From the Vaults : Retrospective Lives Up to Joplin’s Rep

Record companies don’t usually give consumers much choice when it comes to CD retrospectives. The goal is to get you to buy fancy boxed sets rather than individual CDs because there’s more profit in them.

To tempt you, the label offers all sorts of extras--from upgraded sound and bonus tracks to new liner notes and, of course, the sturdy box itself.

So it’s encouraging to see Columbia Legacy give you all sorts of options when it comes to expanded and remastered versions of Janis Joplin’s four best-known albums--her two with Big Brother & the Holding Company and her two solo collections.

Whether you buy the albums individually or purchase all four in a boxed set, you get the same bonus tracks, the same remastered editions and the same liner notes.

The only difference is that the boxed set, titled “Box of Pearls: The Janis Joplin Collection,” includes a fifth disc of five previously unreleased selections.

For casual fans of the late blues-rock singer, it might make more sense to focus one or two of the individual albums. In fact, some may prefer Joplin’s “Greatest Hits” collection, which also has been digitally remastered for the first time from the original master tapes. The collector, however, will want the boxed set, with a list price ($44.98) that’s slightly less than the cost of the four individual CDs, which list for $11.98 each.

Here’s a look at the individual albums.

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** Big Brother & the Holding Company, “Big Brother & the Holding Company,” Columbia / Legacy / Mainstream. Recorded over three days in 1966, it wasn’t released by Mainstream Records until the following summer--after Joplin’s triumphant performance at the Monterey International Pop Festival.

The album itself was ragged, but the Monterey buzz was enough to push it to No. 60 on the national charts. Joplin’s real breakthrough on record, however, didn’t come until 1968, when Columbia released Big Brother’s second album, “Cheap Thrills.” That album shot to No. 1, where it stayed for two months.

On this debut, it was hard at times to even tell who was the San Francisco band’s featured member. Joplin got the most time at the microphone, but other members of the band took over for a spell on various tracks, and the musicianship was anything but tight.

Even though the album is far beneath the quality of later Joplin efforts, there are moments in it that showcase the emotional abandon of her live performances--an abandon that captivated Clive Davis, then president of Columbia Records, when he saw Joplin on stage at Monterey. This is the first time this album has been available on CD.

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**** Big Brother & the Holding Company, “Cheap Thrills,” Columbia Legacy. In moving to Columbia, Joplin brought along the Holding Company, but there’s no way to mistake the fact that she is now the star of the band. The group’s ragged, stretch-out-every-note style still kept her on the sidelines on much of this 1968 release, but when the blues-rock belter did get to the microphone, the results were electric.

It also helped that the material was much stronger than on the debut, thanks to such signature numbers as Jerry Ragavoy and Bert Berns’ “Piece of My Heart” and Big Mama Thornton’s “Ball and Chain.”

Of Joplin, the Pretenders’ Chrissie Hynde once said, “There was something scary in her total delivery. . . . Her performance was so in your face and electrifying that it really put you right there in the moment. There you were living your nice little life in the suburbs and suddenly there was this train wreck, and it was Janis.”

True enough. The Port Arthur, Texas, native threw herself into the music with as much raw urgency as anyone who ever stepped on a stage, and this is the first Joplin album that conveys that uniqueness.

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*** Janis Joplin, “I Got Dem Ol’ Kozmic Blues Again Mama!,” Columbia / Legacy. “I’m gonna try just a little bit harder,” Joplin sings in the opening seconds of her third album, which came out in 1969, and there is more of a sense of professional polish here. That’s largely due to the fact that Joplin and Big Brother guitarist Sam Andrew are backed by a new and far more disciplined group. And the sound moved from the acid-rock tendencies of Big Brother to more of the horn-driven approach of Otis Redding and other Stax / Volt Records artists. The material ranges from the Bee Gees’ “To Love Somebody” to Rodgers-Hart’s “Little Girl Blue.”

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**** Janis Joplin, “Pearl,” Columbia / Legacy. This was Joplin’s final album, released shortly after she died of a drug overdose in a Hollywood hotel room in 1970 at age 27. It featured yet another band--the Full-Tilt Boogie Band--and the musical style leaned more to the blues and country influences of her native Texas. “Pearl” contains her show-stopping version of Kris Kristofferson’s “Me and Bobby McGee,” a song about restless spirits that wasn’t written for Joplin but which she made her own. It’s a particularly moving album because you get the sense listening to it that Joplin was just beginning to find her direction in the studio.

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Note: The five tracks on the boxed set’s fifth disc, titled “Rare Pearls,” include two from the “Cheap Thrills” sessions, but they are of limited value, and shouldn’t have a bearing on whether you opt for the set or the individual discs.

Albums are rated on a scale of one star (poor), two stars (fair), three stars (good) and four stars (excellent).

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Robert Hilburn, The Times’ pop music critic, can be reached by e-mail at [email protected]