More Five Star Albums Available Now
- Cheap Thrills returns to the site for only the second time since2019, here with solid Double Plus (A++) sound on both sides of this original Stereo 360 pressing
- We would love to offer this classic to more of our customers at a better price, but we simply don’t have the staff it takes to return nine out of ten copies to their sellers for noise and scratches, which forces us to make do with the few copies that show up in stores, and that means a wait of more than five years between listings, sorry!
- Most copies we played were too compressed or veiled to involve you in the music, but this one has the kind of rich, big, clear sound this Bay Area band needs to work its bluesy magic
- Turn this one up good and loud (which you can do when the sound is right) and you’ll have a living, breathing Janis Joplin performing right in front of you
- Problems in the vinyl are sometimes the nature of the beast with these vintage LPs, but once you hear how excellent sounding this copy is, you might be inclined, as we were, to stop counting stitches and just be swept away by the music
- 5 stars: “Nobody had ever heard singing as emotional, as desperate, as determined, or as loud as Joplin’s, and Cheap Thrills was her greatest moment… Heard today, Cheap Thrills is a musical time capsule and remains a showcase for one of rock’s most distinctive singers.”
We’ve rarely been able to get this shootout off the ground, but we finally managed to stumble upon enough clean copies to get this round going. It’s been years since we last had a copy of this album on the site.
This album has got that trippy 60s San Francisco sound, no doubt about it. Those of you who are familiar with Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow or the early Grateful Dead albums know what I’m talking about. The Tubey Magic of the guitars is worth the price of admission alone; you just don’t hear this kind of sound on modern records.
Like you might expect from this mixture of blues and psychedelic rock, the sound can be a bit raw. Of course, that’s probably the way the band wanted it to be — I don’t see what more a mastering engineer could have done to make this music work any better.
This vintage Stereo 360 pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records can barely BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn’t showing signs of coming back. If you love hearing INTO a recording, actually being able to “see” the performers, and feeling as if you are sitting in the studio with the band, this is the record for you. It’s what vintage all analog recordings are known for — this sound.
If you exclusively play modern repressings of vintage recordings, I can say without fear of contradiction that you have never heard this kind of sound on vinyl. Old records have it — not often, and certainly not always — but maybe one out of a hundred new records do, and those are some pretty long odds.
What the Best Sides of Cheap Thrills Have to Offer Is Not Hard to Hear
- The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space
- The most Tubey Magic, without which you have almost nothing. CDs give you clean and clear. Only the best vintage vinyl pressings offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes in 1968
- Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low
- Natural tonality in the midrange — with all the instruments having the correct timbre
- Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional studio space
No doubt there’s more but we hope that should do for now. Playing the record is the only way to hear all of the qualities we discuss above, and playing the best pressings against a pile of other copies under rigorously controlled conditions is the only way to find a pressing that sounds as good as this one does.
You Can Find One Yourself (If You’ve Got Time and Money To Spare…)
Let me tell you, you’re going to have to clean and play a whole bunch of copies if you want to find one that sounds this good and plays this quietly. That’s gonna set you back quite a bit of dough, because clean pressings are going to set you back quite a chunk of change.
So you could find one on your own, or you could save yourself the trouble and take home (what we consider to be) a reasonably priced Hot Stamper copy.
Heck, it’s even hard for us to cover our costs on a shootout like this, but its worth the trouble, because we know the folks who take one of these home are going to have a lot of fun playing it.
What We’re Listening For On Cheap Thrills
- Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
- Then: presence and immediacy. The vocals aren’t “back there” somewhere, lost in the mix. They’re front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt would put them.
- The Big Sound comes next — wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.
- Then transient information — fast, clear, sharp attacks, not the smear and thickness so common to these LPs.
- Tight punchy bass — which ties in with good transient information, also the issue of frequency extension further down.
- Next: transparency — the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the instruments.
- Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing — an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.
Side One
Combination of the Two
I Need a Man to Love
Summertime
Piece of My Heart
Side Two
Turtle Blues
Oh, Sweet Mary
Ball and Chain
AMG 5 Star Rave Review!
Cheap Thrills, the major-label debut of Janis Joplin, was one of the most eagerly anticipated, and one of the most successful, albums of 1968. Joplin and her band Big Brother & the Holding Company had earned extensive press notice ever since they played the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967, but for a year after that their only recorded work was a poorly produced, self-titled album that they’d done early in their history for Mainstream Records; and it took the band and the best legal minds at Columbia Records seven months to extricate them from their Mainstream contract, so that they could sign with Columbia.
All the while, demand continued to build, and they still faced the problem of actually delivering something worthy of the press they’d been getting — Columbia even tried to record them live on-stage on the tour they were in the midst of when the new contract was signed, but somehow the concert tapes from early March of 1968 didn’t capture the full depth of their work. So they spent March, April, and May in the studio with producer John Simon and, miraculously, emerged with something that was as exciting as anything they’d done on-stage.
When Cheap Thrills appeared in August 1968 — sporting a Robert Crumb cover on its gatefold jacket that constituted the most elaborate album design ever lavished on a rock album from Columbia Records, as well as a pop-art classic rivaling the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s jacket — it shot into the charts, reaching number one and going gold within a couple of months, and “Piece of My Heart” became a Top 40 hit and helped to propel the LP to over a million sales. Joplin, with her ear- (and vocal cord-) shredding voice, was the obvious standout. Nobody had ever heard singing as emotional, as desperate, as determined, or as loud as Joplin’s, and Cheap Thrills was her greatest moment.
Not that everything was done full out — there were relatively quiet moments on the album that were as compelling as the high-wattage showcases; her rendition of George Gershwin’s “Summertime” was the finest rock reinterpretation of a standard done by anybody up to that time (though, in an incident recalled in his autobiography Clive, when Columbia Records president Clive Davis played it to Richard Rodgers to give him an example of some of the sounds that younger audiences of the late 60s were listening to, the 66-year-old Rodgers stomped out of the Columbia corporate offices in fury, vowing never to write another song); and Joplin’s own “Turtle Blues” showed that she and the band could turn down and do credible acoustic blues, in something like an authentic period Bessie Smith (or, more properly, Memphis Minnie) sound.
Big Brother’s backup, typical of the guitar-dominated sound of San Francisco psychedelia, made up in enthusiasm what it lacked in precision. But everybody knew who the real star was, and Joplin played her last gig with Big Brother while the album was still on top of the charts. Neither she nor the band would ever equal it. Heard today, Cheap Thrills is a musical time capsule and remains a showcase for one of rock’s most distinctive singers.