Book excerpt: "Janis: Her Life and Music"
This article, Book excerpt: "Janis: Her Life and Music", originally appeared on CBSNews.com
Music journalist Holly George-Warren's biography of rock and blues singer Janis Joplin (1943-1970), "Janis: Her Life and Music" (published by Simon & Schuster, a division of CBS), explores her trailblazing career and distinctive art, which was ground-breaking in its rebelliousness and assertions of female power and individuality.
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Introduction
Don't compromise yourself. It's all you've got. —Janis Joplin
It's a steamy September night in Nashville, and Ruby Boots is tearing it up onstage at the Basement East, thrashing her electric guitar and belting Janis Joplin's "Piece of My Heart." The 2018 edition of the six-day Americanafest, an annual music conference and festival, is honoring albums from 1968, and Big Brother and the Holding Company's breakthrough, "Cheap Thrills," has made the cut. Boots, born Bex Chilcott in Perth, Australia, fell in love with Janis's music as a kid growing up on the other side of the world, the irresistible, aching soul in Janis's voice undiminished by time, distance, and even mortality. As when Janis herself unleashed this tune fifty years ago, the crowd—wired into its raw but fearless humanity—pushes toward the stage.
Seth and Dorothy Joplin doted on their eldest child in many ways but were ultimately put off by her increasing acts of defiance—the same impulses that would eventually bring her fame. Always an attention hungry rebel, Janis upped her game in adolescence, spurred on by her budding sexuality, her discovery of rock & roll, and alcohol and speed. The wounds inflicted from the clash of wills during those turbulent years in the Joplin home never healed. Much of her life would be colored by the tension of wanting to belong and getting the attention she missed, while knowing that the best way to honor her family's unspoken creed of singularity was to set herself apart. Discovering her outsize voice helped her find a place to fit in and create a new family—of bohemians and musicians, first, in Port Arthur and Beaumont, Texas, and then Austin, and finally San Francisco. She embraced life with a joyous ferocity, though she could never escape a fundamental darkness created by loneliness and a bleak fatalism bequeathed by her father. Choosing alcohol and drugs as painkillers just made everything worse.
A passionate, erudite musician, Janis was born with talent but also worked hard to develop it, though she would often omit this striving toward excellence from her origin story. When you hear outtakes of her in the studio recording what would be her final album, "Pearl," she's taking the reins, running the show. During a period when women did not produce their own music, she collaborated fully with her notoriously iron-fisted producer, Paul Rothchild. These sessions were a time of artistic blossoming for Janis. Her ideas—along with her extraordinary voice and her simpatico Full Tilt Boogie Band—resulted in a masterpiece. After Janis's accidental heroin overdose in 1970 at the age of twenty-seven, the posthumously released "Pearl" would become her most successful and enduring album, with its single "Me and Bobby McGee" the endpiece to a career that started with "Piece of My Heart."
Janis Joplin's distinctive voice sounds as powerful today as it did when introduced on the airwaves in 1967. More so than any of her peers, it cuts through the digital din, the noise of our age, and lands exactly where Janis wanted: deep inside the heart. Since her time, her work and life have inspired so many women to create their own sounds and walk their own uncompromising paths: from Lucinda Williams to Pink, Amy Winehouse to Carolyn Wonderland, Lady Gaga to Brittany Howard, Alicia Keys to Florence Welch, Grace Potter to Elle King, Melissa Etheridge to Kesha. Williams has written a song about her ("Port Arthur"); Pink hoped to play her in a film; Wonderland does a killer version of a 1962 Janis original ("What Good Can Drinkin' Do"); Etheridge helped induct her into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1995. That night, Etheridge said, "When a soul can look on the world, and see and feel the pain and loneliness, and can reach deep down inside, and find a voice to sing of it, a soul can heal."
Perhaps that remains Janis's greatest gift.
Excerpt from "Janis: Her Life and Music" by Holly George-Warren, published by Simon & Schuster. © 2019 Holly George-Warren. Reprinted by permission.
WEB EXCLUSIVE: Music journalist Holly George-Warren offers "Sunday Morning" a roster of Joplin hits – well-known and rare – that capture the brilliance and power of the rock and blues singer.
For more info:
"Janis: Her Life and Music" by Holly George-Warren (Simon & Schuster), in Hardcover, eBook and Audio formats, available via Amazonhollygeorgewarren.comjanisjoplin.com
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