Cheap Thrills by Big Brother & The Holding Company & Janis Joplin

Let’s start with the good. Janis Joplin blazed a trail as one of the very few women in the 60s fronting a band and she brings a very powerful voice to this album, full of raw emotion and cracking in places. As well as a couple of original tracks, her versions of Summertime by George Gershwin and Another Piece of My Heart are genuine classics.

The bad is the bait and switch with this album posing as a live recording. Only one of the tracks was actually live (at least on the original release) with the rest featuring recorded audience noises played in. To be fair, the recording does have a raw, live feel that captures the energy of a top notch rock band, but it feels a little bit of a cheat all the same.

The ugly is the cover art by Robert Crumb, which features crude racist and sexist stereotypes of the worst sort. Apparently Crumb claimed later that he was satirizing those attitudes and that his audience would have understood the context, but it really leaves a sour taste even after all this time.

The final tragedy is that just two years after this record, Joplin joined the pantheon of dead rock stars, dying from a heroin overdose at the age of just 27. What a waste.