You can read more in 'Little Girl Blue - The Alan's Album Archives Guide To The Music Of Janis Joplin' available to buy now in e-book form by clicking here!
"Big Brother And
The Holding Company" (1967)
Bye Bye Baby/Easy
Rider/Intruder/Light Is Faster Than Sound/Call On Me//Women Is
Losers/Blindman/Down On Me/Caterpillar/All Is Loneliness
You've never seen a crowd this big. What could be
scarier than a crowd this big? A crowd whose never heard of you (you've never
had a record out, after all - some of the guys here have been recording for
decades) and are patiently waiting for Country Joe and the Fish to come on
next, that's who. What's worse, there's all those guys whose music you've been
singing along to for the past five years all backstage and adore, busy chatting
away to each other, taking a break while an 'unknown' band walk on stage. You
have to do something special to make this foreign crowd your crowd and to make
sure they all know your name by the end of it. Most bands would crumble, or stumble,
or run away. But this is Big Brother and the Holding Company, a band with a
short but already turbulent history that's all been leading them to this point
in time. After way too many false-starts for one review they finally know where
they're going and have a captive audience all ready to help them get there.
Ladies and gents, we give you four gentlemen and one great, great broad - Janis
Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company...
Bassist Peter Albin and guitarist Sam Andrew had
formed the group in 1965, slowly adding members throughout the next year or so
(second guitarist James Gurley next, then drummer David Getz), gradually
growing by word of mouth to the point where they became the 'House Band' at the
Avalon Ballroom (the same venue where the band will be taped during a riotous
night in 1968 for an album released way in the future, half a lifetime away, in
1998). The music had already clicked with Avalon patrons: the band had a
growing word-of-mouth reputation as the loudest, earthiest rock and roll group
in America at the time and on the basis of the tapes that have survived, I'm
not going to argue. Local papers in need of a newspaper quote on rock bands
were already calling Big Brother up - probably only when the Grateful Dead
weren't in, but even so Big Brother had done well in their first year, building
a reputation that someone simply had to give them a record contract at one time
or another. Only one thing was missing: a 'proper' full-time lead singer (Sam
Andrew with his gutsy, gutteral drawl had been doing most of the vocal work up
till that point). Their 'manager' (read 'entrepreneur' who'd noticed how well
the band had been doing at the Ballroom) Chet Helms had heard from a contact
with the 'hip' but already fading group '13th Floor Elevators' about a Texas
chick who'd escaped her strict Texan upbringing to run away to San Francisco
and decided no harm would come of pairing her up with the band and seeing if
any 'magic' happened.
Janis Joplin hadn't been having an easy time of it.
Ridiculed by her peers for 'singing like a boy' and - shock horror - daring to do stuff like
'walk around college campus barefoot' which good old fashioned girls didn't do,
she inevitably ended up running away from her old stuffy life into the arms of
the San Francisco night scene. What most fans don't realise, though, was that
to all intents and purposes this first time away from home 'failed': still
trying to be a folk singer in bands who thought her too powerful, Janis ended
up broke and with an amphetamine tablet. Despite knowing how much she hated her
home, Janis' friends did a very brave and courageous thing: they got in contact
with Mr and Mrs Joplin, held a party to raise the bus fare and sent her home.
Janis got the inevitable ticking off and vowed to give up all her dreams -
enrolling on a nice course at a nice university and behaving like another
society beauty of the day (yes of course Janis was beautiful - just look at
those eyes for goodness sake!) Bravely,
Janis fought it out for a few months, perhaps a year - long enough to stop her
parents being quite so concerned anyway. But Janis had continued to play the
guitar at Lamar University (near to her Port Arthur home in Beaumont) and,
encouraged by the reception of her fellow students decided to have one last
chance at fulfilling her dreams.
At first, neither band nor singer thought they'd
found the perfect match - this was a union out of necessity, not out of love.
Janis already had a powerful voice but she'd been using it mostly on folksongs
up until that time (check out the toughest version of 'Silver Threads and
Golden Needles' you'll ever hear on Janis' posthumous 'Typewriter Tapes' and
the 'Janis' box set of 1993). Big Brother, unused to having a 'proper' vocalist
onstage who wasn't half-concentrating on playing the guitar at the same time
didn't know what to do (Sam Andrew admits apologetically today that they
probably played too 'loudly' - although by forcing Janis to 'sing up' they may
actually have helped her develop her distinctive style). Strange as it seems to
think of it now, but Janis was still a 'conventional' musician suddenly thrust
in the middle of what must have seemed to her like a 'madhouse' (That's the
impression you get from reading her letters home anyway, emotionally compiled
by her sister Laura into the very moving 'Love, Janis' part autobiography/part
letter fest, long after her death) and it took her a good year to 'connect'
with the band and become one of them. In truth she was only half there when Big
Brother and the Holding Company won their recording contract to make this album
- one that came just when they needed it in financial terms, in December 1966,
when the band had virtually no money (the Ballroom didn't pay enough for five
mouths to feed). Unfortunately for posterity, that contract came just a
fraction too early, when the band were still getting used to one another and
working out what they had to offer that other bands simply didn't possess.
