JANIS JOPLIN

In Memoriam

Part 1

“I’m sure you’re both convinced my self-destructive streak has won out again…

But I do plan on coming back to [secretarial] school…

I’m awfully sorry to be such a disappointment to you…

Please believe that you can’t possibly want for me to be a winner more than I do.”

Janis, 1966 letter to her parents,

after joining Big Brother and the Holding Company

            Four years later, October 4, 1970, the Queen of the Blues was found on the floor of her Los Angeles hotel room, dead from a heroin overdose.

            Weeks before, her former lover, Jimi Hendrix, had perished in London. “I can’t say I was shocked,” Janis reacted. Then she added:  “It just decreases my chances. Two rock stars can’t die in the same year.”

            In the last twenty months, she had overdosed six times, once almost fatally. But, “Nothing will ever happen to me,” she often reassured her friends, “because I come from good pioneer stock.”

Janis’s addiction dated back to her first days with Big Brother. “She attributed her heroin use to the fear that would accompany her growing fame,” wrote her assistant and biographer, Myra Friedman. “Chronic suicide was what she was involved with her entire life.”

Janis looked at it differently. “The more you live, the less you die,” had always been her motto.

            By her own admission, on stage she experienced the purest and most intense expression of life. She had always gloried in living on what she called “on the outer limits of probability.”

            Watching her perform was like beholding both an agonizingly wonderful birth and a self-immolation. As far beyond the limits of life and probability the Queen of the Blues went, she never lost sight of who she was doing it for: her ever-expanding audience which, like an insatiable but passive suitor, demanded more and more. Yet, just as the fans couldn’t get enough of her bursting heart, she couldn’t get enough of their adoration.

“I only live to perform,” she told an interviewer. “That’s the only time I really feel.” She compared performing to “falling in love twenty times” and to “having a baby.”

Both she and her audience fell in love twenty times at Monterey Pop in the spring of ’67 – the gig that turned her, as it did Hendrix, from a local cult figure into an international sensation. No one had heard a human being sing like this before.

Riveting, almost harrowing in its intensity, her Ball and Chain was something beyond song. She used her voice like Hendrix did his guitar, but with greater emotional range—tenderness, tears, and desperate longing beneath the raw power. Hers was music from the heart, the soul, and every fiber of her being which left the audience of 70,000 breathless and awestruck.

Just before the glorious debut she wrote another letter to her mother, a Texas Sunday school teacher, and father, a Texaco engineer. “From all indications I’m going to become rich & famous. Incredible! … Wow, I’m so lucky—I just fumbled around being a mixed up kid & then fell into this.”