Janis Joplin's Greatest Hits poll

i own this on CD and will dig it out and listen first before voting.

oh the car is: "Joplin's Porsche 356C in "Summer of Love – Art of the Psychedelic Era" (Whitney Museum, New York)."

"Down On Me". Juggernaut of a song.

reading the recent Ellen Willis anthology made me feel kind of bad for being pretty much indifferent to Janis

"Ball And Chain" rules though obviously

Wasn't 'Half Moon' one of her 'hits'?

yes but this poll is this album however:

Janis Joplin's Greatest Hits is a 1973 collection of hit songs by American singer-songwriter Janis Joplin, who died in 1970. Writing for Allmusic, Steve Huey called the collection "solid, if skimpy" and noted the inclusion of "Me and Bobby McGee", missing from other Joplin compilations.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/97/Janisjoplingreatesthits.jpg

Tough call. Most of these have been played to death. I'm going to cue some Janis tomorrow so I can vote for something other than Me and Bobby McGee!

Her "Summertime" kills.

Take it!
Take a big old chunk of my lung, chunk of my lung!

You know you bought it
If you buy it with things.

Songs like piece of my heart or move over are good but I hate listening to them. They sound very raw in the bad way. I can't really imagine them in another version but there's something in the production that irks me.

Me and Bobby McGee is the one I'd listen to first in this comp. I like more the idea of her voice being the central force of the song and the rest of the instruments being laidback and tender. Piece of My Heart for example has too many things going on imho.

Not sure I'm that familiar with the studio stuff. Do have the 2 main BBHC lps but I think I'm a lot more familiar with live versions.
The Summertime on the other JJ vinyl anthology is sublime. Think that has a lot to do with the guitar though. Have assumed that it was James Gurley but bits of the noisy stuff seem to have better chops than I thought he had.

Looking forward to getting the new live set the one recorded by Owsley Stanley.

played me and bobby mcgee on the jukebox tonight
fondly remembered college dive had that in heavy rotation back in the day, always will play it whenever i see it as it just puts me in that hard drinkin ~mood~

I associate this so much with bar jukeboxes as well. "Summertime" is terrific.

"Move Over" was my favorite back when I used to listen to her all the time, but it's been about 20 years. I'll have to give these a listen.

Pretty sure this would have been one of my first half-dozen albums when I started collecting records in the mid-'70s. I'd go with "Down on Me," although "Piece of My Heart" and "Bobby McGee" are close (and although the studio version, from Big Brother's first LP, is preferable). There's a documentary from '74 called Janis that used to play on TV periodically but is long out of circulation. I still remember the scene where she goes back to Texas for a high school reunion. Very sad--she's been on the cover of Newsweek by this point, and she's still traumatized/intimidated by these people who used to make her life so miserable. (On the whole, I'm a bigger fan of her than her music. Her really bluesy side loses me. But I find Janis the person endlessly interesting and inspirational.)

Lots of OTM here. Eazy is probably right, the music has a lot of sadness in it and might sound better in a bar or on a weekend afternoon. As opposed to cuing it up at work or on your commute!

I was under the impression that Janis was not very well liked around these parts. I haven't really listened to her since I was in high school, mainly due to over-exposure at the time. My local library has a handful of her albums and comps though, so I'll stop there after work and really try and dig into how this stuff fares with me now.

xp: that's probably sound advice, Mount Cleaners.

I hated hearing Janis Joplin when I was a kid, it was about adult people and feelings I didn't want to intrude on.

I only chime in here because I heard some Janis a couple of weeks ago and was surprised at how listenable I found it. But it was on a weekend when I was feeling relaxed.

"Move Over" rocks so hard.

I was indifferent to her until watching Monterey Pop & that "Ball & Chain" slew me, so that.

any live videos/DVDs that people would recommend? The recordings kind of grate on me and the big songs are an ugly combination of overexposed and dated.

Her performances in the doc Festival Express are really great.

