Janis Joplin

• 1. Introduction

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  In the summer of 1962, the campus newspaper at the University of Texas at Austin printed a profile of a student named Janis Joplin. The issue was dated the 27th of July, and the headline read “She Dares to Be Different.” The writer noted that she went barefoot “when she feels like it” and kept an Autoharp handy in case she felt the urge to sing. Eight years later she was dead, found in a Hollywood motel room. Her cover of “Me and Bobby McGee” reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in March 1971, months after she died. Admirers prized her powerful mezzo-soprano and her electric stage presence. How did a girl from Port Arthur, Texas, become one of the most successful rock performers of her era? What did the road cost her? And why do her records still sell in the millions?

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• 2. Texas Outsider

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  Janis Lyn Joplin was born in Port Arthur, Texas, on the 19th of January 1943. Her mother, Dorothy, worked as a registrar at a business college. Her father, Seth, was an engineer at Texaco. Two younger siblings, Laura and Michael, completed the household, and the family belonged to First Christian Church of Port Arthur. Her parents felt that Janis needed more attention than their other children.

  At Thomas Jefferson High School, Joplin gravitated to a circle of outcasts. One friend owned records by Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey and Lead Belly. Joplin later credited those records with pushing her toward a singing career. She began performing blues and folk songs with friends. Among her classmates was Jimmy Johnson, who later became a Pro Football Hall of Fame coach. Joplin said she was ostracized and bullied. As a teenager she gained weight and developed acne, which left deep scars that later required dermabrasion.

  She graduated in 1960. Lamar State College of Technology in Beaumont, Texas, took her for a summer, and the University of Texas at Austin followed, though she never finished a degree. In Austin she sang with a folk trio called the Waller Creek Boys, alongside Powell St. John and Lanny Wiggins. She also spent time with the staff of the campus humor magazine The Texas Ranger. Gilbert Shelton, the future Freak Brothers cartoonist, became her friend. He recalled that she sold copies of the magazine on campus, including issues carrying some of his earliest comics.

  In December 1962, Joplin recorded her first song on tape at the home of a fellow University of Texas student. The song was “What Good Can Drinkin’ Do.” She had cultivated a rebellious manner, styled partly after her female blues heroines and partly after the Beat poets. In January 1963 she left Texas, saying she wanted “Just to get away.” She hitchhiked to North Beach in San Francisco with her friend Chet Helms.

  In 1964 Joplin was still in San Francisco, where she and future Jefferson Airplane guitarist Jorma Kaukonen recorded seven blues numbers. Kaukonen’s wife, Margareta, can be heard typing in the background, and one track is titled “Typewriter Talk.” The set included “Trouble in Mind” and “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out.” It reached listeners only long after Joplin’s death, as a bootleg called The Typewriter Tape.

  In 1963 Joplin was arrested in San Francisco for shoplifting. Over the next two years her drug use grew, and she earned a reputation as a “speed freak” and occasional heroin user. She drank heavily throughout her career, and her favorite drink was Southern Comfort. By May 1965 her friends were alarmed by the toll of regular methamphetamine injections. They described her as “skeletal” and “emaciated.” They persuaded her to go home and threw her a bus-fare party. Five years later she told Rolling Stone writer David Dalton about that first stay in San Francisco. “I didn’t have many friends and I didn’t like the ones I had,” she said.

  At 88 pounds, Joplin alarmed her parents when she returned to Port Arthur in the spring of 1965. She gave up drugs and alcohol and adopted a beehive hairdo. She enrolled at Lamar University in Beaumont as an anthropology major, although her sister Laura said in a 2016 interview that the major was social work. She commuted to Austin to sing solo, accompanying herself on acoustic guitar. One performance was a benefit for the ailing Texas bluesman Mance Lipscomb.

  In the fall of 1965 Joplin became engaged to Peter de Blanc. He lived in New York and worked with IBM computers. He traveled to Texas to ask her father for her hand, and she and her mother began planning the wedding. De Blanc, who traveled often, ended the engagement soon afterward.

