Janis Joplin album features the first and only take that Joplin recorded. A cover of Nick Gravenites's "Buried Alive in the Blues", to which Joplin had been scheduled to add her vocals on the day she was found dead, was included as an instrumental. Joplin checked into the Landmark Motor Hotel in Hollywood on August 24, 1970, near Sunset Sound Recorders, where she began rehearsing and recording her album. During the sessions, Joplin continued a relationship with Seth Morgan, a 21-year-old UC Berkeley student, cocaine dealer, and future novelist who had visited her new home in Larkspur in July and August. She
Janis Joplin of Southern Comfort and delighted in playing the role of sexual predator." On July 11, 1970, Full Tilt Boogie and Big Brother and the Holding Company both performed at the same concert in the San Diego Sports Arena, which was decades later renamed the Valley View Casino Center. Joplin sang with Full Tilt Boogie and appeared briefly onstage with Big Brother without singing, according to the next day's review in the "San Diego Union". She had a conversation offstage with her old friend Richard Hundgen, the San Francisco-based road manager for the Grateful Dead whom she had known since 1966.