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  For Robert Burke Warren, my soul mate, and Jack Warren, my inspiration

  INTRODUCTION

  Don’t compromise yourself. It’s all you’ve got.

  —JANIS JOPLIN

  It’s a steamy September night in Nashville, and Ruby Boots is tearing it up onstage at the Basement East, thrashing her electric guitar and belting Janis Joplin’s “Piece of My Heart.” The 2018 edition of the six-day Americanafest, an annual music conference and festival, is honoring albums from 1968, and Big Brother and the Holding Company’s breakthrough, Cheap Thrills, has made the cut. Boots, born Bex Chilcott in Perth, Australia, fell in love with Janis’s music as a kid growing up on the other side of the world, the irresistible, aching soul in Janis’s voice undiminished by time, distance, and even mortality. As when Janis herself unleashed this tune fifty years ago, the crowd—wired into its raw but fearless humanity—pushes toward the stage.

  At the Americana Honors & Music Awards Show held at the Ryman Auditorium (former home of the Grand Ole Opry), numerous Janis acolytes take the stage: singer-songwriter-activist Rosanne Cash, a Janis fan since her teens, wins the Free Speech in Music Award; Alberta, Canada, native k. d. lang, who went public as a lesbian in the 1980s, gets the Trailblazer Award. Formidable singers Brandi Carlile, Margo Price, and Courtney Marie Andrews—all nominees for various honors—signal Janis’s influence in their blazing performances.

  Prior to Janis Joplin’s all too brief time in the spotlight, these artists would have been hard pressed to find a female role model to compare with the beatnik from Port Arthur, Texas. The mix of confident musicianship, brash sexuality, and natural exuberance, locked together to produce America’s first female rock star, changed everything. As such, Janis still holds sway over multiple generations, artists of countless genres, across the gender spectrum. And although her bookishness, sharp intellect, and deep desire for home with the requisite white picket fence were not at the forefront of the identity she crafted for her fans, those parts of her also informed her every move.

  The same could be said of her pioneering instincts. While Janis’s era is largely considered a time of release from the strictures of the 1950s, rock was, in fact, almost exclusively a boys’ club, and Janis suffered appalling sexism, from both the mainstream and counterculture press, and cold, occasionally cruel dismissiveness from industry pros. Yet she blazed on. Through force of will and unprecedented talent, she showed how rock could include unapologetic women musicians, writers, and fans. Feminist Ellen Willis, a New Yorker music critic in the 1960s, called Janis “the only sixties culture hero to make visible and public women’s experience of the quest for individual liberation.” Patti Smith, Blondie’s Debbie Harry, Cyndi Lauper, Chrissie Hynde, the B-52’s’ Kate Pierson, and Heart’s Ann and Nancy Wilson are among the artists who experienced Janis firsthand. They began to breathe in the possibility of their own futures. When Stevie Nicks was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in March 2019, she said that playing on a bill with Janis in the 1960s transformed her: “Her connection with the audience was so incredible that I said, ‘I want to do what she did.’ ”

  Through her influence and her own enduring work, Janis Joplin remains at the core of our music and culture. As we look back at pivotal moments in 1960s rock history, she is usually there: the Monterey Pop Festival; the vibrant Haight-Ashbury scene in San Francisco; the streets, clubs, and studios of gritty New York City; Woodstock. She’s been feted at museum exhibitions and the subject of theater productions and films. Her first solo album, the eclectic, daring departure I Got Dem Ol’ Kozmic Blues Again Mama!, sounds as fresh today as upon its 1969 release. Her Monterey Pop performance, documented by filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker, still brings wild applause from a new generation of audiences at screenings, and with YouTube views in the millions and counting.

  When Janis hit the Monterey stage in June 1967, few outside San Francisco knew her name. “What is this girl all about?” Monterey coproducer Lou Adler wondered. “Where did she come from, looking like that and leading this all-male band?” Offering a clue, Haight-Ashbury impresario Chet Helms introduced her onstage: “Three or four years ago, on one of my perennial hitchhikes across the country, I ran into a chick from Texas by the name of Janis Joplin,” he told the unsuspecting crowd. “I heard her sing, and Janis and I hitchhiked to the West Coast. A lot of things have gone down since, but it gives me a lot of pride today to present the finished product: Big Brother and the Holding Company!”

