Janis Joplin
A man and a woman have each other, baby,
To find their way in this world.
I need you, darling, like the fish needs the sea,
Don’t take your sweet, your sweet love from me.
Sam Andrew, “Call On Me”
Other bands had already achieved success with female singers and Big Brother wanted to follow their example. Peter Albin remembers: “The reason was I couldn’t sing very well. I knew that and the rest of the band knew that, and it was fairly obvious that we needed to get somebody to do more of the lead vocals than me. There were a lot of female vocalists at that time with the rock groups and we kind of like went along with the trend. The Jefferson Airplane had Signe Anderson, the Great Society had Grace Slick. It gave a particular kind of look to them and also a kind of a vocal quality that we liked.” After Big Brother had auditioned several singers and were unhappy with the results, Chet Helms mentioned Janis Joplin, whom he knew in Texas. Peter Albin and James Gurley were afraid that Janis would dominate the band, since they had already heard her and they knew her extraordinarily strong voice. Finally, though, they came to terms with the idea of trying her.
Janis Joplin was born on January 19th, 1943 in Port Arthur, Texas, and she was the eldest of three children. Her father worked for Texaco Oil as did many other men in Port Arthur, and her mother was a registrar at Port Arthur College. Port Arthur was an oil refining town through and through. Janis’s first solo performance was in a Christmas recital of her ninth grade school choir. In time, she became known for interpreting the blues music of Leadbelly and Bessie Smith which was to imprint her for life. Janis also was interested in painting and poetry and she worked on the literary magazine at school, for which she wrote short stories and made drawings. Later she did set designs for The Port Arthur Little Theater and also played minor dramatic roles there.
“Art was for Janis a way of communicating with people,” wrote her sister Laura in her biography of Janis. Janis began to sing songs and she recognized her vocal talent. Little, square Port Arthur soon became too small for her. Janis hated life in Port Arthur and already early on she was an outsider. Later, at the University of Texas in Austin, the “fraternity brothers” voted her “the ugliest man on campus.” Her face was scarred with acne and she had a defensive attitude. “To several of her fellow students, my sister seemed sullen and quarrelsome” writes Laura Joplin. “Mother always tried to help her get approval by sewing her pretty things or by buying them for her, but Janis mostly refused to wear them.”
Janis became a beatnik and she hung out in a Port Arthur coffee shop with other young people inspired by writers like William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac. They listened to jazz and blues music there and discussed their heroes, politics, and literature. That many of their models were African American was for the group, as for beatniks in general, an implied criticism of the racial discrimination that was rampant in their surroundings. This put them in opposition to the racist society of Port Arthur which was every bit as conservative and prejudiced as the rest of the South. Janis Joplin was looking for a way out and she decided to leave home.
She had her first performance as a blues singer while she was in Austin at the University of Texas. The venue was a former gas station where Ken Threadgill, an old folksinger/yodeler had a bar. She accompanied herself on the Autoharp and she was backed up by the Waller Creek Boys, with Powell St. John on harmonica and banjo and guitarist Lanny Wiggins. Recordings from this time have been released by Columbia Records as Janis Joplin - Early Performances and include such songs as What Good Can Drinkin’ Do and Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out. One of Janis’s friends at the University of Texas and on the local scene was Chet Helms. They hitchhiked out to San Francisco together, and Janis lived in North Beach for a while singing in coffeehouses and moving in the beat life of the neighborhood. One of her roommates at this time was her long-haired friend Linda Waldron who notes that Janis already knew that she could be a star. This is when she sang at the Coffee Gallery in North Beach for the first time. It is also when she became known for her use of speed and for upping her intake of alcohol which she had begun already in Port Arthur. “She slid over the edge of the controllable in that excess that she had been craving,” said Laura Joplin. In May 1965, Janis admitted defeat and returned to Port Arthur, emaciated and exhausted. She tried, though still resisting, to adapt herself to a “normal” life in Port Arthur. She wore a serious hairstyle, got a job, and tried not to displease those who were around her. She still played music, though, and wrote at this time a song called Turtle Blues that was to be recorded on Big Brother’s second album. The song is a real picture of that strange time she spent back home in Port Arthur. When Chet Helms invited her to return to San Francisco and sing with Big Brother, Janis pulled back at first. “She had a lot of anxiety about coming back into the drug environment here,” says Chet. “I told her that I would put her on a bus back home if it doesn’t work.” He sent a charming young man Travis Rivers to Texas to convince Janis to come to San Francisco. The ploy worked.
“When Janis Joplin came to her first rehearsal with Big Brother and the Holding Company,” Sam Andrew remembers, “it was on Henry Street in San Francisco at an old converted firehouse. The poster artists, Mouse and Kelly had a studio in a loft there and they were air-brushing a poster for that weekend. In another part of the large space, a mother was nursing her baby, and someone was making brown rice in the kitchen. It was a very organic scene. Chet Helms walked into the room, and cowering behind him, as much as Janis Joplin could ever cower, was our new singer wearing huaraches, blue jeans, and a work shirt. So she was just this very funky Texas girl that reminded me of my mother's side of the family, who sort of specialized in that unmade-bed look. It felt like home when I met Janis.”
James Gurley adds, “She look like punk or something. She had Levis that had the knees turned out. She had Mexican huaraches sandals on and her hair was pined up in a bun. She had no make-up and her face was really broken out. She had bad complexion and she had this blue sweatshirt on, that was all torn and covered with paint because she had been a painter. Nobody would have looked at her and thought, in a few years she is gone be the biggest thing on the planet.” Janis wasn’t exactly what the band had been expecting. “As she began to sing,” Sam says, “she was loud and fast. It was as if a freight train was passing by and she was grabbing for it, not sure that she could hold on.”