Big Brother & The Holding Company

Big Brother and the Holding Company came up in San Francisco in 1965, out of the same psychedelic scene that produced the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Quicksilver Messenger Service, and they played it louder and rawer than most. After some early changes the lineup settled: Sam Andrew and James Gurley on guitars, Peter Albin on bass, Dave Getz on drums, and Janis Joplin up front with a voice that could strip paint.

Cheap Thrills, their second album, came out on Columbia in 1968 and went all the way to number one. It's a ragged, blazing thing, the guitars fraying at the edges while Joplin tears into "Piece of My Heart" as if her life hung on it and stretches "Summertime" into a slow, smoldering ache.

Joplin left once the record was done to go solo, and Nick Gravenites, Kathi McDonald and Dave Schallock came in; that version of the band made a pair of albums and then folded in 1972. Joplin was long gone, dead since 1970, when Andrew, Gurley, Albin and Getz regrouped in 1987, and they have kept playing with a string of different singers, though time has thinned the ranks: Gurley left in 1997 and died in 2009, and Sam Andrew died in 2015.

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