Janis Joplin

You go back there and find out who it is and tell them that Janis says she’s gotten it on with a couple of thousand cats in her life and a few hundred chicks and see what they can do with that

The first book-length biography of her, which I’ve read but not in years, included a lengthy Freudian explanation of Janis Joplin’s bisexuality, which I believe was excised in later editions. She apparently wasn’t cohesive enough as an individual and was too scarred to be either straight or lesbian. While it’s true that it seems obvious we can add Joplin to the canon of Disaster Bisexuals, I think she herself would have thought that was ridiculous. Frankly, I think Janis was a woman of vast pleasures, and she didn’t see anything wrong with experiencing pleasure with woman any more than she was anything wrong with experiencing it with men. She had bigger problems, poor soul.

Janis Lyn Joplin was born in Port Arthur, Texas, and spent roughly two-thirds of her life as an outcast. As a teenager, she was overweight and had severe acne. Almost as bad, she was creative and didn’t hate black people. In fact, one of her outcast friends introduced her to the music of blues artists. Young Janis was fascinated. She graduated from high school and went off to college, where she was notable enough to have an article about her appear in the University of Texas at Austin newspaper the summer after her sophomore year.

A few months later, Joplin recorded her first song. “What Good Can Drinkin’ Do” was recorded on tape in another student’s home. It’s Joplin on autoharp performing solo. It’s a blues number. It’s also, frankly, something that sounds like a cry for help. To be sure, the “I am consuming substances because I am miserable but they don’t help and I am now miserable and hungover” is a staple in the blues. It’s still a little sad, given what would happen to Joplin over the following eight years. Within a few months, she would move to San Francisco; within eighteen months, she would be back in Port Arthur with a meth addiction and a weight of eighty-eight pounds. She was five foot five.

What’s really sad is that, for the rest of her life, Joplin would conflate performing and drugs. She began seeing a therapist with whom she discussed her dreams, but she asked how she could be a musician without going back on drugs. On the other hand, she didn’t want the same life she saw the women around her, presumably including those of her own generation, living. She was pursuing a degree in social work, but what she still wanted was a career in music. She joined Big Brother and the Holding Company and told her parents they would be in Austin. She wrote them from San Francisco.

She tried. She roomed with a man named Travis Rivers, whom she made promise that there would be no needle use in the home, the sort of thing you’d wish you didn’t have to make your roommates promise. The first time she saw needle use in the home, she was told it was “just mescaline.” Because the ‘60s were a hell of a time. I don’t know if she’d stopped drinking—Southern Comfort, famously, was her drink of choice—but she was seized again by her addiction.

Gods know I don’t want to just talk about the drugs, or even the drugs and the sex. Though by all accounts there was a lot of sex. (My favourite detail is that she apparently had a relationship with Howard Hesseman, which in my head means she also had one with Dr. Johnny Fever in the WKRP universe.) There are a lot of people known to have been involved with her and a lot in her social circle with whom she might’ve fooled around because that’s the kind of person in the kind of circles we’re discussing.

More important by far, however, there is the music. Such music. Unbelievably, the conservative Washington Evening Star once sent an opera buff to review a concert of hers, apparently held in a roller rink with the appalling acoustics of all roller rinks. Now, since reviewer John Segraves was probably not a fourteenth century English baron, I don’t have any information about him, but he wasn’t wrong when he said, “In a proper room, I would imagine there would be no adjectives to describe her.” Probably my own favourite of her songs is her recording of “Summertime” from Porgy and Bess. She infuses the song with intensity and sorrow. It’s astounding and worth seeking out.

Unfortunately, there did continue to be the heroin. Her lover/friend/groupie/enabler Peggy Caserta insists that her death was actually caused by catching the heel of a sandal on shag carpeting and hitting her head, but I’m going to go along with coroner Thomas Noguchi on this one. Especially because it seems several of her dealer’s other customers overdosed that weekend on heroin stronger than they were used to. In the long run, I’m not sure how much it matters; we know we lost out on music because she was scheduled to record the next day.

Pearl was released posthumously. It seems certain that many other albums could have followed had Joplin kept away from drugs and, probably, alcohol. I am fond of her last recording, which hails back to the simplicity of the first one, bringing Joplin back full circle in a way. It was another of her own songs, “Mercedes Benz.” It’s a remarkably simple song sung a capella. And it ends with Joplin declaring, “That’s it!” and laughing. After asking all of us to sing along.