Remember to visit
MO'Sfor the
Manic Monday submissions...
You know...Janis was a singer
but she needed someone with a drum
KIT in her band!
(yeah we did steal it MO!)We also just found out that
SKITTLES did an interview with the good
Doc Blogstein which includes a real picture of the host of the
RADIO HAPPY HOUR..
You can find it
HERE
She came out of the small town of
Port Arthur, Texas on January 19, 1943 at
St. Mary’s Hospital;
Janis Lyn Joplin was the eldest daughter of
Seth Ward Joplin and
Dorothy Bonita East.
Her dad worked for
Texaco and mom was the registrar at a local business college and Janis had two younger siblings;
Michael and
Laura. Janis had a knack for being a painter which is credited back to her mom and dad.
Joplin attended
Thomas Jefferson High School in Port Arthur from 1957 – 1960. As would be the case in her adult years, Janis was different from most of the kids in high school and was therefore shunned until she met a football player named
Grant Lyons.
Lyons could probably be credited with giving us this remarkable artist, as it was he who played Janis her first bit of the blues; an old
Leadbelly record. From that point on Janis began listening to blues musicians such as
Bessie Smith,
Odetta, and
Big Mama Thornton and singing in the local choir.
"I got treated very badly in Texas. They don't treat beatniks too good in Texas. Port Arthur people thought I was a beatnik,
though they'd never seen one and neither had I." - JANIS
After high school, Janis attended the
University of Texas in
Austin and lived in a building nicknamed
“The Ghetto” at 2812 ½ Nueces Street. In 1962 she was the subject of an article in the campus newspaper entitled
“She Dares To Be Different”. Fashioning herself after her blues heroines, Janis sang at the local coffee houses.
In 1963 Janis headed off to
North Beach and then
Haight Asbury, California continuing to play the coffee houses singing the blues and folk music.
On June 25, 1964 Janis was at the home of
Jorma Kaukonen (who two years later would help found
The Jefferson Airplane), and they recorded a group of songs including
“Kansas City Blues” and
“Hesitation Blues”.
These songs were recorded on a non-stereo reel-to-reel tape machine with Jorma’s wife
Margareta playing the typewriter as a percussion instrument. These songs found their way onto a bootleg album entitled
“The TypewriterTape” a number of years later.
"Onstage, I make love to 25,000 people - then I go home alone." - JANIS
At this time Janis’ drug use began to increase, with speed and heroin becoming more prevalent in her life. She had also acquired a taste for
Southern Comfort which became synonymous with Janis throughout her life.
A few months after the session with Jorma, her friends in California began to get very concerned as Janis was down to 88 pounds and doing far too many drugs. They bought her a bus ticket back home and in April of 1965 Janis was back in Port Arthur, TX. Her lifestyle changed as she sobered up and enrolled at
Lamar University in nearby
Beaumont, TX.
During this time Janis continued to correspond with a man she knew back in California. He was a methadrine dealer and he had asked Janis to marry him a number of times. A one point he showed up at the Joplin home, dressed in a suit and tie and asked Janis’ father for her hand in marriage.
Almost immediately after that, he broke off all contact with Janis and she never saw him again. Was this the catalyst to the heartbreak in the music Janis sang afterward? It is speculation, but it seems to make sense.
"People, whether they know it or not, like their blues singer’s miserable.
They like their blues singers to die afterwards." - JANIS
Janis began to drive to
Austin and perform at clubs there, just she and her guitar. This continued her love for music and when an old Texas friend,
Chet Helms, called her from
San Francisco and offered her a job singing with a band he managed, she headed back to there.
Chet Helms also ran a company called
“Family Dog Productions" which along with
“Bill Graham Productions” became the two largest promotion companies of the time.
The band he managed was named
Big Brother & The Holding Company and on June 10, 1964 the band performed at
The Avalon in San Francisco for the first time.
In August of 1966 the band signed with
“Mainstream Records” and recorded their first album. The singles off the album made nary a squeak and the album was not released at that time.
