she had disastrous relationships with cruel men and emotionally dysfunctional women. She got stoned and beaten up on the street
David Dalton, one of the founding editors of Rolling Stone magazine, interviewed Janis numerous times. ‘It is really important the way she is represented because she was a wonderful person,’ he told me. ‘I did a lot of the Rolling Stone interviews and I love a lot of the people I interviewed, but Janis absolutely was my favourite person.’
Port Arthur, Texas, where Janis was born in 1943, was an oil town, a bastion of redneck conservatism. The American South was still segregated and racial tensions were high. Janis was the black sheep of a conventional, church-going family, always questioning the status quo, but she excelled at school. As a child she loved to perform. At high school, she was always singing or starring in plays she wrote. She developed a talent for drawing and instead of painting landscapes, as expected, she specialised in voluptuous sexy nudes—and delighted in the scandalised reactions.
Bill Haley and the Comets and Elvis Presley were dominating the radio waves, but Janis gravitated towards the rawness of the blues, preferring Bessie Smith and Big Mama Thornton. She sang in the church choir and in glee club as a child, but never thought of being a singer until she was in her late teens.
An avid reader, Janis devoured the Beat writers, in particular Jack Kerouac whose seditious take on the world appealed to her. Adopting the rebellious idiosyncrasies of Kerouac’s characters, she took on mannerisms that were masculine and concealed her insecurities. She felt unattractive. She began dressing in a mannish manner, with trousers and long shirts, her unbrushed hair pulled back into a rough ponytail. Her face was pock-marked with acne scars, her skin dry and patchy. She never wore make-up. Janis attached herself to a group of male musicians and writers who fancied themselves the ultimate rebels. But her outrageous antics rattled her male companions, who were bemused and horrified at the same time. Her ‘unladylike’ manner and penchant for profanity landed her in hot water wherever she went.
In 1961 she enrolled to study arts at Lamar State College in Port Arthur, but she barely lasted the year. That summer she took off for Los Angeles. It didn’t take her long to gravitate to Venice Beach, then a seedy suburb where dealers, pimps and con artists littered the boardwalk. Grass, benzedrine, heroin and codeine-based cough syrup were readily available. Janis began a wild ride of drugs and indiscriminate sex with men and women. She exuded confidence, but her bravado concealed her anguish. Janis just wanted to be loved and accepted.
Whatever she was looking for in LA didn’t materialise. The following year she was back in Port Arthur to resume her arts studies. She started singing at a club in Austin, Threadgill’s, every Wednesday night as part of the Waller Creek Boys, a trio with Powell St John on harmonica and Lanny Wiggins on bass. They played the club circuit around Austin and on campus at the University of Texas, where Janis was now studying and where she was named ‘ugliest man on campus’—an incident that reportedly drove her to despair and haunted her for years to come.
By 1963 Janis was back in California, living in North Beach, San Francisco, where the Beats had hung out in the 1950s. The area swarmed with artists, poets, writers, musicians, painters and actors, the accepted lifestyle was dionysian and LSD was becoming the favourite party drug. For the first time, Janis felt she belonged.
She began singing at small venues like The Coffee Gallery, sometimes alone playing her autoharp or with guitarist Jorma Kaukonen, who would turn up later in Jefferson Airplane. On the personal front she was turning from one disastrous relationship to another with cruel men and emotionally dysfunctional women. She got stoned, beaten up on the street and ended up in hospital after a motorbike accident.
The next year Janis was in New York, singing in Slug’s and other East Village clubs. Her outfit had morphed into black pants and a V-neck jumper. She cut a slender figure, thanks to an increasing flirtation with the city’s newest drug craze. Janis hung with the speed freaks. But it wasn’t long before she returned to the more mellow vibes of San Francisco and the nascent Haight-Ashbury scene. The city was rocking along with Dylan and the Stones and overloading on grass and acid.
Chet Helms, an old Texas friend who was managing and promoting bands, suggested she hook up with Big Brother and the Holding Company, who were looking for a female singer. Janis was her usual unkempt self when she arrived to meet Big Brother but wowed the band with her deeply drawn blues voice.
