by dubkitty » Fri Nov 16, 2018 1:21 am
Janis Joplin really was a product of her time, or one of the definers of her little scene which wound up breaking worldwide. when she became popular she was pretty much unprecedented: a young white girl apparently determined to be not only bluesy but fabulous. her over-the-top wailing blew the minds of the acidheads of the Haight, and her sense of style--which was more or less as important as her singing--became legendary. she played up to the role, but her front concealed a deeply broken person. she had an awful time of it growing up in Port Arthur, Texas (an ugly little oil town), and was widely despised for her beatnik ways; in college she was voted Ugliest Man on Campus. she noped the hell out of there and went to SF in '65, and wound up literally being packed onto a bus by her friends and sent home to Texas because she was so strung out on speed. she went home and tried to be a good girl, but Chet Helms (Big Brother and the Holding Company's manager and honcho of the Family Dog concerts at the Avalon Ballroom) had heard Janis sing in '65 and went to Texas and talked her into coming back, and that was that. but behind the facade she was terribly lonely and depressed, and a lot of the behavior that made her famous--the loud and profane speech, the swaggering attitude, the fuck-you demeanor--was put on for public consumption. erstwhile Stones road manager Sam Cutler describes getting to know Janis in 1970...he was staying at Jerry Garcia's house, and she lived just up the road. in his memoir he describes her in private as being very bright, witty, soft-spoken, and forlorn. but that wasn't what the public wanted...she suffered an early iteration of the Pete Doherty/Amy Winehouse thing where people were consuming her self-destruction. heroin entered the picture early, and cut a swath through Big Brother, killing James Gurley's wife as well as Janis.
well, it's a pretty depressing story. but when Cheap Thrills came out it was a new thing...there hadn't been an endless stream of young white Blues Mamas, and none of the women who came after had nearly her panache. she's been likened to a skyrocket, which is kind of fair. she was nothing if not spectacular. it's another of those stories like Keith Moon where that kind of addiction shit just wasn't understood while they were still alive.
i can really only listen to her recordings with Big Brother, though; once she's off on her own without her posse she gets lost in the hoopla pretty fast, and never sounds completely comfortable again. there's some nice live BB recordings available, and a lot of folk-ier material that only appeared on radio broadcasts and concert recordings which shows Janis in a more laid-back ensemble mode which can be quite charming. give me till tomorrow when i'm at work and it isn't a total pain to do links and i'll find some examples.