Janis Joplin

I MEAN, what were we thinking? We were in our teens. We should have been out there jiving with the chicks to good commercial music. Instead we were holed up in our bedroom, with equally spaced out mates, listening to the likes of Janis Joplin.

It was common knowledge at the time that Joplin would go through a bottle of Southern Comfort during each stage performance. She was a white woman singing the blues, and suffering along with it in the best blues tradition.

But we became obsessed with her music for a time. There are a few things that stand out for me thinking back on that era. The first was the name of her backing bands. One I recall as Big Brother and the Holding Company, and the other was Full Tilt Boogie. We’ll try to find out more about them later. Then there was, for us, her most famous album, Pearl, on the cover of which she is shown curled up on a couch. The album, for me, captured the essence of the performer, who – in her unique, husky voice – could go from harsh and plaintive, to the most soothing and consoling sound imaginable. And if one song catapulted her into stardom then it has to be her version of Kris Kristofferson’s Me And Bobby McGee, which is an odd thing considering she was a blues singer and he was a country music singer-songwriter. But if anyone could bridge the divide, creating a really beautiful country blues song in the process, it was the diminutive, seemingly vulnerable, Janis Joplin. And, as we all know, tragedy would cut her down very young, leaving us – as occurred with Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Canned Heat’s Alan Wilson – with just the legacy of a few albums, and of a presence which, in a few short years, left an indelible mark on the souls of all who heard her music.

Who was Janis? The dispassionate Wikipedia says Janis Lyn Joplin, born in 1943, was “an American blues-influenced rock singer and occasional songwriter with a distinctive voice”. She performed on just four albums, recorded between 1966 and 1970. The first two were as lead singer to the San Francisco band Big Brother and The Holding Company, and the last two as a solo artist. She was inducted posthumously to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995.

Born in Port Arthur, Texas, her father was a Texaco engineer. She had two younger siblings, a brother and a sister. As a teen she heard the blues from Grant Lyon, an “outcast” she used to hang out with. She listened to the likes of Leadbelly, Bessie Smith, Odetta and Big Mama Thornton, while singing in the local choir. At Thomas Jefferson High School she dabbled in painting, but also started singing blues and folk music with friends. Graduating from school in 1960, she attended the University of Texas at Austin, but never attained a degree. Clearly not one to conform to conventional forms of female dress, according to a “persistent story” she was “nominated in a Fraternity contest ‘The Ugliest Man on Campus’.”  Modelling herself on her female blues heroines and the beat poets, she moved to San Francisco in 1963. In June 1964, she and future Jefferson Airplaine guitarist Jorma Kaukonen – playing a typewriter as a percussion instrument – recorded some blues standards, later released as the bootleg album, The Typewriter Tape. 

She acquired a reputation, says Wikipedia, as a “speed freak” and occasional heroin user. As noted earlier, her “trademark beverage”, says Wikipedia, was Southern Comfort. She certainly boosted our interest in the whiskey, which we went through a period sampling, as a tribute to Janis. Was she emotionally vulnerable? The website says her “feisty public image was at odds with her real personality”. Her sister, in a biography, says she was a “highly intelligent, articulate, shy and sensitive woman who was devoted to her family”. Settling in San Francisco in 1966, she joined Big Brother and The Holding Company, which was based in the growing hippie commune of Haight-Ashbury. Six days after joining them, on June 10, she performed live at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco. By August, the group had signed a recording deal with Mainstream Records, but their eponymously titled album, recorded late that year, was released in August 1967, after their singles failed. But it was their appearance at the mid-June 1967 Monterey Pop Festival that, as with so many other bands, provided the breakthrough. Joplin became an overnight international star, as did Jimi Hendrix. In November 1967 Albert Grossman became their manager, having already signed the likes of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. In 1968 they toured the East Coast. In what must have been a seminal event, on April 7, 1968, the last day of their tour, Big Brother and The Holding Company performed with Hendrix, Buddy Guy, Joni Mitchell, Richie Havens, Paul Butterfield and Elvin Bishop at the Wake for Martin Luther King Jr concert in New York.

