Life ain’t for everybody, but everyone surely has their time. For some it can stretch forward forever, like they’re linked to the eternal stars above and it will never end. And others flare across the sky like comets, sharing a cosmic rush with those lucky enough to be in their presence. There is no way to change that fate, it seems, but rather accept whatever it may be. Musicians can be like that. They may explode into our world, sometimes pointing the way for a decades-long path. Others fill our souls with so much feeling it seems like they were always there. And then they are gone, their music becoming a living memory of inspiration.
Janis Joplin was a down-to-earth galaxy of emotions. She wasn’t just a singer. Joplin was a vibrational force who single-handedly twisted blues into something much bigger than that. What the woman did was like modern art, taking sounds that started as slave chants and then using them to unlock a brand new universe of boldness. Along the way she showed both men and women how to open up a private place within themselves to allow the rest of the world to come inside. Giving that gift to others is something so many aspire to, and so few ever achieve. For Joplin, she had to, because she suffered from that deadliest of diseases: loneliness. Singing was the only medicine that worked. While heroin might have finally stopped her from breathing, it was the loneliness that really killed her.
Growing up in Port Arthur, Texas in the 1950s was a prescription of disaster for girls with a deep artistic streak. Conformity was the prevailing religion there, no matter what church was the actual worship of choice. To color outside the lines was considered a near-mental illness, and dealt with accordingly. Ostracism and ridicule were the punishments du jour, and each was applied aggressively to Joplin. She liked reading books, listening to blues and running with a wild crowd during her youth. She spent years dodging the dark looks and verbal darts aimed her way. Many saw her as an Outcast with a capital O, and steered clear. Luckily she found enough male friends as running buddies in Port Arthur, and once she heard Bessie Smith’s records Janis Joplin had an everlasting friend. The teenager was home free, taking off on the road to self-discovery and inner expression. Little did anyone know then the world would be changed by the way she so openly shared her spirit, and would come to call her simply Janis. Once the singer opened her mouth to sing, it would be impossible to think of Joplin ever again as a stranger.
When Joplin was called to San Francisco from Austin in 1966 by Avalon Ballroom impresario Chet Helms, it was to hopefully join Big Brother & the Holding Company. She had lived in San Francisco a few years earlier, but hit the wall with some self-destructive habits that got her sent back to Port Arthur. Her Bay Area friends were worried, and could feel her opportunities were narrowing down to nothing. Joplin tried being normal back in her hometown for awhile, but like so many bohemian-inclined Texans found her way to Austin looking for some bigger room to breathe. She’d started her musical life there in the early ’60s, singing with the aptly named Waller Creek Boys and becoming part of a folk music contingent who hung out at Kenneth Threadgill’s combination gas station-beer joint. But like many early endeavors, it didn’t last long enough for stage-two to kick in. Joplin’s second-time around in Austin lead her to auditioning for brand new psychedelic pioneers the 13th Floor Elevators until Helms made the call. Considering that the University of Texas fraternity crowd had just voted Janis Joplin “Ugliest Man on Campus,” leaving town likely looked a wise move. Friend Travis Rivers loaded his car with Joplin and a suitcase, swung by singer-songwriter Powell St. John’s place to pick up his newly-written gem “Bye Bye Baby,” and off they went into the sunset. The road was wide open and the traveling pair filled with hope and wonder. It was a time when overplanning was an undesirable option. America felt like a new adventure was rushing in, even if it was only visible in neighborhoods in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and a few other enlightened areas. It was a time of uncertainty to be sure, except for one thing: change was coming and colorful choices were there for the taking. It was not a time to be left behind.
When Janis Joplin hit the Haight-Ashbury district in 1966 minds were being blown on a daily basis. On every corner, in most apartments and all through Golden Gate Park was a parade of sweetness and swirls. Without a doubt a youth revolution was being born, and entry was open to anyone with an open heart and a curious mind. The rock & roll bands based in the Haight had kicked open the doors of perception and ushered in an unlimited assault on what had come before. “Furthur” was the password and going back was not an option, because there was no back to go to. It probably took only one ten-block stroll down Haight Street across Stanyan into the park for Joplin to find her inner-groove thing start to twang full-tilt, and one song sung on the rooming house basement stage at 1090 Page with Big Brother & the Holding Company to snap that she’d found home. Life is like that: there are millions of unexplainable links that come and go, until finally The One hits full-force with an irrefutable realization that all the others were just a warm-up leading to The Now. Her freak flag was finally fully unfurled.