  During 1965 and 1966 she commuted to Beaumont for sessions with Bernard Giarritano, a psychiatric social worker at a counseling agency funded by the United Fund. He later told biographer Myra Friedman that she was baffled by how she could pursue a singing career without relapsing into drugs. Joplin said that without singing she would have to work as a keypunch operator or a secretary. After that she would become a wife and mother, like the other women in Port Arthur. She sometimes brought her guitar along, and people in neighboring offices could hear her singing.

  About a year before she joined Big Brother and the Holding Company, she recorded seven tracks alone with her acoustic guitar. They included her own “Turtle Blues” and a version of Buffy Sainte-Marie’s “Cod’ine.” The tracks were released in 1995 as an album titled This is Janis Joplin 1965.

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• 3. Big Brother Breakthrough

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  Joplin joined Big Brother and the Holding Company on the 4th of June 1966. The San Francisco psychedelic rock band had earned some renown among the young hippie community of Haight-Ashbury. Chet Helms, the promoter who managed the group, recruited her. He sent his friend Travis Rivers to find her in Austin, where she was singing with her acoustic guitar.

  Joplin let her parents believe that Austin was her destination and the home of her new band. Her first public show with Big Brother was at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco. Soon afterward a letter reached Port Arthur, and that is how her parents learned she was in San Francisco.

  That June, Joplin shared an apartment with Rivers and made him promise that no needles would be used there. Bandmate Dave Getz remembered, 25 years later, walking her home from a rehearsal. Two or three guests of Rivers were in the middle of injecting drugs. Rivers walked in, and she screamed at him, “We had a pact! You promised me!” Getz tried to calm her by saying they were only taking mescaline. “I just can’t stand to see that!” she told him.

  A four-week engagement in Chicago in August 1966 ended badly. The promoter ran out of money after crowds fell short of expectations, and he could not pay the band. Stranded, the group signed with Bob Shad’s Mainstream Records. Sessions in Chicago that September disappointed everyone, and the band returned to San Francisco. A single of “Blindman” and “All Is Loneliness,” recorded in Los Angeles, sold poorly. Between the 12th and the 14th of December 1966, again in Los Angeles, the band cut ten tracks with Shad producing.

  The breakthrough came at the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967. The debut album followed in August 1967 on Mainstream, with the earlier single’s two tracks added to the rest. When Columbia Records took over the band’s contract and reissued the album, the cover announced “featuring Janis Joplin.” Four minor hits sung by Joplin came from it, including “Down on Me,” a traditional song she arranged.

  The follow-up, Cheap Thrills, was almost entirely recorded in a studio. Only “Ball and Chain” was captured in front of a paying audience. The album kept a raw edge, including the sound of a drinking glass breaking and being swept up during “Turtle Blues.” Robert Crumb designed the cover. “Piece of My Heart” and “Summertime” became popular hits.

  On the 26th of December 1968, the documentary Monterey Pop premiered at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York. Together with the album, the film launched Joplin as a star. Cheap Thrills reached number one on the Billboard 200 eight weeks after its release. It held the top spot for eight nonconsecutive weeks. That same December, guitarist Sam Andrew left Big Brother with Joplin to form her new backing group.

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• 4. Kozmic Blues and Woodstock

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  Keyboardist Stephen Ryder and saxophonist Cornelius “Snooky” Flowers were among the session players Joplin gathered for her Kozmic Blues Band. Sam Andrew joined them, along with Brad Campbell, a bassist who would later play in the Full Tilt Boogie Band. The group looked to the Stax-Volt rhythm and blues and soul bands of the 1960s, such as Otis Redding and the Bar-Kays.

  By early 1969 Joplin was allegedly spending at least $200 a day on heroin. Producer Gabriel Mekler nonetheless kept her away from drugs and drug-using friends while the band recorded I Got Dem Ol’ Kozmic Blues Again Mama! Her European concerts with the band reached cinemas in several documentaries. One of them, Janis, shows her arriving in Frankfurt by plane and includes interviews in Stockholm and London, where she played Royal Albert Hall. Road manager John Byrne Cooke later wrote a book about her use of narcotics, especially outside the United States.

  On the night of the 18th of July 1969, The Dick Cavett Show aired in the United States with Joplin and her band performing “Try (Just a Little Bit Harder)” and “To Love Somebody.”

