In Praise of Difficult Women

by Karen Karbo

  PORT ARTHUR IS AN OIL REFINERY TOWN on the Gulf Coast, 91 miles east of Houston and a stone’s throw from Louisiana. It’s a town of billowing smokestacks, tall gas flares topped by ever burning flames, oil jacks that pump ceaselessly as a heart, and row upon row of squat white petroleum storage tanks. It’s one of the most humid places in the country, where the air smells of rotten eggs, fireworks, and scalded plastic. (I’m told people who live there don’t notice after a while.) There are tidy, well-heeled neighborhoods too, with shady streets, manicured front lawns, and churchgoing neighbors. The Joplins lived on one such street.

  Janis’s father, Seth, was an engineer at Texaco. Her mother, Dorothy, was a housewife, focused on raising Janis and her two younger siblings, Laura and Michael. They were a Texas-style Leave It to Beaver family. Janis, older than Laura by six years, was sent to Sunday school and joined the Bluebirds. She showed some singing ability, but no one made much of it. Aside from her intelligence (which was viewed as a liability in a girl), she seemed poised for an expected future: attending Lamar State College of Technology in neighboring Beaumont for training as either a teacher or a nurse before marrying a local boy and settling down. That was pretty much the lone option for a young woman in Port Arthur, Texas, in the late 1950s.

  Then as now, the biggest natural advantage a woman has is beauty. It may be skin deep, but when has that bothered the teachers, employers, suitors—even parents—in charge of doling out the time, attention, favors, promotions, and marriage proposals? When Janis turned 14, it became apparent that she would be just this side of homely, a reality she struggled with her entire life.

  Puberty is more transformational for some of us than others. Janis’s blond curls darkened to dust-bunny brown, and she gained weight. Worst of all, she was smacked with a catastrophic case of acne that no amount of pancake makeup could disguise. Her mother took her to the dermatologist, who blamed the victim; Janis was told to keep her hands off her face and avoid fried foods. She did, but nothing helped. In school, she was desperate to fit in, at first. She joined the Future Teachers of America and was part of a group that decorated the gym for dances and made posters for student elections. But at some point, being relegated to the invisible army of female do-gooders and behind-the-scenes helpers was too dispiriting.

  Junior year she took up with a group of senior boys who were artistic and outlaw-ish: Jim Langdon, a jazz musician; David Moriaty, who remained a friend after she left Texas; and Grant Lyons, who turned her on to the music of Leadbelly and Bessie Smith, Janis’s primary musical influences and inspiration. The older boys also turned her on to the Beat poetry of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, and Gary Snyder. Already an avid reader, she devoured Jack Kerouac, and took his thoughts about racism to heart. Port Arthur was segregated in 1958, and the large African-American population—40 percent of the town—lived on the wrong side of the tracks. One day in Janis’s social studies class, the topic of the rights of Negroes came up. Everyone solemnly affirmed the wisdom of segregation, except Janis, who stood up and said, “Society’s treatment of the black person is wrong. They are people like you and me.”

  After that, the bullying began in earnest. Janis was called a weirdo, a nigger lover, a pig—and, of course, a whore, that all-purpose insult for women who refuse to obey. Boys with whom she’d never exchanged a single word spread rumors about banging her in the backseat of their cars. (This was not an era when parents marched down to the high school and demanded justice.) Janis’s reaction was not to lie low, as another girl might have. Instead, she doubled down. If someone passed her in the hallway and made oinking sounds, she spun on her heel and yelled at them to fuck off. Janis was rebellious and mouthy to a degree the good people of Port Arthur had rarely seen. And you know what? It made her feel good and alive.

  It was a 40-minute drive from Port Arthur across the border into Louisiana, where you could hear live music at the bars in Vinton and get seriously shit-faced. The bars were whites-only, but there were a few where you could sneak in and hear black musicians playing what Janis and her crowd considered to be real music. However, it was well known among the high school rebels that the best music was in New Orleans, a daring four-hour drive across the state. Few people had the chops to try to get away with it.

