The story of Janis Joplin

A misfit in Port Arthur

Janis Lyn Joplin was born on the nineteenth of January 1943 in Port Arthur, Texas, a refinery town on the Gulf Coast right by the Louisiana border. Her father Seth was an engineer at Texaco, and her mother Dorothy worked as a registrar at a business college. A sister, Laura, arrived six years later, and a brother, Michael, four years after that. Dorothy taught Janis piano and pushed her painting, and the girl sang in the church choir. Port Arthur did not offer much else. One historian of her life notes that her father's idea of a family outing was a trip to the post office to study the latest Most Wanted posters.[1] [2] [3] [4]

As a teenager Janis fell in with a small crowd of bookish outsiders. They read Kerouac, argued about everything, and listened to jazz, folk and the blues. One friend owned records by Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey and Lead Belly, and Janis later said those records made her want to sing. Her sister Laura remembers the night she discovered she could sound just like Odetta, and how thrilled she was by that power. Port Arthur was strictly segregated, and Janis spoke up for black civil rights, which did not go down well in town. She also painted seriously, and she was good at it.[1] [2] [3] [4]

High school was hard. Janis put on weight and suffered from acne so severe it left scars that later needed dermabrasion. Classmates at Thomas Jefferson High taunted her with cruel names, and she got a reputation as unladylike and wild, partly for sneaking over the state line into Louisiana with a gang of boys to drink and hear music in rough dance halls. One of her classmates was Jimmy Johnson, the future Hall of Fame football coach. Her family has pushed back on the legend of total loneliness, though. Laura says Janis always had a tight group of friends who were proud to be different.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Janis graduated in 1960 and started a pattern that lasted years, heading out into the world and then retreating home. She studied art at Lamar State College of Technology in Beaumont but quit after a few months. She took a clerical course, worked as a keypunch operator in Los Angeles, and sang in the beatnik coffeehouses of Venice Beach. Her very first recording, made around this time, was a jingle for a Texas bank sung to the tune of Woody Guthrie's This Land Is Your Land. It was never broadcast. Somebody decided the bank's customers could live without it.[1] [2]

Austin, North Beach and a narrow escape

In the summer of 1962 Janis enrolled at the University of Texas in Austin and moved into a run down former army barracks the students called the Ghetto, where rent was forty dollars a month. She sang folk and bluegrass with a trio called the Waller Creek Boys and carried an autoharp everywhere. On the twenty seventh of July 1962 the campus paper profiled her under the headline She Dares to Be Different. Her real schooling happened at Threadgill's, a converted gas station bar, where she sang on Wednesday nights for two dollars and all the beer she could drink. The owner, Kenneth Threadgill, was one of the first to believe in her.[1] [2] [3]

Austin had a cruel side too. Fraternity boys put her name forward in an Ugliest Man on Campus contest, a humiliation that stung for years. In January 1963 she hitchhiked to San Francisco with her friend Chet Helms and landed in North Beach, singing in coffeehouses and passing the hat. There she lived for a while with a woman named Jae Whitaker, a relationship that biographers only made public decades later. In 1964 she recorded a set of blues standards with the guitarist Jorma Kaukonen, later of Jefferson Airplane. His wife Margareta can be heard typing in the background, which is why the bootleg is known as The Typewriter Tape.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Those first San Francisco years turned dark fast. Janis was arrested for shoplifting in 1963, hurt in a motorbike accident, and beaten up in a street fight. She started injecting methamphetamine, dealt it for a while, used heroin now and then, and drank heavily. By the spring of 1965 friends described her as skeletal. She weighed around eighty eight pounds and was convinced she was going to die. In May 1965 her friends threw her a party to raise the bus fare home, and she went back to her parents in Port Arthur. Years later she admitted she had few friends back then and did not like the ones she had.[1] [2]

Back in Texas she tried hard to become someone else. She quit speed, cut back on drink, put her hair up in a beehive and enrolled again at Lamar. She saw a counselor named Bernard Giarritano every week, sometimes bringing her guitar, and told him she feared that if she gave up singing she would end up a keypunch operator and a housewife like every other woman in town. She got engaged to a man named Peter de Blanc, who even asked her father for her hand. Then he broke it off, and according to one account he already had a pregnant wife. Slowly, she began singing again around Austin.[1] [2] [3]

