Joplin’s Passion Revealed on ‘Live’ Album

***JANIS JOPLIN

“Live at Winterland ‘68”

Sony Legacy

In the liner notes to this previously unreleased collection featuring Joplin and the Big Brother & the Holding Company blues-rock band, Stevie Nicks tells us about the jolt of seeing Joplin in concert for the first time some three decades ago.

“She was extraordinary,” Nicks recalls. “She had a connection with the audience that I had not seen before. . . . In the blink of an eye, she changed my life.”

Nicks isn’t alone in marveling over Joplin.

The booklet that comes with this 14-track, 76-minute CD also contains testimonials from such artists as Chrissie Hynde, Heart’s Wilson sisters and Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon.

Of them all, Hynde comes closest to conveying Joplin’s special magic.

“There was something scary about her in her total delivery . . . ,” the Pretenders’ singer says. “Her performance was so in your face and electrifying that it really put you right there in the moment. There you were living your nice little life in the suburbs and suddenly there was this train wreck and it was Janis.”

You may wonder if any album could live up to that buildup--and the truth is, this one probably doesn’t.

The main reason is that Joplin was always even more compelling live than on record. Indeed, she may have been the most captivating female performer ever in rock.

The only person who could stir as much electricity in a ballroom is Tina Turner. But not even on the latter’s best days with Ike Turner did she reach out to you with the vulnerability and urgency of Joplin.

Joplin’s main weapon wasn’t her voice. She had little of the clarity or control of Turner, Hynde or scores of other vocalists. But she delivered a raw passion that was unequaled.

“Come on and take it . . .,” Joplin screamed in her most celebrated number. “Take another little piece of my heart, now, baby.” And the intensity level was scary.

This album contains “Piece of My Heart,” which was written by Jerry Ragovoy and Bert Berns, as well as such other signature Joplin numbers as Big Mama Thornton’s “Ball and Chain” and Joplin’s own “Down on Me.”

But the collection conveys only part of Joplin’s emotional punch.

She was an erratic singer, which means her studio collections are the most reliable introduction. The best single-disc offering is “Pearl,” which was released after Joplin died of a heroin overdose in 1970 at age 27. For anyone really wanting to investigate her body of work, there’s “Janis,” the excellent three-disc package released by Columbia Legacy in 1993.

*

** 1/2 Jefferson Airplane, “Live at the Fillmore East,” RCA. The Airplane, another celebrated voice from San Francisco, seemed for a brief time in the late ‘60s to be a door to the future in rock--a group that challenged musical and cultural sensibilities so forcefully that its ambition sometimes seemed more important than much of its music. In the team of Grace Slick, Paul Kantner, Marty Balin, et al., the Airplane had a virtual repertory company of writers and singers, giving the band an unusually wide range of musical colors. And the group started off with two great singles, “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love.” At the time of these 1968 concerts, however, the band was suffering from increasingly uneven material, and its psychedelic experimentation has not worn well over the years.

*

Albums are rated on a scale of one star (poor), two stars (fair), three stars (good) and four stars (excellent).