Cheap Thrills. Now there is a name I remember well. The group’s second album was released in 1968. And, yes, I remember it’s cover featured cartoon-style drawings, some of them somewhat lewd. Wikipedia tells us the design was by “noted underground cartoonist Robert Crumb”. It featured concert and live-in-the-studio performances, including Piece Of My Heart, the band’s “breakthrough hit single”, which we probably first heard on an underground music compilation album. “You know you’ve got it if it makes you feel good.” Or suchlike. I remember a lot of heavy brass, with Joplin’s vocals scaling a vast range of moods and decibels. Cheap Thrills was certainly part of our upbringing, and it sold over a million copies in its first month of release. That summer, in 1968, they toured again, before playing a final two shows in San Francisco, whereafter Joplin announced she was going solo. She gave her last performance with the band on December 1, 1968.

She formed a new backing group, the Kozmic Blues Band, which backed her on I Got Dem Old Kozmic Bues Again Mama!, from 1969. The group’s soul connections were evident in their first concerts in late 1968. The band was not as well received as its predecessor, and played its last gig in New York in December, 1969. Then followed The Full Tilt Boogie Band, made up of Canadian musicians. But before starting  a tour with them in the summer of 1970, she played a one-off reunion concert with BB&THC at the Fillmore West in San Francisco on April 4. In June that year, she and her new band were part of the all-star Festival Express tour of Canada which also featured, listen to this, The Band and The Grateful Dead. Financial and other problems saw the tour being cut short. More than 30 years after Joplin’s death, concert footage remained unseen.

Isn’t it bizarre how 1970 seems to have been a turning point in the lives of so many artists from this time. Not only those who died tragically young, but as recounted in earlier chapters, so much seemed to happen that year. It was, I guess, the year when people started to take stock after the heady, pioneering work of the 1960s. I entered high school that year, and the more I look at these many, many great bands of that era, the more I marvel at how I managed to do any work at all. Music was our major distraction. Certainly we used dagga, or marijuana, for most of my high school years, but that was usually always as a door to obtaining a better, more relaxed ambience within which to listen for hours to our music.

It was, says Wikipedia, in September 1970 that Joplin and her new band started recording a new album in LA, with Paul A Rothchild, best known for his work with The Doors, as producer. It was to be her last work. On October 4, 1970, at the age of just 27, she died – the cause said to be an overdose of heroin and whiskey. The last thing she recorded was Mercedes Benz, an a cappella track put down on October 1, along with a birthday greeting for John Lennon. Wikipedia says Lennon, whose birthday was on October 9, later told Dick Cavett that her taped greeting arrived at his home after her death. We loved that track, Mercedes Benz. It demonstrated the lighter side of Janis Joplin, who seemed to have an impish sense of humour. And it was, I discover, a “first take”. There wouldn’t be a chance to redo it. But in the end it was perfect, one of the highlights of a brilliant album. Another track, Buried Alive In The Blues – isn’t that title a tragic irony? – to which Joplin was due to add the vocals the day she died – was retained as an instrumental. Just as Jimi Hendix’s Cry of Love was released after his death, so too with Pearl, which was released in 1971. Wikipedia says it became the biggest selling album of her short career, featuring her biggest hit single, “the definitive version of Kris Kristofferson’s Me And Bobby McGee, as well as the wry social commentary of the a cappella Mercedes Benz, written by Joplin and beat poet Michael McClure”.

After a traumatic 10-year school reunion, her last public performance had been with Full Tilt Boogie on August 12 at the Harvard Stadium in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Six weeks after she was cremated – her ashes were scattered in the Pacific Ocean – Pearl was released. Both the album and Me And Bobby McGee went to No 1 in the US. Was it a sympathy vote, or had Joplin died just as her remarkable talents were finally being more widely recognised and loved? I believe Pearl would, should, have been the starting point for a long and successful career. But who can ever understand what goes on within the mind, the soul, of a person of such sensitivity and creativity? The reality is she left us with a small but for that very reason all the more valuable treasure trove of music which will survive as long as recorded music can be played.

It is fitting to sound out the experts on what she achieved. Wikipedia’s writers say she is remembered best for her “powerful and distinctive voice – her rasping, overtone-rich sound was significantly divergent from the soft folk and jazz-influenced styles that were common among many white artists at the time”.  And, it seems, the “long-unreleased” documentary film, Festival Express, referred to earlier, has been recently released. Because Wikipedia says partly due to its release, the importance of her contribution to the rock idiom is only now becoming widely appreciated.