Big Brother and the Haight

The band that would make her famous grew out of a rooming house at 1090 Page Street in Haight Ashbury. Its huge basement had been a speakeasy during Prohibition. Peter Albin, Sam Andrew and James Gurley jammed down there, and a regular named Chet Helms realized people would pay fifty cents to come in and dance. Big Brother and the Holding Company played its first show under that name at the Trips Festival in January 1966, and the painter Dave Getz soon took over on drums. They became the house band at the Avalon Ballroom, playing loud, experimental instrumental rock. What they lacked was a strong singer.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Helms remembered his friend from Texas and sent Travis Rivers to Austin to fetch her. Janis was also weighing an offer to sing with the Thirteenth Floor Elevators. She chose San Francisco, but she did not tell her parents, who only found out from a letter. She arrived on the fourth of June 1966 and played her first show with Big Brother at the Avalon on the tenth. Sam Andrew later admitted it was not love at first sight. She showed up dressed like a Texan, not a hippie, and he said it took her about a year to learn how to sing over a loud electric band.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Janis arrived determined to stay clean. She made Travis Rivers promise there would be no needles in their apartment, and Dave Getz remembered her screaming and crying when she found guests shooting up there. That resolve did not last. The band moved into a communal house in Lagunitas in Marin County, and Sam Andrew later said that he and Janis were doing speed and sometimes heroin almost from the start. She also began an affair with James Gurley, which strained his marriage. Andrew thought heroin appealed to her because it switched off a mind that never stopped analyzing.[1] [2] [3]

In August 1966 the band took a four week club booking in Chicago and ended up stranded when the money ran out. Broke, they signed with Bob Shad's Mainstream Records, a jazz label, and cut a debut album that sounded tame next to their stage show. Back home they played the Love Pageant Rally on the day LSD became illegal in California, and in January 1967 the Mantra Rock Dance alongside Allen Ginsberg and the Grateful Dead. Janis lived for a few months with Country Joe McDonald, and she met a boutique owner named Peggy Caserta, who became a friend, a lover and a drug partner.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Janis wrote home constantly, and her letters were funny, affectionate and not entirely honest about her life. In the summer of 1967 her parents brought Laura and Michael out to see for themselves. They toured Golden Gate Park, walked Haight Street while strangers asked Janis for autographs, and watched Big Brother play a special set at the Avalon. Laura remembers a dark hall full of people swaying in a trance to music that shook the building. As they left, she overheard one parent say to the other that they probably would not have much influence over Janis any more.[1] [2] [3]

Monterey and Cheap Thrills

The Monterey International Pop Festival ran from the sixteenth to the eighteenth of June 1967, and Big Brother went on early on the Saturday afternoon. When Janis tore into Ball and Chain, the crowd rose to its feet for the first time all weekend. The film crew of D. A. Pennebaker captured none of it, because the band's manager Julius Karpen had refused to let them film without being paid. The organizers were so impressed they asked Big Brother back on the Sunday evening to do it again for the cameras. In the finished film, Mama Cass sits in the audience, mouthing a stunned wow.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Ball and Chain came from Big Mama Thornton. Janis and James Gurley had heard her sing it at a San Francisco club and asked permission to cover it, and Gurley slowed it into a brooding minor key blues. At Monterey the song made Janis a national name almost overnight. Clive Davis of Columbia Records was in the crowd and moved to sign the band, which meant buying them out of their Mainstream contract. By late 1967 they were managed by Albert Grossman, who also handled Bob Dylan. Grossman signed them on one condition, that none of them would take intravenous drugs.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Big Brother played its first East Coast show at the Anderson Theater in New York on the seventeenth of February 1968. The press grumbled about tuning and volume, but raved about the singer. On the eighth of March they became the first band ever to play Bill Graham's new Fillmore East. Columbia's marketing put Janis front and center, and the billing soon read Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company, which stung a band that had prided itself on being a democracy. Industry people were already whispering to her that she deserved more polished musicians.[1] [2]

