02/20/08
Janis Joplin Rock and Blues Legend
Click the thumbnails below to see larger images.
Janis Joplin performing Piece of My Heart in Germany in 1969
Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company perform Summertime
Janis Joplin with The Cosmic Blues Band belts out Cry Baby at her 1970 Toronto concert
Janice Joplin's July 18, 1969 appearance on The Dick Cavett Show.
Janis Joplin's final appearance on The Dick Cavett Show (August 3, 1970). Janis passed away two months later.
Part one of ABC's Downtown look at the life of Janis Joplin
Part two of ABC's Downtown look at the life of Janis Joplin
Janis Lyn Joplin (January 19, 1943 – October 4, 1970) was an American singer, songwriter, and music arranger, from Port Arthur, Texas. She rose to prominence in the late 1960s as the lead singer of Big Brother and the Holding Company, and later a solo career. In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine ranked Joplin #46 on their list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time. Her career continued until her death in Los Angeles, California of a drug overdose, at the age of 27.
Biography
Early life
Janis Joplin was born to Seth and Dorothy (East) Joplin; her father was an engineer at Texaco, her mother, registrar at a business college. She had two younger siblings, Michael and Laura. The Joplins felt that Janis always needed more attention than their other children. Her mother, Dorothy, stated, "She was unhappy and unsatisfied without [receiving a lot of attention]. The normal rapport wasn't adequate." As a teenager, she befriended a group of outcasts, including Jim Langdon, Dave Moriaty and Grant Lyons, the latter of whom lent Joplin his albums by African-American blues artists Bessie Smith and Leadbelly for the first time. Joplin later stated that listening to Bessie Smith and Leadbelly influenced her to want to become a singer. She began singing in the local choir and, along with listening to Smith and Leadbelly, started listening to musicians such as Odetta and Big Mama Thornton. Primarlily a painter while still in school, she first began singing blues and folk music with friends. While at Thomas Jefferson High School, she stated that she was mostly shunned. Joplin was quoted as saying, "I was a misfit. I read, I painted, I didn't hate niggers." As a teen, Joplin went through ravaging physical changes. She became overweight and her skin broke out so badly she was left with deep scars which required sanding. Other kids at high school would routinely taunt her and call her names like "pig," "freak" or "creep." Joplin developed a tough outer shell as a result of being taunted, in order to protect herself.
University
Joplin graduated from high school in 1960 and attended the University of Texas at Austin, though she did not complete her studies. She lived in a building commonly referred to as "The Ghetto,"located at 2812 1/2 Nueces Street. The campus newspaper ran a profile of her in 1962 headlined "She Dares To Be Different."
Career
Early efforts
Cultivating a rebellious manner, Joplin styled herself in part after her female blues heroines and, in part, after the Beat poets. She left Texas for San Francisco in 1963, living in North Beach and later Haight-Ashbury. On June 25, 1964, Joplin and future Jefferson Airplane guitarist Jorma Kaukonen recorded a number of blues standards, further accompanied by Margareta Kaukonen on typewriter (as percussion instrument). These sessions, recorded in monaural sound on a reel-to-reel tape recorder, included seven tracks: "Typewriter Talk," "Trouble In Mind," "Kansas City Blues," "Hesitation Blues," "Nobody Knows You When You're Down And Out," "Daddy, Daddy, Daddy" and "Long Black Train Blues," and were later released as the bootleg album The Typewriter Tape. More early recordings are found on the album collection Janis, including the tracks "What Good Can Drinkin' Do", "Mary Jane" and "No Reason For Livin'".
Around this time her drug use began to increase, and she acquired a reputation as a "speed freak" and occasional heroin user. She also used other intoxicants. She was a heavy drinker throughout her career, her trademark beverage Southern Comfort.
In the spring of 1965, several months after Joplin recorded the tracks with Kaukonen, her friends, noticing the physical effects of her amphetamine habit (she was described as "skeletal" and "emaciated"), convinced her to return to her parents in Port Arthur, Texas. In May 1965, Joplin's friends threw her a bus-fare party so she could return home. Living at home, she changed her entire lifestyle. She avoided drugs and alcohol, began wearing relatively modest dresses, adopted a beehive hairdo, and enrolled as a sociology major at Lamar University in nearby Beaumont, Texas. Nevertheless, she still corresponded by mail with a methamphetamine dealer she had known in San Francisco and they became engaged to be married. Shortly after the man visited the Joplin household wearing a conservative suit and tie, charming the entire family and asking Mr. Joplin for permission to marry his daughter, the man broke off contact with her. During her year at Lamar University, she commuted to Austin to perform solo, accompanying herself on guitar. One of her performances was reviewed in the Austin American-Statesman.
Big Brother and The Holding Company
In 1966, Joplin's bluesy vocal style attracted the attention of the psychedelic band Big Brother and The Holding Company, a band that had gained some renown among the nascent hippie community in Haight-Ashbury. She was recruited to join the group by Chet Helms, a promoter who had known her in Texas and who at the time was managing Big Brother. Helms' promotion company was Family Dog Productions. Joplin joined Big Brother on June 4, 1966. Her first public performance with them was at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco.
On August 23, 1966 during a four week engagement in Chicago at club known as Mother Blues, the group signed a deal with independent label Mainstream Records. They recorded an album in the fall, but due to the lack of success of their early singles, the album was not released until August 1967, shortly after the group's breakthrough appearance in June at the Monterey Pop Festival. The Big Brother set at Monterey included a version of Big Mama Thornton's "Ball and Chain." Joplin's performance at Monterey, like that of Jimi Hendrix, made her an international star virtually overnight. (The D.A. Pennebaker documentary Monterey Pop captured Cass Elliot in the crowd silently mouthing "Wow!" during Joplin's performance.)