“Janis’s vocal style, her flamboyant dress, her outspokenness and sense of humour, her liberated stance (politically and sexually) and her strident, hard-living ‘one of the boys’ image all combined to create an entirely new kind of female persona in rock”. Which is probably why it took nearly two decades before her home town of Port Arthur finally recognised her achievements. A bronze, multi-image sculpture of Joplin by Douglas Clark was unveiled at the Janis Joplin Memorial in 1988.

It took the non-racial world of music – we saw Bob Dylan already active in the early 1960s – to lay down an unwritten law of universal acceptance. The likes of Joplin and her white male counterparts, notes Wikipedia, had adopted “the image, repertoire and performance style of African American blues and rhythm and blues artists, both male and female. Alongside Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane, (Joplin) also pioneered an entirely new range of expression for white women in the previously male-dominated world of post-Beatles rock.”

Apart from her early use of a tattoo – a small heart on her breast – and coloured streaks in her hair, along with scarves, beads and feather accessories, she also pioneered the no-makeup look, something that was considered unthinkable by most female performers at the time.

The Rose, a 1979 film based loosely on Joplin’s life and featuring Bette Midler, helped revive interest in her career, as did a late-1990s musical, Love, Janis. But, more interestingly, it seems a biographical film starring Zooey Deschanel as Joplin,  is also in the pipeline.

For many, Joplin’s singing style was a total turn-off. Wikipedia says “her highly unusual voice … was not lovely or beautiful in the classical sense. Her vocals were often scratchy, sometimes to the point of screaming, and there was a masculine/androgynous quality to her singing”. But it all comes down to that wonderful human attribute, generosity of spirit. It was, always is, easy to dismiss something on a superficial level, without making a conscious decision to enter into the spirit of the thing – whether it be a musical performance, or a work of art. I recall my first reaction to Joplin was much like my reaction to Dylan. They made weird, even ugly, sounds with their voices. But when you allowed them to work their magic on you, what seemed ugly became beautiful beyond measure.

Before looking at her music more closely, it is interesting to look at some of the “trivia” cited by Wikipedia – as if being “romantically involved with Leonard Cohen” could ever have been a trivial experience! As will be observed in my piece on Cohen, he wrote Chelsea Hotel #2 about their relationship. It was also noted that before she died, she allocated money in her will for her friends to have a party. At a wake, her closest friends raised a banner reading, “Drinks are on Pearl!”

As far as finally gaining recognition is concerned, Wikipedia tells us she was inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995 and was ranked No 41 on VH1’s The 100 Greatst Artists of Rock ’n Roll in 1988 (the third highest woman, behind Aretha Franklin and Joni Mitchell). In 2003, the album Pearl was No 122 on Rolling Stone’s top 500 albums of all time. In 2004, the magazine included her in its 100 greatest artists of all time. She received a posthumous Grammy Lifetime Achievement Ward in 2005. And, in probably the most poignant tribute of all, Don McLean’s 1971 folk-rock classic, American Pie, is, says Wikipedia, believed to refer to Joplin in its final verse: “I met a girl who sang the blues, and I asked her for some happy news. She just smiled and turned away …” 

Cheap Thrills

As mentioned earlier, our first introduction to Joplin was via the Big Brother and Holding Company album, Cheap Thrills, which was released in 1968. It is certainly one I’d love to hear again. That song, Piece Of My Heart, was simply superb, one of the great “underground” songs of the era. We had it on a vinyl, South African pressing called The CBS Rock Machine Turns You On, which had this pen-and-ink drawing of a machine churning out, well, rocks. The album itself was multicoloured and resembled those “artworks” we used to make at hobbies exhibitions where you poured different coloured inks on paper which was spinning on a wheel like those used for pottery. Anyway, this album was a superb introduction to the pick of the music going down at the time. Piece Of My Heart opened Side 2, which also included Hard Coming Love by The United States of America, My Days Are Numbered by Blood, Sweat and Tears, Highway 61 Revisited by Bob Dylan and You Don’t Love Me by Mike Blomfield, Al Kooper and Steve Stills from Super Session. Side 1 opened with The Electric Flag’s Killing Floor. Spirit’s Mechanical World followed. Then came Time Has Come Today by The Chambers Brothers, Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne and Can’t Be So Bad by Moby Grape.

