Janis Joplin

A posthumous retrospective of material from across her career, this CBS/Sony Japan pressing is the right format to have it in. The care the Japanese market took with American and British rock records in the ’70s and early ’80s — the quality of pressing, the attention to packaging — is a well-established fact of vinyl collecting, and a CBS/Sony Japan issue of a posthumous compilation is exactly the configuration where that care shows.

Joplin died in October 1970 at 27, three weeks after Jimi Hendrix. The concentration of deaths in the late-’60s and early-’70s American rock generation — Joplin, Hendrix, Morrison, Jones, later Cobain — has been theorised as a cohort pattern, a particular intensity of life at a particular cultural moment. Whatever its cause, the Monterey recording and this record together hold two sides of the same brief window.