Big Brother and the Holding Company are an American rock band that was formed in San Francisco in 1965 as part of the same psychedelic music scene that produced the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and Jefferson Airplane. After some initial personnel changes, the band became well known with the lineup of vocalist Janis Joplin, guitarists Sam Andrew and James Gurley, bassist Peter Albin, and drummer Dave Getz.
Their second album Cheap Thrills, released in 1968, is considered one of the masterpieces of the psychedelic sound of San Francisco; it reached number one on the Billboard charts, and was ranked number 338 in Rolling Stone’s the 500 greatest albums of all time. The album is also listed in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.
Joplin sang for the first time with Big Brother in 1966. Years later, Andrew described the band’s first impressions of her:
“We were the established rock and roll band. We were heavy. We were like: all right, out of three or four bands in this city, we are one of them. We’re in the newspapers all the time. We’re working out. We are doing this woman a favor to even let her come and sing with us. She came in and she was dressed like a little Texan. She didn’t look like a hippie, she looked like my mother, who is also from Texas. She sang real well but it wasn’t like, ‘Oh we’re bowled over.’
“It was probably more like, our sound was really loud. It was probably bowling her over. I am sure we didn’t turn down enough for her. She wrote letters home about how exotic all of us were. The names of the bands. That kind of thing. In other words, we weren’t flattened by her and she wasn’t flattened by us. It was probably a pretty equal meeting. She was real intelligent, Janis was, and she always rose to the occasion.
“She sang the songs. It wasn’t like this moment of revelation like you would like it to be. Like in a movie or something. It wasn’t like, ‘Oh my God, now we have gone to heaven. We have got Janis Joplin.’ I mean she was good but she had to learn how to do that. It took her about a year to really learn how to sing with an electric band.”
It took a while for some of the band’s followers to accept the new singer, whose musical style differed from the experimental and unconventional sound that Big Brother played at the time. With the addition of Joplin, they became more disciplined musicians, their songs adopted a more traditional structure, and the band started to increase its popularity in the San Francisco psychedelic scene.
In 1968, Big Brother and the Holding Company released Cheap Thrills, their second studio album. The album, featuring tracks like “Piece of My Heart” and “Summertime,” became a commercial and critical success, reaching No. 1 on the Billboard charts, and was ranked number 338 in Rolling Stone’s the 500 greatest albums of all time. The album is also listed in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.
Despite their success, creative differences and the uneven musicianship of some band members led to tensions. Janis Joplin left Big Brother and the Holding Company in December 1968 to pursue a solo career, though she occasionally reunited with them for live performances.