Having been sat on for some eight months (at a time
when music was changing almost by the hour this seems a suicidal move), that
debut album 'Big Brother and the Holding Company' couldn't have been released
at a better time: the group had been the talking point of everyone who'd been
at the Monterey Pop Festival that June and at the time there was no other
product to buy: not even a single. Add in the fact that August 1967 was the
perfect month for something 'new' and 'big' to happen (in AAA terms this album
feats neatly in between The Beatles' June release 'Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts
Club band' and Pink Floyd's legendary September debut 'Piper At The Gates Of
Dawn') and you have what looks on paper like a guaranteed gold record. So why
is this album easily the hardest of Janis' sadly short discography of four
'proper' albums to find, even today? And why have so very few of these album
tracks been recycled on the many Janis Joplin compilations released to date
(even the three-hour 3 CD 1993 box set 'Janis' contains only four of them - and not the four I'd have chosen! - despite having only four 'proper' albums to choose from)?
Well, the problem is, this first 'proper' album by
either Janis Joplin or Big Brother and the Holding Company is probably not what
you're expecting now - and certainly the fans who'd been raving about nothing
else for two whole months since Monterey expected then. At Monterey Janis had
owned the stage, singing with a confidence and skill that allowed her to
destroy most of the famous names at the event and already meant she'd sang on
what many considered the 'definitive' versions of blues songs written decades
before she was born. By comparison this record is timid, seemingly afraid of
allowing any glimpses of the 'new' sound of San Franciscan acid rock out of its
cage and into the wide world and desperate to conform with what the world
already knew (not a word one will ever associate with Janis Joplin again!). In
other words, this sounds like a record from 1965, at most early 1966, when the
new and the bold and dangerous were still being glimpsed at instead of placed
upfront and proud - another 'Jefferson Airplane Takes Off' rather than a
'Surrealistic Pillow' (to be fair this album and companion on-album single 'Coo
Coo/The Last Time' - was recorded in three rushed days not in the summer of
love but in the cold December of 1966; although that said it's worth pointing
out that the very same week across the pond The Beatles were busy on
'Strawberry Fields Forever' and 'Penny Lane'). As a result, however good many
of the songs are, this debut ultimately winds up being a minor (though by no
means terrible) release from a band everyone were expecting to be the next best
thing and that fact has left a slightly puzzled and confused air to reign over
this record ever since.
To be fair, even the band were surprised at how the
album turned out. It's tempting to blame this record on producer Bob Shad and
the engineers (who guitarist Sam Andrew, in his informative sleeve-notes,
remembered had no clue how to record rock groups after years working with jazz
musicians and who kept ordering the band to 'turn their amplifiers' down).
They, surely, must have known that to treat Big Brother the way of every band
was going to rob them of their 'natural' gifts that had already kept audiences
enthralled by December 1966. Yet Shad
had signed the band while out looking for exactly their sort of music in San
Francisco (he was clearly enthusiastic about the band, too, rather than simply
after a money-spinner: he actually bothered to go back a second time when their
first manager Chet Helms turned him down without asking his clients). The band
too - while novices - weren't entering into the kind of uncertain, unknown
world that had awaited the Airplane while making their debut earlier in the
year (and while not the strongest seller either, it did better than either band
or record label had hoped).
What seems to have happened is a bit of a
misunderstanding, mixed with nerves. Big Brother's biggest selling point -
apart from the sheer power of Janis' vocals - was their wonderful ramshackle
nature, that exhilarating feeling that one of their songs could go belly up any
moment because the band were living on the edge and never daring to take it
safe. With so much resting on a first record they deliberately toned that
element of their sound down and even went to the unheard of lengths of
rehearsing over and over before the recording dates. The band also threw out
any of their material with a hint of controversy away in favour of their
simpler, more obvious 'pop' songs - even returning to an abandoned 'children's
record' concept that Peter and Sam had talked about years before the group had
come together (sadly 'Caterpillar' is the only song to have survived from it!)
Frustratingly, the band already had 'Ball and Chain' and a killer arrangement
of 'The Hall Of The Mountain King' in their setlist, as the 1966 live compilation
'The Lost Tapes' (released in 2008) demonstrates: this album would have been so
much better with just a hint of that power and magic and undoubtedly that was
what Bob Shad was after when he signed the band, but as it is Janis sounds
muted and Big Brother simply sound like any other competent American band of
the era, rather than one of its best.
