Janis Joplin

Janis Lyn Joplin (Port Arthur, Texas, January 19, 1943-Los Angeles, California, October 3, 1970) was an American rock and blues singer who became a hippie and counterculture icon in the 1960s.

Considered by specialized critics as one of the best and most influential artists of all time and the first female star of rock and roll, her albums are among the best-selling in the music industry.

He passed away at the age of twenty-seven, just a couple of weeks after another great American musician (and friend), Jimi Hendrix, who also passed away at the age of 27.

Biography and career

Childhood and adolescence (1943-1961)

Joplin in his last year of high school in 1960.

He was born on January 19, 1943 in Port Arthur, a Texas industrial town. Her parents, Seth (1910-1987), who worked at a refinery, and Dorothy (1913-1998), who had excelled in singing in her high school, would have wanted Janis to be a teacher. She had two younger siblings, Laura (1949) and Michael (1953).

Her family used to attend Christ Church. The Joplins felt that Janis always needed more attention than the rest of her children. Her mother said: "She was unhappy and dissatisfied." The relationship was not the most appropriate".

In her teens, she befriended a group of outcasts through whom she gained access to records by African-American blues artists like Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and Lead Belly, whom Joplin later credited as influencing her decision to become in Singer. By starting to participate in a choir, she was introduced to other blues singers such as Odetta, Billie Holiday and Big Mama Thornton. At sixteen she began to manifest her love for music, frequenting bars in Louisiana, where she listened to African-American, blues and jazz music.

Her classmates included GW Bailey and Jimmy Johnson. Joplin graduated from high school in 1960 and attended Lamar State College of Technology in Beaumont, Texas, for the summer, and later the University of Texas at Austin, although he did not complete his studies. The college newspaper, The Daily Texan, ran a profile of her in the July 27, 1962 issue, titled "She Dare to Be Different." The article began: "She goes barefoot when she feels like herself, wears Levi's to class because they're more comfortable, and takes her Autoharp with her wherever she goes so, in case she had the urge to snap at sing, it will be very useful to you. Her name is Janis Joplin ».

When she was studying Fine Arts at the University of Texas at Austin, she began singing regularly in bars. She was a frequent performer with the Waller Creek Boys band. She there she began to have a reputation for being a heavy drinker. In 1963 she moved to the city of San Francisco. She left Texas for San Francisco "just to be away from Texas, because my head was in a very different place," she said in January 1963 living in North Beach and later Haight-Ashbury.

While there she met many musicians she would later meet again, such as her lover Ron "Pigpen" McKernan (later a member of The Grateful Dead). In 1964 he recorded a home album with Jorma Kaukonen, future Jefferson Airplane guitarist, and Margareta Kaukonen on the typewriter, used as a percussion instrument, thereby recording a series of blues standards.

It was during this period that he began to use drugs and slowly sank into a state of abandonment, weighing 35 kilos. In 1965 she announced to her family that she would resume her university studies, and that she would marry a man she had met in San Francisco, named Peter LeBlanc; However, the couple did not work out and Peter LeBlanc abandoned her; this would further mark her affective insecurity and her feeling of loneliness.

Big Brother and the Holding Company (1965-1968)

Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company, c.1966, 67

Tired of waiting for LeBlanc and being a good girl, she moved to San Francisco with Chet Helms, a producer she met in Texas. She joined the band Big Brother and the Holding Company on July 4, 1966, making it a perfect match.

Chet Helms offered him to join the band of which he was his manager, and with which he would eventually record his first album, Big Brother and the Holding Company, which had an important impact.

Joplin loved the creative freedom of the San Francisco music scene. He used to perform alongside other psychedelic groups like The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Quicksilver Messenger Service at the famous Avalon Ballroom, Fillmore East, and Fillmore West ballrooms, or at outdoor festivals in Golden Gate Park and Haight-Ashbury.

He performed with his group at the 1967 Monterey Festival along with some great artists of the day like Jimi Hendrix, The Mamas and The Papas, Jefferson Airplane, Otis Redding, and The Who, among others. Since the Big Brothers' first performance had not been filmed, they were asked to play the next day. During that performance, they performed Combination Of The Two; Janis wowed the audience with a cover of Big Mama Thornton's iconic blues hit, "Ball And Chain."

