Janis Joplin

Janis Joplin1

Birth: 19th January, 1943
Place of Birth: Port Arthur, Texas,
Nationality: American
Job Title: Singer, Songwriter
Partners: Multiple
Died: 4th October, LA, USA

Even though nature makes us all different, humans have an innate desire to conform. The rules governing ‘fitting in’ are complex and they change every day depending on the circumstances. Wouldn’t it be great if we could take the rule book and rip it up, proving that we don’t give a damn about what people think of us?

Defying society’s codes and conventions not only defined the life of this month’s Gay Great, it also fed her creativity, helped her write some of the most memorable songs of the sixties and eventually led to her demise. She rebelled against every facet of the life that she was born into and joined thousands of other beatniks in order to carve out an alternative future.

The oldest child of Seth and Dorothy Joplin, Janice Lyn was born on 19th January 1943, at the local hospital in Port Arthur, Texas. Despite being a cute little girl with curly blond hair, she soon got a reputation as a ‘difficult’ child. She knew her own mind and was not afraid to speak it, whatever the situation. By the age of 14, she was regarded as an eccentric social outcast, a ‘nigger lover’ in a racist town. By refusing to conform to the rules of the fifties southern American lifestyle, Joplin was labelled an ‘oddball’ at an astonishingly young age. She tried desperately to use her eccentricity to gain popularity but in the Pleasantville-esque world of Port Arthur, she was pushed to the fringe of society.

At high school, Joplin slipped from rebelliousness into full-blown delinquency. In her first year at Thomas Jefferson High, she hung around with three young guys who had relinquished their ‘normal’ status in favour of a life of music, odd dress codes and alternative social theories. Musically, they led the young Joplin towards Blues, especially the music of Bessie Smith. She would listen to her endlessly and try to replicate Smith’s husky, soulful voice. It was also at Jefferson High that she had her first lesbian affair with a fellow student. The relationship was not monogamous and they both still enjoyed one night stands with men, often heading into town together to find male prey. This first, fledgling relationship would prove to set the agenda for the rest of Joplin’s long and complicated love life.

Her last year at high school proved to be a testing time as her young male friends moved on to college, leaving Joplin to face the taunts of the other students alone. Without the barrier of her companions, her eccentricity became a huge source of ridicule and the bullying soon started. Other students would throw coins at her, call her names and even spit on her. She became reckless and turned up drunk for her graduation. Within days of starting college she dropped out and ran away from home. It was no surprise that her parents, along with the rest of the town, pretty much wrote her off as a failure.

Joplin found herself in Houston and was lucky to discover the Purple Onion Club soon after she arrived. This was a live performance venue specialising in contemporary folk music. Despite dreading live performances, Joplin managed to sing a few times, much to the delight of the alternative and radical crowd. Her voice was amazing and original. Even at the young age of 17, it had a husky, worn-out, Afro-Caribbean sound ‘as if she had come right out of the cotton fields’, as one onlooker commented. However, her performances, now and throughout the rest of her life, were always fuelled by Southern Comfort and before the end of 1961 Joplin was in a state of breakdown. With her tail between her legs, she returned to Port Arthur to dry out.

Joplin realised that she wasn’t ready to return to the town where she felt so unloved and after dropping out of Port Arthur College once again, she headed to the University of Texas in Austin. Once there, she began to concentrate more on music than her major, which was in art. She joined a Bluegrass duo and began singing in local clubs, often just for free beer. It was in one of these bars that she met a young traveller, a member of the Jack Kerouac backpack generation, who lived life ‘On the Road’ with never more than a dollar in his pocket. His name was Chet Helms and he became one of Joplin’s greatest friends and a major influence on her career. With only the slightest encouragement, he convinced her to hit the road with him and head for the home of sixties disaffected youth; San Francisco.

Joplin found not just a home in San Francisco but the acceptance from her peers that she so desperately needed. She hit the folk scene and soon made a name for herself as a strong singer but although her career was improving, her health was slowly deteriorating. She began to shoot speed intravenously and almost never went to bed sober. Her sex life was very active and she had both male and female partners, often at the same time. By 1965, like many of the other San Francisco drifters, she started to use heroin too. It was a dark year for Joplin who, knowing her body couldn’t take much more, headed back to Port Arthur to become ‘normal’ again, her San Francisco dream seemingly at an end.

Joplin managed to give up most of her bad habits but her personality suffered greatly. Friends who came to visit from the west coast found her uptight and creatively powerless. She was a shell of a woman and nothing like the hothead Joplin that the folk scene of San Francisco loved so much. James Langdon, one of the three boys she’d known back in high school, offered her a lifeline. After a lot of persuasion, Langdon convinced Joplin to sing at a benefit concert at the Eleventh Door Club in Austin. The crowd loved the white woman who sang with such a black-sounding voice and Joplin found her career as a singer back on track. When Helms got in contact again and invited her to join his new band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Joplin didn’t hesitate to accept.

Within a few months she was back to her old ways, living in a hippie commune in San Francisco with her new band, gigging all night, ‘coming down’ all day and feeling well just in time to do it all again. Not long after forming, the band got their first record deal. Big Brother and the Holding Company signed to Mainstream Records in the summer of 1966. Unfortunately, there was a time-bomb hiding in the small print and despite getting their first few singles and an album onto the shelves the band received little return for their sales.

