CHAPTER 27

JANIS JOPLIN

Defiant

WHEN I WAS IN GRADE SCHOOL in the late 1960s, a gang of older teenage girls in the neighborhood adopted me as their mascot. They were 16 years old and smoked pot and longed to flee our Southern Californian suburb for San Francisco, where it was all happening. They could not possibly be more cool. One day, hanging out at the mall, we spied a rack of albums for sale at, of all places, the Singer Sewing store (in a bid to lure young people into the store, they’d started selling records). The ringleader sent me in to pinch a copy of Cheap Thrills, the new album by Big Brother and the Holding Company. Inside the store, the salesperson was nowhere to be seen, so I grabbed two. As a reward, they let me keep one. I played it over and over again on my record player in my bedroom, screeching and moaning “Piece of My Heart” into my salt-shaker microphone, pinching my eyebrows together and throwing my hair around. Janis Joplin was a revelation.

My mom worked tirelessly to impress upon me that girls should be polite and soft-spoken. They should be good listeners. They should be careful not to be too expressive, or risk startling the rest of the human race and sending it into a panic. Complaining was very unattractive, and should be indulged in only with my best friend. Crying in particular tended to upset people, and should be done in private, if at all; no one looked good doing it. And the other thing girls should be was as pretty as possible at all times.

Then came Janis, who not only refused to hide her feelings; she refused to even dial them down a notch. She flaunted them. She owned them with every cell in her body. She moaned and crooned and groaned and panted and screeched and shrieked. I just loved her.

JANIS JOPLIN WAS THE FIRST CERTIFIED female rock star. She was the lead singer of Big Brother and the Holding Company, one of a handful of bands making up the psychedelic music scene in San Francisco during the late 1960s. For a few early months in 1965, they were the psychedelic music scene.^*1 When Big Brother played the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, they left everyone in the dust. Or rather, Janis did. Her yowling, howling, crooning, broken-hearted rendition of the classic blues song “Ball and Chain” was raw, aggressive, and sexy. It was unlike anything anyone had ever heard from the lungs and heart of a middle-class white female. The most popular girl singers of the age were safely feminine. Joan Baez and Judy Collins come to mind, with their silky hair and dulcet tones.^*2 They were graceful fawns in the forest, dipping a dainty hoof in a clear pond of sweet water, while Janis was a monster truck with a broken muffler hauling ass down a rutted, pot-holed southern road.

Janis Lyn Joplin was born in Port Arthur, Texas, in 1943, two years before the end of World War II and the official beginning of the baby boom. She was an agreeable child and excellent student, but in her senior year of high school discovered booze, the Beats, the blues, teenage rebellion, and the joy of shooting her mouth off. In 1962, after a halfhearted attempt at college, she drifted between Austin, Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco before finally settling in Haight-Ashbury, where she joined Big Brother, already a well-established Bay Area band. Her performance at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival caught the eye of the music industry brass in attendance that day; within a year, she would be a star. Big Brother’s first major recording was the psychedelic masterpiece Cheap Thrills, certified gold on release in August 1968, selling more than a million copies (and shoplifted by many enterprising preteens).

With hot pink and purple feather boas pinned in her hair, long beaded necklaces, bracelets stacked up to her elbows, skimpy tops, satin bell-bottoms, macramé vests, and a bottle of Southern Comfort at her side, Janis was for a brief time the undisputed queen of rock-and-roll. Still, she was often troubled, and didn’t care who knew it. She yearned for love, took up with people who couldn’t love her, and turned away people who would. She fretted that the world would discover she was a fraud. She was heartbroken when people didn’t recognize her on the street. She worried that she was ugly. She drank a staggering amount and struggled with a moderate heroin habit until her accidental overdose on October 4, 1970, at the age of 27.

