Janis Joplin

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Janis Lyn Joplin (January 19, 1943 – October 4, 1970) was an American singer-songwriter who performed rock, soul, and blues music.

Joplin, one of the most popular and well-known rock stars of her time, came to fame in 1967 after appearing at Montegoulo's Monte Montefo and the Holding Company, where she was a lead singer of the then little-known San Francisco psychedelic rock band Big Brother and the Holding Company.

She left Big Brother after releasing two albums with the band, first the Kozmic Blues Band and later the Full Tilt Boogie Band.

She appeared at the Woodstock festival and the Festival Express train tour.

Five singles by Joplin reached the Billboard Hot 100, including a recreation of Kris Kristofferson's "Me and Bobby McGee," which debuted at number one in March 1971.

"Piece of My Heart," "British Baby," "Down on Me," "Machine," "Summertime," and "Summertime" are among her most popular songs.Joplin died of a heroin overdose in 1970 after releasing three albums.

Pearl's fourth album was released in January 1971, just over three months after she died.

It has risen to number one on the Billboard charts.

In 1995, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Joplin was ranked 46 on the Rolling Stone list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time in 2004 and number 28 on its 2008 list of the 100 Greatest Singers of All Time.

With records in the United States, she remains one of the top-selling artists in the United States, with sales of 15.5 million albums in the United States.

Early life

Janis Joplin was born in Port Arthur, Texas, on (1943-01-19), she and her husband, Seth Ward Joplin (1910-1977), an engineer at Texaco. Laura and Michael were her two younger sisters. The family attended First Christian Church of Port Arthur, a church of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) denomination.

Janis needed more attention than her other children, according to her parents. Joplin befriended a group of outcasts, one of whom had albums by blues artists Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and Lead Belly, which Joplin later credited with her decision to become a singer. She began playing blues and folk music with her classmates at Thomas Jefferson High School. She was a classmate of Pro Football Hall of Fame coach Jimmy Johnson in high school.

Joplin claimed she was ostracized and mocked in high school. She became overweight and acne-prone as a child, resulting in deep scars that necessitated dermabrasion. Other children in high school would routinely mock her and say her names like "pig," "freak," "nigger lover," or "creep." "I was a misfit," she explained. I read, I painted, I suppose. "I didn't hate niggers" was the word in the story.

Joplin graduated from high school in 1960 and attended Lamar State College of Technology in Beaumont, Texas, during the summer and later the University of Texas at Austin (UT), but she did not finish her college studies. "She Dares to Be Different" was the title of The Daily Texan's campus newspaper, which appeared in the newspaper on July 27, 1962. "She goes barefooted when she feels like it," the author says, wears Levi's to class because they're more convenient, and hauls her autoharp with her everywhere she goes, so if she feels the desire to break into song will be useful." Janis Joplin is the author of this story. While at UT, she worked with the Waller Creek Boys, a folk trio, and often socialized with the staff of the campus humor publication The Texas Ranger. Gilbert Shelton, a Freak Brothers cartoonist who befriended her, sold The Texas Ranger, which contained some of Shelton's early comic books, on the campus.

Personal life

Joplin's most significant friendships with men included ones with Peter de Blanc, Country Joe McDonald (who wrote the song "Janis"), Kris Kristofferson, and Seth Morgan (from July 1970 to her death, a period when they were allegedly engaged).

She had also had affairs with women. Joplin briefly lived with Jae Whitaker, a woman she had encountered while playing pool at the bar Gino & Carlo in North Beach, during her first stint in San Francisco in 1963. Whitaker and their partner were unable to get together because of Joplin's strong heroin use and sexual relationships with other individuals. When Alice Echols' biography Scars of Sweet Paradise was first published, Whitaker was first identified by name in connection with the singer in 1999.

Peggy Caserta's on-again, off-again romantic relationship. They first met in November 1966 at The Matrix, a San Francisco venue. Caserta was one of 15 people in the audience, and she owned Mnasidika, a clothing store in the Haight Ashbury at the time. Joplin, about a month after Caserta's appearance, visited her boutique and said she couldn't afford to buy a pair of jeans that were not for sale, instead asking to pay the first 50 cents on the $5 item. Caserta was stunned that such a gifted performer could not afford a $5 item and gave her a pair for free. For more than a year, their relationship had been platonic. Caserta was in love with Big Brother guitarist Sam Andrew before it went to the first half of 1968, and he went from San Francisco to New York to flirt with him. He did not want a serious relationship, and Joplin sympathized with Caserta's dissatisfaction with the case.

Joplin and Caserta were walking together for 37 seconds before they arrived at the stadium, where Joplin waited for her turn to perform. Both were intravenous heroin users by the time the festival took place in August 1969.

