Janis Joplin
A girl bullied in a Texas refinery town borrowed the voice of the blues and sang the loneliness she could not hide louder than anyone.
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
Bandmates and colleagues ⏳🌊
- FamilyDorothy Joplin
A mother who watched her daughter's success yet wished for her an ordinary life; all her life Janis sought her approval through letters.
- InfluenceBessie Smith
The queen of the blues in the 1920s; Janis learned to sing by singing along to her records, and in 1970 placed a headstone on her grave.
- MemberSam Andrew
Big Brother's guitarist, who arranged “Summertime” and followed Janis after she left the band, all the way to the Kozmic Blues Band.
- ManagerAlbert Grossman
Bob Dylan's manager, who took her on after Monterey, signed her to Columbia, and steered her solo career.
- FriendshipKris Kristofferson
The country singer-songwriter who wrote “Me and Bobby McGee” and first heard her recording of it only after her death.
- ProducerPaul Rothchild
The producer behind the Doors, he captured her voice with the greatest finesse on "Pearl."
I. The outsider from Port Arthur · 1943–1962
(Birth) In January 1943 she was born in Port Arthur, Texas, a refinery town on the Gulf of Mexico. Her father, Seth Joplin, was an engineer at a Texaco container plant, and her mother, Dorothy, worked as a registrar at a local business college. A younger sister, Laura, and a younger brother, Michael, followed. Young Janis sang in the church choir and had a gift for drawing that raised her parents' hopes. (Ostracism) Things changed when she entered Thomas Jefferson High School. She put on weight, her skin broke out, and in a neighborhood that took segregation for granted, she spoke up in favor of integration and became a target for her classmates. Insulting nicknames about her looks and behavior followed her. Later she said more than once that her hometown had laughed her out of town. The wound never healed, even after she became a success. (Records) Her consolation was a handful of misfit friends and records. She listened and sang along to Lead Belly and Odetta, Big Mama Thornton, and Bessie Smith, the queen of the blues in the 1920s. She and her friends would drive across the river to bars in Louisiana to hear blues and Cajun music. That a middle-class white girl found her own voice in the songs of Black women singers became the starting point of her music. (College) After graduating from high school in 1960, she attended Lamar State College of Technology in nearby Beaumont but did not last long there. Torn between the idea of studying art and the urge to sing, she left in 1962 for Austin, home of the University of Texas.
II. Songs on the road · 1962–1966
(Austin) In Austin, Janis performed regularly for the first time. She formed a trio with two friends on harmonica and guitar and sang country and blues at Threadgill's, a bar in a converted gas station. The owner, Kenneth Threadgill, a country singer who sang Jimmie Rodgers songs, took her under his wing and put her onstage. In the summer of 1962 the student newspaper profiled her as an unusual student who went barefoot and always carried an autoharp. There is also the story that a fraternity nominated her for 'Ugliest Man on Campus.' (The West) In January 1963 she hitchhiked to San Francisco with Chet Helms, a friend from Austin. Singing blues in the coffeehouses of North Beach, she slowly made a name for herself, but her life was always precarious. (Speed) Around this time she sank deep into stimulants such as methamphetamine, and into drink. In 1965, when her weight fell to barely 40 kilograms, her friends pooled money for the fare and sent her back to Texas. (Homecoming) Back in Port Arthur, Janis tied her hair back neatly, wore plain clothes, and took sociology classes at Lamar. She got engaged to a man she had met out West and began planning a wedding, but the engagement fell apart when he stopped getting in touch. It was an attempt to become the ordinary daughter her parents wanted. Still, she could not let go of singing and appeared now and then on Austin stages. (The call) In the spring of 1966, Helms, by then a concert promoter in San Francisco, sent someone to suggest she try singing with a band he was looking after. After some hesitation, Janis headed west again. The split between the good daughter from home and the singer onstage followed her for the rest of her life.