Had Janis recorded this album later in her career,
she's had have undoubtedly done it better. While a good 90% of music fans
simply consider her a powerful shrieker (albeit often a good one), what I think
makes Janis' work special is the nuances in her vocals - it's when she chooses
to shriek at full power that counts and her control of dynamics (especially on
next album 'Cheap Thrills') is one of the best in the business. This album
contains songs that, by and large, call less for her normal power and more for
her control and should by rights be marvellous - but the Janis Joplin of 1966
is a very different creature to the one the world saw post-Monterey. Shyer than
most people expected, almost painfully aware of what others thought of her
(despite a determination not to be restricted by others), she's still trying
out her persona here and for now it sounds like a coat she's wearing, no
different to the folk singing she did in her early days (Janis would have been
a great folk singer too in time). If you ever wanted to hear what a nervous
Janis Joplin sounded like, simply play this record (especially the three songs
recorded the first day, December 12th 1966: 'Caterpillar' Easy Rider' and 'All
Is Loneliness') - Big Brother leave a lot of space to fill, even more than on
'Cheap Thrills', but hard as she often tries Janis isn't up to filling it yet
because she isn't living' the songs. That said, you can already hear Janis
starting to realise that she's actually good at this and that the evidence has
transferred itself to tape - despite what grimaces the engineers might have
giving the band - and her vocals are much more confident by the last session on
December 14th. Had the band had time to go back in and re-record this album the
following week it may have been very different.
Now that the dust has settled, though, with the
album 47 years old at the time of writing, it's easy to appreciate how
'different' 'Big Brother and the Holding Company' is, even for an artists who
never recorded the same sort of album twice. Looked at through the eyes of a
new band nobody outside San Francisco had heard about yet (rather than one that
had been talked about endlessly for two months - what a shame Columbia didn't
release this album earlier in the year, say Spring 1967, a climate it would
have suited better) there's much to enjoy. No other band had quite the mixture
of styles that Big Brother did: instead of one lead guitar Big Brother had two
and when both Sam Andrew and James Gurley mesh (as on 'Intruder' and 'Light Is
Faster Than Sound') they already sound like no other band of their era (when
lead and rhythm guitar was the norm). Peter Albin may have scared the engineers
by pushing every recording into the red, but even diluted he gets a fatter
sound than anyone except perhaps the Airplane's Jack Casady had managed at the
time. Perhaps worried about playing anything too intricate and as nervous as
the rest of the band, Dave Getz keeps his drumming simpler (in comparison to
'Cheap Thrills' anyway) which gives this album a tougher, garage rock sound
even when the two guitarists are heading off somewhere else entirely. Janis,
meanwhile, has learnt to mix folk with the blues, approaching these songs quite
differently to how most other singers would approach them even back then: making
what's largely in compositional terms a straightforward 'op' album into
something tougher, even if her vocals are still at half-power for now. That
said, not everything here is pop by any means and, impressively still for a
debut at the time, the band write seven of the ten songs, none of them anything
like each other. Albin's two compositions alone range from the raucous range of
psychedelia to pure childhood novelty: at the time only Country Joe and the
Fish had found a similar link between glorious exploration and childhood
silliness, 'Down On Me' is heavy rock before there properly was such a term and
'Call On Me' is Motown (had you not known what either Janis or Diana Ross
sounded like back in 1967 or what the colour of their skin was - which you probably
didn't if you lived outside America - would you have guessed which one had
which voice?) Ultimately, though, Sam Andrew is right in his sleeve-notes when
he records that the band sound 'sweet and innocent' on this LP, even though
they weren't on stage even back then.
