Northern California Folk-Rock Festival, Santa Clara County Fairgrounds, San Jose, CA, 5-18-1968, Part 4 - Big Brother & the Holding Company

This is the fourth album out of seven albums I'm posting from the 1968 Northern California Folk-Rock Festival. This set features Big Brother and the Holding Company. The main attraction was the band's lead singer, Janis Joplin.

I said quite a lot in my write-up for the first album I posted from this festival, the Youngbloods set. I recommend you read that, because most of that applies to this set too. Most importantly, note that this is sourced from an audience bootleg, so the sound quality isn't up to my usual standards. I had to do a lot of work to fix all sorts of flaws. The final results sounds pretty decent for a 1968 concert, in my opinion, but you need to be tolerant about the flaws that still remain.

At the time of this concert, Big Brother and the Holding Company hadn't had much success with their records yet. They'd released a self-titled debut album in 1967, but it didn't fully capture their appeal and was largely ignored. But the positive buzz they were getting from their live appearances was tremendous. In August, they would release their second album, "Cheap Thrills." It would go to Number One in the U.S. and stay there for many weeks. The lead single, "Piece of My Heart," would also be a big hit.

I mentioned issues with the sound quality above. However, this set apparently was recorded by Jorma Kaukonen, lead guitarist of Jefferson Airplane. I think it does sound a little better than most of the other recordings from this festival. Presumably, he would have been able to position his tape recorder very close to the stage, and may have been able to use a better tape recorder as well. But it still was an audience boot, and suffered many of the same problems I described elsewhere. 

This album is 38 minutes long. 

01 Catch Me Daddy (Big Brother & the Holding Company)
02 Roadblock (Big Brother & the Holding Company)
03 talk (Big Brother & the Holding Company)
04 Summertime (Big Brother & the Holding Company)
05 talk (Big Brother & the Holding Company)
06 Coo Coo (Big Brother & the Holding Company)
07 Combination of the Two (Big Brother & the Holding)
08 Farewell Song (Big Brother & the Holding Company)
09 Piece of My Heart (Big Brother & the Holding Company)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/wx3ki6Bi

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/yKQ07qH6uudt1I7/file

The cover photo is from this exact concert. I had to scrounge for photos for most of the other acts, but there were quite a few of Joplin, many of them in color. I went with one that showed other band members as well.

Texas International Pop Festival, Dallas International Motor Speedway, Lewisville, TX, 8-30-1969, Part 4: Janis Joplin

Here's the fourth album from the first day of the 1969 Texas International Pop Festival. It's a set by Janis Joplin. This time, I'm more sure about the order, since I know this was the second to last set of the day. 

Janis Joplin was the star of the first day of the festival, and probably the most anticipated act of the entire festival. She had been one of the standout acts at Woodstock two weeks earlier, and she was well known for her on-stage charisma. She had been a part of the band Big Brother and the Holding Company, but she went solo at the end of 1968. At the time of this concert, she hadn't yet released her first solo album, "I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama!" But it was due to come out less than two weeks after this concert, so many of the songs she played were from that album.

Even though Joplin was a big star, her set started late into the night. That's because the organizers of the festival screwed up with the timing. The audience was let in shortly before noon, but the first act didn't began playing until about four P.M. Then there were big delays between acts. As a result, Joplin took to the stage close to one in the morning. The set here seems short, at a little over half an hour, but that's because it's incomplete. It's known that the last song she performed was "Piece of My Heart," and she also played "Work Me, Lord," and neither of them are included here. So it's possible some other songs are missing as well. Just two weeks earlier, her set at the Woodstock festival lasted slightly over an hour, so it's likely she played a similar amount of time at this festival.

Her performance lived up to expectations, and she left the stage to a long standing ovation. 

The concert was a particularly emotional one for Joplin, because she had been born and raised in Texas. Growing up in Port Arthur, off the Gulf of Mexico about three hundred miles away, she had been very unhappy because she already was a hippie of sorts in the early 1960s and she didn't know anyone else unconventional like her. After performing "Work Me, Lord," which I mentioned isn't included here, she reportedly happily told the crowd, "You're looking great! Texas never looked like this when I lived here, man. But man, look at you now!" 

She moved from Texas to California in 1966. After the concert, she told reporters that this was only the second time she'd been back to Texas after moving. She said, ""I had to get out man, they were fuc*ing me over." She also said that she planned to visit her family in Port Arthur in the days after the concert.

The recording is a soundboard that sounds excellent. The only problem, as mentioned above, is that it's incomplete. At least none of the songs here got cut off.  

This album is 32 minutes long. 

01 talk (Janis Joplin)
02 Raise Your Hand (Janis Joplin)
03 As Good as You Been to This World (Janis Joplin)
04 talk (Janis Joplin)
05 Try [Just a Little Bit Harder] (Janis Joplin)
06 talk (Janis Joplin)
07 Maybe (Janis Joplin)
08 To Love Somebody (Janis Joplin)
09 Summertime (Janis Joplin)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/HzzKCy8p

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/en/2GAZ3CYz1CpjVQ0/file

The cover photo is from this exact concert. It was in black and white, so I used the Kolorize program to colorize it. I also used the Krea AI program to improve the detail. 

Newport Folk Festival, Festival Field, Newport, RI, 7-25-1968 to 7-28-1968, Part 7 - Big Brother & the Holding Company

Next up for the 1968 Newport Folk Festival was Big Brother and the Holding Company, led by singer Janis Joplin.