  At about 2:00 a.m. on Sunday the 17th of August 1969, Joplin finally walked onstage at Woodstock. She had told her band to treat it as just another gig. Then she was flown to the site by helicopter with the pregnant Joan Baez and Baez’s mother. Baez recalled that Joplin saw the enormous crowd and instantly became nervous and giddy. Other bands were contractually due to play first, so she faced a ten-hour wait backstage. She spent part of it drinking and using heroin in a tent with her friend Peggy Caserta. When her turn came, she asked the crowd whether they had everything they needed and whether they were staying stoned. The audience cheered for an encore, and she sang “Ball and Chain.”

  Pete Townshend of the Who played later that morning and watched her set. In his 2012 memoir he wrote that she had been amazing at Monterey but was not at her best at Woodstock, probably because of the delay and what she consumed while waiting. “But even Janis on an off-night was incredible,” he added.

  Joplin was unhappy with her performance. At her own insistence, her singing was left out of the 1970 documentary and its soundtrack. The 25th anniversary director’s cut does include her version of “Work Me, Lord.” She stayed at the festival. At about 3:00 a.m. on Monday the 18th of August, she stood in a circle behind Crosby, Stills & Nash as they played, according to David Crosby in 1988. Later that morning she and Baez sat in Joe Cocker’s van and watched Jimi Hendrix close the show, as Baez wrote in her 1989 memoir.

  Released in September 1969, the Kozmic Blues album went gold that year but did not match the success of Cheap Thrills. Reviews were divided. Ralph J. Gleason of the San Francisco Chronicle called the new band a “drag” and urged her to return to Big Brother. Carl Bernstein of The Washington Post wrote that she had “finally assembled a group of first-rate musicians with whom she is totally at ease.” The single “Kozmic Blues” peaked at number 41 on the Hot 100. A live “Raise Your Hand” became a top ten hit in Germany. The album itself reached number five on the Billboard 200.

  On the 16th of November 1969, police arrested Joplin at Curtis Hixon Hall in Tampa, Florida. She had shouted a profanity at officers doing crowd control, and she was charged with using “vulgar and indecent language.” She was found guilty and fined $200 plus court costs. On Thanksgiving Day she sang a duet with Tina Turner during Ike and Tina Turner’s opening set for a Rolling Stones concert at Madison Square Garden. Friedman later said Joplin was so drunk and stoned that she seemed out of control.

  On the 19th of December she returned to the Garden with solo billing. Johnny Winter and Paul Butterfield joined her onstage, and some observers believed she tried to incite the audience to riot. She told Dalton that Garden crowds listened with “Is she gonna make it?” in their eyes. That show was the Kozmic Blues Band’s last gig with her. Andrew had already quit in the late summer of 1969 to return to Big Brother, and by year’s end the band broke up.

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• 5. Full Tilt Boogie

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  In February 1970, Joplin flew to Brazil, where she stopped using drugs and alcohol. Her friend Linda Gravenites came along. Gravenites had designed Joplin’s stage costumes from 1967 to 1969. At Rio Carnival the press photographed Joplin with David Niehaus, an American tourist who was traveling the world and who courted her. Gravenites took color photographs of the pair as well. Biographer Ellis Amburn said the snapshots showed what looked like “a carefree, happy, healthy young couple.”

  Rolling Stone reached Joplin by international phone. She said she was going into the jungle with “a big bear of a beatnik named David Niehaus.” “I finally remembered I don’t have to be on stage twelve months a year,” she told the magazine.

  Back in the United States she began using heroin again. Niehaus ended the relationship after he saw her injecting drugs at her new home in Larkspur, California. Her relationship with Caserta, herself an intravenous drug user, complicated matters. So did her refusal to take time off and travel the world with him.

  On the 4th of April 1970, Joplin played what proved to be her last reunion with Big Brother, at the Fillmore West in San Francisco. Recordings from that night appeared in 1972 on Joplin in Concert. On the 12th of April she appeared with the band again at Winterland, where both were reported to be in excellent form.

  Her new group was briefly called Main Squeeze before it became the Full Tilt Boogie Band. Most of its members were young Canadians who had worked with Ronnie Hawkins. It had an organ but no horn section. Joplin took a more active part in assembling it than she had with the Kozmic Blues Band. “It’s my band. Finally it’s my band!” she was quoted as saying. In May 1970 the group began a nationwide tour.