In early 1967, Joplin met Country Joe McDonald of the group, Country Joe and the Fish, and they lived together as a couple for a few months. Most of 1967 was spent playing gigs. Joplin and Big Brother played in San Francisco most often at the Fillmore West, Winterland and the Avalon Ballroom. They also played at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, as well as in Seattle, Washington, Vancouver, British Columbia, the Psychedelic Supermarket in Boston, Massachusetts and the Golden Bear Club in Huntington Beach, California.
In November 1967, the group parted ways with Helms and signed with top artist manager Albert Grossman. Up to this point, Big Brother had performed mainly in California (mostly in San Francisco) but they had gained national prominence with their Monterey performance. On February 16, 1968, the group began its first East Coast tour in Philadelphia, and the following day they gave their first performance in New York City at the Anderson Theater. On April 7, 1968, the last day of their East Coast tour, Joplin and Big Brother performed with Jimi Hendrix, Buddy Guy, Joni Mitchell, Richie Havens, Paul Butterfield, and Elvin Bishop at the "Wake for Martin Luther King, Jr." concert in New York.
During the spring of 1968, Joplin and Big Brother made their nationwide television debut on an ABC daytime variety show hosted by Dick Cavett. Later, she made three appearances on the primetime Cavett program. During this time, the band was now billed as "Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company." Joplin was beginning to get massive media coverage which incurred resentment among the other members of the band. The other members of Big Brother thought that Joplin was on a "star trip;" meanwhile, others were telling Joplin that Big Brother was terrible band and that she ought to dump them.
Time magazine called Joplin "probably the most powerful singer to emerge from the white rock movement," and Richard Goldstein, in Vogue magazine, wrote that Joplin was "the most staggering leading woman in rock...she slinks like tar, scowls like war...clutching the knees of a final stanza, begging it not to leave...Janis Joplin can sing the chic off any listener."
Big Brother's second album, Cheap Thrills, featured cover design by counterculture cartoonist Robert Crumb. It was recorded in New York and Los Angeles between March and June 1968 and released in August. Cheap Thrills was made to sound as if it was mostly "live," when all but one track ("Ball and Chain") was actually recorded live; the rest of the tracks were recorded in the studio. The album retained a raw quality, including the sound of a cocktail glass breaking and the broken shards being swept away during the song "Turtle Blues." Together with the documentary film Monterey Pop, released to repertory movie theaters in late 1968, the album launched Joplin's very successful, albeit short, musical career in the late Sixties. Cheap Thrills, which also gave the band a breakthrough hit single, "Piece of My Heart," reached the number one spot on the Billboard charts eight weeks after its release and stayed there for eight (nonconsecutive) weeks. The album was certified gold at the time of its release and sold over a million copies in the first month of its release. Live at Winterland '68, recorded at the Winterland Ballroom on April 12 and 13, 1968, showed Janis and Big Brother and the Holding Company at the height of their mutual career working through a selection of tracks from their albums.
The band made another East Coast tour during July-August 1968, performing at the Columbia Records convention in Puerto Rico and the Newport Folk Festival. After returning to San Francisco for two hometown shows at the Palace of Fine Arts Festival on August 31 and September 1, Joplin announced that she would be leaving Big Brother. The group continued touring through the fall and Joplin gave her last official performance with Big Brother at a Family Dog benefit on December 1, 1968.
Solo career
After splitting from Big Brother, Joplin formed a new backup group, the Kozmic Blues Band. The band was influenced by the Stax-Volt Rhythm and Blues bands of the 1960's, as exemplified by Otis Redding and the Bar-Kays, who were major musical influences on Joplin. The Stax-Volt R&B sound was typified by the use of horns and had a more bluesy, funky, soul, pop-oriented sound than most of the hard-rock psychedelic bands (such as Big Brother) of the period. The Kozmic Blues Band backed her on the I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama! album in 1969. Their first public performance was at the Stax-Volt Christmas Show in Memphis, Tennessee on December 21, 1968. Joplin was the only non-Stax artist to appear and she received the next-to-top billing under Johnnie Taylor. Also appearing were Booker T. & the M.G.'s, Albert King, and the Staple Singers.
Reviews of the new group were mixed. Some music critics, including Ralph Gleason of the San Francisco Chronicle, were negative. Gleason wrote that the new band was a "drag" and that Joplin should "scrap" her new band and "go right back to being a member of Big Brother...(if they'll have her)." Other reviewers, such as reporter Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post generally ignored the flaws and devoted entire articles to celebrating the singer's magic.
By the spring of 1969, Joplin was addicted to heroin, shooting at least $200 worth of heroin per day, according to Peggy Caserta, whom Joplin was getting high with, as well as having an affair with, in between affairs with various men. The Kozmic Blues album, released in September of 1969, was certified gold later that year but did not match the success of Cheap Thrills. At the end of the year, the group broke up. Their final gig with Joplin was at Madison Square Garden in New York City on the night of December 19-20, 1969.
Joplin and the Kozmic Blues Band toured North America and Europe throughout 1969, appearing at Woodstock in August. By most accounts, Woodstock was not a happy affair for Joplin. After being helicoptered in to the festival, she was told she would have a ten hour wait before being able to go on stage. She was accompanied by Peggy Caserta, and the two of them were shooting heroin in a one of the festival Portosan toilets prior to Joplin's performance. In addition, Joplin was drinking alcohol, so by the time she hit the stage, she was "three sheets to the wind." Adding to Joplin's drug and alcohol use was the fact that the band was still not tight, despite many months of gigging. She told Friedman and others in the music business that she was a lot more nervous and prone to drinking and drugging in recording studios and playing large venues than at the Fillmore West and other small clubs. A writer for Playboy magazine noted during the Kozmic Blues sessions that Joplin made her own personal recordings of each day's takes with a Sony cassette recorder and, after leaving the studio at night, played them repeatedly searching for mistakes.
