Cheap Thrills (Big Brother and the Holding Company album)

Cheap Thrills
Studio album by Big Brother and the Holding Company
Released August 12, 1968
Recorded March 2 – May 20, 1968
Genre Blues rock, acid rock
Length 37:11
Label Columbia
Producer John Simon
Big Brother and the Holding Company chronology
Big Brother & the Holding Company
(1967)		 Cheap Thrills
(1968)		 Be a Brother
(1970)
Janis Joplin chronology
Big Brother & the Holding Company
(1967)		 Cheap Thrills
(1968)		 I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama!
(1969)

Cheap Thrills is a studio album by American rock band Big Brother and the Holding Company. It was their last album with Janis Joplin as lead singer. For Cheap Thrills, the band and producer John Simon incorporated recordings of crowd noise to give the impression of a live album, which it was subsequently mistaken for by listeners. Only the final song, their cover of "Ball and Chain", had been recorded live at The Fillmore in San Francisco.[1]

Record history

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. Cheap Thrills was a great success, hitting #1 on the charts for eight nonconsecutive weeks in 1968. Columbia Records offered the band a new recording contract, but it took months to get through since they were still signed to Mainstream Records.[2] 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". "Ball and Chain" is the only song on the album recorded entirely live, and even though the cover credits assert that the live material was recorded at Bill Graham's Fillmore Auditorium, it was actually taken from a concert at the Winterland Ballroom in 1968. The album's overall raw sound effectively captures the band's energetic and lively concerts. The LP was released in both stereo and mono formats with the monophonic pressing now a rare collector's item. The album had been considered for quadraphonic format in the early 70's and eventually in 2002, was released as a Multichannel Sony SACD. The original quadraphonic mix remains unreleased.

Cover and title

The cover was drawn by underground cartoonist Robert Crumb after the band's original cover idea, a picture of the group naked in bed together, was dropped by the record company. Crumb had originally intended his art for the LP back cover, with a portrait of Janis Joplin to grace the front. But Joplin—an avid fan of underground comics, especially the work of Crumb—so loved the Cheap Thrills illustration that she demanded Columbia Records place it on the front cover. It is number nine on Rolling Stone's list of one hundred greatest album covers. Crumb later allowed prints of the cover, some of which he signed before sale.

In an interview for the AIGA, Columbia Records Art Director John Berg told design professor Paul Nini, "[Janis] Joplin commissioned it, and she delivered Cheap Thrills to me personally in the office. There were no changes with R. Crumb. He refused to be paid, saying, 'I don't want Columbia's filthy lucre.'"[3]

In at least one early edition, the words "HARRY KRISHNA! (D. GETZ)" are faintly visible in the word balloon of the turbaned man, apparently referring to a track that was dropped from the final sequence. The words "ART: R. CRUMB" replace them.

Initially, the album was to be called Sex, Dope and Cheap Thrills, but the title was not received well by Columbia Records.[4]

A variation of the title on the cover is used as the logo for the Cheap Thrills record label, owned by British DJ Hervé.

Release

Cheap Thrills 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.

Outtakes originally to have appeared on the album have since been released on Janis Joplin compilations such as Farewell Song (In which Big Brother's original instruments were replaced with studio musicians from 1983, angering the band) and the Janis compilation box set featuring all original studio songs and live recordings. The 1999 re-release of Cheap Thrills features the outtakes "Flower in the Sun" and "Roadblock" as well as live performances of "Magic of Love" and "Catch Me Daddy" as bonus material.

Critical reception

Professional ratings
Retrospective reviews
Review scores
SourceRating
AllMusic[2]
Encyclopedia of Popular Music[5]
Entertainment WeeklyA–[6]
Q[7]
The Rolling Stone Album Guide[8]

In a contemporary review, Rolling Stone magazine's John Hardin believed Cheap Thrills lives up to its title and is merely satisfactory: "What this record is not is 1) a well-produced, good rock and roll recording; 2) Janis Joplin at her highest and most intense moments; and 3) better than the Mainstream record issued last year."[9] Robert Christgau was more enthusiastic in his column for Esquire and called it Big Brother's "first physically respectable effort", as it "not only gets Janis's voice down, it also does justice to her always-underrated and ever-improving musicians."[10] He named it the third best album of 1968 in his ballot for Jazz & Pop magazine's critics poll.[11]