In Joplin's room at the Landmark Motor Hotel on September 29, 1970, according to Caserta's book Going Down With Janis, which Caserta has since disowned, Joplin introduced her to her boyfriend Seth Morgan. Caserta "had seen him around" in San Francisco but had not met him before. An agreement was reached for a threesome to take place the following Friday, but Caserta later said she discarded the proposal after learning that it was Morgan who would be with Joplin. Morgan made alternate plans, assuming that Caserta would be with Joplin that evening. However, each one was unaware that the other had bowed out. Caserta saw Joplin briefly in Joplin's bedroom the day after Joplin introduced Caserta to Morgan, when Caserta accommodated her new Los Angeles acquaintance Debbie Nuciforo, age 19, an aspiring hard rock drummer who wanted to see Joplin. At the time, Nuciforo was high on heroin, and the three women's encounter was brief and uncomfortable. After having spent less than 24 hours with her, Caserta suspected that the reason for Joplin's foul mood was that Morgan had abandoned her earlier this day. Caserta said she had attempted to contact Joplin by phone at the Landmark Motor Hotel and at Sunset Sound Recorders, but later said she did not see or hear her by phone. Caserta and Morgan lost touch with each other, and both had devised alternate plans for Friday night, October 2nd. On Saturday, Joplin expressed her disappointment (over both of her friends' abandonment out of their ménage à trois), while her druggist learned of her that killed her.

Myra Friedman, a historian, appeared in Buried Alive (1973): Myra Friedman said so.

Kim France wrote "Nothin' Left to Lose" in her May 2, 1999 article. "Once she became well-known, Joplin yearned like a truck driver, did not believe in wearing undergarments, was seldom seen without her bottle of Southern Comfort and was delighted in playing the role of sexual predator."

Joplin made a revealing statement about her sexuality to her friend Richard Hundgen, the Grateful Dead's San Francisco-based road manager, who hadn't known her since 1966. Joplin and Hundgen were offstage at a San Diego gig for both Full Tilt Boogie and the Holding Company, as well as the Holding Company, and the Holding Company, she said the following, she said.

Source

Career

Joplin had a rebellious demeanor and styled herself partly after her female blues heroes and partly after Beat poets. "What Good Can Drinkin' Do" is her first song, and it was recorded on tape in December 1962 at the home of a fellow University of Texas undergraduate.

She left Texas in January 1963 ("just to get away" she said, while her companion Chet Helms hitchhiking to North Beach, San Francisco. Joplin and future Jefferson Airplane guitarist Jorma Kaukonen set a number of blues standards in San Francisco in 1964, one of which prominently featured Kaukonen's wife Margareta using a typewriter in the background. This session featured seven tracks: "Typewriter Talk," "Kansas City Blues," "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out," "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out," "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out," "Daddy, Daddy, Daddy," and "Long Black Train Blues," and was released long after Joplin's death as the bootleg version of the Bootleg Tape."

Joplin was arrested in San Francisco in 1963 for shoplifting. Her heroin use increased in the two years that followed, and she became known as a "speed freak" and occasional heroin user. She used other psychoactive medications and was a big drinker throughout her career; her favorite alcohol drink was Southern Comfort;

Joplin's friends in San Francisco, who noticed her declining effects after she was regularly injecting methamphetamine (they were described as "skeletal" and "emaciated"), persuaded her to return to Port Arthur in May 1965. Her parents threw her a bus-fare party to ensure she returned to her parents in Texas during that month. Joplin wrote about her first stay in San Francisco five years ago, telling Rolling Stone magazine writer David Dalton, "I didn't have many friends and I didn't like the ones I had."

Since Joplin's parents discovered her weight in the spring of 1965, she regained control in Port Arthur. (40 kg) She avoided heroin and alcohol, got a beehive hairdo, and enrolled as an anthropology major at Lamar University, Texas. During her year at Lamar, Laura said in a 2016 interview that social work had been her biggest. During her time at Lamar University, she rode alone in Austin to perform solo, accompanying herself on acoustic guitar. Mance Lipscomb, a Texas bluesman who was suffering from ill health, was one of her appearances at a charity for local musicians.

In 1965, Joplin proposed to Peter de Blanc. She began a relationship with him about the end of her first stint in San Francisco. He spent his time in New York with IBM machines, so he came back to visit her to ask her father's hand in marriage. The wedding was planned by Joplin and her mother. De Blanc, who travelled frequently, ended the relationship shortly afterward.

Joplin moved from Port Arthur, Texas, where she worked with Bernard Giarritano, a psychiatric social worker who was sponsored by the United Fund in 1965 and 1966, where she continued to meet with Bernard Giarritano, a social service agency that was funded by the United Fund, which changed its name to United Way after her death. Giarritano, a photographer who was interviewed after his client's death, said Joplin had been baffled by how she could pursue a career as a singer without returning to Port Arthur, and her heroin use began to terrorize her right away. Joplin used an acoustic guitar to her Giarritano sessions, and people in other departments of the building could hear her singing.

Giarritano continued to inform her that she did not have to use opioids in order to thrive in the music industry. She also stated that if she wanted to stop singing professionally, she would have to become a keypunch operator (as she had done a few years ago) or a secretary, then a wife and mother, and then she'd have to be very similar to all the other women in Port Arthur.

Joplin performed seven studio tracks with her acoustic guitar a year before joining Big Brother and the Holding Company. Buffy Sainte-Marie's original composition "Turtle Blues" and an alternate version of "Cod'ine" were among her songs. These songs were later released as a new album in 1995, titled This is Janis Joplin 1965 by James Gurley.