Joplin's performance was not included in the documentary film Woodstock. The 1975 documentary film Janis included a clip of her dancing with saxophone player Cornelius "Snooky" Flowers during an instrumental break. The 25th anniversary director's cut of Woodstock includes her performance of Work Me, Lord. The segment begins with Joplin, her eyes almost shut, asking the audience, "How you doin'?" and then advising people who are stoned to "drink lots of water" before plunging into the song. Gabriel Mekler, who produced the Joplin album, I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama!, told publicist-turned-biographer Myra Friedman after Joplin's death that the singer had lived in his house during the June 1969 recording sessions at his insistence so he could keep her away from drugs and her drug-using friends (who included Peggy Caserta).
In February 1970, Joplin travelled to Brazil, where she stopped her drug and alcohol use. She was accompanied on vacation there by her friend Linda Gravenites, who had designed the singer's stage costumes from 1966 to 1969. Joplin was romanced by an American schoolteacher named David (George) Niehaus, who was traveling around the world. They were photographed by the press at Carnival in Rio de Janeiro. Gravenites also took photgraphs of the two during their Brazilian vacation and they appeared to be a "carefree, happy, healthy young couple" having a great time. Returning to the United States, Joplin began using heroin again and resumed her lesbian affair with Peggy Caserta, whom she'd been seeing on and off again since 1967. Her relationship with Niehaus soon ended due to Joplin's drug use, her relationship with Caserta and her unwillingness to take some time off work and travel the world with him. Around this time she formed her new band, the Full Tilt Boogie Band. The band was comprised of mostly young Canadian musicians who didn't associate with her friends from Big Brother, the band included an organ but no horn section. Joplin took a much more active role in putting together the Full Tilt Boogie Band than she did with her prior band. She was quoted as saying, "It's my band. Finally it's my band!" The Full Tilt Boogie Band began touring in May 1970. Joplin remained quite happy with her new band, which received mostly positive feedback from both her fans and the critics. Prior to beginning a summer tour with Full Tilt Boogie, she performed in a reunion with Big Brother at the Fillmore West in San Francisco on April 4, 1970. Recordings from this concert were included in an in-concert album released posthumously in 1972. She again appeared with Big Brother on April 12 at Winterland where she and Big Brother were reported to be in excellent form.
From June 28 to July 4, 1970, Joplin and her new band joined the all-star Festival Express tour through Canada, performing alongside the Grateful Dead, Delaney and Bonnie, Rick Danko and The Band, Eric Andersen and Ian and Sylvia. They played concerts in Toronto, Winnepeg and Calgary. Footage of her performance of the song "Tell Mama" in Calgary became an MTV video in the 1980s. The audio portion of same was included on the 1982 Farewell Song album. The audio of other Festival Express performances were included on that 1972 Joplin In Concert album. Video of the performances was included on the Festival Express DVD.
In the "Tell Mama" video shown on MTV in the 1980's, Joplin wore a psychedelically colored loose-fitting costume and feathers in her hair. This was her standard stage costume in the spring and summer of 1970. The new costumes came after her designer, Linda Gravenites (whom Joplin had praised in the May 1968 issue of Vogue), resigned (and ended their friendship) shortly after their return from Brazil, due largely to Joplin's continued use of heroin.
During the Festival Express tour, Joplin was accompanied by Rolling Stone writer, David Dalton, who would later write several articles and a book on Joplin. She was quoted as saying, "I'm a victim of my own insides. There was a time when I wanted to know everything...It used to make me very unhappy, all that feeling. I just didn't know what to do with it. But now I've learned to make that feeling work for me. I'm full of emotion and I want a release, and if you're on stage and if it's really working and you've got the audience with you, it's a oneness you feel."
Contemporary concerns
Despite Janis Joplin's substance abuse, she voiced criticism of two practices that were common at rock concerts. A 1970 interview for Newsweek reflected her opinion on gate-crashers at concerts:
"I don't believe in gate-crashing,"Janis Joplin said last week. "The people aren't up there when I'm sweating on a stage at a festival, breaking my ass. You can get the money, man. Sell your old lady, sell your dope. Look at me, man, I'm selling my heart."
While Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead shared her rejection of gate-crashing (as evident in Festival Express), Jefferson Airplane guitarist Paul Kantner by contrast did not, as reflected in the same Newsweek piece: "I would enthusiastically urge anyone attending a rock festival to break in. They should be free," he said.
Joplin also objected to the practice of dosing people with LSD without their permission or knowledge. On August 4, 1970, while at New York's El Quijote bar with her publicist Myra Friedman and a fan, she commented that people who did that were comparable to police officers who go around smashing people's skulls. Joplin expounded on the topic a few days later. Over dinner with Friedman and "several members of Full-Tilt (Boogie Band)" in a New York restaurant called Bradley's, Joplin spoke about "what she called 'hippie brainwashing'. 'They're frauds, the whole goddamn culture. They bitch about brainwashing from their parents and they do the same damn thing. I've never known a one of those people who would tolerate any way of life but their own.'"
