Big Brother and the Holding Company

Big Brother and the Holding Company formed in San Francisco in 1965, emerging from the city's early psychedelic rock scene alongside acts like the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane. Guitarists Peter Albin and Sam Andrew were among the group's founders, and the band's lineup soon expanded to include guitarist James Gurley and drummer Dave Getz, with Janis Joplin joining as lead vocalist in 1966, bringing a raw, blues-soaked power that quickly became the band's defining feature.

The group's landmark release, ‘Cheap Thrills’ (1968), captured their loose, live-wire energy, deliberately produced to sound like a concert recording despite being made in the studio, and became one of the essential documents of the San Francisco psychedelic scene. It featured Joplin-fronted staples like «Piece of My Heart» and «Ball and Chain», songs built on the interplay between her searing vocals and the band's raw, guitar-driven improvisation, and the album became a commercial and critical breakthrough, helping define the psychedelic blues-rock sound coming out of the Bay Area.

After Joplin and Sam Andrew departed to pursue other projects, the band went through various lineup changes and periods of inactivity, but its surviving members, largely centered on Albin and Getz, continued performing and reuniting for decades afterward, keeping the group's legacy and its ties to the psychedelic era alive on stage well beyond the 1960s.