Janis Joplin

Janis Lyn Joplin was born in Port Arthur, Texas, on , to Dorothy Bonita East (1913–1998), a registrar at a business college, and her husband, Seth Ward Joplin (1910–1987), an engineer at Texaco. She had two younger siblings, Laura and Michael. The family attended First Christian Church of Port Arthur, a congregation belonging to the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) denomination. Her parents felt that Janis needed more attention than their other children. As a teenager, Joplin befriended a group of outcasts, one of whom had albums by blues artists Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and Lead Belly, which Joplin later credited with influencing her decision to become a singer. She began singing blues and folk music with friends at Thomas Jefferson High School. In high school, she was a classmate of Pro Football Hall of Fame coach Jimmy Johnson. Joplin stated that she was ostracized and bullied in high school. Joplin graduated from high school in 1960 and attended Lamar State College of Technology in Beaumont, Texas, during the summer The campus newspaper, The Daily Texan, ran a profile of her in the issue dated July 27, 1962, headlined "She Dares to Be Different." While at UT she performed with a folk trio called the Waller Creek Boys (Powell St. John and Lanny Wiggins), showcasing her strong mezzo-soprano vocals, and frequently socialized with the staff of the campus humor magazine The Texas Ranger. According to Freak Brothers cartoonist Gilbert Shelton, who befriended her, she used to sell copies of The Texas Ranger, which contained some of Shelton's early comic books, on the campus. == Career ==

1962–1965: Early recordings Joplin cultivated a rebellious manner and styled herself partly after her female blues heroines and partly after the Beat poets. Her first song, "What Good Can Drinkin' Do", was recorded on tape in December 1962 at the home of a fellow University of Texas student. She left Texas in January 1963, "Just to get away," she said, "because my head was in a much different place", hitchhiking with her friend Chet Helms to North Beach, San Francisco. Still in San Francisco in 1964, Joplin and future Jefferson Airplane guitarist Jorma Kaukonen recorded a number of blues standards, which incidentally featured Kaukonen's wife Margareta using a typewriter in the background. This session included seven tracks: "Typewriter Talk", "Trouble in Mind", "Kansas City Blues", "Hesitation Blues", "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out", "Daddy, Daddy, Daddy", and "Long Black Train Blues", and was released long after Joplin's death as the bootleg album The Typewriter Tape. In 1963, Joplin was arrested in San Francisco for shoplifting. During the two years that followed, her drug use increased and she acquired a reputation as a "speed freak" and occasional heroin user. She also used other psychoactive drugs and was a heavy drinker throughout her career; her favorite alcoholic beverage was Southern Comfort. In May 1965, Joplin's friends in San Francisco, noticing the detrimental effects on her from regularly injecting methamphetamine—she was described as "skeletal" During her time at Lamar University, she commuted to Austin to sing solo, accompanying herself on acoustic guitar. One of her performances was at a benefit by local musicians for Texas bluesman Mance Lipscomb, who was suffering with ill health. Joplin became engaged to Peter de Blanc in the fall of 1965. She had begun a relationship with him toward the end of her first stint in San Francisco. he visited her to ask her father for her hand in marriage. Joplin and her mother began planning the wedding. which had gained some renown among the nascent hippie community in Haight-Ashbury. She was recruited to join the group by Chet Helms, a promoter who was managing Big Brother and with whom she had hitchhiked from Texas to San Francisco a few years earlier. Helms sent his friend Travis Rivers to find her in Austin, Texas, where she had been performing with her acoustic guitar, and to accompany her to San Francisco. At that time, she gave her parents the impression Austin was her final destination and it was the location of the rock band she was joining. Joplin joined Big Brother on June 4, 1966. Her first public performance with them was at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco. Soon after that, her parents received a letter from her, and that was how they learned she was in San Francisco, not