Listen: Down On Me / Big Brother & The Holding Company
Down On Me / Big Brother & The Holding Company

There are two things about Janis Joplin that annoy me. Neither are her fault.

Firstly, there is so little footage that really captures her power and that the media uses. The clips on a short lived US pop music show, MUSIC SCENE, are the best ones. That was with her Kozmic Blues Band lineup. Then to be fair, the Ed Sullivan and Dick Cavett shows were great as well. But the media always use that shit footage from the Monterey Pop Festival, when she hadn’t yet exploded vocally or visually. By the time she left the Bay area and was playing nationally, her voice was rasp and tortured; and she was visually a ball of color and fire. So heads up: seek out some of the aforementioned performances.

The second is Clive Davis. Why people line up to credit him with her success sickens me. Yes, he signed Big Brother & The Holding Company. And yes, he’s done a lot of things. His resume looks way better than mine. For instance, he let Ray Davies make two awesome Kinks albums, SLEEPWALKER and MISFITS, when most felt he and the band were washed up, signed The Patti Smith Group and let her make two great ones initially as well, plus gave both Lou Reed and Iggy Pop shots on Arista.

But masterminding the break up of Big Brother & The Holding Company with Albert Grossman is not a creative stroke of genius and is definitely unforgivable. How fucking dumb can you be? Their CHEAP THRILLS album soared to #1 in the Billboard charts being a blisteringly perfect document of her and the band’s magnetism.

Big Brother & The Holding Company were the ultimate acid rock group, probably of all time. They were raw and ragged but had swing, a lethally positive combination. Listen to James Gurley’s solo on the version of ‘Down On Me’ I’ve posted. By the time this was released, after her death, Columbia didn’t even have the courtesy to credit the band on the label. I assume the plan was to polish her for mainstream acceptance. Please. The whole point was her wild abandon.

Big Brother & The Holding Company live were an experience I’ll never forget. Friday October 11, 1968. Syracuse University presented the band at The War Memorial, but you had to be a student to get in. I wasn’t an SU student, in fact I was a little boy; no way could I even pass for a college kid. My friend Denny and I begged a security guy to let us in, bless him cause he did! Changed my life.

Above and below: Big Brother & The Holding Company / Syracuse War Memorial / October 11, 1968

These two pictures are from that night, snapped with my crap camera. I wish I had the negatives as the prints are fading. Check out how little equipment is up on stage. Still it was loud and out of control. Fantastic. Luckily, Janis played my area many times. I got to see all her line ups through the years. She was amazing. It’s not because I was young and impressionable. Janis Joplin was truly a living legend. And the lasting effect she has over everyone, not just me, proves it.

Listen: Anything That’s Rock ‘n’ Roll / Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers TomPettyAnything.mp3

This band got off to a slow start. Maybe it was simply his motorcycle jacket on their album cover, but Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers were thrown into the punk category by US radio programmers. Those radio gate keepers were a very intimidated, non-musical and paranoid bunch. Their heyday was nearing an end.

Proving their ineptitude, to them, Talking Heads, Blondie, Elvis Costello & The Attractions, The Ramones, Television, The Sex Pistols, The Patti Smith Group and Eddie & The Hot Rods all sounded the same: they were punk bands the American public didn’t want to hear. Wrong and wrong.

Sharing bills with both The Ramones and Blondie were probably temporary bad moves, because on to the unplayable scrapheap they went. Funny enough, fans of those bands were the first to appreciate them. Right up to the present day, it’s hard finding many folks, regardless of musical tastes, to hate on Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers.

Howard Thompson was the guy who turned me on to them. He’d convinced Island in the UK to release their debut album. The single, ‘Anything That’s Rock ‘n’ Roll’, charted soon after over there, and he sent me a copy. I preferred it then, and now, to that first album’s eventual hit, ‘American Girl’ – and it unfortunately seems lost in the band’s history, never getting any mentions ever again.