Just two years later, she would share the bill with him at the Monterey Pop Festival, and, displaying the same barely contained power, land Big Brother a Columbia Records deal on the strength of a single performance. His emotional vocals and frenetic performance so enraptured Joplin that she returned to all of his shows at The Fillmore that weekend, arriving an hour early to secure the best position. But the evening’s most mind-altering event was yet to occur: seeing Otis Redding sing for the first time. Though she tried to avoid hard drugs, former bandmate Dave Getz recalls watching Joplin swig from a magnum of wine – oblivious that the bottle had been dosed with 68 hits of LSD. The child-woman ideal of the Haight,” Rolling Stone magazine’s David Dalton recalls. “She was just funny, unassuming, sexy, with almost a Huck Finn innocence to her. Joplin was a regular at 710 Ashbury Street, and she traded her Texan attire for the trappings of a freewheeling gypsy. She got the gig.Īs the vocalist for Big Brother and the Holding Company, Joplin’s address in the Haight-Ashbury district placed her at the ground zero of America’s hippie counterculture. Returning to San Francisco in 1966 to audition for an emerging rock band called Big Brother and the Holding Company, Joplin told a friend she was “scared to death” her voice wasn’t good enough – a suspicion she constantly harboured – and that her sobriety would not withstand the city’s thriving drug culture.

After watching Joplin’s raw, gutsy, performance, a family friend reported back to her mother, “Dorothy, you don’t stand a chance.” She was right. Though she tried to fit in, dressing modestly and studying sociology, it wasn’t to last. “I think she was with girls because that’s what she felt in the moment.” Following the breakdown of that relationship, she became engaged to a con man who nurtured her growing speed habit, and wound up right back where she started: living with her parents in Port Arthur. “I don’t think she was with girls to shock people,” Whitaker said. She took to booze and speed with gusto and romanced a string of men and women. Here, an interracial lesbian couple could be left alone. Best of all, no-one made fun of her unconventional clothes or opinions. The last vestiges of the beat generation were giving way to the civil rights movement and a thriving folk scene, and Joplin started making a name for herself singing in coffee shops. When she met Joplin in San Francisco’s North Beach in 1963, the city was in the midst of upheaval. “She definitely needed people to tell her how great she was, needed that stroking all the time,” says Jae Whitaker, her former girlfriend.

“To that point, I had never seen Janis cry.” By the time her mother received an anguished letter, Joplin had already packed for California. “It was the saddest thing,” recalls her friend and fellow musician Powell St. When the university fraternity humiliated Joplin by nominating her “Ugliest Man on Campus”, her already tenuous self-esteem was crushed. This period of stability was short-lived, however. Around this time she discovered her two great loves: Odetta, the blues singer whose voice she had a gift for mimicking, and Southern Comfort, the drink that would become her totem and her curse.Īfter a brief stint in LA’s Venice Beach, she returned to Texas in 1961 to study art in Austin. Styling herself as “one of the boys” – outrageous and quick-witted – allowed Joplin to escape some of the suffocating small-town dogma, as did frequent road trips to Austin and New Orleans, where the jazz of Bourbon Street served as an early musical education. “They don’t treat beatniks too good in Texas,” Joplin once said. She expressed support for integration at a time when Port Arthur still had an active Ku Klux Klan chapter, and was mercilessly bullied, her persecution compounded by acne and weight fluctuations. Her parents fostered her independent spirit, but it wasn’t until the final years of high school that she began to reject the archaic values of her home town. Born in 1943 to Seth, an engineer, and Dorothy, a registrar at a business college, Joplin’s quiet disposition hid the gentle hum of ambition. Tho ugh she cultivated a public image as a woman who could drink, sing, swear and have sex with the same abandon as any male musician – a stark contrast to the serene, flower-child pin-ups of the day – the industry’s quintessential wild child began life in the mild-mannered town of Port Arthur, Texas. Joplin performing at Woodstock Music Festival in 1969

Was janis joplin nude at woodstock