PORT ARTHUR IS AN OIL REFINERY TOWN on the Gulf Coast, 91 miles east of Houston and a stone’s throw from Louisiana. It’s a town of billowing smokestacks, tall gas flares topped by ever burning flames, oil jacks that pump ceaselessly as a heart, and row upon row of squat white petroleum storage tanks. It’s one of the most humid places in the country, where the air smells of rotten eggs, fireworks, and scalded plastic. (I’m told people who live there don’t notice after a while.) There are tidy, well-heeled neighborhoods too, with shady streets, manicured front lawns, and churchgoing neighbors. The Joplins lived on one such street.

Janis’s father, Seth, was an engineer at Texaco. Her mother, Dorothy, was a housewife, focused on raising Janis and her two younger siblings, Laura and Michael. They were a Texas-style Leave It to Beaver family. Janis, older than Laura by six years, was sent to Sunday school and joined the Bluebirds. She showed some singing ability, but no one made much of it. Aside from her intelligence (which was viewed as a liability in a girl), she seemed poised for an expected future: attending Lamar State College of Technology in neighboring Beaumont for training as either a teacher or a nurse before marrying a local boy and settling down. That was pretty much the lone option for a young woman in Port Arthur, Texas, in the late 1950s.

Then as now, the biggest natural advantage a woman has is beauty. It may be skin deep, but when has that bothered the teachers, employers, suitors—even parents—in charge of doling out the time, attention, favors, promotions, and marriage proposals? When Janis turned 14, it became apparent that she would be just this side of homely, a reality she struggled with her entire life.

Puberty is more transformational for some of us than others. Janis’s blond curls darkened to dust-bunny brown, and she gained weight. Worst of all, she was smacked with a catastrophic case of acne that no amount of pancake makeup could disguise. Her mother took her to the dermatologist, who blamed the victim; Janis was told to keep her hands off her face and avoid fried foods. She did, but nothing helped. In school, she was desperate to fit in, at first. She joined the Future Teachers of America and was part of a group that decorated the gym for dances and made posters for student elections. But at some point, being relegated to the invisible army of female do-gooders and behind-the-scenes helpers was too dispiriting.

Junior year she took up with a group of senior boys who were artistic and outlaw-ish: Jim Langdon, a jazz musician; David Moriaty, who remained a friend after she left Texas; and Grant Lyons, who turned her on to the music of Leadbelly and Bessie Smith, Janis’s primary musical influences and inspiration. The older boys also turned her on to the Beat poetry of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, and Gary Snyder. Already an avid reader, she devoured Jack Kerouac, and took his thoughts about racism to heart. Port Arthur was segregated in 1958, and the large African-American population—40 percent of the town—lived on the wrong side of the tracks. One day in Janis’s social studies class, the topic of the rights of Negroes came up. Everyone solemnly affirmed the wisdom of segregation, except Janis, who stood up and said, “Society’s treatment of the black person is wrong. They are people like you and me.”

After that, the bullying began in earnest. Janis was called a weirdo, a nigger lover, a pig—and, of course, a whore, that all-purpose insult for women who refuse to obey. Boys with whom she’d never exchanged a single word spread rumors about banging her in the backseat of their cars. (This was not an era when parents marched down to the high school and demanded justice.) Janis’s reaction was not to lie low, as another girl might have. Instead, she doubled down. If someone passed her in the hallway and made oinking sounds, she spun on her heel and yelled at them to fuck off. Janis was rebellious and mouthy to a degree the good people of Port Arthur had rarely seen. And you know what? It made her feel good and alive.

It was a 40-minute drive from Port Arthur across the border into Louisiana, where you could hear live music at the bars in Vinton and get seriously shit-faced. The bars were whites-only, but there were a few where you could sneak in and hear black musicians playing what Janis and her crowd considered to be real music. However, it was well known among the high school rebels that the best music was in New Orleans, a daring four-hour drive across the state. Few people had the chops to try to get away with it.