III. Big Brother · 1966–1967
(The band) Big Brother and the Holding Company was an experimental band from Haight-Ashbury. James Gurley loved feedback, in which the sound from the amplifier loops back into the guitar and howls without end; Sam Andrew played a second guitar, Peter Albin bass, and Dave Getz drums. Their first show with Janis took place at the Avalon Ballroom in June 1966. (The voice) The clear singing style she had used in folk clubs could not hold up against the band's enormous volume. Janis met the roar of psychedelic rock with a raw, throat-scraping shout and with sounds that burst out of ragged gasps for breath. In the process, the blues idiom she had learned from Bessie Smith and Big Mama Thornton met the volume of rock. (Commune) That summer the members lived together in a house in Lagunitas, Marin County. Janis was the only woman in the band and at first struggled to find her place. Alcohol was still close at hand. (The contract) When a Chicago engagement fell through and the money ran out, the band signed with a small label, Mainstream Records. The deal is said to have later become a burden on the band. The recordings from this period came out as their debut album in August 1967. (Monterey) In June 1967, at the Monterey Pop Festival, she sang Big Mama Thornton's "Ball and Chain" and the audience froze. Because the band's manager at the time refused to allow filming, the first performance was never captured on film, so the organizers put the band back onstage the next day to shoot it. At the same festival Jimi Hendrix made his first appearance on an American stage. Within a single day, Janis went from local singer to a name the whole country was watching.
A single from the debut album released on Mainstream, it is an old Black spiritual reworked by Janis. It captures the raw, rough first sound of a band from the hippie commune scene.
- The Mainstream recordings came out thin and short, failing to capture the band's onstage volume. Listen to how songs they stretched out in concert were squeezed down to barely three minutes, and compare them with later live recordings.
- Peter Albin's bass and Dave Getz's drums repeat a beat as simple and insistent as handclaps in church. This is where the repeating rhythm of a spiritual turns into the pulse of rock.
- Janis's voice already rasps at the edges, but it is higher and straighter than on her later recordings. Follow the way she adds a little more force with each new verse.
- Rather than filling out the harmony, the two guitars cross paths, tossing off short phrases. Hear them separately and the band's rough, collective way of working comes into view.
Big Mama Thornton's blues, sung at the Monterey Pop Festival. That performance made Janis known across the country overnight.
- In the intro, James Gurley's guitar opens with long, drawn-out feedback and distorted notes. The heavy air of a slow minor-key blues settles in before the singing even begins.
- The song moves at a very slow tempo, and at one point the band suddenly stops and Janis carries on alone in the silence. The contrast between sound and silence is the heart of the song.
- In the middle she inserts a long monologue, pleading as if speaking rather than singing. The understated blues of the original turns into a confession of pain.
- D.A. Pennebaker's documentary "Monterey Pop" also caught Mama Cass Elliot in the audience, watching spellbound. The 1968 performance on "Cheap Thrills" runs over 9 minutes.
IV. Cheap thrills · 1967–1968
(Grossman) After Monterey, Albert Grossman, Bob Dylan's manager, took over the band. He untangled the Mainstream contract and landed a new deal with Columbia Records. In March 1968 the band played the opening of the Fillmore East in New York, making its name in the East as well. (Recording) The second album was produced by John Simon, who that same year also produced the Band's debut, "Music from Big Pink." They tried recording in concert halls to capture the heat of the stage, but the results were unsatisfying, so most of it was cut in the studio and dressed up as live with overdubbed crowd noise. Only "Ball and Chain" was an actual concert recording. (Success) The album came out in August 1968 under the title "Cheap Thrills." The record company refused the more explicit title the band wanted, and the cover was drawn by the cartoonist Robert Crumb. The album held No. 1 on the Billboard album chart for 8 weeks. Their cover (remake) of Erma Franklin's "Piece of My Heart" also sold strongly as a single. (Tilt) Success shifted the center of gravity to one side. Press photos and stories focused on Janis alone, and Grossman is said to have wanted her to sing with a bigger, more polished band. Janis herself was dreaming of the horn sound of soul singers like Otis Redding. (Farewell) On December 1, 1968, Janis played the last regular show of her years with Big Brother. Only Sam Andrew, on guitar, followed her. Leaving a band she had lived with like family was not an easy decision for her either, and from then on she grew ever more alone onstage.
Their last official album with Big Brother and their greatest success. The raw energy of a commune band and the polish of the studio mix on a single record.
