Another Look: Janis Joplin’s Kozmic Blues

In 1969 Janis Joplin departed from the highly successful band Big Brother & the Holding Company and went solo. Janis Joplin’s Kozmic Blues Band was formed around the legendary blues-rock goddess, and she set her mind to changing up the sound a bit, from her classic blues influenced psychedelic, hippie-rock to a more traditional soul and R&B layered style. I Got Them Ol’ Kozmic Blues Again Mama was the result of Janis’s new found freedom, and my goodness is it a powerful statement.

Kozmic Blues reached gold record status after only three months on the shelves, helped significantly by Janis’s performance at Woodstock in August. Her set on August 16^th at that wonderful 3-day festival included several new songs from the yet unreleased Kozmic Blues album.

The album opens with Try (Just A Little Bit Harder), which for Joplin fans should be a well-known classic from any of her greatest hits releases. The song truly expresses the essence of Janis and the new style of the Kozmic Blues Band. The next track is Maybe and it’s a balled of sorts. A real love song in the tradition of Otis Redding or James Brown, Maybe, just drips pain and anguish, it literally pulls on the heart strings, you can feel Janis’s heart breaking as she belts out the lyrics and the horns blare on behind her. One Good Man, the third song on Kozmic Blues is a stripped down, gritty blues joint. Sounding more like an old Howlin Wolf song than a Janis number, lead guitarist Sam Andrew bleeds all over his instrument with riff after riff.

The forth song As Good As You’ve Been To This World, opens with a two and a half minute instrumental jam session followed by Janis repeating the title over and over. It’s defiantly a great song, and harkins back to her Big Brother days, loud and raspy just how I like it. The fifth and sixth tracks from Kozmic Blues are belt your brains out, heart wrenching pronouncements about the inner workings of a woman, her body and soul. To Love Somebody just makes you want to cry, now I cry at everything so maybe it’s just me, but test yourself and find out how emotional you are. Kozmic Blues is the albums title track and doesn’t disappoint. Slightly ethereal unlike To Love Somebody, it’s more of a haunting tale about lost love and the ongoing need to have someone.

The last two tracks are Little Girl Blue & Work Me Lord, both are bluesy love songs and both are utterly breathtaking. Blue has all the tenderness of an Aretha Franklin number with a nearly overwhelming, Ray Charles, like string section. A master effort by Janis, this just might be the best song on Kozmic Blues. Work Me Lord is a powerful last song, made famous from her set at Woodstock. Not in the original film released in 1970, Work Me Lord was later put in the Woodstock 25^th Anniversary cut of the movie. The album version of Work Me Lord is beautiful and strong; the horns build and build to a wonderful crescendo, when compiled with Janis’s yell-sing style, Work Me Lord says everything about the direction she’s going but doesn’t forget where she came from.

In all Kozmic Blues is a wonderful piece of rock history. I suggest you give it a listen and decide if Janis Joplin isn’t the best female rock singer of her generation and perhaps any generation. It’s available on Itunes for $9 bucks, come on!