Right off the bat let me say that I am not a big Janis Joplin fan. I’ve always found her singing to be a cross between an unfocused soul/ R&B type of crooning and simply screeching. Joplin had her moments of clarity but for the most part I could never get into her music. That being said, when I threw on Big Brother and The Holding Company’s Live at the Carousel Ballroom 1968 album I made it a point to really listen, really give the album its due by scrutinizing everything else beyond Janis Joplin’s very early career as a singer.

Big Brother and the Holding Company was a psychedelic band that emerged from the scene in San Francisco in 1965. The band played alongside giants like The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, some of their members even intermingling with a few of those other would be legendary bands. When they decided that they were ready to move forward with their music they incorporated a sweet Texas girl into their fold, her name was Janis Joplin. Joplin would make her singing debut with the band and would later depart under controversy. I think it’s important to jot down this quote from lead guitarist Sam Andrews about the bands take on Joplin:

It wasn't like this moment of revelation like you would like it to be. Like in a movie or something. It wasn't like, "Oh my God, now we have gone to heaven. We have got Janis Joplin." I mean she was good but she had to learn how to do that. It took her about a year to really learn how to sing with an electric band.

It’s interesting to think that the band obtained Joplin as their singer in late 1966 and that it took her, according to Andrews, a year (1967) to mesh well with the bands sound, and then the band released this live album in 1968. Simply put despite everything this is a live album that should have been put off for a bit longer. Both Joplin and the rest of the band sound terrible.

The first thing I noticed about the album that made me cringe my teeth was the production. Joplin sounded distant on the album for the most part while Sam Andrews sounded a bit too close to the microphone. As a duo their vocals didn’t work well together and separate there were a lot of off key moments. Sam Andrews and James Gurley’s guitar work on the album sounded atrocious for a majority of the album. I couldn’t help but think back to Black Flag guitarist Greg Ginn and his drunken guitar playing on the BF album Family Man or on any of his other solo albums. When focused the guitar work sounded methodically planned out but when the band burst into a jam out session it sounded like four people were attempting to play one guitar with very little success. Aside from that you had terrible feedback interruption and what sounded like an electric bubble bursting through the right hand speaker at one point. It was terrible.

I’m sure that a lot of fans will want to get their hands on this album for nostalgic reasons or simply because their a fan of Janis Joplin. That’s cool. I don't know if maybe it was the live conditions, the band was simply terrible, or if the gear was faulty, this was not a good addition to the rememberence of Owsley Stanley aka Bear. As always final judgment is yours.