Rock Bottom: Dark Moments In Music Babylon (29 page)
Read Rock Bottom: Dark Moments In Music Babylon Online
Authors: Pamela Des Barres
A few days after Brian’s funeral, a beaming Anita Pallenberg announced that she and Keith Richards would soon be parents.
JANIS JOPLIN
W
hen Janis Joplin overdosed on heroin in a tacky Hollywood motel on October 4, 1970, her death was perceived as yet another nail in the free-loving, hedonistic, swinging-sixties coffin. Jimi Hendrix had died a raunchy death two weeks earlier, but somehow Janis’s death was more shocking and unseemly so much more sordid and ignoble, simply because she was a woman. Her high-priestess hippie crown was quickly replaced with a shameful tiara of thorns.
hen Janis Joplin overdosed on heroin in a tacky Hollywood motel on October 4, 1970, her death was perceived as yet another nail in the free-loving, hedonistic, swinging-sixties coffin. Jimi Hendrix had died a raunchy death two weeks earlier, but somehow Janis’s death was more shocking and unseemly so much more sordid and ignoble, simply because she was a woman. Her high-priestess hippie crown was quickly replaced with a shameful tiara of thorns.
Janis Joplin made no apologies. With her passion for the frenetic moment and disdain for outmoded, fictitious values, she took a stab at the shaky status quo every step of the way. Proud and uncompromising, Janis was also a severe addict and lived her short life in a state of heightened, frightened hysteria. Her voice was shredded rapture, a howling plea for release. She shared her pain with us like it was a swig from her blessed bottle of Southern Comfort.
A year before her death Janis told a journalist about her early days in San Francisco: “I just wasn’t serious about anything,” she said. “I was just a young
chick. I just wanted to get it on. I wanted to smoke dope, take dope, lick dope, suck dope, fuck dope, anything I could lay my hands on, I wanted to do it, man.”
chick. I just wanted to get it on. I wanted to smoke dope, take dope, lick dope, suck dope, fuck dope, anything I could lay my hands on, I wanted to do it, man.”
Music kept Janis on the planet for twenty-seven years. She was a doomed diva chock-full of soul. “There’s no patent on soul,” Janis said. “You know how that whole myth of black soul came up? Because white people don’t allow themselves to feel things. Housewives in Nebraska have pain and joy; they’ve got soul if they give into it. It’s hard. And it isn’t all a ball when you do.”
As a young girl Janis Joplin tried to fit all that soul into her stifling middle-class neighborhood in the fading oil-refinery town of Port Arthur, Texas, but instead she felt like an unattractive sore thumb. Her mother dolled Janis up in ruffles and organdy, gave her piano lessons, took her to the First Christian Church every Sunday to instill values. She and her younger siblings, Laura and Michael, went on frequent trips to the library with their father, who encouraged them to read the classics and do something meaningful with their lives. When precocious Janis showed an interest in art, she got lessons with the best art teacher in town, even though it was hard on the Joplin bank account. She was raised right, but in school she asked too many questions, wouldn’t pay attention to the teachers, didn’t show “good sportsmanship.” Highly intelligent and underchallenged, Janis Lyn Joplin was bored.
Janis onstage—the only place she felt safe:“The one thing that felt honest and right.” (HENRY DILTZ)
In 1957 Janis volunteered at the library, painting posters and bulletin boards, eventually appearing in the
Port Arthur News
with the headline LIBRARY JOB
BRINGS OUT TEENAGER’S VERSATILITY. Even though she joined the Junior Reading Circle for Culture, was a member of the glee club, and sang a solo in the Christmas pageant, during her first year of junior high Janis was already questioning authority. She ridiculed Top Forty radio, preferring black soul music, and when she announced her adamant belief in integration, students accused her of being a “nigger lover.” By the tenth grade it was obvious that she would never be a feminine Southern belle—she wasn’t graceful and she wasn’t pretty—so Janis started hanging with the local bad boys, getting an undeserved “reputation.” When she and some male friends took her dad’s car to a New Orleans honky-tonk, crossing invisible color lines to hear the right music, they were stopped by the cops. The incident started hushed whispers about illicit liaisons and barroom brawls and Janis became even more of an outcast. She was loud and crude and spoke her mind. She laughed in a screechy cackle, dressed like a slob to hide her weight, and bit her nails down to the quick. Her complexion had started erupting and was giving her horrible grief. Next to the bouffanted, polished Maybelline debs, Janis felt ugly, cursing her “little pig” eyes and horrible pimples. But she had a large ego and was defiant and uncompromising. Seemingly the slings and arrows from her peers did little to alter her hell-bent course, but deep down Janis was confused and hurt.