One night during her senior year, Janis talked some of the boys in her gang into making the trip.^*3 They got smashed, barhopped until the wee hours, then suffered a minor wreck on the way home. Cops arrived, parents were called, and by Monday the gossip had spread throughout the high school. The reputation of the boys had soared—what cool cats, living on the edge!—while Janis was branded the class slut. No one believed they’d gone all that way merely to hear some good bands.

Given Janis’s complete failure before this time to woo the boys in her class, this might initially have seemed like an improvement in her social status—at least someone wanted to have sex with her! But Port Arthurians were a judgmental lot, and she was now fully ostracized. The irony is that the boys in her crowd were completely uninterested in her. They lusted after other girls—the pretty ones—and she always went home alone.

JANIS GRADUATED FROM high school in 1960. In 1962, she enrolled in the fine arts program at the University of Texas, Austin, ostensibly to become a painter. She moved into The Ghetto, an apartment house near campus where the political activists, artists, and folk singers lived. She and her Autoharp joined a bluegrass band called the Waller Creek Boys. They had a regular Wednesday night gig at a converted gas station called Threadgill’s Bar & Grill. It was owned by country singer and yodeler Kenneth Threadgill, who supported Janis and believed in her talent—a kindness she would never forget. For two bucks you could drink beer until the wee hours, listening to Janis sing Leadbelly’s and Bessie Smith’s greatest hits in her mournful alto.

In 1962, Texas college coeds still wore beehive hairdos, straight skirts, white shirts with Peter Pan collars, and flats. Boys had short hair and dressed like their fathers. Shelley Fabares was the top-selling white female singer of the year with “Johnny Angel,” which topped out at number six on the Billboard charts.

Janis could not have been more different. She wore raggedy-hemmed jeans, denim work shirts, and no bra. She was freakish enough to be newsworthy for a Daily Texan story headlined “She Dares to Be Different.” (Oh, they had no idea.)

Janis might have stayed in Austin indefinitely. She loved performing at Threadgill’s, where she was developing a following. People were starting to think that however weird she might be, she could really sing.

The Greek system was big at UT, and every year Alpha Phi Omega held the Ugliest Man on Campus contest as a fundraiser for charity. For five dollars, frat boys nominated each other, sorority girls secretly nominated boys who’d spurned them, and it was all good, clean early-1960s fun. Someone entered Janis into the contest. She didn’t win, as legend holds. But given how self-conscious she was about her looks, she didn’t need to.

A week later, ugly, manly Janis was gone.

She hitchhiked to the Bay Area with Chet Helms, a long-haired friend who’d been there before. Janis wowed the crowds at popular coffeehouses in North Beach, Santa Cruz, and Palo Alto, who were used to agreeable-sounding guitar strummers, rather than an angst-ridden, acne-scarred Texas woman who sang her guts out. Around this time, during her first foray to San Francisco, she started using both speed and heroin. She was never one for acid; her mind was active enough, she didn’t need hallucinations on top of everything else. But anything that could be shot into a vein to distract her for a while from her ever aching, ever wounded heart? She was all over that.

Oh, she made some bad decisions. She shot her mouth off to a Hells Angels gang and got herself beat up. She was bisexual, and took up with an assortment of men and women who loved her either too much or not enough. Still, she had friends who cared about her, and when they saw how strung out she was, how skinny and dirty and arm scratching and crazy-eyed, they pooled their money and bought her a bus ticket back to Port Arthur.

Back she went to her parents’ house. She enrolled as a sociology major at Lamar State College. She bought modest gathered skirts and long-sleeved blouses to cover the track marks. She saw a psychiatric social worker, briefly. She told him that if she could just be a good Port Arthur girl, she would be able to bury her ambition, her passion to sing, her need for the needle. For all of Janis’s intelligence, she seemed happy to be a mystery to herself. Another theory: The only thing that made her singing come alive was her tsunami of unarticulated feelings—and perhaps intuitively, she realized that sorting them all out would compromise her gift.

