Cheap Thrills by Big Brother & The Holding Company

Cheap Thrills, Big Brother and the Holding Company's second album, came out on Columbia on August 12, 1968, and it is the sound of San Francisco's ballroom scene caught with its hair on fire. Janis Joplin wails like the building is coming down around her, while Sam Andrew and James Gurley twist their guitars into knots over Peter Albin's bass and Dave Getz's drums.

Producer John Simon laid crowd noise over the tracks to make it feel like a concert record, and plenty of listeners fell for it. Only "Ball and Chain" was truly cut in front of an audience, at the Winterland Ballroom on April 13, 1968. The ruse hardly mattered: the album sat at number one on the Billboard Top LPs chart for eight weeks, on and off, that year. It was also the end of the road for this lineup, as Joplin left afterward to go solo. In 2007 it entered the Grammy Hall of Fame.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.