#the song writers were made to write like 40 songs they had to scrap UNTIL they were finally told the issue

[mbat]

the fact that disney is more determined to give us "amazing" visuals rather than good stories and songs anymore is insulting

like they act like they cant have it all. youre the biggest studio ever, you own more companies than anything ever should, you have more money than i can even concieve of.

YOU ARE FULLY CAPABLE OF GIVING US MOVIES THAT ARE AMAZING IN EVERY ASPECT. SO FUCKING SHOW IT

[soundsof71]

Hal Blaine: “May he rest forever on 2 and 4.”

That quote is from his family’s Facebook posting, announcing Hal Blaine’s passing at age 90.

He played on 40 #1 singles, 150 top 10s, some 6000+ tracks in all. (You’ll see stats that say north of 30,000 but don’t believe the hype. All these guys were union and kept their timecards. When Hal says more than 6000, he knew what he was talking about.)

Hal was the drummer on six straight Grammy Record of the Year winners, 1966 through 1971: 

“A Taste of Honey”, Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass

“Strangers In The Night”, Frank Sinatra

“Up, Up, and Away”,  The Fifth Dimension

“Mrs. Robinson”, Simon & Garfunkel

“Aquarius/Let The Sunshine In”, The Fifth Dimension

“Bridge Over Troubled Water”, Simon & Garfunkel

Plus if it was a studio recording by The Byrds, The Beach Boys, Simon & Garfunkel, Sonny & Cher, Carpenters, The Association, The Fifth Dimension, or The Partridge Family, the odds are that it was probably Hal. 

You don’t need me to cue up Hal’s biggest hits like the ones listed above, or “Be My Baby”, “Good Vibrations” (Hal seen below working on it with Brian Wilson)...

...so I’m going to take you to the first song that made me say, “WHO’S PLAYING  THOSE DRUMS?!?!” The song was a deceptively complicated pop trifle called “Dizzy” by Tommy Roe, and it spent four weeks at #1, starting on March 15, 1969 (50 years ago almost to the day as I write this). 

I say deceptively complicated because even though it’s basically two verses and the chorus three times (it actually starts with the chorus, which I’m a sucker for.) There’s not even a bridge, but it manages to go through 11 key changes in less than three minutes! And while there are other instruments, I always heard it as a duet between the drums and the strings. 

You already know it was Hal Blaine on strings, and the string arranger was another member of the extended family known at the time as The Usuals, Jimmie Haskell. I was delighted to find this, as both Hal and Jimmie were well known to me from so many other albums in the family collection by then. (I was reading album credits before I was reading books.) 

This really is an astonishing track. Bubblegum pop on one level, exceptionally baroque on another, and a drums-strings pas de deux the likes of which we’ve yet to hear again. I used to listen to this on repeat for hours, singing at the top of my lungs -- including the drum breaks and strings stings (c’mon, you know you sing instrumental parts too!) spinning around and around the room until I was DIZZY. 

Check Hal’s snare kicking it off like a gunshot.

I have a couple of other gems of Hal’s that are a little off the beaten path.

I hope that y’all are enough in the know by now to not be pissing on The Partridge Family, who was making absolutely first-rate pop composed by some of the best writers of the day, with pros like Hal Blaine laying down the tracks. 

(Plus, c’mon, David Cassidy would have been a singing star without the show,  and Shirley Jones WAS a star, an Oscar-winner no less, with one of the great voices that humankind has ever been blessed with.)

“I Can Hear Your Heartbeat” uses Hal’s right foot on the bass pedal as the titular heartbeat, until the whole kit comes swinging in after the first verse. One of the keys to appreciating Hal (or any drummer, really) is to listen to when he starts and stops, and the gaps in between what his hands are doing. This one is a real gem. 

(And yes, there’s performance footage of the Partridges of course, but none of the clips SOUND good enough to hear all that Hal is up to.)