Thereafter they were hired by Bob Dylan's producer, Albert Grossman. Joplin dwarfed the Big Brothers. In the spring of 1968, they moved to New York to record their first album. That combination of repetitive music, psychedelic style of the 60s, with the imposing voice of Joplin, was prodigious and Cheap Thrills came out in August of 1968. Launching Joplin to success, within three days it became a hit. gold record and in the first month more than a million copies were sold. In 2003, Cheap Thrills was ranked 338th on the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

The critics towards Joplin were very good and the press began to focus more on her than on the group. Many of these implied that she was too good for the group. Thus, her fame and prominence generated tension in the group. She also wanted to do a more blues and soul style, like the singers she revered -Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday or Aretha Franklin-. All this caused her, finally, she ended up responding to the pressures of her manager , Albert Grossman, and leaving Big Brother and the Holding Company.

Kozmic Blues Band (1968-1969)

Joplin in 1969.

Together they began to find the best musicians in the country to create the new group. At the beginning of 1969 it was already created, although the musicians would vary throughout the year. She took guitarist Sam Andrew of Big Brother and the Holding Company with her.

With his new band, "Kozmic Blues Band," he released his second album, I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama!. The sound was different from what her listeners were used to: it was a mixture of rock, soul and blues, and it received bad reviews, the magazine Rolling Stone called it the "Judy Garland of rock" 3. 4;.

In April, Janis and the Kozmic Blues Band toured Europe, stopping by Frankfurt, Stockholm, Paris, London, and a few more places, where the audiences welcomed her very warmly and she returned to the US very happy., saying that the best concert he had ever given was in London, where the audience went wild.

In that year, due to the pressure, he became addicted to heroin and began to lavish himself on interviews, in which he ended up talking about his life and his feelings. She said that she "made love to 25,000 people on stage and then she went home alone...". She increasingly depended on alcohol and heroin. However, she had become a symbol of strength and rebellion for many women of her time.

On August 16, 1969, he performed to enormous success at the Woodstock festival, where he performed two reprises of "Ball and Chain" and "Piece of My Heart."

The musicians in the band were just professionals, and Joplin wanted her band to be like a family, like in Big Brother. The only one he ended up connecting with was saxophonist Cornelius & # 34; Snooky & # 34; Flowers. By the end of 1969 Janis was already broken and too addicted to heroin and alcohol, so she decided to take a break and leave the band. At the end of that year the band broke up. His last concert was at Madison Square Garden in New York on the night of December 19 and 20, 1969.

In February 1970, she went on a trip with a friend to Rio de Janeiro for the carnival, to detoxify, at least, from heroin. There she met David Niehouse and they fell in love, they spent a few months in the Brazilian jungle traveling like two old beatniks on the highway and when they returned to San Francisco, David settled in Janis's house.

Full Tilt Boogie Band

Albert Grossman proposed a new band to Janis, the Full Tilt Boogie Band, and Janis, already off heroin but not alcohol, accepted. David Niehouse wanted to continue traveling the world and offered to leave together, but she preferred to stay with her audience and her music. Thus, Joplin got along very well with all the members of the band, they loved her and she loved them.

In the summer of that year, Janis and her band participated in the Festival Express, along with other important artists of the time such as The Grateful Dead, Buddy Guy and The Band.

At a Hell's Angels party in San Francisco that same summer, she met Seth Morgan and fell in love with him. In September 1970, she moved to Los Angeles to record Pearl. October 3, 1970 had been a good day at the studio, and to celebrate it she went out drinking with her classmates and got drunk. According to the coroner's study, she died at 1:40 a.m. on October 4 from a heroin overdose. Joplin had been through similar experiences before and had come out alive, but this time there was no one to help her. Her body was discovered some 18 hours later. Everyone was surprised, because they thought that Janis no longer used, and she was in the best period of her life.

In 1971, six weeks after his death, the album Pearl came out; it was a success and stayed at number one in sales for 14 weeks. As a tribute, the song "Mercedes Benz" was left a capella, since it was the last song that Janis recorded; the song "Buried Alive in the Blues" was also included with music only, without Janis' vocals.

The single "Me and Bobby McGee," composed by Kris Kristofferson (with whom the singer had an affair) and Fred Foster, represented her biggest hit, being the only Janis Joplin song to reach No. the Billboard Hot 100, for one week in March 1971.

In 2003, Pearl was ranked 122nd on the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

Personal life

It is known that since his adolescence, he had serious personality and self-esteem problems, related to his physical appearance.

