Get It While You Can

“Janis – Her Life and Music,” by Holly George-Warren, 2020

San Francisco produced the best U.S. rock music during the later 1960s and Joplin was one of its psychedelic standouts.  She brought the blues ethos of Bessie Smith and Big Mama Thornton into rock. From the early loose folk-rock of the Charlatans in the Red Dog Saloon in Virginia City, Nevada to the Family Dog at the Avalon and Bill Graham’s Fillmore in San Francisco, Janis became the ‘queen of the hippies.’  This detailed bio illustrates every problem, person and skill Joplin had.  There is a massive amount of name-dropping, as Joplin in her short life ran into people from the whole hippie and music sub-culture of the day – Hendrix, Country Joe, Jim Morrison, R. Crumb, the Dead’s Pigpen, Leonard Cohen, Jerry Lee Lewis, George Harrison and on and on.  The violent and fraught encounters with a drunk Morrison are especially funny. 

Buddy Guy, echoing B.B. King, said of Joplin:  “She sang black.  She proved that the color of our skin don’t have shit to do with the depth of your soul.”  Big Mama Thornton said of Janis, who covered her song Ball & Chain:  “That girl feels like I do.”  Etta James respected her style.  Only Mick Jagger told her he’d listen to a black singer if he wanted to hear ‘black.’  So much for ‘cultural appropriation.’

Joplin mastered various styles and singing skills.  As a teenager in Port Arthur and Austin Texas, she learned country, folk and blues, then incorporated them into her ‘screaming’ rock style, which she later toned down to give depth to her performances.  Scat singing, tonal variations, split and elongated syllables, quiet to loud vocal moves, harmony with other singers, fast and slow pacing, chest and head singing – she was one of the best singers of the time.  The author covers her 4 albums, though the first was a weak effort put out by Mainstream Records that the band denounced, as it did not reflect their live performances.  The book also details the various bands Joplin was in - the raving hippies and partially skilled family of Big Brother; the chaotic and quitting session musicians of the Kozmic Blues Band; the solid Canadian pros of the Full Tilt Boogie Band.  Her funny folk song Mercedes Benz was the last thing included on her last  album, done several days before her death from an accidental overdose in Los Angeles of too-pure heroin.

The author does not pull punches on Joplin’s problems – drug addiction, insecurity, alcoholism, promiscuity.  In fact, it gets pretty creepy.  My non-professional analysis is that she was manic-depressive, so the heroin ‘smoothed out’ the vacillations.  It was not just admiration for Coltrane or Parker that led her to junk. As Janis said, she could not control her emotions.  The book dwells on her troubled teen-age years and complicated relationship with her parents and peers in racist and conservative Port Arthur.  That is a familiar story.   The vacillations are evident in the book, as she sways between straight Port Arthur Texas girl, hippie earth mother, biker chick, bi-sexual, parent’s child, careerist and caricatured blues mama.

Jammin' on the Festival Express

This is the best book about Janis.  I saw her once at the 1969 Atlantic City Pop Festival held at a racetrack just prior to Woodstock, sipping on a bottle of Southern Comfort placed at the front of the stage, playing wedged in among other national bands for 45 minutes.  One of her heroes, Little Richard, closed out the show with 3 encores repeatedly singing Bony Moronie while dancing on his white piano to the ecstatic joy of the audience.  She joined Richard for a few tunes in that show.  Her breakthrough moment at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival can still be watched by anyone today, closing with Ball & Chain that made Mama Cass gasp.  Janis is also in the 1970 movie Festival Express that showed the musicians playing festivals, then jamming and getting drunk on a train going across Canada from Toronto to Calgary.  Right now I’m looking for live recordings of Big Brother – one of which Detroit rock critic Lester Bangs raved about.

Other prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box upper left:  “Love, Janis,”(Laura Joplin) “Life,” (Richards) “Echo in the Canyon,” “Laurel Canyon” or the words “blues, “Grateful Dead,” “Zappa” “Beatles,” “Kids,” “The Conspiracy.”

P.S. – A salute to Little Richard, who is no longer with us.  Rip It Up!

And I bought it at May Day Books which has a selection of books on music, especially political music.

The Cultural Marxist

May 20, 2020