Janis Joplin's Greatest Hits

JANIS JOPLIN'S GREATEST HITS debuted on the Billboard chart on 7/14/73, reaching the #37 position. The album stayed on the chart for a total of 22 weeks. Album originally released June 1973. Cover design by Bob Cato and John Berg. Cover Photo by Clark Pierson.

1. PIECE OF MY HEART
(J. Ragavoy, B. Berns) Big Brother & The Holding Company
Producer: John Simon
Recording date: May 20, 1968
From: Cheap Thrills, released July 1968
"Piece Of My Heart" debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 chart on 8/31/68 where it peaked at #12. It stayed on the chart for 12 weeks.

2. SUMMERTIME
(G. Gershwin, D. Heyward) Big Brother & The Holding Company
Producer: John Simon
Recording date: May 28, 1968
From: Cheap Thrills, released July 1968

3. TRY (JUST A LITTLE BIT HARDER)
(C. Taylor, J. Ragavoy) Kozmic Blues Band
Producer: Gabriel Mekler
Recording date: June 24, 1969
From: I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama!, released Sept 1969

4. CRY BABY
(J. Ragavoy, B. Berns) Full Tilt Boogie Band
Producer: Paul A. Rothchild
Recording date: September 5, 1970
From: Pearl, released January 1971
"Cry Baby" debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 chart on 5/15/71, peaking at #42. It stayed on the chart of 6 weeks.

5. ME AND BOBBY McGEE
(K. Kristofferson, F. Foster) Full Tilt Boogie Band
Producer: Paul A. Rothchild
Recording date: September 25, 1970
From: Pearl, released January 1971
"Me And Bobby McGee" debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 chart on 1/30/71, reaching #1 and holding that position for 2 weeks. It stayed on the chart for 15 weeks.

6. DOWN ON ME
(Arr: J. Joplin) Big Brother & The Holding Company
Recorded by Fred Catero at the Grande Ballroom, Detroit, Michigan
Recording date: March 2, 1968
From: In Concert, released May 1972
"Down On Me" debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 chart on 7/15/72, reaching #91. It stayed on the chart for 4 weeks.

7. GET IT WHILE YOU CAN
(J. Ragavoy, M. Shuman) Full Tilt Boogie Band
Producer: Paul A. Rothchild
Recording date: September 24, 1970
From: Pearl, released January 1971
"Get It While You Can" debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 chart on 9/11/71, peaking at #78. It stayed on the chart for 2 weeks.

8. BYE, BYE BABY
(P. St. John) Big Brother & The Holding Company
Producer: Bob Shad
Recording date: December 13, 1966
From: Big Brother and The Holding Company, released Sept 1967

9. MOVE OVER
(J. Joplin) Full Tilt Boogie Band
Producer: Paul A. Rothchild
Recording date: September 25, 1970
From: Pearl, released January 1971

10. BALL & CHAIN
(W. M. Thornton) Full Tilt Boogie Band
Recording date: July 4, 1970 at the Canadian Festival Express, Calgary, Canada
From: In Concert, released May 1972

11. MAYBE
(R. Barrett) Kozmic Blues Band
Producer: Gabriel Mekler
Recording date: June 15, 1969
From: I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again, Mama!, released Sept 1969

12. MERCEDES BENZ
(J. Joplin, M. McClure) Full Tilt Boogie Band
Producer: Paul A. Rothchild
Recording date: October 1, 1970
From: Pearl, released January 1971

photo by Elliot Landy

JANIS JOPLIN
Raised in Port Arthur, an oil refinery town, that was "more Louisiana than Texas," Janis forged an identity out of the harsh Texas dust, the books of Jack Kerouac and the records of old blues-belters like Bessie Smith and Odetta. Her radical notions of purpose and freedom had nothing to do with what was expected from a girl from the Golden Triangle.

