Evening Standard April 1969
Janis Joplin is instantly, aggressively friendly. I’m a complete stranger and right away she’s asking me to massage her neck and kissing me ‘hello’ with a scorching cat-lick of my right eyebrow. She wears her sexuality with an arrogance tainted with derision. Yet she’s a woman of little femininity. Her voice is wild, raw and Leadbelly strangulated, and her features are rough and workmanlike. She is a formidable lady.
The Deadwood Stage could have made good use of Janis Joplin. She’s the current American singing idol of the hard-rock-blues era, and does for male rock and roll fans what Hendrix, Jagger and Jim Morrison do for the girls. According to all reports her act is an experience of eroticism.
‘But I’m not as sexy as Hendrix. He’s really something,’ she claims, licking her top lip from left to right, a habit she indulges in each time she mentions men.
Yes, she would make a great calamity Jane or Annie Oakley. Born in Texas, and resembling an only slightly more female Gabby Hayes, she boasts a façade of over-shock – a constant barrage of four-lettered, non-descriptive adjectives.
This week she was to have been the cover story on Newsweek but Eisenhower’s death meant that the feature on her had to be postponed. She had some very un-American things to say about Eisenhower.
I met her this week in her hotel bar. She was holding court with members of her eight-piece band, and the barman was pouting his lips and making those silent sucking motions that are intended as manifestations of shock and disapproval.
She was, she said, feeling very brought down. She’s been drinking all day (she says she drinks every day) and the first thing she’s told when she lands in Britain is that Mick Jagger won’t be going to her concert: ‘If I want to hear black singing,’ Jagger is reputed to have said, ‘then I’ll listen to black singers.’ She’s cut to the quick.
She began her astonishing career at the Monterey pop festival in 1967. Before she went on stage hardly anyone had ever heard of Janis Joplin, but when she opened her mouth the trauma was unforgettable. Janis, it seems, can sing several notes at the same time.
‘I don’t really know how I do it, but I do. It happens when I’m tired and I’m pushing. I now find I can sing all the notes in harmony with each other. I don’t know why. I just open my mouth and it comes out.’
She lives with her friend Linda in a small flat in San Francisco. Linda, who is one of those tall black-haired brown-eyed Americans, has come along for a holiday. She’s twenty-nine, Janis is twenty-six. Her twenty-sixth birthday party has become almost folk lore.
‘How did you hear about my twenty-sixth birthday party? Oh! Well there was Linda and me, and this crate of Southern Comfort, and then these two guys came that we know. So we asked everybody else to leave. And we knew, and they knew … and it was a beautiful party. I didn’t realise until after it that it was my twenty-sixth birthday. That was just pure love ….’
Her parents, she figures, are more proud of her than they ever hoped to be. At Port Arthur, a small Gulf town in Texas, she says she was a problem for them running wild and fooling around. At school she chose the wrong friends and her class mates threw stones at her and called her ‘nigger lover’. But as she got older it became fashionable to be a beatnik, to run wild and to fool around. ‘I don’t know whether it’s fashionable yet to be a nigger-lover in Texas’, she says.
After dropping out of Austin University she went to Los Angeles and eventually ended up in San Francisco when the hippy cult suddenly threw her into national prominence.
For a while she sang with a group called Big Brother and the Holding Company and an album she made with them sold over a million copies on the day it was released. But internal arguments over billing and the size of her name led to the group’s disbanding. She now has her own band. ‘I wanted to call them the Cheap Thrills, but that had been the name of my album. So they’re just “my band”,’ she says.
She sits back in her leather-bound chair and stretches. Then carefully placing her left hand along her jawbone and her right hand on her skull she breathes in and gives the most almighty jerk. Crack! Her neck joints pop as though she had pulled all her fingers out of their sockets at one. My own head nearly falls off in shock.
‘Man, that’s better,’ she cackles. ‘Hey, do you wanna know how I got my fur coat? Southern Comfort! I had the chick in my manager’s office photo-copy every goddam clipping that ever had me mentioning Southern Comfort, and they sent me a whole lot of money. How could anyone in their right mind want me for their image? Can you imagine getting paid for passing out for two years?’
Southern Comfort is a brand of bourbon. On stage she used to boast she could drink a whole bottle during her act. Tonight she is doing her level best to prove she can do the same with Gordon’s gin.
‘Nobody ever asks me about my singing,’ she complains. ‘All anyone ever wants to know is about fellas and booze and sex. I want to be known as a singer.’
‘When I get scared or worried I tell myself “Janis, just have a good time.” So I juice up real good and that’s just what I have. I just live for happiness. You should use everything you’ve got to be happy.
‘My doctor said my liver was a little swollen, and got all melodramatic about me, saying “What’s a good, talented girl like you doing with herself?” and all that …
‘Man, I’d rather have ten years of superhypermost than live to be seventy sitting in some goddam chair watching TV.’
She’s quite a change from the luvvy-duvvy hippy Americans we’re used to receiving. Tonight she looks like Davy Crockett, with her hat of bleached foxes’ tails, boots and purple pants. Only the beads are there as a token of her adopted home town. She says she wants to go out to the Speakeasy or the Revolution and find these English boys she’s hears so much about.
‘Yes, I suppose you could call me promiscuous in one sense of the word. But it’s not really all that superficial. I just don’t have one person. It’s sad. But I couldn’t just stay home baking bread and having babies. I know it’s a fine trip, but I couldn’t do it.’
She’s great rollicking company, a female version of J. P. Donleavy’s Ginger Man. But there’s also the occasional touch of pathos, the sudden hurt innocence. ‘What sign are you? I went out with a Scorpio once. I wanted to marry him, but he turned me around and kicked me about.
‘And you know what I wanted most in the world … I wanted to be on the same bill with Otis Redding. It was all arranged, and then he was killed. He was my idol. I wanted him to tell me I was good.’
But then brightening immediately and grinning like mad, she’s back on her pet subject.
‘I think my interest in men is growing as I get older. It used to be a casual interest but now it’s day and night,’ and her tongue shoots along her lips at the idea of it.
‘Now how’s that going to look in print?’
POSTSCRIPT Janis Joplin died from an overdose of heroin just eighteen months after this interview. Although she had claimed not to touch heroin, her death might almost have been predicted so self-destructive was her life style. What this interview didn’t tell at the time was that throughout our conversation she continually mauled and groped me. In 1979 Bette Midler appeared in a salacious and unpleasant movie, Rose, a fictionalised account of Janis Joplin’s life.