At the time of this festival, Joplin and her band hadn't had much success so far. They'd released one album in 1967, simply called "Big Brother and the Holding Company," but it had only reached Number 60 in the U.S. charts. They'd put out a few singles, but only one of them, "Down on Me," had charted at all. In August, just one month after this concert, their second album, "Cheap Thrills," would be released. It would hit Number One in the U.S. and sell millions, becoming a classic. But that was still in the future.

Despite that relative lack of success so far, the buzz about Joplin had already turned her into a star. 

I previously posted a link to a Rolling Stone Magazine review of the entire Newport festival. It was written by famed rock critic (and future producer for Bruce Springsteen) Jon Landau. He was a real curmudgeon in his sour review, disliking most all the acts in the festival, especially Joplin and her band. (He even wrote, "I should note the audience loved every minute of [her performance] and that I was singularly isolated in my reaction.") But even he had to admit that her set was "unquestionably the hit of the festival."

Joplin and her band was the last act to perform on the July 27th day of the festival. Technically, their set was on the 28th, because they went on well after midnight. A curfew was enforced, so the band had to play a shorter set than they wanted. Many or even most of the people in the crowd waited through folk acts all day in order to see Joplin, and they'd gotten bored and restless. 

However, all that changed when Joplin took the stage. Landau later wrote that the song "Ball and Chain" in particular earned a "massive standing ovation." And at the end of the set, "[Joplin] and the audience just beamed at each other through her two encores."

Here's that Landau review again, in case you're curious to read the whole thing:

The Newport Folk Festival: 1968 (rollingstone.com)

This album is 35 minutes long.

087 talk by Unknown Emcee (Big Brother & the Holding Company)
088 Piece of My Heart (Big Brother & the Holding Company)
089 talk (Big Brother & the Holding Company)
090 Summertime (Big Brother & the Holding Company)
091 talk (Big Brother & the Holding Company)
092 Coo Coo (Big Brother & the Holding Company)
093 talk (Big Brother & the Holding Company)
094 Combination of the Two (Big Brother & the Holding Company)
095 talk (Big Brother & the Holding Company)
096 Ball and Chain (Big Brother & the Holding Company)
097 talk (Big Brother & the Holding Company)
098 Down on Me (Big Brother & the Holding Company)
099 talk (Big Brother & the Holding Company)
100 Piece of My Heart [Reprise] (Big Brother & the Holding Company)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16033565/NewprtFlkFestivl_1968_07BigBrothrtheHoldngCompny.zip.html

The cover photo comes from this exact concert.

Janis Joplin - Honolulu International Center Arena, Honolulu, HI, 7-6-1970

I haven't published any of Janis Joplin's music until now. She's one of many big name musicians I haven't gotten to at all yet, because I don't want to have too many balls juggling in the air at once. But today, I was listening to the radio and it was mentioned that this was the exact 50th anniversary of Joplin's death, on October 4, 1970. I normally miss those kinds of anniversaries, but since I happened to catch one, I figured I'd post something from her.

This seems to be the best concert recording from her that hasn't been officially released. There's surprisingly little well recorded live material from her, especially considering what a big star she was in the last few years of her life, and one that was well known for her exciting concert performances. There are only three official live albums, plus some other live material here and there.

This bootleg, I'm happy to say, is a soundboard. The sound quality is generally pretty good, but it's not without its flaws. I've tried to fix those flaws the best I could, and I think I succeeded most of the time, but not all the time. It was a long slog getting this ready to post, because I had to fix little things with almost every song. For instance, removing little bursts of feedback, or patching in some audience noise when the crowd reaction faded too fast, or boosting the volume of Joplin's comments between songs. I had to do a lot of volume adjustment in particular. Many songs got louder or quieter for long stretches, for no particular reason. The good thing is that's an easy thing to fix with no loss of sound quality.

But there were some issues like that I couldn't entirely fix. Especially for the last couple of songs, the volume sometimes wobbles up and down, as if someone was turning a volume knob up and down every couple of seconds. Luckily, it's not that noticeable during a song, and I did some extra editing to make it less noticeable between songs.

One nice thing about the concert is that it shows a lot of spirit of the times, and Joplin's personality in particular. It's a good guess that she was drunk, but she sang as well as usual. The crowd was especially rowdy too, with the emcee trying to calm down during the encore and at the end.

Another thing I like about this concert is that it came near the end of her life, during the time she was recording her classic album "Pearl," which wouldn't be released until after her death. Three songs are from that.

The concert is 54 minutes long, and appears to be complete.

01 talk (Janis Joplin)
02 Tell Mama (Janis Joplin)
03 talk (Janis Joplin)
04 Half Moon (Janis Joplin)
05 talk (Janis Joplin)
06 Move Over (Janis Joplin)
07 talk (Janis Joplin)
08 Maybe (Janis Joplin)
09 Summertime (Janis Joplin)
10 talk (Janis Joplin)
11 Get It while You Can (Janis Joplin)
12 Kozmic Blues (Janis Joplin)
13 talk (Janis Joplin)
14 Piece of My Heart (Janis Joplin)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15905244/JanisJ_1970c_HonluluInternationalCenterArena__7-6-1970_atse.zip.html

The cover art photo comes for her appearance on the Dick Cavett Show on August 5, 1970.