DAYS & SUMMERS

JANIS JOPLIN: “Oh, wait ’til you see the album cover, it’s so groovy. It’s a cartoon done by this freak, man. It’s just insane. It’s beautiful. It’s got all of our names on the cover. Plus, the name of the group, the name of all the tunes and all these little silly people. It’s a fine album cover.”

DAVE GETZ (drums, Big Brother & The Holding Company): There were a couple of initial ideas for the Cheap Thrills cover that didn’t work out. Then we were sitting around in our loft one day and I said, ‘What do you think about asking R. Crumb to do it?’ Everybody said, ‘Yeah, that would be far out.’ We were all reading his Zap comics and thought he was a genius. I had a way to get in touch with him through a friend and Janis wanted to be the one to call him.

So Janis spoke to Crumb and he came and sat on the floor in a corner of our dressing room at the Carousel Ballroom [later the Fillmore West], where we were playing. He just watched what was going on and never spoke to anybody. He took Polaroid pictures of everyone in the band and then he went home.

Just a couple of days later he called Janis to say that he’d finished. She picked up the artwork boards from him and we all met at our rehearsal place to take a look. For the front cover he had drawn and painted what looked like a school auditorium stage, and on the stage were these stick figure musicians onto which he’d cut out and pasted the heads from the Polaroid pictures. And it had the backs of the