Janis Joplin

Janis Joplin

Pearl (Columbia/Legacy)

What if Janis Joplin had lived past 27? Would she have stayed on the left coast, schooling the Sheryl Crows of the music world on the heights and depths of "chick singers," the salty Texan's preferred term? Maybe she'd have a lifetime Thursday night residency at Threadgill's, and even made peace with Port Arthur. Who knows? The questions she left behind in late 1970, when, bored with Pearl's prolonged production, she tragically resumed her heroin habit, are a big reason she's a star to this day. Earlier this year, for instance, Joss Stone and Melissa Etheridge's fiery Joplin tribute was an unexpected Grammy showstopper. The other, main reason, as this 2-CD expanded edition of her final album affirms yet again, is That Voice: big as Aretha, rough as Grace Slick, feral as Big Mama Thornton, tender as Sarah Vaughan. It's both sword and shield, which Joplin flexes like a gladiator on Pearl, released January 1971, and on a second disc of live material recorded on the wild and wooly Canadian Festival Express tour the year before. Live, the genial Joplin invites the Toronto crowd over to her pad for a drink before "Kosmic Blues," and both paces and chases her band Full Tilt Boogie on the breathless, Otis-style pump of "Tell Mama" and ripping Traffic jams like "Try (Just a Little Harder)." "Me and Bobby McGee," unlike "Summertime" and "Piece of My Heart," is missing from the live disc, but the first CD's demo, sung over just acoustic guitar, reveals a song that helped define the Sixties even while owing a debt to the thumb-riding Thirties. For the second time in 2005, Port Arthur's Pearl posthumously brings the house down.