Janis Joplin has been the subject of a number of biographies. She is an irresistible topic after all. A rising star, a trailblazer for women in rock whose passion and emotion were evident in every song she sang, she lived hard and died young. Janis performed at Monterey and Woodstock, palled around with other musical greats of the ‘60s and died of a heroin overdose while at the height of her artistic powers. Hers is a story of triumph and tragedy combined. In this biography, Linda George-Warren gives the reader a picture of Janis as a young woman committed to her art and driven to achieve fame, while at the same time trying to get the attention and love of her family and maybe one good man or woman. By interviewing Janis’ family, friends, and fellow artists and examining her correspondence, Warren-George shows us a Janis who was smart, funny and vulnerable.
Warren-George starts by giving a little background on Janis’ parents Seth and Dorothy. They were both well educated people and Seth was something of an intellectual in a town (Port Arthur, TX) where intellectuals were scarce. As the first child, Janis got a lot of attention, especially from her father. She was a very good student and even skipped grades when she was in elementary school. Trouble began for her in high school where her beatnik interests and way of dressing set her apart. Being different is always tough, but in 1950s America I think it was especially rough. Even the few good female friends she had could be cruel. Janis took to hanging around with a small group of boys who had similar interests, and she was known for being wild and daring. As a result, she got an undeserved reputation for being promiscuous and was mercilessly bullied at school. Her grades fell and by the time she graduated, she really just wanted to get away from Port Arthur, preferably to California.
Over the next few years, Janis was a bit untethered. She tried community college as well as the University of Texas in Austin. Her attention to her studies was sporadic, but she did become attached to the beatnik/folkie community, performing at coffee houses and roadhouses around Austin. Janis also had a brief stint in California where she developed a drug problem and was living pretty rough. Her parents seem to have had some idea of what was going on. After coming home, cleaning up and trying school again, Janis decided to give up on singing and focus on becoming what young women were expected to be at that time. She was even engaged to a man who was dishonest with her about his prospects and intentions. It’s painful to read about this part of her life, where she tries to be what she is not and is deeply in love with someone who is going to hurt her.
Janis’ attempt at living what was considered a normal, typical, appropriate kind of life for a young woman in the early ‘60s was doomed to fail, and she eventually returned to live performing, gaining positive press and a following in Texas. She and a friend eventually moved back to California, to San Francisco, where she would become the singer for a new band, Big Brother and the Holding Company. Warren-George has a lot of detailed information about this point in Janis’ life, much of it coming from people who lived in San Francisco and knew Janis. Big Brother became a kind of surrogate family for Janis; she and her bandmates had good rapport and ran the band as a democracy. Problems arose from rampant drug use among band members combined with Janis becoming the breakout star; she was more famous than the band itself, and people in the music industry tried to convince Janis that she should dump Big Brother and find better musicians if she wanted to make it.
What I find interesting about Janis is that she did want to make it in the music business. She was ambitious and pretty savvy about the business of making music. In her letters to her parents throughout this period, she doesn’t hide the fact that what she wants is fame but she felt conflicted about leaving Big Brother. Janis had a fear of losing people close to her; she seems to have wanted to hang on to those who mattered in her life — her parents and siblings, her bandmates, lovers, etc. Part of Janis was always grasping at this elusive success and happiness, while another part of her awaited the inevitable “Saturday Night Swindle.” The Saturday Night Swindle was a concept that Janis got from her father, and what it essentially said was that all your hard work is useless in the end. You think that if you work hard all week, you get to enjoy your weekend, but life gets in the way and you’re screwed out of it time and again.
This need for family, for love, and for fame, as well as the conviction that somehow it was all going to fall apart somehow fed into Janis’ self-destructive behaviors with alcohol and drugs. Just when it seemed that things were going her way professionally and personally, she would fall back into using. Reading about it, when you know how it ends for her, is just so sad. Janis Joplin was a brilliant artist and a good person. Her love and devotion to her family is quite touching and might surprise people who only know her as a bawdy blues singer and drug user. Holly George-Warren’s research for this biography is exhaustive and impressive; she is both knowledgeable and respectful of Janis. Her death at such a young age when she was finishing up her album Pearl feels like an even greater loss to me now.