On June 18, 1967 Big Brother
(pictured on the left) performed at the
Monterey Pop Festival and everything changed. The performance was hailed as a career changer for Big Brother, but especially for Janis.
She became an international star almost overnight – similar to another performer who made one of his first appearances at the festival that same year. His name?
Jimi Hendrix.
If you ever see the documentary on this festival, you will see a shot of
Mama Cass in the audience during Janis’ performance and she is mouthing the words,
“Wow, that’s really heavy”In November of 1967 the band left the management of Chet Helms and began working with noted manager
Albert Grossman (most famous for his client; Bob Dylan) and he began to book venues for the band outside of San Francisco and California, where they had only performed thus far.
An East Coast tour began in
Philadelphia on February 16, 1968 and then headed to the
Anderson Theatre in
NYC for a show the next day. On the last day of their East Coast swing, April 7, 1968, the band performed at the
“Wake For Martin Luther King Jr.” concert in NY along with
Jimi,
Buddy Guy,
Joni Mitchell,
Richie Havens,
Paul Butterfield and
Elvin Bishop.
"I was the same chick, because I've been her forever, and I know her, and she ain't no star: she's lonely, or she's good at something. I have to get undressed after the show, my clothes are ruined, my heels are run through, my underwear is ripped, my body's strained from my clothes, my hair's stringy, I got a headache and I got to go home, and I'm lonely, and my clothes are all fucked up, my shoes have come apart, and I'm pleading with my road manager to please give me a ride home, please, please, just so I can take these fuckin' clothes off, and that ain't no star, man, that’s just a person." - JANIS
Between April and June Big Brother spent time between LA and NYC recording the album
Cheap Thrills which was released in August and debuted as the
#1 Album on the Billboard Charts, selling 1,000,000 copies in the first month alone.
It was a collection of studio and live performances and cover artwork by the famed
Robert Crumb. The breakthrough hit from the album was, of course, the incomparable
“Piece Of My Heart”.
The band made another East Coast swing between July-August 1968 which included a performance at the
Newport Jazz Festival.
The picture on the left was taken during the Festival.Upon returning to San Francisco Janis announced she would be leaving Big Brother at the end of the year and made her final performance with this lineup on December 1, 1968 at a Family Dog benefit concert.
Janis then formed a band called the
Kosmic Blues Band which was modeled after the classic soul revue bands. Their first performance signaled their intent on their playing soul music as it was at the
Stax-Volt Christmas Show in
Memphis, TN on December 21, 1968.
Kosmic Blues Band:
The band, including a complete horn section, began touring non-stop throughout
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America and
Europe throughout 1969. In September 1969
I Got Dem Ol’ Kosmic Blues Again Mama was released and certified Gold, but never had the success of “Cheap Thrills”.
It included the bluesy, tough sounding song
"Try (Just A Little Bit Harder"The band was short-lived however and played their final gig with Janis at
Madison Square Garden in NYC on December 21, 1969 exactly a year from their first performance.
"I read a story about some old opera singer once, and when a guy asked her to marry him, she took him backstage after she had sung a real triumph, with all the people calling for her, asked, 'Do you think you could give me that?' That story hit me right, man. I know no guy ever made me feel as good as an audience. I'm really far into this now, really committed. Like, I don't think I'd go off the road for long now, for life with a guy no matter how good. Yeah, it's the truth. Scary thing to say though, isn't it?" - JANIS In August 1969, Janis performed at the legendary
Woodstock Festival. Depending upon who you speak with or read, she was brilliant, or she was below par that weekend.
For 25 years after Woodstock, the only portion of her performance there that was available commercially -- in either sound or picture -- was a spontaneous dance she did with her band's African-American tenor saxophone player,
Cornelius "Snooky" Flowers, during an instrumental break. It is part of the 1975 theatrically released documentary
Janis.
The feature film,
Woodstock includes several seconds of Janis walking with her friend
Peggy Caserta to the festival site in broad daylight hours before she went on stage, but this film omitted her entire performance, even the dance with Flowers.
