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From the Gulf Coast of Texas to the San Francisco Underground, Janis Joplin was the Queen of Blues when the Blues came from the Heart and Soul and Life or Death hung in the balance. It has been forty-five years since Janis died, at just 27 years old, when the world was just beginning to sit up and take notice. The following is her biography from A&E Network.
Bio. - A&E Network
Janis Joplin Biography
Singer (1943–1970)
Singer Janis Joplin rose to fame in the late 1960s and was
known for her powerful, blues-inspired vocals. She died of an accidental drug
overdose in 1970.
Synopsis
Born on January 19, 1943, in Port Arthur, Texas, Janis Joplin developed a
love of music at an early age, but her career didn't take off until she joined
the band Big Brother and the Holding Company in 1966. Their 1968 album,
Cheap
Thrills, was a huge hit. However, friction between
Joplin and the band prompted her to part ways
with Big Brother soon after. Known for her powerful, blues-inspired vocals,
Joplin released her first
solo effort,
I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama!, in 1969. The
album received mixed reviews, but her second project,
Pearl
(1971), released after
Joplin's
death, was a huge success. The singer died of an accidental overdose on October
4, 1970, at age 27.
Wild Child
Janis Lyn Joplin was born on January 19, 1943, in
Port Arthur, Texas.
Breaking new ground for women in rock music,
Joplin rose to fame in the late 1960s and
became known for her powerful, blues-inspired vocals. She grew up in a small
Texas town known for its
connections to the oil industry with a skyline and dotted with oil tanks and
refineries. For years,
Joplin
struggled to escape from this confining community, and spent even longer to
trying to overcome her memories of her difficult years there.
Developing a love for music at an early age,
Joplin sang in her church choir as a child
and showed some promise as a performer. She was an only child until the age of
6, when her sister, Laura, was born. Four years later, her brother, Michael,
arrived.
Joplin
was a good student and fairly popular until around the age of 14, when some
side effects of puberty started to kick in. She got acne and gained some
weight.
At
Thomas Jefferson
High School,
Joplin began to rebel. She eschewed the
popular girls' fashions of the late 1950s, often choosing to wear men's shirts
and tights, or short skirts. Joplin, who liked to stand out from the crowd,
became the target of some teasing as well as a popular subject in the school's
rumor mill. She was called a "pig" by some, while others said that
she was sexually promiscuous.
Joplin
eventually developed a group of guy friends who shared her interest in music
and the Beat Generation, which rejected the standard norms and emphasized
creative expression (Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg were two of the Beat
movement's leading figures).
Musically, Janis Joplin and her friends gravitated toward blues and jazz,
admiring such artists as Lead Belly.
Joplin
was also inspired by legendary blues vocalists Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey and
Odetta, an early leading figure in the folk music movement. The group
frequented local working-class bars in the nearby town of
Vinton,
Louisiana. By
her senior year of high school,
Joplin
had developed a reputation as a ballsy, tough-talking girl who like to drink
and be outrageous.
After graduating from high school,
Joplin
enrolled at Lamar State College of Technology in the neighboring town of
Beaumont,
Texas.
There, she devoted more time to hanging out and drinking with friends than to
her studies. At the end of her first semester at Lamar,
Joplin left the school. She went on to attend
Port Arthur College,
where she took some secretarial courses, before moving to
Los Angeles in the summer of 1961. This first
effort to break away from wasn't a success, however, and
Joplin
thus returned to
Port Arthur
for a time.
In the summer of 1962,
Joplin fled to the
University of
Texas
at
Austin,
where she studied art. In
Austin,
Joplin began performing
at folksings—casual musical gatherings where anyone can perform—on campus and
at Threadgill's, a gas station turned bar, with the Waller Creek Boys, a
musical trio with whom she was friends. With her forceful, gutsy singing style,
Joplin amazed
many audience members. She was unlike any other white female vocalist at the
time (folk icons like Joan Baez and Judy Collins were known for their gentle
sound).
In January 1963,
Joplin ditched school to
check out the emerging music scene in
San
Francisco with friend Chet Helms. But this stint out
west, like her first, proved to be unsuccessful, as
Joplin struggled to make it as a singer in
the Bay Area. She played some gigs, including a side-stage performance at the
1963 Monterey Folk Festival—but her career didn't gain much traction. Joplin
then spent some time in New York City, where she hoped to have better luck
getting her career off the ground, but her drinking and drug use (she'd begun
regularly using speed, or amphetamine, among other drugs) there proved to be
detrimental to her musical aspirations. In 1965, she left
San Francisco and returned home in an effort
to get herself together again.
