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Profile/Copyright © 1974, 2006 by Jim O’Donnell
Some
performers let off steam on a stage. Janis Joplin let off lava. She was so volcanic, her back-up bands functioned mainly as
rumbling blue clouds harboring her lightning bolts.
Every concert, she'd get under the spotlight, hoist all flags,
and give battle. The vivacity was so extraordinary, it prompted actress Geraldine Page to say in Myra Friedman's Janis biography:
"Most performers just give a fraction of themselves. I can't remember the last time I saw one who gave everything they had."
But
like most other human beings, she only seemed inexhaustible. In concert, she often looked as if she were poised on
a thirty-foot ledge; later on, she often wouldn't go to bed, she'd just pass out.
Fact is, Janis Joplin was ordering
her gravestone—date, size, and epitaph—with every show she did. Wordsworth might have called her a "Phantom of Delight."
As
of 1974, Janis Lyn Joplin, a Southern Woman, was the first and the last—the one and the only—of the rock 'n' roll
belles. She was born in 1943 in Port Arthur, Texas, fifteen miles from the Louisiana border.
She sang soprano in a
church choir, dropped out of four or five schools, even though she was a voracious reader, and ran away from home the first
time when she was seventeen.
A woman who was as easily bored as she was easily paranoid, she once told writer Michael
Lydon that to Port Arthur "I was just 'silly crazy Janis'," whose biggest concern was hitching a ride out of Texas to the
Newport Folk Festival.
Outside Port Arthur, Janis sang for beers in hillbilly bars with a bluegrass band, worked as
a key punch operator, served beer in a bowling alley.
She went to San Francisco in 1963. She stayed for two years
before heading back home and studying for a year or so at the Lamar State College of Technology at Beaumont.
Janis
was doing well as a student, but wasn't so satisfied with her progress as a human being. In the spring of 1966, an old hitchhiking
friend named Chet Helms told her what was going on in Haight-Ashbury, and it was back to Frisco.
She got into a band
called Big Brother and the Holding Company, and sang her first dance in June, 1966, at the Avalon Ballroom.
Janis
made Big Brother "the band with the incredible chick singer," as people were calling it, and Number Three in a San Francisco
triumvirate rounded out by the Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane.
She had idolized Otis Redding, gotten inspired
by Leadbelly, and discovered her voice at a party while doing an imitation of Odetta.
It took the boom of rock 'n'
roll to pull the trigger on that voice all the way. The style that fired out of her throat did Bessie Smith proud. When Janis
Joplin was good, she was great, and by most accounts she was good most of the time.
She sang so loud, you wondered
sometimes if there were really speakers in the amplifiers or, instead, an array of pre-recorded sonic booms. It was a unique
voice of astonishing power.
No one had ever heard anything like it. "Janis Joplin," wrote Vogue, "makes bunk
of the history of singing the minute she opens her mouth."
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A total unknown outside San Francisco circles, Janis
bolted from the clouds into the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, and made a shambles of a female pop music pantheon that included
Connie Francis, Dionne Warwick, Joan Baez, Brenda Lee and Diana Ross.
Her furious vocal and stage style broke the
mold of female pop singers as detached, controlled performers.
Her hair and face effervescent, she exploded the last
words of Big Mama Willie Mae Thornton’s "Ball and Chain" with that fearsome gut lightning. The crowd roared up at her—like
the mob under Marie Antoinette's window—figuring that if this was what she could do with a ball and chain, then what
next?
Next she was cruising through San Francisco in a custom-designed Porsche, finally believing she was a star when
someone slipped a copy of Time under her nose, and she saw herself in it.
The only thing Janis Joplin feared
on a stage was the floor. She often rehearsed for her shows on Southern Comfort, then got down a pint-and-a-half before the
show was over.
And she wasn't sipping it out of a Dixie cup. Southern Comfort sent her a fur coat once for her fine
promotional work.
After a few years of bottles—and pills and needles—her veins glutted, her liver swelled,
her eyes wan, her face vexed, her hair ravaged, she looked as if she'd been hit by a train.
December, 1968, she quit
Big Brother and went solo. She formed a seven-piece group in June, 1970, but Janis Southern Woman Joplin was not born to sing
in choirs. Hers was a solo act.
She was found solo on the floor of a California hotel, October 4, 1970. There were
needle marks in her left arm, and they were fresh. Accidental heroin overdose was the verdict. She was 27.
"Desire"
in Janis Joplin proved to be a fiercely souped-up streetcar with the brakes out. And it cracked up.
According to Myra
Friedman's Buried Alive biography, Janis Joplin told Kris Kristofferson a few weeks before her death that she was working
on a new song.
"I'm gonna call it," said Janis Joplin, "'I Just Made Love to 25,000 People But Now I'm Goin' Home
Alone.'"
The tragedy of Janis may have been that she knew how to live, but not how to survive; that she loved reality,
but lived a dream; that as a performer she was in a class of her own, a Lone Star, but as a woman she was just alone.
***
CD:
Janis Joplin, In Concert. Sony, 1972.
Book: Myra Friedman, Buried Alive: The Biography of Janis Joplin. Bantam,
1974/
Websites: http://www.officialjanis.com
http://www.janisjoplin.net
http://www.rockandrolljournal.com
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