The 25th anniversary director's cut of Woodstock includes just one of her selections from the concert:
"Work Me, Lord".
In February of 1970, Janis traveled to
Brazil with her friend
Linda Gravenites and got clean and sober. Gravenities had designed all of Janis’ stage costumes since 1966 and led a clean and sober lifestyle.
While there Janis met
David Niehaus an American schoolteacher who was traveling the world at the time. He also led a clean lifestyle and it appeared Janis had kicked her habit.
Upon returning home, Janis formed a band with a group of drug-free
Canadians who had no association with her San Francisco crowd and the
Full Tilt Boogie Band came into existence.
"I gotta go on doin' it the way I see it...I got no choice but to take it like I see it. I'm here to have a party while I'm on this earth...I'm gettin' it now, today. I don't even know where I'm gonna be twenty years from now, so I'm just gonna keep on rockin', cause if I start saving up bits and pieces of me...man, there ain't gonna be nothing left for Janis." - JANIS
In late June 1970, Janis and the band joined the
Grateful Dead and
The Band on a tour of
Canada called the
Festival Express.
During this tour Janis began designing her own costumes. Linda Gravenites and she split company after returning from Brazil for no known reason and once again Janis took on the
‘tough first lady of rock and roll’ mantle and did not replace her, instead deciding to
‘rebuild her image’.
Feathers in her hair, multi-colored outfits, downplaying her cleavage and sexuality became the norm. Around this time she also requested that her band and entourage begin to call her
“Pearl” though she did not want the press to report the nickname.
Janis thought differently then many of the other stars of the time who encouraged free-concerts. In an article in Newsweek in 1970, Janis was quoted as saying;
'I don't believe in gate-crashing. The people aren't up there when I'm sweating on a stage at a festival, breaking my ass. You can get the money, man. Sell your old lady, sell your dope. Look at me, man, I'm selling my heart.'
She was also very against the common practice at Dead shows to dose people with LSD without their knowledge. In 1970, she said in the presence of
Myra Friedman, her long-time publicist, that
Deadheads who did that were comparable to the Chicago police officers who had beaten hippies on the head at the
1968 Democratic Convention. A pretty heavy statement for the times.
Janis had a nasty drug and alcohol habit but was never late or missed a show, always telling people she believed in the American work ethic.
In 1970 Janis and the band went into the studio to record a new album. On October 1, 1970, Janis completed the song
“Mercedes Benz” in one take and then recorded a birthday greeting for
John Lennon, the
Dale Evans song
“Happy Trails”. It may have been prophetic.
Two days later, Saturday October 3rd, Janis visited the
Sunset Sound Studios to listen to the instrumental track for
“Buried Alive In The Blues” so she could lay down the vocals the next day. That night at the studio she had a long angry conversation with her boyfriend
Seth on the phone, which was overheard by the members of the band. All say she was in great spirits before and even after the phone call when they all went out for Chinese food.
According to many sources, here is what happened next. Her boyfriend Seth was at Janis’ home in
Marin County playing strip poker with a waitress he had met that day. This caused him to miss the date with Janis.
Sometime Saturday Janis bought heroin from a known dealer. She was staying at the
Landmark, which was known to draw drug users as its guests. That afternoon she told the front desk to not put any calls through to her room.
It seems that Janis ended up making her way to
Barney’s Beanery in
West Hollywood and drank for a while there.
The next day when she had not shown back up at the studio, Full Tilt’s road manager drove to The Landmark and found Janis dead on the floor. It would seem that the dealer’s normal
‘cutter’ (the person responsible for taking pure heroin and mixing it with a substance to lessen its strength) was not available and whoever cut this batch lef it much too pure. There were other deaths in
Los Angeles around that time that were linked back to this dealer and that batch.
A service only attended by Janis’ parents and her aunt
Mimi was held at
Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Mortuary in LA and then her ashes were scattered by plane into the
Pacific Ocean and along
Stinson Beach in Marin County.