Now having sung Hal’s praises, I’ll note again that it’s possible to overstate the case (which Hal encouraged, and participated in more than once). There were plenty of other drummers on the Hollywood studio scene, including Earl Palmer (very likely on more records than Hal in fact), plus a number of times that Hal was one of a couple of drummers on a single track.

This was a Phil Spector trick. Multiple drums, multiple bassists (often one electric and one acoustic), and an army of guitars all playing at once were the key to the Wall of Sound, NOT multitracking. Sure, Phil used that too now and again, but rarely to add depth. More often for polishing, because there’s no substitute for the vibrations in the air when all those players are playing simultaneously. THAT’s the Wall of Sound, and Hal and his friends are the exact musicians Phil used.

Mike Nesmith used this "Wall of Sound” trick to fine effect when he produced one of the best tracks he wrote for The Monkees, “Mary Mary”, so sharp that it appeared in FIVE episodes, yet still manages to be too little known.

“Mary Mary” features FIVE guitarists (Glen Cambell and James Burton both on lead, with Peter Tork among the rhythm players), two bassists (Larry Knechtel and Bob West), and two drummers (Hal Blaine and Jim Gordon, whose name may also be familiar to you from Derek & The Dominoes, George Harrison, Delaney & Bonnnie,  et al.), with notable percussive support from Cary Coleman.

This is definitely Hal kicking it off, though, with a snare lick so sweet that Mike looped it three times and added it to the front of the track, making it that much easier to sample, and sampled it was, including on a nifty COVER of this track by Run-D.M.C. (even though they changed Mike’s lyric on the verses, Mike is the only writer credited) that also used Mickey’s vocal singing the words “Mary Mary”.

I should mention that The Monkees’ version of “Mary Mary” was never released as a single in the US, but WAS included as a cardboard cutout single on the back of Honey Combs cereal!!!! Yes, I had it, though, like a fool, I failed to keep  up with it.

Anyway, this is GROOVE, kids.

Last but not least, Elvis Presley’s “A Little Less Conversation” (1968) was so far ahead of its time that it STILL sounds like it’s from the future. Originally recorded early in the year, it was re-recorded for the famed Elvis ‘68 TV special, but scrapped at the last minute. (Hal did in fact appear in the special!) The second version of "A Little Less Conversation” was used to outstanding effect in the 2001 version of Ocean’s Eleven, and a subsequent remix by Junkie XL charted even higher than Elvis’s original, going to #1 in 14 countries including the UK.

And all of ‘em featured Hal’s drums, absolutely swinging.

You’ve surely seen Hal’s name by now in the context of “The Wrecking Crew”, a name that he invented well after the era had finished to describe this loose group of LA studio aces. It was not only NOT used at the time, but explicitly and angrily rejected by many of the folks tagged with that label later (Leon Russell was so furious at the name that he insisted that the chapter of the movie devoted to him be removed, and he’s far from alone in his outrage)...but hey, as long as you keep that in mind, you can still enjoy the documentary of the same name for what it is: a long conversation between some of the folks who made some remarkable music.

You probably know the song “A Little Less Conversation” well enough (although you should check it out if you don’t), but in this little clip from the aforementioned Wrecking Crew movie, you can see 2008 Hal playing along with 1968 Hal for 30 seconds or so.

Watch his right hand in particular. It’s practically floating on air. He’s holding the drumstick so lightly that I bet you could have snuck up behind him and snatched it right out of his hand. Not that 70s rock drummers like Bonzo couldn’t swing plenty, but the death grip on drumsticks as heavy as telephone poles characteristic of later drumming is barely even the same thing as what Hal was doing.

I’m not saying one is better than the other -- I hope you know by now that I love light 60s pop every bit as much as heavy 70s rock -- but this clip tells you everything you need to know about why drummers in particular revere Hal as one of the greats...even if he pissed them off sometimes, too. 

