Well, jeez I can't let this pass!
For me, Janis is a BIG BG yes -- but mainly with Big Brother & the Holding Company.
Saw them from a front row center seat in a movie theater in Jersey City, NJ, on a rainy night in 1968, on one of the last tours the band did with Janis before she went solo, and they were amazing.
A friend of a friend's mom had bought a half dozen tickets as a birthday present for her son, and with one ticket left over, my friend Bob invited me. We all had next-to-last row seats.
The band played a few songs and you could tell something wasn't gelling -- maybe the monitors were bad, or they were in a bad mood, bad drugs, who knows? -- but songs fizzled out after a few bars, the band glared at each other, then huddled, then started again.
Finally Janis said, "We're gonna take a break and try to get our sh*t together." Band exits; lights come up.
I said to my friend, Bob, "Let's go down front and try to catch a few songs up close when the band returns, before the rent-a-cops chase us back to our seats."
When we got up there, two guys with front row center seats saw us milling around and offered us their tickets for $2.00 each. I guess they figured the band was having an off night and decided to try to recoup some of their losses.
We'd paid nothing for our tickets anyway, so were delighted to take their places.
The band finally re-emerged and by the third or fourth song, were firing on all cylinders. I was directly under Janis -- I can still see her silhouetted against the stage lights -- and was blown away. (I'd heard a few things on the radio but knew very little about the band before that show -- had neither of their records at the time.)
After a half-hour or so the audience finally got it too, and went ballistic. Clambering over seats, everyone surged in a giant wave to the front. Bob and I had no choice but to stand, our chests pressed against the stage for the next couple hours.
Because I was pinned right to the edge of the stage, my instinct was to put my hands on the stage itself, to brace myself against the weight of all the people pressing me from behind. But if I had, I'd have had my fingers mashed by Janis's pumps, furiously stomping to the beat.
The band played a long set and were fantastic, so much so that the audience wouldn't let them leave. They brought them back for SEVEN encores. (In all my years of of going to see shows, that's the most encores I've ever seen anyone get. Beat that, Tom Jones!)
After the first couple encores, they said goodbye and waved, indicating that that was it; they were done for the night. But we would have none of it, and after screaming and clapping for 15 minutes, the band finally came back out, where an ebullient Janis cackled and said, "Man, we've played everything we know!" And so they began repeating songs. And were called back again and again and again.
My recollection is that they did "Ball and Chain" and "Piece of My Heart" three times; "Combination of the Two," "Summertime" and "Down On Me" twice and probably repeated some others I don't remember now.
When it was all over, Bob and I were so giddy and star-struck that we found our way to the back door to the theater where, after a half-hour in the rain, I got Janis's autograph (which, along with my ticket, I still have.)
I never cared for Janis's later bands, the Kozmic Blues Band and the Full Tilt Boogie Band. Sure, they were far more slick and "pro" than Big Brother, who, it's true, often veered out of tune and sometimes seemed to have trouble holding down the beat.
But for me, none of Janis's later bands had the chemistry that Big Brother had with her, nor their energy, looseness, verve, grittiness, joie de vivre, etc.