  One night during her senior year, Janis talked some of the boys in her gang into making the trip.*3 They got smashed, barhopped until the wee hours, then suffered a minor wreck on the way home. Cops arrived, parents were called, and by Monday the gossip had spread throughout the high school. The reputation of the boys had soared—what cool cats, living on the edge!—while Janis was branded the class slut. No one believed they’d gone all that way merely to hear some good bands.

  Given Janis’s complete failure before this time to woo the boys in her class, this might initially have seemed like an improvement in her social status—at least someone wanted to have sex with her! But Port Arthurians were a judgmental lot, and she was now fully ostracized. The irony is that the boys in her crowd were completely uninterested in her. They lusted after other girls—the pretty ones—and she always went home alone.

  JANIS GRADUATED FROM high school in 1960. In 1962, she enrolled in the fine arts program at the University of Texas, Austin, ostensibly to become a painter. She moved into The Ghetto, an apartment house near campus where the political activists, artists, and folk singers lived. She and her Autoharp joined a bluegrass band called the Waller Creek Boys. They had a regular Wednesday night gig at a converted gas station called Threadgill’s Bar & Grill. It was owned by country singer and yodeler Kenneth Threadgill, who supported Janis and believed in her talent—a kindness she would never forget. For two bucks you could drink beer until the wee hours, listening to Janis sing Leadbelly’s and Bessie Smith’s greatest hits in her mournful alto.

  In 1962, Texas college coeds still wore beehive hairdos, straight skirts, white shirts with Peter Pan collars, and flats. Boys had short hair and dressed like their fathers. Shelley Fabares was the top-selling white female singer of the year with “Johnny Angel,” which topped out at number six on the Billboard charts.

  Janis could not have been more different. She wore raggedy-hemmed jeans, denim work shirts, and no bra. She was freakish enough to be newsworthy for a Daily Texan story headlined “She Dares to Be Different.” (Oh, they had no idea.)

  Janis might have stayed in Austin indefinitely. She loved performing at Threadgill’s, where she was developing a following. People were starting to think that however weird she might be, she could really sing.

  The Greek system was big at UT, and every year Alpha Phi Omega held the Ugliest Man on Campus contest as a fundraiser for charity. For five dollars, frat boys nominated each other, sorority girls secretly nominated boys who’d spurned them, and it was all good, clean early-1960s fun. Someone entered Janis into the contest. She didn’t win, as legend holds. But given how self-conscious she was about her looks, she didn’t need to.

  A week later, ugly, manly Janis was gone.

  She hitchhiked to the Bay Area with Chet Helms, a long-haired friend who’d been there before. Janis wowed the crowds at popular coffeehouses in North Beach, Santa Cruz, and Palo Alto, who were used to agreeable-sounding guitar strummers, rather than an angst-ridden, acne-scarred Texas woman who sang her guts out. Around this time, during her first foray to San Francisco, she started using both speed and heroin. She was never one for acid; her mind was active enough, she didn’t need hallucinations on top of everything else. But anything that could be shot into a vein to distract her for a while from her ever aching, ever wounded heart? She was all over that.

  Oh, she made some bad decisions. She shot her mouth off to a Hells Angels gang and got herself beat up. She was bisexual, and took up with an assortment of men and women who loved her either too much or not enough. Still, she had friends who cared about her, and when they saw how strung out she was, how skinny and dirty and arm scratching and crazy-eyed, th
ey pooled their money and bought her a bus ticket back to Port Arthur.

  Back she went to her parents’ house. She enrolled as a sociology major at Lamar State College. She bought modest gathered skirts and long-sleeved blouses to cover the track marks. She saw a psychiatric social worker, briefly. She told him that if she could just be a good Port Arthur girl, she would be able to bury her ambition, her passion to sing, her need for the needle. For all of Janis’s intelligence, she seemed happy to be a mystery to herself. Another theory: The only thing that made her singing come alive was her tsunami of unarticulated feelings—and perhaps intuitively, she realized that sorting them all out would compromise her gift.

