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After reading “Janis: Her Life and Music” (Simon & Schuster, $28.99), New York writer Holly George-Warren’s engrossing new biography of Janis Joplin, I’m left to wonder how the self-destructive singer lived as long as she did. Joplin was 27 when she died of an accidental heroin overdose in a Hollywood motel room while recording “Pearl,” released posthumously in 1971. It was her third and most successful album, selling 8 million copies, a quadruple-platinum legacy left by a boundless personality and fervidly passionate singer that Newsweek anointed America’s first female rock star.
In George-Warren’s granular but highly readable and compassionate telling, Joplin lived so hard and so fast, so rebelliously and so recklessly, that, in my estimation, she could have succumbed from any number of calamities and sorrows during her brief but extraordinary time on Earth — previous heroin overdoses, a motorcycle crash in Brazil, abuse of methamphetamines and alcohol, even a broken heart from numerous ill-fated love affairs and her depression over her inability to please her parents, particularly her disapproving mother. When you live on a razor’s edge, as Joplin did, you risk having your lifetime cut short.
There have been numerous other books about Joplin, notably Myra Friedman’s “Buried Alive;” “Love, Janis,” by Joplin’s sister, Laura; and David Dalton’s “Piece of My Heart.” By most reports, though, this is the definitive bio of one of the ’60s most electrifying talents and tragic figures.
Over the past five decades, I’ve been fortunate enough to have interviewed many of Marin’s rock stars and musicians. Regrettably, never Joplin, who died a couple of years before I arrived on the local scene. Over the years, though, I’ve gotten to know members of Big Brother and the Holding Company, the pioneering Haight-Ashbury-era band that gave her a first taste of fame. And I knew the late John Byrne Cooke, the road manager who found Joplin’s lifeless body on that sad October day in 1970 and penned a book about his experiences, “On the Road with Janis Joplin.” I’ve listened raptly as they told me stories about this complex, conflicted and charismatic woman who was truly larger than life, and I’ve read other books about her. But I’ve always wanted to know more, to have someone fill in the blanks. Gratefully, George-Warren’s “Janis” does that and then some.
Time in Texas
Naturally, I was particularly interested in the chapters about Joplin’s time in Marin County, and I’ll get to that. But, first, what may be George-Warren’s most significant contribution to the Joplin literature is her detailed account of the singer’s formative years in conservative Port Arthur, Texas. As a teen, Joplin self-identified as a beatnik after reading Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road,” and resisted the social pressures for girls to conform to traditional gender roles in the Eisenhower-era 1950s. She dressed sloppily in jeans and oversized men’s shirts, hung out with older boys, became enamored of blues and early rock ‘n’ roll, and started drinking at roadhouses and dance halls across the Sabine River in Louisiana.
“The sense of release provided by spirits clearly resonated with Janis as a way to calm her anxiety, unleash her courage and dull her fears of judgment from her classmates, her family and Port Arthur as a whole,” George-Warren writes.
A smart kid, young Joplin adored her book-reading, intellectual father, who dared to be quietly atheist in a staunchly Christian community. She was encouraged by her parents to voice her opinions, at least at the dinner table. But Joplin was never one to confine her feelings about things. When she was a junior in high school, she spoke out against racism in segregated Port Arthur and paid the price.
“During a classroom discussion on integration, Janis was the sole student to argue in favor of black and white students attending school together,” George-Warren writes. “This move, combined with her carousing with older boys, her identification with the Beats, and her lashing out at those who ridiculed her, cut her off from conventional Port Arthur. She became a pariah in her hometown.”
‘Beat Weeds’
George-Warren singles out one of her worst tormentors: high school jock Jimmy Johnson, who would go on to become Port Arthur’s second-most famous graduate as the head coach of the Dallas Cowboys and later as a Fox NFL commentator. He was one of the bullies who derisively called Joplin “Beat Weeds,” a combination of beatnik and a slang word intimating that she was sexually available. She wasn’t. She’d graduate from high school a virgin, but would make up for it later as an unashamedly promiscuous, bisexual rock goddess. Among the men she slept with: Leonard Cohen, Kris Kristofferson, Jim Morrison, New York Jets quarterback Joe Namath and, possibly, talk-show host Dick Cavett.
Joplin’s mother, Dorothy, had been a promising local singer before marrying and raising a family. And it may have been from her that Joplin inherited her vocal talent. In Joplin’s case, that talent was writ large, and it brought her for the first time the praise, recognition and attention she’d craved, George-Warren says. Influenced by the likes of Odetta, Bessie Smith, Nina Simone and Big Mama Thornton, among other African American women folk and blues singers, Joplin would develop a ferocious singing style that stunned fans and sent music critics searching for superlatives.
When she unleashed that howling vocal prowess on an impassioned rendition of Big Mama Thornton’s “Ball & Chain” with Big Brother at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, it caused an instant sensation, making her a budding superstar. You only have to see Mama Cass mouthing “wow” in D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary, “Monterey Pop,” to appreciate the impact of Joplin’s incandescent performance.
Ironically, as George-Warren points out, the lonely young woman who considered herself unattractive after being derided about her acne, her stringy hair and “little pig eyes” by schoolmates when she was growing up, and who would be deeply hurt when someone entered her in an ugly man contest while she was a student at the University of Texas, would metamorphosize into a Dionysian hippie sex symbol in her boas, beads and colored eye glasses, placed on a pedestal as “Haight Ashbury’s first pinup girl.”
Happy in Marin
Joplin complained that she was “the Queen of Unrequited Love.” There were men she wanted to marry and settle down with, but, when you were Joplin, long-term relationships weren’t in the cards. She was often depressed and unhappy about that. George-Warren writes that she once told soul singer-guitarist Bobby Womack that she used heroin because it could “bury her thoughts and deaden her from the world.” Which is not to say that she was never happy. And some of her happiest moments were in Marin County.
After fellow Texan Chet Helms brought Joplin and Big Brother together, the band lived communally in a rustic cottage in Lagunitas, just down the road from the Grateful Dead’s compound in a former children’s camp. Joplin was the first to move in. George-Warren quotes a letter she wrote to her parents: “I am now safely moved into my new room in our beautiful house in the country. I’m the only member of the band out here so far…sitting in a comfortable chair by the fireplace, doors wide open and a 180 view of trees, redwood & fir. Bliss! I’ve never felt so relaxed in my life. This is the most fantastic house & setting.”
After splitting from Big Brother, when she started making money as a rock star, Joplin tooled around in a psychedelic-painted Porsche and bought a wood-shingled house with a stone fireplace and wood beams at 380 West Baltimore Ave. in Larkspur’s Baltimore Canyon. George-Warren quotes another letter Joplin wrote to a friend, saying that “the beautifully quiet” house would provide sanctuary, helping her stay off drugs.
That didn’t happen, sadly. And Joplin must have sensed that she wouldn’t live into old age. If she had, she would have been 76 this year. After her death, her cremated remains were scattered by air off the Marin coast, as she specified in her will. She also set aside $2,500 for her friends to have a party in her honor at the Lion’s Share nightclub in San Anselmo, where, George-Warren writes, “grieving members of Big Brother and other musicians friends performed, attended by some 200 people, including her sister, Laura.”
George-Warren ends “Janis” with something Joplin said to singer Bonnie Bramlett. “In 1970, Janis acknowledged, with a new, deeper degree of self-realization, the choice she had made to become who she was, as well the limits imposed by that choice. ‘You give up every constant in the world except music,’ she explained. ‘That’s the only thing in the world you’ve got.’”
Contact Paul Liberatore at p.liberatore@comcast.net