There's no getting away from it, though: interesting
as this record may be, both in the face of what both Janis and Big Brother go
on to do and in terms of how few other records like this one there were around
in August 1967, there's very little that's memorable. The guitarists have been
told to turn their guitars down just that little bit too much, the mix
separates the band just a little too much and somehow nothing quite catches
fire. Well, almost nothing: this studio version of traditional song 'Down On
Me' doesn't compare to the gloriously ragged stop-start epics the song will
become, but it's clearly the right way to go. Janis sounds comfortable here in
a way that she doesn't singing 'I'm a caterpillar crawling for your love' or the
sheer music hall of 'Bye Bye Baby' and is 'living' a song that clearly means a
lot to her (the true writing credit is 'traditional', nobody quite knowing who
the author of this 1920s blues song is, but Janis 'borrowed' the tune and
re-wrote most of the words anyway). Although I'd take the Monterey performance
of the song anyday (it's the only song from this album the band performed that
night, despite the fact that it's the album they were in effect 'plugging',
speaks volumes about what the band thought about the record afterwards) it's by
far the best thing on the record, light years ahead of the rest. 'Light Is
Faster Than Sound' is the second best, Peter Albin's song trying to teach the
audience at home lyrically about psychedelia even though the music has clearly
been watered down for the listeners at home to the point where it almost sounds
conventional; still, listeners who hadn't already been 'turned on' before this
album would no doubt have felt a shiver of something new and exciting over the
horizon. Janis' 'Woman Is Losers' is quite a daring song for the age too, a
feminist anthem with a funky beat that even gets a risque sex reference in
there somewhere ('men always seem to wind up on top!', sung with a knowing
wink), even if the band haven't quite got the swing they need to perfect it
just yet. Frankly the rest of the album is nowhere close: the songs are either
mis-cast ('Bye Bye Baby'), silly ('Caterpillar'), foot-draggingly slow ('Call
On Me') or simply don't quite hit the groove (the rest). Note too that not one
song breaks the three minute barrier, at a time when the Dead had already
released the ten minute 'Viola Lee Blues' on their debut record. Perhaps the
main problem is that this record isn't 'exciting', despite what both the
typically pompous sleeve-notes on the back cover (even if they got this album's
unexpected eclecticism' spot on) and any concerts of the time would have
promised and nor does it put 'hard, earthy, emotional music' at the 'forefront'
of the music business as promised either
- instead the only real emotion heard here is nerves.
Ah well, you can easily understand why - three
hurried days recording for a band who've never been inside a studio before and
are miles away from home in a scary looking Los Angeles is not the best way to
make your first record. Nor is getting some unsympathetic engineers without
experience of rock and roll in to work and tut-tut whenever they can (at least
the Airplane has Jerry Garcia when making their second record). Given the
circumstances, it's amazing that as much of what will become 'the' Big Brother
sound made it onto tape at all. Perhaps the best thing you can say about this
record is that Big Brother learnt from it
- and learnt fast. Second album 'Cheap Thrills' sounds like it was made
by a different band entirely, one who know exactly where they're going and have
so much to say that they don't care what it takes to say it: fiery solos,
lengthy playing times, old blue songs, live-studio hybrids: whatever it takes
to get 'that' sound on record intact. 'Big Brother and the Holding Company' may
not be a great record in its own right, but it's an often fascinating one for
hearing where that sound came from - and all the other directions the band
might have gone in. Would we still have been talking about this record without
Monterey and all the stories that came after it? probably not - but equally,
without this album and the lessons learnt from it we might never have had that
legendary Monterey set. Buy this one if you're a curious fan who wants to know
where their favourite singer started (give or take some folk recordings
published after Janis' death anyway) - but I would heartily recommend the many
'Big Brother' live recordings that came out posthumously in the 1990s and 2000s
over this record, which is best treated as a 'sampler' record for the delights
to come. If you were there at the time, of course, and bought this album in the
wake of that Monterey performance then, well, it's up to you whether it's worth
getting out of the loft or buying on CD: by trying to sound like what's come
before instead of what's to be, it hasn't aged as well as any of Janis' - or
Big Brother's - records from the rest of the decade. As a document of the band
'before' they were famous (even if most people bought it 'after') 'Big Brother
and the Holding Company' is a fascinating document of how the band must have
sounded when no one outside the Avalon Ballroom knew their name (if you
compensate by turning the bass up anyway!) Please note, by the way, that we
won't be reviewing contemporary single 'Coo Coo'/The Last Time' as part of this
review - technically speaking it never has been part of the album even if
pretty much all of the CD -reissues of this album have included it. Fear not,
though: sometime in the future, when we've covered all the actual AAA albums,
we're planning a run-down of all the 'non-album AAA songs' including these two
- and if you desperately want to know what we think then you only have to ask
in the 'comments' box below!
