![]() ![]() Joplin had outgrown Big Brother by the end of ’68, forming her own outfit, The Kozmic Blues Band, for a series of gigs the following year, including a prestigious slot at Woodstock. “She was open and spontaneous enough to get her heart trampled with a regularity that took me 30 years to experience or understand,” observed friend and fellow rock goddess Grace Slick, in her memoir, Somebody to Love? For all the adoration bestowed on her, Joplin would famously lament that “on stage, I make love to 25,000 different people, then I go home alone.” Neither fame nor celebrity sat easily with Joplin, whose bawdy public image as a hedonistic rebel belied a vulnerable, sensitive soul who thought deeply about the more esoteric aspects of life. It was one of the year’s biggest sellers, topping the US charts for eight weeks and going platinum. The band concocted steady psych-blues grooves, over which Joplin roared and subsided, bawling hurt into songs like Piece Of My Heart and drawing out the bittersweet ecstasies of George Gershwin’s Summertime. Hendrix: The Gigs That Changed History – #7 Monterey Pop Festivalġ968’s Cheap Thrills, Big Brother’s second album, was a landmark release.The epic true story of Grace Slick and Jefferson Airplane.The Hard And Fast Times of Janis Joplin. ![]() “It took her about a year to really learn how to sing with an electric band.” “She was good, but she had to learn how to do it,” guitarist Sam Andrew recalled of Joplin, whose prior engagements had been as an acoustic folk-blues singer. In May 1966, she headed back out to San Francisco, where she was invited by promoter Chet Helms to audition for Big Brother. “It’s a supreme emotional and physical experience.” “Singing is like loving somebody,” she once offered. Put simply, Joplin burned with an intensity that outshone most of her peers. She invested herself fully, singing as if her very life depended on it, a private testimony of blues, soul, gospel and no-holds rock executed with almost religious fervour. ![]() Here was a white American singer who sublimated the earthy blues that had first inspired her – Thornton, Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey – into the rowdy psychedelia of the Summer Of Love. ![]() Within months, Vogue was trumpeting Joplin as “the most staggering leading woman in rock.” Bob Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman, signed her and the band as a direct result, leading to a deal with Columbia, who promptly reissued their debut LP in a flurry of excitable promotion. Along with the pyrotechnics of Jimi Hendrix and The Who, Joplin’s volcanic rendition of Big Mama Thornton’s Ball And Chain was one of the standout moments of the festival. ![]()
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