Port Arthur News
with the headline LIBRARY JOB
BRINGS OUT TEENAGER’S VERSATILITY. Even though she joined the Junior Reading Circle for Culture, was a member of the glee club, and sang a solo in the Christmas pageant, during her first year of junior high Janis was already questioning authority. She ridiculed Top Forty radio, preferring black soul music, and when she announced her adamant belief in integration, students accused her of being a “nigger lover.” By the tenth grade it was obvious that she would never be a feminine Southern belle—she wasn’t graceful and she wasn’t pretty—so Janis started hanging with the local bad boys, getting an undeserved “reputation.” When she and some male friends took her dad’s car to a New Orleans honky-tonk, crossing invisible color lines to hear the right music, they were stopped by the cops. The incident started hushed whispers about illicit liaisons and barroom brawls and Janis became even more of an outcast. She was loud and crude and spoke her mind. She laughed in a screechy cackle, dressed like a slob to hide her weight, and bit her nails down to the quick. Her complexion had started erupting and was giving her horrible grief. Next to the bouffanted, polished Maybelline debs, Janis felt ugly, cursing her “little pig” eyes and horrible pimples. But she had a large ego and was defiant and uncompromising. Seemingly the slings and arrows from her peers did little to alter her hell-bent course, but deep down Janis was confused and hurt.
Somehow Janis got good grades, even though she didn’t make it to school all the time, and she graduated in May 1960. She worked part-time as a waitress and sold tickets in a local theater. Her Modigliani-inspired oil paintings were on the walls of a beatnik coffeehouse, and she even managed to sell a few. Discovering the alternative, edgy Beat poets Kerouac and Ginsberg helped Janis feel that she might not be alone in the world after all. She started speaking in hipster slang, she found the blues, and when she started to sing, her own voice astounded her.
Janis also learned about the numbing glory of booze by reading the Beats. In fact, most of her literary icons seemed to have been alcoholics. She somehow equated creativity with liquor and began her lifelong passion for the bottle. It became her constant companion and most trusted ally. She would never put it down.
Hoping to please her increasingly distraught parents, Janis tried a semester of college in Beaumont, Texas, but she did a lot more partying than studying. When she got back to Port Arthur, the parties were getting crazier and they didn’t stop. There was even a brief stint with a psychiatrist. Frightened for their wild-eyed, skittish daughter, the Joplins shipped her off to Los Angeles to stay with Aunt Mimi and Uncle Harry. After a few weeks with her relatives and a fleeting job as a keypunch operator, Janis met a guy at the bus stop headed for Venice, and she went with him. Excited by Venice’s post-Beat energy and array of hip, racially mixed coffeehouses, Janis rented a funky little
apartment near the beach and started singing. She probably dabbled with methedrine and maybe even heroin during this period, but her fascination with the fading glory of Venice didn’t last long. Janis hitchhiked to the hallowed Beat ground of City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, then headed back to Texas.
apartment near the beach and started singing. She probably dabbled with methedrine and maybe even heroin during this period, but her fascination with the fading glory of Venice didn’t last long. Janis hitchhiked to the hallowed Beat ground of City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, then headed back to Texas.
