Love, Janis

by Laura Joplin

  Janis had been in touch with Jerry Ragovoy in New York. “Haven’t you got a new tune for my new album?” she asked. He wrote her one called “I’m Going to Rock and Roll Heaven.” She didn’t want to wait for the demo to arrive, so she had him sing it to her over the telephone. She loved it! He went out to get a demo made so the band could learn it.

  In the studio, Janis telephoned Nick Gravenites, asking him too for a new tune for the album. He was producing a record for Brewer and Shipley, but took time to fly down to L.A. He sat in the corner of Sunset Sound, absorbing the music and the jive. He wrote “Buried Alive in the Blues,” a tune that thrilled everyone.

  Walking across the street with Bennett Glotzer, Janis ordered hamburgers for everyone. Waiting for them, “she spilled the beans,” Bennett said. “She talked about Seth, how she felt about him, her trepidation, her doubts about it being the right relationship for her, and whether he really loved her.”

  Saturday, October 3, 1970, the band laid down the instrumental tracks for “Buried Alive.” Everything was ready for Janis to record the vocals the next day. It looked good and the group was pleased. They finished around eleven P.M. As usual, Janis stopped for a drink at Barney’s Beanery before heading to the Landmark Hotel. She had two drinks at the bar, on top of the liquor she had consumed at the studio. She drove to the hotel with Ken Pearson, her organ player, and they headed to their separate rooms.

  Janis frequently went for a swim after work, but not that night. She only went to the lobby to buy cigarettes about one A.M. The last person who talked with her was Jack Hagy, at the desk. He gave her change for five dollars so she could use the cigarette machine.

  After closing the door to her room, Janis sat on the bed clad in a blouse and panties. She put the cigarettes on the bedside table, and still holding the change in her hand, she fell forward. Her lip was bloodied as she struck the bedside table. Her body became wedged between the table and the bed. Sometime after returning to the hotel, she had injected herself with heroin. Janis skin-popped the drug instead of putting it into a vein. An intravenous injection gives the strongest impact immediately. Skin-popping gives a delayed maximal impact, up to ninety minutes.

  The heroin Janis used that night she had purchased around four P.M. that afternoon from George, her supplier for as long as she used the drug. She was careful to use only one supplier, and he was careful about what he sold. Usually, he had a chemist check the drug before he sold it. For that batch, his chemist had been out of town. He had sold the dope without checking it. The dope Janis had bought that Saturday was four to ten times stronger than normal street heroin. It was 40 to 50 percent pure.

  No one found Janis, lying crumpled on the floor, until the following evening around seven-thirty. Seth had refused to fly down the night before because he was playing strip pool with some waitresses from the Trident Restaurant, but he arrived Sunday afternoon. He called John Cooke before he left San Francisco, because he couldn’t find Janis to tell her when to pick him up. John checked with Paul Rothchild to see if Janis was at the studio, but Paul said she was uncharacteristically late for recording. John was at the hotel, so he grabbed a desk key (he had done that before) and went to her room.

  When John saw Janis lying on the floor, he approached her, holding out a hand as though to shake her awake. One touch of her cold, firm flesh was all he needed to realize that he would not need to call her name again. He telephoned Bob Gordon, her attorney. Bob called a doctor friend and the police. As John waited for them to arrive, he sent someone to the airport to meet Seth and break the news to him.

  Later John drove to the studio. He couldn’t bear to give the band the news over the telephone. He wanted to do it in person. He pulled Paul outside and told him. Then they asked the engineers to leave. There was no way to say it but quick, so John just said, “Janis died.” You could watch the effect sink into people, visibly changing their bodies. It continued to sink in for days.

  The coroner and police searched the room the next day at eleven A.M. They found Janis’s hype kit in the top dresser drawer of her room. They found a towel, some gauze, and a ball of cotton with blood on them. Later, they also found a red balloon containing a powder in the wastebasket. Tests determined it was heroin. The time lapse between finding the syringe and then the heroin seems to have been due to a friend’s impulsive act. Someone had thought to remove the heroin from the room after her death, hoping to keep drugs out of the press. Later it was obvious that that wasn’t a good idea, so the balloon was returned.