A non-conformist in a Republican conservative town, Janis suffered bitterly because she didn't fit in. She tried college, bragging she had attended four different institutions of higher learning, toyed with marriage, sang in a few Austin nightclubs, and auditioned for -- but was rejected as a singer with the 13th Floor Elevators -- but none of this seemed to satisfy her.

She was a closet intellectual who voraciously devoured books, although when caught in the act by an interviewer, insisted that he keep her secret vice to himself. She was also an accomplished visual artist. "I was raised in Texas, man, and I was an artist," she once said. "i had all these ideas and feelings that I'd pick up in books, and my father would talk to me about, and I'd make up poems. And man, I was the only one I'd ever met. There weren't any others." Seth Joplin, Janis' father, echoed those sentiments in an interview shortly after her death. "There were no people she could relate with, talk to... she was one of the first revolutionary youth." In spite of this, it was also true that Janis ran with a group of people who were united in their sense of alienation and their love of the arts.

Janis and Chet

Being a maverick and an outcast contributed to her sense of pain and dislocation, but was also one of the key ingredients of her extraordinary success. However, she did find a kindred spirit in Texas expatriate and San Francisco impresario Chet Helms, whom she met in Austin while she was singing at a club. Helms convinced her one particularly tedious night in the winter of 1963 to hitchhike with him to San Francisco, a 50-hour road trip which landed Janis smack in the middle of the burgeoning Beat scene.

Janis did not make the sojourn to the West Coast to set off the first flares of revolution. "I started out in the world to be a beatnik, I wanted to do what felt right to me." she said. "I didn't want to be an executive or a teacher just because I could do it, I didn't want to be something just to make money, I wanted to be something because it felt right to me."

After a false start, and an unfortunate run-in with amphetamines, Janis returned to Port Arthur to restore her equilibrium, and re-enrolled in college, and for a time even gave up singing. But the siren call of freedom and possibility lured her to San Francisco once again, and by the summer of 1966 she was back. This time Chet Helms introduced her to the members of Big Brother and the Holding Company, the house band at the San Francisco's Avalon Ballroom, where he worked as the manager. While never having sung rock and roll before, she introduced this free-form-psychedelic outfit to her brand of the blues. Together they fused together the two genres creating one of the foundations of what would later be called The San Francisco Sound.

Janis with Big Brother & The Holding Company

Janis moved in with the band, and after rehearsing for afternoons on end, the band started gigging locally and developed what would become a formidable reputation that even extended as far as Chicago. The band was invited for a four week residency at the Mother Blues club in Old Town, where they were offered an unheard of $1000 per week. During their stormy tenure in the Windy City, the band was offered a recording contract with the upstart Mainstream Records. In between shows, they recorded a few cuts, with the promise of reconvening in Los Angeles to finish the record.

But before the record was even released, the band came to national prominence after they played at 1967's Monterey International Pop Festival. They were only scheduled to perform a single afternoon show, but the reaction was so overwhelming and contract differences had prevented their being filmed, so the promoters quickly stuck them on the bill for an evening show. By the time Janis' little sling back pumps hit the back stage area, the jungle drums were beating and the myth was set into motion. Bob Dylan's manager Albert Grossman signed them on the spot.

Singing felt so right to Janis, although she claimed at the time that it really wasn't her design to pursue a career as a vocalist, despite the fact that she had an incredible vocal range. "I know I had a good voice and I could always get a couple of beers out of it," she said. "All of a sudden someone threw me in this rock and roll band. They threw these musicians at me, man, and the sound was coming from behind, the bass was charging me, and I decided then and there that was it. I never wanted to do anything else. It was better than it had been with any man, you know. Maybe that's the trouble..."

While many have commented that all Janis wanted to be was "one of the guys," it was much more fundamental than that. She just wanted to be herself regardless of gender, and to choose her own path. She did not define herself like other women did, by her relationships, but with her vocation. As a fifth-generation Texan, she still believed in the Protestant ethic when it came to industry. "Work keeps you going," she said, "that's why I can't quit to become someone's old lady, because I've had it so big. Most women's lives are so beautiful because they are dedicated to a man. I need him too, a lolling, touching, beautiful man, but it can't touch, it can't even touch hitting the stage at full-tilt boogie."