Apart from that one song, I don’t recall us getting into Cheap Thrills, but I see that in 2003 it was ranked No 338 on Rolling Stone’s top 500 albums. It’s cover, mentioned earlier, is ranked No 9 in Rolling Stone’s list of the 100 greatest album covers. The other covers are, from 1 to 10 (excluding No 9) Sgt Pepper’s by The Beatles (1967), Never Mind the Bollocks by the Sex Pistols (1977),  The Beatles white album (1968), Sticky Fingers by The Rolling Stones (1971), Exile on Main Street by the Stones (1972), Hotel California by the Eagles (1976), Blind Faith (1969), Aoxomoxoa by Grateful Dead (1969), and The Velvet Underground by The Velvet Undergound & Nico (1967). It is no surprise, looking at the top 10, and the rest in fact, that the vast majority of albums are from the 60s and 70s.

Big Brother & the Holding Company

 Janis Joplin's Greatest Hits

I did not know Big Brother & the Holding Company’s eponymously titled first album, released in 1967, but came across a couple of the songs off it on a Janis Joplin’s Greatest Hits vinyl album I picked up for a few rands at a local second-hand shop. The first great thing about this album, first released in 1972 though this was a 1973 local pressing, is the great cover photograph of Joplin seated on what looks like a Harley Davidson, with high-rise handlebars, wearing large circular shades. Her hair is a delightfully mass of wavy locks and she is dressed in a bright crimson top with floral decoration, paisley trousers and half a dozen bangles on her wrist.

Side 2 of this album opens with Down On Me, a Joplin arrangement, which immediately gives you a hint as to just how heavy this band was. The lead guitar is shrill and rasping, and Joplin uses her voice in similar mode. Indeed, at one stage it is as if the lead guitar solo is upstaged by her incredible vocal range. Also from that debut album is Bye, Bye Baby, a slow blues featuring much quieter guitar and soulful female backing vocals. Interestingly, at times Joplin’s voice sounds almost like that of a country singer on this track, which has a country-blues feeling and is, to my mind, not really her type of song.

Not surprisingly, Side 1 opens with Piece Of My Heart off Cheap Thrills which, as noted previously, was our first real introduction to Joplin’s unique talent. This was Underground music with a capital U – a sort of coming together of the blues, psychedilia and rock in a blaze of vehement, almost violent sound – and Joplin’s voice in a way symbolised the angst that was its driving force. The song starts, naturally, with a searing lead guitar solo, packaged in an equally aggressive bass and drum rhythm section, before Joplin tears in with those famous cries from the heart: “Oh, come on, come on, come on, come on!” Then things quieten down a tad: “Didn’t I make you feel like you were the only man - yeah! / Didn’t I give you nearly everything that a woman possibly can? / Honey, you know I did!” But not quiet for long, as she picks up that hectoring style: “And each time I tell myself that I, well I think I’ve had enough, / But I’m gonna show you, baby, that a woman can be tough. / I want you to come on, come on, come on, come on and take it,” Backing vocalists cry: “Take it!” Joplin replies: “Take another little piece of my heart now, baby!” Backing group: “Oh, oh, break it!” Joplin: “Break another little bit of my heart now, darling, yeah, yeah, yeah.” And so this brilliant song continues. This song was the ideal showcase for Joplin, who clearly crafted it to fit her gifted sense of what was required to make a consummately tasteful blues-rock song. Take this verse, and you can just imagine hearing her voice. It comes alive again, just through these lyrics: “You’re out on the streets looking good, / And baby deep down in your heart I guess you know that it ain’t right, / Never, never, never, never, never, never hear me when I cry at night, / Babe, I cry all the time! / And each time I tell myself that I, well I can’t stand the pain, / But when you hold me in your arms, I’ll sing it once again.” Then back again to that stunning chorus section. The band pours brass, brilliant lead guitar and lead-style bass into this track, which culminates in a typically Joplinesque cry from the heart. Indeed, the song is all about that heart, that inner soul, of hers, which is so often the basis for great blues songs. “. . .Have another little piece of my heart now, baby. / You know you got it - whoahhhhh!! / Take it! / Take it! Take another little piece of my heart now, baby, / Oh, oh, break it! / Break another little bit of my heart, now darling, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, / Oh, oh, have a / Have another little piece of my heart now, baby, hey, / You know you got it, child, if it makes you feel good.”

