How can you talk about Classic Rock & Roll and not mention one of the all time greats: Janis Joplin. It is not easy writing about Janis because of all the sadness and tragedy that encompassed her life. So misunderstood by many, but never by me. I did enjoy writing about her because I found out things I didn’t know. Like the fact that she and Country Joe McDonald were an item once and lived together. Remember him from Woodstock? I do and I wasn’t even a teenager yet. This girl
had some major talent, let me tell you, but like so many others, she was taken from us way too soon. Had she lived, she’ll be 65 years old now and I bet still Rocking & Rolling.


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.”


About Janis Joplin: She was born on January 19, 1943 in Port Arthur, Texas and died at the age of 27 on Octover 4, 1970.
Some of the great songs by Janis Joplin include “Me and Bobby McGee”, “Piece Of My Heart”, “Ball And Chain”, “Get It While You Can”, “Mercedes Benz”, “Try
(Just a Little Bit Harder)”, “Cry Baby”, “Down On Me”, “Summertime” and many, many more.


Now let’s go back in time, back to where it all began …......
The Cosmic Giggle must have been in full tilt hysterics on January 19, 1943 when the oil refinery seaport of Port Arthur, Texas, won the heavenly crapshoot as the birthplace of Rock & Roll’s first female superstar, Janis Joplin. In retrospect, Port Arthur’s most famous daughter both defied and defined the Texas town that raised, rejected, reviled, then ultimately rejoiced in her brief, mad existence. In a way that she never would have admitted then (but might now), Port Arthur made Janis Joplin what she was: a more tolerant, nurturing atmosphere might have diluted the fire that burned within her.


Life in the Gulf Coast town was not exactly hard; like much of the town’s population, Janis’ father, Seth, worked at the Texaco refinery and the Joplins resided comfortably.
By all accounts, Janis had a happy childhood, but her entrée into womanhood was less than graceful. As a teenager, she tended to gain weight, her soft child-blond hair turned brown and unruly, and she developed acne that would scar as well as shape her looks and personality. She became an unwilling member of an elite club of misfits, a woman who avoided mirrors because of pitted reflections, knowing that the scars underneath caused by the ones on the surface are the most painfully inflicted. Rejected and made fun of by most of her peers, she sought and found
solace in the works of other outcasts: writers, musicians and artists. When your society rejects you, you do the obvious: You reject it.


Joplin felt like an ugly duckling because she didn’t fit anyone’s notion of beauty. Port
Arthur was a one-high-school town, and to be rejected by the school was to be rejected by the town. A culture that puts a premium on marketable feminine beauty has no use for the Janis Joplins of the world, and why should it? Her kind of beauty can only be captured in its natural state: candidly or in performance. Look at the posed shots of Joplin and you’d swear her eyes plead with you to like her, really like her. Now, look at the performance photos, where she’s recklessly lost in song, or examine the candid shots of her, where Joplin’s face is soft and vulnerable in repose.


In front of the photographer’s camera in a studio she was naked to the world, but in front of an audience, she came alive, transforming into a vibrant and seductive entertainer who channeled every honker and shouter she ever heard on the Texas radio in the thick, black night.


For kids in East Texas’ “Golden Triangle” (Beaumont, Port Arthur, and Orange) the promised land of booze and blues lay just across the Louisiana border. While the big-city sound of Bobby Bland and gritty rhythm of Lightnin’ Hopkins filtered in
from Houston, 90 miles away, Slim Harpo, Clifton Chenier, and swamp pop royalty like Tommy McLain, Rod Bernard, and Dale & Grace reigned in the roadhouses and dance halls of Cajun and swamp country that ran off Highway 90 between Lafayette and the Lone Star border. From the moment it crossed the Sabine River, that highway was lined with clubs and juke joints with names like the Big Oaks, Buster’s, the Stateline, joints that attracted the locals as well as nearby Texans.