  There was also something else: While in San Francisco she’d fallen in love with Peter de Blanc,*4 whom she knew through speed user circles. A few weeks after Janis had returned to Port Arthur, Peter dropped in and asked Seth Joplin for his daughter’s hand. He was on his way to New York to do something or other. The family was apparently not overly impressed with Peter, but it hardly mattered. Janis was engaged! She embarked upon the traditional bride-to-be activities of the time: selecting a china pattern, assembling a hope chest, shopping for a wedding gown, and stitching together, with her mother and sister, a Texas Lone Star quilt for the marital bed.

  Then, suddenly, Janis stopped hearing from him. Peter de Blanc had disappeared.

  Back she went to singing, to plotting another escape. Back she went to Austin, to singing at Threadgill’s. For a short time, Jekyll and Hyde merged: She hurled herself back into the blues in her modest skirt and poufy bun. Guys who’d known her when she was at UT, and were still hanging around town, didn’t notice her square ensemble as much as how good she’d gotten. Her feelings poured out of her. Her voice was raw and unadorned. Her charisma was weird and affecting.

  I’m making it sound so simple and freewheeling. Janis was tortured. She felt Texas was safer, better, and “good” for her, while also boring, closed-minded, and an artistic dead end. She couldn’t make peace with this fact. She might have dithered in Austin indefinitely, but in 1966, her old pal Chet Helms, now a self-styled music promoter who would go on to become the so-called father of 1967’s “Summer of Love,” talked her into coming back—again!—to San Francisco to audition for Big Brother and the Holding Company.

  Years later, Janis would recall it like this: “How I happened to join Big Brother? Well, Chet Helms sent Travis Rivers to get me. What I usually say is that I wanted to leave Texas, but that’s not what really happened. I didn’t want to leave. But he was such a good fuck! How could I not go?”

  The less groovy truth—completely at odds with the spirit of the laid-back times—is that Janis was driven, ambitious, competitive, and itching for success.

  AT THAT TIME, BIG BROTHER was the house band at the Avalon Ballroom, managed by Bill Graham, the granddaddy of the modern rock concert, who also ran the Fillmore Auditorium. The band consisted of psychedelic rock specialist “Weird” Jim Gurley; self-taught bassist Peter Albin; San Francisco State student Sam Andrew; and artist and Spaghetti Factory waitperson Dave Getz on drums. Like many bands of the time, they spent perhaps as much time coming up with the band name as they did practicing. (Second runner up: Tom Swift and His Electric Grandmother.) They called their sound “freak jazz”—and from all reports, it was sort of progressive/hard rock/raga riffs/fuzz tone/feedback distortion/blues.*5 Their stated mission was “to speak to all the children of the earth,” which may have led to their desire to bring in a “chick singer,” given that 51 percent of the aforementioned children are female. More likely, they hoped it would distinguish them from the other rock bands popping up daily like head shops on Haight Street.

  When Janis auditioned, at the age of 23, she wasn’t particularly impressed, and the feeling was mutual. Part of the issue was a difference in musical style—a diplomatic way of saying that Janis was pretty much a stone-cold genius, while BBHC excelled at being very loud. But Helms had persuaded both parties to give it a chance. So when they asked her to join them, Janis said hell yes.

  In July 1966 the band moved to a big house in Lagunitas, a tiny rural community in Marin County. Frank Zappa once said (possibly around the same time), “The older you get, the more you realize life is like high school.” I wonder if Janis realized this as she settled in with her male bandmates and their wives and girlfriends. There she was again, one of the guys, but still essentially alone. At the end of the night, they all crawled into bed with their old ladies, and she was left to ponder the injustice of it all. When Big Brother wasn’t rehearsing, she hung out at a local roadhouse where she drank herself into a stupor and played pool with the Grateful Dead, who lived down the road.

  The Lagunitas idyll lasted only a few months—long enough for Janis to make the all-important transition from Texas beatnik in drab work shirts and jeans to would-be sparkly hippie princess. Her inspiration was Jim Gurley’s wife, Nancy, a small-boned creature with a master’s degree in English, whose interpretation of counterculture couture ran toward high priestess/gypsy queen. Oh, the velvet gowns! The satin, lace, and endless swags of glittery necklaces! Janis decided that would be the look she would adopt, once she had a little money. To demonstrate her adoration and devotion to Nancy, she rather ostentatiously slept with Jim. You know, as one did in those days. Nancy was apparently a little miffed, but nothing a joint couldn’t fix.

