Piece of My Heart

The Zoo Crew just dropped the needle on a real barn-burner, Zoo Freaks. “Piece of My Heart” by Big Brother & the Holding Company, pulled off the 1968 album Cheap Thrills, is the kind of record that still smells like patchouli, motorcycle oil, and a ballroom full of bare feet. This is the song that put Janis Joplin’s voice on the national radio dial and proved a San Francisco band could take a soul number and stretch it until the seams howled. If you are riding with us over at THE ZOO, turn it up. The guitars do not ask permission.

The tune was not born in the Haight. New York writers Bert Berns and Jerry Ragovoy wrote it as a gospel-soaked soul piece. Berns, the man behind “Twist and Shout” and “Hang On Sloopy,” offered it first to Van Morrison, who had just left Them. Morrison passed. He wanted to sing his own songs. Berns then handed it to Erma Franklin, Aretha’s older sister, who had all but stepped away from the business and was working an office job. Her 1967 single for Berns’s Shout label climbed to number 10 on the R&B chart and number 62 on the Hot 100. It was arranged with a strident soul feel after an early idea that leaned calypso. Erma later said her models were the flat-footed gospel singers who needed no dance routine. They just stood there and tore the house down. Berns died of a heart attack at the end of 1967, the follow-up album never happened, and Erma went back to computer work. Her version still earned a Grammy nomination for Best Female R&B Vocal Performance once the cover blew up.

Big Brother found the song the old-fashioned way, by a friend walking into rehearsal with a record. Drummer Dave Getz remembered the band’s first East Coast tour in March 1968. Jack Casady of Jefferson Airplane came in and said he wanted to play them something he thought they could do. They loved it. Janis loved it. Bassist Peter Albin later said they had no interest in copying Erma. Her take had a delicacy and a sense of mystery that was beyond them, so they “Big Brotherized” it the same way they had done with “Summertime” and Big Mama Thornton’s “Ball and Chain.” Sam Andrew arranged the track and cut three loud, distorted guitar solos. James Gurley answered with that feral lead tone. The rhythm section of Albin and Getz kept the floor moving. Producer John Simon recorded the band in New York in the spring of 1968, and the finished cut ran four minutes and fifteen seconds.

Columbia put it out in August 1968, backed in some pressings by “Turtle Blues” and in others by “Summertime.” Billboard called the single dynamite. Cash Box talked about an explosive performance and a power-packed Janis Joplin vocal. It reached number 12 on the Hot 100, the only Top 20 hit Big Brother ever had, and it landed on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s list of 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll. Cheap Thrills itself went to number one and sat there for eight weeks. Columbia had balked at the band’s original album title, Sex, Dope and Cheap Thrills, so the R. Crumb cartoon cover went out under the safer name. Years later the anniversary set restored the original title, and the band’s own site still points listeners straight at “Piece of My Heart” from that record.

Erma Franklin said that the first time she heard Janis on the radio she did not even recognize her own song. The vocal arrangement had been torn up and rebuilt. In a later interview she allowed that the cover was so different she did not resent it too much. Writer Ellen Willis heard two different women in the same lyric. When Erma sang it, the challenge was that no matter what you do to me, I will not let you destroy my ability to love. Janis sounded more like a woman saying that if she kept giving, kept setting the example, surely he would have to give something back. Joan Jett later said the primal scream in the middle of the record is what hooked her. Clive Davis, who signed the band to Columbia, has written that he personally re-edited the single and then went to Janis to get her okay. She did not write a word of it. She just inhabited it until half the country thought the song had always belonged to her.

The band that carried that scream started in a Victorian house on Page Street in the Haight-Ashbury in 1965. Peter Albin, a folk-blues guitarist out of the same South Bay scene that produced Jerry Garcia, was playing upstairs when Sam Andrew walked in off the sidewalk. Andrew had been in bands since his teens in Okinawa and had studied languages and philosophy. Albin told him he wanted a group that would write songs for children. With concert promoter Chet Helms they pulled in Detroit guitarist James Gurley, whose untamed style became the early signature, and then painter-drummer Dave Getz, who had played Dixieland in Europe and jazz since he was a kid. They opened at Ken Kesey’s Trips Festival in January 1966 and became a house band at the Avalon Ballroom, living together and rehearsing every day.

They still wanted a strong woman out front. Helms sent word to Port Arthur, Texas, and talked Janis Joplin into coming back to San Francisco. She had hitchhiked out once before, in 1963, amazed the folk rooms, and gone home. This time she stayed. By the summer of 1967, her “Ball and Chain” at the Monterey Pop Festival knocked the industry sideways. A bad early deal with Mainstream had left them broke. Manager Albert Grossman and Clive Davis got them to Columbia, and Cheap Thrills was the payoff. At the end of 1968 Janis left, taking Sam Andrew with her for a while. The others scattered. They rebuilt in 1970 with new singers and two more Columbia albums, Be a Brother and How Hard It Is. After a long layoff the surviving originals regrouped for the twentieth anniversary of the Summer of Love in 1987 and kept the Cheap Thrills songs on the road. Gurley died in 2009 and Andrew in 2015. Albin and Getz have carried the name forward, still playing “Piece of My Heart” the way the people who built it play it.

You can follow the long ride on the band’s official site, Big Brother & the Holding Company, where the history page and the front page both sit right next to Cheap Thrills and “Piece of My Heart.” Their official Facebook is Big Brother and the Holding Company, the official Instagram is @bbhcband, and the official X account is @BBHC. Those are the rooms the band keeps open. The rest of the story is on the record. Take another little piece, Zoo Freaks. You know you got it if it makes you feel good.