Janis Joplin performs Piece Of My Heart 1967

About Janis Joplin (From Rolling Stone Magazine) Singer Janis Joplin was perhaps the premier blues-influenced singer of the '60s, and certainly one of the biggest female stars of her time. Even before her death, Janis Joplin tough blues-mama image only barely covered her vulnerability. The publicity concerning Janis Joplin's sex life and problems with alcohol and drugs made her something of a legend. In recent years, periodic attempts to recast her life and work within the context of feminism have met with mixed results, and of her deceased contemporaries (Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, et al.), she is perhaps the least well known to younger audiences.

Born into a comfortable middle-class family, Joplin was a loner by her early teens, developing a taste for blues and folk music; soon she retreated into poetry and painting. She ran away from home at age 17 and began singing in clubs in Houston and Austin, Texas, to earn money to finance a trip to California. By 1965, she was singing folk and blues in bars in San Francisco and Venice, California; had dropped out of several colleges; and was drawing unemployment checks. She returned to Austin in 1966 to sing in a country & western band, but within a few months a friend of San Francisco impresario Chet Helms told her about a new band, Big Brother and the Holding Company [see entry], which needed a singer in San Francisco. She returned to California and joined Big Brother.

Joplin and Big Brother stopped the show at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival; Albert Grossman agreed to manage them, and Joplin was on her way to becoming a superstar. After a fairly successful first LP in 1967 with Big Brother, Columbia Records signed the unit; and Cheap Thrills, with the hit single “Piece of My Heart” (#12, 1968), became a gold #1 album. Within a year Joplin had come to overshadow her backing band, and she left Big Brother (though she appears, uncredited, on a few tracks on the group’s 1971 Be a Brother LP), taking only guitarist Sam Andrew with her to form the Kozmic Blues Band.

Joplin toured constantly and made television appearances as a guest with Dick Cavett, Tom Jones, and Ed Sullivan. Finally the Kozmic Blues LP appeared, with gutsy blues-rock tracks like “Try (Just a Little Bit Harder).” During this time she became increasingly involved with alcohol and drugs, eventually succumbing to heroin addiction. Yet her life seemed to be taking a turn for the better with the recording of Pearl. She was engaged to be married and was pleased with the Full Tilt Boogie Band she’d formed for the Pearl album (Pearl was her nickname). On October 4, 1970, her body was found in her room at Hollywood’s Landmark Hotel, face down with fresh puncture marks in her arm. The death was ruled an accidental heroin overdose.

The posthumous Pearl LP (#1, 1971) yielded her #1 hit version of former lover Kris Kristofferson’s “Me and Bobby McGee” and was released with one track, “Buried Alive in the Blues,” missing the vocals Joplin didn’t live to complete. Several more posthumous collections have been released, as well as the 1974 documentary Janis. The 1979 film The Rose, starring Bette Midler, was a thinly veiled account of Joplin’s career. She has since been the subject of several biographies, including Love, Janis, penned by her therapist sister, Laura, and Alice Echols’ 1999 work, Scars of Sweet Paradise. Joplin’s former residence in San Francisco’s Haight district was converted into a drug rehab center in 1999.

...As Published In The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll ((c)2001 Simon & Schuster)

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