The next album was meant to be a live record, but tapes from two nights at the Grande Ballroom in Detroit did not satisfy producer John Simon or Grossman. So they recorded in the studio, slowly and painfully, and Simon added crowd noise to make it sound live. Only Ball and Chain was actually recorded in front of an audience. The band wanted to call the album Sex, Dope and Cheap Thrills, and Columbia allowed only the last two words. A photo of the band naked in a hotel bed was vetoed for the cover, so they used a cartoon by the underground artist Robert Crumb, who refused to take Columbia's money.[1] [2] [3]

Cheap Thrills came out on the twelfth of August 1968 and hit number one on the Billboard album chart in its eighth week, spending eight weeks at the top in total. It sold around a million copies and was one of the biggest albums of the year. Its single, Piece of My Heart, reached number twelve. The song had been a soul hit for Erma Franklin, Aretha's older sister, who said she did not even recognize Janis's version the first time she heard it on the radio. Rolling Stone's review was harsh, but in 2013 the Library of Congress added the album to the National Recording Registry.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Going solo with the Kozmic Blues

At the end of the summer of 1968, with Cheap Thrills at the top of the charts, Janis announced she was leaving Big Brother. The official reason was that she wanted a soul band with horns. She finished the tour, and the last show with the old band was a benefit in San Francisco on the first of December 1968. Sam Andrew came with her. Around this time she bought a Porsche convertible and paid a friend, Dave Richards, five hundred dollars to cover it in psychedelic paint, including images of Janis and Big Brother. Three weeks after that last show she debuted her new group in Memphis.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The new outfit, eventually called the Kozmic Blues Band, leaned on horns and the Stax soul sound, and it struggled from the start. Musicians came and went, and critics were rough. Rolling Stone wondered if she was becoming the Judy Garland of rock, and Ralph Gleason of the San Francisco Chronicle told her to go back to Big Brother if they would have her. Her heroin use was escalating, reportedly to two hundred dollars a day, and she overdosed at least once. Albert Grossman learned she was injecting and did not confront her. Instead, in June 1969, he took out a two hundred thousand dollar accident insurance policy on her life.[1] [2] [3] [4]

There were real triumphs in 1969. Janis sang on The Ed Sullivan Show in March, and her first and only European tour that spring included the Royal Albert Hall in London and a wild show in Frankfurt where fans invaded the stage. Her solo album, I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama, was recorded in June with producer Gabriel Mekler, who kept her away from drugs during the sessions. It came out on the eleventh of September 1969, went gold and reached number five. Around this time she fired Sam Andrew. He said he never even asked why, because the main thing he felt was relief.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Janis flew into Woodstock by helicopter with Joan Baez, and the sight of the crowd made her giddy and nervous. Then she waited about ten hours to go on. She spent part of that time in a tent with Peggy Caserta, drinking and shooting heroin. She finally took the stage at around two in the morning on Sunday, the seventeenth of August 1969. Pete Townshend later wrote that she was not at her best that night, but that even Janis on an off night was incredible. She was so unhappy with the set that she kept it out of the Woodstock film and soundtrack.[1] [2] [3]

On the sixteenth of November 1969 Janis played Curtis Hixon Hall in Tampa after an opening set by B. B. King. When police started shouting at fans who had crowded the aisles, she swore at them over the microphone. Officers let her finish, then arrested her in her dressing room for vulgar and indecent language. She posted a bond of five hundred and four dollars and left town, and was later fined two hundred dollars. Later that month, at Madison Square Garden, she joined Tina Turner onstage in a state her publicist Myra Friedman called shockingly out of control. The Kozmic Blues Band played its last show at the Garden in December.[1] [2] [3]

1970, a new band and a last homecoming

In February 1970 Janis took a real break. She went to Brazil with her friend and costume designer Linda Gravenites, stopped using, and fell for an American traveler named David Niehaus. The press photographed them together at the Rio Carnival. Back in California she returned to heroin, and Niehaus left after he walked in on her using at her new house in Larkspur, and after she chose her career over traveling the world with him. Decades later the documentary Janis, Little Girl Blue tracked him down and presented him as the man she loved until the end.[1] [2] [3]

