Big Brother & The Holding Company – Big Brother & The Holding Company

Even to the enthusiast, the first Big Brother & The Holding Co. LP is often treated as an afterthought, though there are several things of relevant interest here. The first is the marvelous, freaky acid journey "All Is Loneliness," which alone makes this record worth hearing, more than anything else on the label. Powell St. John (later to work with the 13th Floor Elevators and Mother Earth) also wrote the hit "Bye, Bye Baby," which provides an interesting connection. Janis Joplin's voice channels that highly-sought-after blues howl, which would also later be captured by e.g. Robert Plant -- and when it's used right, it _really_ works.

This album was originally released as a short-duration 10-track venture on Mainstream records circa August 1967 in both mono and stereo. These original pressings tend to be quite noisy. After "Bye, Bye Baby" became a hit, Columbia acquired the rights for distribution and reissued the album starting in the '70s with 12 tracks, adding a non-LP single at the end of each side. The album has also been reissued several times on CD, with a remix appearing in 1999 as done by Vic Anesini. The remix is quite good and emulates the original mix so well that it apparently was not even recognized as a remix for more than 20 years; for the audiophile scrutineers, that may be the "best" version. For archivists, the 2016 high-res remaster has good fidelity with lots of headroom, and seems to be closer the original Mainstream vinyl if the left channel is amplified by about 3db.

I like this album a lot, it's their most psychedelic album. Very underrated in my mind.

There were quite a few psych bands on Mainstream, but I don't think any of them recorded more than one album for the label. Anyway, Big Brother & the Holding Company was a perfect band for Janis and they only got better on their fantastic second album, Cheap Thrills, released of course on their new label, Columbia. They could have made other landmark psych/blues rock records like this with Janis, but unfortunately she let worthless bigwigs in the record business convince her that she needed a more "precise" band, a professional studio band. Bad decision. Though she did remain friends with Sam Andrew, the rawness and the passion in the music largely disappeared on her solo albums. Dumping Big Brother has got to be the worst thing she ever did short of overdosing. She probably knew she made a bad move and was torn between a solo deal worth more money, and her original band. I don't think there would have been a better reason than that for her to turn to heroin the way she did.

Worth a listen for fans of Joplin or the psychedelic San Francisco sounds of acts like the Grateful Dead, Country Joe and The Fish or Jefferson Airplane but unfortunately at this point Big Brother aren't utilising Joplin as much as they could have, and there's some weak material here that hasn't aged well. The CD re-release contains some interesting bonus tracks, but this is maybe the least essential of her work.