Austin. In June 1966, Joplin was still strict about drug use and when she shared an apartment with Travis Rivers upon their arrival in San Francisco, she made him promise that using needles would not be allowed there. The band went to Chicago for a four-week engagement in August 1966, then found itself stranded after the promoter ran out of money when its concerts did not attract the expected audience levels, and he was unable to pay them. In the unfortunate circumstances the band signed with Bob Shad's record label Mainstream Records; recordings for the label took place in Chicago in September, but these were not satisfactory, and the band returned to San Francisco, continuing to perform live, including at the Love Pageant Rally. The band recorded two tracks, "Blindman" and "All Is Loneliness", in Los Angeles, and these were released by Mainstream as a single that did not sell well. In late 1966, Big Brother switched managers from Chet Helms to Julius Karpen. In early 1967, Joplin met Country Joe McDonald of the group Country Joe and the Fish. The pair lived together as a couple for a few months in her Lyon Street apartment. Joplin and Big Brother played at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, as well as in Seattle, Washington; Vancouver, British Columbia; the Psychedelic Supermarket in Boston, Massachusetts; and the Golden Bear Club in Huntington Beach, California. the album launched Joplin as a star. Cheap Thrills reached number one on the Billboard 200 album chart eight weeks after its release, and was number one for eight (nonconsecutive) weeks. shows Joplin arriving in Frankfurt by plane. The film Janis includes interviews with Joplin in Stockholm and from her visit to London, for her gig at Royal Albert Hall. John Byrne Cooke, road manager for Joplin and the Kozmic Blues Band, wrote a book about her ongoing use of narcotics, particularly when she was outside the United States. On the episode of The Dick Cavett Show that was telecast in the United States on the night of July 18, 1969, Joplin and her band performed "Try (Just a Little Bit Harder)" as well as "To Love Somebody". Joplin performed at Woodstock starting at approximately 2:00 a.m., on Sunday, August 17, 1969. Joplin had informed her band that they would be performing at the concert as if it were just another gig. Joplin was flown by helicopter with the pregnant Joan Baez and Baez's mother to the festival site. During the helicopter ride, she saw the enormous crowd and instantly became extremely nervous and giddy, as Baez recalled. Initially, Joplin was eager to get on the stage and perform, but was repeatedly delayed as bands were contractually obliged to perform ahead of Joplin. Faced with a ten-hour wait after arriving at the backstage area, Joplin spent some of that time shooting heroin and drinking alcohol Janis remained at Woodstock for the remainder of the festival. Starting at approximately 3:00 a.m. on Monday, August 18, Joplin was among many Woodstock performers who stood in a circle behind Crosby, Stills & Nash during their performance. This information was published by David Crosby in 1988. In addition to Woodstock and her Tampa concert, in 1969 Joplin had problems at Madison Square Garden. Her publicist-turned-biographer Myra Friedman said, after Joplin's death, she had witnessed a duet Joplin sang with Tina Turner during the opening act (Ike and Tina Turner) for a Rolling Stones concert at the Garden on Thanksgiving Day. Friedman said Joplin was "so drunk, so stoned, so out of control, that she could have been an institutionalized psychotic rent by mania." During another Garden concert where she had solo billing on December 19, some observers believed Joplin tried to incite the audience to riot. Bernstein's review said that Joplin "has finally assembled a group of first-rate musicians with whom she is totally at ease and whose abilities complement the incredible range of her voice." Columbia Records released "Kozmic Blues" as a single, which peaked at number 41 on the Billboard Hot 100, and a live rendition of "Raise Your Hand" was released in Germany and became a top ten hit there. Containing other hits like "Try (Just a Little Bit Harder)", "To Love Somebody", and "Little Girl Blue", ''I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama! reached number five on the Billboard'' 200 soon after its release. January–July 1970 At the time of the June 1970 interview with Dalton, she had already performed in the Bay Area for what turned