Post by Lauren Curtis on Dec 16, 2006 4:49:43 GMT -5
Janis Joplin was born at St. Mary Hospital in Port Arthur, Texas, the daughter of Seth Ward Joplin and Dorothy Bonita East.[1] Her father was an engineer at Texaco. Janis had two younger siblings, Michael and Laura. As a teenager, she befriended a group of outcasts, including Jim Langdon and Grant Lyons, the latter of whom played her the blues for the first time. She began listening to musicians such as Leadbelly, Bessie Smith, Odetta, and Big Mama Thornton and singing in the local choir. While at Thomas Jefferson High School, she was mostly shunned. Among her high school classmates was another individual destined for stardom: future college and NFL coach Jimmy Johnson. In a 1992 Sports Illustrated profile of his career, Johnson claimed that he gave Janis the high school nickname of "beat weeds." Primarily a painter, it was in high school that she first began singing blues and folk music with friends. Joplin graduated from high school in 1960 and attended the University of Texas in Austin, though she never attained a degree. One persistent story is of her being nominated in a Fraternity contest "The Ugliest Man on Campus." She lived in a building commonly refered to as "The Ghetto" which was located at 2812 1/2 Nueces Street. The building has since been torn down and replaced with new apartment buildings. The rent was a mere $40 a month when she lived there.
Cultivating a rebellious manner that could be viewed as "liberated" — the women's liberation movement was still in its infancy at this time — Joplin styled herself in part after her female blues heroines, and in part after the beat poets. She left Texas for San Francisco in 1963, lived in North Beach and in Haight-Ashbury as well as Corte Madera. On 25 June 1964 Janis and Jefferson Airplane guitar player Jorma Kaukonen recorded a number of blues standards at Jorma's Mother's House in San Jose, CA , further accompanied by Margaretta Kaukonen on typewriter (as percussion instrument). These lo-fi sessions included seven tracks: "Typewriter Talk", "Trouble In Mind", "Kansas City Blues", "Hesitation Blues", "Nobody Knows You When You're Down And Out", "Daddy, Daddy, Daddy" and "Long Black Train Blues", and were later released as the Bootleg Album The Typewriter Tape.
Around this time her drug use began to increase, and she acquired a reputation as a "speed freak" and occasional heroin user. She also used other intoxicants. She was a heavy drinker throughout her career, and her trademark beverage was Southern Comfort.
Like many other female singers of the era, Joplin's feisty public image was at odds with her real personality. The book Love, Janis, written by her sister, has done much to further the reassessment of her life and work and reveals the private Joplin to have been a highly intelligent, articulate, shy and sensitive woman who was devoted to her family.
[edit] Big Brother and the Holding Company
Joplin again moved to San Francisco in 1966, where her bluesy vocal style saw her join Big Brother and The Holding Company, a band that was gaining some renown among the nascent hippie community in Haight-Ashbury. The band signed a deal with independent Mainstream Records and recorded an eponymously titled album in 1967. However, the lack of success of their early singles led to the album being withheld until after their subsequent success.
The band's big break came with their performance at the Monterey Pop Festival, which included a version of Big Mama Thornton's "Ball and Chain" and featured a barnstorming vocal by Joplin. (The D.A. Pennebaker documentary Monterey Pop captured Cass Elliot in the crowd silently mouthing "Wow, that's really heavy" during Joplin's performance.) Their 1968 album Cheap Thrills featured more raw emotional performances and together with the Monterey performance, it made Joplin into one of the leading musical stars of the late Sixties. It also produced Joplin's breakthrough hit single, "Piece of My Heart", whose chorus would be borrowed two years later by Alive N Kickin''s one-hit wonder "Tighter, Tighter". Cheap Thrills sold over one million copies in its first month of release. Live at Winterland '68, recorded at the Winterland Ballroom on April 12 and 13, 1968 shows Janis and Big Brother and the Holding Company at the height of their mutual career working through an inspired selection of tracks from their studio albums.
Janis Joplin singing, from the cover of the posthumous album Super Hits
[edit] Solo career and Woodstock
After splitting from Big Brother in December of 1968, she formed a new backup group, modelled on the classic soul revue bands, named the Kozmic Blues Band, which backed her on I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama! (1969: the year she played at Woodstock). The band contained a horn section and many reviewers felt the horns competed with her. The album was certified gold later that year but was a more modest success than Cheap Thrills. The group was indifferently received and soon broke up after a year, and Joplin then formed The Full Tilt Boogie Band. The result was the posthumously released Pearl (1971). It became the biggest selling album of her short career and featured 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.
Among her last public appearances were two broadcasts of The Dick Cavett Show on June 25 and August 3, 1970. On the June 25 show she announced that she would attend her ten-year high school Class reunion, although she admitted that when in high school her schoolmates "laughed me out of class, out of town and out of the state, man". She made it there, but it would be one of the last decisions of her life and it reportedly proved to be a rather unhappy experience for her.[citation needed]
[edit] Death
During the fall 1970 recording sessions for the Pearl album with The Doors and Phil Ochs producer Paul A. Rothchild, Joplin died, aged 27. Her death was caused by an overdose of heroin on October 4, 1970. The last recordings she completed were "Mercedes Benz" and a birthday greeting for John Lennon on October 1, 1970; Lennon, whose birthday was October 9, later told Dick Cavett that her taped greeting arrived at his home after her death.