She was raw, emotional, sexy and at times agonisingly ugly in her pain
Big Brother—Sam Andrew, Peter Albin and James Gurley on guitars and Dave Getz on drums—was transformed by Janis’s powerful stage presence. Within months the band, along with the Grateful Dead, Country Joe McDonald and the Fish and Jefferson Airplane, had a big following. They became an instant attraction on the touring circuit, spending much of the year on the road playing halls, theatres and campuses around America. Through it all, Janis was consuming vast quantities of pills, powders and heroin. She was loving recklessly, often with strangers, and drowning her sorrows with hard liquor. The first album, Big Brother and the Holding Company, was released on Mainstream Records. Then it was into the studio to record Cheap Thrills, which was released in 1968 and reached number one. The album features one track written by Janis, ‘Turtle Blues’.
But it wasn’t the record that catapulted Janis into rock stardom—it was her live performance which rocked in a way no white woman had ever done. She was raw, emotional, sexy and at times agonisingly ugly in her pain. Her stage performance—fuelled by the copious quantities of Southern Comfort that she slugged before, during and after a concert—lifted the audience to great heights and spun them around with the emotional urgency of her voice. When Janis and Big Brother performed at the first Human Be-In Festival in Golden Gate Park in 1967—on the bill with Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead—each performance was more dramatic and flamboyant than the last.
The turning point was at the Monterey Festival later that year. Taking to the stage in a silver lurex pant suit, Janis mesmerised the audience, crews and other performers with her electrified performance. She sang Big Mama Thornton’s ‘Ball and Chain’, one of the songs she’d listened to as a child, and Bessie Smith covers. The press went overboard in their praises and began to seek Janis out for interviews. She was featured in Newsweek and Time as the woman who had infiltrated the male rock world. Her Monterey performance made Janis an instant celebrity and the media swarmed, delighting in her bad behaviour. Soon she was signing a deal with Albert Grossman, Bob Dylan’s manager. Grossman had the reputation of behaving like a pit bull, but with Janis he was caring and understanding.
Rolling Stone compared her to Judy Garland: a tragic artist hell bent on self-destruction
Her dependency on Southern Comfort was growing to such an extent that she wrote to the distiller pointing out how much free publicity she was giving its product, making her one of the first artists to leverage product endorsement. The company responded by sending her a fur coat.
Photos of Janis were appearing in journals like New York magazine, the Village Voice and Vogue and the rock sections of the major dailies such as the New York Times. The rash of new music titles led by Rolling Stone, the first issue of which was published in San Francisco in November 1967, were fighting to feature the wild woman of rock. The Janis of Big Brother jangled with jewels, bangles, rings and bright swirling scarves. She often wore pants, lots of black and lots of bling. The press loved her flamboyance and theatricality, her multi-coloured hair and the layers of fabric. She rarely disappointed in her raw emotional crudeness. Reviewers raved about her as if she were a new species.
But Janis was more than the performing, partying animal, although few had the opportunity to know the real person. She was intelligent and outspoken, her rebellious statements stabbing at the heart of conservatism. Janis topped the list of rock stars
not permitted to perform in Texas because of their liberal views.
Janis and Big Brother played to thunderous applause at the opening of the new Fillmore theatre in San Francisco in 1968. The Fillmore became one of the central venues to watch psychedelic light shows enhanced by LSD. Mirroring theatrical gatherings, the men dressed in tail coats with velvet pants and leather top hats and women wore layers of colours, flowing pants and handkerchief skirts. There were high heels and sandals. Boots and suede. Bangles and bells.
With the money starting to flow in, Janis bought herself a Porsche and an apartment. She paid for a headstone for Bessie Smith who had died impoverished. But most of her money went on partying and drugs, and she footed the bill for a considerable entourage.
Despite her commercial successes and the adoration of fans and media, Janis wasn’t happy. She was constantly brought down by the drugs and booze hangovers. The emptiness didn’t evaporate with the endless procession of lovers and the ever-increasing substance abuse. Janis was consumed with self-loathing and doubt.