In a retrospective review, AllMusic's William Ruhlmann hailed Cheap Thrills as Joplin's "greatest moment" and said it sounds like "a musical time capsule [today] and remains a showcase for one of rock's most distinctive singers."[2] Marc Weingarten of Entertainment Weekly called it the peak of blues rock,[6] while Paul Evans wrote in The Rolling Stone Album Guide (2004) that the record epitomizes acid rock "in all its messy, pseudo-psychedelic glory".[8] In 2003, Cheap Thrills was ranked #338 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.[12] The magazine previously ranked it #50 on their Top 100 Albums of the Past 20 Years list in 1987.[13] It is also listed in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.[14] On March 22, 2013, the album was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress and thus it was preserved into the National Recording Registry for the 2012 register.[15]

Track listing

Side one
No. TitleWriter(s) Length
1. "Combination of the Two"  Sam Andrew 5:47
2. "I Need a Man to Love[16]"  Andrew, Janis Joplin 4:54
3. "Summertime"  George Gershwin, Ira Gershwin, DuBose Heyward 4:01
4. "Piece of My Heart"  Bert Berns, Jerry Ragovoy 4:15
Side two
No. TitleWriter(s) Length
1. "Turtle Blues"  Joplin 4:22
2. "Oh, Sweet Mary"  Peter Albin, Andrew, David Getz, James Gurley, Joplin 4:16
3. "Ball and Chain"  Big Mama Thornton 9:02

Personnel

Big Brother and the Holding Company

Additional personnel

Chart positions

Chart (1968) Peak
position
Billboard Top LPs 1

Sales certifications

Region Certification Sales/shipments
United States (RIAA)[17] 2× Platinum 2,000,000

^shipments figures based on certification alone

References

  1. ↑ Adelt, Ulrich (2010). Blues Music in the Sixties: A Story in Black and White. Rutgers University Press. p. 105. ISBN 0813547504. Retrieved April 26, 2015.
  2. 1 2 3 "Big Brother & the Holding Company: Cheap Thrills > Review" at AllMusic. Retrieved 10 September 2011.
  3. ↑ Nini, Paul (October 30, 2007). "Across the Graphic Universe: An Interview with John Berg".
  4. ↑ Hardin, John (September 15, 1972). "Big Brother and the Holding Company: Cheap Thrills". Rolling Stone (Wenner Media). ISSN 0035-791X. Retrieved 10 September 2011.
  5. ↑ Larkin, Colin (2011). "Big Brother and the Holding Company". The Encyclopedia of Popular Music (5th ed.). Omnibus Press. p. 2006. ISBN 0857125958. Retrieved April 26, 2015.
  6. 1 2 Weingarten, Marc (1999). Entertainment Weekly (New York) (October 1): 75. ...a blues-rock apotheosis, with Joplin's primal scream scraping up against Big Brother's willfully deranged, acid-stoked boogie...
  7. ↑ Q (London) (November): 156. 1999.
  8. 1 2 Evans, Paul (2004). "Big Brother and the Holding Company". In Brackett, Nathan; Hoard, Christian David. The New Rolling Stone Album Guide. Simon & Schuster. p. 70. ISBN 0743201698. Retrieved April 25, 2015.
  9. ↑ Hardin, John (1968). "Cheap Thrills Review". Rolling Stone (New York) (September 14): 17.
  10. ↑ Christgau, Robert (1968). "Columns". Esquire (November). Retrieved April 11, 2015.
  11. ↑ Christgau, Robert (1968). "Robert Christgau's 1968 Jazz & Pop Ballot". Jazz & Pop. Retrieved April 11, 2015.
  12. ↑ "500 Greatest Albums of All Time". Rolling Stone: 338 | Cheap Thrills – Big Brother and the Holding Company. Retrieved 10 September 2011.
  13. ↑ "Top 100 Albums of the Last 20 Years". Rolling Stone Lists. rocklistmusic.co.uk. Retrieved 10 September 2011.
  14. ↑ Dimery, Robert; Lydon, Michael (2006). Dimery, Robert, ed. 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. Universe. ISBN 978-0-7893-1371-3. Retrieved 10 September 2011.
  15. ↑ National Recording Preservation Board
  16. ↑ Janis Joplin interviewed on the Pop Chronicles (1969)
  17. ↑ "American album certifications – Janis Joplin – Cheap Thrills". Recording Industry Association of America. If necessary, click Advanced, then click Format, then select Album, then click SEARCH
Preceded by
Time Peace: The Rascals' Greatest Hits by The Rascals		 Billboard 200 number-one album
October 12 – November 15, 1968
November 30 – December 20, 1968 		Succeeded by
Electric Ladyland
by Jimi Hendrix Experience
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