Pearl of rock
Life and legacy of Janis Lyn Joplin
Janis Joplin is one of the greatest artists the world of rock has ever seen. Her voice was the incarnation of blues.
Born in 1943 in Port Arthur, Texas, Janis Lyn Joplin was encouraged by her parents to pursue art and music, resulting in a deep diversity that is blamed by the small town’s inhabitants. When she was a teen, Port Arthur was swarming with conservative kids, including members of the Ku Klux Klan, who bullied her and calling her a “weird pig”, mocking her weight, acne and, especially, her civil rights’ ideas.
Janis Joplin became depressed, trapped in her mental cage. She sought refuge in music, deciding to follow in the footsteps of two artists who deeply influenced her: Leadbelly and Bessie Smith. Therefore, at 17, Janis Joplin left her hometown and began performing at various San Francisco’s clubs, such as Coffee & Confusion on Grant Avenue. However, her addiction to alcohol and drugs brought her back to Port Arthur, where she attended sociology classes at Lamar School, but that did not last long.
After quitting university, Janis Joplin returned to San Francisco, immersed in the beat generation, a youth movement rebelling against the traditional values of contemporary society and that, with a strong spirit of rebellion, managed to bring to light other movements, such as pacifism, feminism and the claim of social right by Afro-Americans.
At that time, Janis Joplin, thanks to her friend and music producer Chet Helms, met Big Brother & The Holding Company, the band that accompained her in her musical jounery until 1969. Their first performance together was on June 10, 1966, at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco.
When they all moved to Lagunitas, California, the young woman abandoned her Texas girl disguise for a more hippie style: brightly colored dresses, eye-catching rings and feathers in the hair. Nonetheless, she remained addicted to heroin and alcohol.
The blend of Janis’ abrasive voice and the band’s rough blues was explosive: their debut album, titled Big Brother & The Holding Company, led to immediate success. In 1967, Janis Joplin performed with the band at the Monterey Rock Festival, and they killed it! Since then, the group continued its total ascent. The same year they signed a contract with Bob Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman, and in 1968 their second album, Cheap Thrills, was released, earning them their first gold record. In December of that year, Janis Joplin left the band and embarked on her solo career.
The group of musicians that followed her at the beginning of her solo career was the Kozmic Blues Band, with whom she recorded her first album for Columbia Records: I Got Dem Ol’Kozmic Blues Again Mama, her second gold record. In 1969, Janis Joplin brought to the stage of Woodstock a song that had already inebriated the audience: To love somebody.
At the beginning of 1970, tired of her tumultuous life, Janis formed a new group, the Full-Tilt Boogie Band, with whom she produced an album as wonderful as it was heartbreaking: Pearl, from the nickname her friends called her. This album, released posthumously, earned her a third and final gold record. The album also features Cry baby, one of the most iconic songs of her career, along with Piece of my heart.
Later that year, Janis Joplin traveled to Brazil, determined to detox There she met David Niehaus an American guy with whom she fell in love. David tried, unsuccessfully, to help her in her detox journey; he eventually left when he found out that Janis was using heroin again. The girl returned to her hometown one last time before traveling to Los Angeles to record her album. The heroin was destroying her, slowly but surely.
Every time Janis Joplin went on stage, it was like a meteor hitting the ground: everything was extremely chaotic and wonderful at the same time. Her harsh voice reached the soul of the most skeptical, and her lyrics, never trivial, conjured the inner demons of anyone who was listening. In a mix of blues melancholy and psychedelic fire, Janis Joplin dominated the stage at every turn: a muse, a restless woman, tormented by past and present ghosts. She was a drug-addicted and alcoholic, but also a true rock-loving priestess. She became the epitome of wild sensuality. As a female leader of an all-men group, Janis Joplin was not afraid to infuse her lyrics and stage presence with an immense sexual charge: she was a bisexual woman, free from the patriarchal and misogynist standards of the time. Shameless and transgressive, irreverent and sensual, was an artist at 360º: while listening to her, the whole world disintegrated itself and then reappeared in a snap of fingers; stability was overturned, leading spectators on a long journey with their souls.
Janis Joplin’s music was poetry internalized by billions of people: it had the ability to transform sorrow into ethereal beauty.
Just like a demon that never sleeps, her end was inevitable, foretold by Janis herself in her last song: the artist would be buried alive in the blues.
So, at 6:00am on October 4, 1970, the lifeless body of Janis Lyn Joplin was found in a room at the Landmark Hotel in Los Angeles. Crushed by a fatal overdose at only 27, Janis entered the 27 Club, along with many other artists who over the years had written the history of music. Later, as she requested, her ashes were scattered along the coast of Marin County, California.
As if fate wasn’t mocking enough, the day after her death, a telegram arrived at the hotel where she had been staying. It said: «Love you Mama, more than you know» - it was from David Niehaus, probably the only man she has ever loved, the one she was still waiting for.
The album Pearl, considered almost as Janis Joplin’s testament, was released posthumously on 11 January 1971 and reached number one on the Billboard 200 chart on 2 April.
«I can see if that maybe a lot of artists have one way of art and another way of life. In me, they’re the same»
- Janis Lyn Joplin