out to be the last time. Sam Andrew, the lead guitarist who had left Big Brother with Joplin in December 1968 to form her back-up band, quit in late summer 1969 and returned to Big Brother. At the end of the year, the Kozmic Blues Band broke up. Their final gig with Joplin was the one at Madison Square Garden with Winter and Butterfield. In February 1970, Joplin traveled to Brazil, where she stopped her drug and alcohol use. She was accompanied on vacation there by her friend Linda Gravenites (wife of songwriter Nick Gravenites), who had designed Janis's stage costumes from 1967 to 1969. In Brazil, Joplin was romanced by a fellow American tourist named David (George) Niehaus, who was traveling around the world. Andrew's web site quotes him as saying, "This will be the first time that Janis' old band and her new band will be at the same venue, so everyone is a little on edge." On July 11, 1970, Full Tilt Boogie and Big Brother and the Holding Company both performed at the same concert in the San Diego Sports Arena, which was decades later renamed the Valley View Casino Center. Joplin sang with Full Tilt Boogie and appeared briefly onstage with Big Brother without singing, according to a July 13 review of the concert in the San Diego Union. On August 7, 1970, a tombstone—jointly paid for by Joplin and Juanita Green, a registered nurse who as a child had done housework for Bessie Smith—was erected at Smith's previously unmarked grave. Joplin had frequently cited Bessie Smith as a musical influence. The lead paragraph of an Associated Press story said Joplin and Green had "shared the cost of a stone for the 'Empress of the Blues,'" but, according to publicist/biographer Myra Friedman, Joplin and Green never met. According to Myra Friedman's account, Joplin's last public performance with the Full Tilt Boogie Band took place on August 12, 1970, at the Harvard Stadium in Boston. The Harvard Crimson gave the performance a positive, front-page review, despite the fact that Full Tilt Boogie had performed with makeshift amplifiers after their regular sound equipment was stolen in Boston. Joplin denigrated Port Arthur and the classmates who had humiliated her a decade earlier. near Sunset Sound Recorders, (Kristofferson had previously been one of Joplin's lovers, though the song was taught to her by Neuwirth). The opening track, "Move Over", was written by Joplin, reflecting the way that she felt men treated women in relationships. Peggy Caserta claimed in her book Going Down with Janis (1973), that she and Joplin had decided mutually in April 1970 to stay away from each other to avoid enabling each other's drug use. one of the first clothing boutiques in the Haight Ashbury, Friedman wrote that the only Full Tilt Boogie member who rode as her passenger, Ken Pearson, often hesitated to join her, The session ended with Joplin, organist Ken Pearson, and drummer Clark Pierson making a special one-minute recording as a birthday gift to John Lennon with the Dale Evans composition "Happy Trails" as part of the greeting. On Saturday, October 3, Joplin visited Sunset Sound Recorders to listen to the instrumental track for Nick Gravenites's song "Buried Alive in the Blues", which the band had recorded earlier that day. She and Paul Rothchild agreed she would record the vocal the following day. Sometime on Saturday, she learned that her boyfriend Seth Morgan had met other women at a Marin County, California, restaurant, and invited them to her home. People at Sunset Sound Recorders overheard Joplin expressing anger about Morgan's actions, as well as joy about the progress of the sessions. Joplin and Ken Pearson later left the studio together and she drove him in her Porsche to the West Hollywood venue called Barney's Beanery, where they met Bennett Glotzer, a business partner of Joplin's manager Albert Grossman. After midnight, she drove Ken Pearson and a male fan from Barney's Beanery to the Landmark Motor Hotel. During the ride, the fan repeatedly asked her about her singing style, and "she mostly ignored him," as Pearson told Myra Friedman. After arriving at the Landmark, where she and Pearson were staying in separate rooms, they prepared to part in the lobby of the Landmark, when she expressed a fear, possibly in jest, that he and the other Full Tilt Boogie musicians might decide to stop making music with her. Then they separated and went to their rooms. ==Death==

