Two songs, "All Is Loneliness" and "Ego Rock", were performed April 4, 1970 when Joplin reunited with Big Brother & the Holding Company over a year after leaving the group, to perform at the Fillmore West venue in San Francisco.

While the recordings with Big Brother and the Holding Company were taken from various performances from 1968 and 1970, the entire live recordings with the Full Tilt Boogie Band were performed at the Festival Express in Toronto and Calgary in Canada on June 28, and July 4, 1970, respectively.

Lester Bangs of the RollingStone gave a mixed review, describing the recordings as "second-rate", but compliments the energy delivered with the performances, stating; "Everyone is having a ball no matter how sloppy the music gets; in fact its sense of errant energy with no place to go but up is part of its power.

Janis, the band, the audience, all feeding off of each other and giving back as much as they can of what they get."

Bangs also noted that Joplin's increasing deterioration was "graphically" apparent in the recordings, stating; "On the record, we hear her as she gradually passes from the tailend of the initial exuberant phase with Big Brother, through the jarring difference between that on-stage persona and what emerges immediately in the Full-Tilt Boogie Band tapes, on which we hear a disoriented and thoroughly pathetic individual and a music whose raggedness is made even less palatable by the breakdown and sense of strain behind it."