Soon after the band began to take off, Joplin met Peggy Caserta, a Bohemian clothes store owner from downtown San Francisco. Despite them both taking other lovers, this proved to be the closest Joplin would ever get to a long-term relationship. They would often fall out, fight over men, share lovers and have self-destructive nights of drug taking and sex, but Joplin and Caserta remained devoted to each other for the rest of their lives. With a woman like Joplin, it was hard to differentiate between the partners and the lovers. While both women would be appalled to be labelled the very down-to-earth term of a ‘partner’, Caserta and Joplin were certainly more than just lovers.

1967 was the year to be young and American. The Summer of Love was all about finding a voice; when twenty-something’s from all over America, a generation supposed to be sitting back and learning from its elders, decided to bring issues such as racism, war and the environment kicking and screaming into the public consciousness. The start of the Summer of Love for Joplin was all about Monterey Pop, the first huge festival of the year. Joplin and Big Brother were the stars of the show, dominating all the press coverage of the event. Without really meaning to, Joplin had become a key voice in what would become a legendary year.

It was in 1967 that Joplin met Linda Gravenites, her new room mate and a woman who was to have a huge stabilising influence over Joplin. Although their relationship was never sexual, Gravenites was like a wife to Joplin and she offered her all the support, love (and nagging) expected of a spouse. As Monterey Pop fuelled the flames of Joplin’s fame, Gravenites stood by her devotedly as her best friend, confidante and dress designer. When Big Brother and the Holding Company released their first album, Cheap Thrills, it shot to No1. Their single, Another Little Piece of my Heart, sat at the top of the charts for 12 weeks. Joplin was now a huge star and a voice of a generation.

Joplin soon grew restless and she sacked her band and built up a new one - Kozmic Blues. Despite being panned by the critics at most of their first gigs, the band managed to get it together just in time for the biggest music event the world has ever seen; Woodstock ‘69. In spite of almost passing out from a huge shot of heroin she took just before going on stage, Joplin managed to pull off one of the most memorable performances of the decade.

Back home, Gravenites was worried about Joplin’s health. Despite being a user herself, she could see the signs of imminent death in the faces of Joplin and all of her friends. She pleaded with her to give up, which she did try to do several times, unsuccessfully. For those around Joplin, it was like watching her fall repeatedly from a high-wire. In one year alone, from 68-69, she suffered six overdoses and had numerous trips to the hospital. Her skin was dry and flaking from dehydration, her chest rattled from endless smoking. Without a drastic change in lifestyle, Joplin would soon be dead and Gravenites couldn’t bear to watch her self-destruct. When she packed up and left for good, Joplin was heartbroken and deeply lonely.

Despite another best selling album at the start of 1970, Joplin sacked the Kozmic Blues band and formed yet another, the Full Tilt Boogie Band. With the sixties at an end, she started to search for a new musical direction. Returning to the Blues music she loved so much in her youth, she started work on Pearl, a seminal album that would mark a new direction in her work. Joplin decided this would be the ‘Magnum Opus’ of her career to date and devoted all her efforts into writing it.

Janis Joplin2

Before recording started, there was an all-important high school reunion to attend. Ten years after leaving the school she hated so much, Janice returned, set to flaunt her fame and fortune. She was surprised to receive such a cold reception but the organisers were upset that the press had turned their reunion into a ‘Joplin homecoming’. Her bawdy approach to the event didn’t go down well either as she drank and bragged about her lifestyle all day. Port Arthur was not impressed and she wasn’t asked to sing a single note whilst she was there. The whole reunion was a disaster and shook her to the core. Despite all her fame and achievement, her home town still wouldn’t accept her. To this day, Port Arthur still doesn’t cash in a single dime from its most famous product.

Feeling more rejected than ever, Joplin returned to the Landmark Motor Hotel in LA to set about recording Pearl. Her behaviour was even more erratic than usual. Sometimes she would arrive several hours late for recordings, other times she wouldn’t even make it to the studio. A casual engagement to Seth Morgan, a San Francisco drug dealer, didn’t help with her various addictions. Life in an LA hotel was lonely and one night in January 1970, she sent money to Morgan and Caserta, asking them to spend it on a plane ticket to come and see her. Instead, they both spent it on drugs. Alone in the hotel, she opened a new batch of heroin and took a shot, not knowing that the new supply was around 80% pure. After a short trip down to reception to get some cigarettes, her heart gave out. Joplin fell to the floor in her room where she lay dead for 18 hours. She was discovered by two roadies, who were puzzled to see her brightly painted Porsche in the car park, but no sign of her at that day’s recording session.

Her death, which came only two weeks after Jimi Hendrix’s similar demise, started a wave of change across the hippie generation. Drugs were no longer a mind-freeing, life-giving experience but a threat to life. The party was officially over and the liberated sixties where consigned to the history books. However, the changes which were instigated by the summer of love generation did go on to change the world and as a result, what was once called avant-garde has become a part of mainstream media; children are encouraged to think and discuss rather than just learn; minorities are considered worth standing up for; design of even the simplest household object has changed from neat, straight edges into colourful works of art. The world around us is no longer simply somewhere we live, it is a place we can create and change every day to suit our own taste and morals.

Staying on the right side of society’s expectations is a delicate game. In the late sixties, vast numbers of young people decided to escape the set rules of life and create their own way of doing things. For many, the utopian dream was not to last. Most hippies from the sixties settled down into sensible jobs and focused on family matters, rather than trying to break down the structuralist bounds of society. Joplin never lived long enough to conform, although some say she could have lived forever and it still wouldn’t have been long enough. In spite of the lost years, the unwritten music and the life that was stolen from her, Joplin would be more than happy with her place as part of a generation who completely changed the world.