Unrestrained, devoted, powerful and tender at the same time: Nobody sang like Janis Joplin, and certainly no woman. “Another Piece of My Heart”, “Ball and Chain”, “Try (Just A Little Bit Harder)”, “Me and Bobby McGee” – songs like these made her immortal. On January 19, the blues and rock sensation would have been 80 years old. She died of a heroin overdose in 1970 at the age of 27.
It was a different time: resistance to authority, the desire for something new, plus the proverbial “sex, drugs and rock’n’roll” shaped the lives of many young people in the 1960s. Back then, Janis Joplin was a young woman with wild outfits and an equally wild lifestyle. She symbolized the world of counterculture in the USA, the hippie era.
Her life began in the Texan oil industry town of Port Arthur, where she was born in 1943 – the same year as Mick Jagger (79). She had two siblings, her father was an engineer at Texaco, her mother a housewife.
At the height of her career, Joplin was the brightest star in the US music world. Like many musicians, she was drawn to San Francisco, California. She wanted “freedom to create,” she said in an interview featured in the 2015 Amy Berg documentary Janis: Little Girl Blue.
Freedom was obviously a big word for Joplin. In search of freedom she had left the confines of Port Arthur in 1963, where she did not fit in at all with her offbeat style and her penchant for the black blues of Bessie Smith, Odetta and Lead Belly.
Janis was ahead of her time, says filmmaker Berg. At that time, advocacy for civil rights in Port Arthur was completely out of the ordinary. Nobody invited her to the high school graduation. “I had to get out of Texas baby,” Joplin sang in one of her songs. “It got me down.” She’s been all over the world and “Port Arthur is the worst place I’ve ever found.”
Decades following her death on October 4, 1970, biographies and films continue to search for the “real” Janis Joplin. What was performance, what was real? Her music was full of longing, which led to theses that she wanted to fill her insides with alcohol and drugs. In “Work Me, Lord” she appeals to God not to forsake her. She mightn’t find anyone to love.
She never quite left her childhood and youth in Port Arthur. After her first major success as the lead singer of the group “Big Brother And The Holding Company” at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival – which also featured Jimi Hendrix, “The Who” and Otis Redding on stage – Joplin wrote to her parents: “One day might I’m going to be a star… I’m ready.” And she wanted to know if the local newspaper “Port Arthur News” had written anything regarding her success.
Janis Joplin toured all over the USA, her songs were at the top of the charts. In April 1969 she also sang in Germany. A video shows Joplin in the Centennial Hall in Frankfurt am Main. She sings “Another Piece of My Heart” and lures timid listeners onto the stage, “feel good right now”.
When she sings, Joplin told a New York Times reporter in 1969, it’s like falling in love for the first time. “It’s more than sex. It’s the highest emotional and physical experience.” Before her death, Joplin was working on a solo record in Los Angeles. “Pearl” came out with the sardonic song “Mercedes Benz,” in which she begs God to buy her a Mercedes.
Joplin signed her will a few days before her death, publicist and friend Myra Friedman wrote in Janis Joplin: Buried Alive (1983). The fortune should go to her parents and siblings. $2,500 was earmarked for a party following her death.
In Friedman’s view, more than any other artist, Joplin symbolized the “tone and vibe” of her era. She was interested in the now and not in the future. In the 1969 New York Times piece, Joplin reported seeing a doctor. The doctor had “melodramatically” warned of health risks because of their lifestyle. She doesn’t go to that anymore: “I’d rather have ten fantastic years than turn 70 and just sit in a damn chair and watch TV.”
A few decades later, at the latest, it was known that the rebellious spirit of the 1960s had finally vanished. The car company Mercedes-Benz used Joplin’s song of the same name in a commercial. And in 2022, “Miss Dior” advertised a perfume with Joplin’s love song “Cry Baby”. The City of Port Arthur has placed a plaque in front of Janis’ childhood home. She rebelled once morest the “conservatism of her hometown,” it says, and was an “international sensation” toward the end of her career.
