cheap thrills (1968) - big brother and the holding company: columbia records 1970 reissue, KCS-9700

One of my favorite books is Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and it contains a fantastically melancholy quote (heavily edited here):

San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of [...] no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world.

[B]ooming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end  [. . .] but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

So now […] you can go up on a steep hill […] and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."

One of the things not explicitly mentioned in that quote, but made clear by the constant musical references within F&L, is that music played a huge part in the whole atmosphere by the Bay in those days. And putting Cheap Thrills on the platter while considering Dr. Thompson's words was like getting battered by the wave he described.

Side 1: Combination Of The 2 I Need A Man To Love Summertime Piece Of My Heart
Side 2: Turtle Blues Oh, Sweet Mary Ball And Chain

Cheap Thrills just feels like pure 100% summer-of-love San Francisco.  Geek up the volume, close your eyes, and open your mind to really feel as if I you're right there in the Fillmore grooving to the heavy acid-blues and Janis' vocals.

And what vocals.  Janis had some serious pipes, and I doubt there will ever be another singer able to belt out Ball & Chain or Piece of My Heart with the same insane power that she did.  She was a force of nature - a mutated super singer with a direct line to the very souls of her forebears. She could channel Etta and Big Mama and Bessie and others.

This is the music that tortured Spiro Agnew and kept him awake at night quaking with rage and fear.  To the squares, albums like Cheap Thrills were a soundtrack for long-haired freaks running wild, raping wives and daughters and feeding LSD to the family dog.  To them it wasn't music as much as the sound of the very foundation of America's moral purity being ground into a fine powder to be injected into a godless junkie's vein.  It symbolized an American Ragnarok - an age of chaos in which children are torn from their parents arms and forced to endure non-stop orgies, while Good, Decent, Law Abiding people are marched from their homes, shaved bald, stripped naked, tattooed, and made to harvest hemp or work in factories manufacturing illicit narcotics.

Of course, the paranoia was unfounded and in reality Big Brother & the Holding Company just played basic blues with a bit of embellishment and extra grindy guitar. The kind of stuff Zeppelin and Rory Gallagher and others would end up doing.  Something that could have come out of the juke joints and honky tonks of the chitlin' circuit. Nothing to threaten the American way of life at all.  In fact, the most subversive part of the entire album may have been the cover artwork (done by underground comic artist R. Crumb), particularly the stoned, one-eyed space Jeebus, or the crowd of hippies and heads (with a cameo by Mr. Natural) waiting for the show:

The funny thing is that today, Cheap Thrills is almost classical music.  The sounds that froze the blood of middle-class America in the late 60's now sounds as harmless and quaint as Vivaldi.  And all those stoners and smack-heads and revolutionaries and pinko anarchists that were in the crowd that night in 1967 to see Janis wail are now in their late 60's to mid 70's, worrying about the dangers of rap and complaining about the temperature of their soup. The record keeps spinning ...

But playing this album sure does remind one of what music meant back in the day.  And, with much apology, to paraphrase Dr. Gonzo himself, today you can put a disc of vinyl on a turntable and with the right kind of ears you can almost hear the crescendo—that place where the music finally broke and rolled back.

Up next: Four geeks from Georgia fire up College Radio