HOW THE STARS WERE BORN 

Part 1

When playing San Francisco folk dives on open-mike nights in 1965, the future Queen of the Blues wrote her parents, “Please believe that you can’t possibly want for me to be a winner more than I do.” 

A year later, after winning her audition for Big Brother and the Holding Company, she wrote home again: “Dear Mother, 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.” 

She told her first Bobby McGee, Travis Rivers, who had arranged the original audition: “I know I’m going to be really big. Really, really big!” Her prophecy was fulfilled with her Ball and Chain apotheosis at Monterey Pop in 1967.

Hendrix’s own dream of stardom was fulfilled at the same venue. But his road to Monterey had been even rockier than Janis’s. “Aunty Dorothy,” the boy had once sobbed to his guardian, “when I get big, I’m going far, far away. And I’m never comin back. Never.” After playing for King Curtis and Little Richard on the southern “chitlin circuit,” the guitarist traveled to New York to hit the big time. But “I’d get a gig every twelfth of never,” he recalled. “Sleeping outside between them tall tenements was hell. Rats runnin’ all over your chest, cockroaches stealing your last candy bar.” Finally, he packed his Strat, his toothbrush, and one satin shirt and followed the Animal’s Chas Chandler to London, and on to Monterey. Two years later, the prodigal son did indeed return to Seattle and when the mayor gave him the keys to the city, he remarked: “The only keys I expected to see in that town were of the jailhouse.”

Before his own launch to stardom, Cobain had been a jailhouse regular for graffiti, vandalism, and public intoxication. But he still dreamt of being “a big star… and going out in a flame of glory like Jimi.” He was a penniless junkie and sleeping in his Dodge Dart when Nevermind broke the Top Ten and soon became one of the best selling albums in history.