Janis: Her Life and Music by Holly George-Warren, looks at Janis Joplin’s life.
Over the past three weeks I’ve talked about John Dickerson’s book, The American Presidency: The Toughest Job in the World; Eric Larsen’s The Splendid and the Vile, about the Battle of Britain in WW2; and, last week, Saving America’s Cities by Lizabeth Cohen, otherwise known as Urban Redevelopment 101. These were weighty tomes, with lots of detail. So, for a change, this week’s book is about a legendary singer, Janis, a biography of Janis Joplin.
This was a tough book to get through because you know how it will end.
Janis Joplin was a gifted artist who could never quite find real happiness, despite her outsized success as a performer. She was born in Port Arthur, Texas, in 1943, to a middle-class family. She had a brother and a sister and her parents were decent people.
People who knew young Janis would never see her as a huge star. She was smart – she essentially skipped two grades – and she was a tomboy. She’d sing at gatherings with her friends and they noticed that she was good. Port Arthur was not welcoming to minorities but Janis gravitated towards classic Black blues singers like Odetta, Bessie Smith, and Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton, who sang the original “Hound Dog” much more soulfully than Elvis.
She sang at various local clubs and got noticed in Austin where she developed a strong following. She was fairly meek in high school but once she graduated she liked to fight and drink, and she did a lot of each. She got sick of Texas so she and a friend thumbed to San Francisco where she sang at various clubs and developed a small fan base.
Janis was a wanderer. She went to New York City and got addicted to meth as her drug of choice. Her weight dropped to 86 pounds so she figured that it was time to go back home. She was 21. After straightening out her drug situation a bit, she went back to San Francisco and got noticed for her talent and joined up with a group known as Big Brother and the Holding Company.
One of the themes in the book is that Big Brother wasn’t a very good band. Janis was seen by fans and critics as much better than her group, which caused a lot of tension that eventually led her to leave the band at the end of 1968.
Janis made a big splash at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival where her performance was a show-stopper. As one reviewer wrote, “Otis Redding got their souls, and Ravi Shanker drove them out of their seats. Janis tore their hearts out.” Clive Davis, honcho from Columbia Records in NYC, noticed her and wrote a recording contract for the group.
Janis was a polysubstance abuser; she would drink, shoot, or ingest just about anything. Up until the summer of 1967, she had avoided heroin, but she found out that she really liked it. She was becoming distant from her parents; she could never find anyone for long-term relationships; and the pressures of becoming a big star pressured her. Heroin calmed her down.
By the spring of 1968 she had become a real star but she also a bit of a diva. One of her girlfriends said she started to believe her press clippings. By the summer of that year, she had decided to leave Big Brother, but they did a few final performances including the Newport Folk Festival in front of 20,000 people. While she was great, a lot of performers - Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead; Marty Balin of Jefferson Airplane; and Mick Fleetwood of you-know-what - kept telling her how bad her band was.
Despite having broken up, she and Big Brother did a successful east coast tour in the winter of 1969. Along the way, she bedded lots of people, including Jim Morrison of the Doors and Leonard Cohen of “Suzanne” and “Hallelujah”, and several women. Janis was really bisexual, sometimes having active sexual relationships with men and women going on at the same time.
In the fall, she and Big Brother did a few final shows which weren’t very good. She was doing a lot of heroin, including overdoses.
In late 1969 she didn’t have a band so she pulled together a bunch of talented session musicians – professionals who played at recording sessions to back up stars. They did a European tour, with the highlight a concert at the Royal Albert Hall in London. She and her new Kozmic Blues Band (they finally had a name) played Woodstock in August at 4 AM after Creedence Clearwater and the Grateful Dead and she woke the crowd up. That summer she also played in Asbury Park, NJ, with a 19-year old Bruce Springsteen. Janis thought Bruce was cute but he ran for the hills and wanted to have nothing to do with her. Later in December of 1969 the band played Madison Square Garden, after which she and Joe Namath got it on.
By 1970, Janis was getting sick of all of the drama in her life, much of it self-induced. She took a break and went to Brazil with a girlfriend (not a lover) and really enjoyed herself. She stayed clean for months thanks to methadone, and she met a guy, David Neihaus. They became an item and she had someone she really connected to for the first time in her life. They went back to California in March.
Janis took up heroin again with a long-time lover who loved heroin more than Janis did. David was not amused so after two months they parted. He was a rich guy who did a lot of world traveling and she was a star singer. She didn’t want to travel and he didn’t want to stay in San Francisco, so they had a tearful farewell and promised to meet each other in 18 months.
Despite being out of the groups, she and Big Brother did a reunion concert which was a huge success. She kept using heroin off and on, but she also performed. In May she decided to get clean again and did for a while. She had a new band, Full Tilt Boogie, and they did a summer tour through Canada with a lot of other acts that she really enjoyed. The band did concerts that summer, including one in Harvard Stadium with 40,000 people. She was clean. Things were good. That was her last public concert.
Janis went back to Port Arthur for her 10th high school reunion. It did not go well. Her parents and she did not get along well since she had recently trashed them on the Dick Cavett Show. She didn’t quite get what she was looking for at the reunion dinner and got into a fight with Jerry Lee Lewis at a bar. She still liked to fight. She and her friends trashed her parents’ house. It was not good.
Back in San Francisco she worked on her music. Jimmy Hendrix, a friend, had just died of an overdose. In early October, she and her latest male beau and her long-time female lover arranged for a party of heroin and group groping. They stood her up and she started without them, shooting up heroin from a new dealer. It was really strong and it killed her. Ironically, because she had months of being clean, she was more likely to overdose on strong stuff, which she did.
Bob’s Take
It’s hard to summarize this book. It is a tragedy on lots of levels. It reminds me a bit of John Belushi, but his life was not nearly as dramatic as Joplin’s. He overdosed after having had off-and-on clean periods, but the drugs eventually won. Janis was rarely really happy. She really craved a lasting, loving relationship but her demons and her genius made that hard to achieve. She was a great singer, as good as the classic Black blues singers that she revered.