The next four years for Janis Joplin were the kind of breathtaking ride very few humans get to take. The early times with Big Brother forged a sister-brotherhood bond often found in a new band which becomes so close and savvy that mind-reading becomes the new norm. The group had been a loud, somewhat aimless aggregation pre-Joplin. With her exploding on song after song as their singer, the quintet emerged as an out-of-body experience on their best nights. On their not-so-best, there was still no-one like them. When Big Brother got booked to perform at the Monterey International Pop Festival in June 1967, their then-manager would not allow them to be filmed for the proposed D.A. Pennebaker film. But once everyone there experienced the onstage explosion of everythingness emanating out of Joplin, minds were quickly changed and the band was allowed another set the next day to ensure their exposure to the world once the Monterey concert movie was released. Columbia Records eagle-eye Clive Davis immediately zeroed in on signing Big Brother to his label, and erstwhile Bob Dylan manager Albert Grossman outmaneuvered the hometown team and added Big Brother & the Holding Company to his elite stable of artists. It was like a rock & roll trifecta had occurred in that coastal California town, which would set up the coming of Janis Joplin as a musical force of nature, one that could not be stopped. Little Girl Blue became the Queen of Rock & Roll, and was never toppled until she fell on her own sword.
Loneliness, like a dark night, does not ever really disappear. And as every single box on the list of immortality would get checked off by Janis Joplin, the feeling of being apart from others kept returning. Pills, powders and Southern Comfort could sometimes wrap the pain in a paper bag, but eventually the bag would be torn open and the aloneness came back. Often when she was surrounded by thousands of adoring fans. The childhood wounds of being a stranger in a strange land in Port Arthur cut so deep that true healing was never an option. Managing the slices and dices took a busload of courage, but a steady solution remained beyond Joplin’s grasp. The human mind is a cunning beast, and seems to feed on confusion eerily masked as contentment. Until it isn’t.
When Janis Joplin flew into Austin from Hawaii in July 1970, the world was hers. She was going to start recording a new album in Los Angeles, but first wanted to attend her earliest mentor Kenneth Threadgill’s 60th birthday party. Joplin was only 27 years old, but had the outward soul of eternity on her side, and carried it well in a shimmering silk outfit and feather-topped kitten heels. The celebration was being held at a party barn 10 miles from Austin, with a small stage set up outdoors. When she first saw Threadgill backstage, Joplin took off the ring of flowers she’d worn from Hawaii and put them around the man’s neck, saying, “Here you go Mr. Threadgill. You need a good lei.” She’d been using bawdy humor her whole life, like the Ipana toothpaste shield of protection, never giving in to those early years of being picked on, laughed at and not invited to her schoolmates’ parties. Joplin may have had the last laugh at her childhood bullies, but the hurt was still there. When it was time for her to sing a few songs for Threadgill, who had supplied her first stage to sing on, she sat down on a bale of hay holding an acoustic Gibson guitar, backed by old Austin friends Chuck and Julie Joyce. “I’m going to play some songs by someone you’ve never heard of, but you will someday. His name is Kris Kristofferson.” And then Janis Joplin went right into “Sunday Morning Coming Down.” Naturally, she had chosen the ultimate theme song of loneliness, the kind that makes the heart freeze with an aching emptiness. When she sang the line, “There’s something in a Sunday that makes a body feel alone,” it was like every one in the audience had a group cry together, their king-sized tears hitting the bone-dry Texas dirt they were sitting on. Joplin saw it happen right in front of her, and at the end of the song ripped off one of her snappy cackles knowing she’d nailed her listeners to an inner cross. Without wasting a moment, she began singing, “Busted flat in Baton Rouge waitin’ for a train and feelin’ near as faded as my jeans.” Joplin hadn’t recorded “Me and Bobby McGee” yet, but there was something that felt so strikingly familiar about the words it wrapped around the audience like an old friend. By the end, the few hundred people sitting in front of her had melted together into one. Their fellow Texan stood up and took a small bow, raised her right hand above her head to wave and then was gone. Almost like the Lone Ranger. We were all speechless, quickly realizing words didn’t exist to describe what we’d just witnessed.
When we heard three months later that Janis Joplin was dead in Los Angeles, like it always does when death walks in the door, the body felt alone. Her loneliness became our loneliness, one that would be impossible to shake. For someone who seemed to be so invigorated by life and music, she obviously spent many of her days on earth wondering what it meant and where it would lead. And while there is no final answer, the clues seem to suggest it will always be about the enjoyment of the journey and not the inevitable final destination, which is already known. Playwright August Wilson once wrote, “This be an empty world without the blues,” and in so many ways Wilson could have been writing about Janis Joplin herself. The young woman from Port Arthur had learned that lesson early, and used the blues as her calling card to living, turning hurt into happiness and despair into deliverance. For that, Little Girl Blue’s spirit will forever shine on.
Bill Bentley