  Janis’s astonishing performance that day would change her life—and the future of popular music. By the time the five-song set ended with her dramatic reinvention of R&B/blues singer Willie Mae Thornton’s “Ball and Chain,” thousands of mind-blown fans—and hundreds of dazzled journalists—knew her name and fervently spread the news. Her emotion-drenched vocal style took hold upon other developing singers; Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant among them. Young women who saw her onstage at the Avalon Ballroom or Bill Graham’s Fillmore venues still recall the experience: It was like she was singing to or for them, telling their stories, feeling their pain, emboldening them, and absolving them of shame. Janis was a walking live nerve capable of surfacing feelings that most people couldn’t or wouldn’t, and she was willing to endure the toll it took on her.

  Janis never compromised her vision. She wasn’t afraid to cross boundaries—musical, cultural, and sexual. Openly bisexual in an era when it was illegal, she was not afraid of jail, of judgment. Similarly, when critics and fans expressed umbrage at her audacity to quit her role as “chick singer” in a band that she felt was holding her back, she did it anyway. Just four days before her death on October 4, 1970, she told journalist Howard Smith, “You are only as much as you settle for.”

  Janis Joplin never settled. The oldest child of a close-knit family, she adored her father, a Bach-loving secret intellectual and a closet atheist in a conservative oil town. Preteen Janis was a rambunctious tomboy who was also cerebral, curious, and a gifted visual artist, which her parents encouraged. When she reached high school, the 1950s were in full swing, and her embrace of the Beat Generation and of progressive racial views alienated her from her community. Janis’s first transgressive act was to be a white girl who gained an early sense of the power of the blues, chasing the music in Gulf Coast saloons and on obscure records. She never fully recovered from the intense scorn of her peers, who also ridiculed her appearance, especially after she patterned herself on beatnik girls she’d seen in Life magazine.

  Seth and Dorothy Joplin doted on their eldest child in many ways but were ultimately put off by her increasing acts of defiance—the same impulses that would eventually bring her fame. Always an attention-hungry rebel, Janis upped her game in adolescence, spurred on by her budding sexuality, her discovery of rock & roll, and alcohol and speed. The wounds inflicted from the clash of wills during those turbulent years in the Joplin home never healed. Much of her life would be colored by the tension of wanting to belong and getting the attention she missed, while knowing that the best way to honor her family’s unspoken creed of singularity was to set herself apart. Discovering her outsize voice helped her find a place to fit in and create a new family—of bohemians and musicians, first, in Port Arthur and Beaumont, Texas, and t
hen Austin, and finally San Francisco. She embraced life with a joyous ferocity, though she could never escape a fundamental darkness created by loneliness and a bleak fatalism bequeathed by her father. Choosing alcohol and drugs as painkillers just made everything worse.

  A passionate, erudite musician, Janis was born with talent but also worked hard to develop it, though she would often omit this striving toward excellence from her origin story. When you hear outtakes of her in the studio recording what would be her final album, Pearl, she’s taking the reins, running the show. During a period when women did not produce their own music, she collaborated fully with her notoriously iron-fisted producer, Paul Rothchild. These sessions were a time of artistic blossoming for Janis. Her ideas—along with her extraordinary voice and her simpatico Full Tilt Boogie band—resulted in a masterpiece. After Janis’s accidental heroin overdose in 1970 at the age of twenty-seven, the posthumously released Pearl would become her most successful and enduring album, with its single “Me and Bobby McGee” the endpiece to a career that started with “Piece of My Heart.”