'Bye Bye
Baby' must be the most untypical 'debut' song ever: imagine having never heard
of Janis Joplin and being asked to judge her style based on this one song: part
music-hall, part pop, with arguably the only narrator in the Joplin canon whose
a 'winner' rather than 'loser' in life. The sound of Big Brother in the
background is highly untypical too - they're playing as straight as they can
(well, by their standards anyway), with a central 'cute' guitar riff that so
isn't them and the power down to minimum. So why did they record such an
oddball song? Chances are Janis was doing an old friend a favour. Composer
Powell St John had been a friend of Janis' since long before she'd worked with
Big Brother: a 'campus radical' he was quite a name back in Janis' home town of
Austin Texas and was probably one of the few 'kindred spirits' Joplin met there
she identified with (they were together, briefly, in the trio 'Waller Creek
Boys' - the joke being that one of them was a 'girl' - before Powell left to write
songs for the '13th Floor Elevators'). Could it be that this song - which
cackling bids an old way of life goodbye - was her way of saying 'goodbye' not
to a person but to her detested home town, with its marriage-with-kids
go-to-college-and-hold-down-a-good-job motto? Sam Andrew records in his sleeve-notes
for the CD re-issue of the album that this song was 'difficult to record'
because it 'seemed so unlike us'. Usually we'd be thrilled that an AAA band is
trying something different to their normal sound and placed later on any later
Joplin LP this song might have been up to the grade - but why give the coveted
opening spot of a debut album to such an uncharacteristic song? (just compare
it to what some of our other bands did: in comparison 'I Saw Her Standing
There' is prime early Beatles - and has there ever been a more Oasisy-moment
than 'Rock and Roll Star'?) The song isn't bad, just mis-cast (sadly the 13th
Floor Eleevators never did do this one, but it's right up their street) and
putting it in pride of place at the start of the album seems perverse somehow. The
CD re-issue of this album includes an alternate take of the song that's much
better, if only for having Janis sing solo all the way through instead of being
partly double-tracked!
'Easy Rider' is slightly better. Guitarist James
Gurley has come up with the kind of thing most record companies would jump at:
a novelty song that manages to combine current 'hip' references with a silly,
daft tune that clearly isn't going to subvert minds (there's even the same sort
of 'stomping beat' the early Monkees will make their own). Of course nowadays
when anybody mentions 'Easy Rider' they think of that film and those
motorbikes, but 'Easy Rider' has none of the god time bonhomie of film or
soundtrack. Instead it's a puzzle of a song that seems to consist of in-jokes:
again the kind of thing that's fun with
established bands but not as the second song on a debut album. The 'easy rider'
of the title might be a motorbike rider for all we know - but we never find out
why he's asked 'not to deny my name' by the narrator, what his relationship is
to the girl in the second verse who 'knows how to shake that thing' is (typically
for this schizophrenic album, the band will be offering the rather closer idea
of gender roles in the community with 'Women Is Losers' just four songs later) and
- most confusingly - why his horse 'lives in a tree, watching Huckleberry Hound
on his TV' (perhaps he just gets a better reception up there? Personally if I
had to compare Big Brother to a band it would be the anarchic gang mentality of
'Top Cat', not the comparatively law-abiding 'Clementine' singing canine
sheriff, but then that's horses for you - no accounting for taste). As you can
probably tell, this is a very odd song, even for 1967 and the band sound
distinctly uncomfortable, especially on the backing vocals (in actual fact this
is a strong candidate for Janis' first professional recording - but she doesn't get much to do and sounds
like she'd much rather be anywhere else, to be honest). Gurley copes well with
his own oddball lyrics (especially his sudden piercing shriek on the fade-out),
but he's not a natural enough singer to pull it off successfully - again the
later Big Brother would have pulled this off no problem but they don't have the
confidence yet. The one part where Big Brother do sound quite at home is during
the instrumental break, led by Peter Albin's bass suddenly growing in power and
spirit with every run through the song's riff which isn't all that far removed
from the terrific thrilling 'duel' in the middle of the next album's opener
'Combination Of The Two'. Sadly, though the song got in the way - 'oh no!'
'Intruder' is Janis' first published song and while
not her best by a long way it gets closer to what's to come than most songs on
this album. With a typical fiery uptempo blues riff beneath her, Janis soars
for the first time on a very Rolling Stones-like song that tries to put down a
lover for not being good enough. Janis doesn't quite have Mick Jagger's
likeable leer yet and if any double-tracking should be banned for any singer
it's her (getting all that passion once is hard - twice in sync is
impossible!), but she's clearly worked hard on developing this blues persona
and it's beginning to pay off. This song 'feels' like a truthful song too, even
though it's not all that much more developed than the others: instead of a simple
verse-chorus structure, Janis simply cuts into her thoughts with the piercing
chorus 'what are you trying to prove?' every time she feels like it, giving the
song an added tension and drive it wouldn't have if the chorus simply arrived
on time after every verse, like a train. In which case, who is the person who
tried to 'walk in my life' and yet never got close, Janis putting him down with
the line 'I never even knew your name'? Is it the mysterious man (who we think
is named 'Peter') who became engaged to her during her brief spell back home as
a student in Port Arthur who was apparently so smitten with her singing he
drove all the way to her house to ask her parents for their daughter's hand in
marriage? (Definitely not the way to courting Janis Joplin!) Like 'Bye Bye
Baby', Janis seems to be having fun laughing at her old way of life now that
she's older and more confident in herself and the near-closing lines in this song
are ominous: 'I look like I'm suffering, but now I'm doing fine' - Janis might
be eating less and taking drugs more, giving her body a pallid, aged look that
worried her family on their rare visits to see her (given what sister Laura Joplin
writes in her book anyway), but mentally she's a lot stronger than she ever was
at home: she has a new 'family', she has a vocation, she knows what to do now
and how to make life work. Ultimately Janis is too nice a writer to fully give her
passionate partner the kiss off, telling him that they've simply gone down two
very different paths: 'I'll take care of
mine, you take care of yours' is how the song ends, Janis knowing too well
already that the pain of love is painful enough without being mean, whatever
roar she sings the song's opening lines with. Again, it's unusual to hear one
of Janis' characters being the 'kiss-ee' rather than the 'kiss-off', with
'Intruder' both closer and further away from her trademark sound than anything
else on this album. The power is there - but not the way it's used yet. An
interesting song.