- The "Summertime" in the card video is George Gershwin's lullaby as arranged by Sam Andrew. Listen in the intro to how the two guitars weave separate melodic lines together, like a piece by Bach.
- In "Summertime," Janis turns the hushed lullaby of the original into a lament close to weeping. Toward the last verse, the cracked, splitting texture of her breath grows thicker.
- Most of the applause and cheering throughout the album was overdubbed onto studio recordings after the fact. Compare the room sound with "Ball and Chain," a genuine concert recording, and you can hear the difference.
- The guitar tone is unkempt and tears sharply. The deliberately torn, warped tone (distortion) and the feedback left in place give the album its character.
A cover of a soul song Erma Franklin released in 1967, it became the single from "Cheap Thrills" and the song that defined Janis.
- The song opens with a short repeated phrase (riff) that the guitar slams down. Unlike the original, smoothed out with horns and backing vocals, this version has two guitars barging in roughly.
- In the verses Janis sings low, as if pressing herself down, then bursts into throat-tearing high notes as she crosses into the chorus. The contrast brings out the paradox of a wounded person who turns around and drives the other into a corner.
- Just before the chorus there is a moment where the band briefly stops and then comes back in. Thanks to that gap, the next cry sounds far louder.
- Sam Andrew takes the guitar solo in the middle. After the short, rough-toned solo, the final chorus is harsher than anything before it.
V. Kozmic blues · 1968–1969
(Soul) The new band was a soul lineup with a horn section, trumpet and saxophone players moving as a unit. It debuted in December 1968 at the Stax Records year-end show in Memphis, but it was underprepared, and the audience in soul's heartland was cold. (The album) In September 1969 came "I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama!," made with producer Gabriel Mekler. On "Try" and "Little Girl Blue," Janis experimented with singing in long, drawn-out breaths rather than shouting. Reviews were mixed, but the album went gold. (Heroin) That year her dependence on heroin deepened. She came onstage with a bottle of the whiskey liqueur Southern Comfort and played up a hard-living image. The better that image sold, the more Janis confided to friends that offstage she was lonely. (Woodstock) At Woodstock in August 1969, after a long wait, she did not take the stage until the small hours of Sunday morning. She was not pleased with the performance, and it was left out of the documentary released the following year. The same festival also featured Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Band, and Neil Young with Crosby, Stills & Nash. (Tampa) At a November show in Tampa, Florida, she cursed at police who were ordering the audience back to their seats and was arrested after the concert. She raged without restraint at any authority that kept an audience from getting up to dance. That same year, on the TV talk show "The Dick Cavett Show," she surprised viewers with her quick wit. At year's end, the Kozmic Blues Band broke up.
A soul song made with the Kozmic Blues Band. Over the horn section, Janis revealed her longing for Stax soul.
- From the intro on, a horn section of trumpets and saxophones playing short, clipped stabs drives the song. This is the biggest change from the guitar-centered Big Brother years.
- Rather than a rock roar, the bass and drums lay down a beat as tight and disciplined as a soul record. Keep your ear on the low end as you listen.
- Janis sings as a narrator who drives herself to try harder to win love. The soul-singer flourishes that stretch and bend the ends of her lines are more frequent than before.
- Live, the closing section stretches out into improvisation, and the exchanges between the horns and her voice grow longer. Hear the studio and concert versions side by side, and the band's promise and its unfinished state come through together.
VI. Full Tilt · 1970
(Brazil) In February 1970, Janis left for Carnival in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, vowing to quit drugs. For a few weeks she spent her days on beaches and on the road and seemed to be getting well, but after returning to the United States she went back to heroin. (The band) In May a new band, Full Tilt Boogie, came together. Made up mostly of Canadian players, it was a small, tight group in which piano and organ laid down solid ground and she could sing over it as freely as she liked. People around her recalled that she seemed most at ease with this band. (The train) From late June to early July she joined the Festival Express, a touring festival that crossed Canada by train. She rode the same train as the Grateful Dead and The Band from city to city, and in the carriages the drinking and impromptu jams went on all night. Scenes of her singing shoulder to shoulder with Rick Danko of The Band and Jerry Garcia of the Dead survive in the documentary. (The reunion) In August she attended her 10th high school reunion in Port Arthur. She had come back a star, but when reporters at a press conference asked about her school days, she answered briefly, her face set. Her biographers wrote that a homecoming meant to bring reconciliation only confirmed old wounds. (The headstone) That same month she helped pay for a headstone on the grave of Bessie Smith, who had died in 1937 and lain in an unmarked grave. It was a way of repaying a debt to the woman who had led her to sing. On stage she was growing ever more seasoned, gaining a sense of when to scream and when to whisper.
