13 Aug JANIS JOPLIN IS FINALLY IMMORTAL – Songwriter and friend Johanna Hall on the debt we owe the rock goddess
Esquire.com
By Johanna Hall on August 13, 2014
Janis Joplin is getting a Forever stamp. She’d have liked that, with her fierce ambition, her fear of being forgotten, and the creative striving that drove her brief career. She set an example for all the powerful, complicated performers who came after her, who were unafraid to unleash their talent into the world and didn’t fit into a ready-made mold. Janis certainly didn’t fit the image of the pretty girl singer. Instead she roared on stage at Woodstock 45 years ago this month, expressing deep hunger and psychic pain in an extravagant performance that catapulted her into the national consciousness.
The last time I saw Janis was August 8, 1970, at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, New York. Two months later she would be dead. I was standing in the wings watching my songwriting partner and then-husband, John Hall, soundcheck for his opening-act slot. The stage door opened, and in a slant of afternoon sun, Janis entered wearing civilian clothes, her hair loose around her shoulders. She smiled with her blue eyes when she saw me and came over to give me a hug hello. We stood and talked of inconsequential things. Then she sighed, “Well, I’ve got to go upstairs and put on Janis Joplin.” She gave her mouth a wry twist. “I’ve got her in a box.”
I smiled back. We both knew she meant not only her trademark feathers and glittery garb but also the colorful persona she’d created: the hard-living psychedelic blues mama, with a bottle of Southern Comfort in her hand.
Janis had me from the first moment I saw her. It was the spring of 1968 and John and I went to check out Big Brother and The Holding Company, a new band from San Francisco with a “chick singer.” Wailing as she ran on to the stage of Generation, a basement rock club on West 8th Street in New York City that later became Jimi Hendrix’s studio, Electric Ladyland, Janis’s voice and persona filled the room with such power that I was an instant convert.
Early in 1969, I became a rock critic for the Village Voice. All the other critics were men, save one or two. When Janis left Big Brother to go out on her own, the press hated her. She was on a star trip, they said, counter to the hippie ideals of love and brotherhood. Male musicians weren’t treated that way. Steve Winwood went from group to group without accusations. I was one of the few writers who saw through the double standard. When she released her first solo album I Got Dem Ol’ Kozmic Blues Again Mama!, I countered the backlash with a rave review, going so far as to call her my generation’s Judy Garland, our Edith Piaf.
After my review, Janis reached out to me through her publicist, Myra Friedman, who called to say, “Janis wants to meet you.”
Myra explained that Janis was feeling wounded and insecure because of the backlash. She was afraid her success wouldn’t last and she would fail. Myra told me Janis had asked her manager, Albert Grossman, “Will you give me a job in the office when no one wants me anymore?”
I pitched a profile to my editor and he approved it, so it was arranged for me to meet Janis at her hotel. I’d been given her room number since rock stars never registered under their own names. At the appointed time, I walked to the genteelly aging Fifth Avenue Hotel. I took the elevator up and knocked on her door. And knocked until it dawned that I should have called from the lobby. Embarrassed, I turned to go back down when the door opened. Janis stood there wrapped in a bedspread, nothing else. I’d woken her. She invited me into her suite.
She’d used her scarves, necklaces, and feather boas to decorate the rooms, draping lamps and mirrors to make the place her own. After she dressed, we sat at the foot of her bed facing a mirror. It didn’t seem odd to talk into a mirror, to speak to a reflected image of the other, my own blue eyes looking into the reflection of hers in the dim light of the room.
We spent 12 hours together that day. We went out into Greenwich Village, walked MacDougal Street, popped into shops, and bonded over dinner in a Mexican restaurant. As she revealed more of herself, we became equals, sisters under the skin, sharing our insecurities. She confessed that she’d been strung out on heroin but had been clean a little while. Albert had sent her somewhere to get clean and she was going to try to stay on the path. But she said fervently, describing the high, “There’s nothing you wouldn’t do for that peace!”
After that, Janis would come by our apartment whenever she was in town. I never knew which Janis I’d see when I opened the door. Sometimes she looked like a tired waitress in a diner in her native Texas; and at other times, she was a radiant siren. She had unusual skin, large-pored and translucent. Everything showed. She was funny and smart and perceptive when she was sober.
It amazed me that Janis could get drunk one night and do it again the next. She had no brakes, no governor on her excesses. At the same time she had a strong work ethic and took her responsibility to her audience seriously. She said she considered it her job to “get them off.”
She was always on the lookout for new material. John played her some of his songs and she liked the music but not the lyrics. So one night, standing in the doorway to leave, she suggested, “Why don’t the two of you write me a song?”
She looked at me and said, “You’re a woman, you’re a writer. Write me a song!”
“Half Moon,” written by John and me, was released on the posthumous Pearl album and was the B-side of Janis’s number-one single, “Me and Bobby McGee.” After that John and I continued to collaborate and wrote hits for John’s band Orleans, as well as songs for other artists, including Bonnie Raitt, James Taylor, Linda Ronstadt, Ricky Skaggs, the Doobie Brothers, and Chet Atkins. Our catalog of songs has been certified by BMI for over 10 million airplays worldwide.
Because of Janis, I went from journalist to lyricist. She changed my life and career by drafting me into the male-dominated music business and showing me a path to creative and financial independence. She was as generous with her encouragments as she was with her performances, “leaning in” until toppled by the weight of her pain and excesses, but not before she influenced a generation of artists. Her legacy is visible in rock singers from Eddie Vedder to Adam Lambert and Katy Perry to Lana Del Rey. We all owe her a debt.
The Janis Joplin Forever stamp is now on sale, joining her with the likes of Elvis Presley, Rosa Parks, and next year, Steve Jobs. These postage-stamp icons changed our culture with their grit and individualism. Like them, Janis captured our imaginations indelibly and left us transformed. I’m glad the U.S. Post Office used a photograph, not an illustration. The stamp features an image of a triumphant Janis, in round rose-colored glasses, feathers woven into her flowing hair, arm adorned in silver bracelets. But I don’t want to reduce her to an image, to put her in a box.
There is already talk about a 50th anniversary Woodstock reunion. But it’s hard to imagine anyone who can duplicate the visceral power of Janis’s performance. Janis was complicated and flawed, always striving, always longing for what she didn’t have. That may be what made her so charismatic, so close to the mystery, as she worked consciously to give of herself and fill her own emptiness. Maybe Janis never found what she was looking for in life. But 44 years after her death, her place in rock and roll history and our culture is sealed.