Additional notes: the photo, the quote and some of the stats at the top are courtesy redef,  the picture of Hal with Brian Wilson is via forums.stevehoffman.tv, and the single of “Mary Mary” is via 45cat. The rest is from yewchewb, and me obsessively reading the back of albums since 1963.

Here’s a great list of highlights from Hal’s credits. You’re going to be flabbergasted by them. If you have any kind of record collection that dips into the 60s at all, you may have dozens of them.

And while most of Hal’s key work was in the 60s, he did in fact have a terrific 1971, with appearances on two albums each by The Partridge Family (including one of my favorite singles of theirs, “Echo Valley 2-6809″) and Barbra Streisand (Stoney End is one of my favorites by anyone that year), Carpenters (featuring “Rainy Days and Mondays”), and a good-sized handful more.

[caltropspress]

RAPS + CRAFTS #3: Alaska

1. Introduce yourself. Past projects? Current projects?

Hi my name is Tim. I am a rapper. You might know me as Alaska, but chances are you do not know me at all. I have been making rap music since the mid-1990s. I was part of a collective called Atoms Family and a group within Atoms named Hangar 18. In 2004 Hangar 18 was signed to the Definitive Jux label. We dropped two albums. One which was good and one which was meh. After the label and group fell apart I started a weird career as a solo rapper who teams up with different producers to form different groups (Crack Epidemic, Words Hurt). The most recent group is named Cargo Cults which is myself and Zilla Rocca. We dropped Nihilist Millennial approx. one year ago. I am currently working on a few projects including the follow up to Nihilist Millennial.

2. Where do you write? Do you have a routine time you write? Do you discipline yourself, or just let the words come when they will? Do you typically write on a daily basis?

I am a husband and a father. I have a full-time job and I am currently enrolled in a Master’s program at NYU. I write whenever I have a spare moment. I usually write in the morning, it is when my mind is most clear and I can give the job the most attention. I have found that I am also the most creative at this time. I am usually writing with a project in mind. As I mentioned earlier I tend to work on projects with one producer. Usually they will give me a gang of beats. I will sit with them and start to write to them. I usually write 4-8 bars every morning. Which means I am usually writing a song a week. Typically I have an idea of what I want to say. I find that the words are always pouring out, but I end up throwing a lot of them out. At this point in my career I know when something is right. It is only at that point that I move on to the next line.

3. What’s your medium—pen and paper, laptop, on your phone? Or do you compose a verse in your head and keep it there until it’s time to record?

I write on my phone. Sometimes I will write in my head but it always ends up on the phone because I am old and my memory is shot.

4. Do you write in bars, or is it more disorganized than that?

I usually write in bars. Sometimes when I am just listening to music, cooking or doing something else a line will pop into my head and I will jot it down in my phone as something to use later. Most times those ideas get tossed.

5. How long into writing a verse or a song do you know it’s not working out the way you had in mind? Do you trash the material forever, or do you keep the discarded material to be reworked later?

It depends. I have scrapped entire albums before because they did not work. Usually it is anywhere from a half a verse to a half of a song. I usually take that material and put it into a running file of ideas to potentially reuse. However, if I do not reuse the idea by the time the album is done I throw them out. I have found that sometimes you have to just let it go. Once everything is precious you can get stuck.

6. Have you engaged with any other type of writing, whether presently or in the past? Fiction? Poetry? Playwriting? If so, how has that mode influenced your songwriting?

I used to write for a few music websites including one that I founded called SYFFAL (shut your fucking face and listen). I have also attempted to start a book on a few occasions detailing my career as a failed musician. I do not know if this helped my writing, but I find that the more I write the more ideas I have.

7. How much editing do you do after initially writing a verse/song? Do you labor over verses, working on them over a long period of time, or do you start and finish a piece in a quick burst?