VII. Pearl · 1970–1971
(Pearl) In September, Janis recorded a new album with producer Paul Rothchild at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles. The man who had made the Doors' records polished the band's playing and brought out every grain of her voice. Pearl, the nickname her friends called her, became the album's title. (Engagement) Around this time she became engaged to Seth Morgan, who would later become a novelist. The sessions went smoothly, and those around her remembered that she was talking about the future for the first time in a long while. On October 1 she recorded “Mercedes Benz,” a short song written with friends, a cappella and without accompaniment, in a single take. (Death) On October 4, 1970, Janis was found dead in her room at the Landmark Motor Hotel in Hollywood. The cause was a heroin overdose, and the heroin going around that week is said to have been unusually pure. She was twenty-seven. It was 16 days after Jimi Hendrix died. In the studio, only the backing track remained of “Buried Alive in the Blues,” the song she was to have added her voice to the next day. (Will) In her will she left $2,500 so that her friends could throw a party for her. The party was held at a club in Marin County, and her ashes were scattered over the Pacific off the California coast. (Legacy) Released in January 1971, “Pearl” spent 9 weeks at number 1 on the Billboard album chart, and “Me and Bobby McGee,” written by Kris Kristofferson, went to number 1 as a single. In 1995 she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. That voice, which borrowed the blues to lay bare her own loneliness, remains a benchmark that widened the place for women singers in rock.
Recorded days before her death, it went to number 1 as a single after she died. Its writer, Kris Kristofferson, recalled that he first heard the recording only after her death.
- It begins with a single acoustic guitar and a low, gentle voice. The plain, country-singer delivery calls to mind the days when she sang in Austin bars.
- Verse by verse, drums, organ and piano pile on one at a time, and midway through, a key change (modulation) raises the pitch center a step and brightens the mood. Follow how Full Tilt Boogie slowly sets the song alight.
- The song's theme is the freedom and loss that come after losing someone you once drifted with. Janis tells it in a tone more reminiscent than sorrowful, then lets her feelings burst out in the second half.
- At the end, a long improvisation (ad-lib) of wordless humming and shouting unspools. This passage, sung as though no ending had been decided, is the most alive moment on the recording.
Her last studio album and her best-selling record. Paul Rothchild's meticulous production captured her matured voice more vividly than ever.
- The “Cry Baby” in the card's video is a song by Jerry Ragovoy and Bert Berns, who wrote “Piece of My Heart.” Her tone shifts from verse to verse, from coaxing a departed lover to come back to scolding him.
- Full Tilt Boogie's organ and piano lay a broad floor beneath the songs. Unlike her earlier, guitar-led bands, the resonance of keyboards sits at the center of the sound.
- “Mercedes Benz” is an a cappella recording made with nothing but her voice and the sound of her foot keeping time. Even the words she offers with a laugh just before the take survive intact.
- “Buried Alive in the Blues” appears as an instrumental, because her voice was never recorded. Listening to it with the space for the singing left empty is the loneliest moment on the album.
- Rothchild captured each instrument clearly and separately. Alternate it with “Cheap Thrills” and you can hear how finely the same voice has been refined.
Lesser-known stories
Janis is often remembered as an interpreter who made other people's songs her own, but one of her earliest surviving recordings is a blues she wrote herself. “What Good Can Drinkin' Do,” recorded around 1962 at a friend's house in Austin, is a short song about the futility of drink; it survived for years only on a friend's tape before becoming known when it appeared on “Janis,” the 1975 documentary soundtrack. In August 1970, a headstone was raised over Bessie Smith's grave in a cemetery in Sharon Hill, Pennsylvania. Smith had lain in an unmarked grave since dying in a car crash in 1937. The cost was split between Janis and Juanita Green, who as a girl had worked in Smith's household. At the time it got only a small news item, and it became something hidden behind her rough stage image. “Love, Janis,” published in 1992 by her younger sister Laura Joplin, was based on the letters she sent her family. The Janis of the letters, unlike the rebel on stage, was a daughter who carefully reported her concert successes and press clippings to her mother, hoping for approval. Her public image was so strong that this side of her went largely unseen until the letters were published. On October 1, 1970, she recorded a brief “Happy Trails” as a song to celebrate John Lennon's thirtieth birthday. Lennon later said the tape reached him only after her death. The recording was later included on an expanded edition of “Pearl.”