She tried going back to college, took a job in a local bowling alley, even went intermittently to church, but having gone from beer to Thunderbird to bourbon, Janis needed more and more excitement to keep herself buzzing. She spent a lot of time across the river at Louisiana blues bars, getting into trouble, pissing off the locals, rubbing her newfound hipster consciousness in their holier-than-thou faces. Once again she took her father’s car on a weekend excursion, this time to Austin, and found that she liked it there. When she told her concerned parents she wanted to study at the University of Texas, they hoped for the best and Janis enrolled at UT in Austin during the summer of ’62.
School was just a sidebar to Janis’s burgeoning social life. One of the few to make it onto the dean’s list of designated “troublemakers,” she fell in with a cynical, reckless, intellectual crowd, who lived in a funky complex called “The Ghetto.” Like Janis they had come to be proud of their outsider status, prodding and poking sacred Texas traditions, reveling in the havoc it created. She had only short-lived romantic relationships, and even though Janis seemed to have a voracious sexual appetite (which included several flings with women), she was seen by her clique as just “one of the guys.” Despite her loudmouthed bravado, she felt helplessly plain, unfeminine, and insecure. Janis dressed in black, grew her hair long and wild, didn’t wear makeup, and littered conversations with her favorite word, “fuck.” She also sang and played autoharp at a converted gas station called Threadgills, and despite her growing rep for eccentricity, people were starting to pay attention. “Her voice was magnificent,” recalls Clementine Hall, friend and founding member of the Thirteenth Floor Elevators, “rich and clear, with a deep burr in it.”
The campus newspaper,
The Summer Texan,
ran a story on Janis titled SHE DARES TO BE DIFFERENT! The favorable article revealed that Janis went around barefoot and wore Levi’s to school “because they’re more comfortable,” and that she took her autoharp everywhere she went “in case she gets the urge to break into song … .” The journalist said that the “squares” would most likely call Janis a “beatnik,” but that she preferred the world “jive” to describe herself. “She leads a life that is enviously unrestrained. She doesn’t bother to have her hair set every week, or to wear the latest feminine fashion fads, and when she feels like singing, she sings in a vibrant alto voice … .”
The Summer Texan,
ran a story on Janis titled SHE DARES TO BE DIFFERENT! The favorable article revealed that Janis went around barefoot and wore Levi’s to school “because they’re more comfortable,” and that she took her autoharp everywhere she went “in case she gets the urge to break into song … .” The journalist said that the “squares” would most likely call Janis a “beatnik,” but that she preferred the world “jive” to describe herself. “She leads a life that is enviously unrestrained. She doesn’t bother to have her hair set every week, or to wear the latest feminine fashion fads, and when she feels like singing, she sings in a vibrant alto voice … .”
The crowds loved Janis—she was really getting a feeling for the blues—but there were painful brush—offs when she auditioned at certain bars, because she wasn’t slim and doe-eyed like Joan Baez. And despite the
Summer Texan
article,
Janis’s fellow students were angered by her freewheeling disdain for the values they held on to so dearly. When one of the frat houses jokingly entered her in a school contest for “The Ugliest Man on Campus,” Janis was mortally wounded when she found that fellow students were actually voting for her. She felt hemmed in, ugly as sin, and deeply misunderstood.
Summer Texan
article,
Janis’s fellow students were angered by her freewheeling disdain for the values they held on to so dearly. When one of the frat houses jokingly entered her in a school contest for “The Ugliest Man on Campus,” Janis was mortally wounded when she found that fellow students were actually voting for her. She felt hemmed in, ugly as sin, and deeply misunderstood.
When a former UT student and fellow liberal, Chet Helms, heard Janis sing at Threadgills, he swore she could be a sensation in San Francisco, where he thought the folky music scene could benefit from her rich, raucous wail. In early January 1963 the two hitched across the country, and just two days later Janis was singing in North Beach at Coffee and Confusion, earning fourteen dollars her first night.