I am editing throughout the entire process. By the time I get to the end of a song I usually have anywhere from 16 to 40 bars of material that did not make the song. This material ends up in the list I mentioned earlier. I tend to take whatever time is needed. Sometimes songs come together in a few hours, sometimes it takes a month to get through a verse. I view writing a song to be like working on a puzzle. You can force the wrong piece into a spot, but in the end the puzzle is not going to work. You just have to wait until you find the right piece. You know it when you find it. It clicks right in.

8. Do you write to a beat, or do you adjust and tweak lyrics to fit a beat?

When I am working on a project I write to beats. I want to make sure that the words and the flow match the soundscape. When I come up with random lines more often than not they are not written to a beat. If I end up incorporating it into a song I usually have to make edits so that it lands in the pocket.

9. What dictates the direction of your lyrics? Are you led by an idea or topic you have in mind beforehand? Is it stream-of-consciousness? Is what you come up with determined by the constraint of the rhymes?

I usually have ideas of what I want to discuss going into a project. Once the project starts I usually let the beat pick what the topic is going to be. A lot of what I am writing is just me trying to figure out the world around me or a reflection of the inputs. For example, with the Rammellzee song. There was an exhibit of his work at Red Bull Music like two summers ago, I used to go to it all the time on my lunch break. So spending all of that time around his work, and watching the videos of him discussing his philosophy about art is what inspired that song. I added a line at the end about being someone who dons the mask, meaning the mask of Rammellzee. I thought of this idea about doing art for the sake of purity of one’s soul, which is what I always felt Ram was doing and it is what I wanted to do. I would never put myself on the same level as a god like Ram, but at the same time I was writing this song, I was watching all of these Star Wars YouTube channels and there was an episode about this Boba Fett story line. The story followed his armor as it was sold from one person to the next. I liked that idea and how it connected with Rammellzee’s obsession with armor and wanted to incorporate it into the song.

10. Do you like to experiment with different forms and rhyme schemes, or do you keep your bars free and flexible?

I do enjoy it but I am not really concerned with it. I used to be obsessed with it, but I realized that was just to cover up the fact that I didn’t have much to say. I started looking at artists like Andre 3000, who can do all of the technical stuff better than everyone else, but he no longer needs to. He is more concerned with what he is saying and the ideas. He still drops some flex in here and there to remind you what he can do, but ultimately he is serving the song and the vision. That is how I approach it now as well. I am more interested in making a good song than I am in showing people how clever I am.

11. What’s a verse you’re particularly proud of, one where you met the vision for what you desire to do with your lyrics?

I really like “All Power to All People” from the Cargo Cults album. At the time when I wrote it there was so much chaos, it was shortly after Trump won, so the trolls and racist assholes were on full display and the resistance grift was at full force. There was a lot of blaming social media, free speech, and shutting down ideas. A lot of hand wringing about how it was the worst time in American history. I wanted to address those ideas head on because they are so wrong. I wanted to show how important maintaining these values is. I wanted to show all of the ways that the things that we were suddenly vilifying because they brought us temporary discomfort were essential to freedom and giving voice to the voiceless. I also wanted to examine how silencing ideas gives them more power. Moralists never seem to learn this. Once you let an asshole like Milo or Richard Spencer say what moronic bullshit they have to say they are exposed for the shithead idiots that they are. They become powerless. When you give them the power of your fear they win. They want the spectacle because the spectacle is all they have to offer. You do not defeat bad ideas by shutting them out, you defeat them by exposing them as bad ideas.

12. Can you pick a favorite bar of yours and describe the genesis of it?

There is a bar on the title track from the Words Hurt album Soul Music for the Soulless where I say “Watching stranger things and hanging upside down like Poppa Large”. It is a little line in a bigger song but it has been my favorite line for quite some time. I don’t really remember the origin of it, other than it has a few layers to it. Stranger Things has the mirror world called “the upside down” and in the video for the Ultramagnetic MCs song “Poppa Large,” Kool Keith spends a portion of the video hanging from his feet upside down. I don’t know why but it is still my favorite bar ever.