She was cremated in the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Westwood, California, and her ashes were scattered into the Pacific Ocean. The album Pearl, released six weeks after her death, included a version of Nick Gravenites' song "Buried Alive In The Blues", which was left as an instrumental because Joplin had died before she was able to record her vocal over the backing track
Cultivating a rebellious manner that could be viewed as "liberated" — the women's liberation movement was still in its infancy at this time — Joplin styled herself in part after her female blues heroines, and in part after the beat poets. She left Texas for San Francisco in 1963, lived in North Beach and in Haight-Ashbury as well as Corte Madera. On 25 June 1964 Janis and Jefferson Airplane guitar player Jorma Kaukonen recorded a number of blues standards at Jorma's Mother's House in San Jose, CA , further accompanied by Margaretta Kaukonen on typewriter (as percussion instrument). These lo-fi sessions included seven tracks: "Typewriter Talk", "Trouble In Mind", "Kansas City Blues", "Hesitation Blues", "Nobody Knows You When You're Down And Out", "Daddy, Daddy, Daddy" and "Long Black Train Blues", and were later released as the Bootleg Album The Typewriter Tape.
Around this time her drug use began to increase, and she acquired a reputation as a "speed freak" and occasional heroin user. She also used other intoxicants. She was a heavy drinker throughout her career, and her trademark beverage was Southern Comfort.
Like many other female singers of the era, Joplin's feisty public image was at odds with her real personality. The book Love, Janis, written by her sister, has done much to further the reassessment of her life and work and reveals the private Joplin to have been a highly intelligent, articulate, shy and sensitive woman who was devoted to her family.
[edit] Big Brother and the Holding Company
Joplin again moved to San Francisco in 1966, where her bluesy vocal style saw her join Big Brother and The Holding Company, a band that was gaining some renown among the nascent hippie community in Haight-Ashbury. The band signed a deal with independent Mainstream Records and recorded an eponymously titled album in 1967. However, the lack of success of their early singles led to the album being withheld until after their subsequent success.
The band's big break came with their performance at the Monterey Pop Festival, which included a version of Big Mama Thornton's "Ball and Chain" and featured a barnstorming vocal by Joplin. (The D.A. Pennebaker documentary Monterey Pop captured Cass Elliot in the crowd silently mouthing "Wow, that's really heavy" during Joplin's performance.) Their 1968 album Cheap Thrills featured more raw emotional performances and together with the Monterey performance, it made Joplin into one of the leading musical stars of the late Sixties. It also produced Joplin's breakthrough hit single, "Piece of My Heart", whose chorus would be borrowed two years later by Alive N Kickin''s one-hit wonder "Tighter, Tighter". Cheap Thrills sold over one million copies in its first month of release. Live at Winterland '68, recorded at the Winterland Ballroom on April 12 and 13, 1968 shows Janis and Big Brother and the Holding Company at the height of their mutual career working through an inspired selection of tracks from their studio albums.
Janis Joplin singing, from the cover of the posthumous album Super Hits
[edit] Solo career and Woodstock
After splitting from Big Brother in December of 1968, she formed a new backup group, modelled on the classic soul revue bands, named the Kozmic Blues Band, which backed her on I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama! (1969: the year she played at Woodstock). The band contained a horn section and many reviewers felt the horns competed with her. The album was certified gold later that year but was a more modest success than Cheap Thrills. The group was indifferently received and soon broke up after a year, and Joplin then formed The Full Tilt Boogie Band. The result was the posthumously released Pearl (1971). It became the biggest selling album of her short career and featured 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.
Among her last public appearances were two broadcasts of The Dick Cavett Show on June 25 and August 3, 1970. On the June 25 show she announced that she would attend her ten-year high school Class reunion, although she admitted that when in high school her schoolmates "laughed me out of class, out of town and out of the state, man". She made it there, but it would be one of the last decisions of her life and it reportedly proved to be a rather unhappy experience for her.[citation needed]
[edit] Death
During the fall 1970 recording sessions for the Pearl album with The Doors and Phil Ochs producer Paul A. Rothchild, Joplin died, aged 27. Her death was caused by an overdose of heroin on October 4, 1970. The last recordings she completed were "Mercedes Benz" and a birthday greeting for John Lennon on October 1, 1970; Lennon, whose birthday was October 9, later told Dick Cavett that her taped greeting arrived at his home after her death.
She was cremated in the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Westwood, California, and her ashes were scattered into the Pacific Ocean. The album Pearl, released six weeks after her death, included a version of Nick Gravenites' song "Buried Alive In The Blues", which was left as an instrumental because Joplin had died before she was able to record her vocal over the backing track