That spring she sang twice more with Big Brother, at the Fillmore West in April and at Winterland a week later. She also spent about three weeks on a drinking spree with Kris Kristofferson and Bob Neuwirth, later nicknamed the Great Tequila Boogie, and got a wrist tattoo from the San Francisco artist Lyle Tuttle. Then she built a new band, mostly young Canadians led by guitarist John Till. She called them Full Tilt Boogie and told people that, finally, this was her band. Their first road show, in May 1970, was a Hells Angels party in San Rafael that paid her two hundred and forty dollars.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

From the twenty eighth of June to the fourth of July 1970, Full Tilt Boogie rode the Festival Express, a chartered train that carried the Grateful Dead, the Band, Buddy Guy and others across Canada for concerts in Toronto, Winnipeg and Calgary. The shows lost money, but the train became a rolling, round the clock party. Footage shows Janis singing drunken verses with Rick Danko and Jerry Garcia. Rolling Stone's David Dalton taped her talking with Bonnie Bramlett about what women give up to be in music. Days earlier, on The Dick Cavett Show, she had announced she was going back to Port Arthur for her ten year class reunion.[1] [2] [3]

On the seventh of August 1970 a headstone was unveiled on the grave of Bessie Smith, the blues singer Janis worshipped, which had been unmarked since 1937. She had helped pay for it. A day later, drinking at a bar called Vahsen's in Port Chester, New York, before a show at the Capitol Theatre, she and Bob Neuwirth worked up a mocking little prayer song while he jotted words on bar napkins. She sang it unaccompanied on stage that same night. It became Mercedes Benz. Her last public concert came on the twelfth of August at Harvard Stadium, where the band played through makeshift amplifiers because its gear had been stolen.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

In the middle of August 1970 Janis flew home for her ten year reunion at Thomas Jefferson High, arriving with an entourage, feather boas and sunglasses. At a press conference she took a few jabs at her hometown. Then a local reporter asked about school, and she quietly admitted she had not gone to the prom. The footage is painful to watch, and friends said the trip was an unhappy one. Laura Joplin, who went with her, sees it differently. She thinks Janis got what she needed from it, and began to accept that she did not need the approval of the people who had mocked her.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Pearl and the Landmark

On the twenty fourth of August 1970 Janis checked into the Landmark Motor Hotel in Hollywood to make a new album. An early attempt with Todd Rundgren that spring had gone nowhere, so now she worked with Paul Rothchild, the producer of the Doors. Rothchild insisted on recording at Sunset Sound rather than at Columbia's own studio, and Clive Davis reluctantly bent the company rules. It worked. Rothchild called her a producer's dream, and the sessions were loose and happy. Janis had also fallen for Seth Morgan, a twenty one year old Berkeley student with a trust fund, and by early September they were engaged.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The Landmark had a problem. It was popular with drug users, and a heroin dealer made regular deliveries there. Janis had been off heroin for a while, but she soon started buying again. She told a friend she was using it only to avoid drinking so much, because hangovers hurt her singing in the studio. The sessions kept producing gold. Bob Neuwirth had taught her Kris Kristofferson's Me and Bobby McGee, and she recorded it while Kristofferson was away in Peru filming a movie. Bobby Womack wrote Trust Me for her and played on it. Near the end she also taped a tongue in cheek Happy Trails as a birthday present for John Lennon.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