There is a general tendency to define her as bisexual, to which was added her riotous lifestyle. Although she reportedly had more female than male partners, Joplin never described herself as lesbian or bisexual, but simply "sexual." Her sexual life included numerous men and women, in what were described as "animal orgies". These aspects of her caused her own parents to reject her and refuse to meet her, on many occasions.

Perhaps his most stable and well-known partner was Peggy Caserta, a relationship that caused his breakup with businessman David Niehaus. Caserta claimed in her 1973 book, Going Down With Janis, that she and Joplin had mutually decided to separate in April 1970, to stay away from each other's drug use, which they failed to do. Caserta was a former Delta Airlines flight attendant and owner of a clothing boutique in Haight Ashbury. Both would continue their friendship, united by their strong addiction to heroin, until the death of the singer.

In the last months of her life, Janis Joplin established a fleeting relationship with Berkeley student Seth Morgan, a 21-year-old heroin dealer and future novel writer. The two met in August 1970 at a party at the Hell's Angels bar in San Francisco. By then, Joplin was residing at the Landmark Motor Hotel in Hollywood Heights, Los Angeles (where she was found dead two months later), a place where she settled prior to the recording sessions for Pearl at Sunset Sound Recorders.

Morgan and Joplin even announced their plans to get married in early September 1970 and invited all the musicians participating in the studio to the ceremony.

After a troubled life, on October 17, 1990, Morgan died in a traffic accident while riding his motorcycle with his girlfriend, both under the influence of alcohol and cocaine.

In 1974, Leonard Cohen released the album New Skin for the Old Ceremony including the song "Chelsea Hotel #2" where he describes his affair with Janis Joplin at the Chelsea Hotel in New York.

Death

The circumstances of the singer's death were confusing, and even today they arouse various hypotheses; On Saturday, October 3, 1970, Joplin visited Sunset Sound Recorders recording studio in Los Angeles, to hear the instrumental part of 'Buried Alive in the Blues,' before recording her scheduled vocal track for the day. following. Sometime later that day, he was told by phone that his fiancé, Seth Morgan, was at his house playing pool with other women he had met that Saturday. In the study he expressed his anger at the news, and that he had not kept his promise to visit her the night before. Despite this, he expressed joy at the progress of the recording. At night, he along with band member Ken Pearson, left the studio for Barney's Beanery bar. After midnight he took them to his house and then retired to his room at the Landmark Motor Hotel.

The next day, Sunday afternoon the 4th, Joplin did not show up at the studio as arranged, which caused producer Paul Rothchil to worry. The administrator and manager of the band Full Tilt Boogie, John Cooke, decided to visit her and found her Porsche convertible car in the parking lot. Upon entering her room, he found her dead, lying on the floor next to her bed. The official cause of her death was a heroin overdose, probably under the influence of alcohol. Cooke believes Joplin accidentally received higher-than-normal strength heroin from other addicts overdosing that week.

The episode reportedly occurred around 1:45 a.m. on October 4. It is said that this happened to her on other occasions, but this time there was no one to help her. Some circumstances surrounding her death were never explained, such as the extreme purity of the drug that killed her and the fact that the used syringes were never found; it was even speculated that a person could be involved. Her friend Peggy Caserta admitted that she, like Seth Morgan, had promised to visit Joplin on Friday night, October 2, but she had gone out partying with other drug users who were staying at a Los Angeles hotel. Angels. According to her book Going Down With Janis, Caserta heard from the dealer who sold the heroin to her and Joplin on Saturday that the artist expressed her sadness for two friends who had killed her. abandoned the night before.

The song "Buried Alive in the Blues" it was left unfinished with the singer's tragic death, although it was finally included as an instrumental on Pearl, as a posthumous tribute. Joplin was cremated at Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Funeral Home in Los Angeles. Her ashes were scattered from a plane into the Pacific Ocean along Stinson Beach. The only funeral service was private, as only Joplin's parents and her maternal aunt attended.

In her will, Joplin left $2,500 to throw a party in her honor in the event of her disappearance. Around 200 people received invitations to the party that read: "Drinks are for Pearl", a reference to the singer's nickname. The event, which took place on October 26, 1970, was at Lion's Share, located in San Anselmo, California. It was attended by her sister Laura and close friends of Joplin's including tattoo artist Lyle Tuttle, Joplin's fiancé Seth Morgan Bob Gordon and her tour manager John Cooke. Brownies laced with hashish were handed out to attendees.