Pearl
The single cover of "Me & Bobby McGee"
During September 1970, Joplin and her band began recording a new album in Los Angeles with producer Paul A. Rothchild, who had produced recordings for The Doors. Although Joplin died before all the tracks were fully completed, there was still enough usable material to compile an LP. "Mercedes Benz" was included despite it being a first take, and the track "Buried Alive In The Blues" — to which Joplin had been scheduled to add her vocals on the day she was found dead — was kept as an instrumental.
The result was the posthumously released Pearl (1971). It became the biggest selling album of her career and featured her biggest hit single, a cover of Kris Kristofferson's "Me and Bobby McGee" (which she learned from Arlo Guthrie), as well as the social commentary of the a cappella "Mercedes Benz", written by Joplin, close friend and song writer Bob Neuwirth and beat poet Michael McClure. In 2003, Pearl was ranked #122 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.
Among her last public appearances were two broadcasts of The Dick Cavett Show on June 25 and August 3, 1970. On the June 25 show, she announced that she would attend her ten-year high school class reunion, although she admitted that when in high school, her schoolmates "laughed me out of class, out of town and out of the state." She attended the reunion on August 14, accompanied by fellow musician and friend Bob Neuwirth and road manager John Cooke, but it would be one of the last decisions of her life and it reportedly proved to be a rather unhappy experience for her. Joplin held a press conference in Port Arthur during her reunion visit. She was described by Rolling Stone journalist, Chet Flippo, as wearing enough jewelry for a "Babylonian whore." Curious Port Arthur residents cruised by in cars, neither waving nor smiling, "staring at [Joplin] from icy redneck eyes." When asked by a reporter during the reunion if Joplin entertained at Thomas Jefferson High School when she was a student there, Joplin replied, "Only when I walked down the aisles." Joplin and her mother, Dorothy, had bitter words during Joplin's visit. Dorothy Joplin lashed out at her daughter and said, "I wish you'd never been born!" during a particularly contentious altercation between the two. Joplin attempted to denigrate Port Arthur and the people who'd humiliated her a decade earlier in high school, but her attempts backfired and made her visit an outright fiasco.
Returning to California after the disastrous reunion, Joplin, according to Linda Gravenites, felt she couldn't do anything right. At this time, in late August - early September 1970, Joplin began seeing Seth Morgan, a 21 year-old Berkeley student, cocaine dealer and future novelist; and she checked into the Landmark Motel in Los Angeles to begin recording her album, Pearl. She and Morgan became engaged to be married in early September and Joplin threw herself into the recording of songs for her new album.
During the August 3rd Cavett broadcast, Joplin referred to her upcoming performance at the Festival for Peace to be held at Shea Stadium in Queens, New York on August 6, 1970. The date was selected because it was the 25th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan. The anti-war concert was a day-long event featuring many of the top acts of the day including Steppenwolf, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Paul Simon, The James Gang, and a dozen others.
Joplin's last public performance, with the Full Tilt Boogie Band, took place on August 12, 1970 at the Harvard Stadium in Boston, Massachusetts. A positive review appeared on the front page of the Harvard Crimson newspaper despite the fact that Full Tilt Boogie performed with makeshift sound amplifiers after their regular equipment was stolen in Boston.
Death
The last recordings Joplin completed were "Mercedes Benz" and a birthday greeting for John Lennon on October 1, 1970, Happy Trails composed by Dale Evans. Lennon, whose birthday was October 9, later told Dick Cavett that her taped greeting arrived at his home after her death. On Saturday, October 3, Joplin visited the Sunset Sound Studios in Los Angeles to listen to the instrumental track for Nick Gravenites' song "Buried Alive In The Blues" prior to recording the vocal track, scheduled for the next day. When she failed to show up at the studio by Sunday afternoon, producer Paul Rothchild became concerned. Full Tilt Boogie's road manager, John Cooke, drove to the Landmark Motor Hotel (since renamed the Highland Gardens Hotel) where Joplin had been a guest since August 24. He saw Joplin's psychedelically painted Porsche still in the parking lot. Upon entering her room, he found her dead on the floor. The official cause of death was an overdose of heroin, possibly combined with the effects of alcohol.
Joplin was cremated in the Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Mortuary in Los Angeles, and her ashes scattered from a plane into the Pacific Ocean and along Stinson Beach. The only funeral service was held at Pierce Brothers and attended by Joplin's parents and maternal aunt.
Legacy
Joplin's body decoration, with a wristlet and a small heart on her left breast, by the San Francisco tattoo artist Lyle Tuttle, is taken as a seminal moment in the tattoo revolution and was an early moment in the popular culture's acceptance of tattoos as art. Another trademark was her flamboyant hair styles, often including colored streaks and accessories such as scarves, beads and feathers.
The 1979 film, The Rose, was loosely based on Joplin's life. Bette Midler earned an Academy Award nomination as Best Actress for her performance.
In the late 1990s, the musical play Love, Janis was created with input from Janis' younger sister Laura plus Big Brother guitarist Sam Andrew, with an aim to take it to Off-Broadway. Opening in the summer of 2001 and scheduled for only a few weeks of performances, the show won acclaim and packed houses and was held over several times, the demanding role of the singing Janis attracting rock vocalists from relative unknowns to pop stars Laura Branigan (1957-2004) and Beth Hart. A national tour followed. Gospel According to Janis, a biographical film starring Zooey Deschanel as Joplin was scheduled to begin shooting in early 2007 but was postponed indefinitely.
In 1988, the Janis Joplin Memorial, with an original bronze, multi-image sculpture of Joplin by Douglas Clark, was dedicated in Port Arthur, Texas.
Joplin was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, and was given a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005.