There was also something else: While in San Francisco she’d fallen in love with Peter de Blanc,^*4 whom she knew through speed user circles. A few weeks after Janis had returned to Port Arthur, Peter dropped in and asked Seth Joplin for his daughter’s hand. He was on his way to New York to do something or other. The family was apparently not overly impressed with Peter, but it hardly mattered. Janis was engaged! She embarked upon the traditional bride-to-be activities of the time: selecting a china pattern, assembling a hope chest, shopping for a wedding gown, and stitching together, with her mother and sister, a Texas Lone Star quilt for the marital bed.

Then, suddenly, Janis stopped hearing from him. Peter de Blanc had disappeared.

Back she went to singing, to plotting another escape. Back she went to Austin, to singing at Threadgill’s. For a short time, Jekyll and Hyde merged: She hurled herself back into the blues in her modest skirt and poufy bun. Guys who’d known her when she was at UT, and were still hanging around town, didn’t notice her square ensemble as much as how good she’d gotten. Her feelings poured out of her. Her voice was raw and unadorned. Her charisma was weird and affecting.

I’m making it sound so simple and freewheeling. Janis was tortured. She felt Texas was safer, better, and “good” for her, while also boring, closed-minded, and an artistic dead end. She couldn’t make peace with this fact. She might have dithered in Austin indefinitely, but in 1966, her old pal Chet Helms, now a self-styled music promoter who would go on to become the so-called father of 1967’s “Summer of Love,” talked her into coming back—again!—to San Francisco to audition for Big Brother and the Holding Company.

Years later, Janis would recall it like this: “How I happened to join Big Brother? Well, Chet Helms sent Travis Rivers to get me. What I usually say is that I wanted to leave Texas, but that’s not what really happened. I didn’t want to leave. But he was such a good fuck! How could I not go?”

The less groovy truth—completely at odds with the spirit of the laid-back times—is that Janis was driven, ambitious, competitive, and itching for success.

AT THAT TIME, BIG BROTHER was the house band at the Avalon Ballroom, managed by Bill Graham, the granddaddy of the modern rock concert, who also ran the Fillmore Auditorium. The band consisted of psychedelic rock specialist “Weird” Jim Gurley; self-taught bassist Peter Albin; San Francisco State student Sam Andrew; and artist and Spaghetti Factory waitperson Dave Getz on drums. Like many bands of the time, they spent perhaps as much time coming up with the band name as they did practicing. (Second runner up: Tom Swift and His Electric Grandmother.) They called their sound “freak jazz”—and from all reports, it was sort of progressive/hard rock/raga riffs/fuzz tone/feedback distortion/blues.^*5 Their stated mission was “to speak to all the children of the earth,” which may have led to their desire to bring in a “chick singer,” given that 51 percent of the aforementioned children are female. More likely, they hoped it would distinguish them from the other rock bands popping up daily like head shops on Haight Street.

When Janis auditioned, at the age of 23, she wasn’t particularly impressed, and the feeling was mutual. Part of the issue was a difference in musical style—a diplomatic way of saying that Janis was pretty much a stone-cold genius, while BBHC excelled at being very loud. But Helms had persuaded both parties to give it a chance. So when they asked her to join them, Janis said hell yes.

In July 1966 the band moved to a big house in Lagunitas, a tiny rural community in Marin County. Frank Zappa once said (possibly around the same time), “The older you get, the more you realize life is like high school.” I wonder if Janis realized this as she settled in with her male bandmates and their wives and girlfriends. There she was again, one of the guys, but still essentially alone. At the end of the night, they all crawled into bed with their old ladies, and she was left to ponder the injustice of it all. When Big Brother wasn’t rehearsing, she hung out at a local roadhouse where she drank herself into a stupor and played pool with the Grateful Dead, who lived down the road.