  Janis Joplin’s distinctive voice sounds as powerful today as it did when introduced on the airwaves in 1967. More so than any of her peers, it cuts through the digital din, the noise of our age, and lands exactly where Janis wanted: deep inside the heart. Since her time, her work and life have inspired so many women to create their own sounds and walk their own uncompromising paths: from Lucinda Williams to Pink, Amy Winehouse to Carolyn Wonderland, Lady Gaga to Brittany Howard, Alicia Keys to Florence Welch, Grace Potter to Elle King, Melissa Etheridge to Kesha. Williams has written a song about her (“Port Arthur”); Pink hoped to play her in a film; Wonderland does a killer version of a 1962 Janis original (“What Good Can Drinkin’ Do”); Etheridge helped induct her into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1995. That night, Etheridge said, “When a soul can look on the world, and see and feel the pain and loneliness, and can reach deep down inside, and find a voice to sing of it, a soul can heal.”

  Perhaps that remains Janis’s greatest gift.

  CHAPTER 1

  PIONEER STOCK

  Don’t write what you are doing; write what you are thinking.

  —SETH JOPLIN

  Janis Joplin came from a long line of risk takers: seventeenth- and eighteen-century pilgrims, pioneers, preachers, Revolutionary War and Civil War soldiers, sodbusters, cowboys, ranchers, and farmers. Both her father’s and mother’s families date back to America’s early arrivals from England, Scotland, and Sweden, landing in New England and Virginia. Branches of the family survived shipwrecks, kidnapping by Indians in the French and Indian War, and wagon treks across the continent.

  “I’m from pioneer stock,” Janis would boast to friends who worried about her drinking and drug taking. Perhaps she was thinking of the ancestral great-grandmother whom Janis’s sister, Laura, would later describe in her memoir, Love, Janis: “a tough pioneer woman, stout of body and strong of heart, whose inner convictions and faith in her husband carried her across the frontier.” If Janis looked deeper, she also might have traced her ambition and restless spirit to her forebears.

  Her parents met on a blind date. In December 1932, in the midst of the Great Depression, nineteen-year-old college student Dorothy East went out with engineering school dropout Seth Joplin, twenty-two, in their hometown of Amarillo, Texas. Like their hardscrabble ancestors, Dorothy and Seth would stake out unchartered territory: the American middle class, where they hoped to earn a living with their minds rather than their hands, and safely pass on their upwardly mobile aspirations to their children, though in markedly different ways.

  Dorothy East, the eldest of four, grew up in the trauma of her parents’ troubled marriage, a fraught union begun in tiny Clay Center, on the Nebraska plains. Settling as ranchers in the newly minted state of Oklahoma, Cecil and Laura Hanson East gave birth to Dorothy Bonita on February 13, 1913. But missing her large farming family back in Nebraska, Laura insisted they return to Clay Center, where Cecil started a hog farm in 1920. Disease wiped out his stock and the Easts went bankrupt and moved in with the Hansons, where Laura reimmersed herself in their fundamentalist Christianity. Cecil struck out alone for West Texas boomtown Amarillo and became a real estate agent, a heavy drinker, and a philanderer. The Easts reunited in Amarillo when Dorothy was a high school senior, but the marriage was broken.

  Decades later, Dorothy remained haunted by her parents’ “horrible verbal abuse” and violent arguments, her enraged mother sometimes attempting to hitchhike back to Nebraska—without Dorothy or her younger siblings, Gerald, Barbara, and Mildred. While Dorothy tended the children, Cecil would drive out, retrieve his wife, and bring her home. Word spread around Amarillo about their marital problems and Cecil’s carousing, which shamed Dorothy, who vowed to have a congenial marriage and never invite small-town gossip.

  One refuge she sought was music. Dorothy started singing in church as a child, and by all accounts, she had a beautiful voice. In Amarillo, she joined her school’s Lyric Club and participated in light-opera musicales. The Amarillo Globe-News singled her out in a review of the operetta Once in a Blue Moon: “Dorothy East, as the Moon Lady, was worthy of the praise bestowed upon her from all sides during and following her parts. Her aplomb was excellent and outstanding.” Dorothy sang at weddings, Lions Club events, and in local musical productions. “I always had the lead,” she told her children later. “My lungs were so good and my pitch so true. In that great big auditorium, [I] could hit high notes and low notes [that would reach] the last row. But it didn’t affect my ego any. I didn’t think I was the best in town or anything.” Still, she harbored the desire to sing professionally. Her father encouraged Dorothy’s musical pursuits, while her mother, who’d lost most of her hearing during a childhood illness, did not.

