June 18th, 1967, Monterey Pop Festival, California. Janis Joplin was 24 years old. She had been performing with Big Brother and the Holding Company for 1 year. Nobody outside of San Francisco knew her name. The night before, June 17th, she had played the same festival. The crowd had stopped.

 The response had been extraordinary, but Albert Grossman, her new manager, had refused to let the cameras roll. He didn’t want to give away the footage for free. After the show, he changed his mind. She was asked to come back the next day and do it again. For the cameras this time. She agreed. She was terrified. The set list was shorter this time.

 She wore the same simple white dress with gold threads. She fluffed her hair. She walked onto the stage and she sang Ball and Chain. 3 minutes and 28 seconds into the performance, D. A. Pennebaker’s camera left her. It found a woman in the crowd. It held there for 20 seconds. That woman was Mama Cass Elliott of the Mamas and the Papas. Her mouth was open. A round O.

She was mouthing one word. Wow. That wow changed everything. This is the story of what it meant. To understand what happened at Monterey, you have to understand where Ball and Chain came from. Willie Mae Thornton. Big Mama. Born 1926 in Alabama. The daughter of a minister. She taught herself harmonica and drums.

She was large. She was loud. She wore men’s clothes before it was acceptable. She wrote Ball and Chain in 1959. She recorded it for Baytone Records. They never released it. The song sat in a drawer for 9 years. Then in 1966, she performed the song at a bar in San Francisco. Janis Joplin was in the audience.

 James Gurley, Big Brother’s guitarist, remembered it clearly. Janis heard Big Mama sing Ball and Chain at a bar. She brought it to us. We slowed it down, changed the key, gave the voice room to rise. Janis went home that night and didn’t sleep. This is mine. I don’t know how a song written by someone else can be mine, but this is mine.

The Ball and Chain is real. I can feel the weight of it. She wrote the weight of it. And I know how to sing the weight of it. I have been carrying it my whole life. Big Mama Thornton’s recording of Ball and Chain had never been released. Janis Joplin performed it at Monterey in 1967. The response made Columbia Records release Big Mama Thornton’s original recording the following year to capitalize on what Joplin had made famous.

The woman who wrote the song finally got to release it because the woman who covered it made it famous. A debt paid sideways across time. She was terrified. D. A. Pennebaker said later, “When she walked out, you could see it. The nerves.” She knew this was different. Bob Neuwirth said, “Watching her perform was like watching a great violinist.

 It was the reaching for the notes that held the drama.” She opened softly. Eyes closed, the way Big Mama had opened it. Quietly, like something coming from a distance. “Sitting down by my window, honey, looking out at the rain.” The crowd leaned forward. Then it built. At exactly 1:59 into the performance, Pennebaker cut from her face to her feet.

 She was stomping in time with the music. He held on her feet for 5 seconds because everyone watching had been stomping their own feet without realizing it. The crowd was not watching a performance. They were inside one. Joel Selvin wrote, “It was as if the earth had opened up. The audience was spellbound, startled at the crude power unleashed.

 She was the first real hit of the festival. Tell me why. Tell me why.” She wrung every ounce of emotion from the song. She ended it softly. Back to where it started. The circle closed. Explosive applause drowned out the final note. And then at 3:28, Pennebaker’s camera left her face. It moved through the crowd. It found a face.

 And it stayed there. Mama Cass Elliott was supposed to be the prima donna at Monterey. The Mamas and the Papas were headlining. She was the famous one. Janis Joplin was nobody. And Mama Cass sat in the crowd and watched an unknown hippie from San Francisco sing a Big Mama Thornton blues song. And her jaw dropped. For 20 seconds, the most famous woman at Monterey was just an audience member who couldn’t manage her own face.

Rob Sheffield wrote, “This might be the first film footage of a female rock star admiring another one. Her open appreciation, her sheer joy, her generous heart caviling. Her pure slack-jaw fandom. She wasn’t just welcoming Janis to the tribe. She was also looking at the hippie singer and recognizing a piece of her own heart.

Both of them were women who had been told they were too much. Mama Cass was too fat, too loud, not the right kind of beautiful. Janis was too ugly, too raw, not the right kind of anything. And standing in that field, one of them watched the other do the thing they both understood was the only answer. Give everything. Take up all the space.

Let them watch you be too much. Janis sprinted off stage after the performance. Pure childlike glee on her face. Pennebaker caught it. The before, terrified, unknown, walking out in a simple white dress. The after, sprinting, grinning. The girl from Port Arthur who had just stopped 7,000 people cold. Then the camera found Mama Cass one more time. Still in the same expression.

Still processing. Still mouthing the word. Wow. After Monterey, nothing was the same. Albert Grossman signed with Columbia Records. The footage made Janis Joplin’s face known before her records did. By the time Cheap Thrills came out in August 1968, the audience already knew who she was. They had seen her.

 They had seen Mama Cass’s jaw drop. Mama Cass and Janis became friends. The Mamas and the Papas recorded Pearl, a tribute album, after Janis’s death in 1970. Mama Cass died in 1974. She was 32 years old. Two women. Both too much for the worlds they were born into. Both gone too young. Both leaving behind recordings that outlasted the categories the world tried to put them in.

 And Ball and Chain is still being sung. Still the weight of Port Arthur. Still the weight of what love costs. Still the weight of being told you are too much. When did you last let someone see that you were moved? Mama Cass Elliott was the headliner. She was supposed to be the cool one. And she sat in a crowd and let her jaw drop and let the word wow form on her lips. In public. On camera.

For everyone to see. She didn’t perform composure. She let it happen. Janis Joplin sang Ball and Chain the way Big Mama Thornton wrote it. As a report from inside the weight. As a true account of what the chain feels like on the leg. And Mama Cass in the crowd received it the way it was meant to be received.

 As something true. Pennebaker noticed it and held the camera there for 20 seconds. The wow. The moment one woman saw another woman be everything. It still lives in the footage. It will always live in the footage. Subscribe. The next story goes somewhere nobody has taken you before.