Grossman started telling Janis she needed a more professional band, a view repeated in reviews. Although she felt guilty about it, she recognised Grossman was right. Janis didn’t want to be seen just as the queen of the Haight-Ashbury sound. She wanted to be a big star. A new band was one way of getting the professional acclaim she was seeking. Before the year was out Janis had left Big Brother, taking Sam Andrew with her.
when Kristofferson arrived at Janis’s house to discuss the song with her, ‘he was terrified because Janis is overwhelming’
Her new backing band, Kozmic Blues, included horn and saxophone session players and Andrew on guitar. Janis appeared with her new line-up at the annual concert held by Stax-Volt, one of the leading R&B recording companies, in Memphis in late 1968. Her performance was atrocious. Clearly inebriated, she wailed and screamed and was her usual unruly self. The crowd were used to choreographed routines and booed her off stage. Although she loved R&B artists’ music, the compliment wasn’t returned.
Still rattled by her performance at Stax-Volt, Janis took the stage with her new band at the opening of the Fillmore East in New York a few months later. She was obviously nervous and throughout the performance sought approval from the audience, prompting one Rolling Stone journalist to compare her to Judy Garland: a tragic artist hell bent on self-destruction.
Janis toured Europe in 1969, the only time she performed outside North America, playing to capacity crowds at such venues as the Albert Hall in London. She was on the bill for the massive Woodstock Festival, but her performance didn’t come near the brilliance of her Monterey act two years earlier. Complaining she couldn’t connect with the 400,000 crowd, Janis spent the day drunk, surly and antagonistic, snapping at everyone and refusing to do interviews.
In between touring Janis went back into the studio to record I Got Dem Ol’ Kozmic Blues Again Mama! The album featured eight tracks, with a re-recording of ‘Piece of My Heart’, one of her Big Brother hits, the Bee Gee’s ‘To Love Somebody’, her own ‘One Good Man’, ‘Try (Just A Little Bit Harder)’ and Hart and Rogers’ ‘Little Girl Blue’. The album reached number five on the Billboard charts, but her move further into blues didn’t sit well with fans. They wanted the rocking Janis back.
As the next decade dawned, Janis left Kozmic Blues behind, taking two of her band mates with her: bass player Brad Campbell and guitarist John Till. The new ensemble, Full-Tilt Boogie Band, also featured drummer Clark Pierson, organist Ken Pearson and pianist Rick Bell.
Around this time Janis embarked on a brief affair with Kris Kristofferson, who gave her ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ to record, one of her most memorable songs. It appears on the posthumously released album Pearl. Her association with Kristofferson was erratic, like all her relationships. David Dalton tells of Kristofferson arriving at Janis’s house to discuss the song with her. ‘He was like terrified because Janis is an overwhelming person you know. Incredibly endlessly needy and wanting and this is not the kind of thing that guys are especially attracted to ... poor Janis. She was always pursuing guys who weren’t likely to really be lifelong mates.... it was always said as part of the Janis Joplin persona, but if I would hit on a waitress or an airline steward, Janis would say, “well, what about me honey?” ... I think that a lot of people were probably intimated by her.’
By the time she was on the Festival Express railroad tour of Toronto, Winnipeg and Calgary in early 1970, she was no longer shooting heroin, but was feeding herself plenty of booze, powder, pills and dope. Dalton joined Janis on the tour, spending days with her, recording interviews and random conversations. ‘Festival Express was very innocent,’ Dalton said. ‘People always imagined all this wild stuff, but really it was just people having a good time and getting together and recreating the whole situation on the Haight-Ashbury before they became famous. It was wonderful in that way, there was no real monstrous behaviour.’