The text above came from from The Wikipedia.
Click the thumbnails below to see larger images.
Janis Joplin performing Piece of My Heart in Germany in 1969
Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company perform Summertime
Janis Joplin with The Cosmic Blues Band belts out Cry Baby at her 1970 Toronto concert
Janice Joplin's July 18, 1969 appearance on The Dick Cavett Show.
Janis Joplin's final appearance on The Dick Cavett Show (August 3, 1970). Janis passed away two months later.
Part one of ABC's Downtown look at the life of Janis Joplin
Part two of ABC's Downtown look at the life of Janis Joplin
Janis Lyn Joplin (January 19, 1943 – October 4, 1970) was an American singer, songwriter, and music arranger, from Port Arthur, Texas. She rose to prominence in the late 1960s as the lead singer of Big Brother and the Holding Company, and later a solo career. In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine ranked Joplin #46 on their list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time. Her career continued until her death in Los Angeles, California of a drug overdose, at the age of 27.
Biography
Early life
Janis Joplin was born to Seth and Dorothy (East) Joplin; her father was an engineer at Texaco, her mother, registrar at a business college. She had two younger siblings, Michael and Laura. The Joplins felt that Janis always needed more attention than their other children. Her mother, Dorothy, stated, "She was unhappy and unsatisfied without [receiving a lot of attention]. The normal rapport wasn't adequate." As a teenager, she befriended a group of outcasts, including Jim Langdon, Dave Moriaty and Grant Lyons, the latter of whom lent Joplin his albums by African-American blues artists Bessie Smith and Leadbelly for the first time. Joplin later stated that listening to Bessie Smith and Leadbelly influenced her to want to become a singer. She began singing in the local choir and, along with listening to Smith and Leadbelly, started listening to musicians such as Odetta and Big Mama Thornton. Primarlily a painter while still in school, she first began singing blues and folk music with friends. While at Thomas Jefferson High School, she stated that she was mostly shunned. Joplin was quoted as saying, "I was a misfit. I read, I painted, I didn't hate niggers." As a teen, Joplin went through ravaging physical changes. She became overweight and her skin broke out so badly she was left with deep scars which required sanding. Other kids at high school would routinely taunt her and call her names like "pig," "freak" or "creep." Joplin developed a tough outer shell as a result of being taunted, in order to protect herself.
University
Joplin graduated from high school in 1960 and attended the University of Texas at Austin, though she did not complete her studies. She lived in a building commonly referred to as "The Ghetto,"located at 2812 1/2 Nueces Street. The campus newspaper ran a profile of her in 1962 headlined "She Dares To Be Different."
Career
Early efforts
Cultivating a rebellious manner, Joplin styled herself in part after her female blues heroines and, in part, after the Beat poets. She left Texas for San Francisco in 1963, living in North Beach and later Haight-Ashbury. On June 25, 1964, Joplin and future Jefferson Airplane guitarist Jorma Kaukonen recorded a number of blues standards, further accompanied by Margareta Kaukonen on typewriter (as percussion instrument). These sessions, recorded in monaural sound on a reel-to-reel tape recorder, included seven tracks: "Typewriter Talk," "Trouble In Mind," "Kansas City Blues," "Hesitation Blues," "Nobody Knows You When You're Down And Out," "Daddy, Daddy, Daddy" and "Long Black Train Blues," and were later released as the bootleg album The Typewriter Tape. More early recordings are found on the album collection Janis, including the tracks "What Good Can Drinkin' Do", "Mary Jane" and "No Reason For Livin'".
Around this time her drug use began to increase, and she acquired a reputation as a "speed freak" and occasional heroin user. She also used other intoxicants. She was a heavy drinker throughout her career, her trademark beverage Southern Comfort.
In the spring of 1965, several months after Joplin recorded the tracks with Kaukonen, her friends, noticing the physical effects of her amphetamine habit (she was described as "skeletal" and "emaciated"), convinced her to return to her parents in Port Arthur, Texas. In May 1965, Joplin's friends threw her a bus-fare party so she could return home. Living at home, she changed her entire lifestyle. She avoided drugs and alcohol, began wearing relatively modest dresses, adopted a beehive hairdo, and enrolled as a sociology major at Lamar University in nearby Beaumont, Texas. Nevertheless, she still corresponded by mail with a methamphetamine dealer she had known in San Francisco and they became engaged to be married. Shortly after the man visited the Joplin household wearing a conservative suit and tie, charming the entire family and asking Mr. Joplin for permission to marry his daughter, the man broke off contact with her. During her year at Lamar University, she commuted to Austin to perform solo, accompanying herself on guitar. One of her performances was reviewed in the Austin American-Statesman.
Big Brother and The Holding Company
In 1966, Joplin's bluesy vocal style attracted the attention of the psychedelic band Big Brother and The Holding Company, a band that had gained some renown among the nascent hippie community in Haight-Ashbury. She was recruited to join the group by Chet Helms, a promoter who had known her in Texas and who at the time was managing Big Brother. Helms' promotion company was Family Dog Productions. Joplin joined Big Brother on June 4, 1966. Her first public performance with them was at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco.
On August 23, 1966 during a four week engagement in Chicago at club known as Mother Blues, the group signed a deal with independent label Mainstream Records. They recorded an album in the fall, but due to the lack of success of their early singles, the album was not released until August 1967, shortly after the group's breakthrough appearance in June at the Monterey Pop Festival. The Big Brother set at Monterey included a version of Big Mama Thornton's "Ball and Chain." Joplin's performance at Monterey, like that of Jimi Hendrix, made her an international star virtually overnight. (The D.A. Pennebaker documentary Monterey Pop captured Cass Elliot in the crowd silently mouthing "Wow!" during Joplin's performance.)