On Thursday the first of October 1970 Janis recorded Mercedes Benz alone at the microphone in a single take, cracking up with laughter at the end. It was the last song she ever recorded. On Saturday the third she came in to hear the backing track for Nick Gravenites's Buried Alive in the Blues, and agreed with Rothchild that she would sing it the next day. People in the studio heard her delighted about the music and furious at Seth Morgan, who had reportedly invited other women back to her house. Later that night she drove the organist Ken Pearson to Barney's Beanery, and after midnight they returned to the Landmark and went to their separate rooms.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Janis had expected company that weekend. Both Peggy Caserta and Seth Morgan had promised to come to the Landmark, and neither showed up. Late that night she went down to the lobby to get change for cigarettes, and the desk clerk was apparently the last person to speak to her. On the evening of Sunday the fourth of October 1970 her road manager John Byrne Cooke found her dead on the floor of her room, wedged between the bed and the night stand, still holding the change. Coroner Thomas Noguchi ruled it an accidental heroin overdose, possibly made worse by alcohol. She was twenty seven. Jimi Hendrix had died sixteen days earlier.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Cooke believed Janis had been sold heroin far stronger than usual, because several other customers of the same dealer overdosed that weekend. Her family held a private service, attended only by her parents and an aunt. She was cremated in Los Angeles, and her ashes were scattered from a plane over the Pacific and along Stinson Beach. Her will set aside two thousand five hundred dollars for a wake. On the twenty sixth of October her friends gathered at the Lion's Share club in San Anselmo, under invitations that read Drinks are on Pearl. Everyone got very high, but Cooke wrote that the party never took off, because she was not there.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Pearl, the aftermath and the legend

Rothchild and the band spent two weeks finishing what they had. Buried Alive in the Blues stayed an instrumental, because Nick Gravenites declined an offer to sing it in her place. The album was called Pearl, after the nickname Janis had taken for her rowdy stage self. Released on the eleventh of January 1971, it spent nine weeks at number one. Me and Bobby McGee topped the singles chart in March 1971, only the second posthumous number one in American chart history after Otis Redding's Dock of the Bay. Kristofferson first heard her recording the day after she died. Pearl has since been certified four times platinum.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The aftermath was ugly. Albert Grossman's insurer refused to pay out on his policy and, in a 1974 trial, tried to prove her death was suicide. Grossman testified he had never known how much she used, won, and collected one hundred and twelve thousand dollars. In 1973 two books appeared, Myra Friedman's biography Buried Alive and Peggy Caserta's lurid memoir Going Down With Janis. Caserta's book described the dealer in detail, and her friend Kim Chappell later told a biographer that men looking for Caserta stabbed her instead, puncturing both lungs. Chappell survived. Caserta spent decades disowning that book as the work of her ghostwriter.[1] [2] [3]

Janis kept turning up in other people's art. Leonard Cohen's Chelsea Hotel No. 2 was about a brief affair with her in 1968, and in 1994 he apologized on the BBC for revealing it. The 1979 film The Rose, starring Bette Midler, began life as a project called Pearl but was fictionalized after her family refused to sell the rights. In 1988, on what would have been her forty fifth birthday, around five thousand people packed the Port Arthur convention center to unveil a sculpture of the girl the town had once mocked. Three years later, her estate lost a court fight to shut down a Seattle play about her.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In 1995 Janis became the first female solo artist inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in her first year of eligibility, and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award followed in 2005. The Rock Hall displays her psychedelic Porsche. She got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in November 2013 and a postage stamp in 2014. The stage show A Night with Janis Joplin reached Broadway in 2013, and Amy Berg's documentary Janis, Little Girl Blue arrived in 2015, built around her letters home. As of 2026 she remains one of the best selling singers in America, with RIAA certifications for eighteen and a half million albums.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Many of the people around her had hard roads. James Gurley's wife Nancy died of a heroin overdose in 1969, and he was charged with murder for injecting her before receiving probation. Seth Morgan served prison time for armed robbery, wrote a well reviewed novel called Homeboy, and died in a motorcycle crash in New Orleans in 1990. Gurley died in 2009 and Sam Andrew in 2015. In 2024 the circle lost Nick Gravenites, Kris Kristofferson at eighty eight, and Peggy Caserta at eighty four. Peter Albin and Dave Getz kept Big Brother going for decades with a string of new singers.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10]