The next song on that greatest hits album is Summertime, the old jazz-blues standard which is given a great makeover. It starts quietly, with gentle guitar notes over slow bass. But, as Joplin sings those famous lyrics, so the song ratchets up, her versatile vocals rubbing off on the lead guitar, with the two working in tandem in a manner probably not previously achieved.  Also on the album is Ball And Chain, which is off Cheap Thrills, although on the Greatest Hits album it is the Full Tilt Boogie Band who are credited with having performed it. It is reminiscent of her rendition of Work Me, Lord, at Woodstock. At over eight minutes, this live performance is a wonderful example of how she was capable of getting an audience eating out of her hand. Again, the song starts loud and heavy, with Joplin’s screaming vocals competing with the lead guitar. A piano keeps up a blues-rock rhythm, before the song slows to let Joplin in with some soulful lyrics. As it picks up tempo again, you get a sense that the lead guitar feeds off her energy. Her vocal gymnastics are phenomenal, and make one question how her voice survived such an onslaught. You keep expecting it to break down completely. Towards the end she uses a sort of talking-blues technique as she philosophises about life. Eventually, she ends up just talking to the audience, there is an audible response – especially when at one point she half-jokingly says “it’s all the same fuckin’ day, man”.  She starts singing again near the end, her voice still capable of sounding like a veritable siren. There is one track on the Greatest Hits album from her experimental group, formed after she left the Holding Company. Try (Just A Little Bit Harder) is off I Got Dem Old Kozmic Blues Again Mama!, from 1969. And, somehow, after the electric energy of her previous albums, I found this song a bit of a let-down. It relies on a big brass section and female backing vocals. But it is still vintage Joplin – only here her voice is complementing not a rampant lead guitar, but the shrieking of trumpets.

Pearl

Cry Baby, track four, is the first on the Greatest Hits album off Pearl, and it immediately makes you realise what a masterpiece this was. How many songs start as impressively? After a heavy opening section, things slow to facilitate those opening words: “Cry-y-y-y-y-y-y-y-y … Baby!” Again, this is part talking-blues, but with the piano and guitar seamlessly integrating with Joplin’s almost gospel-sounding voice as crescendo after crescendo is reached. It’s a song about getting a man back. “I know she told you, / Honey I know she told you that she loved you / Much more than I did, / But all I know is that she left you, / And you swear that you just don’t know why, / But you know, honey I’ll always, / I’ll always be around if you ever want me / Come on and cry, cry baby, cry baby, cry baby, / Oh honey, welcome back home.” I love the insistence with which she talk-sings this part, something that has been part of my psyche since the days when we played Pearl over and over again: “And when you walk around the world, babe, / You said you’d try to look for the end of the road, / You might find out later that the road’ll end in Detroit, / Honey, the road’ll even end in Kathmandu. / You can go all around the world / Trying to find something to do with your life, baby, / When you only gotta do one thing well, / You only gotta do one thing well to make it in this world, babe. / You got a woman waiting for you there, / All you ever gotta do is be a good man one time to one woman / And that’ll be the end of the road, babe, / I know you got more tears to share, babe, / So come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, / And cry, cry baby, cry baby, cry baby.” This, I believe, captures beautifully the intensity of Joplin’s approach. And the backing group was always up to the task, ably tapping into that energy and yielding sounds akin, in my mind, to the best of Bob Dylan in his electric era in the late 1960s.