The Lagunitas idyll lasted only a few months—long enough for Janis to make the all-important transition from Texas beatnik in drab work shirts and jeans to would-be sparkly hippie princess. Her inspiration was Jim Gurley’s wife, Nancy, a small-boned creature with a master’s degree in English, whose interpretation of counterculture couture ran toward high priestess/gypsy queen. Oh, the velvet gowns! The satin, lace, and endless swags of glittery necklaces! Janis decided that would be the look she would adopt, once she had a little money. To demonstrate her adoration and devotion to Nancy, she rather ostentatiously slept with Jim. You know, as one did in those days. Nancy was apparently a little miffed, but nothing a joint couldn’t fix.

Bead making was Nancy’s thing. (So was dropping acid, with a speed chaser.) The proper way to bead involved using a slender needle to ease a small glass bead onto a piece of waxed leather thread, followed by tying a tiny knot, then slipping on the next bead. Janis, determined to stay clean, used beading to keep her hands busy and away from dope. But one day it simply got away from her and she shot up with the others. In a single afternoon, she, Nancy, and another girl, Rita, pinwheel-eyed on speed, whipped out a 15-foot beaded curtain.

This is as good a place as any to say that in those years, everyone sat around doing a lot of drugs. I don’t think I have it in me to carefully reconstruct the scenes, which are numerous and all essentially identical: People do the drug. They say things they believe to be profound or funny but are generally neither. Someone puts on a record. People bob their heads to the music. If the drug is of the upper persuasion, they may dance around like maniacs until they collapse in a heap. Whether on uppers or downers, some guy plays an air guitar. People start making out, then either forget they’re doing it or disappear into another room for a proper balling.^*6 Time passes. A lot of time passes. Someone orders a pizza.

In those pre-Internet days acronyms weren’t really a thing. No SMH, BTW, LOL, YOLO, or all the rest. It’s unfortunate, because if there’s one place we could really use a universally accepted acronym, it would be as a placeholder for what happened during the many hours, days, and weeks in the 1960s and ’70s when people did drugs. If there is one thing more boring than sitting around while other people do drugs, it’s listening to them tell stories about sitting around doing drugs—and I’m afraid that’s what a true accounting of Janis’s life during these years would entail. A popular acronym affirmed by the Oxford English Dictionary would be really handy here. Something like SADD, Sat Around Doing Drugs.

SADD, SADD, SADD.

THE MONTEREY POP FESTIVAL, held June 16 to 18, 1967, became the template for all the outdoor music festivals to follow. The lineup included pretty much everyone still in heavy rotation on your local classic rock station: Canned Heat, Steve Miller Band, The Who, Jimi Hendrix, Grateful Dead, The Mamas & the Papas, Otis Redding, Ravi Shankar, Jefferson Airplane, and Big Brother and the Holding Company. This is the concert at which Jimi Hendrix set his guitar on fire with lighter fluid, bashed it onto the stage a good half dozen times, then tossed the shredded bits into the audience. Still, I would argue that Janis’s performance was more memorable. Documentarian D. A. Pennebaker captured brilliant, unexpected moments in his film Monterey Pop: the way Janis’s feet lift out of her kitten heel sandals when she really belts it out; the expression on the face of Mama Cass, sitting in the front row and mouthing “Wow!”; Janis’s sweet, awkward bow at the end, and her girlish skip offstage.

In a matter of weeks, she was being celebrated as the bright, off-the-rails young thing helping to usher in the new age of sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll. She was applauded for operating with no filter, beloved for doing all the dope, screwing all the guys, and shrieking and cussing about her repressed middle-class childhood.

JANIS’S SIBLINGS, LINDA AND MICHAEL, saw a different side of their sister. In 1992 Linda, who has a master’s in psychology and a Ph.D. in education, would publish her own memoir—Love, Janis—in an effort to rehabilitate her sister’s image. They insisted she wasn’t just a “ballsy mama” but a kind, normal girl who’d been influenced by a bad crowd. And, you know, they weren’t crazy or in denial.