Janis became a regular on the coffeehouse circuit and she and Chet crashed all over town until a couple of fans let her live in their basement. She worked regular jobs sporadically (including a brief stint at the American Can Company), and along with her ever-increasing booze consumption, Janis became a consistent drug user—mainly methedrine. Speed made her feel as if she could accomplish anything. She had flings with men and women, but Janis still felt unsettled and lonesome. In the summer of 1964 she just had to check out the Greenwich Village scene and took off for New York, moving into a hotel full of creative stoners—and quickly becoming one of them. She did a lot of speed, sang in Village clubs, and had a short, lusty affair with a black girl, but by August she was restless and drove her yellow Morris Minor convertible back to San Francisco, stopping just long enough in Port Arthur to worry her mom and dad sick.
According to Bob Dylan, times were a-changing, and Janis felt she was an integral part of the movement, determined to live every second
right now.
She moved into a little dump on Geary Street with a friend, Linda Gottfried, and ravenously pursued her “art.” “Janis called herself the first black-white person,” Linda said, “a candle burning on both ends,” announcing she knew she would die young, often wondering, “When am I going to burn out?”
right now.
She moved into a little dump on Geary Street with a friend, Linda Gottfried, and ravenously pursued her “art.” “Janis called herself the first black-white person,” Linda said, “a candle burning on both ends,” announcing she knew she would die young, often wondering, “When am I going to burn out?”
She listened to Bessie Smith, studied Hesse, Kant, and Nietzsche, hunting the truth while she shot meth, which she felt made her more creative. She even dealt the drug for a while before trying to commit herself to San Francisco General Hospital for being “crazy.” They told her she was sane and to go away. Then early in 1965 she fell in love with another speed freak, a well-dressed, intelligent charmer with impeccable manners and a mysterious past. He had big dreams and so did Janis and they connected, but together they shot so much methedrine that their dreams turned into hallucinations. Janis got down to eighty-eight pounds, and her boyfriend actually did wind up in a mental hospital. She visited him daily and the recovering couple decided to get married when he was well enough.
Realizing she had hit bottom, a reformed Janis went back to Port Arthur to
ready herself for the upcoming wedding. It seems that deep down she must have desired that idealized notion of normalcy. Back at home, she heartily attempted to redeem her wicked past by enrolling at Lama State, becoming an ardent college student. With her unruly hair tucked into a prim bun, she wore ordinary dresses—with long sleeves to cover the tracks on her arms.
ready herself for the upcoming wedding. It seems that deep down she must have desired that idealized notion of normalcy. Back at home, she heartily attempted to redeem her wicked past by enrolling at Lama State, becoming an ardent college student. With her unruly hair tucked into a prim bun, she wore ordinary dresses—with long sleeves to cover the tracks on her arms.
Janis’s love arrived a few weeks later and asked Mr. Joplin for his daughter’s s hand. He seemed to be a sincere, devoted fiancé, spending quality time with the Joplin family before leaving to take care of his own “family business.” It wasn’t long before Janis found out that her “fiancé” was already married and his wife was expecting a baby! He convinced Janis he was going to get a divorce, and she carried on making her Texas Star quilt, shopping for linens and china while her mother stitched her wedding dress.
Janis saw a counselor about her former drug use, got B’s in her boring classes, and waited for Mr. Right, who told her he was bringing her an engagement ring for Christmas. When he didn’t show, Janis took the rejection hard. Her last-ditch trip to Normalville hadn’t worked and she started spending more time in Austin clubs, belting out her brokenhearted blues, which earned her a great review in the
Austin American-Statesman:
“But the most exciting portion of the program [was] JANIS JOPLIN—the only female performer on the bill—who literally electrified her audience with her powerful, soul-searching blues presentation.”
Austin American-Statesman:
“But the most exciting portion of the program [was] JANIS JOPLIN—the only female performer on the bill—who literally electrified her audience with her powerful, soul-searching blues presentation.”
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