a well-constructed song that I'm pretty sure a macaque could give an effective reading of it. I also kind of like "Oh, Sweet Mary", which is really a dreadful song but has a fun, psychedelic surf sound, a good beat, and a nifty guitar riff. "Combination of the Two" is also a solid opener, consisting of a rollicking groove over which the group promise to rock you to the core and show you a great time. But do they? No, not really. Instead they set about butchering Gershwin's "Summertime", with the band playing completely at odds to the material and Joplin giving a histrionic vocal that sets my teeth on edge. I guess it must have seemed novel in the 60s to take a song your grandma likes and put it through the blender, but that doesn't change the fact that it's fucking terrible, and I have trouble making it through. As for the rest of the songs, they're pretty much forgettable (if you can ever forget Janis Joplin's larynx-shredding warbling).

Still, I have to be fair. This is not a good album, but it was a popular and influential one, and a lot of people seem to like it. Joplin may not be my cup of tea as a singer, but she broke new ground for female vocalists - I mean, it would take a long time for people to catch up to the idea that a white woman could sing raw hard rock and blues. And the techniques she explores here would be put to much better use by Robert Plant and John Fogerty. Ultimately, though, I'm reminded of a comment someone made once on a forum I used to frequent - "Why the hell does everyone lose their shit every time a young white woman comes along who sounds like an old black lady?". She was talking about Amy Winehouse, but it's just as true of Joplin at this point in her career. In a lot of ways she's the female Jim Morrison - strip away the mystique and mythology and all you're left with are a couple of OK songs. 

I read that some publication or other called this "the epitome of blues rock". That is bullshit - the epitome of blues rock is clearly ZZ Top's Tres Hombres. But whatever.