Until her death, Janis faithfully wrote long, very sweet letters home. The world’s most cheerful, detailed-oriented summer camper has nothing on Janis when it came to writing letters. She wrote about her gigs, how much money she was making, her apartment, her neighborhood, her new clothes, her dog, George. She included magazine articles from LOOK and Newsweek on the Haight-Ashbury scene, then reassured her family these were mere distortions. The golly gee willikers tone is unmistakable. In a letter dated April 1967 she wrote, “…guess who was in town last week—Paul McCartney!!!! (he’s a Beatle).”

In the same missive, she cagily breaks the news about her infamous black-and-white topless portrait, taken by photographer Bob Seidemann. In it, her chest is festooned with many beaded necklaces, styled so that one nipple pokes out coyly between the strands. “Also, they’re bringing out a poster of me!” she writes chattily. “Maybe you’ve read in Time magazine about the personality posters. They’re big, very big photographs, Jean Harlow, Einstein, Belmondo, Dylan, & Joplin. Yes, folks, it’s me wearing a sequined cape, thousands of strings of beads & topless. But it barely shows because of the beads. Very dramatic photograph & I look really beautiful!! If it wouldn’t embarrass you, I’ll send you one. I’m thrilled!! I can be Haight-Ashbury’s first pin-up.”

Bob Seidemann, weighing in on the experience of being on the other side of the camera, saw it a bit differently. He found Janis to be aggressive and kind of a pain in the ass. During the shoot, she was naked from the waist up, mostly covered by the sequined cape. Throughout, she kept yowling, “Oh motherfucker! I want to take my fuckin’ clothes off.” She stripped, even though Seidemann told her to keep her clothes on. Later, she laid into him because she wasn’t seeing any money from the sale of the poster. “You motherfucker, you’re taking all the money I’m making for you.”

Which one was the “real” Janis? Why can’t it be both? Or many things, for that matter. Why couldn’t she be a sweet daughter; kind sister; witty, compassionate friend; vulnerable lover; defiant genius; complicated, difficult woman? Why can’t we all be that?

IN THE SUMMER AND FALL OF 1967, Big Brother played a number of gigs, including the Summer Solstice festival in Golden Gate Park (a benefit for the Free Clinic, and also for the Zen Mountain Center). Groovy peace and love vibes notw­ithst­anding, the band was not getting along. By “not getting along,” I mean the guys were put out because since Monterey, word on the street was that the band was holding Janis back.

In February 1968, they made their East Coast debut at Anderson Theater on the Lower East Side. Janis was a basket case, intimidated by the thought of playing New York. She fretted that they would just be written off as a gang of “street freaks” from the Haight.^*7

In her satin, beads, feathers, and bracelets, Janis brought it. Her scorching, vocal cord–shredding rendition of “Piece of My Heart” had people on their feet. They rushed the stage, which she encouraged and flat-out adored. She gave four encores that night. The New York Times gave the show a rave, writing, “The lines can start forming now, for Miss Joplin is as remarkable a new pop music talent as has surfaced in years.” Two weeks later, after successful gigs in Boston, Providence, and Detroit, they returned to New York to play the Fillmore East. Lines had formed, snaking down the street for many blocks—a crush of people there to see Janis. Not long after that, the group was booked and billed as Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company. (You can imagine how well that went over.)

Also in 1968, Janis spent some of her newly acquired rock star moola on a 1965 Porsche. She paid $3,500 for it, and commissioned Big Brother roadie Dave Richards, who obviously possessed some serious art chops in addition to his music equipment–hauling skills, to do a custom psychedelic paint job. Richards covered the Porsche with turquoise, orange, and pink flowers, butterflies, astrological signs, mushrooms, skulls, and even a portrait of the band. The car instantly became as famous as its driver; in 2014, it sold at auction for $1.76 million.