But then how about that next song on this album, Me And Bobby McGee? I don’t recall if we heard this version or Kristofferson’s original first, but there can be no denying Joplin moulded a wonderful country song into one of the greatest blues numbers ever – all thanks to her inimitable feeling for what is required of a blues singer. It is an innate response, something she clearly did intuitively, as the mood, the melody, took her. It is strange, on an album like this, to suddenly hear gently strummed acoustic guitar in the early Dylan mould. But that’s how this song begins. The band keeps up the country mood by the use of steel guitar about the time Joplin sings those immortal first lines: “Busted flat in Baton Rouge, waiting for a train / And I’s feeling nearly as faded as my jeans. / Bobby thumbed a diesel down just before it rained, / It rode us all the way to New Orleans.” There is lovely understated electric guitar and piano here which, combined with THAT voice, gives the song a distinctive musical texture what is, indeed, a hallmark of most of Joplin’s songs. There is also something quite seductive in her enunciation of words. McGee becomes McGee-ah, as the song becomes increasingly bluesy. Sung at a faster tempo than the original, Kristofferson must have considered it a great compliment to have had Joplin turn what was a great song into one of the all-time greatest pieces of music in the modern era. Joplin and her band had the ability to maintain a tension, a taughtness, throughout a song which never relented. It is like something on a tightrope – one slip and the whole thing would collapse. The miracle is that slip doesn’t come. It is a musical masterpiece, replete with a brilliant piano solo and some lovely, deliberately stuttering guitar-work at the end. But what really makes this version of Kristofferson’s song is her ad-libbing and improvising in the latter parts. Instead of sticking religiously to Kris’s lyrics, she has built on them, adding a new and interesting dimension. This happens once she gets into the la-la-laa-la-laa-la-laa section, whereafter she adds: “Lord, I’m calling my lover, calling my man, / I said I’m calling my lover just the best I can, / C’mon, where is Bobby now, where is Bobby McGee, yeah, / Lordy Lordy Lordy Lordy Lordy Lordy Lordy Lord / Hey, hey, hey, Bobby McGee, Lord! / Yeah! Whew! / Lordy Lordy Lordy Lordy Lordy Lordy Lordy Lord / Hey, hey, hey, Bobby McGee.” It is at this point that that guitar stutters and stumbles to an end. Brilliant!

Get It While You Can is the second song on Side 2 of the Greatest Hits album, and is another example of why Pearl became the apogee of Joplin’s output. This is another side of Joplin. Suddenly we are in a gentler, more reflective mood. A piano starts off with a slow blues, with Joplin again exploring the gamut of emotions: “In this world, if you read the papers, Lord, / You know everybody’s fighting on with each other. / You got no one you can count on, baby, / Not even your own brother.” Those words are sung in a descending scale, evoking a sense of distress, disillusionment and dismay. But there is hope: “So if someone comes along, / He’s gonna give you some love and affection / I’d say get it while you can, yeah! / Honey, get it while you can, / Hey, hey, get it while you can, / Don’t you turn your back on love, no, no!” Considering how soon after recording this, Joplin was to die so young and pointlessly, the next verse becomes particularly poignant: “Don’t you know when you’re loving anybody, baby, / You’re taking a gamble on a little sorrow, / But then who cares, baby, / ’Cause we may not be here tomorrow, no.” Again, here voice and the lead guitar seamlessly interchange notes in the upper registers. If Hendrix was the master of the electric guitar, she was the vocal equivalent, achieving in these few songs sounds and emotions that are unlikely ever to be equalled.

Just a thought before I continue. They say only the good die young. Jimi and Janis, and Jim, were all clearly troubled, deeply sensitive people. As Don McLean said of Vincent van Gogh in Vincent: “This world was never meant for one as beautiful as you.” In a way I think the same applies here. Certainly Janis Joplin, for all her apparent brash exterior, seemed to have such an inner warmth towards her fellow human beings that in the end it consumed her. She expressed it in those songs, which is what makes them such bright, blazing beacons.

And one such beacon is Move Over, arguably the best song on this hits album. Quick-tempo drums set a rhythm. Then, accompanied by solo lead guitar, Joplin sings: “You say that it’s over baby, Lord, / You say that it’s over now, / But still you hang around me, come on, / Won’t you move over.” Da-da dee dum. The intensity increases in the next verse: “You know that I need a man, honey Lord, / You know that I need a man, / But when I ask you to you just tell me / That maybe you can.” Piano, bass, lead guitar – the solos are subtly integrated, as the dynamic builds: “Please dontcha do it to me babe, no! / Please dontcha do it to me baby, / Either take this love I offer / Or honey let me be.” Ouch! This cookie ain’t letting him off the hook easily. “I ain’t quite a ready for walking, no no no no, / I ain’t quite a ready for walking, / And whatcha gonna do with your life, / Life all just dangling ?” But like Bobby McGee, this is only the start, because it is when she ventures into that talking blues-type stuff that the pressure really mounts. It all happens staccato-like, but I picked up keeping her on the “end of a string” and plenty of whao! whao! whao!s. In all, one of the Joplin classics – and so accessible! This isn’t some heavy, dowdy dame singing “da blues”. This is a hip chick with nous, giving it her best, most-inspired, shot. And all of this is only possible thanks to that band. They were drummer Clark Pierson, organist Ken Pearson, bassist Brad Campbell who came with Janis from the Kozmic Blues Band, pianist Richard Bell and lead guitarist John Till, who had played in Ronnie Hawkins’s famous band, the Hawks.

