Janis Lyn Joplin was born in Port Arthur, Jefferson, Texas on January 19, 1943 and died at the Landmark Motor Hotel, Los Angeles, California on October 4, 1970.
Considered by specialized critics one of the best and most influential artists of all time and the first female rock and roll star. He passed away at the age of twenty-seven. His albums are among the best sellers in the music industry.
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She died at the age of 27 due to a heroin overdose and was popularly known as: Cosmic Witch, Pearl, White Lady of Blues and La Vagina del Rock and Roll, here we will tell you some details of her short but successful artistic life and staff.
He was born on January 19, 1943 in Port Arthur, an industrial town in Texas. Her parents, Seth (1910-1987), who worked at a refinery, and Dorothy (1913-1998), who had excelled in singing at her high school, would have wanted Janis to be a teacher. He had two younger siblings, Laura (1949) and Michael (1953).
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His family used to attend Christ Church. The Joplins felt that Janis always needed more attention than the rest of their children. Her mother said: "She was unhappy and dissatisfied. The relationship was not the most appropriate."
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In her teens, she befriended a group of outcasts through whom she gained access to records by African-American blues artists like Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and Lead Belly, whom Joplin later credited as influencing her decision to become a singer. By starting to participate in a choir, he met other blues singers such as Odetta, Billie Holiday and Big Mama Thornton. At the age of sixteen, he began to express his love for music, frequenting bars in Louisiana, where he listened to African-American, blues and jazz music.
His classmates included GW Bailey and Jimmy Johnson. Joplin graduated from high school in 1960 and attended Lamar State College of Technology in Beaumont, Texas, for the summer, and later the University of Texas at Austin, although she did not complete her degree. The college newspaper, The Daily Texan, ran a profile of her in the July 27, 1962 issue, headlined "She Dare To Be Different." The article began: "She goes barefoot when she feels like herself, wears Levi's to class because they're more comfortable, and carries her Autoharp with her wherever she goes so, in case she had the urge to break into song, I'll give her It will be very useful. Her name is Janis Joplin."
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When she was studying Fine Arts at the University of Texas at Austin, she began singing regularly in bars. He was a frequent performer with the Waller Creek Boys band. There she began to have a reputation for being a heavy drinker. In 1963 he moved to the city of San Francisco. He left Texas for San Francisco "just to be away from Texas, because my head was in a very different place,"​ he said in January 1963 living in North Beach and later Haight-Ashbury .
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While there he met many musicians he would later meet again, such as his lover Ron "Pigpen" McKernan" (later a member of The Grateful Dead). In 1964 he recorded a home album with Jorma Kaukonen, future guitarist for Jefferson Airplane and Margareta Kaukonen on the typewriter, used as a percussion instrument, thus recording a series of blues standards.
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It was during this period that he began to use drugs and slowly sank into a state of abandonment, weighing 35 kilos. In 1965 she announced to her family that she would resume her university studies, and that she would marry a man she had met in San Francisco, named Peter LeBlanc; However, the couple did not work out and Peter LeBlanc abandoned her; this would further mark their affective insecurity and their feeling of loneliness.
His musical career
Big Brother and the Holding Company (1965-1968)
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Tired of waiting for LeBlanc to marry and being a good girl, she moved to San Francisco with Chet Helms, a producer she met in Texas. He joined the band Big Brother and the Holding Company on July 4, 1966, making a perfect match.
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Chet Helms offered him to join the band of which he was his manager, and with which he would eventually record his first album, Big Brother and the Holding Company, which had an important impact.
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Joplin loved the creative freedom of the music scene in San Francisco. He used to perform alongside other psychedelic groups like The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Quicksilver Messenger Service at the famous Avalon Ballroom, Fillmore East, and Fillmore West ballrooms, or at outdoor festivals in Golden Gate Park and Haight-Ashbury.
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He performed with his group at the 1967 Monterey Festival along with some great artists of the day such as Jimi Hendrix, The Mamas and The Papas, Jefferson Airplane, Otis Redding and The Who, among others. Since the Big Brothers' first performance had not been filmed, they were asked to play the next day. During that performance, they performed Combination Of The Two; Janis wowed the audience with a cover of Big Mama Thornton's iconic blues "Ball And Chain."
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Thereafter they were hired by Bob Dylan's producer, Albert Grossman. Joplin dwarfed the Big Brothers. In the spring of 1968, they moved to New York to record their first album. That combination of repetitive music, in the psychedelic style of the 60s, with Joplin's imposing voice, was prodigious and Cheap Thrills came out in August 1968. Launching Joplin to success, within three days it went gold and in the first month sold more than a million copies. In 2003, Cheap Thrills was ranked 338th on the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.
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The criticism towards Joplin was very good and the press began to focus more on her than on the group. Many of these implied that she was too good for the group. Thus, his fame and prominence generated tension in the group. She also wanted to do a more bluesy and soul style, like the singers she revered -Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday or Aretha Franklin-. All of this caused him to finally end up responding to pressure from his manager, Albert Grossman, and leaving Big Brother and the Holding Company.
Kozmic Blues Band (1968-1969)
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Together they began to look for the best musicians in the country to create the new group. At the beginning of 1969 it was already created, although the musicians would vary throughout the year. She took guitarist Sam Andrew of Big Brother and the Holding Company with her.
