Hopefully some video footage surfaces to compliment this apparently incendiary performance! To see this now that would be incredible and Janis on fire!

 

Big Brother Live In Concert at the Carousel Ballroom, 23 June 1968. (SONY/Legacy).

NOTE: (As of Sept 2000). I have word that Sony Music is at last ready to offer a contract agreeable to (most of) my terms, which means the album may actually get into production sometime soon.

I believe this album will be hailed as the definite Big Brother live album of all time. Perhaps on some other night they gave a better and more energetic performance, I don't know-- I wasn't lucky enough to be present at it. I was at this one, and I thought at the time it was exceptional. The important thing is, these tapes survived. This is Janis at her absolute peak, and the band was rarely so "on" as they were at these shows. They were kicking ass and having a hell of a good time. Listeners should realise that in those days we didn't yet have onstage monitors for the singers and they depended on the sound coming back from the hall and the sound of their instruments to find the pitch, so the singing sometimes is a bit off. That is how it was then and most multi-tracks of live concerts of the era were overdubbed later to "fix" this problem. Is that a "live album? (...Sort of.) This album is a real concert, warts and all. Working with Paul Stubblebine, the tapes of the weekend's concerts were transferred to digital using the HDCD encoding process. If played on a player with the Pacific Microsonics decoder chips, this will give essentially a 20-bit signal. Not all the tapes managed to make it through to the present, and I didn't have enough blank tape at the time to record all the shows. However, Sunday was far and away the hot night and we have all of that show. The sound is much better than I thought it would be, no tape hiss, and no noticeable distortion or evidence of deterioration of the recording media. This is surprising considering these tapes are 31 years old and have not always been stored under ideal conditions. In fact, I think the sound is a "monster". A unique character of the technique I used in my "diary" or sonic journals of that era was to put the PA signal in the left channel and all instruments not sent to the PA (most of them, usually) were placed in the right. The PA systems of the day were barely able to manage the vocals and drums. This odd sounding (to modern ears) technique produces a nice fat, three dimensional sound when it is played back. The sound is so hot and LIVE that I think few listeners will complain about the vocals and drums coming from one side. Turn it up good and loud! You could even try moving the speakers around, or use three channels, with the right side duped into a second outside channel, with the left channel as center! There are 13 songs from Sunday and one bonus track from Saturday on the album, which is 71 minutes long. The second version of Call on Me shows how different the band's interpretation of a song could be from one performance to the next. The album cover will be an adaptation by the artist, Crazy Arab, of the poster he did for an earlier show in May (BB cancelled that weekend). The set list will be along the right hand edge in the finished cover art.

That project has been on hold for a long time. 

Another unreleased release is "One Night With Janis."

http://www.amazon.com/One-Night-Janis-Joplin/dp/B000HIP4HE/sr=8-7/qid=1168881456/ref=sr_1_7/102-0044886-0064961?ie=UTF8&s=music

This was supposed to come out last September. The label is MegaForce, which has nothing on their site about it and also seems to handle a totally different type of music.

http://www.megaforcerecords.com/main.html

For an update on downloads, please check out

"What Performers Are Paid" in the Ladies and Gentlemen forum.

I think it should be noted that this is from Bear's post at his website (http://www.thebear.org/index.html). Also the last update provided on this concert was: "Sony has no schedule for release as yet (!). Updated 21 JUN 2005."
Perhaps Bear and CV could get together so that we could hear this before we are all dead (and ungrateful).

Amen Polypheme

It seems that the diplomatic approach you propose of perhaps Bear and CV making this Incendiary Musical treasure unleashed like the wild untamable Beast that Big Brother With Janis was in apparent Zenith form. There is so much Janis out there that needs to be shared to turn on a whole new people to a voice that changed the game and it is a crime that young people today are not exposed to Janis' unbridled individuality. Janis would be pissed  with her music being held back or almost intentionally neglected. That is a national crime because at the end of the day she was one of the revolutionaries who helped to build the house of Classic Rock and Janis isn't even allowed into her own home. Somebody has control issues with Janis' legacy or is carrying a briefcase agenda meanwhile this American cultural masterpiece is being disgraced in this state of neglect of some of the most intense raw visceral music ever created! Till then all hail the land of booters!