Big Brother And The Holding Company Conjure Up the Ghost of Janis Joplin on the Wings of the Phenomenal Mary Bridget! (2

Big Brother And The Holding Company is a name most music nuts link first and foremost with Janis Joplin. Nothing unusual there, of course, since before her galactic launch into the pantheon of rock & roll icons, the girl spent a good while faithfully shaping the image of this psychedelic-leaning outfit from the second half of the sixties. A true romantic, though after just two albums Janis, having noticed the band’s lack of ambition (read: unprofessionalism), soon traded them in for a solo career, which surely played rudely with a few egos. The guys, or rather by now the blokes of pretty respectable age, have been dealing with that awkward situation for forty years in a fairly simple way: with the diplomatic self-label “the band that discovered Janis Joplin,” they cling to a sort of compromise definition of their status, which, when all is said and done, is also the most accurate one.

Today, this kind of fuss over Janis Joplin’s image might seem a bit unfair, especially with the incredible Mary Bridget standing right in front of us, who, in both voice and stature, seems like the pure incarnation of the legendary singer. Mary’s interpretation is a pure distillation of those well-known vocal lines, which the lady backs up even further with a fully lived-in stage performance. That Mary is a woman sent straight from the devil himself became clear from the first chords of Down On Me, which shook Bluesiana right down to its foundations. Combination Of The Two, armed with a well-grounded edge of funky rhythm, would surely have gone even further if we’d only been spared the clumsy guitar experimenting of Big Brother’s old-timer Sam Andrew. Sam certainly doesn’t belong among the top-tier guitarists, which the ever-cheerful old man doesn’t even try to hide. So the gentleman prefers to win the audience’s sympathy by diligently dictating the tempo and by humorous but never tasteless verbal pelting of everyone present, which quietly also gives away his dominant status. The fast-fingered guitar juggling, which at the same time takes care of a suitably modern update of the band’s sound, falls to the lanky youngster Collins. The main attraction, of course, remains the indestructible Mary Bridget. The self-assured girl wears her famous predecessor’s shoes with no major trouble and, with a sincere smile, bats away every attempt to discredit her with looks of doubt and distrust. Quite the opposite, Mary’s voice hits you straight in the heart, which, understandably, doesn’t stray far from what her great role model did.

The first real test of the supernatural quality of Mary’s vocal delivery came with Gershwin’s Summertime. Her soulful take instantly gave the evening a sense of mystery that only first-rate singing can conjure. The ability to leap quickly out of the range of aggressive vocal agitation into the safe haven of melancholic rhetoric, where blues and soul walk hand in hand, is certainly one of Mary Bridget’s most powerful weapons. Add a pinch of that spontaneous sixties carefreeness to such an arsenal of vocal characteristics, and soon we’re face to face with an untamable musical monster. Paralyzed by the force of Mary’s voice, we sailed obediently through Turtle Blues, the fantastically delivered Women Is Losers and the no less astonishing Get It While You Can. The evening certainly wouldn’t have been complete without the famous chorus of Bobby McGee, during the heartfelt performance of which Mary squeezed the last atoms of strength out of her lungs. But no matter, the young woman confidently tackled even the famous Ball & Chain at the end of the night, a song by the legendary Big Mama Thornton, with which Janis first made a name for herself way back in 1967 at the Monterey Pop Festival! In all honesty, Ball & Chain was perhaps even a step too far for Mary in probing the upper limit of vocal resonance, but no matter. Mary Bridget is a venomous woman who, under the mask of her ample bosom, hides more charisma and balls than the vast majority of male vocalists, not to mention the idiocy of the feminist leanings of the modern women’s music crowd.

I don’t doubt that for many it was a blasphemous indulgence in the creative peaks of a band whose best moments were mostly the fruit of the exceptional, one-of-a-kind Janis Joplin, but after nearly two hours of musical preaching, it was over too fast. Much too fast even for the so-called backup lineup of Big Brother And The Holding Company, who even after forty years, with the irreplaceability of their own status in the encyclopedia of music, seem completely at peace. Freed from the ghosts of the past, maybe even more than at the height of their powers.

Text: Daniel Pavlica
Photos: Mojca Perdih