'Light Is Faster Than Sound' is one of the album's
success stories. A cyclical Peter Albin that's the closest thing to psychedelia
Janis ever recorded, it's a shame this song didn't last longer in Big Brother's
set-list because it sounds like it would have been a powerhouse live. Here,
played for a bunch of disapproving strangers, it doesn't quite take off: the
scatterbrained Sam Andrew guitar solo is still pretty revolutionary for the day
but doesn't have the same angry snarl as the 'Cheap Thrills' songs and the band
are tentative at going all out, as if aware that they have to get this song
down compact rather than lengthy. Peter's lead vocal is terrific though,
everything that was frightening to the parental generation in 1967: it's gruff,
it's angry, it's sung in small bursts of staccato emotion and you can't tell
what the words are! Albin, a keen photographer, may have been inspired to write
this song about the very parental-approving subject of science (light is genuinely
faster than sound, you see, unless the Spice Girls come on the radio when you
can't turn the thing off quickly enough!) Then again, he may simply have been
writing about drugs: listen out for the way the song comes across not in linear
time but relating to its own laws of physics: it seems to end, fades back in
again, repeats, then goes off somewhere completely new, alternating beauty and
terror along the way. In short, this is a drug trip - albeit one taken in a
public place, with lots of disapproving eyes watching you so you can't quite go
all the way. Janis, sadly, doesn't get much to do except mouth
'so-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-und' in the background, but of all the performances on the
album this is one of only two where Big Brother sound like a proper bona fide
'band' (sample story: at least one take of this song had to be discarded
because the band started laughing at the faces Albin was pulling during the
noisy 'bridge' section: the engineers were doubtless disgusted, but at least the band only had two
other songs to record that day, the last of the sessions).
'Call On Me' is Sam Andrew's first published song
and again, like much of the album, it sounds like it belongs on an entirely
different album. A drippy 1950s-style ballad that's as conventional as they
come, it would have sounded fine in another band's hands (Otis Redding would
have cut a nice version of this song, actually) but Big Brother don't quite
know how to handle it and spend most of the song audibly concentrating on
keeping the power down. Sample lyric: I need you darling like fish need the sea
- don't take your sweet love away from me'. Yawn. The original intention - and
the first arrangement of the song live - had been for Sam and Janis to
alternate lines, which would at least have spruced things up a bit. As it is
Janis tries hard to keep on the straight and narrow on a song that's simply too
'soft' and slow for her. Not one of her better performances, you get the sense
that this narrator hasn't even noticed the guy trying to chat her up and
certainly isn't likely to call him up (she's probably 'lost' his number down
the back of the sofa by the end of the song). To be fair I can understand why
this song is here: both producer and engineers were no doubting harassing the
band for something 'normal' other people might want to cover and like a lot of
early songs by later brilliant writers 'Call On Me' sounds like a talented
writer struggling to write down to a level he knows other people will
understand. Even, so, this song is a strong candidate for the worst song on a
Janis Joplin record. Thankfully, better is yet to come. The CD includes an
alternate take of the same song that's even rougher and more tentative than the
first, although at least you get to hear Janis singing solo instead of being
swamped by Sam's gruffer voice.