  On the 21st of May 1970, Joplin played a Hells Angels party in San Rafael, California, billed as Main Squeeze. The crowd numbered 2,300, and the Hells Angels, who had known her since 1966, paid her $240. Big Brother, with Nick Gravenites singing, opened the night. Gravenites called her singing “stupendous.” Sam Andrew, remembering the night twenty years later, said she was visibly deteriorating and sounded flabby. He felt a tinge of fear for her. Soon afterward she began wearing multi-colored feather boas in her hair. By the time she toured with Full Tilt Boogie she told people she was drug-free, but her drinking increased. Fans and critics eventually responded to the new band mostly with praise.

  On the 25th of June 1970, Joplin told Dick Cavett’s audience that she planned to attend her ten-year high school reunion. Asked whether she had been popular in school, she said her schoolmates “laughed me out of class, out of town and out of the state.”

  From the 28th of June to the 4th of July 1970, Joplin and Full Tilt Boogie rode the Festival Express tour. Also on the bill were Buddy Guy, The Band, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Ten Years After, the Grateful Dead, Delaney & Bonnie, Eric Andersen, and Ian & Sylvia. Concerts took place in Toronto, Winnipeg and Calgary. Footage of her singing “Tell Mama” in Calgary became an MTV video in the early 1980s.

  At the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, Joplin played two shows, according to Myra Friedman. Between them, she and her friend Bob Neuwirth walked to a bar called Vahsen’s, about three minutes away, with the actors Geraldine Page and Rip Torn. There they wrote “Mercedes Benz,” a song partly inspired by a poem by Michael McClure. Neuwirth told The Wall Street Journal in 2015 that Joplin came up with the first verse and the second, about a color TV, while he wrote them on bar napkins with a ballpoint pen. He supplied the third verse, about asking the Lord to buy a night on the town and another round. She sang it at the second show.

  On the 7th of August 1970, a gravestone went up at the previously unmarked grave of Bessie Smith. Joplin and Juanita Green, a nurse who as a child had done housework for Smith, shared the cost. Joplin had often cited Smith as an influence. An Associated Press story said the two paid for a stone for the “Empress of the Blues.” According to Friedman, the two women never met.

  On the 12th of August 1970, Joplin gave her last public performance with Full Tilt Boogie, at Harvard Stadium in Boston. Their regular sound equipment had been stolen, so they played through makeshift amplifiers. The Harvard Crimson still gave the show a positive, front-page review. Two days later she attended her high school reunion with Neuwirth, Cooke and her sister Laura. It was reportedly an unhappy occasion. She disparaged Port Arthur and the classmates who had humiliated her a decade earlier. Ten days after the reunion, she would check into a Hollywood motel to make an album.

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• 6. Pearl and Final Days

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  On the 24th of August 1970, Joplin checked into the Landmark Motor Hotel in Hollywood, close to Sunset Sound Recorders. There she began rehearsing and recording a new album with producer Paul A. Rothchild, best known for his long relationship with The Doors. The sessions ran through late August, September and early October.

  At the same time she kept up a relationship with Seth Morgan, a 21-year-old UC Berkeley student, cocaine dealer and future novelist. He had visited her new home in Larkspur in July and August. They became engaged in early September, though he came to only eight of her many rehearsals and sessions.

  Joplin died before every track was finished, but enough was usable to assemble an LP. Pearl came out on the 11th of January 1971 and became the biggest-selling album of her career. It reached number one on the Billboard 200. The album included “Me and Bobby McGee,” by Kris Kristofferson and Fred Foster. Kristofferson had once been her lover, though it was Neuwirth who taught her the song. The opening track, “Move Over,” was Joplin’s own, and it reflects how she felt men treated women in relationships.

  On the 26th of September 1970, she recorded vocals for “Half Moon” and “Cry Baby.” The session ended with a one-minute birthday greeting for John Lennon. She made it with organist Ken Pearson and drummer Clark Pierson, using Dale Evans’s “Happy Trails.”

