We continue our look back to the music of 50 years ago.
When you went into your local record store in early January 1971 one of the choices out there was the last studio LP for Janis Joplin called “Pearl”. Janis had died three months earlier and most of this album was finished before that. Produced by Paul Rothschild of The Doors fame, a guy who said that Joplin was a “producers dream”.
Janis was backed up by a group that called themselves the Full Tilt Boogie Band. Janis and the band had honed these songs on a 1970 tour that included the “Festival Express”. Oh, you aren’t familiar with the Festival Express??
It was a drunken train tour that ran the length of Canada in the summer of 1970 and featured not only Joplin but also The Band, The Grateful Dead, The Flying Burrito Brothers, Delaney & Bonnie and assorted others.
Here is a a smokin version of Tell Mama from that tour
Here is some video from the documentary of that tour with a drunk Rick Danko trying to sing No More Cane On The Brazos with Janis and others. I think the other guy is John Dawson from New Riders of the Purple Sage…
The album Pearl was filled with goodness. The songs were solid…Bobby Womack wrote Trust Me for Janis…She wrote Move Over that other artists would eventually cover…Cry Baby which always is a pleasure to listen to… Mercedes Benz (the last song she ever recorded, three days before her death), and of course Me and Bobby McGee.
We’ve been talking about mix tapes this week with the death of the man who invented the cassette. If I was putting a mix tape together to take to a desert island…Joplin’s version of the Kris Kristofferson classic would be on it. She took a song, written by one the country’s best songwriters, changed the gender and some of the lyrics and made it her own… and that’s her strumming the acoustic guitar…
I’ll let Kris tell the story ….
Here is the complete LP…enjoy!
Comments