Bye Bye Baby/Easy Rider/Intruder/Light Is Faster Than Sound/Call On Me/Women Is Losers/Blindman/Down On Me/Caterpillar/All Is Loneliness
History has judged Big Brother & The Holding Company to be no more than the backing band which launched the career of rock music's most dynamic female vocalist, Janis Joplin. Their follow up LP would do considerably better chart wise that this self titled debut. (US:60)
"But as everyone saw with all of the other albums that came out around the this time, the same San Francisco sound that sounded so fantastic when performed live, lost almost everything when translated in the studio. Unfortunately, this album is probably the best example of that phenomenon. One needs only to check out the live album recorded in July '66 to hear what several of these tracks were capable of sounding like, vibrant and full of potential. Yet here, they have been so sanitized and drained of all their vitality as to sound as if the band were simply going through the motions."
"Mediocre blues-rock with a little psychedelia thrown in. It has a certain liveliness about it, even when the tempo is slow or the song is more of a ballad. Janis's rowdy, gregarious do-your-own-thing personality seeps through and shows itself in the music."
"Janis Joplin was the biggest star of this band, and rightly so - she is a great blues singer. On this album she unleashes some of the style that she would later develop, but it doesn't have songs like Ball & Chain on it. Rather, they are shorter songs, much punchier, and she doesn't even take lead vocals on all of them."
"Don't expect Big Brother's acid-rock roar. This is completely unlike their classic Cheap Thrills, with a much thinner sound but still an interesting mixture of blues, folk-rock and psychedelic rock. I like Janis' vocals on Call On Me, although she doesn't sound quite as desperate as usual. An early recording of a group that was in the process of finding its identity, with several songs in the signature Big Brother mould - blues-rock with Joplin's gospel-inflected vocals. It's a solid rock album, but not as memorable as Cheap Thrills. I think the band were still finding their feet here. Only for Joplin/Big Brother completists."
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