The Cover Uncovered: Big Brother and the Holding Company’s R. Crumb classic, ‘Cheap Thrills’
When deciphering the peaks and troughs of the 1960s rock and roll scene, it can be easy to forget just how many people outside of music influenced the explosion of culture that we still see reverberating throughout society to this day. For every monumental Rolling Stones album, Andy Warhol delivered countless installations that would shock and inspire just as greatly. While The Beatles delivered classic songs that littered the airwaves, Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson took to the streets in Easy Rider.
The decade was positively brimming with creativity, and one place where the art world and growing music scene could converge was on their album cover art. Where previously the front of a 12″ record was reserved for the name of your band and title of the album without much further thought, the 1960s saw a host of groups use their cover art as a canvas for expression. One album cover is particularly revered for its impressive artwork and life-changing benefits: Big Brother & The Holding Company’s classic Cheap Thrills.
As the band, complete with iconic lead singer Janis Joplin, sat down to write and record their landmark album Cheap Thrills, they did so amid a wave of marijuana-scented excitement. The group’s performance at the Monterey Pop Festival had not only signalled their arrival into 1967’s summer of love but had christened them as one of the most exciting new bands of the growing counterculture movement of America’s west coast.
As such, producer John Simon sought to capitalise on the band’s growing importance as a live outfit, interspersed audio clippings of crowd noise, and an introduction from famed promoter Bill Graham to give the illusion that the record was a live LP. However, only the brilliant ‘Ball and Chain’ was recorded live, captured at the famous Winterland Ballroom. Naturally, with one of the most fearsome singers of all time backed by a powerhouse live outfit and the swell of enthusiasm that threatened to swallow the band whole, the record hit the top of the charts in 1968, enjoying eight nonconsecutive weeks in their lofty position.
While the music was certainly a huge draw for the majority of listeners, Big Brother & The Holding Company had another secret weapon: the artwork. By 1968, LP covers were routinely used as another area of artistry. One needs only look back a year to The Beatles’ album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and compare it to their first release, Please, Please Me, four years prior to see how far the notion had come. Still, the use of underground artist and soon-to-be comic strip royalty R. Crumb was a move of considerable genius.
The band did have other plans for the cover, but their pitch for a photo of the group naked in bed together fell on deaf ears, and Columbia Records quickly vetoed the idea. Instead, the group mused on the idea of finding work for the newest underground artist on the scene. Drummer Dave Getz remembered: “We had a huge loft/warehouse in San Francisco where we rehearsed and I lived. I remember us all sitting around and talking ideas for the cover, and I said, ‘How about asking R.Crumb?’ Janis, James [Gurley], and I were all big fans of his work; we loved his cartoons which were appearing in the SF underground newspapers and Zap Comics. But outside of San Francisco, not that many people knew of his genius.”
The illustrator had moved to the flourishing San Francisco during the birth of the hippie era and found himself a home in the neighbourhood of Haight-Asbury. Here, he would hone his craft for subversive cartoons and become an icon of the decade, as Crumb neatly describes himself: “My comics appealed to the hard-drinking, hard-fucking end of the hippie spectrum as opposed to the spiritual, Eastern-religious, lighter-than-air type hippie.”
In a letter to his friend in 1968, he noted: “I am going over to meet Janis Joplin tonight… CAN’T WAIT! Which brings me to another important point, which is my sex life has been sliding downhill lately, so I’m trying to do something about that! The only girl I’m making it with is my wife, and getting’ tired of just her all the time.” In truth, he represented everything that Big Brother and The Holding Company were about.
Crumb remembered the moment he was asked to create the cover: “Janis asked me to do an album cover. I liked Janis OK, and I did her cover. I took speed and did an all-nighter. The front cover I designed wasn’t used at all. They used the back cover for the front. I got paid $600. The album cover impressed the hell out of girls much more so than the comics. I got a lot of mileage out of that over the years!”
Crumb originally created the front cover for Cheap Thrills as a design for the back, with an illustration of Joplin put forward for the front. However, Joplin loved the Cheap Thrills design so much that she demanded it be made the front of the record, convincing the record label to make the switch. Columbia Records’ art director of the time noted: “Joplin commissioned it, and she delivered Cheap Thrills to me personally in the office. There were no changes with R. Crumb. He refused to be paid, saying, ‘I don’t want Columbia’s filthy lucre.'”
The cover includes an illustration for each song and frequently depicts unsavoury images, especially of Joplin. But, somehow, it worked for the band. It provided a cover to be relentlessly devoured, continuously pawed over and, therefore, a permanent fixture in any muso’s record collection. But, perhaps most perfectly of all, it succinctly represented the explosive counterculture that both Big Brother and The Holding Company and R. Crumb were all about. In fact, they were each holding a match to the fuse.
