JANIS
JOPLIN
The Cosmic
Giggle must have been in full-tilt hysterics on January 19, 1943 when the
oil refinery seaport of Port Arthur, Texas, won the heavenly crapshoot as
the birthplace of rock & roll's first female superstar, Janis Joplin.
In retrospect, Port Arthur's most famous daughter both defied and defined
the Texas town that raised, rejected, reviled, then ultimately rejoiced in
her brief, mad existence. In a way that she never would have admitted then
(but might now), Port Arthur made Janis Joplin what she was -- a more
tolerant, nurturing atmosphere might have diluted the fire that burned
within her.
And that fire is what
everyone knows about Janis Joplin: her incendiary stage performances, her
masochistic tango with the bottle, her tumultuous love life, and her fatal
dalliance with drugs. Janis Joplin's musical legacy is also a part of
Austin's history -- how the dishevelled folkie/UT student playing at west
campus hootenannies and Kenneth Threadgill's bar on North Lamar took off
for San Francisco with some other Texans in the Sixties and changed the
history of rock & roll.
On the surface, she
seemed the perfect icon for stardom in the late Sixties: She fit no
standard of beauty yet exuded a raw sensuality that mirrored a movement
which rejected societal standards by creating its own. When Janis Joplin
arrived in San Francisco, in 1966, the year before the Summer of Love, its
music scene was already in a nascent, post-Beat hippie whirl. Young people
flocked to the Bay area as if to Mecca by the thousands, searching for
identity, reason, justification, maybe just something as simple as
acceptance. This is the irony of all the great Sixties icons -- Joplin
included: that their desire for acceptance was at the heart of their
rebellion, and that their ultimate embrace by the masses came about
because of this rebellion. The sad part about rebellion, however, is that
it usually follows rejection, and that was something Janis Joplin knew
deep down in her soul.
The Janis Joplin of
legend set the standard for the blues mama image of white female singers.
Blues mamas have to be hard-livin', hard-lovin' and, of course, hard
drinking. But life in the Gulf Coast town was not exactly hard; like much
of the town's population, Janis' father, Seth, worked at the Texaco
refinery and the Joplin’s resided comfortably.
By all accounts, Janis
had a happy childhood, but her entrée into womanhood was less than
graceful. As a teenager, she tended to gain weight, her soft
child-blond hair turned brown and unruly, and she developed acne that
would scar as well as shape her looks and personality. She became an
unwilling member of an elite club of misfits, a woman who avoided mirrors
because of pitted reflections, knowing that the scars underneath caused by
the ones on the surface are the most painfully inflicted. Rejected and
made fun of by most of her peers, she sought and found solace in the works
of other outcasts -- writers, musicians, artists. When your society
rejects you, you do the obvious: You reject it.
For kids in East Texas' "Golden Triangle" -- Beaumont, Port Arthur, and Orange -- the promised land of booze and blues lay just across the Louisiana border. While the big-city sound of Bobby Bland and gritty rhythm of Lightnin' Hopkins filtered in from Houston, 90 miles away, Slim Harpo, Clifton Chenier, and swamp pop royalty like Tommy McLain, Rod Bernard, and Dale & Grace reigned in the roadhouses and dance halls of Cajun and swamp country that ran off Highway 90 between Lafayette and the Lone Star border. From the moment it crossed the Sabine River, that highway was lined with clubs and juke joints with names like the Big Oaks, Buster's, the Stateline -- joints that attracted the locals as well as nearby Texans.
Clandestine
forays over the border -- called going "on the line" -- were a
rite of passage, in those days, and one that Joplin was exposed to early
on because she ran with the boys in high school. On weekends, they would
load up and drive across the state line where the brass-heavy bands were
tearing up the clubs. Gulf Coast bands like the Boogie Kings and Jerry
LaCroix & the Counts specialized in the hits of the day and infused
their sets with raucous dirty dancing and hip-grinding ballads. These
bands might be dismissed as cover bands today but back then they
functioned not only as living jukeboxes, but also as keepers of the flame.
At this strip of clubs across the border, American rock & roll
resonated endlessly in the night, its bluesy beats and frantic rhythms
greased by the free-flowing booze; Texas drinking age was 21, Louisiana's
18.
The rowdy blues Joplin
saw live in Louisiana were a marked contrast to the classical music she
was raised on in Port Arthur and the omnipresent country music found in
Texas. Jazzmeisters like Dave Brubeck and folksingers like Odetta were
cultivated by her circle of friends, who likewise found the
question-authority philosophy of the Beats palatable. Her knowledge and
quest for understanding inspired her to not just appreciate but to learn
the music, taking up guitar as well as
singing. By the time she graduated Thomas Jefferson High School in 1960,
she was imbued with an unusually well-rounded knowledge of music as well
as a desire to explore its core.
What happened to Janis
Joplin after she graduated high school is well known: College courses at
Lamar Tech; a lifestyle-expanding trip to Venice, California; more college
courses back in Port Arthur where she played coffeehouses; a mid-summer
1962 trip to Austin resulting in her move here. From Austin, her life is
even better documented. She played the folk circuit for a while locally
but left Austin for San Francisco and, briefly, New York. Burnt out and
drug-weary, she returned to Port Arthur briefly in the summer of 1965 and
tried unsuccessfully to conform to the straight life. Her rebellious
nature reared its head during a trip to Austin that fall; she stayed and
never returned home to Port Arthur. Seven months later, she left for San
Francisco. It was June 1966. Janis Joplin had finally gotten out.
On October 4, 1970, four
years and four months after she bolted from Austin, Janis Joplin overdosed
in her room at the Landmark Hotel in Los Angeles, having scored a
particularly pure batch of heroin. Her career had been virtually meteoric,
but her ascent as the first goddess of rock was doused by her sad, lonely
death, which followed that of Jimi Hendrix, who'd died two weeks earlier.
Jim Morrison would die within a year, and whatever glow the Sixties had
was finally dimmed for good.
What would Janis Joplin
have been like today, Undoubtedly mellower; likely dried out and cleaned
up, because if she wasn't alcoholic at the time, she surely would have
been soon. The toll would not have shown well on her face, but blues mamas
are supposed to look the part, anyway. By dying young, she is frozen at
the pinnacle of her success -- brilliant and shimmering in the easy grace
of audience acceptance and approval. She is, forever, raw iron soul.
by Margaret Moser