  They called Janis’s death an accidental overdose, though the coroner did a psychological autopsy, interviewing friends, checking her activities and establishing a state of mind. He needed to be sure it wasn’t suicide. Strange, that a person known for dedication to the verve and excitement of life should immediately be considered potentially suicidal.

  Questions and rumors about the details of her death circulated in the gossip circuit for years. People speculated on Janis’s death as a CIA job, a contract killing, or some other fantasy. No such theory can surmount the facts. Some of Janis’s friends knew that she had been using heroin for a few weeks. In addition to one fresh needle mark, there were several marks on her arms that showed enough healing to have been from the last week or so. The drug Janis used was extremely pure, though it may not have caused her to die on its own. Janis was also legally drunk. A death labeled “heroin overdose” is often the result of the interaction of different drugs, particularly heroin and alcohol. That weekend, several other people who had been customers of George, the heroin supplier, died. Their deaths were also called heroin overdoses.

  Janis’s friends still remember the shock of hearing she was dead. Even twenty years later, the feelings of the day rushed back as they described commiserating among themselves. Janis’s death affected them, like me, in ways different from her life. Juli Paul had talked with Janis the Friday before she died. “She wanted me to come out to L.A. As soon as I heard that she died, I felt like, if I’d gone, maybe she wouldn’t have, so there was guilt, too.” Pat Nichols, who had been waiting for their movie date, vowed to stay away from heroin forever. She listened to Janis’s death like she had listened to nothing before. Twenty years after Janis died, Pat is still clean.

  “I lost six friends in six months from drugs,” said Paul Rothchild. “The world changed radically. Janis’s death was the most devastating thing in my life. We’d threatened to work together for years, and when we did, we decided we’d be together forever. It was the most fun we’d ever had in the studio. She was always one hundred ten percent there. I miss her tremendously, still.” Sam Andrew, however, went out and scored some more dope, to help ease the pain of losing yet another friend.

  Our hearts ached, those of us who loved her, but life went on. Paul and the band had to finish the album. They gave 100 percent, just like they did when Janis was in the room with them. A surreal quality entered the studio as they recorded new instrumental tracks to go under the vocal tracks they had cut for the original battle of the studio sounds. A strange feeling came over them, that anything they did had to be perfect this time. There would be no second chance. Janis’s voice dominated their senses as they listened to the vocal and played their hearts onto the tape.

  They also found the fun song “Mercedes Benz,” recorded on a lark. During the band’s summer tour, Janis had been sending messages through friends to have Michael McClure call her. He had written a song for a group he played with called Freewheeling McClure Montana. Michael McClure’s friends Emmett Grogan and Rip Torn sang it to Janis over a game of pool when they were all in New York. Janis finally called Michael, saying, “I’m singing a song with your ‘Mercedes Benz’ line in it.” He said, “Will you sing it for me?” So she sang it over the telephone. He said, “I like my song better.” “Do you mind if I use it?” she asked. “No, go ahead,” he said, ignoring any discussions of money or credit. So they agreed they would both sing their own versions. Michael never thought of it as a busi
ness arrangement. He was just sharing art, as he was prone to do. Days later she died. Much later, he found she had shared the writer’s royalty with him.

  Finishing the recording took a few weeks. By October 18 they had completed a masterful album, Pearl. Critics often cite it as the best recording of Janis’s work, the only time the musicians in the studio worked with her and not against her. Popular Music, an annotated guide to recordings, called Pearl “probably one of the best albums overall in the rock genre.”

  The day after Janis died, Paul ran into Bobby Neuwirth. Each commented on the haggard look of the other. “What’s wrong?” “The telephone keeps ringing, and it’s Janis. She says, ‘It’s okay, man. This is a good place. I’m in good shape. Don’t worry about a thing.’” “Wow! I don’t believe it! The same thing’s been happening to me.”