Glossary 📚🔎
Blues
(Meaning) The English word blue names a color, but it can also mean 'melancholy.' The name of this music of sorrow is thought to come from an old expression that called a gloomy mood the blue devils. (In rock) Music created by Black Americans in the South in the late 19th century, singing of hard lives and the pain of love. It usually repeats a short twelve-bar frame: the singer sings a line, sings the same line once more, then adds a line that answers it. It is much like telling a friend about something that upset you, saying the same thing twice before you get to the point. Rock and roll and rock grew almost entirely out of the blues. (Elsewhere) In everyday English, the blues can mean not the music but simply a downcast mood.
Psychedelic rock
(Meaning) Psychedelic combines the Greek psyche (soul, mind) and delos (to reveal), meaning 'mind-revealing.' It was coined by a psychiatrist in the 1950s. (In rock) Rock that spread through San Francisco and London in the mid-1960s, creating a dreamlike feeling through high volume, strange sound effects and long, sprawling improvisation. Concert-hall walls shimmered with light shows of swirling color. Think of the way time seems to vanish when you keep doodling endless swirls in the corner of a notebook; this is that feeling turned into sound. (Elsewhere) In design, 1960s-style images full of fluorescent colors and swirling patterns are called psychedelic.
Feedback
(Meaning) Feedback means to feed something back. (In rock) The long, piercing howl produced when guitar sound from an amplifier's speaker re-enters the guitar's strings and the device that picks up their sound (the pickup), then goes out through the speaker again, over and over. It started as an accident, but guitarists in the 1960s began triggering it on purpose and using it as part of their playing. When someone holds a microphone close to a speaker in a school auditorium and it lets out a sharp squeal, that is the very same phenomenon. (Elsewhere) At school or work, the comments a teacher or colleague gives back on your homework or work are called feedback.
Cover
(In rock) Newly recording or performing a song first released by another singer is called a cover or a remake. The same song can become something entirely different depending on who sings it and how. It's like your class taking a dance routine the class next door made up first and trying it anew with a different tempo and moves. Many of Janis's signature songs were covers, yet many people think of her version before the original. (Elsewhere) In everyday use, a cover is a book's jacket or a lid that covers something.
Horn section
(Meaning) A horn was originally an animal's horn. Because trumpets were once made from horns, wind instruments played by mouth came to be called horns as a group. Section means one part of a whole. (In rock) A group of wind players, such as trumpet, trombone and saxophone, who play together as a unit. They usually punch out short, powerful lines in unison to add drive to a song. It's like a cheering squad shouting a chant all at once to fire up the stadium. (Elsewhere) In an orchestra, horn on its own usually refers to a single instrument, the coiled brass French horn.
Overdubbing
(Meaning) Overdubbing means to dub, or record, over something. (In rock) The process of recording another layer of sound on top of what has already been recorded. A guitar may be recorded first and the vocal laid on separately later, or the same singer may stack harmonies several times. On “Cheap Thrills,” crowd cheers were laid over studio recordings to dress them up as a live concert. It's like painting a watercolor in art class, letting it dry, then drawing over it with colored pencils. (Elsewhere) In film, dubbing means replacing a foreign actor's lines with a voice speaking Korean.
A cappella
(Meaning) A cappella is Italian for 'in the manner of the chapel (cappella).' The name comes from the singing of chants with voices alone, without instruments, in the chapels of old churches. (In rock) A song sung with voices alone, with no instrumental accompaniment. With no instrument to lean on, the singer's timbre, breath and even the slightest wavering are laid bare. Picture a night at a retreat when everyone sits in a circle without a single guitar, clapping along as they sing.