quality:corruption
1966–1969: Big Brother and the Holding Company

In 1966, Joplin's bluesy vocal style attracted the attention of the San Francisco-based psychedelic rock band Big Brother and the Holding Company, which had gained some renown among the nascent hippie community in Haight-Ashbury. She was recruited to join the group by Chet Helms, a promoter who was managing Big Brother and with whom she had hitchhiked from Texas to San Francisco a few years earlier. Helms sent his friend Travis Rivers to find her in Austin, Texas, where she had been performing with her acoustic guitar, and to accompany her to San Francisco.

Aware of her previous nightmare with drug addiction in San Francisco, Rivers insisted that she inform her parents face-to-face of her plans, and he drove her from Austin to Port Arthur (he waited in his car while she talked with her startled parents) before they began their long drive to San Francisco. She gave her parents the impression Austin was her final destination and it was the location of the rock band she was joining. Joplin joined Big Brother on June 4, 1966. Her first public performance with them was at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco. Soon after that, her parents received a letter from her, and that was how they learned she was in San Francisco, not Austin.

In June 1966, Joplin was photographed at an outdoor concert in San Francisco that celebrated the summer solstice. The image, which was later published in two books by David Dalton, shows her before she relapsed into drugs. Due to persistent persuading by keyboardist and close friend Stephen Ryder, Joplin avoided drugs for several weeks. She shared an apartment with Travis Rivers upon their arrival in San Francisco, and made him promise that using needles would not be allowed there.

When bandmate Dave Getz accompanied her from a rehearsal to her home, Rivers was not there, but "two or three", according to Getz' recollection 25 years later, guests whom Rivers had invited were in the process of injecting drugs. "One of them was about to tie off," recalled Getz. " Janis went nuts! I had never seen anybody explode like that. She was screaming and crying and Travis walked in. She screamed at him: 'We had a pact! You promised me! There wouldn't be any of that in front of me!' I was over my head and I tried to calm her down. I said, 'They're just doing mescaline,' because that's what I thought it was. She said, 'You don't understand! I can't see that! I just can't stand to see that!'"

A San Francisco concert from that summer (1966) was recorded and released on the 1984 album Cheaper Thrills. In July, all five bandmates and guitarist James Gurley 's wife Nancy moved to a house in Lagunitas, California, where they lived communally. The band often partied with the Grateful Dead, the members of whom lived less than two miles away. She had a short relationship and longer friendship with founding member Ron "Pigpen" McKernan.

The band went to Chicago for a four-week engagement in August 1966, then found itself stranded after the promoter ran out of money when its concerts did not attract the expected audience levels, and he was unable to pay them. In the unfortunate circumstances the band signed with Bob Shad 's record label Mainstream Records; recordings for the label took place in Chicago in September, but these were not satisfactory, and the band returned to San Francisco, continuing to perform live, including at the Love Pageant Rally. The band recorded two tracks, "Blindman" and "All Is Loneliness", in Los Angeles, and these were released by Mainstream as a single that did not sell well. After playing at a happening in Stanford in early December 1966, the band traveled back to Los Angeles to record ten tracks between December 12 and 14, 1966, produced by Bob Shad, which appeared on the band's debut album in August 1967.

In late 1966, Big Brother switched managers from Chet Helms to Julius Karpen. One of Joplin's earliest major performances in 1967 was at the Mantra-Rock Dance, a musical event held on January 29 at the Avalon Ballroom by the San Francisco Hare Krishna temple. Janis Joplin and Big Brother performed there along with the Hare Krishna founder Bhaktivedanta Swami, Allen Ginsberg, Moby Grape, and the Grateful Dead, donating proceeds to the Krishna temple. In early 1967, Joplin met Country Joe McDonald of the group Country Joe and the Fish. The pair lived together as a couple for a few months in her Lyon Street apartment. A driver's license, issued to Joplin in 1967, shows her residence as 122 Lyon Street No. 3, in San Francisco.

Joplin and Big Brother began playing clubs in San Francisco, at the Fillmore West, Winterland, and the Avalon Ballroom. They also played at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, as well as in Seattle, Washington; Vancouver, British Columbia; the Psychedelic Supermarket in Boston, Massachusetts; and the Golden Bear Club in Huntington Beach, California.