In early 1967, Joplin met Country Joe McDonald of the group, Country Joe and the Fish, and they lived together as a couple for a few months. Most of 1967 was spent playing gigs. Joplin and Big Brother played in San Francisco most often at the Fillmore West, Winterland and the Avalon Ballroom. They also played at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, as well as in Seattle, Washington, Vancouver, British Columbia, the Psychedelic Supermarket in Boston, Massachusetts and the Golden Bear Club in Huntington Beach, California.
In November 1967, the group parted ways with Helms and signed with top artist manager Albert Grossman. Up to this point, Big Brother had performed mainly in California (mostly in San Francisco) but they had gained national prominence with their Monterey performance. On February 16, 1968, the group began its first East Coast tour in Philadelphia, and the following day they gave their first performance in New York City at the Anderson Theater. On April 7, 1968, the last day of their East Coast tour, Joplin and Big Brother performed with Jimi Hendrix, Buddy Guy, Joni Mitchell, Richie Havens, Paul Butterfield, and Elvin Bishop at the "Wake for Martin Luther King, Jr." concert in New York.
During the spring of 1968, Joplin and Big Brother made their nationwide television debut on an ABC daytime variety show hosted by Dick Cavett. Later, she made three appearances on the primetime Cavett program. During this time, the band was now billed as "Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company." Joplin was beginning to get massive media coverage which incurred resentment among the other members of the band. The other members of Big Brother thought that Joplin was on a "star trip;" meanwhile, others were telling Joplin that Big Brother was terrible band and that she ought to dump them.
Time magazine called Joplin "probably the most powerful singer to emerge from the white rock movement," and Richard Goldstein, in Vogue magazine, wrote that Joplin was "the most staggering leading woman in rock...she slinks like tar, scowls like war...clutching the knees of a final stanza, begging it not to leave...Janis Joplin can sing the chic off any listener."
Big Brother's second album, Cheap Thrills, featured cover design by counterculture cartoonist Robert Crumb. It was recorded in New York and Los Angeles between March and June 1968 and released in August. Cheap Thrills was made to sound as if it was mostly "live," when all but one track ("Ball and Chain") was actually recorded live; the rest of the tracks were recorded in the studio. The album retained a raw quality, including the sound of a cocktail glass breaking and the broken shards being swept away during the song "Turtle Blues." Together with the documentary film Monterey Pop, released to repertory movie theaters in late 1968, the album launched Joplin's very successful, albeit short, musical career in the late Sixties. Cheap Thrills, which also gave the band a breakthrough hit single, "Piece of My Heart," reached the number one spot on the Billboard charts eight weeks after its release and stayed there for eight (nonconsecutive) weeks. The album was certified gold at the time of its release and sold over a million copies in the first month of its release. Live at Winterland '68, recorded at the Winterland Ballroom on April 12 and 13, 1968, showed Janis and Big Brother and the Holding Company at the height of their mutual career working through a selection of tracks from their albums.
The band made another East Coast tour during July-August 1968, performing at the Columbia Records convention in Puerto Rico and the Newport Folk Festival. After returning to San Francisco for two hometown shows at the Palace of Fine Arts Festival on August 31 and September 1, Joplin announced that she would be leaving Big Brother. The group continued touring through the fall and Joplin gave her last official performance with Big Brother at a Family Dog benefit on December 1, 1968.
Solo career
After splitting from Big Brother, Joplin formed a new backup group, the Kozmic Blues Band. The band was influenced by the Stax-Volt Rhythm and Blues bands of the 1960's, as exemplified by Otis Redding and the Bar-Kays, who were major musical influences on Joplin. The Stax-Volt R&B sound was typified by the use of horns and had a more bluesy, funky, soul, pop-oriented sound than most of the hard-rock psychedelic bands (such as Big Brother) of the period. The Kozmic Blues Band backed her on the I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama! album in 1969. Their first public performance was at the Stax-Volt Christmas Show in Memphis, Tennessee on December 21, 1968. Joplin was the only non-Stax artist to appear and she received the next-to-top billing under Johnnie Taylor. Also appearing were Booker T. & the M.G.'s, Albert King, and the Staple Singers.
Reviews of the new group were mixed. Some music critics, including Ralph Gleason of the San Francisco Chronicle, were negative. Gleason wrote that the new band was a "drag" and that Joplin should "scrap" her new band and "go right back to being a member of Big Brother...(if they'll have her)." Other reviewers, such as reporter Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post generally ignored the flaws and devoted entire articles to celebrating the singer's magic.
By the spring of 1969, Joplin was addicted to heroin, shooting at least $200 worth of heroin per day, according to Peggy Caserta, whom Joplin was getting high with, as well as having an affair with, in between affairs with various men. The Kozmic Blues album, released in September of 1969, was certified gold later that year but did not match the success of Cheap Thrills. At the end of the year, the group broke up. Their final gig with Joplin was at Madison Square Garden in New York City on the night of December 19-20, 1969.
Joplin and the Kozmic Blues Band toured North America and Europe throughout 1969, appearing at Woodstock in August. By most accounts, Woodstock was not a happy affair for Joplin. After being helicoptered in to the festival, she was told she would have a ten hour wait before being able to go on stage. She was accompanied by Peggy Caserta, and the two of them were shooting heroin in a one of the festival Portosan toilets prior to Joplin's performance. In addition, Joplin was drinking alcohol, so by the time she hit the stage, she was "three sheets to the wind." Adding to Joplin's drug and alcohol use was the fact that the band was still not tight, despite many months of gigging. She told Friedman and others in the music business that she was a lot more nervous and prone to drinking and drugging in recording studios and playing large venues than at the Fillmore West and other small clubs. A writer for Playboy magazine noted during the Kozmic Blues sessions that Joplin made her own personal recordings of each day's takes with a Sony cassette recorder and, after leaving the studio at night, played them repeatedly searching for mistakes.
