Cheap Thrills is the second studio album by Big Brother and the Holding Company, released on August 12, 1968, by Columbia Records. Cheap Thrills was the band’s final album with lead singer Janis Joplin before she left to begin a solo career.
The cover was drawn by underground cartoonist Robert Crumb after the band’s original cover idea, a photo of the group naked in bed together, was vetoed by Columbia Records. Crumb had originally intended his art for the LP back cover, with a portrait of Janis Joplin to grace the front. But Joplin—an avid fan of underground comics, especially the work of Crumb—so loved the Cheap Thrills illustration that she demanded Columbia place it on the front cover. It is number nine on Rolling Stone’s list of 100 greatest album covers. Crumb later authorized the sale of prints of the cover, some of which he signed before sale.
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| The front cover for the album Cheap Thrills by Big Brother & the Holding Company / Janis Joplin. |
Crumb was not the first choice for Big Brother and the Holding Company’s album cover. The band, which rose to meteoric success immediately after their milestone performance at the Monterey Pop Festival in the summer of 1967, was quickly signed to Columbia Records who wanted an album quick to cash in on the emerging flower power market. The original title for the band’s first album for Columbia was Sex, Dope and Cheap Thrills, a fair summary of the band’s credo. That, of course, did not fly with the suits at Columbia who nixed the blunt Sex and Dope and left only the vague Cheap Thrills. When it came time for the album cover, the band’s idea was to go with an expected band photo, with a minor twist of taking the photo in their birthday suits. The result proved unsatisfactory, and another no-no for the suits who make the decisions.
The idea of going with a standard band photograph was not abandoned yet, as drummer Dave Getz recalled: “Then Bob Cato, CBS’s art director, thought we should do a photo session with Richard Avedon, perhaps the most famous fashion photographer in the world. Avedon did his ‘Avedon thing’ on us; the fan blowing our hair, the strobe lights flashing, white background, random rearrangement of our faces. It was another huge and costly miss. The photos were good but more about Avedon than us.”
What’s a band to do now? Enter Crumb the Sex, Dope and Cheap Thrills universe. Drummer Dave Getz recalls the moment the idea of asking Crumb to do the cover came up: “We had a huge loft/warehouse in SF where we rehearsed and I lived. I remember us all sitting around and talking ideas for the cover and I said ‘How about asking R.Crumb?’ Janis, James (Gurley, guitar player) and I were all big fans of his work, we loved his cartoons which were appearing in the SF underground newspapers and Zap Comics. But outside of SF not that many people knew of his genius.”
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| Robert Crumb in 1969 |
Through a mutual friend they got Crumb’s number and Janis called him. Crumb remembered the moment he was asked to create the cover: “Janis asked me to do an album cover. I liked Janis OK and I did her cover. I took speed and did an all-nighter. The front cover I designed wasn’t used at all. They used the back cover for the front. I got paid $600. The album cover impressed the hell out of girls much more so than the comics. I got a lot of mileage out of that over the years!”
Getz added: “The next weekend Crumb came to our show at The Carousel Ballroom, sat on the floor in our backstage dressing room and observed. He really wasn’t into our music but it didn’t matter. It was maybe one or two days later Crumb called Janis to come and pick up what he’d done.”
Getz is understandably mild in his description of Crumb’s opinion of Big Brother and the Holding Company. Here is Crumb’s version, unadulterated: “She was a swell gal and a very talented singer. Ever heard any of this pre-Big Brother stuff she recorded? She was great. Then she got together with those idiots. The main problem with Big Brother was they were amateur musicians trying to play psychedelic rock and be heavy and you listen to it now and it’s bad… just embarrassing.” Agree with him or not, this is Crumb. Gotta love his candid way of describing things in words and images.
Back to that cover. Crumb’s original idea for the front cover was a cartoon of the band performing on stage with the band’s faces pasted on them. The band was less than overwhelmed by this, but then they looked at what Crumb delivered for the back cover and they saw the light. A comic strip with a panel for each of the songs plus band members credits. They immediately decided to make it the front cover and forever cemented the iconic status of that comic strip among album covers.
Cheap Thrills was released in August of 1968, steadily climbing the Billboard LPs chart until it reached the top and stayed there 8 consecutive weeks. When Janis Joplin announced during a show at the Fillmore East in the fall of 1968 that their album cover was the work of R.Crumb, they received the biggest standing ovation of the night.
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| Janis Joplin by Robert Crumb |
Crumb was a hero for the hippies, but by that point he was on a very different wavelength. He liked some aspects of the Hippie movement, what he termed as seeing through the hype of consumer culture. He valued how they strived to live simply and saw the ecology movement being sparked by that. But he quickly became disillusioned by the movement: “Since it was mostly children of the middle class, it was immediately something for them to be smug about. ‘Oh, I have seen the light and you haven’t. I’m beautiful, I’m spiritual. I lost my ego and you haven’t.’ It became where in any social gathering everybody sat around trying to out-cool each other.” But as he admits, he never felt comfortable in that environment anyway, even when it was at its peak of innocence: “I couldn’t kick off my shows and go dance in the park. I didn’t have it in me.”
In 2007, Cheap Thrills was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. Rolling Stone magazine ranked the album number 338 in its 2003 list of the “500 Greatest Albums of All Time.” It was repositioned to number 372 in the 2020 list.
(via The Music Aficionado)
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