Love, Janis Read online

  DEDICATION

  THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO JANIS JOPLIN,

  AND TO ALL THOSE WHO LOVED HER.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  INTRODUCTION: Forever Loving Janis

  ONE: October 1970

  TWO: Our Ancestors

  THREE: Janis’s Childhood

  FOUR: Adolescence

  FIVE: College and the Venice Beat Scene

  SIX: Austin, Texas

  SEVEN: The San Francisco Beat Scene

  EIGHT: Home Again

  NINE: The San Francisco Hippie Movement

  TEN: Success with Big Brother

  ELEVEN: After the Monterey Pop Festival

  TWELVE: Breaking Up with Big Brother

  THIRTEEN: The Band from Beyond

  FOURTEEN: Rest, Romance, and Regroup

  FIFTEEN: Full Tilt Triumph

  SIXTEEN: The Memorial Celebration

  Acknowledgments and Sources

  Permission Acknowledgments

  Index

  Photos Section

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  INTRODUCTION

  FOREVER LOVING JANIS

  By Laura Joplin

  GROWING UP WITH JANIS held little constancy beyond the intensity with which she greeted life. When she felt wronged at school, or anywhere else for that matter, she pushed back with righteous words and a saucy attitude. Then she brought the emotional fallout home. I was six years younger than my sister, and I worshipped her. I applauded her wins and held my breath when she lost. I saw her stomp through the house in defiance, raging loudly against the way classmates treated her. I didn’t understand what created such anger in her or why our parents could not fix it.

  But I was most drawn to the quieter, wiser Janis. I watched her spend hours painting a canvas, and was amazed to see the emotional figure emerge from her brush. I admired her thoughtful comments during dinner-table discussions citing books she had read. Janis was a study for me in the joy that flows from satisfying projects and the hell of becoming a social target. I relied on her honesty to show me the world behind the curtain.

  Then Janis became famous, and I found it increasingly challenging to live with a sister who had become as gargantuan a personality, as outspoken a figure and as newsworthy as Janis had. The changes in her forced me to adjust my past ideas of who my sister was, and to embrace her counterculture honesty. I saw that the girl I had grown up with, railing against her peers and our parents, was destined to become a proponent racial equality and an early voice for feminism.

  Today, several decades after her death in 1970, Janis’s voice still rings through radios on all continents and in theatrical stages around the globe. Though Janis died when I was only twenty-one, she is as much a part of my life as she was in childhood. Writing Janis’s biography brought me into the worldwide discussion about her life and work that’s never ceased. I tell my own stories of my sister, just as important I listen to the stories of others. And alongside the memories of the private Janis that I so treasure, I find great joy from the world of fans who post their own memories and reflections on the Internet. I truly believe that as long as Janis dances in the lives of others, she retains a vital heartbeat in the world.

  This book Love, Janis first appeared in hardcover in 1992. It was published by Villard Books, a division of Random House. I was ecstatic that Janis and I had found a voice together in print. I was even more elated when the book was published all over the world in Japan, Brazil, Germany, Croatia, Italy, Portugal, Sweden, Britain, and Canada. The long tail of my sister’s comet then appeared in paperback from HarperCollins Publishers in 2005 and has remained in print ever since. In 2017, Love, Janis becomes an eBook, claiming real estate in the worldwide digital discussion that marks our present and future.

  I have grown and changed in the thirty years since I wrote the book. I enjoyed connecting with Janis through Amy Berg’s 2016 soulful documentary Little Girl Blue, during stage productions of Randy Johnson’s Broadway triumph, A Night with Janis Joplin, and Randy Myler’s heart-claiming, off-Broadway production of Love, Janis. I feel so lucky to hear Janis’s voice onstage in so many different ways and in so many different venues, and to share her story with readers and audiences over and over.

