When I first moved to northern Indiana I started writing a pop culture blog for The South Bend Tribune. In it I would pick some aspect of popular culture that fascinated me, and I would write something about it and then include a list of what I thought were the five best examples of that subject. Subjects included such things as best backup singing performances, cinematic death scenes, double albums, TV commercials, albums to drive to (preferably with a manual transmission), and primal screams in rock and roll.
As you may have guessed, I am a compulsive list-maker and this was the perfect indulgence for that side of my personality. It's one of those things in which I take a lot of delight. It creates a nice distraction when I'm pissed off at everyday life and kind of keeps me sane. The problem is that, being me, I can never seem to make practical lists for anything. I rarely can make a decent "To Do" list. My grocery lists are spotty at best. But if you ask me for a list of albums or songs to listen to after the sun has gone down, I'll present you with what I feel is the ultimate playlist--my specialty.
Since I started writing these weekly "sermons" almost six years ago, I've somehow managed to submit nine of my top ten favourite albums of all time. This week, I wanted to be able to submit that last album (#4 on my list) just because I haven't so far and I think that's kind of sad. (I'll even supply a recap if you missed some of them.)
I've been a fan of this album since at least college. In 2018, I discovered that it was actually a much different album than I thought it was. Weirdly, this didn't detract from my enjoyment of it--in fact, I think it made me like it more.
Big Brother & The Holding Company recorded their eponymous debut album in December of 1966 for Mainstream Records, which was primarily a jazz label. Big Brother was a rock band from San Francisco that was part of the burgeoning psychedelic/acid rock/hippie movement. The band and the label were not a good match. The resulting album--released in August of 1967--does, in fact, sound like a rock album produced by jazz engineers. The whole sound is clear and polished and, overall, just too... clean. If you were to see the band play in a club at that time, they wouldn't sound anything like their record. When they performed live, they had a much heavier, distorted, even experimental sound to them--a sound that recording engineers who were used to working with jazz musicians would not exactly understand how to record. Vocalist/guitarist Sam Andrew was later quoted as saying, "We were quite disappointed at the time that we could not make the engineer understand what we wanted. He was afraid of the needle going into the red and that is where we wanted the needle to be all the time."
Two months before the album's release, Big Brother played the legendary Monterey Pop Festival. It was one of the standout moments of the entire weekend. If you watch D.A. Pennebaker's documentary of the festival (1968's Monterey Pop), the look on Cass Elliott's face as Janis Joplin belts out "Ball and Chain" says it all. I think it's safe to say they blew the crowd away. Consequently, Columbia Records signed them to a new contract and bought out their contract with Mainstream. By the end of the year, the group also had a new manager in Albert Grossman who also managed Peter, Paul & Mary and Bob Dylan, among others.
Their next goal seemed to be to make a record that managed to approximate what they sounded like live. The outcome, 1968's Cheap Thrills, went to #1 on Billboard's Top LPs chart and eventually went double platinum (more than 2 million copies sold). I fell in love with the album about 25 years later. I considered it one of the greatest (mostly) live albums I'd ever heard. At the time I was taking a class in audio production. Our instructor asked us to name an album that stood out to us just from a production level. I cited Cheap Thrills because of that raw, imperfect sound. It wasn't polished, it wasn't clean. It was distorted and dirty. I felt it lent a certain level of character to the album that made it stand out more than it might have otherwise.
Fast forward another 25 years. In 2018, Columbia Records released a two-CD set of the session recordings from that album called Sex, Dope & Cheap Thrills (which, as I understand it, was the original title of that 1968 album, but Columbia wouldn't allow it at that time). In reading those liner notes and listening to those session recordings, I was surprised to discover that those live recordings on the record were not really live. The applause and other crowd noises were actually added to the studio recordings in an effort to make it sound like a live performance. In fact, the album's closing track, a blistering cover of Willie Mae "Big Mama" Thornton's "Ball and Chain," is the only song on the album that actually is a live performance, and I feel the best recording of that song.
In spite of that discovery, the album is still one of my all-time favourites--one of those albums that is just part of the soundtrack of my life that I feel it necessary to revisit on a semi-regular basis. Featuring their hit single, "Piece of My Heart," and one of my favourite album covers by the great underground cartoonist Robert Crumb, please enjoy--to quote Bill Graham at the beginning of the record--"Four gentlemen and one great, great broad, Big Brother & The Holding Company," with their 1968 classic, Cheap Thrills.
GEEK NOTE: The attached YouTube link features four bonus tracks that were included in the 1999 CD re-issue of the album--two studio outtakes ("Roadblock" and "Flower in the Sun") and two live performances ("Catch Me Daddy" and "Magic of Love") recorded at the Grande Ballroom in Detroit in March of 1968.
Until next week, stay safe, be good to your neighbours, and please remember that if at first you don't succeed, then skydiving definitely isn't for you.
Yours in peace, love, and rock and roll!
The Reverend Will the Thrill
The Reverend Will the Thrill's Top 10 Favourite Albums
1. Abbey Road by The Beatles (1969)
2. Abraxas by Santana (1970)
3. Let It Bleed by The Rolling Stones (1969)
4. Cheap Thrills by Big Brother & The Holding Company (1968)
5. Born To Run by Bruce Springsteen (1975)
6. Bridge Over Troubled Water by Simon & Garfunkel (1970)
7. Surrealistic Pillow by Jefferson Airplane (1967)
8. In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida by Iron Butterfly (1968)
9. Bashin' by Jimmy Smith (1962)
10. Mr. Lucky by John Lee Hooker (1991)
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