Clandestine forays over the border, called going “on the line”, were a rite of passage, in those days, and one that Joplin was exposed to early on because she ran with the boys in high school. On weekends, they would load up and drive across the state line where the brass-heavy bands were tearing up the clubs. Gulf Coast bands like the Boogie Kings and Jerry LaCroix & the Counts specialized in the hits of the day and infused their sets with raucous dirty dancing and hip-grinding ballads. These bands might be dismissed as cover bands today but back then they functioned not only as living jukeboxes, but also as keepers of the flame. At this strip of clubs across the border, American Rock & Roll resonated endlessly in the night, its bluesy beats and frantic rhythms greased by the free-flowing booze; Texas drinking age was 21, Louisiana’s 18.


The rowdy blues Joplin saw live in Louisiana were a marked contrast to the classical music she was raised on in Port Arthur and the omnipresent country music found in Texas. Jazzmeisters like Dave Brubeck and folksingers like Odetta were cultivated by her circle of friends, who likewise found the question-authority philosophy of the Beats palatable. Her knowledge and quest for understanding inspired her to not just appreciate but to learn the music, taking up guitar as well as singing. By the time she graduated Thomas Jefferson High School in 1960, she was imbued with an unusually well-rounded knowledge of music as well as a desire to explore its core.


What happened to Janis Joplin after she graduated high school is well known:
College courses at Lamar Tech; a lifestyle-expanding trip to Venice, California; more college courses back in Port Arthur where she played coffeehouses; a mid-summer 1962 trip to Austin resulting in her move here. From Austin, her life is even better documented. She played the folk circuit for a while locally but left Austin for San Francisco and, briefly, New York.
For a while she occasionally worked as a folk singer. Around this time her drug use began to increase, and she acquired a reputation as a “speed freak” and occasional heroin user. She was a heavy drinker throughout her career, and her trademark
beverage was Southern Comfort.


Burnt out and drug-weary, she returned to Port Arthur briefly in the summer of 1965 and tried unsuccessfully to conform to the straight life. Her rebellious nature reared its head during a trip to Austin that fall; she stayed and never returned home
to Port Arthur. Seven months later, she left for San Francisco. It was June 1966.
Janis Joplin had finally gotten out.


On the surface, Janis Joplin seemed the perfect icon for stardom in the late Sixties:
She fit no standard of beauty yet exuded a raw sensuality that mirrored a movement which rejected societal standards by creating its own. When Janis Joplin arrived in San Francisco, in 1966, the year before the Summer of Love, its music scene was already in a nascent, post-Beat hippie whirl. Young people flocked to the Bay area as if to Mecca by the thousands, searching for identity, reason, justification, maybe just something as simple as acceptance. This is the irony of all the great Sixties icons, Joplin included: their desire for acceptance was at the heart of their rebellion, and that their ultimate embrace by the masses came about because of this rebellion. The sad part about rebellion, however, is that it usually follows rejection, and that was something Janis Joplin knew deep down in her soul.


Janis joined a struggling early San Francisco psychedelic group, Big Brother & the Holding Company. Although their loose, occasionally sloppy brand of bluesy psychedelia had some charm, there can be no doubt that Joplin, who initially didn’t even sing lead on all of the material, was primarily responsible for lifting them out
of the ranks of the ordinary. She made them a hit at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, where her stunning version of “Ball and Chain”, perhaps her very best
performance, was captured on film. After a debut on the Mainstream label, Big Brother signed a management deal with Albert Grossman and moved on to
Columbia. Their second album, Cheap Thrills, topped the charts in 1968, but Joplin left the band shortly afterward, enticed by the prospects of stardom as a solo act.


Joplin’s first album, I Got Dem Ol’ Kozmic Blues Again Mama!, was recorded with the Kozmic Blues Band, a unit that included horns and retained just one of the musicians that had played with her in Big Brother, guitarist Sam Andrew. Although it was a hit, it wasn’t her best work; the new band, though more polished musically, was not nearly as sympathetic accompanists as Big Brother, purveying a soul-rock groove that could sound forced. That’s not to say it was totally unsuccessful, boasting one of her signature tunes in “Try (Just a Little Bit Harder).”
Musically, however, things were on the upswing shortly before her death, as she assembled a better, more versatile backing outfit, the Full Tilt Boogie Band, for her final album, Pearl. Joplin was sometimes criticized for screeching at the expense of subtlety, but Pearl was solid evidence of her growth as a mature, diverse stylist who
could handle blues, soul, and folk-rock.