13. Do you feel strongly one way or another about punch-ins? Will you whittle a bar down in order to account for breath control, or are you comfortable punching-in so you don’t have to sacrifice any words?

I punch in all the time. I have zero issue with it as long as you can perform it when you get on stage and the punch is not obvious. We are trying to make the best song we can. If that means a punch, so be it.

14. What non-hiphop material do you turn to for inspiration? What non-music has influenced your work recently?

I don’t spend much time with hip hop in general these days. I actively avoid it because I am writing so much. I find that when I am writing and listening I subconsciously bite what I am listening to. I tend to mostly listen to Jazz and podcasts. When I am seeking inspiration I will usually read.

15. Writers are often saddled with self-doubt. Do you struggle to like your own shit, or does it all sound dope to you?

I used to when I was trying to impress others. After the second Hangar 18 album which was meh, I made a promise to myself to a. Only make music for myself, I don’t care if anyone else likes it as long as I do, and b. To only make music if I have something I want to say or if it is fun. From that point on I have had zero self-doubt because I was making exactly what I wanted to make and doing exactly what I wanted to do. There is a passage in this Carlos Castaneda book talking about self-doubt and how it is a self created and a construct of our ego. I think when you go into something without ego, even if it fails to achieve what you hoped, you can accept it for what it is and that allows you to be present and enjoy what you are doing.

16. Who’s a rapper you listen to with such a distinguishable style that you need to resist the urge to imitate them?

Shit, so many. Woods, Castro, Zilla, Alex Ludavico, Theravada, Blueprint, Moses Rockwell, it goes on and on. It is why I don’t listen to rap that much anymore. I mean I check it when it drops but I no longer obsess over it because too often it leaks into whatever I am working on.

17. Do you have an agenda as an artist? Are there overarching concerns you want to communicate to the listener?

Outside of making myself happy there is no agenda or concern.

RAPS + CRAFTS is a series of questions posed to rappers about their craft and process. It is designed to give respect and credit to their engagement with the art of songwriting. The format is inspired, in part, by Rob McLennan’s 12 or 20 interview series.

[itsfinancethings]

October 26, 2019 at 07:00AM

On September 30, 1970, a reporter asked Janis Joplin to explain her fearless sexuality. “It seems to bother a lot of women’s lib people that you’re kind of so upfront sexually,” Village Voice writer Howard Smith told her. Joplin, by then accustomed to such criticism, responded: “I’m representing everything they said they want.… It’s sort of like: you are what you settle for.… You’re only as much as you settle for. If you don’t settle for that and you keep fighting it, you know, you’ll end up anything you want to be… I’m just doing what I wanted to and what feels right and not settling for bullshit and it worked. How can they be mad at that?”

Janis made it sound as if fighting the urge to settle was the most natural thing to her. But deep down inside there had always been the yearning for doing exactly that: getting the house, the white picket fence and the husband. They had been the middle-class hopes of her mother, Dorothy, who herself had fought hard for a life of stability in 1950s Port Arthur, Texas. Janis, her mother’s daughter, was often tormented about leaving that white picket fence behind. “I keep pushing so hard the dream/I keep tryin’ to make it right/Through another lonely day,” she sang in “Kozmic Blues.”

She was born a misfit—a tomboy, a painter, a girl who didn’t accept arbitrary boundaries, a girl with a big voice—but she never stopped wanting to belong. That’s why, years later at the age of 25, it had been so daring of her to leave behind the band that had launched her, Big Brother and the Holding Company. She had joined the group in San Francisco in June 1966 and two months later they were bunking communally in Marin County. Despite technical shortcomings as musicians, they were a dynamic live band with a solid following, and they correctly saw in Janis the element that would elevate them to status similar to their Haight-Ashbury scene-mates Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead. Sure enough, Big Brother and the Holding Company broke big in June 1967 at the Monterey Pop Festival, signing with Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman, who secured a lucrative deal for them with Columbia Records.

