![]() Less than three months later, Janis Joplin was dead. He looked at me and looked at her and said: ‘You wouldn’t be bad-looking if you weren’t trying to look like your sister.’ The jerk that he is,” Laura says, witheringly. Nonetheless, it was an “unfortunate experience. Janis was proud to be able to take her little sister backstage to meet the man, part of “a desire to show she had connections with powerful people.” Later that same night, the Joplin girls went to see Jerry Lee Lewis play in Port Arthur. “Instead of being the person who had reached the greatest visible recognition in the country, Janis got a tyre for having travelled the longest distance.” “That’s what I find most insulting,” says Laura, audibly pained 51 years later. At the reunion, Janis was symbolically gifted a tyre, to represent “that she’d come the farthest”. ![]() No matter what she did, she could not get applause from her classmates.”Įven then, the recognition was miserly. ![]() It was only when the president of the class said, ‘What about Janis Joplin?’ that everyone stood up and applauded. “However, the guy running things thought in terms of how many people had law degrees. But in my mind, and in Janis’s, they should have made her attendance and her success one of the central points to celebrate – ‘Look what someone from our high school has achieved!’ There was a sense they didn’t quite know what to do about her. “Everyone else was in straight, middle-class clothing and teased hair. She accompanied Janis, six years her elder, to the reunion, and wore a dialled-back version of her sister’s fabulous freak-out garb. “It was a formal event and it was an awkward fit!” recalls her 72-year-old sister, Laura, laughing. But before that, there was that detour back to Port Arthur, the small, conservative Texan community in which, as a beatnik-channelling teen rebel, she’d never felt at home. Later that summer of 1970, Joplin would begin work on her second solo album, Pearl, which would feature some of her best-known songs, including her cover of 1963 R&B track Cry Baby and her own (co-written) Mercedes Benz. ![]() As The Washington Post wrote in April 1968 of her stage persona: “She screams, she stomps, she jumps, she quivers, she flails her arms, she flings her great wild mane like an unbroken pony.” But even Janis on an off-night was incredible.” As The Who’s Pete Townsend wrote in his memoir, Who I Am: “She had been amazing at Monterey, but tonight she wasn ’t at her best, due, probably, to the long delay, and probably, too, to the amount of booze and heroin she ’d consumed while she waited. The previous summer Joplin had been one of the star performers at Woodstock, managing to cut through the stoned fug and 2am start time with an earth-shaking performance. Her incredible blues range saw her credited as having “The Voice of a Lady Leadbelly”, as the New York Free Press headlined a February 1968 profile. An incendiary performer on- and off-stage, she was a hippie style icon and feminist trailblazer who’d made her name on the San Francisco scene as frontwoman with Big Brother and the Holding Company. Joplin rocked up in hippie flares, a scoop-necked T-shirt, a feather boa that she wore as a hat, and her trademark round, colour-tinted sunglasses.Īt the time, the 27-year-old singer and songwriter was one of the biggest counter-cultural forces in America. Thomas Jefferson High School in Port Arthur, Texas, was holding a 10-year reunion. On August 14 1970, Janis Joplin went home. ![]()
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