On Sunday evening, October 4, 1970, Joplin was found dead on the floor of her room at the Landmark Motor Hotel by her road manager and close friend John Byrne Cooke. Alcohol was present in the room. Newspapers reported that no other drugs or paraphernalia were present. According to a 1983 book authored by Joseph DiMona and Los Angeles County coroner Thomas Noguchi, evidence of narcotics was removed from the scene by a friend of Joplin and later put back after the person realized that an autopsy was going to reveal that narcotics were in her system. The book adds that prior to Joplin's death, Noguchi had investigated other fatal drug overdoses in Los Angeles where friends believed they were doing favors for decedents by removing evidence of narcotics, but then "thought things over" and returned to put back the evidence. Noguchi performed an autopsy on Joplin and determined the cause of death to be a heroin overdose, possibly compounded by alcohol. John Byrne Cooke believed Joplin had obtained heroin much more potent than what she and other L.A. heroin users had received on previous occasions, as was indicated by overdoses of several of her dealer's other customers during the same weekend. Her death was ruled accidental. Both Peggy Caserta, Joplin's close friend, and Seth Morgan, Joplin's fiancé, failed to meet Joplin on Oct. 2, the Friday immediately before her death; Joplin had been expecting both of them to keep her company that night. According to Caserta, Joplin was saddened neither of her friends came to the Landmark as promised. ==Personal life==

Joplin's significant relationships with men included ones with Peter de Blanc, David (George) Niehaus, Kris Kristofferson, She also had relationships with women. During her first stint in San Francisco in 1963, Joplin met and briefly lived with Jae Whitaker, a woman whom she had met while playing pool at the bar Gino & Carlo in North Beach. Whitaker broke off their relationship because of Joplin's hard drug use and sexual relationships with other people. Whitaker was first identified by name in connection with Joplin in 1999, when Alice Echols' biography Scars of Sweet Paradise was published. a clothing boutique in the Haight Ashbury. Approximately a month after the concert, Joplin visited Caserta's boutique and said she could not afford to buy a pair of $5 jeans for sale, asking to make a 50 cent down payment. Their friendship was platonic for more than a year. The day after Joplin introduced Caserta to Morgan, Caserta saw Joplin briefly when Caserta accommodated her new Los Angeles friend, 19-year-old Debbie Nuciforo. Nuciforo was an aspiring rock drummer who wanted to meet Joplin Given the near-infinite potentials of infancy, it is really impossible to make generalizations about what lies behind sexual practices. This, however, is probable: to become clearly homosexual, to make the choice that one honestly prefers relations with one's own sex, no matter the origins of such preference, requires a certain integration, a stability of psychic development, a tidiness of personality organization. The ridicule and the humiliation that took place at that most delicate period in [Joplin's] early teens, her own inability to surmount the obstacles to regular growth, devastated her a great deal more than most people comprehended. Janis was not heir to an ego so cohesive as to permit her an identity one way or the other. She was, as [the psychiatric social worker she saw regularly in Beaumont, Texas in 1965 and 1966] Mr. [Bernard] Giarritano put it [in an interview with Friedman], "diffused" – spewing, splattering, splaying all over, without a center to hold. That had as much to do with her original use of drugs [before she first met Giarritano] as did the critical component of guilt and its multiplicity of sources above and beyond the contribution made by her relationships with women. Were she so simple as the lesbians wished her to be or so free as her associates imagined! On July 11, 1970, Joplin made a revealing statement about her sexuality to her friend Richard Hundgen, the Grateful Dead's San Francisco-based road manager, whom she had known since 1966. When Joplin and Hundgen were offstage during a San Diego gig for both Full Tilt Boogie and Big Brother and the Holding Company, she said the following that he later repeated to Myra Friedman: Another trademark was her flamboyant hair styles, which often included colored streaks and accessories such as scarves, beads and feathers. ==Legacy==