'Women Is Losers' is much better, Big Brother having
latched on to the fact that what they probably do best is updating old blues songs
for a contemporary up-tempo sound. Janis sounds like Janis for the first real
time in her career and punctuates her own song with some very soul-style whoops
and yells. Big Brother, too, have worked out that playing in tandem gives them
a 'bigger' attack - getting both guitarists, bass and drums to hammer home the
same riff while Janis shrieks overhead is a template they're going to be using
often in the rest of their short time together. Sam's short, shrieking guitar
solo, too, is a sign of things to come, getting dangerously deranged just right
at the very end before 'catching' the song and returning back to base (a very
clever and very typical trick!) I'm impressed, too, that the powers that be let
Big Brother record such a risque song: understandably Janis wasn't allowed to
use her preferred title 'Whores Are Funky' but there aren't many other punches
she doesn't pull back in an age when feminism was at-best a work in progress:
'They wear a nice shiny armour - until there's a dragon to slay' and 'if they
don't desert you, they'll just leave you'. Janis slips in a few, err, winks to
her audience too, as she complains about a man always 'being on top' and that a
woman ought to have more control because she can get them 'begging to pay' for
their services (Janis learnt the song, whose melody is taken from an old blues
song in her Port Arthur days but added the lyrics over time - you doubt she got
the lines about prostitution from her days back home, somehow!) Again, it's a
shame that this song didn't last longer in Big Brother's set-lists: it has a
real stomp and menace to it even without Janis soaring over the top of it and
Sam Andrew's sleeve-notes add that the band had built up 'three different
arrangements' for the song, suggesting they spent a lot of time on it. Another
album highlight which, unlike most of the album, points to the future not the
past.
'Blindman' is a group composition that has a
cracking haunting Byrds-like tune (and jangly Roger McGuinn style guitar) and
some lyrics that try hard but don't quite deliver. To the best of my knowledge
'Blindman' is the only 'protest song Big Brother ever wrote and you can kind of
tell why: the single line 'Blindman stood on the way and cried 'show me the way
to go home!' is repeated (with a few variations) throughout the rest of the
song and its' not exactly poetry is it? Still, Big Brother put in another
strong performance here and already have
their future impressive use of dynamics down pat: this song sounds all the
stronger for the verses trailing off into a gentle guitar flurry and sudden
silence before being whacked awake again by a particularly on-form Dave Getz. Apparently
this was another 'traditional' song, a spiritual even, that the band re-dressed
and offered a new home to - arguably more people know it from Big Brother
nowadays than the original! It's the sort of thing that might have appeared on
the first Jefferson Airplane album: it's very much folk played by an electric
band with a growing awareness of psychedelia, rather than the 'heavy'
blues-rock the band will be known for later.
'Down On Me' is the other masterpiece here. The one
song from the album that did last in the band's setlist (they'd already given
up playing everything else by the time it came out!) it's another fumbling
performance of a style that Big Brother will soon be doing in their sleep. A
stop-start Janis Joplin song full of righteous indignation at people sitting in
ivory towers looking down at everyone around them, it's clearly the most
'right' song here, even if the band arguably need another take of the song to
truly master. In truth, it's another 'old' song that got re-written, a gospel
song from the 1920s that Janis put slightly different words to and updated on
behalf of the 'hippie' generation. The Big Brother equivalent of the Airplane's
'3/5ths of a Mile in Ten Seconds' ('Do away with people laughing at my hair!'),
what's impressive about this song is that despite Janis' power at heart this is
still a love song - she urges us to 'believe in your brother, have faith in
man' and when you see a hand held out towards you to 'give it some love - one
day it might be you!' There's a second theme creeping in that will soon become
Janis' central dialogue with her audience too: 'Love in this world - so hard to
find' she sighs, lashing out at the 'I've got mine' mentality she sees all
around her, when what she really wants is for everyone to be in love with the
partners they need and deserve. That's not what the audience takes away from the
song, though: it's the angry, snarling defensive response to the idea that the
whole world is 'down on me' simply for being different. An impressive song for
any band, the fact that Big Brother managed to get this one down on tape
despite the uncomfortable circumstances is one of their greatest success
stories and even if the performance is a bit tentative and rough compared to
what's to come (there are no 'Big Brother' answering vocals as per most live
recordings of it, for example) Janis' charisma still comes over strong.
'Caterpillar' is the joker on the album, a silly
song that knows it's being silly. The sort of thing that would have made for a
fun B-side sounds rather out-of-place here, even if the band attack it with more
vigour than almost anything else on the album. Writer Peter Albin, who very
much seems to be the lead Big Brother composer on this album, came out of an
early 'meeting' with Sam Andrew when the pair proposed going globe-trotting as
a sort of children's troupe singing novelty songs with a guitar. On this
evidence they'd have done quite well, having a good feel for the genre (the
narrator's metaphors for his love include a caterpillar, butterfly, pterodactyl,
abominable snowman and a chimpanzee, the song getting stranger with each verse!)
Albin's best lead vocal on the album suggests that the humour of this song is
where his heart lies and the rest of the band really get 'into' this song too:
Janis is the perfect back-up vocalist, passionately roaring through the song
but not in such a way it distracts from the lead, the guitars turn in a real Beach Boys-style surfer stomp and Getz excels
on the song's twisty turns and sudden stops. It's a shame actually the band
didn't more songs like 'Caterpillar' - although at the same time this song is
so far removed from what fans must have been expecting from this album
post-Monterey you can almost hear the confusion etched into the record's
grooves at this point.