  Bob Gordon had a similar experience. His life had been consumed by the mob scene of questioning people and legal details after her death. For weeks he did nothing but deal with the coroner’s office, the investigation, the press, and our family. One Sunday afternoon, when the chaos was subsiding, he remembered, “I just kind of collapsed and was taking a nap and had a vision. It was very vivid, not like a dream that disappears. It was very forceful. She and I were sitting on the couch that was in the Pearl album cover, talking to each other. She said that she was just fine, that she had never felt as calm as she did then, and that it was time to go.”

  John Cooke had his own vision. “Some months after Janis died, I had a dream. It was at the end of a concert. Janis came off-stage and I was waiting for her. She said, ‘Was I okay?’ with that little-girl uncertainty of hers, and I said, ‘You were great.’ I hugged her. It was incredibly vivid. I woke up with this ball of emotion inside me, and I felt that Janis had visited me from the grave. She wasn’t just asking if she did all right in the concert. She was asking about her life. And I was so glad to have a chance to reassure her. ‘You were great, Janis.’”

  SIXTEEN

  THE MEMORIAL CELEBRATION

  Come back and believe in my love

  Come back and believe in my love

  Come back and believe in the magic of love!

  —MARK SPOELSTRA, “Magic of Love”

  GO BACK TO PORT ARTHUR?” I asked incredulously. “I haven’t been there in eighteen years!” My mother prevailed upon my brother and me to represent the family in a memorial ceremony for our sister, Janis. Sam Monroe, the head of the local historical society, had called her with the request. As the son of her former boss, Sam always had Mother’s ear. He wanted help in developing an exhibit honoring Janis.

  Sam was working with John Palmer, a Port Arthuran whom Janis vaguely knew in school. One of life’s cruel ironies brought the successful businessman, John, a run-in with local society when he testified against a prominent family in an oil-siphoning scam. Smarting from the sting of a tarnished personal image, he developed a renewed empathy with outcasts. What more obvious totem was there to hoist in our town than Janis, a high school classmate of his, a woman applauded by the nation but whose name still evoked seething resentment in some proper hometown citizens? It was time, he declared earnestly, to welcome Janis back home, with full honor and love. Underwriting the cost of creating a bronze statue of her was his way of doing that.

  John Palmer’s symbolic effort was all it took to bring forth the fans in our hometown area—those dedicated to her and her music, those who shared her resentment of social rules, and those who wanted to make peace with the past. The press caught it, and the ideas kept rolling. On January 19, 1988, which would have been her forty-fifth birthday, Port Arthur held a dedication ceremony for the museum exhibit and unveiled a statue of Janis Joplin.

  More than five thousand people crammed into a hall that was designed to hold only three thousand. Refinery workers, college students, and housewives stood alongside toddlers and adolescents. Most came from in and around our hometown of Port Arthur, Texas. Chartered busloads of people traveled from nearby Houston, and some came from places as distant as Iowa and Canada.

  They came to honor a hometown girl who had made good in the distant and seemingly foreign world of San Francisco and 1960s rock and roll. Janis had publicly scorned our hometown during many press interviews. The kindest thing she had said about it was that it was a good place to leave. Twenty years after her death, the local town fathers felt it was acceptable to bury the hatchet that she had lofted. They ignored her role as rock-and-roll knight jousting with our culture’s innate hypocrisy. Instead, they grasped her more acceptable achievement of making great music that sold many records and earned her an enduring spot in many music lovers’ hearts.

  Whether fans or friends, their ideas of Janis were determined in part by the hoopla of fame in our culture. In The Frenzy of Renown, Leo Braudy said there were four elements to fame: the person, her accomplishment, the immediate publicity, and what posterity thought about her ever since. In Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity, Richard Schickel wrote, “After death, stars become cartoon characters, owned by fans, with the true elements that didn’t fit allowed to disappear, and the other aspects embellished.” People came to the ceremony with their own viewpoints, but all were ready to pay their respects.