Legacy in the 1970s Joplin's death in October 1970 at age 27 stunned her fans and shocked the music world, especially when coupled with the deaths of Canned Heat guitarist Alan Wilson a month earlier, and rock icon Jimi Hendrix 16 days earlier, both aged 27. All three musicians performed at the two biggest rock festivals of the 1960s: Monterey Pop Festival and Woodstock. (This would later cause some people to attribute significance to the death of musicians at the age of 27, as celebrated in the "27 Club".) Music historian Tom Moon wrote that Joplin had "a devastatingly original voice", music columnist Jon Pareles of The New York Times wrote that Joplin as an artist was "overpowering and deeply vulnerable" and author Megan Terry said that Joplin was the female version of Elvis Presley in her ability to captivate an audience. Her most popular songs include her cover versions of "Piece of My Heart", "Cry Baby", "Down on Me", "Ball and Chain", and "Summertime", as well as her original song "Mercedes Benz", which was her final recording. A book about Joplin by her publicist Myra Friedman titled Buried Alive: The Biography of Janis Joplin (1973) was excerpted in many newspapers. At the same time, Peggy Caserta's memoir, Going Down With Janis (1973), attracted much attention; its provocative title is a reference to Caserta's claim that she had engaged in oral sex with Joplin while they were high on heroin in September 1970. The description provided by Dan Knapp, Caserta's co-author whom she denounced decades later, In 2018, Caserta denounced Going Down With Janis as the pornographic fantasy of Dan Knapp, her co-author, and largely unreliable. During that year, the public had its first access to her own story via a memoir she co-wrote with Maggie Falcon titled I Ran into Some Trouble. It describes a long, friendly relationship with Joplin that only occasionally featured sexuality. The Mamas & the Papas' song "Pearl" (1971), from their album People Like Us, was a tribute to Joplin. Leonard Cohen's song "Chelsea Hotel #2" (1974) is about Joplin. Lyricist Robert Hunter has commented that Jerry Garcia's "Birdsong", from his first solo album, Garcia (1972), is about Joplin and the end of her suffering through death. Mimi Farina's composition "In the Quiet Morning", most famously covered by Joan Baez on her album Come from the Shadows (1972), was a tribute to Joplin. Another song by Baez, "Children of the Eighties", mentioned Joplin. A Serge Gainsbourg-penned French language song by English singer Jane Birkin, "Ex fan des sixties" (1978), references Joplin along with other disappeared "idols", such as Jimi Hendrix, Brian Jones and Marc Bolan. When Joplin was alive, Country Joe McDonald released a song called "Janis" on his band's album ''I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die (1967). In her memoir Just Kids'', Patti Smith mentions writing a song for Joplin and singing it to her one night at the Chelsea Hotel, where both were living at the time. The song, called "Lullaby (I Was Working Real Hard)", was never recorded by Joplin but eventually appeared on Smith's Live At The Bottom Line, a performance from 1975. The film The Rose (1979) is loosely based on Joplin's life. Originally planned to be titled Pearl—Joplin's nickname and the title of her last album—the film was fictionalized after her family declined to allow the producers the rights to her story. Bette Midler won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture—Female and earned nominations for the Academy Award for Best Actress, the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role, the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress, and the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Actress for her performance in the film. Legacy in 1980s and 1990s In 1988, on what would have been Joplin's 45th birthday, the Janis Joplin Memorial, with an original gold, multi-image sculpture of Joplin by Douglas Clark, was dedicated during a ceremony in Port Arthur, Texas. In 1992, the first major biography of Joplin in two decades, Love, Janis, authored by her younger sister Laura Joplin, was published. In an interview, Laura stated that Joplin enjoyed being on the Dick Cavett Show, that Joplin had difficulties with some, but not all, people at Thomas Jefferson High School and that Joplin enthusiastically talked about Woodstock with her parents and siblings during a visit to their Texas home a few weeks after she had performed at the festival. In 1995, Joplin was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In 2005, she