The people around Janis Joplin

Janis Joplin and Peggy Caserta. Caserta ran Mnasidika, an early Haight Street boutique, and gave Janis a pair of jeans for free after she asked to put fifty cents down on them. They became friends, on and off lovers and heroin partners for about four years, and Caserta was with her backstage at Woodstock. After Janis died many in her circle blamed Caserta. She said Janis introduced her to heroin, not the other way round. She died in November 2024 at eighty four.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Janis Joplin and Sam Andrew. Sam Andrew was Big Brother's guitarist and musical director and arranged their Summertime. He was the only bandmate Janis took with her when she went solo, then fired him in 1969. He admitted they used heroin together early on, and said they later became lovers. He stayed loyal to her memory, serving as music director of the stage show Love, Janis. He died in 2015.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Janis Joplin and James Gurley. Gurley was Big Brother's wild lead guitarist, a Coltrane fan who shaped the band's psychedelic sound and slowed Ball and Chain into a minor key blues. He and Janis had an affair early on, which shook his marriage. In 1969 his wife Nancy died of a heroin overdose. At Janis's wake he raised a toast to what's her name, and he later blamed Clive Davis for splitting her from the band.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Janis Joplin and Country Joe McDonald. Janis met Country Joe McDonald of Country Joe and the Fish in San Francisco in early 1967, and they lived together for about three months in her Lyon Street apartment. She was angry when he left her for another woman, but she still asked him to write a song about her. The result was Janis, released in 1967 while she was very much alive.[1] [2]

Janis Joplin and Kris Kristofferson. Bob Neuwirth introduced them, and in the spring of 1970 the three spent weeks on a tequila soaked spree. The romance was brief. Neuwirth taught her Kristofferson's Me and Bobby McGee, and she recorded it while he was away filming in Peru. He did not know she had cut it, and heard it for the first time the day after she died. It became her only number one single. Kristofferson died in 2024 at eighty eight.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Janis Joplin and Seth Morgan. Morgan was a twenty one year old Berkeley dropout from a wealthy family who, by one account, first came to her Larkspur home delivering cocaine. They got engaged in September 1970. He failed to show up at the Landmark on her last weekend and angered her on the phone the day before she died. He later went to prison for armed robbery, wrote the novel Homeboy, and died in a 1990 motorcycle crash.[1] [2] [3]

Janis Joplin and Albert Grossman. Grossman, Bob Dylan's manager, took on Big Brother in late 1967 on the condition that nobody used needles. When he learned Janis was injecting anyway he did not confront her, and instead insured her life for two hundred thousand dollars. He did stage an intervention with Myra Friedman in the winter before she died. After her death he fought his insurer in court and helped assemble the 1974 documentary Janis.[1] [2] [3]

Janis Joplin and Chet Helms. Helms knew Janis from the Austin folk scene and hitchhiked with her to San Francisco in January 1963. Later, as the promoter behind the Avalon Ballroom and Big Brother's first manager, he sent Travis Rivers to Texas to bring her back as the band's singer. He introduced them on stage at Monterey, the show that changed everything for her.[1] [2] [3]

Janis Joplin and Laura Joplin. Laura was six years younger and idolized her big sister, who taught her to draw and play guitar. Janis wrote the family a stream of witty letters that Laura kept. They became the heart of her 1992 book Love, Janis, the stage show of the same name, and Amy Berg's 2015 documentary. Laura went with Janis to the 1970 reunion and still defends her against the lonely misfit myth.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Janis Joplin and Leonard Cohen. In the spring of 1968 Janis and Leonard Cohen had a brief fling at the Chelsea Hotel in New York. Cohen later wrote Chelsea Hotel No. 2 about it and, for years, told audiences who it was about. He came to regret the graphic detail, and in a 1994 BBC broadcast he said he wanted to apologize to her ghost for the indiscretion.[1] [2]

Janis Joplin and Paul Rothchild. Rothchild, the Doors' producer, took over the Pearl sessions in 1970 and insisted on Sunset Sound instead of Columbia's studio. He called Janis a producer's dream and shaped her most controlled, confident singing. He also remembered her driving her Porsche against traffic on blind curves, laughing. After her death he finished the album, and later produced the soundtrack for The Rose.[1] [2] [3]