Two months before her death, Janis provided a gravestone for her idol, Bessie Smith at
Philadelphia’s Mount Lawn Cemetery.
In 1979
Bette Midler stared in and earns an
Academy Award nomination for
“The Rose”, a story loosely based on Janis’ life.
Janis…along with
Grace Slick of
The Jefferson Airplane opened doors to women in rock. The genre was dominated by men until these two remarkable women came along and changed the face of the music.
Music journalist
Ellen Wills asserted that
“Joplin belonged to that select group of pop figures who mattered as much for themselves as for their music. Among American rock performers, she was second only to Bob Dylan in importance as a creator-recorder-embodiment of her generation’s mythology.”
Rock critic
Lillian Roxon summed up her influence with these words:
“[Janis Joplin] perfectly expressed the feelings and yearnings of the girls of the electric generation – to be all woman, yet equal with men; to be free, yet a slave to real love; to [reject] every outdated convention, and yet get back to the basics of life.”
Janis's albums have gone gold, platinum, and triple-platinum. Her
Greatest Hits album still appears on the charts in Billboard. Several new releases have followed her death, with wide acclaim for her boxed set,
Janis.
She was the subject of a 1973 feature documentary,
"Janis" and numerous TV documentaries, the most notable being
VH-1's Legends program. She is currently the subject of two hotly contested biographical movie projects.
Not recognized by her hometown during her life, she was remembered much later. In 1988, her life and achievements were showcased and recognized in Port Arthur, Texas by the dedication of the
Janis Joplin Memorial, with an original bronze, multi-image sculpture of Joplin by
Douglas Clark.
Joplin was inducted to the
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, and received a
Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005.
"I hope you're going to edit this stuff. I don't want to sound like a senile, self-pitying chick babbling on and on about her days of glory." - JANIS So much information on Ms. Joplin...we hope we gave you a little insight into this remarkable woman and her music...
Discography
Janis Joplin & Jorma Kaukonen• The Typewriter Tape (1964, bootleg recording)
Big Brother and the Holding Company• Big Brother & the Holding Company (1967, Mainstream Records)
• Big Brother & the Holding Company (1967?, Columbia) Contains 2 extra single tracks.
• Big Brother & the Holding Company (1967, CD 1999 Columbia Legacy CK66425) Contains 2 extra single tracks.
• Cheap Thrills (1968, Columbia)
• Cheap Thrills (1968, CD 1999 Legacy CK65784) Contains 4 extra tracks.
• Live at Winterland '68 (1998, Columbia Legacy)
Kozmic Blues Band• I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama! (1969, Columbia)
• I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama! (1969, CD 1999 Legacy CK65785) Contains 3 extra tracks.
Full Tilt Boogie• Pearl (posthumous 1971, Columbia)
• Pearl (posthumous 1971, CD unknown date Columbia CD64188)
• Pearl (posthumous 1971, CD 1999 Legacy CK65786) Contains 4 extra tracks.
• Pearl (posthumous 1971, 2CD 2005 Legacy COL 515134 2) CD1 contains 6 other extra tracks, CD2 contains a full selection from The Festival Express Tour, from all 3 venues.
Big Brother & the Holding Company / Full Tilt Boogie• In Concert (1972, Legacy CK65786)
Later collections• Janis Joplin's Greatest Hits (1973, Columbia)
• Janis (2 discs 1975, Columbia Legacy)
• Anthology (1980)
• Farewell Song (1983)
• Cheaper Thrills (1984)
• Janis (3 discs 1993, Columbia Legacy)
• 18 Essential Songs (1995, Columbia Legacy)
• The Collection (1995)
• Live at Woodstock: August 19, 1969 (1999)
• Box of Pearls (1999, Sony Legacy)
• Super Hits (2000)
• Love, Janis (2001)
Seduce my mind and you can have my body,
Find my soul and I'm yours forever.
~ by Anonymous ~
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