The Festival Express tour featured the Band, the Grateful Dead, Delaney and Bonnie and Friends, Ian and Sylvia, New Riders of the Purple Sage, Tom Rush, Buddy Guy, Eric Andersen, Ten Years After, Traffic, Seatrain, Cat, Mashmakan and the Modern Rock Quartet. As there were no washing amenities on the train, in each town the musicians and crew would descend upon the local swimming pool. Janis threw modesty to the wind, stripping naked and plunging into the pool to the horror of authorities and amusement of her fellow musicians, many of whom followed suit.
she loved to party, but she was very introspective—she was a beatnik and intellectual. She was very philosophical, had a very, very serious side to her
‘She loved to party, but she was very introspective,’ said Dalton. ‘A lot of the time on tours she would be in her room reading; she was a beatnik and intellectual, someone who pondered. She was very philosophical, had a very, very serious side to her. I think this created a dilemma with her desire to present the Janis Joplin character twenty-four hours a day. She felt she had to go out and be this person,’
When the Festival Express tour ended Janis sunk into a depression. She had enjoyed the camaraderie and getting stoned, singing, drinking and playing with the other musicians.
Dabbling in heroin again, Janis flew to New York that year to perform at the Peace Festival at Shea Stadium. She was electric on stage and it was one of her best performances, the crowd spinning and jumping wildly. The band played numerous dates in New York and Janis befriended the young Patti Smith, who was starting to put words to music. She gravitated towards Greenwich Village and hung out at Max’s Kansas City, where Debbie Harry waited on her. Feted by the artistic elite, including Warhol and Ginsberg, Janis became entrenched in the celebrity culture.
she exuded confidence but her bravado concealed her anguish. Janis just wanted to be loved and accepted
After New York she paid her family a visit in Port Arthur, which might as well have been on another planet. Her parents were at wits’ end and were no longer prepared to tolerate her bizarre lifestyle. Her desire to be different drove her poor, staid mother Dorothy to distraction. Her father Seth was a stern man who didn’t understand his unruly daughter. Rock music was as foreign to him as casual sex and drugs. Sparks flew. Janis left the house disgruntled and emotionally shaken.
Returning to her home in Larkspur in San Francisco, Janis threw herself back into the social fray, trying to shake off her anger and hurt. There she met Seth Morgan who was twenty-one, six years younger than Janis. They became inseparable. For a few short weeks she played house, shopping, cooking, going to the movies, eating out—doing all the normal things you do when in a new relationship. She enjoyed the semblance of normality but knew it wouldn’t last. She was scheduled to go to LA to lay down tracks for Pearl.
According to Dalton, ‘Fame is one of the huge paradoxes of Janis’s life because in a way she started out wanting to find a good guy who would love her and care for her, but her fame created a situation wher
e that was going to be impossible. The sort of guys she claimed she wanted—log-splitting guys who lived in Alaska and fucked bears—are not going to turn up back stage. The kind of people she met were more like the sexy lounge-lizard character who was always there on tour, like her fiancé Seth Morgan. A good-looking hustler and ex-drug dealer. They were going to have an open marriage. I don’t think Janis realised quite how open that was going to be, you know.’
Janis was planning a whole domestic package with Morgan: marriage and perhaps even a baby. She began talking about winding down her career and touring less, much to the chagrin of Albert Grossman, who was battling an increasing number of promoters reluctant to take on Janis. Her reputation for blowing off gigs and her manic on- and off-stage antics preceded her. Her arrest for using profanity on stage did not help Grossman’s attempts to book her. Promoters were playing hardball and local governments banned certain performers and musical genres. Janis incited audiences to frenzy, her calls to ‘fuck not fight’ infusing an already-electric atmosphere. For those lucky enough to have seen Janis perform live the memories are unforgettable.
after she’d shot up the smack, she ventured into the hotel lobby to buy cigarettes
Tearing herself away from Morgan, Janis headed off to the Landmark Hotel, a Los Angeles establishment as popular with celebrities then as Chateau Marmont. In the studio under the direction of the Doors producer Paul A Rothchild, work on Pearl was progressing. Janis recorded ‘Me and Bobby McGee’, which would become her greatest hit. The album also included ‘Mercedes Benz’, which she co-wrote with Michael McClure.
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