Big Brother & The Holding Company wanted to call their 1968 album Sex, Dope & Cheap Thrills and they sort of got their way 50 years on. The new two-disc release compiles 29 outtakes from the sessions that produced their breakout LP, which was simply titled Cheap Thrills, all but four of those tracks were previously unreleased. A certain amount of creative fumbling is audible. Many numbers featured here are less focused than the familiar versions released in ’68. Vocalist Janis Joplin is—of course—in full whiskey-and-nicotine throated attack. What’s more interesting is the unpolished window into Big Brother. They are crude as an ax handle, proto-punk and mind-scorchingly psychedelic, heavy as the metal that soon would follow.
Sex, Dope & Cheap Thrills includes no less than two outtakes of George Gershwin’s “Summertime,” with the Bach-like mathematics of guitarist James Gurley’s classic arrangement in development but not fully realized. A hint of resignation hangs over the song. Summer would be over soon. Joplin would soon be gone.