Joplin's performance was not included in the documentary film Woodstock. The 1975 documentary film Janis included a clip of her dancing with saxophone player Cornelius "Snooky" Flowers during an instrumental break. The 25th anniversary director's cut of Woodstock includes her performance of Work Me, Lord. The segment begins with Joplin, her eyes almost shut, asking the audience, "How you doin'?" and then advising people who are stoned to "drink lots of water" before plunging into the song. Gabriel Mekler, who produced the Joplin album, I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama!, told publicist-turned-biographer Myra Friedman after Joplin's death that the singer had lived in his house during the June 1969 recording sessions at his insistence so he could keep her away from drugs and her drug-using friends (who included Peggy Caserta).
In February 1970, Joplin travelled to Brazil, where she stopped her drug and alcohol use. She was accompanied on vacation there by her friend Linda Gravenites, who had designed the singer's stage costumes from 1966 to 1969. Joplin was romanced by an American schoolteacher named David (George) Niehaus, who was traveling around the world. They were photographed by the press at Carnival in Rio de Janeiro. Gravenites also took photgraphs of the two during their Brazilian vacation and they appeared to be a "carefree, happy, healthy young couple" having a great time. Returning to the United States, Joplin began using heroin again and resumed her lesbian affair with Peggy Caserta, whom she'd been seeing on and off again since 1967. Her relationship with Niehaus soon ended due to Joplin's drug use, her relationship with Caserta and her unwillingness to take some time off work and travel the world with him. Around this time she formed her new band, the Full Tilt Boogie Band. The band was comprised of mostly young Canadian musicians who didn't associate with her friends from Big Brother, the band included an organ but no horn section. Joplin took a much more active role in putting together the Full Tilt Boogie Band than she did with her prior band. She was quoted as saying, "It's my band. Finally it's my band!" The Full Tilt Boogie Band began touring in May 1970. Joplin remained quite happy with her new band, which received mostly positive feedback from both her fans and the critics. Prior to beginning a summer tour with Full Tilt Boogie, she performed in a reunion with Big Brother at the Fillmore West in San Francisco on April 4, 1970. Recordings from this concert were included in an in-concert album released posthumously in 1972. She again appeared with Big Brother on April 12 at Winterland where she and Big Brother were reported to be in excellent form.
From June 28 to July 4, 1970, Joplin and her new band joined the all-star Festival Express tour through Canada, performing alongside the Grateful Dead, Delaney and Bonnie, Rick Danko and The Band, Eric Andersen and Ian and Sylvia. They played concerts in Toronto, Winnepeg and Calgary. Footage of her performance of the song "Tell Mama" in Calgary became an MTV video in the 1980s. The audio portion of same was included on the 1982 Farewell Song album. The audio of other Festival Express performances were included on that 1972 Joplin In Concert album. Video of the performances was included on the Festival Express DVD.
In the "Tell Mama" video shown on MTV in the 1980's, Joplin wore a psychedelically colored loose-fitting costume and feathers in her hair. This was her standard stage costume in the spring and summer of 1970. The new costumes came after her designer, Linda Gravenites (whom Joplin had praised in the May 1968 issue of Vogue), resigned (and ended their friendship) shortly after their return from Brazil, due largely to Joplin's continued use of heroin.
During the Festival Express tour, Joplin was accompanied by Rolling Stone writer, David Dalton, who would later write several articles and a book on Joplin. She was quoted as saying, "I'm a victim of my own insides. There was a time when I wanted to know everything...It used to make me very unhappy, all that feeling. I just didn't know what to do with it. But now I've learned to make that feeling work for me. I'm full of emotion and I want a release, and if you're on stage and if it's really working and you've got the audience with you, it's a oneness you feel."
Contemporary concerns
Despite Janis Joplin's substance abuse, she voiced criticism of two practices that were common at rock concerts. A 1970 interview for Newsweek reflected her opinion on gate-crashers at concerts:
"I don't believe in gate-crashing,"Janis Joplin said last week. "The people aren't up there when I'm sweating on a stage at a festival, breaking my ass. You can get the money, man. Sell your old lady, sell your dope. Look at me, man, I'm selling my heart."
While Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead shared her rejection of gate-crashing (as evident in Festival Express), Jefferson Airplane guitarist Paul Kantner by contrast did not, as reflected in the same Newsweek piece: "I would enthusiastically urge anyone attending a rock festival to break in. They should be free," he said.
Joplin also objected to the practice of dosing people with LSD without their permission or knowledge. On August 4, 1970, while at New York's El Quijote bar with her publicist Myra Friedman and a fan, she commented that people who did that were comparable to police officers who go around smashing people's skulls. Joplin expounded on the topic a few days later. Over dinner with Friedman and "several members of Full-Tilt (Boogie Band)" in a New York restaurant called Bradley's, Joplin spoke about "what she called 'hippie brainwashing'. 'They're frauds, the whole goddamn culture. They bitch about brainwashing from their parents and they do the same damn thing. I've never known a one of those people who would tolerate any way of life but their own.'"