The trouble was Janis didn't think she could sustain a relationship both with a man and her audience. She was the best judge of that, considering the intensity of emotions that she expended during one of her charged performances. She set forth on her thorny path where few women had ventured, save the trinity of Madonna-faced folk singers like Judy Collins, Joni Mitchell, and Joan Baez. Janis refused to let her sex hinder her, in fact, if anything she used it strategically, keeping her detractors off-balance, and her audience tantalized. She was bawdy, her body language and phrasing full of voluptuous suggestion, her yearning spirit in constant motion trying to out-distance the personal demons and loneliness that haunted her throughout her life. But what she lacked in intimate personal relationships, she made up in audience adoration.

Called a "night blooming flower" by biographer David Dalton, Janis Joplin flourished in the hours after midnight, nourished by the strobe lights, the cigarette smoke and the applause. While not a classic beauty, she was luminous when she got in front of the crowd, preening in her thrift store finery, with all the elegance of a warrior queen. When Janis would enter a venue, the air would bristle around her, her lush, wheat-colored hair crackled with electricity and fury, and her clothes were a blur of color, as she took up the microphone in her be-ringed hand. She would routinely fix the front rows with a saucy grin, adjust her skirt, and launch into one of her signature tunes.

Three weeks after Cheap Thrills was released, her manager, Albert Grossman announced that Janis would be leaving the band. While Janis professed to love her bandmates, she not-so-secretly believed the band wasn't willing to work as hard as she was, and was holding her back. Although she quit in September, the band didn't play their final show until December 1, making for some tense times -- tenser still since she brought Sam Andrews, one of Big Brother's guitarists along with her.

By December 21, Janis was playing her first show with her newly recruited Kozmic Blues Band in Memphis for a record company convention, and planning a new album. By October, I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama! was released, and the record climbed to #5. The band never seemed comfortable on stage, and following her earlier pattern, Janis pulled the plug on the outfit two months later.

A reunion appearance with the reformed Big Brother and the Holding Company in April 1970 was enough to send Janis back to the drawing board, and a month later, she debuted her Full Tilt Boogie Band at a Hells Angel benefit in San Rafael, California - a band she whipped into shape by constant touring before she took them to a Los Angeles studio four months later, to begin recording Pearl. Janis never finished recording the album.

Although those close to the singer had believed that she had been free of heroin addiction for some time, Janis was found dead of an accidental heroin overdose at the Landmark Hotel in Hollywood, the day before she was scheduled to record the vocal for "Buried Alive In The Blues." Janis' unfinished album was released four months later, and skyrocketed to number 1, where it stayed for nine weeks while stunned fans, family, and friends tried to make sense of her death.

Janis' star rose and fell in three short years, and although she left us with a relatively small body of work - a sampling of her best are collected on this Greatest Hits record, her legacy is tremendous. Not only was she the preeminent singer of her time, but Janis helped give voice, definition, and guts to a whole generation of women, with her unflinching, courageous approach to life. The late rock critic Lillian Roxon said that, "She perfectly expressed the feelings and yearnings of the girls of the electric generation - to be all woman, yet equal with men; to be free, yet a slave to real love; to be a living nose thumb to every outdated convention, and yet get back to the basics of life."

Although Janis died young, her life is both an inspiration and a cautionary tale. Her story has informed subsequent waves of women, not only performers - that it's important to feel everything and not hold back. It was only when she attempted to blur her feelings with alcohol and drugs that sh faltered and fell. "if I hold back, I'm no good," she remarked. "I'd rather be good sometimes than holding back all the time." Listening to Janis Joplin's Greatest Hits proves once again that she never did hold back.

~~Jaan Uhelszki