But Joplin was beginning to feel again that part of her that would not settle. Her ambition ratcheted up. She looked more to her heroes Nina Simone and Etta James. Rather than shriek over Big Brother’s blaring psychedelic “freak rock,” Joplin longed to work her voice with more nuance, and explore soul and other musical genres; she envisioned keyboards, a horn section, more sophisticated tunes. In remarkable letters she wrote her parents, she explained, “I have to find the best musicians in the world & get together & work. There’ll be a whole lot of pressure because of the ‘vibes’ created by my leaving Big Brother & also by just how big I am now. So we’ve got to be just super when we start playing—but we will be.” To New York Times reporter Michael Lydon, she admitted: “I’m scared. I think, ‘It’s so close. Can I make it?’ If I fail, I’ll fail in front of the whole world. If I miss, I’ll never have a second chance on nothing. But I gotta risk it. I never hold back…” Anyone who really knew her would not have been surprised by her leap of faith. As a roughhousing tomboy in Port Arthur, she’d exhibited a fierce will not unlike that of her father, Seth, who led a double life as a Texaco engineer by day, and a cerebral bookworm and atheist by night. He and Dorothy adored their daughter, but their showdowns were legend—Janis refusing to do what she was told, damn the consequences. With adolescence came compulsive risk-taking; she was the female “mascot” among a group of outlier intellectual boys, a role that helped set a bold Joplin in motion.

Unlike her father, Joplin would not hide her defiance. She vocally opposed segregation in her high school, which made her a target of bullies and racists. She sought out the hard-to-find music of Lead Belly and Bessie Smith, sneaking out to juke joints with boys, and was accused of sleeping with her male companions. At 17, after a midnight ramble in New Orleans, she crashed her father’s car. She would soothe the shame with alcohol, the first drug on which she became dependent. And then she’d do it all again.

Joplin found temporary solace in traveling, which she’d been introduced to by Kerouac’s On the Road, a game-changer for her. Her first taste of freedom came at 19, when she briefly lived like a beatnik in Venice Beach, California, then hitchhiked alone to San Francisco, before hightailing it back to Texas. She soon cultivated an ardent following of fellow college students in Austin, who clamored to hear her sing blues, country, and folk with her first group, the Waller Creek Boys.

Forever restless, Joplin hitchhiked for the second time to San Francisco the day after her 20th birthday in 1963. Already writing songs and accompanying herself on an autoharp, she floored audiences in the Bay Area, gaining confidence and vocal skill, gig by gig. But after spending the summer of ’64 in New York’s Lower East Side, where she learned to play 12-string guitar, Joplin became addicted to methamphetamines. She returned to Port Arthur yet again, sobered up at the Joplin homestead, and attempted to renounce her life as an artist. But she could not resist opportunities to perform in Houston and Austin clubs, where her voice manifested ever more powerfully, an uncorked siren calling her away from the life of dutiful commuter student and sociology major at Beaumont’s Lamar Tech. At age 23, after sharing a bill in Austin with the 13th Floor Elevators, she split town for Haight-Ashbury yet again. When she wrote her parents to give them her whereabouts, she promised to stay clean.

In just over a year, she achieved much of what she thought she wanted, but chafed at the constraints of Big Brother. As she turned to heroin to soften anxiety and fears of rejection, her urge to rebel—even within the parameters of the counterculture—could not be reined in. “I’ve been doing it for 26 years,” she told the New York Times in 1969, conflating her age and her lifelong iconoclasm, “and all the people who were trying to compromise me are now coming to me, man. You better not compromise yourself, it’s all you got.… I’m a goddamn living example of that…. People aren’t supposed to be like me, sing like me, make out like me, drink like me, live like me, but now they’re paying me $50,000 a year for me to be like me. That’s what I hope I mean to those kids out there… that they can be themselves and win. You just have to start thinking that way, being that righteous with yourself, and you’ve won already.”