  Janis chose to live her life on her terms. Since her death, women have been able to choose more elevated and important roles for themselves, kicking down doors, and raising their voices louder and higher than ever before. There is still work to be done, but I want to thank each and every one of these sisters for their insistence and dreams. I believe that Janis helped make it possible for women to speak out and that she forced the culture to listen. She encouraged us, with her words “Let yourself go and you’ll be more than you’ve ever thought of being.”

  ONE

  OCTOBER 1970

  What good can drinking do?

  What good can drinking do?

  I drink all night,

  But the next day I still feel blue

  —JANIS JOPLIN, “What Good Can Drinking Do?”

  IN THE FALL OF 1970 I was living a graduate student’s bohemian life in a roomy Victorian apartment in a seedy neighborhood in south Dallas, Texas. Sunday afternoon, October 4, 1970, I spent quietly at home. I made myself a cup of tea and stepped from the kitchen to walk through the dining room. Pouring through the large window, the brilliant afternoon sunshine soaked my body.

  I paused as thoughts fleetingly passed through my mind until I was grabbed by an overwhelming desire to speak with my sister. I hesitated, thinking of the trouble I would have if she didn’t answer the telephone—the difficulty of trying to prove to whoever picked up the phone that I was really Janis Joplin’s sister. Then the hesitation vanished. Walking toward the telephone, I was thrilled by that unique bond I had with my older and more daring sister.

  I had last seen Janis during the middle of August 1970. Our relationship had a special constancy that went beyond time apart and dissimilar lives. We didn’t always agree and sometimes shared heated words about our differences, but that would drop away each time we met. In August we had talked about sex, romance, marriage, careers, cars, houses, clothes, our hometown, her fame, and our family. When we parted, we had planned to get together in California at Christmas, when I had time off from graduate school.

  By the time I walked across the yellowed oak floor to the telephone beside my bed in the living room, the compulsion to call had evaporated. I felt no reason even to try. But the thought would come back to me that night. Why hadn’t I called? I went to bed early, readying myself for a busy class schedule the next day. I was fast asleep, relaxed under the quilts, when the telephone rang.

  “Janis is dead,” my father’s tense voice stated simply. It was one o’clock early Monday morning. The startling words seemed unreal. I pulled myself from sleep just enough to answer, “No.” He repeated, “Janis is dead.” I shook my head as though trying to throw the unwanted words out, repeating insistently, “No.” Shock slammed into my heart and hardened it like ice crystals. Janis was dead.

  My roommate appeared from her bedroom, knowing something was wrong. “Janis is dead,” I repeated to her. She disappeared and reappeared with two aspirins and a glass of water. “What are these for?” I asked. “Take them,” she urged, trying to give me the kind of comfort an American knew best. I downed them, knowing I hadn’t the vaguest idea of how to stop the ache. I cried myself into a troubled sleep, wondering, Why didn’t I call her this afternoon?

  The next day my parents telephoned, saying they were going to Los Angeles to settle Janis’s affairs. My brother, Michael, and I did not go, as our parents wanted to keep u
s away from the cameras and press attention. Crowds of people had gathered outside the Landmark Hotel, where she lay, as word slowly spread among her friends. Police stretched out the official yellow KEEP OUT ribbons and the crowd milled and shivered in confusion, frustration, grief, and shock.

  Mother’s sister, Barbara Irwin, lived in Los Angeles, and she helped my parents with the necessary arrangements. They met Janis’s attorney, Robert Gordon, whose elegance and firmness both comforted and frustrated them. From Bob they learned the details of Janis’s death and about the stipulation in her will that her body be cremated and her ashes scattered off the California coast near Marin. My parents were anguished. Not only had they lost their firstborn daughter, but they couldn’t even take her home for a proper burial.

  Before he left Texas, my father had told me that they weren’t sure of the cause of Janis’s death. It might be a drug overdose, but it could also be that she passed out, fell, and suffocated in the shag carpet. When they got to California, they neglected to call me, they were so consumed by their duties there. I wandered around Dallas in a vacuum of facts, hearing the litany on the radio and the gossip of the partially informed in the halls of Southern Methodist University’s classroom buildings.