  On the 1st of October 1970, Joplin finished her last recording, “Mercedes Benz,” in a single take. On Saturday the 3rd of October she went to Sunset Sound to hear the instrumental track for Nick Gravenites’s “Buried Alive in the Blues.” She and Rothchild agreed she would sing the vocal the next day. People at the studio overheard her joy over the sessions and her anger about Morgan. She had learned he had met other women at a Marin County restaurant and invited them to her home.

  That night she drove Pearson in her Porsche to Barney’s Beanery in West Hollywood. They met Bennett Glotzer, a business partner of her manager, Albert Grossman. After midnight she drove Pearson and a male fan to the Landmark. In the lobby, as they parted for their separate rooms, she voiced a fear, possibly in jest, that the Full Tilt Boogie musicians might stop making music with her.

  On the evening of Sunday the 4th of October 1970, her road manager and close friend John Byrne Cooke found Joplin dead on the floor of her room. Alcohol was in the room. Los Angeles County coroner Thomas Noguchi performed the autopsy and found a heroin overdose, possibly compounded by alcohol. Her death was ruled accidental. Cooke believed she had obtained heroin far stronger than what she had used before. Several of her dealer’s other customers overdosed the same weekend.

  On Friday the 2nd of October, Joplin had expected both Caserta and Morgan to keep her company at the Landmark. According to Caserta, she was saddened when neither came. Morgan did speak with her by phone within her last 24 hours. Colleagues at the studio noticed that whatever he said made her very angry. Caserta later insisted that the death was not an accidental overdose. She said Joplin lost her balance when the heel of a slingback sandal caught in the shag carpet, and the fall left a gash on her head. Caserta conceded that drugs or alcohol may have hastened the death.

  Joplin was cremated at Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Memorial Park and Mortuary in Los Angeles. Her ashes were scattered from a plane into the Pacific Ocean.

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• 7. Love and Image

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  Country Joe McDonald met Joplin in early 1967, and for a few months they lived together in her apartment at 122 Lyon Street in San Francisco. He wrote the song “Janis” at her request. It appeared in 1967 on his band’s album I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die.

  Years earlier, in 1963, Joplin had met a woman named Jae Whitaker over a game of pool at the North Beach bar Gino & Carlo. The two briefly lived together. Whitaker ended the relationship because of Joplin’s hard drug use and her sexual relationships with other people. Whitaker was not publicly named in connection with Joplin until 1999, when Alice Echols published the biography Scars of Sweet Paradise.

  Peggy Caserta first met Joplin in November 1966, when Big Brother played The Matrix in San Francisco. Caserta was one of 15 people in the audience and ran a Haight-Ashbury clothing boutique called Mnasidika. About a month later Joplin visited the shop and said she could not afford a $5 pair of jeans. She asked to make a 50 cent down payment. Caserta was amazed that such a talented singer lacked $5, so she gave Joplin the jeans for free.

  The friendship stayed platonic for more than a year. Before it turned romantic, Caserta was in love with Sam Andrew, and in the first half of 1968 she traveled to New York to be with him. He did not want a serious relationship, and Joplin sympathized with her disappointment. The Woodstock film includes 37 seconds of the two women walking together toward the tent where Joplin waited. By the festival in August 1969, both were intravenous heroin users. According to Caserta, they agreed in April 1970 to stay away from each other so they would not enable each other’s drug use.

  Two books about Joplin appeared in 1973. Myra Friedman, her publicist, published Buried Alive: The Biography of Janis Joplin, which many newspapers excerpted. Caserta’s memoir Going Down With Janis, written with Dan Knapp, also drew heavy attention. Its graphic passages repelled many readers. Sam Andrew described Caserta to writer Ellis Amburn as “halfway between a groupie and a friend.” In 2018 Caserta denounced the book as Knapp’s pornographic fantasy and largely unreliable. That year she published I Ran into Some Trouble, co-written with Maggie Falcon. It describes a long, friendly relationship with Joplin that only occasionally involved sexuality.

  On the 11th of July 1970, offstage at a San Diego show, Joplin answered a rumor about her sexuality that was circulating in San Francisco. She told Richard Hundgen, the Grateful Dead’s San Francisco-based road manager, that she had been with a couple of thousand men and a few hundred women. She told him to carry that message back and see what the rumor-spreaders could do with it. Hundgen later repeated her words to Friedman.

