It was Sunday October 4, 1970. The news that Janis Joplin had died rocked the world. The next day I went to calculus class wearing a black arm band. I couldn’t concentrate. Fortunately, I was in the back with my head on the book rest. I remember a person telling me I didn’t look good and suggested I go to the infirmary. When I arrived there they took my temperature. 106! Maybe, 104 I can’t remember. I lay in a delirious fever for three days. I liken it to what Dostoevsky wrote about in The Brothers Karamazov (or was it Crime and Punishment?) when he spoke of falling into a fever for days.
I was and am still a big Janis fan. The local paper here in Northampton, Massachusetts ran a front page article about her on the 4th. She played in the area several times. The article quoted a rock historian who in elegant words got it right about Janis.
I saw her live three times. When people ask me what it was like and what her performance was like I say, “Pure liquid sex.” I saw men rush the stage like teenage girls on steroids at a Beatles performance. I observed her take a disbelieving crowd at the Yale New Haven Bowl at a concert put on by The Greater New Haven Jaycees and have everyone eating our of her hand by the time she was done. No one has ever come close to what she could emote on stage. The passion, the depth, the sexualness, the rawness, the power. When I talk about her sexuality, it wasn’t flirtatious stuff. It was pure honest stuff without compromise. As the expert in the paper wrote there was “a joyous physicality” about her on stage performance.
It was joyous. It was vulnerable. She had a sense of humor about whatever her situation was. She had been arrested in Florida for lewd behavior the week before she performed at The University of Maryland’s Cole Field House. After her first song she said, “When I got here they told me I can’t smoke, I can’t drink, I can’t take my clothes off. Man, I can’t do nuthin’! “ The crowd ate it up.
Since her death I’ve read various accounts of what happened. At Woodstock she and a buddy were doing herion for fun. The stuff that killed her was much purer than what was usually on the street. The dealer that sold it to her said his chemist was out of town that weekend and hence it didn’t get tested. What? It all sounds so normal, so antiseptic.
Janis would be 77 today. Imagine what she could have done? She and Jimi and Jim Morrison were all unique in their own ways. The likes of which we have not seen again. When it was happening, it swirled around me. I had such luck, such coincidences, such good fortune to have experienced some of it.
Janis brought pain and joy, rage and humility, depth and humor to the stage.
She typically ended her shows with “Ball and Chain.”
It was like a diva or prima-ballerina holding the audience in her thrall.
“And it felt like a balllllllllllll
A balllllllllll……
And CHAIN.”
Ta dum.
She didn’t let them go until she was done, and she wasn’t done for as long as she wanted to hold that last line. Nothing and no one moved until she brought down the house with that last word.
Even now, fifty years later, recounting it in the written word I tear up.
Lydia Pence of Cold Blood had the jazzy chops.
Courtney Hadwin has the chops but is too young.
Cecila Bartoli has the power, and the emotional range, but not the physicality.
No. There has been no one like Janis.
Janis had that unique Texas passion. With apologies to Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, she stomped on this Earth.