Back in
Texas,
Joplin took a break from her music and her
hard-partying lifestyle, and dressed conservatively, putting her long, often
messy hair into a bun and doing everything else she could to appear
straight-laced. But the conventional life was not for her, and her desire to
pursue her musical dreams wouldn't remain submerged for long.
Joplin slowly returned to performing, and in
May 1966, was recruited by friend Travis Rivers to audition for a new
psychedelic rock band based in
San
Francisco, Big Brother and the Holding Company. At the
time, the group was managed by another longtime friend of Joplin's, Chet Helms.
Big Brother, whose members included James Gurley, Dave Getz, Peter Albin and
Sam Andrew, was part of the burgeoning
San
Francisco music scene of the late 1960s; among the
other bands involved in this scene were the Grateful Dead.
Big Brother
Joplin blew
the band away during her audition, and was quickly offered membership into the
group. In her early days with Big Brother, she sang only a few songs and played
the tambourine in the background. But it wasn't long before
Joplin assumed a bigger role in the band, as
Big Brother developed quite a following in the Bay Area. Their appearance at
the now legendary Monterey Pop Festival in 1967—specifically their version of
"Ball and Chain" (originally made famous by R&B legend Big Mama
Thornton) brought the group further acclaim. Most of the praise, however,
focused on
Joplin's
incredible vocals. Fueled by heroin, amphetamines and the bourbon she drank
straight from the bottle during gigs, Joplin's unrestrained sexual style and
raw, gutsy sound mesmerized audiences—and all of this attention caused some
tension between Joplin and her bandmates.
After hearing
Joplin at
Monterey, Columbia Records President Clive
Davis wanted to sign the band. Albert Grossman, who already managed Bob Dylan,
the Band, and Peter, Paul & Mary, later signed on as the band's manager,
and was able to get them out of another record deal they'd signed earlier with
Mainstream Records.
While their recordings for Mainstream never found much of an audience, Big
Brother's first album for
Columbia,
Cheap Thrills (1968), was a huge hit. While the album was wildly
successful—quickly becoming a certified gold record with songs like "Piece
of My Heart" and "Summertime"—creating it had been a challenging
process, causing even more problems between Joplin and band's other members. (The
album was produced by John Simon, who'd had the band do take after take in an
attempt to create a technically perfect sound.)
Cheap Thrills helped solidify
Joplin's
reputation as a unique, dynamic, bluesy rock singer. Despite Big Brother's
continued success,
Joplin
was becoming frustrated with group, feeling that she was being held back
professionally.
Joplin
struggled with her decision to leave Big Brother, as her bandmates had been
like a family to her, but she eventually decided to part ways with the group.
She played with Big Brother for the last time in December 1968.
Following a historic performance at
Woodstock
(August 1969),
Joplin
released her first solo effort,
I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama!,
in September 1969, with Kozmic Blues Band. Some of the project's most memorable
songs were "Try (Just a Little Bit Harder)" and "To Love
Somebody," a cover of a Bee Gees tune. But
Kozmic Blues received
mixed reviews, with some media outlets criticizing
Joplin personally. Feeling uniquely pressured
to prove herself as a female solo artist in a male-dominated industry, the
criticism caused distress for
Joplin.
"That was a pretty heavy time for me," she later said in an interview
with Howard Smith of
The Village Voice. "It was really important,
you know, whether people were going to accept me or not." (Joplin's
interview with Smith was her last; it took place on September 30, 1970, just
four days before her death.) Outside of music,
Joplin appeared to be struggling with alcohol
and drugs, including an addiction to heroin.
Joplin's
next album would be her most successful, but, tragically, also her last. She
recorded
Pearl
with the Full Tilt Boogie Band and wrote two of its songs, the powerful,
rocking "Move Over" and "Mercedes Benz," a gospel-styled
send-up of consumerism.
Tragic
Death and Legacy
Following a long struggle with substance abuse,
Joplin
died from an accidental heroin overdose on October 4, 1970, at a hotel in
Hollywood's Landmark
Hotel. Completed by
Joplin's producer,
Pearl was released
in 1971 and quickly became a hit. The single "Me and Bobby McGee,"
written by Kris Kristofferson, a former love of
Joplin's, reached the top of the charts.
Despite her untimely death, Janis Joplin's songs continue to attract new
fans and inspire performers. Numerous collections of her songs have been
released over the years, including
In Concert (1971) and
Box of
Pearls (1999). In recognition of her significant accomplishments,
Joplin was posthumously
inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, and honored with a
Recording Academy Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammy Awards in 2005.
Dubbed the "first lady of rock 'n' roll,"
Joplin has been the subject of several books
and documentaries, including
Love, Janis (1992), written by sister Laura
Joplin. That book was adapted into a play of the same title. Amy Berg’s
documentary,
Janis: Little Girl Blue, premiered at the Toronto Film
Festival in September 2015.
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