But there was no band backing Joplin on one of her most memorable songs off Pearl. Consider the self-deprecating irony in her introduction to the song Mercedes Benz: “I’d like to do a song of great social and political import. / It goes like this:” Of course it is a lovely dig at consumerism and materialism, but in the nicest possible way. Singing a cappella, she launches forth: “Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz? / My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends. / Worked hard all my lifetime, no help from my friends, / So Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz ?” This is the first time I’m seeing these lyrics, so a few gaps are being filled in for me, too. Like what is Dialing For Dollars? Well, the trusty Wikipedia has an instant reply: “Dialing for Dollars was a franchised format local television programme in the United States and Canada, popular in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. The programme’s usual format had the host, a local television personality, announce a certain password to the audience at the beginning of the programme and then randomly select a phone number from a bowl or drum (from those that had been previously submitted by viewers) and call it. If the viewer was watching the show, they would know that they were being called, answer the phone with the correct password, and would win a monetary prize. If the number did not answer, the prize money would continue to increase.” Wikipedia says the idea originated as a radio programme in 1939, switching to television in the late 1950s. It’s popularity faded by the mid-1970s. When we first heard this song, I never knew what she was saying there. It was one of those Joplin mysteries. “Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a color TV ? / Dialing For Dollars is trying to find me. / I wait for delivery each day until three, / So oh Lord, won’t you buy me a color TV?” It was on this song that her impish sense of humour became most evident. She was clearly having great fun doing it, too. “Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a night on the town? / I’m counting on you, Lord, please don’t let me down. / Prove that you love me and buy the next round, / Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a night on the town ?” I mean, how would the Bible Belt respond to that. Asking the Lord to buy her a drink! But isn’t that exactly what Jesus would have done? She wraps it up by repeating the first verse, then, with a chuckle declares: “That’s it!”

What does Wikipedia have to say about this wonderful album? It says it has “a more polished feel” than the earlier albums “due to the expertise of producer Paul A Rothchild and her new backing musicians”. Rothchild was “best known as the producer of The Doors, and worked well with Joplin”. Now that explains matters. Like so many great talents, it required a talented producer to bring out the best in them. How serendipitous that this coalescence occurred – in the nick of time, or we might never have heard Joplin at her best. As Wikipedia puts it: “Together they were able to craft an album that showcased her extraordinary vocal talents.” Ah, and here’s something I didn’t know. Don’t you just love celebrity gossip! But for me it is more an interest in the professional lives of people, because Wikipedia tells us that Me and Bobby McGee was “written by Kris Kristofferson, her lover at the time”. Could this have been a song about them, I wonder.

That brilliant song, Move Over, mentioned earlier, was also penned by Joplin who was supposed to sing on Buried Alive In The Blues, the tragically titled track which remained an instrumental because, as noted earlier, she was no longer around to do the vocals. The recording of Pearl occurred from early September till early October, 1970. She died on October 4. Did I mention earlier that Pearl was ranked No 122 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 greatest albums of all time? If I did, it’s worth repeating. Indeed, I would have been one of those voting it higher up the list. Because, apart from those songs mentioned, it includes other equally memorable tracks in A Woman Left Lonely, Half Moon, My Baby and Trust Me.

I’ve just given Joplin’s bit of the Woodstock Director’s Cut DVD a quick look, and came to the realisation that she was really burning herself out with live concerts. She does Work Me, Lord, and because it’s at night, you see only those parts of her face catching the spotlight, with a few slow-mo’s of her from perhaps earlier in the day. But even here, her compassion seems to flow out. Before singing, she asks this massive crowd: “How are you out there?” She says something about staying stoned and getting enough water and a place to sleep, before the band, featuring thunderous bass and some great brass, take her through some really raspy lyrics. Later, as she sings into that mic she seems to become totally lost in the blues. The crowd, to their credit, seem quite appreciative. But then again, this was an audience steeped in the unexpected, the avant-garde. And by then Joplin was already something of a legend. Yet, like Hendrix, it was these live shows, tragically, which probably exacted their greatest toll. She urgently needed the sort of respite so many other great artists, including the Beatles, took, during which they could devote their energies primarily to recording.

It was not to be, and Janis Joplin died young, in the prime of her life, leaving us with a small, but much-coveted legacy. We’ll not see her likes again.