Pearl
The single cover of "Me & Bobby McGee"
During September 1970, Joplin and her band began recording a new album in Los Angeles with producer Paul A. Rothchild, who had produced recordings for The Doors. Although Joplin died before all the tracks were fully completed, there was still enough usable material to compile an LP. "Mercedes Benz" was included despite it being a first take, and the track "Buried Alive In The Blues" — to which Joplin had been scheduled to add her vocals on the day she was found dead — was kept as an instrumental.
The result was the posthumously released Pearl (1971). It became the biggest selling album of her career and featured her biggest hit single, a cover of Kris Kristofferson's "Me and Bobby McGee" (which she learned from Arlo Guthrie), as well as the social commentary of the a cappella "Mercedes Benz", written by Joplin, close friend and song writer Bob Neuwirth and beat poet Michael McClure. In 2003, Pearl was ranked #122 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.
Among her last public appearances were two broadcasts of The Dick Cavett Show on June 25 and August 3, 1970. On the June 25 show, she announced that she would attend her ten-year high school class reunion, although she admitted that when in high school, her schoolmates "laughed me out of class, out of town and out of the state." She attended the reunion on August 14, accompanied by fellow musician and friend Bob Neuwirth and road manager John Cooke, but it would be one of the last decisions of her life and it reportedly proved to be a rather unhappy experience for her. Joplin held a press conference in Port Arthur during her reunion visit. She was described by Rolling Stone journalist, Chet Flippo, as wearing enough jewelry for a "Babylonian whore." Curious Port Arthur residents cruised by in cars, neither waving nor smiling, "staring at [Joplin] from icy redneck eyes." When asked by a reporter during the reunion if Joplin entertained at Thomas Jefferson High School when she was a student there, Joplin replied, "Only when I walked down the aisles." Joplin and her mother, Dorothy, had bitter words during Joplin's visit. Dorothy Joplin lashed out at her daughter and said, "I wish you'd never been born!" during a particularly contentious altercation between the two. Joplin attempted to denigrate Port Arthur and the people who'd humiliated her a decade earlier in high school, but her attempts backfired and made her visit an outright fiasco.
Returning to California after the disastrous reunion, Joplin, according to Linda Gravenites, felt she couldn't do anything right. At this time, in late August - early September 1970, Joplin began seeing Seth Morgan, a 21 year-old Berkeley student, cocaine dealer and future novelist; and she checked into the Landmark Motel in Los Angeles to begin recording her album, Pearl. She and Morgan became engaged to be married in early September and Joplin threw herself into the recording of songs for her new album.
During the August 3rd Cavett broadcast, Joplin referred to her upcoming performance at the Festival for Peace to be held at Shea Stadium in Queens, New York on August 6, 1970. The date was selected because it was the 25th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan. The anti-war concert was a day-long event featuring many of the top acts of the day including Steppenwolf, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Paul Simon, The James Gang, and a dozen others.
Joplin's last public performance, with the Full Tilt Boogie Band, took place on August 12, 1970 at the Harvard Stadium in Boston, Massachusetts. A positive review appeared on the front page of the Harvard Crimson newspaper despite the fact that Full Tilt Boogie performed with makeshift sound amplifiers after their regular equipment was stolen in Boston.
Death
The last recordings Joplin completed were "Mercedes Benz" and a birthday greeting for John Lennon on October 1, 1970, Happy Trails composed by Dale Evans. Lennon, whose birthday was October 9, later told Dick Cavett that her taped greeting arrived at his home after her death. On Saturday, October 3, Joplin visited the Sunset Sound Studios in Los Angeles to listen to the instrumental track for Nick Gravenites' song "Buried Alive In The Blues" prior to recording the vocal track, scheduled for the next day. When she failed to show up at the studio by Sunday afternoon, producer Paul Rothchild became concerned. Full Tilt Boogie's road manager, John Cooke, drove to the Landmark Motor Hotel (since renamed the Highland Gardens Hotel) where Joplin had been a guest since August 24. He saw Joplin's psychedelically painted Porsche still in the parking lot. Upon entering her room, he found her dead on the floor. The official cause of death was an overdose of heroin, possibly combined with the effects of alcohol.
Joplin was cremated in the Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Mortuary in Los Angeles, and her ashes scattered from a plane into the Pacific Ocean and along Stinson Beach. The only funeral service was held at Pierce Brothers and attended by Joplin's parents and maternal aunt.
Legacy
Joplin's body decoration, with a wristlet and a small heart on her left breast, by the San Francisco tattoo artist Lyle Tuttle, is taken as a seminal moment in the tattoo revolution and was an early moment in the popular culture's acceptance of tattoos as art. Another trademark was her flamboyant hair styles, often including colored streaks and accessories such as scarves, beads and feathers.
The 1979 film, The Rose, was loosely based on Joplin's life. Bette Midler earned an Academy Award nomination as Best Actress for her performance.
In the late 1990s, the musical play Love, Janis was created with input from Janis' younger sister Laura plus Big Brother guitarist Sam Andrew, with an aim to take it to Off-Broadway. Opening in the summer of 2001 and scheduled for only a few weeks of performances, the show won acclaim and packed houses and was held over several times, the demanding role of the singing Janis attracting rock vocalists from relative unknowns to pop stars Laura Branigan (1957-2004) and Beth Hart. A national tour followed. Gospel According to Janis, a biographical film starring Zooey Deschanel as Joplin was scheduled to begin shooting in early 2007 but was postponed indefinitely.
In 1988, the Janis Joplin Memorial, with an original bronze, multi-image sculpture of Joplin by Douglas Clark, was dedicated in Port Arthur, Texas.
Joplin was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, and was given a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005.
The text above came from from The Wikipedia.
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