  I became furious at those faceless rock-and-roll people who had considered themselves Janis’s friends. How could they let her do heroin? Everyone was doing drugs, including me, but heroin was different! She should have known better! They should have stopped her! Didn’t anyone care enough to intervene? I chastised myself for not having been a better sister and knowing about the heroin. Why didn’t someone do something? Most of all I blamed her role as the Queen of Rock and Roll, that lofty perch from which no mortal woman could hear caution or wisdom.

  The coroner’s report was soon final, and the verdict was an overdose of heroin. She had only been using for a few weeks, taking it as a late-night relaxer every third day or so, after a hard day recording a new album for Columbia Records.

  My parents wrangled with Bob Gordon, and he fretted with the press, the police, and the coroner to ensure a quiet ceremony for the family to pay their last respects. In a funeral chapel they said goodbye to Janis while my brother and I both sat in confused isolation in separate Texas towns.

  Nothing showed the weaknesses in our family quite like the way we handled Janis’s death. We had no funeral to attend as a family. There was no grave for a later pilgrimage. There was no wake full of loved ones who could share our affection and our loss. We cried alone.

  It would never be enough to say simply that I loved Janis. She meant much more to me than that. When I was born, Janis was six years old. She took me under her wing as soon as I was able to hobble after her. On the wall of the bedroom we shared, Mother hung pictures of two girls giggling and telling stories to each other. That is how I remember my early years, intertwined with my constant companion and interpreter of the world, my elder sister. She helped me with everything and took me everywhere. In turn, I idolized her.

  With six years’ difference in age, our daily experiences were often inexplicable to one another. I started grade school when she went on to junior high. I started junior high when she was entering college. I started college when she became the hippie rock-and-roll queen. So our relationship was never based on sharing the same challenges in life. Our alliance was something more basic, a fundamental trust that continued through all changing circumstances. We talked straight to the core. We shared images, fantasies, and feelings that were like secret rooms that others might not even know existed.

  My parents called and I got the final details. It was finished, in some ways. In other ways my experience had hardly begun. Several weeks after Janis died, Bob Gordon called. “Would you like to come to the party? Janis left twenty-five hundred dollars in her will to throw a party for her friends after her death.” Janis had been taken by the idea of partying after a friend died. She told writer Michael Thomas, “Chocolate George [so nicknamed because he had a passion for chocolate milk], one of the Angels, got killed, and they threw a free thing in the park. We got lots of beer, and they got the Dead and us [Big Brother]. It was just a beautiful thing, all the hippies and Angels were just stoned out of their heads . . . you couldn’t imagine a better funeral. It was the greatest party in the world.” When Bob asked me to come to Janis’s party, I didn’t delay in saying, “Yes, I’ll come.” I never hesitated in going. I had to see what it was like out there and who those people were. I needed to touch her house and her things, and find bits of her life that I hadn’t known from my vantage in Texas.

  Janis’s house was half-empty when I arrived October 25, as she had left her possessions to her friends. Many had already come by to claim an Oriental rug, a carved cherry cabinet, and other special items. Bob gallantly explained that he figured sisters were friends too, and that if I saw anything I wanted to keep, I should tell him. The furniture was already promised, her roommate Lyndall Erb explained. So I searched among the remaining trivia. I found my keepsake, a silver-plated cigarette lighter I had given Janis for her birthday. It had embossed roses around its oval belly. It was heavy in my hand, and the weight felt good. Lyndall said it was broken, as though, Who would want that? I didn’t even smoke. I didn’t need the fire, just the warmth of the connection. A gift from me to Janis, and now from Janis to me.

  Janis’s California crew didn’t know what to do with me, but they did put me up in her house. Lyndall Erb had moved into Janis’s bedroom after she died. Lyndall went through the pretense of offering to move out so I could stay there. I declined, saying the bed in the living room was fine for me.