  Writing in The New York Times on the 2nd of May 1999, Kim France said that once Joplin was famous she swore like a truck driver. She was rarely seen without her bottle of Southern Comfort. She also delighted in playing the role of sexual predator.

  Joplin’s hair was part of her look. Her styles often included colored streaks and accessories such as scarves, beads and feathers. San Francisco tattoo artist Lyle Tuttle gave her a wristlet and a small heart on her left breast. Her tattoos marked an early moment in popular culture’s acceptance of tattoos as art.

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• 8. Echoes and Honors

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  Sixteen days before Joplin died, Jimi Hendrix died at 27. Canned Heat guitarist Alan Wilson had died a month earlier, also at 27, and Joplin was 27 too. All three had played at both Monterey and Woodstock. The coincidence later led some people to attach meaning to musicians dying at that age, an idea celebrated as the “27 Club.”

  Music historian Tom Moon wrote that Joplin had “a devastatingly original voice.” Jon Pareles of The New York Times called her “overpowering and deeply vulnerable.” Author Megan Terry compared her power to captivate an audience to that of Elvis Presley.

  Musicians answered her death in song. The Mamas & the Papas recorded “Pearl” in 1971 as a tribute. Jerry Garcia’s “Birdsong,” from his 1972 solo album Garcia, is about Joplin and the end of her suffering, according to lyricist Robert Hunter. Mimi Farina wrote “In the Quiet Morning,” most famously covered by Joan Baez on Come from the Shadows in 1972. Leonard Cohen’s “Chelsea Hotel #2” followed in 1974. In her memoir Just Kids, Patti Smith recalls singing a song for Joplin one night at the Chelsea Hotel, where both were living. That song, “Lullaby (I Was Working Real Hard),” eventually appeared on Smith’s Live At The Bottom Line, a 1975 performance.

  The film The Rose, released in 1979, is loosely based on Joplin’s life. It was first meant to be titled Pearl, her nickname and the name of her last album. Her family declined to give the producers the rights to her story, so the film was fictionalized. Bette Midler won a Golden Globe for her performance and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress.

  In 1988, on what would have been Joplin’s 45th birthday, Port Arthur dedicated the Janis Joplin Memorial. It features a gold, multi-image sculpture by Douglas Clark. In 1992 her younger sister Laura published Love, Janis, the first major biography of Joplin in two decades. In 1995 Joplin was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. She was the first female solo artist admitted in her first year of eligibility. A Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award followed in 2005.

  A 2009 exhibition at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum displayed her scarf and necklaces. It also showed her psychedelically painted 1965 Porsche 356 Cabriolet and a sheet of LSD blotting paper designed by Robert Crumb.

  Randal Myler created and directed the musical play Love, Janis, with input from Laura Joplin and Sam Andrew. It opened in the summer of 2001 for what was meant to be a few weeks. It played to packed houses and was held over several times. In 2013, Washington’s Arena Stage presented A Night with Janis Joplin, starring Mary Bridget Davies. The show moved to Broadway, toured in 2016, and opened at London’s Peacock Theatre in August 2024 with Davies again in the lead.

  On the 4th of November 2013, Joplin received the 2,510th star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. It sits at 6752 Hollywood Boulevard, in front of Musicians Institute. On the 8th of August 2014, the US Postal Service unveiled a commemorative stamp in its Music Icons series at the Outside Lands Music Festival in Golden Gate Park. The 2015 documentary Janis: Little Girl Blue, directed by Amy J. Berg and narrated by Cat Power, was a New York Times Critics’ Pick.

  Rolling Stone ranked Joplin 28th on its 2008 list of greatest singers and 78th on its 2023 list. In 2023 NPR called her the “Queen of Rock” and named her one of its “50 Great Voices.” Certifications from the Recording Industry Association of America credit her with 18.5 million albums sold. That keeps her among the top-selling vocalists in the United States.

  Steven Tyler and Stevie Nicks are among the singers she influenced. Pink praised her for singing blues when it was not culturally acceptable for white women, and for wearing her heart on her sleeve. In Japan, hearing Joplin inspired rock pioneer Carmen Maki to switch from folk to rock.

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