"Piece of My Heart" by Janis Joplin and Big Brother & the Holding Company (1968)

Dance song of the day - August 1, 2024

While I’m working on the final Todd Rundgren piece, it’s back to putting up some dance songs of the day.

This song was requested by Beth Lisogorsky. She has an excellent stack called Beth’s TV & Film Recommendations where I go to find things to watch. (Check it out!)

Janis Joplin actually has a connection with Todd, which I think is quite humorous and share with you below.

Song of the day

One of the things that always struck me about Janis was how bursting with life she was. She’d finally found her tribe in the sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll world of San Francisco in the late sixties and embraced that tribal life with unrestrained zeal and passion.

Enter Todd into her orbit when he’s sent out to California by Bearsville Records head Albert Grossman to oversee preparation of her next album. Janis is now the head and lead singer of her own band, the reconfigured Full Tilt Boogie Band, having quit her previous position as vocalist for Big Brother & the Holding Company two years earlier following the release of their #1 album Cheap Thrills. The lead single from that album, “Piece of My Heart,” had reached #12 on the Billboard Hot 100 and made Janis into a bona fide star — with all the outrageous perks and baggage that came along with that.

You can just imagine 22-year-old Todd all fired up to expedite her record to completion as an up-and-coming producer, wanting to make good on his burgeoning reputation as the “boy wonder” of Bearsville.

But Janis, as he quickly found out, had other more important things on her mind:

“Daily I would make my way to Janis’ house where a cavalcade of songwriting suitors would pitch tunes to her when they could get her attention. Maybe day three and there are players and songsmiths waiting to present to her when I get a phone call from Janis saying she’s at the police station and will be a couple hours late. Shortly thereafter someone accidentially leaves her bedroom door open revealing Janis still abed with a young partner and nowhere near the cop station.”

In reflecting on the experience, he admits that he “was still pretty young and inexperienced… I hadn’t previously worked with someone who really had no interest in the process of making records. The live performance came so naturally that the details of making a record made everything seem tedious… she was already a force unto herself.”

Todd would end up returning to New York, and the recording sessions for what would become Janis’ fourth and final album, Pearl, would finally get under way in early September. Janis would record the a capella hit “Mercedes Benz” on October 1st, just three days before her accidental death from a heroin overdose. The posthumous album, released the following January, would go 4x platinum and the recorded single “Me and Bobby McGee” would reach #1.

As Todd noted, Janis was an absolute natural onstage. She had found her home. Here’s Janis in a live performance of “Piece of My Heart” with Big Brother & the Holding Company. You might need to turn the volume up — a lot of concert videos had so-so sound quality back in the good ol’ days.

And here’s the slower studio version, which is the full-on Janis experience.

If you’re interested in knowing more about her, I recommend On the Road with Janis Joplin by John Byrne Cooke, who was her road manager and gives an insider’s history and perspective.

Worth watching is the documentary Festival Express, about a 1970 train tour across Canada by Janis, the Grateful Dead, The Band, and other rock acts, in which you can see just how full of zeal and passion she was.

Song credits

Songwriters - Jerry Ragovoy and Bert Berns

Producers - John Simon

Big Brother and the Holding Company

• Janis Joplin – vocals

• Sam Andrew – guitar, vocals

• James Gurley – guitar

• Peter Albin – bass

• Dave Getz – drums

Additional personnel

Engineers – Fred Catero, James Gurley, Janis Joplin, Jerry Hochman, Roy Segal