That's followed by two unreleased blues recorded with guitarist Jorma Kaukonen in a San Francisco living room in '65 and eight songs from the controversial (and hard-to-find) 1966 debut album, 'Big Brother & the Holding Company.' The album begins with Joplin's first-ever recording, a vocal- and-autoharp version of 'What Good Can Drinkin' Do' taped in a friend's living room in Austin in '62. There were moments, however, when Joplin's talent could transcend everything and achieve startling moments such as 'I Need a Man to Love,' 'Piece of My Heart,' 'Try (Just a Little Bit Harder)' and 'Me and Bobby McGee.'

If Big Brother was too sloppy, the Kozmic Blues Band and Full-Tilt Boogie Band were too stolidly professional. In her too-short life (she died in 1970 at age 27 of a heroin overdose), Joplin never found the right backing band. There are too many examples of strangled singing by Joplin's male partners in Big Brother and not enough examples of her incendiary live performances. Similarly, the familiar version of George Gershwin's 'Summertime' from the 'Cheap Thrills' album is replaced by a weaker but unreleased alternate take. Typical of compiler Bob Irwin's decisions was his choice to replace the above version of 'Ball and Chain' with a less focused one from another day at the same festival just because the latter was previously unreleased. The new three-CD box set, 'Janis,' captures that mess in all its glory but does little to untangle it. It's Joplin's finest recorded moment and one of the greatest rock 'n' roll vocals of all time.Īll those contradictions - the insufficiency of her collaborators, the spectacular potential of her voice, the inconsistency of her efforts - have left Joplin's historical legacy a tangled mess.

The fifth song, however, is Big Mama Thornton's 'Ball and Chain,' and Big Brother's lead singer, Janis Joplin, transforms the blues lament into an electrifying eruption of pain, anger and defiance. ON LAST YEAR'S box set, 'The Monterey International Pop Festival,' Big Brother & the Holding Company are heard stumbling through four songs of such stunning hippie-blues ineptitude that one wonders why they were ever allowed on the stage at the '67 event.

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