![]() ![]() The halcyon days of rock are over, and it shows. What distinguishes it, in general, from Cheap Thrills, is a certain flavor. They are simply a better band and more congenial to Janis, which is a big reason why Pearl is more satisfying than Kozmic Blues. Eventually, she assembled Full Tilt Boogie, the band that backs her on Pearl. No wonder the association was short lived. Walter Yetnikoff, Combative and Influential Former CBS Records Head, Dead at 87 Having everything thrown on her shoulders, she tortured her mannerisms, and what sounded right with Big Brother verged on unpleasantness and often lacked justification. It was like trying to breathe life into a corpse. In her best moments, she took the lumpish rhythm and gave it wings, using the slides of her voice and her asymmetrical attack on the syllables to break loose from the banal riffing behind her. Her style, too, transplanted to a tighter setting, seemed overblown and uncontrolled. The new band didn’t help much and her voice, subjected to studio clarity, sounded more strained than expressive. Kozmic Blues was bound to be a disappointment, and it was. Evidently, what they had to offer from the beginning was substantial enough to take a lot of wear before it began to thin. But there are no real disasters on the record, and when I saw them live just before they broke up there was still an overriding exultation, remarkable in a band that was supposedly full of discontent and had been repeating a small repertoire of songs for so long. With Big Brother, Janis was free to leap and range the band was always there to break any falls. Nothing on Pearl or Kozmic Blues equals that supreme moment of artistic largesse and it’s promise of life’s bounty. ![]() In the face of such drives, reviewers can be extraneous. And if they hadn’t seen the group live, they went after buying the record and got just what the psychologist ordered: the assurance of finally being present at an event they were luckless enought to have previously missed out on. Not only the music, but their own experience was immortalized, so they bought a million copies of it. ![]() The critics gave that album a rough time, but audiences sized it up just right as a momento of a live show they didn’t want to forget. The song resists her, the way it wouldn’t, say, Ella, or Chris Connor, or most vocalists.” But ooooh, the vibes on Cheap Thrills. Similarly, on “Little Girl Blue” (from Kozmic Blues), her style, her very being, flashed with the firm identity of the song. She couldn’t really handle a song with a tradition behind it, like “Summertime.” The result was hokey and not a little desperate. Her (in my opinion) failures confirmed this. She was a rock singer with a rock band, not a “vocalist” in the conventional, independent sense. A hard act to follow, an even harder one to change from. The music she made with Big Brother (documented on Cheap Thrills) was so full-bodied and complete, had such a distinctive stamp, that it became in a listener’s mind an end, rather than a beginning. Janis’ career was complicated by its skyrocketing character. It’s Janis, or it’s Monk, and you listen, and you care, because you know that whatever is going down is genuine and may contain a revelation, and possibility that may be written off in the case of lesser artists. Would you rather listen to bad Monk or good Ramsey Lewis? Or, if Monk could ever be called bad, could Lewis ever be called good? In certain instances, “good” and “bad” can be pretty useless terms. Anyone who exhibits qualities of greatness earns certain privileges - not critical immunity so much as the right to be forever removed from inconsequentiality: all their work, flawed or not, is worth experiencing. She was a remarkable, if erratic, singer, and she proved it, live and on record. Besides, Janis was a heavy, and had incredible presence whether at the top or bottom of her form. The fact that there will be no more studio albums inevitably outweighs the issue of how good or how bad the record might be. Her last album can’t simply be an occasion for evaluation. I suspect that some of the tracks are not in their final shape, but these are not scraps, and there is every indication that Janis was working toward a new maturity and confidence. The voice cut off was clearly in its prime. Fortunately, Pearl is a good record and Janis is often magnificent.
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