  After one Lions Club performance in 1931, the local paper noted that “judging from the applause, she was a regular sensation,” with Dorothy “being heralded as a second Marion Talley”—the teenage coloratura soprano plucked from Kansas City, Missouri, to join the New York Metropolitan Opera. Eventually “a New York production man,” Dorothy recounted, “got me aside and said, ‘If you want to go to New York, I can get you in a show with no trouble at all.’ ” But Laura East discouraged her daughter, advising her, according to Dorothy, to go to “business college because you can learn some skills… you need to earn a living.” The talent scout admitted that show business was tough and not “your kind of people.”

  The New York idea tapped into Dorothy’s fears of continuing the chaotic cycle of her parents’ lives: It would be an itinerant and insecure life, possibly even bringing disrepute. Dorothy wanted more control than that. Using her vocal talent in a traditionally responsible way, she applied for and won a music scholarship to Texas Christian University, as recommended by her pastor.

  She was home for Christmas vacation freshman year when she met Seth, the son of Seeb Joplin, a stockyard manager and former cowboy and sheriff who had grown up on a West Texas ranch, the eldest of eleven children. Seeb’s grandfather Benjamin Jopling helped build the US Cavalry’s original Fort Worth, one of the outposts constructed after the Mexican-American War. Seth’s mother, Florence Porter Joplin, ran a boardinghouse on the outskirts of Amarillo. A native Texan like her husband, Seeb, Florence was the youngest daughter of thirteen children whose father, Robert Porter, had been a purchasing agent for the Confederacy. Seeb and Florence’s first child was a daughter, Margaret, followed by Seth Ward Joplin, born on May 19, 1910. Margaret attended boarding school, while Seth lived alone in a one-room cabin behind the boardinghouse, away from the roughneck lodgers. A solitary boy, he lived a spare existence, immersing himself in books. He enrolled at Texas A&M College for two years and then transferred to the University of Alabama to study mechanical engineering. With little money and no help from his father, who’d quit school at thirteen, Seth dropped out a few credits shy of graduating and returned to Amarillo. When Dorothy met him, he was living with his parents
at the boardinghouse and pumping gas at a service station.

  Seth and Dorothy made an arresting couple: he, a handsome young man with thoughtful, deep-set blue eyes; she, an attractive, vivacious, green-eyed college girl. Yet, at the same time, they were opposites: he, a brooding introvert and would-be intellectual who preferred quiet evenings discussing literature and philosophy; she, an outgoing “flapper” who loved playing piano, singing, and dancing all night. Dorothy was devoted to her mother’s Christian beliefs; Seth was an avowed atheist. In good times, one could say they complemented each other; in bad, they were, perhaps, destined for discord. They had in common a passion for music, a desire for a better life, a fierce willfulness, and stoicism. They would give all these qualities, except the stoicism, to their daughter.

  When Dorothy returned to college, the sweethearts corresponded. In the intimacy of letters, Seth, in a move uncommon for a man of that time and place, expressed a desire to know his girlfriend’s inner self. Dorothy recalled with some surprise: “He once wrote me, ‘Don’t write what you are doing; write what you are thinking.’ It took me rather aback because any previous correspondence I had was to parents, who certainly did want to know what I was doing.” This inquisitiveness about the life of the mind, as well as a talent for expression through correspondence and the written language, would also surface in their eldest child.

  After her summer break in 1933, Dorothy opted not to return to school. Perhaps still hoping to become a performer, she helped out at Amarillo radio station KGNC, but she was soon fired for inadvertently cursing into a hot mike: “I can’t figure the damn thing out.” She prospered, however, at a Montgomery Ward store, where her knack for business led to a promotion from temporary summer help to head of the credit department. Well groomed and always fashion conscious, despite limited funds, she designed and sewed her own eye-catching dresses and accessorized her dark bobbed hair with jaunty hats. She poured her creativity into dressmaking, a pastime and talent she’d pursue throughout her life.