Exactly what I was going to say. A friend of mine was at that show when he was 14 or so.

These performances?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VnqIuXj9JA

Yeah--that was the highlight of the film for me, more than Joplin's onstage stuff. Dead hippie icons harmonizing on a train.

I want to vote for Summertime but Piece of My Heart is just *one of those songs* for me.

We had a substitute English teacher in high school when I was about 16 or so, and he did this exercise where everyone played their favorite song for the class and handed out lyric sheets so the class could talk about the song, and write about it.
I picked Janis' Piece of My Heart. It was the worst. First off, everyone laughed when she started singing..and then when I handed out the lyrics the teacher said, "Well this song is pretty self explanatory I don't think there's much to talk about here."
I was heartbroken. And I was SO mad, because we had spent a whole class on fucking Jumpin Jack fucking Flash which just "hi I took a bunch of drugs here's a song I wrote that rhymes". RAGH. Plus, all the boys in my class were Led Zeppelin/Jimi Hendrix/Who nerds I was just SO mad that they hadn't heard of her.

Stupid high school. I still love the song though.

That teacher was a dick. That song is way more conflicted than I imagine most other stuff offered up was.

Exactly!

(Thought I posted this story earlier this morning--I hope it didn't end up in some random wrong thread instead.)

I played pool in a bar league for a year or so, all in dive-y Minneapolis bars, and I think every one had this album on the jukebox. "Summertime" is as good a value as you can get for your jukebox dollar in terms of length and quality--so it's sad afternoon-bar sunlight-through-the-slats music for sure, but also beer-and-pool mixed with that.

Anyway, we had an away game once at a bar that the neighborhood later bought in order to close it. There was karaoke there, and no one was singing except for the college-gal karaoke host. At some point, a very very drunk and grizzled 40-something gal got up from the horseshoe-shaped bar and wanted to sing a song.

"Me and Bobby McGee" started on the karaoke machine, and she just mumbled the words, reading them off the prompter--no singing, just mumbling "Freedom's just another word," etc. Then, at the end, the screen says "na na na na na na na na na na" and, not singing, she mumbles "na na na na na na na" into the mic.

Playing pool nearby, I applauded (not ironically, just because she got up there and did it). She walked over and asked if I liked it, and I said yes, and she said, "I knew Janis Joplin."

I said, "You did? Wow."

And she goes, "Well...the era."

I think "Move Over" is my favorite thing here from the post-Big Brother albums. Janis' own composition.

lol "i knew the era"

A+ story, Eazy

Like Christgau said that her strength was as a rock and roll singer, so maybe I agree and think "Move Over" plays to that better than her covers of "Maybe" and "Cry Baby" (and maybe even "Summertime").

Worth pointing out also that this is not the Big Brother version of "Ball and Chain."

Christgau - "She needed Big Brother more than any of us knew, not just for image, but musically, and not as a complement but a parallel."

Move Over

"Summertime"

A poll of Cheap Thrills might make my head explode, I love every track on that album.

also, one of the all-time-greatest album covers

Really knocked out by the "Coo Coo"/"The Last Time" 45, which I'd never heard before. The last record to come out on Mainstream and two songs that weren't on that first album. No one else sounded remotely like this!

so i found this CD and played the first half of this in my car. "Summertime" is astonishing but "Me and Bobby McGee" is just on a different level. will listen to the rest of this a bit later.

ball and chain sounds like getting beat up

I love what she did with Bobby McGee, and she definitely owned it in that Aretha way of owning Respect over Otis, but I still prefer Kristofferson's version of Bobby McGee overall.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

No votes for Get it While You Can? :(

I voted for Piece of My Heart narrowly over Try.

Get It While You Can is a good song for sure. I was the only one to vote for my song (Down On Me), but I can appreciate pretty much everything on this record.

yeah I voted Piece of my heart, but there's at least four I couldve voted for

Damn, I missed this. +1 vote for Summertime from me.