A New Look, with Love, at Janis Joplin
“The nature of Janis’ death, from a heroin
overdose, seems to have overshadowed her image in life,” Laura
Joplin writes in the final chapter of her book, Love, Janis
(New York: Villard Books, 1992). “The press seldom writes about
her fun-loving character, her concentration on art, or her social
attitudes, which were so familiar to those of us who knew her. In
many people’s minds, the Janis Joplin story is mostly about the
steps she took that led to her overdose on drugs.”
Janis Joplin lived a mythical rock-and-roll life.
She was the quintessential blues singer—a “tough, ballsy mama,”
Laura writes—who talked hard and lived hard. She even died hard,
and in her death she left behind controversy and speculation, much
as she did in life. But the myth she left behind is not an entirely
accurate one, Laura insists. She wrote a biography of Janis in part
to correct the misperceptions that surrounded the first woman
rock-and-roll legend.
“We [Janis’ family] realized that by not doing a
project we had allowed Janis to be defined almost by default,”
Laura explained in her cozy room at the Stouffer Tower City Hotel
where she was staying while in Cleveland, “and we felt that we had
an obligation to her as well as to her public to make a more
complete picture known.”
Laura was in the middle of a two-week tour in
promotion of the book, her first. Despite her busy schedule she
still seemed fresh. She bore a striking resemblance to her famous
sister. The initial general questions were met politely, but she
became highly animated when talking about Janis. She was describing
a series of previously unpublished letters written by Janis to her
family over the years while she was away driving toward fame.
“I was just overwhelmed by being able to meet
her again,” Laura said of finding the letters, “to have her in a
room talking in her voice.” These letters provided the spark to
begin writing the book. It was not easy. Years of emotional garbage
had been piling up after Janis’ death—grief, anger, resentment.
They all came tied up in a bundle with the natural sadness, and they
all came tumbling out one day in a scene Laura describes in the
first chapter: “I kicked boxes of files around my office, files
that contained the legal papers that defined my obligation to Janis’
career. I grabbed every artifact of hers that lay around my house
and boxed them up and shipped them to my brother. I made him come
get her Porsche, which I had stored in my garage. I was desperately
trying to be free of something. Finally I broke down and sobbed.”
The effect was cathartic, and it was with a new
sense of freedom and love toward her sister that Laura began this
project. The result is clear: Love, Janis is a beautifully
crafted, unadorned story of Janis’ life. It is told simply, without
any of the pomp or over-sensationalizing that usually accompanies
the narrative of a legend. Admittedly, the legend here is her
sister, but Laura takes care to avoid a narcissistic use the first
person in writing. She tells the facts, as best as she knows them,
through the people who knew Janis best.
“One of my goals in writing [the book] was just
to describe her. I didn’t want to judge the people involved. I
really decided I wanted to present it from the viewpoint of the
people doing it.”
Early in the book she sets aside a chapter
describing the Joplin family tree. At first it seemed odd to be
talking of fishermen and Quaker clergy in the same book as Janis and
such counterculture heroes as Jim Morrison and Country Joe McDonald.
But as a portrait of Janis began emerging from the pages, her
connection to her family’s past became increasingly apparent. Her
ancestors are portrayed as being bold movers within their particular
communities: leaders and pioneers. Many of them founded local
churches. Does Laura see a connection between them and Janis?
“Yeah, I do. I’m real surprised. I thought I’d
see this break, this difference, but instead I think that Janis was
a pioneer just like they were; it’s just that the frontier wasn’t a
physical wilderness, it was a spiritual, emotional thing, getting
away from the intellect to deal with emotions, spiritual life.”
To anyone who has heard Janis’ singing, there can
be no doubt as to her spiritual essence. Janis was the first great
white female blues singer; she had a rich, raspy voice full of power
and presence. She could screech and scream—twist the notes, bend
them, and caress them in a way that was almost heartbreaking. She
was also a lyric writer of surprising power and subtlety. Nicely,
Laura chose to begin each chapter with appropriate lyrical
selections, most of them written by Janis. Here a dark, living voice
speaks through the skeleton of the blues:
I ain’t quite ready for walking
I ain’t quite ready for walking
And what will you do with your
life
Life just a-dangling?
—from
“Move Over”
The lyrics act with the letters to bring a more
intimate Janis to the reader. The letters show different sides to
Janis than the myth allows: humorous, loving, quite clearly attached
to her family. Heavily punctuated with exclamation points, they
provide a startling window normally only those who personally knew
her could look through.
Haven’t
heard from you yet, but I’m brimming w/news so here I am.
First of
all, we begin a 4 week engagement in Chicago next Tuesday—at $1,000
a week!! So don’t write till you hear from me. Really looking
forward to going…. Chicago is Blues Heaven & I can hear &
be heard by some important people. They (the club we’re playing
in—Mother Blues) pay our transportation, so we’re flying out Tue.
Morning. I really dig flying—& being a R&R band &
flying to a gig is even more exciting. SIGH!! And a friend of mine
gave me a dress & cape to wear for the occasion—a wine-colored
velvet, old, from a Goodwill store, but beautiful! Queen Anne kind
of sleeves & a very low & broad neckline. Really fantastic.
Still, the book is balanced. The new dimensions
are used to flesh out and broaden the old myth, but the myth is
addressed also. The book does deal with Janis’ drug use, from her
heavy drinking, to her early days of shooting speed, to the
inevitable stint with heroin.
“In our society, hunting for answers outside
yourself in chemicals is not something just in the
counterculture,” Laura explains, “it’s something all over our
culture, so I think that you can’t separate Janis’ drug use and say
it had to do with something with her individual psychology. I think
it has a lot to do with the times, the options she was given, and,
basically, the sociology of our culture.”
To this end one is swept back into the swirling
cacophony of color and sound that was the 1960s. The book is as much
a story of the hippies and drugs as it is about Janis because Janis
was so much a part of those people and things. While the
kaleidoscope images of the sixties have become stereotypes to us
today, some might say they provide a sharp contrast to our “family
value” times—some might say they are a model of things to (re)turn
to in the nineties. Janis is quoted as saying, “Look, I’m not a
spokesperson for my generation. I don’t even use acid. I drink.”
She seems a bewildering mix between harsh blues cynicism and soft,
little girl compassion. If she were alive today, would she vote for
Clinton or Bush?
“I don’t think Janis was any political
person,” Laura said. “Janis, I think, represents that portion
that stands up and says, ’Everybody, no matter their race, their
creed, their body type or the way they look or anything else, that
everybody deserves equal respect and unconditional love. So I think
that if she’d be looking at political decisions that she’d be
looking at someone who respects humankind.”
Early Sunday morning, October 4, 1970, Janis
Joplin died.
Does Laura have a different view of her sister
now, after completing the book and looking back over the pain and
the years?
“I certainly have a broader view, and a richer
one,” she said. “[Janis] talked about why it was that she
couldn’t want what seemed to satisfy everybody else in society. She
looked around and saw them being content, and she knew that that
wasn’t enough for her, that she had some internal, burning need to
know something—when I think we all do. I think Janis called it the ’Kozmic Blues.’ You want to look at the sixties and the importance
to the nineties? In the sixties they asked the hard questions up
front. I think that we can benefit from getting down to those
gut-level statements and questions.”
Time keeps moving on
Friends they turn away
I keep moving on
But I never find out why…
But it don’t make no difference
And I know that I can always try
—from
“Kozmic Blues”
Originally published in the Cleveland Scene
Magazine
Copyright © 1992, 2006 by Jeff Fearnside