On October 4, 1970, four years and four months after she bolted from Austin, Janis Joplin overdosed in her room at the Landmark Motor Hotel in Los Angeles, having scored a particularly pure batch of heroin. Her career had been virtually meteoric, but her ascent as the first goddess of rock was doused by her sad, lonely death, which followed that of Jimi Hendrix, who’d died two weeks earlier. Jim Morrison
would die within a year, and whatever glow the Sixties had was finally dimmed for good.


Janis Joplin was cremated in the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Westwood, California, and her ashes were scattered into the Pacific Ocean. The album Pearl, released six weeks after her death, included a version of Nick
Gravenites’ song “Buried Alive In The Blues”, which was left as an instrumental because Joplin had died before she was able to record her vocal over the backing track.


The 1979 film The Rose was loosely based on Joplin’s life. The lead role earned Bette Midler an Academy Award nomination as Best Actress. In the late 1990s, a musical based on “Love, Janis,” was launched, with an aim to take it to Off-Broadway.
Opening there 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 and Beth Hart. A national tour followed. As of 2005, two biopics of Joplin’s life are being planned, one called Piece of My Heart starring Renée Zellweger, the other one called Gospel According to Janis.


What would Janis Joplin have been like today? Undoubtably mellower; likely dried out and cleaned up, because if she wasn’t alcoholic at the time, she surely would have been soon. The toll would not have shown well on her face, but blues mamas are supposed to look the part, anyway: hard-livin’, hard-lovin’ and, of course, hard
drinking. By dying young, she is frozen at the pinnacle of her success: brilliant and shimmering in the easy grace of audience acceptance and approval. She is, forever, raw iron soul.


Most of Janis’ songs, as you probaby know, talk about pain and sorrow; the story of her life. In closing my Blog on Janis, I’ll leave you with the lyrics of her Farewell Song:


Whoa, the last time that I saw ya
Child, I know, no, you didn’t say a word.
And I knew, darlin’ as I looked into your eyes
That my feelings, oh, they’d never been heard.


Well, I’m talkin’ to you about love,
Did you hear me, I said love,
Because it’s got to be such a long, long, way
From denyin’, from denyin’.


And I say, don’t say no, no, no to me no more.
And I believed in you all the time,
Honey, until I found out, you know, that I was so wrong.
Won’t you try and build a life with you,
Guess I should’ve known it, I guess I should’ve known it all along.


Oh, oh, oh, oh, let me hold you just once more
Babe, I ask you just once more
Because it’s got to be such a long, long way from cryin’
And I been cryin’ and I got tears in my eyes.


Yeah, but don’t you know when you love somebody that’s so precious
They can never, never, never be had very cheaply
No, no, no, no, no, no, no.


You’re gonna have to pay your dues
And sometimes, sometimes I guess you’re bound to lose.
Hey, but that’s the way
You’re gonna learn, learn, learn to love deeply.


Now oh God, I wish I could explain that myself,
‘Cause I know that it’s my fault, too.
It’s so easy to hurt you, darling,
It’s so hard, it’s hard not to do.


And I know that you showed me a new life
And you’ll always, you’ll always be my friend.
Yeah, but I don’t think, honey, that I can keep from tryin’
And I’ll be tryin’ and I been cryin’ for you, baby,
Yes, I have now.


Well, tell me, tell me, tell me, tell me, tell me, tell me
What would I do without you, child?
I’m afraid that I can’t say.
But I hope, honey, that when you will remember
Lord, it’ll be, it’ll be such a sunny day.


Now, now, now, now, good-bye,
I’ll see you sometime
And don’t be worried, everything’s just fine.
Babe, I don’t think
That I can keep from dyin’
And I’ve been dyin’.


I say now every day I die a little bit, babe
I say now every day I lose me someone in my heart
I’ve been lonely, lonely, look around baby
I said now I can’t help myself
I can’t help myself
I gotta find him, gotta, I gotta need him
‘Cause I gotta find my man, find my baby
‘Cause I gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta,
Gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta, yeah, gotta
Gotta, gotta, gotta, oh my Lord I gotta
Help me now now now now
Help me, babe, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Whoaa – Lord, Lord Lord Lord!!
Whoaa – Lord, Lord Lord Lord!!
Whoaa – Lord, Lord Lord Lord!!