The 25 Best Live Rock Recordings - No. 22: 1967 Monterey Pop Festival --OR-- Janis Joplin - Woodstock Sunday, August 17, 1969

No. 22 - Big Brother & The Holding Company - 1967 Monterey Pop Festival (Internet Archive, 2022) --OR-- Janis Joplin - Woodstock Sunday, August 17, 1969 (Sony Entertainment, 2019)

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Sometimes it begins with an incandescent talent, a light-speed evolution, and a historic event...or two fading to black.

The white-hot arc of Janis Joplin’s career between her appearance at the Monterey Pop Festival (with Big Brother And The Holding Company) on June 17, 1967, and her death on October 4, 1970, was 40 months, not even the length of a self-respecting car note.  Compressed into that brief time, Joplin released four albums, led three bands, and appeared at the two most significant music festivals of the 1960s.  As an artist, she constantly accelerated, evolved, and never slowed down.  Experiencing Janis Joplin was like reading Goethe by lightning flash.

When Joplin appeared at the Monterey Pop Festival, she was not even the headliner in her band, Big Brother & The Holding Company.  After burning the festival down with an incendiary reading of Big Mama Thorton’s “Ball And Chain” things began to change for Joplin, who was quickly to become a headliner.  The first major recording upon which she appeared was Big Brother & The Holding Company (Columbia, 1967) released a scant two months after Monterey.  The album yielded the concert staple, “Down On Me.”

A year later Joplin and the band released Cheap Thrills (Columbia, 1968), cementing the singer’s place in music history with a torrid performance of Gershwin’s “Summertime,” a reprise of “Ball And Chain” and her early signature song, “Piece Of My Heart.”  With the famous album cover designed by cartoonist Robert Crumb, Cheap Thrills would become a ubiquitous presence in many record collections.

Having outgrown Big Brother And The Holding Company, Joplin announced that she would leave the band in the fall of 1968.  In 1969, Joplin formed the Kosmic Blues Band which included Big Brother guitarist Sam Andrew and future Full Tilt Boogie Band bassist Brad Campbell. This new band harbored the heavy influence of the Stax-Volt rhythm and blues and soul bands of the 1960s, as typified by Booker T. & the M.G.'s, Otis Redding, and the horn-laden funk band, the Bar-Kays. The characteristic of the Stax-Volt sound was the presence of a funky, pop-oriented sound anathema to many of the psychedelic/hard rock bands of the late 1960s.

Joplin and her new band entered the studio June 16-26, 1969, recording I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama!  The album was to provide Joplin with the concert staples "Try (Just A Little Bit Harder)," "Kozmic Blues" and "To Love Somebody."  These songs would define Joplin’s penultimate creative period. Considered a disappointment after the success of Cheap Thrills, Kosmic Blues remains vital as the dark passage from Big Brother to the wholly emancipated Joplin of the post-posthumously released masterpiece Pearl (Columbia, 1971).

Then came Woodstock.  The Woodstock Music and Art Fair: an Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace & Music was held on Max Yasgur’s farm in Bethel, New York August 15-18, 1969.  Joplin appeared at Woodstock starting at 2:00 am, on Sunday, August 17, 1969.  Tense and tired from her trip to the festival and aggravated by a ten-hour wait to accommodate the performances of bands contractually obliged to perform ahead of her, Joplin spent the downtime drinking and shooting heroin. Properly loaded, the singer and band took the stage, giving a critically controversial performance.  At the time, Joplin’s performance was considered subpar when compared to her Monterey experience.

An alternate way to consider Joplin at Woodstock is as an element of her overall creative velocity. Joplin was burning white-hot bright, reckless, and always in danger of spinning out of control but still performing cohesively enough to pull it off. Kosmic Blues and Woodstock consumed and expressed Joplin in all of her Left Coast hippie abandon. She was living and performing on the edge and her questionable grasp is apparent both in the studio and on stage. That is what made a Janis Joplin performance so exciting.

The Bee Gee's 1967 hit "To Love Somebody," once thought to be a poor song choice for Joplin, proves, on Kosmic Blues and at Woodstock, a revealing contrast of the singer in the studio versus on stage. On Kosmic Blues, Joplin sings the song barely contained. She is pleadingly soulful yet oddly relaxed, comfortable approaching the creative edge. At Woodstock, Joplin unleashed herself in full abandon. The performance is a big wet, shaggy dog of a mess, shaking off dirty water, but one for the ages.

Woodstock finds Joplin as a psychedelic mystic, a Hildegard von Port Arthur, belting our 100-proof canticles to Dionysus and Eros. Liberally performing from the then soon-to-be-released Kosmic Blues, Joplin gives the audience a hot shot of her Soul Sacrifice. Reprising Big Brother's "Summertime," Joplin reveals her pan-sexual carnality, having too much salacious fun with the lyric, "Your Daddy's Rich And Your Mama's Good Lookin." To be sure, Joplin was frightening all good daughters' mothers, fearing only men,  to death. But all is not perfect. A manic "Piece of My Heart" and Snooky Flower's anemic performance on "I Can't Turn You Loose" mar an otherwise searing set.

Joplin was not perfect either at Monterey or Woodstock, but she was Janis Joplin and there has not been another one since.