The album the ends with its most downbeat moment.
Loneliness - and ways to fight it - is a key theme for the later Janis Joplin,
but here Louis Thomas Hardin's 'round' of a song is sung by the whole band, to
which they all sound detached and rather resigned. The composer of this song is
what you might call a 'colourful figure' - his Wikipedia page has a picture of
him dressed up as Norse God Odin, in a cloak and Viking helmet- who would have
been better known to the band as 'Moondog', a blind musician who lived on the
streets of New York (out of choice) for 20 odd years (my sources tell me he was
a regular busker on the corner of 53rd Street and 6th Avenue Manhattan). A trained classical composer who specialised
in 'street' poems (ie songs that used sound effects of passing cars, sirens,
etc), 'Loneliness' is one of his few straightforward compositions. To my ears,
it's the sort of song that was composed late at night when New York was still
and empty, rather than his usual style when the city was 'buzzing' and 'full',
with a night of sheer nothingness ahead. The central line of 'loneliness is for
me' gets taken up by the band one by one, as if echoing off the empty streets
and pavements while Sam turns in an angry, repetitive guitar lick that burbles
underneath for most for the song, imitating the passive, uncaring crowds. The
result is unsettling and more than a little eerie, especially the fade-out
where the instruments suddenly fade-away without warning, leaving the vocals to
continue on for a split-second before they too disappear abruptly, leaving the
listener dangling. The result is a simple song that conjures up a lot of
images, but again it's a shame that Big Brother didn't maintain this song in
their set-lists or re-record it because a version of this song with their later
power and confidence would sound better yet. This recording still sounds tentative
and unsure somehow, perhaps because it was one of three songs they recorded on
their first ever day inside a recording studio.
'Big Brother and The Holding Company', then, isn't a
bad debut. Given how early on in the band's lifespan it came and how
nerve-inducing the circumstances of making it were it's amazing as much of the
'Big Brother' sound made it to tape as it did. By their standards the band are
on nervy auto-pilot, afraid to go all out and record something deemed
'unsuitable', but at the same time little nuggets of their future power and
glory shine through: the words of 'Women Is Losers', the heavy stomp of 'Down
On Me', the surreal quality of 'All Is Loneliness', the style of 'Light Is
Faster Than Sound', the best of Janis' powerful vocals. The only way you could
really be disappointed with this LP is if you came to it after seeing or
hearing Big Brother at their legendary best; unfortunately, that's how everyone
except a few small Avalon Ballroom attendees came across the band after that powerhouse
Monterey performance when Big Brother had re-written not only their own future
but how the San Francisco music scene was seen. By then Big Brother and
especially Janis were stars: here they're a group only a few people believe in
and even the band members aren't truly certain yet where they're going, with
Janis very much just 'one of' the stars of the band, taking lead vocal on only
four of the ten songs here (the 'featuring Janis Joplin' legend stamped on the
front cover must surely have come about only after Monterey when the singer,
more than the band, became a household name). Had this album come out months
earlier, with 'Cheap Thrills' hot on its heels rather than a year ahead (the
band already had half the album's songs in their setlist by Monterey and period
performances), 'Big Brother' would surely have been better loved: an
interesting portrait of a band who are clearly going places and yet in sonic
terms have barely left their front door.
A NOW
COMPLETE LIST OF JEFFERSON ARTICLES TO READ AT ALAN’S ALBUM ARCHIVES:
'Big Brother And The Holding Company' (1967) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/big-brother-and-holding-company-1967.html
'Cheap Thrills' (1968) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-24-big-brother-and-holding.html
'I Got Dem Ol' Kozmik Blues Again Mama!' (1969) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/janis-joplin-i-got-dem-ol-kozmik-blues.html
'Pearl' (1970) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/news-views-and-music-issue-102-janis.html
'Big Brother And The Holding Company' (1967) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/big-brother-and-holding-company-1967.html
'Cheap Thrills' (1968) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-24-big-brother-and-holding.html
'I Got Dem Ol' Kozmik Blues Again Mama!' (1969) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/janis-joplin-i-got-dem-ol-kozmik-blues.html
'Pearl' (1970) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/news-views-and-music-issue-102-janis.html
Non-Album Songs 1963-1970 http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/janis-joplin-non-album-songs-1962-1970.html
Surviving TV Clips 1967-1970 http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/janis-joplin-surviving-tv-clips-1967.html
Live/Compilation/Outtakes Sets 1965-1970 http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/janis-joplin-livecompilationouttakes.html
Essay: Little Pearl Blue – Who Was The Real Janis? https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/janis-joplin-essay-little-pearl-blue.html
Essay: Little Pearl Blue – Who Was The Real Janis? https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/janis-joplin-essay-little-pearl-blue.html
