Big Brother and the Holding Company is an American rock band that formed in San Francisco in 1965 as part of the same psychedelic music scene that produced the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and Jefferson Airplane. They are best known as the band that featured Janis Joplin as their lead singer. Their 1968 album Cheap Thrills is considered one of the masterpieces of the psychedelic sound of San Francisco; it reached number one on the Billboard charts, and was ranked number 338 in Rolling Stone '’s “The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time”. The album is also included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. (More from Wikipedia)
That brings me back to the original topic at hand: If Germans and Dutch could fluently speak the language of rock and roll, how much easier is it for Canadian rock musicians to blend in seamlessly with the larger rock world. Canadian rock stars are common, even if not everyone knows that they are Canadian: Neil Young is a long-time favorite of mine who is from Toronto, Ontario; the Guess Who, from Winnipeg, Manitoba, had numerous hits in the 1960’s and 1970’s and had a spinoff band as well called Bachman-Turner Overdrive, with lead singer Burton Cummings also having a lucrative solo career; Steppenwolf evolved from a Canadian rock band called the Sparrows (Mars Bonfire, a former Sparrow wrote their massive hit “Born to be Wild”); and the band that Janis Joplin headed for her final album, Pearl (after she left Big Brother and the Holding Company), the Full Tilt Boogie Band is from Stratford, Ontario. Even the seemingly quintessential American band called The Band was actually composed of Canadians with the exception of Levon Helm; they once released a single under the name the Canadian Squires.
(April 2013)
Yet another song on Buffy Sainte-Marie’s album It's My Way!, “Cod’ine” – adapted from codeine, a compound often found in cough syrup, but pronounced “co-dyne” – is one of the first songs to deal with the dangers of drug use. The song “Cod’ine” is among those included on the above album, This is Janis Joplin 1965 that I was not previously familiar with; another track is an early version of her composition “Turtle Blues” that appears on the classic 1968 Big Brother and the Holding Company album, Cheap Thrills. This album collects several songs that were originally recorded by Janis Joplin and her guitar; her bandmate in BB&HC, James Gurley added a full band to the tracks, and the album was released 30 years later, in 1995.
(August 2013)
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The early female rock stars got a lot of attention for their bands, with Janis Joplin in Big Brother and the Holding Company and Grace Slick in Jefferson Airplane (and later in Jefferson Starship and Starship) being two of the biggest. A current Broadway show called A Night with Janis Joplin features Mary Bridget Davies in the title role; Davies is good enough at her job to have previously toured with Joplin’s former band Big Brother and the Holding Company.
(October 2013)
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I have not meant to suggest in these various Women-in-Rock posts that women have just been doing what men do when they do rock and roll. Sometimes women are the ones blazing a trail. When Cheap Thrills, the breakthrough album for Big Brother and the Holding Company came out in August 1968, Janis Joplin had already wowed the crowd at the legendary 1967 Monterey Pop Festival.
To some extent, the psychedelic movement in rock was winding down when Cheap Thrills came out in August 1968, or at least it was old news: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band had come out the year before, “the Summer of Love” in San Francisco was also in 1967, and Hair opened on Broadway in late 1967. There was even a mock funeral for “The Death of the Hippie” in San Francisco in October 1967.
Cheap Thrills was a true sensation – as happened so often with the Beatles, Big Brother and the Holding Company staked out territory on this album that other rock artists could only admire; no one tried to follow them. The front cover art by top “underground comics” artist R. Crumb still looks amazing; almost as well known is the dramatic pose by Janis Joplin on the back cover.
(February 2014)
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Another major San Francisco band was Big Brother and the Holding Company; like pre-Slick Jefferson Airplane, they were already a prominent all-male band before Janis Joplin joined up.
(June 2014)
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As Nick Freund puts it: “I enjoy Bach and Gregorian chant. But I don’t see it as an expression of today. It’s like a beautiful old painting in a museum – you admire and appreciate it, but it has no relevance to ‘Now’. We should express our worship of God in terms we use today.” Also: “I could spend years writing a classical concert, and nobody would ever hear it.”