Janis Joplin and Big Mama Thornton. Thornton wrote and first sang Ball and Chain, the song that made Janis a star at Monterey. Janis asked her permission to cover it, always credited her, and arranged for her to open some of her shows. Thornton said Janis felt the song the way she did. Her own career never got the rewards it deserved, and she died penniless in 1984.[1] [2]

Rare facts about Janis Joplin

• Her first ever recording was a jingle for a Texas bank, sung to the tune of This Land Is Your Land. Before she moved to Austin, Janis recorded a radio and TV jingle for a Texas bank, set to Woody Guthrie's This Land Is Your Land. The ad was never aired.[1]
• At Threadgill's in Austin she sang on Wednesday nights for two dollars and all the beer she could drink. Threadgill's was a converted gas station on North Lamar Boulevard. Owner Kenneth Threadgill encouraged her, and in July 1970, as a star, she flew back to Austin for a party in his honor.[1] [2]
• She once won a vocal contest run by the Austin parks department in Zilker Park. Long before fame, Janis won a singing contest sponsored by the Austin Parks and Recreation Department at Zilker Park, while she was a student at the University of Texas.[1]
• A 1964 session with Jorma Kaukonen features his wife typing in the background. Janis and the future Jefferson Airplane guitarist recorded seven blues standards at home in 1964. Margareta Kaukonen's typing is audible, so the bootleg became known as The Typewriter Tape.[1]
• Legendary football coach Jimmy Johnson was her high school classmate. At Thomas Jefferson High School in Port Arthur, Janis was a classmate of Jimmy Johnson, who went on to coach championship teams and enter the Pro Football Hall of Fame.[1]
• Before joining Big Brother she was also asked to sing with the Thirteenth Floor Elevators. In Austin in May 1966 the psychedelic band the Thirteenth Floor Elevators wanted her as their singer, at the same moment Chet Helms was calling from San Francisco.[1] [2]
• Dave Getz dreamed of a glamorous new frontwoman the night before Janis joined Big Brother. The drummer had never heard of Janis Joplin before the day she joined the band, but he later said he had dreamed the night before that a glamorous singer was coming.[1]
• Peggy Caserta's boutique helped invent the bell bottom jean that Levi's later sold as its 646. Caserta sold altered flared Levi's at Mnasidika and persuaded the Levi Strauss factory to make them for her shop. Levi's launched its 646 Bell Bottom jean in 1969.[1] [2]
• Peggy Caserta's grade school friend in Texas was Lee Harvey Oswald. Caserta moved around the South as a child and, while at grade school in Texas, befriended a shy boy she knew simply as Lee, the future Lee Harvey Oswald.[1] [2]
• Robert Crumb refused payment for the Cheap Thrills cover. Columbia's art director John Berg said Crumb turned the fee down, saying he did not want Columbia's money. Janis had insisted his cartoon go on the front instead of her portrait.[1]
• You can hear a glass break and get swept up during Turtle Blues on Cheap Thrills. Producer John Simon wanted a raw, live feel, and one track keeps the sound of a drinking glass shattering and the shards being swept away. Bill Graham's voice introduces another song.[1] [2]
• Big Brother were the first band to play the Fillmore East. Bill Graham's New York venue opened on the eighth of March 1968 with Big Brother and the Holding Company, alongside Albert King and Tim Buckley.[1]
• Southern Comfort reportedly thanked her for the free publicity with a lynx coat. Janis was so often seen swigging Southern Comfort that she boosted its sales, and she got the company to give her a lynx fur coat as a thank you.[1]
• Her Woodstock fee was reportedly seven thousand five hundred dollars. A Variety clipping shows Janis was to be paid seven thousand five hundred dollars for Woodstock, when a one day ticket cost eight dollars.[1]
• Her Woodstock requests apparently included a personal supply of strawberries. The 2019 documentary Creating Woodstock, which examined festival myths, reported that Janis apparently required her own supply of strawberries.[1]
• After her Tampa arrest she spent the waiting time before her hearing out fishing. Janis posted five hundred and four dollars bond after the November 1969 arrest, then told reporters she went fishing south of Tampa before her court appearance.[1]
• Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame reviewed one of her 1969 concerts. Weeks before Woodstock, the Washington Post sent young reporter Carl Bernstein to her Merriweather Post Pavilion show. He wrote that she had finally found musicians who suited her voice.[1] [2]
• Her last studio recording included a Happy Trails birthday greeting for John Lennon. Near the end of the Pearl sessions Janis and two band members taped Happy Trails for Lennon's thirtieth birthday. Lennon later told Dick Cavett it arrived after she had died.[1] [2] [3]
• Her psychedelic Porsche was painted by a friend for five hundred dollars. Janis bought the Porsche 356 convertible in 1968 and paid Dave Richards five hundred dollars to paint it. It is now displayed at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.[1] [2]
• Lyle Tuttle tattooed her wrist with a symbol for women's liberation. In April 1970 the San Francisco artist Lyle Tuttle inked her wrist. She also had a small heart tattooed on her chest, which she joked was just for her friends.[1] [2]
• Her band's gear was stolen before her final concert, at Harvard Stadium. At her last public show on the twelfth of August 1970, Full Tilt Boogie played through makeshift amplifiers. The Harvard Crimson still gave it a glowing front page review.[1] [2]
• Bobby McGee was named after a studio secretary called Bobbie McKee, whose surname Kristofferson misheard. Producer Fred Foster challenged Kristofferson to write a song with that title, based on the name of Barbara McKee. Kristofferson misheard it as McGee.[1]
• Piece of My Heart's cowriter Bert Berns never heard her version. Berns died of a heart attack on the thirtieth of December 1967, months before Big Brother turned his song into Janis's signature hit.[1]
• Faith Hill was told not to listen to Janis's Piece of My Heart until she finished her own. Hill had never heard the Joplin version. Warner Bros. warned her to avoid it until her recording was done, and her country take reached number one in 1994.[1]
• Paul Rothchild got Columbia to break its own studio rule for Pearl. Columbia artists normally had to record in company studios. Rothchild insisted on Sunset Sound in Los Angeles, and Clive Davis reluctantly agreed.[1]
• Todd Rundgren produced some of her 1970 recordings before Rothchild took over. Rundgren worked on early sessions in March 1970. They came to nothing except the song One Night Stand, which sat in a vault until the posthumous Farewell Song album.[1]
• Bobby Womack said he visited her at the Landmark just hours before she died. Womack, who wrote Trust Me for Pearl and played guitar on it, is described as one of the last people to see her alive, at her hotel on her final night.[1]
• Her will paid for her own wake, with invitations reading Drinks are on Pearl. Janis left two thousand five hundred dollars for a farewell party, inspired by a Hells Angels wake she loved in 1967. It was held at the Lion's Share in San Anselmo.[1]
• Mercedes Benz poet Michael McClure refused to watch the car company's ad that used the song. When Mercedes Benz later used the song in a commercial, McClure, author of the poem that started it, said he would not watch it and would never drive one.[1]
• Her Woodstock set only reached the famous film in the 1994 director's cut. Janis insisted her performance be left out of the 1970 film and album. The twenty fifth anniversary director's cut finally included her singing Work Me, Lord.[1] [2]
• The 1974 documentary Janis played in just one theater, reportedly shelved for Jaws. Universal released Janis in a single San Francisco theater for fourteen weeks. A producer said the studio shelved it to focus on bigger films such as Jaws.[1]
• She sang Turn On Your Love Light with the Grateful Dead's Pigpen. Janis was close to Ron Pigpen McKernan, sharing a love of booze over other drugs. She joined him onstage for his signature song at the Fillmore West in June 1969.[1] [2]
• Seth Morgan based a character in his novel Homeboy on Janis. Her last fiancé published one novel, Homeboy, in 1990, about San Francisco's drug underworld. He said a flamboyantly dressed prostitute in it was based on Janis.[1]
• Janis's family refused rights to her story, so The Rose was fictionalized. The Bette Midler film was originally titled Pearl. When the Joplin family declined, it became the story of a made up singer, Mary Rose Foster.[1] [2]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.