ock‘n’roll archeology can be a bit odd. Rabid fans have been known to bid for scraps of their favorite artists’ used hotel sheets or discarded chewing gum. Care for an old Elvis Presley prescription bottle? You can buy one. While I’ll never understand that kind of connection with art, I do relate to fellow music lovers who chase obscure bootleg tapes or someone’s rough-draft lyrics scrawled on a cocktail napkin. When you fall in love with music, it seems natural to seek deeper insight into what sparked the creation of something so moving and magical. I suspect it’s this type of fandom that drove the team at Omnivore Records to release a remastered and restored 45rpm pressing of The Legendary Typewriter Tape for this year’s Record Store Day Black Friday promotion.

The “master” of these sessions is a 58-year-old cassette tape featuring 21-year-old legend Janis Joplin and former Jefferson Airplane guitarist and Hot Tuna founder Jorma Kaukonen rehearsing for an upcoming gig at a San Francisco coffeehouse. A quick Google search of the sessions will demonstrate the marginal sound quality of the various bootleg versions of the original tape. Throughout the recording, listeners are treated to the off-mic sound of Kaukonen’s Swedish wife, Margareta, casually tapping out a letter to her family on a manual typewriter.

Neither of the performers seems perturbed by the session’s “ambience.” In fact, Kaukonen can be heard joking about getting a rhythm count from the typewriter and assuring Janis that their music won’t “bother” his wife. It’s precisely that unflappable and utterly unfiltered view into how these incredibly talented musicians created their art that has garnered this practice tape a cult following. As I listened, I found myself imagining a deadpan treatment of the scene by film director Wes Anderson: unimpressed wife at the kitchen table intensely plucking typewriter keys while rock history is born in the background.

At this point, you may be wondering whether this recording has any musical payoff. Boy, does it. The LP captures a purity in Joplin’s mezzo soprano that I don’t hear on her more famous recordings. In a 2016 interview with public television station KQED, Kaukonen said the recording captures his “favorite version” of Joplin’s voice. As much as the power of Joplin’s voice impresses, it’s also mind boggling that the blues riffs Kaukonen was tossing around in that living room could have been coming from the fingers of a college kid who’d only been playing for three years.

Whether they’re tackling the traditional “Hesitation Blues” or Joplin’s composition “Kansas City Blues,” the ghosts of Reverend Gary Davis, Bessie Smith and W.C. Handy are nearly palpable. Kaukonen’s introductory riff to Joplin’s “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy” followed by her plaintive wail sounds like a long-lost 78rpm shellac record from the 1930s. While listening to their occasional stops and restarts to discuss just the right approach to a given passage, you can sense that Joplin and Kaukonen considered the music they were playing to be sacred.

Album producer Cheryl Pawelski obtained Kaukonen's reel-to-reel safety copy of the original cassette. She turned that over to Grammy Award-winning sound archivist and tape restorer Michael Graves at Osiris Studios. His restoration recovers a sense of presence and immediacy in the sessions that was obscured in the bootlegs of the original cassette. I experienced this firsthand while playing a passage in which Joplin and Kaukonen are talking as they run through the end of a song; on two occasions during that same passage, Zorro, my loyal canine listening companion, responded by jumping from the couch and barking as she ran around the speakers looking for those nearly corporeal voices.