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With his new band, "Kozmic Blues Band", he released his second album, I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama!. The sound was different from what her listeners were used to: it was a mixture of rock, soul and blues, and received bad reviews, Rolling Stone magazine called her the "Judy Garland of rock".
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In April, Janis and the Kozmic Blues Band toured Europe, stopping by Frankfurt, Stockholm, Paris, London, and a few more places, where the public welcomed her very warmly and she returned to the US very happy, saying that the best concert he had ever given was in London, where the audience went wild.
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In that year, due to the pressure, he became addicted to heroin and began to lavish himself on interviews, in which he ended up talking about his life and his feelings. She said that she "made love to 25,000 people on stage and then went home alone...". He was increasingly dependent on alcohol and heroin. However, it had become a symbol of strength and rebellion for many women of her time.
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The musicians in the band were only professionals, and Joplin wanted her band to be like a family, like in Big Brother. The only one he ended up connecting with was saxophonist Cornelius "Snooky" Flowers. By the end of 1969 Janis was already broken and too addicted to heroin and alcohol, so she decided to take a break and leave the band. At the end of that year the band broke up. His last concert was at Madison Square Garden in New York on the night of December 19 and 20, 1969.
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In February 1970, she went on a trip with a friend to Rio de Janeiro for the carnival, to detoxify, at least, from heroin. There she met David Niehouse and they fell in love, they spent a few months in the Brazilian jungle traveling like two old beatniks on the road and when they returned to San Francisco, David settled in Janis's house.
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Full Tilt Boogie Band (1970)
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Albert Grossman, proposed to Janis a new band, the Full Tilt Boogie Band, and Janis, already off heroin but not alcohol, accepted. David Niehouse wanted to continue traveling the world and offered to leave together, but she preferred to stay with her audience and her music. Thus, Joplin got along very well with all the members of the band, they loved her and she loved them.
In the summer of that year, Janis and her band participated in the Festival Express, along with other important artists of the time such as The Grateful Dead, Buddy Guy and The Band.
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At a Hell's Angels party in San Francisco that same summer, she met Seth Morgan and fell in love with him. In September 1970, he moved to Los Angeles to record Pearl. October 3, 1970 had been a good day at the studio, and to celebrate it he went out drinking with his classmates and got drunk. According to the coroner's study, he died at 1:40 a.m. on October 4 from a heroin overdose. Joplin had been through similar experiences before and had come out alive, but this time there was no one to help her. His body was discovered about 18 hours later. Everyone was surprised, because they thought that Janis was no longer using, and was in the best period of her life.
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In 1971, six weeks after his death, the Pearl album came out; it was a success and stayed at number one in sales for 14 weeks. As a tribute, the song "Mercedes Benz" was left a capella, since it was the last song that Janis recorded; also included the song "Buried Alive in the Blues" with music only, without Janis' vocals.
The single "Me and Bobby McGee", composed by Kris Kristofferson (with whom the singer had an affair) and Fred Foster, represented her biggest success, being the only Janis Joplin song to reach No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, for one week in March 1971.
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In 2003, Pearl was ranked 122nd on the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.
Private life,
drugs and sexuality
Janis Joplin's private life has always been the subject of controversy and extensive controversy. It is known that since his adolescence, he had serious personality and self-esteem problems, related to his physical appearance.
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There is a certain general tendency to define her as bisexual, to which was added her unrestrained lifestyle. Although she reportedly had more female partners than male partners, Joplin never described herself as lesbian or bisexual, just "sexual."
His sexual life included numerous men and women, in what were described as "animal orgies". These aspects caused her own parents to reject her and refuse to meet her, on many occasions.
Perhaps his most stable and well-known partner was Peggy Caserta, a friend, a relationship that caused his break with businessman David Niehaus. Caserta claimed in her 1973 book, Going Down With Janis, that she and Joplin had mutually decided to separate in April 1970, to stay away from each other's drug use, which they failed to do. Caserta was a former Delta Airlines flight attendant and owner of a clothing boutique in Haight Ashbury. Both would continue their friendship, united by their strong addiction to heroin, until the death of the singer.
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In her last months of life, Janis Joplin established a fleeting relationship with Berkeley student Seth Morgan, a 21-year-old heroin dealer and future novel writer. The two met in August 1970 at a party at the Hell's Angels bar in San Francisco. By then, Joplin was residing at the Landmark Motor Hotel in Hollywood Heights, Los Angeles (where she was found dead two months later), the site where she settled prior to Pearl's recording sessions at Sunset Sound Recorders.
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Morgan and Joplin even announced their plans to get married in early September 1970. And they invited all the musicians who participated in the studio to the ceremony.
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After a troubled life, on October 17, 1990, Morgan died in a traffic accident while riding his motorcycle with his girlfriend, both under the influence of alcohol and cocaine.
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In 1974, Leonard Cohen released the album New Skin for the Old Ceremony including the song "Chelsea Hotel #2" where he describes his affair with Janis Joplin at the Chelsea Hotel in New York.
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References
In 2016, Amy Berg made a documentary film of Janis's life, which dissected the queen of blues and rock pioneer through her letters.
Countercultural and fatal woman for herself.