  The nature of Janis’s death, from a heroin overdose, seems to have overshadowed her image in life. The press seldom writes about her fun-loving character, her concentration on art, or her social attitudes, which were so familiar to those of us who knew her. In many people’s minds, the Janis Joplin story is mostly about the steps she took that led to her overdosing on drugs.

  When Janis died in 1970, we never expected her image to grow, evolve, and gel into one of the preeminent symbols of the times. We were waiting for the public interest to fade, for her life and image to return to those who knew her for longer than the four years she was in the spotlight. Instead, we shared her love with the public.

  Mother put her heart into finding items to send for the exhibit. True to her character, she decided that if they were going to do a Janis Joplin presentation, then they were going to do it right. She did her best to send all the trivia of Janis’s early life, the commonplace things that she touched or used. Pulled from the bottoms of bureau drawers and boxes long packed away, Mom sent the mementos and her love.

  How odd the things seemed in glass-and-wood display cases as historical evidence of the particulars of my sister’s existence. Her slide rule, the one we all shared, was still kept safe in its dark green hard-leather case, with only a few teenage scribbles on it. The curator placed it next to her black cloth-covered Bible, the one she got when she joined the First Christian Church downtown. The book showed the wear of curious young hands turning the fine paper pages and pondering the colorful pictures within it. A big green book grabbed my heart. In large type the cover announced, The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Reading was the backbone of the Joplin family, and nothing represented Janis better than that book.

  Mother included the Port Arthur News piece about Janis during the summer of 1957, when she worked at Gates Memorial Library. The yellowing newsprint photo captured the adolescent Janis with neatly curled hair and a beaming, proud, innocent smile next to an illustration she did of L. Frank Baum’s Oz characters. People in town donated the original sketches, which they had purchased from Janis long ago. Her carefree Patchwork Girl of Oz danced merrily alongside her jaunty Scarecrow.

  What Michael and I didn’t know ahead of time, but probably should have surmised, was our responsibility to talk to the press. There is an art to giving interviews that Janis knew. Being new to the game, I found it awkward. The press people were genuine, honest folk, but many were fresh out of college. They had been in grade school when Janis was singing. They assumed too much from what little research they did. That inadequacy made their questions strange to us. One woman asked, “What was the first odd thing you noticed about Janis?” Michael and I looked at each other and laughed! How can we tell someone that our sister was never weird to us?
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  The press had a heyday, crafting such headlines as TOWN THAT SCORNED JANIS, NOW APPLAUDING HER. One reporter asked about Janis’s hideaway, a retreat that she purportedly had fixed up in our garage. She told us it was a place Janis had gone when life in Port Arthur became too frustrating. Where did these stories come from? Michael and I could only murmur that we hadn’t noticed Janis retreating to anywhere. Instead, Janis had stood in the center of things. We explained that she did sometimes paint in the garage when the weather was good or when she wanted the extra room. We couldn’t figure out how to get across that artistic expression was the norm in our family. We told the reporter that most of those Port Arthur stories were a bit overstated. “It’s just a town, you know, nothing particularly special one way or the other.” Michael added, “Janis was a great showman, that was part of her line. It had a great effect and made a point.”

  Janis’s image and quotes have been so distilled and twisted over the years that their relevance has faded. Explaining her and her statements about Port Arthur was impossible without talking about the sixties and how they evolved. I couldn’t get that across in one quick phrase, the kind that newsfolk like to quote.

  After a while their questions sounded the same, as though the news corps had gathered over a cup of strong Texas coffee and arrived at a consensus about what was important in the event. A staple query was, “What do you think Janis would say about this ceremony?” That question more than any other evoked clear memories of Janis at home. I felt safe saying that she would have liked the ceremony. I could imagine her chuckling and saying, “Well, it’s about time,” with a smile showing a twinge of ironic amusement.

  After we completed our obligatory public-relations job, our attention returned to the event that was unfolding around us. We were taken with the slow-moving, densely packed crowd of strangers who stared at Michael and me as though we were also on view inside a glass-and-wood display case.