Cheap Thrills, Janis Joplin's final album with Big Brother & the Holding Company, will be reissued on November 30 via Columbia/Legacy Recordings.
The 50th anniversary set will be released under its original title, Sex, Dope & Cheap Thrills, and will include rare and unreleased tracks recorded during the sessions for the 1968 LP.
Sex, Dope & Cheap Thrills was the name the band had originally chosen for the record, however, Columbia shortened it to Cheap Thrills as the studio deemed the original title to be controversial.
The reissue will include 29 studio outtakes and a live performance of "Ball and Chain" from an April 12, 1968, concert at San Francisco's Winterland. Only five of the tracks have been previously officially available on various reissues and Record Store Day exclusives.
Sex, Dope & Cheap Thrills will be available as a two-CD set or in a 16-track, two-LP distillation.
"Cheap Thrills seems to have stood the test of time," Dave Getz writes in the liner notes. "It might be because it is arguably the greatest work by a great artist, Janis Joplin. It is certainly the greatest and closest representation of what Big Brother & the Holding Company was as a band and I would add to that argument that Big Brother/Janis as a band, and as a SOUND, was the embodiment of the San Francisco, psychedelic, counter-culture of the 1960s."
"On another, more metaphorical level and in the perspective created by the distance of 50 years, I see Cheap Thrills as a time capsule for the year 1968," he adds. "That year might have been the moment when it all came to a boil for Big Brother, Janis and the entire 1960s, acid-infused, revved-to-the-max, counter-culture generation."
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