1968 Columbia Records, New York City. Janice Joplain sat across from Clive Davis, the president of one of the most powerful record labels in America, and told him what she wanted to call her album, Sex, Dope, and Cheap Thrills. Davis said no immediately, without discussion. She had expected that, she said it anyway.

 This is the story of the album that became cheap Thrills. The name they wanted to give it, the cover they couldn’t use, the cartoonist who worked all night on Speed, and the record that went to number one and stayed there for 8 weeks. To understand why the name mattered, you have to understand where it came from. The summer of 1967, Hate Ashberry, the warehouse where Big Brother rehearsed and lived and played cards and cooked and slept on mattresses on the floor.

 They had just played Mterrey. The world was suddenly paying attention. Colia Records had signed them. The album had to happen fast. The label wanted to capitalize on the momentum before it faded. And so the band sat in the warehouse and talked about what to call the record. Sex, dope, and cheap thrills. It was Peter Alban who first said it out loud.

 Or maybe it was Janice. Accounts differ. But the moment it was said, everybody in the room knew it was right because it was accurate. It was an honest description of their lives in 1967. They were young and broke and playing music for the love of it in a city that had decided to try to invent a new way to be human.

 Sex and dope were not metaphors. They were just Tuesday. And the cheap thrills, that was the music, the specific electricity of playing live. of the voice going out to a crowd that responded to it, of the feeling that something real was happening in a room full of people who had come specifically to feel something real. They knew Colombia would never allow it.

They proposed it anyway. Clive Davis said no. The word sex couldn’t be on a major label album in 1968. The word dope couldn’t be on a major label album in 1968. Those were the rules of the world. they had just been signed into. So the album became Cheap Thrills, the vague part without the honest parts.

 Then came the cover. The band’s first idea, a photograph of all of them naked in bed together. Colombia said no immediately, without discussion. Two ideas, two nos. The suits were getting very good at saying no to these people. The band went back to the warehouse. They needed a cover. They needed something that felt like them.

 Underground, irreverent, visual, alive, something that wasn’t a corporate photograph of musicians staring at the camera trying to look important. Dave Gats, the drummer, said the name first. He was sitting in the warehouse with Janice and James Gurley, the guitarist. They were all reading Zap Comics, the underground comic book that had been circulating in San Francisco since 1968.

The artist was R. Crumb. The comics were unlike anything else being published. Raw, weird, funny, drawn with a line that felt like it had been pulled directly from someone’s unconscious. How about asking Rumbr? Get said. Everybody in the room said yes at the same time. Janice was the one who called him.

 Robert Crumb did not particularly like Big Brother and the Holding Company. He was a blues purist. Old 78s, Bessie Smith, Robert Johnson. The psychedelic rock scene that had taken over his city was not his world. But he liked Janice. He had seen her at the Avalon Ballroom before Mterrey, before everything. He remembered. You could tell right away that she had an exceptional voice and would go far.

 She started out singing oldtime blues like Bessie Smith. In the beginning, she was just an authentic, genuine Texas country girl shout. He liked her. He took the job. I needed the money, he said later. And of course, they needed it like the next day. So he did what he always did when a deadline was impossible.

 He took speed and worked all night. He drew all night, the pen moving across the board without stopping. Panel by panel, song by song. He drew Janice introducing the set list in a speech bubble. Playing and singing for you the following tunes. He drew ball and chain as a literal ball and chain.

 He drew peace of my heart as an exploding heart. He drew summertime with characters that would not be approved for reproduction today. He drew comic panels for each member of the band. He drew a front cover, stick figures on a stage with the band members faces cut from Polaroid photos and pasted on. It was serviceable. It was fine.

 The back cover was something else entirely. The back cover was the thing he had been drawing all night, the thing his hand had found when it stopped thinking and started moving. It was dense and intricate and funny and alive and completely unlike anything that had ever appeared on the cover of a major label record.

 In the morning, he called Janice. “It’s done,” he said. She picked up the artboards and brought them to the warehouse. The band looked at the front cover. It was fine. Then Janice turned over the boards and showed them the back. Nobody wanted to look at the front cover anymore. Janice delivered the artwork to Colombia Records herself.

 She walked it into the art director’s office personally. She told them, “This is the back cover on the front.” Colombia’s art director, John Berg, remembered it. Joplain commissioned it, and she delivered cheap thrills to me personally in the office. There were no changes with R. Crumb. He refused to be paid, saying, “I don’t want Colombia’s filthy Lucer.” Crumb was paid $600 for the job.

He refused to accept it. He never took the original art back either. He left it in the Colombia Records art offices. It sat there for a year after Janice died before the band tried to retrieve it. Colombia couldn’t find it. The original artwork for one of the most iconic album covers in rock history. Gone.

 Lost somewhere in a corporate office. Nobody knows where it is today. There was one more problem. One of the comic panels, the one with the man in the turban and a Middle Eastern city in the background, had originally been drawn to illustrate a track called Harry. specifically Harry Krishna, a comic song by drummer Dave Gets that was supposed to open side two of the album.

 Clive Davis didn’t understand the joke. He had the track removed from the album. Now, there was a panel on the cover that referenced a song that wasn’t on the record. Colombia’s solution, remove Crumbs lettering from the Turban Man panel and replace it with the words art crumb in Crumbstyle lettering. Crumb found out when the album came out.

He was furious. He had not been consulted. His name had been used without his permission. He swore he would never do another album cover. He did eventually do other album covers. But the anger was real. Cheap Thrills came out on August 12th, 1968. It went to number one on the Billboard Top LPs chart.

 It stayed there for eight consecutive weeks. It beat Jimmyi Hendris’s Electric Ladyland. It beat Cream’s Wheels of Fire. It beat Jefferson Airplanes Crown of Creation. It went gold, then platinum. The album that had started as Sex, dope, and cheap thrills with a naked band photo that got rejected and a cartoon back cover that became the front was the number one album in America.

 In 2007, Cheap Thrills was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. Rolling Stone ranked it one of the 500 greatest albums of all time. The cover alone was ranked number nine on Rolling Stones list of the 100 greatest album covers ever made. And Clive Davis, the man who had said no to the title, no to the naked photo, no to the Harry Krishna track, no to almost everything the band proposed, had a number one album.

 The one he didn’t understand turned out to be the one that lasted. Here is what this story asks you. How many times have you said no to something because it didn’t fit the rules? And it turned out the rules were the problem. Clive Davis said no to sex, dope, and cheap thrills. He said no to the naked photograph.

 He said no to the Harry Krishna track. He said no to the back cover as front cover. Janice Joplain said yes to all of it. And then she walked the artwork into Colombia Records herself and said, “This is the back cover on the front.” The album she made, the album that didn’t get the name she wanted, the cover she originally wanted, the track sequencing she wanted, went to number one and stayed there for 8 weeks and is still on every list of the greatest records ever made.

 She was right about all of it. The industry just needed a minute to catch up. Subscribe. The next story goes somewhere nobody has taken you