Lost In Tyme Blog

Janis Joplin (Big Brother & The Holding company) - 1968 - Live at Winterland

Great live album! But, unfortunately (or fortunately), Janis live and Janis in the studio are exactly the same thing.

Track listing:
01) Down On Me (version 1)
02) Flower In The Sun
03) I Need A Man To Love
04) Bye Bye Baby
05) Easy Rider
06) Combination Of The Two
07) Farewell Song
08) Piece Of My Heart
09) Catch Me Daddy
10) Magic Of Love
11) Summertime
12) Light Is Faster Than Sound
13) Ball And Chain
14) Down On Me (version 2)

Big Brother mostly built their reputation on live shows, playing lots of venues in San Francisco and all over the States, so that they didn't even bother about recording their new material properly in the studio (Cheap Thrills mostly consists of live material). Therefore, this album can easily serve you as a good substitute for both of their original LP's, as well as for the later Farewell Song: practically all of Janis' big hits and lots of smaller, but none the less interesting tunes are included. The CD is actually a complete recording of their two shows played in Mid-April at Winterland, San Francisco, with everything to recommend it and practically nothing to despise about it. The sound quality is quite tolerable, maybe even excellent at times. The only possible pick is that there are two versions of 'Down On Me' on here - opening and closing the album; but this, together with all the stage banter, even the most boring bits of it, being preserved, only confirms the idea that both of the sets are included in their completeness - a thing rarely cared about by record companies.

Chronologically, this is the band's next album after the self-titled one, and it's really important, because this is the era when Janis finally made the ultimate transgression and got completely loose on stage. Both shows are rather short, with seven songs in each performance, but it's fairly obvious every such show had to leave the poor girl completely exhausted, and not just because it was hard to get her lungs overcome the double guitar distortion, of course. This is where Janis becomes the unstoppable live monster, the 'give-it-yer-all' epiphany of American rock, together with Hendrix.

The problem with the album, of course, is that you really don't need it if you've already got the original LP's. Even 'Summertime' sounds catastrophically close to the studio original; what can be said then of tunes like 'Combination Of The Two' whose original versions were live as well? I mean, you already heard 'Combination Of The Two' live on Cheap Thrills (recorded at the Fillmore, by the way, just a couple of feet and a couple of dates away from Winterland), why should you bother about hearing it here? And, in fact, the version of 'Ball And Chain' used on Cheap Thrills seems to be the very one found on here. Well... actually, the liner notes say 'all tracks previously unreleased', so I suppose the tapes for Cheap Thrills were ultimately taken off some other live recording, but that's up to the qualified Janis specialist to really determine.