received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. In November 2009, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum honored her as part of its annual American Music Masters Series; among the artifacts at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum exhibition are Joplin's scarf and necklaces, her psychedelically painted 1965 Porsche 356 Cabriolet and a sheet of LSD blotting paper designed by Robert Crumb, designer of the Cheap Thrills cover. Also in 2009, Joplin was the honoree at the Rock Hall's American Music Master concert and lecture series. In the late 1990s, the musical play Love, Janis was created and directed by Randal Myler, with input from Janis' younger sister Laura and Big Brother guitarist Sam Andrew, with an aim to take it to Off-Broadway. Opening in the summer of 2001 and scheduled for only a few weeks of performances, the show won acclaim, played to packed houses and was held over several times. Legacy after 2010 In 2013 Washington's Arena Stage featured a production of A Night with Janis Joplin, starring Mary Bridget Davies in which Joplin performs a concert for the audience while telling stories of her past inspirations, including those of Odetta and Aretha Franklin. The production transferred to Broadway, then went on tour in 2016. In August 2024 the Tony-nominated musical opened at London's Peacock Theatre with Davies again in the lead role. On November 4, 2013, Joplin was awarded with the 2,510th star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for her contributions to the music industry. Her star is located at 6752 Hollywood Boulevard, in front of Musicians Institute. On August 8, 2014, the U.S. Postal Service revealed a commemorative stamp honoring Joplin as part of its Music Icons stamp series during a first-day-of-issue ceremony at the Outside Lands Music Festival at Golden Gate Park. Among the memorabilia Joplin left behind is a Gibson Hummingbird guitar. In 2015, the biographical documentary film Janis: Little Girl Blue, directed by Amy J. Berg and narrated by Cat Power, was released. It was a New York Times Critics' Pick. After Rolling Stone ranked Joplin number 46 on its 2004 list of the "100 Greatest Artists of All Time" and number 28 on its 2008 list of the "100 Greatest Singers of All Time", she was then re-ranked in 2023; In 2023, Rolling Stone then ranked Joplin at number 78 on its list of the 200 Greatest Singers of All Time. Also in 2023, NPR dubbed Joplin as the "Queen of Rock" and named her one of the "50 Great Voices". As of 2013, she remains one of the top-selling vocalists in the United States, with Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) certifications of 18.5 million albums sold. ==Influence==

Joplin had a profound influence on many singers, including Steven Tyler and Stevie Nicks. Pink said about Joplin: "She was so inspiring by singing blues music when it wasn't culturally acceptable for white women, and she wore her heart on her sleeve. She was so witty and charming and intelligent, but she also battled an ugly-duckling syndrome." Hearing Joplin is what inspired Japanese rock pioneer Carmen Maki to switch from folk to rock music. ==Discography==

Joplin recorded four albums in her four-year career. The first two albums were recorded with and credited to Big Brother and the Holding Company; the later two were recorded with different backing bands and released as solo albums. Posthumous releases have included previously unreleased studio and live material. Studio albums As lead singer of Big Brother and the Holding Company As solo artist Live albums Compilation albums Singles As lead of Big Brother and the Holding Company As solo artist ==Filmography==

• Monterey Pop (1968) • Petulia (1968) • Janis Joplin and Her Group (1969) • Janis Joplin Live in Frankfurt (1969) • Janis (1974) • Janis: The Way She Was (1974) • ''Comin' Home'' (1988) • Woodstock – The Lost Performances (1991) • ''Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace & Music (Director's Cut)'' (1994) • Festival Express (2003) • Nine Hundred Nights (2004) • The Dick Cavett Show: Rock Icons (2005) Shout Factory • ''Rockin' at the Red Dog: The Dawn of Psychedelic Rock'' (2005) • This is Tom Jones (2007) 1969 appearance on TV show • ''Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace & Music (Director's Cut) 40th Anniversary Edition'' (2009) • Janis Joplin with Big Brother: Ball and Chain (DVD) Charly (2009) • Janis: Little Girl Blue (2015) == Explanatory notes ==