Joplin’s great champion Ellen Willis, a rare female rock critic of the era, worried for post-Big Brother Janis in the pages of The New Yorker. “Did Big Brother perhaps give her more than we realized?” she wrote. As often happens with performers, Joplin had to learn in public, so the initial answer to this question was a resounding maybe. Only three months after assembling her back-up players, Joplin was still finding her way, which showed in her two-night stand at New York’s Fillmore East. Joplin didn’t fall back on her usual over-the-top performance techniques, but modulated herself, doing the “kind of things that milk you rather than hammer you,” she said. Willis was one of the few critics who seemed to get it.

Rolling Stone’s Paul Nelson resolutely panned the shows, describing Joplin as “The Judy Garland of Rock” who “strangled the songs to death.” Six weeks later, when she performed back in San Francisco at Bill Graham’s Winterland, her “people” did not call for an encore—a first on her own turf. Afterwards in the dressing room, journalist John Bowers noted, “She is pale, as if in shock, saying, ‘San Francisco’s changed, man. Where are my people? They used to be so wild. I know I sang well! I know I did!’” One of her earliest fans, esteemed jazz critic Ralph J. Gleason, advised her in his San Francisco Chronicle column to “scrap this band and go right back to being a member of Big Brother if they’ll have her.”

Hurt but undaunted, Joplin continued to pursue her musical vision. She recorded her debut solo album, I Got Dem Ol’ Kozmic Blues Again Mama!, its title alluding to a persistent existential dread her father had called “the Saturday night swindle.” She’d written new songs including “One Good Man,” a Bessie Smith blues update. Other material ranged from her adaptation of the Chantels’ “Maybe,” a favorite from her teen years, and Rodgers and Hart’s “Little Girl Blue,” inspired by the 1959 Nina Simone recording of the song. (Simone would later applaud Joplin’s version.)

The album debuted on Billboard on October 11, 1969, remained there for 28 weeks and gradually moved up to #5. Joplin’s aching original “Kozmic Blues” just missed the Top 40, hitting #41. Reviews were lukewarm, with Joplin, again, being taken to task—by male critics—for being “bent on becoming Aretha Franklin” and dumping Big Brother. An exception was an insightful Village Voice piece by Johanna Schier (later Johanna Hall, coauthor of the Pearl track, “Half Moon”), who wrote that Joplin “was singing stronger and better… The top of her range is more solid and her vocal control is maturing… She breaks through into greatness by anyone’s standards.” Backed by her Kozmic Blues Band, she would play the biggest venues of her career to date, including a sold-out concert on December 19 at Madison Square Garden.

Bettmann ArchiveJanis Joplin and her final group, the Full Tilt Boogie Band, perform at the Festival for Peace at Shea Stadium in August 1970.

The first year of her brief solo flight, Joplin headlined Woodstock, performing an hour-long set in the middle of the night, singing until her voice gave out. She made her debut on The Ed Sullivan Show and The Dick Cavett Show, appeared on the cover of Newsweek (the cover line: “The Rebirth of the Blues”), and toured Europe for the first time, a series of concerts garnering rapturous responses. At London’s Royal Albert Hall, she’d even managed to roust a sold-out, normally staid audience from their seats.

Joplin remained peripatetic, musically speaking, and driven. She’d learned to play and sing Kris Kristofferson’s “Me and Bobby McGee,” and the song opened new doors. Joplin sought a smaller, rootsier-sounding unit to bring it, and other material, to life. She would christen this group Full Tilt Boogie. With them, she would mature as a bandleader and co-producer of her recorded output, all gloriously evident on her final album, Pearl, and in footage of Joplin and Full Tilt Boogie’s live performances. Following her death during the Pearl sessions, on October 4, 1970, “Me and Bobby McGee” topped the charts for two weeks, and Pearl became the most commercially successful album of her career. Despite her kozmic blues and the critics’ initial discouragement, Joplin, of course, had refused to settle for anything less than traveling the road her music took her.