IN THE FALL OF 1968—despite the fact that Cheap Thrills was a massive hit—Janis’s manager, Albert Grossman, announced her plan to leave the band. Hastily, a new band was tossed together. It was called the Kozmic Blues Band, but there was nothing “kozmic” about it. Not their fault, really. Janis was 25, and didn’t have a managerial bone in her body—something no one really thought about before handing her four musicians for whom backing her was merely a gig. Also, the whole of her musical education consisted of getting up in front of a crowd half-crocked and singing her guts out. What was she supposed to do with a bunch of musicians she hardly knew? And what were they supposed to do with her?

In February 1969, all four performances at the Fillmore East were sold out. The mainstream press was there, as well as Mike Wallace and a 60 Minutes camera crew. The band wasn’t terrible, but Janis was. Rolling Stone, in a cover story, called her the “Judy Garland of Rock” and declared her performance “stiff and preordained.” In March, she appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, and played Fillmore West to a hometown crowd. San Francisco Chronicle writer Ralph Gleason said she should “go back to Big Brother, if they’ll have her.” The Rolling Stones and Tina Turner played Madison Square Garden on Thanksgiving 1969. Janis was pressed into doing a duet with Tina, which she managed to botch, being too drunk to stand up.

Only a year earlier, Janis had been fresh and original: the glorious, anarchistic embodiment of the age. Sexual and rebellious, her energy untamed, she was like nothing anyone had ever seen. In retrospect, it was probably time for her style to evolve. But she was afraid to change for fear of losing the love of her audience. Instead, she lost her way for a bit. Whenever she felt insecure or overwhelmed, she acted out, swaggering and cussing and stomping around. Really, she could be obnoxious. Once, while interviewing a roadie, she made a big production of squeezing his bicep, then cackling that he didn’t seem strong enough to carry the equipment, much less have sex with her.

In the meantime, now she was famous. Like most people who imagine the arrival of fame will bring joy, Janis was confused, and sometimes flat-out pissed off, that celebrity brought more problems than it solved.^*8 Whenever her entourage went out to eat and drink, Janis felt obligated to pick up the bill, then would complain bitterly that people were taking advantage of her. She bought a house in Larkspur, in Marin County, and installed a wet bar made of redwood burl, a sunken tub, and a dog door for her beloved George. Junkies and hangers-on came and stayed. She would fly into a rage and kick them all out, then weep with loneliness. She expected everyone to know who she was, and when they didn’t, she panicked that her career was on the skids. Once, she called Bob Dylan just because she could. “Hey Bob, it’s Janis!” she roared. “Janis, who?” he said. She wept. Whether alone or in the middle of one of her raucous parties, she knocked back a quart of tequila; because it wasn’t her signature Southern Comfort, now largely a publicity prop, she believed she was doing better.

During lucid moments Janis admitted to friends that she was in deep trouble. She knew she needed help, that her drinking—there was never any mention of drug use; everyone who knew her believed she’d kicked the needle long ago—was affecting her voice and ability to perform. This sort of clarity never lasted. There would always be someone crashing through the door, sliding into the booth beside her, or skipping backstage with a bottle of something, and she would never say no. On tour she developed a routine: Arise at a respectable hour, drink until passing out in the afternoon, “rest” until showtime, sober up enough to perform, rest afterward by getting drunk.

In January 1970, Janis’s circumstances improved. It’s something you learn as you get older: If you can just hang on, things will eventually get better. The Kozmic Blues Band disbanded, replaced by the Full Tilt Boogie Band. She was better with this setup; her voice was maturing. It was richer, more nuanced. Unfortunately, her shows were less electrifying than they’d been in the past, and also less well attended.

This had more to do with changing times than with Janis, but she took it as implicit criticism anyway. For being an emblem of the 1960s, Janis wasn’t especially political—by which I mean not at all. The moment she stood up in her 11th-grade social studies class and spoke out on behalf of civil rights was her first and last overtly political act. She paid almost no attention to what was going on in the world: quite a feat in an era when presidential candidates and famous civil rights leaders were being assassinated right and left, and pregnant actresses were being slaughtered in their fancy homes by hippie lunatics.