  Bead making was Nancy’s thing. (So was dropping acid, with a speed chaser.) The proper way to bead involved using a slender needle to ease a small glass bead onto a piece of waxed leather thread, followed by tying a tiny knot, then slipping on the next bead. Janis, determined to stay clean, used beading to keep her hands busy and away from dope. But one day it simply got away from her and she shot up with the others. In a single afternoon, she, Nancy, and another girl, Rita, pinwheel-eyed on speed, whipped out a 15-foot beaded curtain.

  This is as good a place as any to say that in those years, everyone sat around doing a lot of drugs. I don’t think I have it in me to carefully reconstruct the scenes, which are numerous and all essentially identical: People do the drug. They say things they believe to be profound or funny but are generally neither. Someone puts on a record. People bob their heads to the music. If the drug is of the upper persuasion, they may dance around like maniacs until they collapse in a heap. Whether on uppers or downers, some guy plays an air guitar. People start making out, then either forget they’re doing it or disappear into another room for a proper balling.*6 Time passes. A lot of time passes. Someone orders a pizza.

  In those pre-Internet days acronyms weren’t really a thing. No SMH, BTW, LOL, YOLO, or all the rest. It’s unfortunate, because if there’s one place we could really use a universally accepted acronym, it would be as a placeholder for what happened during the many hours, days, and weeks in the 1960s and ’70s when people did drugs. If there is one thing more boring than sitting around while other people do drugs, it’s listening to them tell stories about sitting around doing drugs—and I’m afraid that’s what a true accounting of Janis’s life during these years would entail. A popular acronym affirmed by the Oxford English Dictionary would be really handy here. Something like SADD, Sat Around Doing Drugs.

  SADD, SADD, SADD.

  THE MONTEREY POP FESTIVAL, held June 16 to 18, 1967, became the template for all the outdoor music festivals to follow. The lineup included pretty much everyone still in heavy rotation on your local classic rock station: Canned Heat, Steve Miller Band, The Who, Jimi Hendrix, Grateful Dead, The Mamas & the Papas, Otis Redding, Ravi Shankar, Jefferson Airplane, and Big Brother and the Holding Company. This is the concert at which Jimi Hendrix set his guitar on fire with lighter fluid, bashed it onto the stage a good half dozen times, then tossed the shredded bits into the audience. Still, I would argue that Janis’s performance was more memorable. Documentarian D. A. Pennebaker captured brilliant, unexpected moments in his film Monterey Pop: the way Janis’s feet lift out of her k
itten heel sandals when she really belts it out; the expression on the face of Mama Cass, sitting in the front row and mouthing “Wow!”; Janis’s sweet, awkward bow at the end, and her girlish skip offstage.

  In a matter of weeks, she was being celebrated as the bright, off-the-rails young thing helping to usher in the new age of sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll. She was applauded for operating with no filter, beloved for doing all the dope, screwing all the guys, and shrieking and cussing about her repressed middle-class childhood.

  JANIS’S SIBLINGS, LINDA AND MICHAEL, saw a different side of their sister. In 1992 Linda, who has a master’s in psychology and a Ph.D. in education, would publish her own memoir—Love, Janis—in an effort to rehabilitate her sister’s image. They insisted she wasn’t just a “ballsy mama” but a kind, normal girl who’d been influenced by a bad crowd. And, you know, they weren’t crazy or in denial.

  Until her death, Janis faithfully wrote long, very sweet letters home. The world’s most cheerful, detailed-oriented summer camper has nothing on Janis when it came to writing letters. She wrote about her gigs, how much money she was making, her apartment, her neighborhood, her new clothes, her dog, George. She included magazine articles from LOOK and Newsweek on the Haight-Ashbury scene, then reassured her family these were mere distortions. The golly gee willikers tone is unmistakable. In a letter dated April 1967 she wrote, “…guess who was in town last week—Paul McCartney!!!! (he’s a Beatle).”