Janis Joplin

[Evariste Euler Gauss]

Sorry, I've nothing original or insightful to say, so this will probably be the nil thread it deserves to be, but I just couldn't help sharing my reaction. Just watched a Youtube clip of her version of Gershwin's immortal "Summertime" (of which there are over 25,000 recordings, including an utterly wonderful and brilliant intstrumental version by Booker T and the MGs, worth its own set of comments) and I wanted to say "fucking hell!" What a woman, what a time to be alive in.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bn5TNqjuHiU

[Amor de Cosmos]

I do sometimes wonder how long her voice would have held up if she'd lived. Both it, and her, intensity were second to none when she was really on though.

what a time to be alive in.

No one thought that then though. In spite of our generational self-importance I don't know that most of us believed the period itself was particularly remarkable. Arts aside it mostly consisted of crushed ideals.

[Sits]

I fear I have no soul, because her music has never touched me. Watching and listening to that however, she was clearly quite amazing. Something else which has never struck me before (and I'm being quite sincere) is what an influence she obviously was on Robert Plant.

[Amor de Cosmos]

She didn't always hit it. With Big Brother she did most of the time, but lost her mojo until just before the end when it all came back.

I've seen Monterey Pop innumerable times as there are many great performances, but the one I go back for isn't Hendrix, or the Who it's this one: Ball and Chain. If there's a definition of "leaving it all on the stage," that's surely it. But, what's especially thrilling — charming even — is the girlish little skip she gives leaving the stage. She knows she's totally nailed it but, just when you'd expect her to be utterly drained she... just isn't. I not sure why but that moment always chokes me up.

[Satchmo Distel]

There is a danger of seeing the deaths of Hendrix and Janis as inevitable but I do tend to feel that her uniqueness doomed her because pop culture had even more rigid boxes then than now and she had immense insecurities about her place in it and what she really wanted from it.

Favorite performance for me is Little Girl Blue, on This is Tom Jones.

Robert Plant's voice seems more pure to me whereas hers has grit and character, closer to southern blues than he could manage just because of the grain being different. There were male blues singers of the Fifties who had that wail, obviously, and Plant would have heard Janis in that context. Gospel is another factor; blues is gospel's flipside, the devil's interval.

[G-Man]

To me the single greatest Monterey performance is Otis Redding doing "I've Been Loving You".

I'm not really fanatically obsessed with blues rock, so Janis Joplin doesn't excite me much. I'm afraid the "Ball And Chain" performance, with all that screaming, does little for me. Mama Cass seemed to like it though.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Mama Cass was actually watching Ravi Shankar. Pennebaker cut in random audience shots irrespective of performance.

If I'm honest, of all the Monterey performances, (except perhaps the Grateful Dead's which no one's seen because the film ran out) this one edges Janis: Poverty Train — Laura Nyro, but, for inexplicable reasons, it ended up on the cutting room floor.

[Nefertiti2]

I enjoyed Little Girl Blue" [URL], Amy Berg's documentary about her. Lots of great archive. It was on Netflix.y

[1974ddr]

I fear I have no soul, because her music has never touched me. Watching and listening to that however, she was clearly quite amazing. Something else which has never struck me before (and I'm being quite sincere) is what an influence she obviously was on Robert Plant.

Sits- can I offer you Steve Marriott of the Small Faces / Humble Pie in this respect? And if you've never heard You Need Loving by the Small Faces...

[Sits]

Sits- can I offer you Steve Marriott of the Small Faces / Humble Pie in this respect? And if you've never heard You Need Loving by the Small Faces...

How odd, Marriott and his diaspora (wrong word) are another area I've found inaccessible. But thanks, I will follow up.

Edit: and yet the Faces, love 'em.

[Satchmo Distel]

Marriott started to take himself too seriously whereas The Faces carried on that unselfconsciousness living for today ethos that The Small Faces originally had. Ian McLagen's "All The Rage" is essential on these dynamics, and the 60s in London generally.

[Amor de Cosmos]

I thought Marriott's departure was because he wanted Peter Frampton in the group. Stevie M wanted to spend more time on guitar, less on vocals, and Frampton would have enabled that. The rest of the band saw Frampton as an outsider, who didn't share the ethos you mention, so vetoed the idea. Consequently Marriott left to form Humble Pie with Frampton. It probably depends on who's telling the story.

[Stumpy Pepys]

The story I remember was that she wowed the audience, but the film-makers hadn't caught the performance, so she did it again.

A lot of her stuff is too shouty, but she did do my favourite versions of Piece of My Heart¹ and Me and Bobby McGee. And Summertime was good too.



¹ Maybe a tie with Dusty Springfield.

[WOM]

A Night With Janis Joplin was one of the loveliest nights of musical theatre we've spent in years. Mary Bridget Davies was exceptional, and I'd imagine these things pivot on the 'believability' of the star.

She, of course, (Janis, I mean) does my favourite POMH. But a close second is the Melissa Etheridge / Joss Stone pairing with Cry Baby, when ME was undergoing chemo and came onstage bald. Chilling.

[Stumpy Pepys]

I had some singing lessons with a woman who was a Janis Joplin tribute, professionally.

[Amor de Cosmos]

The story I remember was that she wowed the audience, but the film-makers hadn't caught the performance, so she did it again.

I've never seen that reported. What is true is that the film-makers had to fight with Al Grossman in order to film her. He'd just become Janis's manager, and didn't get along with the festival's "everyone plays for free" vibe. In the end he compromised and let them shoot one song. Though Combination of the Two is played over the titles.

[Hot Pepsi]

I had some singing lessons with a woman who was a Janis Joplin tribute, professionally.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssT1Bw3z3EU

[Satchmo Distel]

Watching the Netflix documentary just now, the Woodstock performance is very sad because she is too high on heroin to be on stage, yet even there she was able to express emotions that no other singer was doing at the time, because she was so open and unguarded in her performance. Otis Redding was definitely the model she used for her stage mannerisms, as the documentary shows, but you can also hear in those home tapes of 1961 how she was soaked in the original 1920s blues of Bessie Smith.

Summertime is probably the peak recording, but you also see on the recording footage how she struggled to get to the arrangement she wanted; she wasn't always secure enough to run her own sessions, and it was madness to think she could run her own band.

The men are fucking jerks, obviously, but the Big Brother band did give her a structure and a cushion that kept her from falling off a cliff, and they respected her as an artist. There were far worse jerks outside the band. She spirals into heroine hell very rapidly after she leaves it.