Closer to home, if you were a rock star, was Altamont. On December 6, 1969, at the Altamont Speedway Free Festival, four people died. One drowned in an irrigation ditch, two were killed in a hit-and-run, and audience member Meredith Hunter was stabbed by a Hells Angel as he tried to climb onstage. The fallout was a souring of the concert scene. Concert promoters became strict about crowd behavior, forbidding singers to urge the frenzied audience to stomp and dance in the aisles or rush the stage. At outdoor venues, barriers appeared between the front row and the stage, in an effort to maintain order. But Janis loved nothing more than getting people stirred up to the brink of rioting. Managers, publicists, and minders would beg her to tone it down. “I’m not gonna tell ’em to get out there and dance, but if they do it, man, I won’t say a word! If they break those barriers, I ain’t tellin’ ’em to sit down. I won’t! I won’t!”

The genuine, generous side of Janis could still be glimpsed now and then. In July she canceled a $15,000 gig to travel to Austin for Ken Threadgill’s 61st birthday party. Threadgill, you remember, supported her and believed in her when she was a weirdo and would-be ugliest man on campus. She had come straight from Honolulu, where she and the Boogie Band had delivered a solid, seasoned performance. She serenaded Ken Threadgill with an acoustic version of “Me and Bobby McGee” and presented him with a gift from Hawaii. “…I brought him one thing I knew he’d like,” she said. “A good lei.” She dropped the flowers around his neck and laughed girlishly.

IN THE FIRST DAYS OF OCTOBER 1970, Janis was relatively happy. Things were going well, in fact. She and the band had been in the Sunset Sound recording studio in Los Angeles, finishing up the new album, Pearl. On October 1, she laid down a sly, a cappella version of a new song, “Mercedes Benz.” She was in good spirits. She had a new boyfriend, Seth Morgan, with whom she was talking marriage.

On the last night of her life, she listened to an instrumental track for a song called “Buried Alive in the Blues.” She was invigorated at the thought of laying down the vocal track the next day. At the end of the session she tooled her famous psychedelic Porsche down Sunset to have a drink with a few pals at Barney’s Beanery. She drank two screwdrivers and expressed her joy that the band was coming together and that the new album would most surely be a hit. A little after midnight she returned to her room at the Landmark Hotel, alone.

There are various thoughts about why this particular hit of heroin was fatal. Some say she had not been using at the time, and thus had failed to build up the proper tolerance. Some say this particular smack was especially pure, and thus potent.

During the early morning hours of October 4, she died.

Janis was a pioneer of difficult womanhood for a generation who’d been taught that above all a woman must be nice, polite, and well behaved. She put the music world on notice that a female singer didn’t have to be angelic, but could be nasty, powerful, and ballsy. Her life was not easy, and she was often her own worst enemy. But she demonstrated that women don’t need to constantly be policing their feelings, that being alive means being on speaking terms with every dark corner of our hearts. That we should not be afraid to let it all out. Some might call that difficult. I call it being human.

^*1The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Quicksilver Messenger Service were also practicing in old Victorians that were on the verge of being condemned, making the neighbors’ ears bleed as they figured out their sound.

^*2What about Grace Slick, you may wonder. I don’t know what to tell you. She wasn’t Janis.

^*3In time-honored fashion, Janis lied to her mother, telling her she was spending the night at a girlfriend’s house.

^*4This may not have been his real name, not surprising given all that would transpire.

^*5I cannot begin to imagine what this sounds like; please use your imagination.

^*6I seem to have a lot of friends who miss certain things about the 1960s and ’70s: the music, the flowing attire, the fact that no one had answering machines, much less more advanced technology. No one misses the word “ball.”

^*7She wasn’t being oversensitive. Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention refused to play at Monterey Pop because Zappa thought the Bay Area bands were subpar.

^*8A question for another time is why everyone wants to be famous when it so rarely ends well.