Legacy

Janis Joplin was known for her powerful voice and the great intensity of her performance. After releasing three albums, she died of a heroin overdose at the age of twenty-seven. A fourth album, Pearl, was released in January 1971, three months after her death. Even though it was still in the making phase, this album was a sales success, reaching number one on the Billboard charts.

In 1967, Joplin rose to fame during a performance at the Monterey Pop Festival, where she was the lead singer of the then little-known San Francisco psychedelic rock band Big Brother and The Holding Company. After releasing two albums with the band, she left Big Brother to continue as a solo artist with her own backing groups, first the Kozmic Blues Band and then the Full Tilt Boogie Band. She appeared at the Woodstock Festival and on the Festival Express train tour. Five singles from Joplin went to the Billboard Hot 100, including a cover of the song "Me and Bobby McGee", which reached No. 1 in March 1971. His most popular songs are covers of "Piece of My Heart" (with "Big Brother and The Holding Company"), "Cry Baby", "Down on Me", "Ball 'n' Chain" and "Summertime"; and her original song & # 34; Mercedes Benz & # 34;, the last recording of her.

Joplin was a female symbol of the 1960s counterculture and the first woman to be considered a major rock and roll star. In 1995 he entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and in 2004 Rolling Stone magazine placed him in the 46th place of the 100 greatest artists of all time; while in 2008 he was placed ranked 28th of the greatest singers of all time. In 2013, she received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In 1999, she was chosen as the third best rock female artist in the 100 Greatest Women in Rock list made by VH1. Audiences and critics highlighted her different way of being on stage, calling her "electric"; or as a "wild new sense of freedom".

Janis Joplin remains one of the best-selling musicians in the United States, holding certifications from the Recording Industry Association of America for 15.5 million albums sold in the United States alone.

Discography

Studio Albums

Big Brother and the Holding Company

• Big Brother " the Holding Company (1967)
• Cheap Thrills (1968)

Kozmic Blues Band

• I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama! (1969)

Full Tilt Boogie

• Pearl (1971)

Live Albums

• In Concert (1972)
• Live in Amsterdam (1974)
• Live in Honolulu (1975)
• Live at Winterland '68 (1998)
• Live at Woodstock: August 19, 1969 (1999)
• Live with Big Brother and the Holding Company (2005)
• The Woodstock Experience (2009)
• Live at the Carousel Ballroom 1968 (2012)

Compilation Albums

• Janis Joplin's Greatest Hits (1973)
• Janis (1975)
• Wicked Woman (1976)
• Anthology (1980)
• Farewell Song (1982)
• Janis (1993)
• This is Janis Joplin (1995)
• 18 Essential Songs (1995)
• The Collection (1995)
• Box of Pearls (1999)
• Rare Pearls (1999)
• Super Hits (2000)
• Love, Janis (2001)
• Essential Janis Joplin (2003)
• Very Best of Janis Joplin (2003)
• The Lost Tapes (2008)
• The Woodstock Experience (2009)
• Playlist: The Very Best of Janis Joplin (2010)
• Move Over! (2011)
• Blow All My Blues Away (2012)
• The Pearl Sessions (2012)

In popular culture

• Janis, The Way She Was (1974), a Canadian documentary directed by Howard Alk shows the most important musical moments of the artist's life, in addition to segments of interview, so it is considered a very interesting historical/sociological document.
• The movie The rose (1979), starring Bette Midler, is inspired by the real life of Janis Joplin.
• In 1994, a documentary entitled Janis Joplin Slept Here who tried to investigate myths and legends around his figure.
• In 2003, the film was released Janis and Johnin which the protagonist had to make his cousin believe that his musical idols of the sixty (Janis Joplin and John Lennon) had come to visit him.
• In 2007, it was launched Buried Alive In The Black, a tribute to Janis Joplin of female metal vocalists, including Angela Sin, Liv Kristine and Sarah Jezebel Deva of Cradle of Filth, among others.
• Since the late 1990s, the idea of a biographical film about Janis Joplin, with singer Melissa Etheridge. In 2006, it was agreed to produce a film about Janis' life, called Gospel According to Janisstarring Zooey Deschanel.
• In Beatle Across the Universe (2007), Sadie's character is a remarkable tribute to Janis Joplin.
• In 2015, the documentary was released Janis: Little Girl Blue, led by Amy Berg and narrated by Cat Power.

• It is part of the so-called Club of the 27.