Janis Lyn Joplin (January 19, 1943 – October 4, 1970) was an American blues-influenced rock singer and occasional songwriter with a distinctive voice. Joplin released four albums as the frontwoman for several bands from 1967 to a posthumous release in 1971.
Life and career
Joplin was born at St. Mary’s Hospital in Port Arthur, Texas. The daughter of Seth Joplin, a worker at Texaco, she had two younger siblings, Michael and Laura. She grew up listening to blues musicians such as Bessie Smith, Odetta, and Big Mama Thornton and singing in the local choir. Joplin graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School in Port Arthur in 1960 and went to college at the University of Texas in Austin, though she never completed a degree. While at Thomas Jefferson High School, she was mostly shunned, but found a group of boys who allowed her to tag along. One of those boys, a football player named Grant Lyons, played her the blues for the first time, an old Leadbelly record. Primarily a painter, it was in high school that she first began singing blues and folk music with friends.
Cultivating a rebellious manner that could be viewed as “liberated” ” the women’s liberation movement was still in its infancy at this time ” Joplin styled herself in part after her female blues heroines, and in part after the beat poets. She left Texas for San Francisco in 1963, lived in North Beach and in Haight-Ashbury. For a while she worked occasionally as a folk singer. Around this time her drug use began to increase, and she acquired a reputation as a “speed freak” and occasional heroin user. She also used other intoxicants. She was a heavy drinker throughout her career, and her trademark beverage was Southern Comfort.
Like many other female singers of the era, Janis’ feisty public image was at odds with her real personality. The book Love, Janis, written by her sister, has done much to further the reassessment of her life and work and reveals the private Janis to have been a highly intelligent, articulate, shy and sensitive woman who was devoted to her family.
Big Brother and the Holding Company
After a return to Port Arthur to recuperate, she again moved to San Francisco in 1966, where her bluesy vocal style saw her join Big Brother and The Holding Company, a band that was gaining some renown among the nascent hippie community in Haight-Ashbury. The band signed a deal with independent Mainstream Records and recorded an eponymously titled album in 1967. However, the lack of success of their early singles led to the album being withheld until after their subsequent success.
The band’s big break came with their performance at the Monterey Pop Festival, which included a version of Big Mama Thornton’s “Ball and Chain” and featured a barnstorming vocal by Joplin. (The D.A. Pennebaker documentary Monterey Pop captured Cass Elliot in the crowd silently mouthing “Wow, that’s really heavy” during Joplin’s performance.) Their 1968 album Cheap Thrills featured more raw emotional performances and together with the Monterey performance, it made Joplin into one of the leading musical stars of the late Sixties.
Solo career and Woodstock
After splitting from Big Brother, she formed a new backup group, modelled on the classic soul revue bands, named the Kozmic Blues Band, which backed her on I Got Dem Ol’ Kozmic Blues Again Mama! (1969: the year she played at Woodstock). That group was indifferently received and soon broke up, and Joplin then formed what is arguably her best backing group, The Full Tilt Boogie Band. The result was the posthumously released Pearl (1971). It became the biggest selling album of her short career and featured her biggest hit single, the definitive cover version of Kris Kristofferson’s “Me and Bobby McGee”, as well as the wry social commentary of the a capella “Mercedes-Benz”, written by Joplin and beat poet Michael McClure.
Among her last public appearances were two broadcasts of The Dick Cavett Show on June 25 and August 3, 1970. On the June 25 show she announced that she would attend her ten-year high school reunion, although she admitted that when in high school she had been “laughed out of class, out of school, out of town, out of the state”. She made it there, but it would be one of the last decisions of her life and it reportedly proved to be a rather unhappy experience for her.
Death
Shortly thereafter, during the fall 1970 recording sessions for the Pearl album with Doors and Phil Ochs producer Paul A. Rothchild, Joplin died of an overdose of unusually pure heroin and alcohol, after being off of drugs (clean) for a period of time, on October 4, 1970 at the Landmark Motor Hotel located at 7047 Franklin Ave, room #105 in Hollywood, California, aged only 27. The last recordings she completed were “Mercedes-Benz” and a birthday greeting for John Lennon on October 1; Lennon later told Dick Cavett that her taped greeting arrived at his New York home after her death.
She was cremated in the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Westwood, California, and her ashes were scattered into the Pacific Ocean. The album Pearl, released six weeks after her death, included a version of Nick Gravenites’ song “Buried Alive In The Blues”, which was left as an instrumental because Joplin had died before she was able to record her vocal over the backing track.
The 1979 film The Rose was loosely based on Joplin’s life. The lead role earned Bette Midler an Academy Award nomination as Best Actress. In the late 1990s, a musical based on “Love, Janis,” was launched, with an aim to take it to Off-Broadway. Opening there in the summer of 2001 and scheduled for only a few weeks of performances, the show won acclaim and packed houses and was held over several times, the demanding role of the singing Janis attracting rock vocalists from relative unknowns to pop stars Laura Branigan and Beth Hart. A national tour followed. As of 2005, two biopics of Joplin’s life are being planned, one called Piece of My Heart starring Renée Zellweger, the other one called Gospel According to Janis, starring pop star Pink.
Legacy
Joplin is now remembered best for her powerful, distinctive voice ” her rasping, overtone-rich sound was significantly divergent from the soft folk and jazz-influenced styles that were common among white artists at the time ” as well as for her lyrical themes of pain and loss.
Joplin’s contributions to the rock idiom were long overlooked, but her importance is now becoming more widely appreciated, thanks in part to the recent release of the long-unreleased documentary film Festival Express, which captured her at her very best. Janis’s scorching vocal style, her flamboyant dress sense, her outspokenness and sense of humour, her liberated stance and her strident, hard-living “one of the boys” image all combined to create an entirely new kind of female persona in rock. Ironically, it is clear in retrospect that much of Janis’ flamboyant image and outrageous behaviour masked deep-seated insecurities.
It can be argued that, prior to Joplin, there was a tendency for solo, white female pop performers to be pigeonholed in to a few broadly defined roles ” the gentle, guitar-strumming ‘folkie’ (e.g. Judy Collins, Joni Mitchell), the virginal ‘pop goddess’ (e.g. Doris Day, Rosemary Clooney) or the cool, elegantly dressed chanteuse (e.g. Dusty Springfield). As one of the first women to front a fully-fledged rock band, Joplin followed the precedent set by her white, male counterparts in adopting the image, repertoire and performance style of African American blues and rhythm and blues artists, both male and female. In so doing, Joplin was pivotal in redefining what was possible for white female singers in mainstream American popular music.
Alongside Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane, she pioneered an entirely new range of expression for white women in the previously male-dominated world of post-Beatles rock. It is also notable that, in a very short time, she transcended the role of “chick singer” fronting an all-male band, to being an internationally famous solo star in her own right.
In terms of her visual image, Joplin is also notable as one of the few female performers of her day to regularly wear pants (or slacks), rather than skirts or dresses. Another trademark was her flamboyant hair styles, often including coloured streaks and accessories such as scarves, beads and feathers, a style strikingly at odds with the ‘regulation’ perms or wigs sported by most female singers of the day. It is especially notable that she is probably the only major female pop-rock star of the period who never wore makeup ” something that was very striking at a time when the wearing of makeup was de rigeur for female performers.
Source: Wikipedia