  Arriving at the party at the Lion’s Share in San Anselmo on October 26, I sat amid people trying to force themselves to be jovial, but they naturally turned to quiet conversations about who was doing what. Someone next to me eagerly pointed out the tie-dyed satin sheet that hung behind a pick-up band of friends playing onstage. They crowed that a recent lover of Janis’s had torn that big hole in it while in the midst of passion because he had kept his cowboy boots on. Several people pushed renowned tattoo artist Lyle Tuttle to take his shirt off and show me his tattooed torso. He and I agreed that we didn’t think it necessary.

  Someone offered me a brownie, and I was eager for some food, having eaten little at dinner. Only later did he mention that they were hashish brownies. The air was getting thick inside my head, and I beat a hasty retreat on the arms of Bob Gordon and John Cooke, Janis’s lanky and amiable road manager, an Easterner who had refashioned himself in Western garb. I reached the sidewalk and the cool night air just in time to throw up on John Cooke’s left boot. I thought it couldn’t get much worse!

  The coup de grâce was waking from my drug-induced slumber to feel Seth Morgan, a ruggedly handsome man who had been introduced to me as Janis’s fiancé, trying to slide into the bed in which I was sleeping in the living room. A woman wrapped in blankets on the floor nearby stopped him, saying, “Janis’s sister is there. Come over here.” So he crawled in beside her, trying to reject her enticing caresses, but finally relenting. Janis’s supposed fiancé made love to her close girlfriend on the night of Janis’s wake.

  I spent a mere three days in San Francisco, but I had been to Janis’s home, and I had met her friends and then some. I was ready to go back to Texas and my own life. I thought my grieving was over. I thought I was returning to the routine of life, friends, and work that made up my life in Texas. But I had barely graced the first stage of grief—shock. I still had to live through the ravages of sorrow, guilt, anger, regret, and fear.

  My family took years to share our grief over Janis’s death. A door had closed the day she died, and no matter how hard Michael and I tried, we hardly ever got our parents to open it again. Pop’s agony over losing his daughter turned visible as arthritis spread to every joint in his body. He lived out his sorrow, always worried that his support of Janis’s nontraditional inclinations had contributed to her death. When Michael and I showed signs of asocial behavior, he was
quick to warn against it, obviously worried about where it would lead us.

  Mom locked her feelings in an internal closet that held all the warm memories of an adored firstborn child and worries over a daughter’s transgressions. She was never as gentle, soft, or loving again after Janis died. It was almost as if she believed that acknowledging her colossal grief would knock her to the ground, and she would never rise again. Instead, she tended Janis’s fans like a gardener cared for her flowers. Until Mom’s eyesight failed, every fan who wrote the family a letter after Janis died received a heartfelt response. She worked to give them the guidance that they requested. She wanted to answer their complaints about the world’s mistreatment of them. She wrote to one woman:

  How do I cope with the memories? Simply by remembering with joy the happy times and the many, many times of laughter we had with all our children. These far outweigh the lesser times and problems.

  How do I cope with remembering the problems? Trying to do so without bitterness, knowing my children were loaned to me for 16–18 years; they were not my possessions. Each child growing up and becoming self-sufficient must untie the maternal/paternal umbilical cord. Gradually in adult lives, our young people begin to relate to us as people, and we can relate to them as other, completely separate individuals.

  How do I cope with bitterness? I just give it up, without reservation and without looking back wondering “if this” or “if that.” . . . To fail to do so will result in a warped perspective which twists upon itself. It is not easy; I try and keep on trying.

  How do I cope with the anguish of losing a daughter? Simply by being grateful for the times with her and the riches it did bring . . . and NEVER, NEVER forgetting.

  How do I ever forgive? It takes working at. It MUST be done. After all, I am NOT the judge of any person, either evil or good. The religious thesis in prayer is: Forgive MY sins as I forgive others. That being so, I must do it.