JANIS JOPLIN

In Memoriam

But soon Janis began to descend into the darkness and isolation of fame. “Onstage I make love to 25,000 people,” she said. “Then I go home. Alone.”

Near the end she had millions of fans, and had had thousands of lovers. But, “Nobody really loves me, NOBODY,” was her constant lament. “The only people who love me are the junkies I used to know…and the people on my payroll.”

Her lovers spoke of her nerves being nearer to the skin, how no one took hurt so heavy, and how when Janis was happy, “she STILL wasn’t happy.”

But, in her last days, true happiness seemed to at last be within her grasp. She was creating the greatest album of her career, Pearl; she had a new band which she adored, Full Tilt Boogie; and she was engaged to the man of her dreams, Seth Morgan.

At first she was giddy with happiness. But soon, overcome with doubt and foreboding, she wept to her Bobby McGee, Kris Kristoffersen. “What’s it all worth?”

Would her new album become the hit she hoped would revive her flagging career? Would her band leave her? Did her fiancée, a star grifter, a womanizer, a violent coke dealer, only want her money?

Janis spent her last night in an L.A. bar with her band. Returning alone to her hotel room, she found it empty. Seth was not there as he had promised. He was bedding a waitress in San Francisco.

Her road manager found her body the next afternoon. On that day, she was scheduled to record the vocal for the last song on her new album: Buried Alive in the Blues.

Janis once said, "People like their blues singers miserable. They like their blues singers to die afterwards." Perhaps she was a martyr to her profession. But, in a more profound way, having an unquenchable lust for life in all its joys and sorrows, she had done more living in her brief but tempestuous twenty-seven years than many would ever know regardless of longevity.

            Janis never betrayed the vow she had made to herself  before embarking on her legendary career. In spite of “the whole success thing,” as she called it, she remained true to herself, never straying from “the person I was on the inside,” never failing  “to be righteous to myself… to be real.” Or, as she told others, even more succinctly,  "Don't compromise yourself. It's all you've got."

Despite all the pain, despite all the pressures, despite all the temptation, Janis Joplin, the Queen of the Blues, never did compromise herself. Her determination, her integrity, her openness allowed her to “feel as much as I can, it’s what ‘soul’ is all about.” 

Few artists, before or since, have dug deeper into their feeling and into their soul, and turned it into sublime music. Hers was a song of such power and of such breadth that we cannot define, much less ever duplicate it. We can only honor and cherish it as the immortal hymn of a great spirit who burst all the bounds of life.