Janis Joplin would have been seventy five years old on
Friday. It seems impossible to think of her as ever being that old. It also seems impossible that all this time
later, she would still have been that young, that all that was effectively only
yesterday. She died, as everybody knows, as the great wave of “the sixties”
broke, leaving the debris of those whose vulnerability as well as talent seemed
to define that still extraordinary era.
Even at the time, there was something of an air of ritual
inevitability about it. First there was Jimi…then a few weeks later there was
Janis…then Jim Morrison a few months after that. All damaged, all publically
bearing their wounds to the hungry world, all burning out with a rapidity
contiguous with the brightness of that burning. All 27, of course, famously,
and all, too, in the process of renegotiating the congruence of personal,
cultural and world history that focussed on their unready persons, and devoured
them raw.
In Janis’s case, there was never anything private about what
was happening to her. Heart on her
sleeve wasn’t in it. The whole basis of her sudden fame had lain in what she
had represented as female, freaky and young.
Bewildered hurt was what she did, it was her schtick. In the way she
sang, tearing at herself to find and display her damage, in her rambling but
poetically focussed monologues in between songs on stage, in her alternately
reckless and needy personal relationships, at any time and place, Janis Joplin
would have been a troubled soul, dangerous to know, or know too well. But it
took a very particular time and place to take her out of the provincial, hip
coffee bars of Austin, Texas, and make her personal pain into the global cultural
commodity that it was…and still is.
What happened, basically, upon the discovery by corporate
America that there was money to be made out of “rebellion”, was that the
outcasts and losers…they self-identified as freaks…who have always and will
always be on the failed fringes of home owning consumerism, were handed guitars
and money and the very best of them conquered the world. Whenever you watch film of them, something
like the Band’s great, elegiac concert movie, The Last Waltz, for example, you
find yourself thinking, “would any one of these funny looking fuck ups have
been signed to a record label at any other time in history?” The answer is
probably “no.” It was a particular
moment of cultural dislocation combined with economic expansion that brought
these culturally dislocated people into the economic mainstream. For a giddy year or two, in their early and
mid-twenties, still children, really, with the Beatles at the top of the
pyramid, these glorious inmates had the run of the asylum…and produced what are
still some of the most arresting and brilliant “moments” in the history of popular
culture.
The version of Big Mama Thornton’s “Ball and Chain” on Janis’s
“breakthrough” album with big Brother and the Holding Company is one of the
musical highlights of the century for me, never mind of the decade. A voice breaking into chords over Sam
Houston’s visceral, tearing guitar, reinventing the personal in the
appropriation of a black woman’s blues by a young white woman that, for me
anyway, transcends a later era’s cross-cultural queasiness through the sheer
force of that individual witness. It couldn’t have happened before the moment
that it did happen. And it sure as hell
couldn’t have happened afterwards.
The dumb accidental tragedy of her death, which is brought
to mind by thinking of her as alive today - a cackling, life affirming firebrand
of a certain age, on her fourth marriage to a younger guy with a hell of a
stock of memories and who can tell what other achievements - is that like all
the icons born in the first half of the forties who burned brightly in the
sixties, she was in the process of re-negotiating her own life. They were all doing it, that whole generation
who suddenly found themselves nearer to thirty than twenty…
Some reinvented themselves as corporations in their own
right, some found a niche in the rather quieter, less dangerous world of jazz
or country rock (Janis was heading in that direction). But every change, as in
the case of the Beatles, had a price of breaking something. Perhaps it was easier if you in a group, that
you had to break up the gang…or turn it into a brand… in order to survive into
adulthood.
And maybe somewhere in there is where we find the real link
between members of the 27 club. Not so much in their numerology as in their singularity,
their isolation. Janis changed bands three times in three studio albums, but it
is in her unaccompanied “Mercedes Benz” song that she most wistfully yet definitively
sang to us of her plight. Unable to fit in with what she had been, and with her
very existence defined by her being estranged from herself, she called herself
and her last Album by the name of a black prostitute, , “Pearl.”
That her she destroyed herself just at a time when she had
put the worst of her self-destructiveness behind her, and that her lonely death
on a hotel room floor is so synonymous with her very real achievements as a
musician is every bit as much our tragedy as much as it is hers. It would have
been better for all of us if that remarkable person still lived on, rather than
what we do have left of her…the comparatively cheap currency of a legend.
