Marking Time: Janis Joplin – Rock and Roll Goddess
Emma Connolly
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When the most gifted, tortured, musicians die at their peak they are transformed. They become icons, cult figures, gateways to a rock and roll nirvana. From Jimi Hendrix to Tim Buckley, Nick Drake to Kurt Cobain, the beautiful dead rockers are sadly plentiful.
What of their female counterparts? They are fewer in number and their relationship with the public is more complex. Amy Winehouse, pilloried by the media in the years before her demise, emerges as a lonely and lost young woman, unable to keep pace with the consequences of her own talent. Her music has become her own requiem, a turntable spinning forever in a dark and empty room. Janis Joplin was far more articulate, physically robust and energetic but ultimately as vulnerable. Like Winehouse, she died alone, a solitary sad and squalid death caused by addiction.
For Janis Joplin, the opiate dragon enfolded her in its wings in a lonely hotel room in Los Angeles on October 4th 1970. She had come a long way from Port Arthur, Texas, where she was born 27 years previously to a college registrar mother and engineer father. A difference at first enforced upon her by severe acne and weight gain became a difference that she had taken ownership of by the time she left high school. In 1963 the alternative lifestyle of San Francisco called her away from her studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Although she began to record music, her drug use quickly escalated and in 1965 she returned home to Port Arthur. After a few months and a broken engagement, Janis returned to her musical ambitions.
Going back to San Francisco, Janis joined the local band Big Brother and the Holding Company, touring and releasing two albums. The second album, Cheap Thrills, reached the top of the charts in 1968, but Janis was already on the move. She became a solo artist with a new group, the Kozmic Blues Band, recorded the album I Got Dem Ol’Kozmic Blues Again Mama!, and headlined Woodstock in 1969. Her heroin addiction was by this time beginning to affect her live performances and in early 1970 she took time out from her career and travelled to Brazil, in an attempt to kick the habit. Unfortunately, the clean spell lasted only as long as the holiday, but the late spring of 1970 found her with a new backing band, the Full Tilt Boogie Band, touring, planning a new album and dating Kris Kristofferson. Pearl was recorded during the autumn and on October 3rd Janis went into the studio to listen to the instrumental track for ‘Buried Alive in the Blues’. She was due to record the vocals the following day but did not appear at the studio. Her road manager found her slumped at the side of her bed, and the track remains an instrumental.
Tomboys aren’t supposed to be pinups, but Janis was a glorious rock and roll goddess. Her hair swung loose and wild, decorated with feather boas. Her clothes were a proto-glam rock orgy of coloured velvet and metallic braiding, and she stomped and jerked, riding the music as though it issued directly from her body. Her astonishing blues voice defied all conventions of white female voices in popular music at the time. Only Tina Turner could rival her for female braggadocio, and the modern, gamine twerking of Miley Cyrus is mere hollow theatricals by comparison.
The posthumous album Pearl was a hit, and also gave Janis her only number 1 single in ‘Me and Bobby McGee’, a track written by Kris Kristofferson and Fred Foster, and originally a country hit for Roger Miller in 1969. Like Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, who compelled passers-by to listen to his tragic story, Janis Joplin’s ‘Bobby McGee’ is a song that is impossible to turn away from. She turned the genders of the characters around, embraced the Country essence of the song and inhabited every nuance of the lyrics, reining in her performance just enough create a mesmeric tension. Taking her listeners on a hitchhiking drifter road trip from New Orleans, Louisiana to Salenis, California where Bobby ‘slips away’, she sings, ‘I’d trade all my tomorrows for a single yesterday, to be holding Bobby’s body next to mine. Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose. Nothing, and that’s all that Bobby left me.’ The words are starkly intimate in a woman’s hands: tender, sorrowful, joyful and angry all at once. The song is powered by all the loves, losses and treacherous freedoms of Janis’ own life. Too wild and vulnerable to stay for long herself, Janis Joplin’s music cannot but endure.