In 1966, Joplin's bluesy vocal style attracted the attention of the San Francisco-based psychedelic rock band Big Brother and the Holding Company, which had regained nascent hippie gang Haight-Ashbury's nascent hippie group Big Brother and the Holding Company, which had a nascent hippie group Big Brother and the Holding Company, which had gained a nascent hippie folk'shbury'shy's guigu Chet Helms, a promoter who was assisting Big Brother and with whom she had hitchhiked from Texas to San Francisco a few years ago, was recruited to join the company. Travis Rivers, Helms' friend, was sent by Helms to locate her in Austin, Texas, where she had been playing with her acoustic guitar, and to accompany her to San Francisco.

Rivers, a teen from Austin, was afraid of her previous experience with heroin use, and she pleaded with her parents face-to-face about her plans, and he drove her from Austin to Port Arthur (he waited in his car while she talked to her startled parents) before they began their long drive to San Francisco. On June 4, 1966, Joplin joined Big Brother. This was her first public performance with them at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco.

In June, Joplin was photographed at an outdoor concert in San Francisco that celebrated the summer solstice. The photograph, which was later published in two books by David Dalton, depicts her before she relapsed into opioids. Joplin stopped taking drugs for several weeks due to persistent persuading by keyboardist and close friend Stephen Ryder. Travis Rivers, with whom she shared an apartment on their arrival in San Francisco, promised that needle use would not be permitted there. Rivers weren't there when she was taken from a rehearsal to her home, but "two or three" (according to Getz' recollection, the Rivers had welcomed guests were already injecting opioids. "One of them was about to tie off," Getz remembered.

"Janis went nuts!

I've never seen anything explode like this. Travis stepped in as she was screaming and screaming when she finally arrived.

She screamed at him: 'We had a pact!

You promised me!

There would not be any of that in front of me!' I was over my head as I attempted to calm her down. Because that's what I thought it was, I said, 'They're just doing mescaline.'

She said, 'You don't understand!

I can't see that!

I just can't stand to see that!'"

On the 1984 album Cheaper Thrills, a San Francisco concert from that summer (1966) was recorded and released. Nancy Gurley, the five band members and guitarist James Gurley's wife, all five bandmates and guitarist James Gurley's wife, moved to a house in Laguas, California, where they lived communally. The band appeared at the Grateful Dead quite often, the members of whom lived less than two miles away. Ron "Pigpen" McKernan, a founding member, had a short friendship and a long friendship with him.

In August 1966, the band found itself homeless after the promoter ran out of money when its shows did not attract the desired audience numbers and the band was unable to pay them. Considering the circumstances, the band signed with Bob Shad's record label Mainstream Records; recordings for the band did not exist in Chicago in September, but the band returned to San Francisco, performing live, including at the Love Pageant Rally. In Los Angeles, the band released "Blindman" and "All Is Loneliness" as a single that did not sell well, and "All Is Loneliness" was released by Mainstream as a single that did not sell well. The band returned to Los Angeles on December 12, 1966, which appeared on the band's debut album in August 1967, after playing at a trivia in Stanford in early December 1966.

Big Brother switched managers from Chet Helms to Julius Karpen in late 1966. The Mantra-Rock Dance, a musical performance held at the San Francisco Hare Krishna temple on January 29, was one of Joplin's oldest major performances in 1967. Janis Joplin and Big Brother, as well as Hare Krishna's founder, Bhaktivedanta Swami, Allen Ginsberg, Moby Grape, and the Grateful Dead, all raised money to the Krishna temple. Joplin first met Country Joe McDonald of Country Joe and the Fish in early 1967. For a few months in Lyon Street's apartment, the two couples lived together as a couple. A driver's license, issued to Joplin in 1967, lists her home as 122 Lyon Street #3 in San Francisco.

At the Fillmore West, Winterland, and the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco, Joplin and Big Brother began playing together. They appeared at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, Washington, Seattle, Washington; Vancouver, British Columbia; the Psychedelic Supermarket in Boston, Massachusetts; and the Golden Bear Club in Huntington Beach, California.

Big Brother & the Holding Company, the band's debut studio album, was released by Mainstream Records in August 1967, just after the group's debut at the Monterey Pop Festival in June. Two tracks, "Coo Coo" and "The Last Time," were released as singles, but the remaining eight tracks were also included "Blindman" and "All Is Lonelines." Columbia Records took over the band's deal and re-released the album, and they included "Coo Coo" and "The Last Time" on the front page, as well as "featuring Janis Joplin." With the singles "Down on Me," a traditional song arranged by Joplin, "Bye Bye Baby," "Call On Me" and "Coo Coo," Joplin sang lead vocals, Joplin's debut album resulted in four minor hits.

Two songs from Big Brother's second set at Monterey, which they performed on Sunday, were shot (their first set, which was not captured, though it was audio-recorded). According to some accounts, including a Joplin biography by Ellis Amburn, she was dressed in thrift store hippie clothes or secondhand Victorian clothes during the band's Saturday set, but photos don't seem to have survived. In the DVD and Blu-ray boxed set of D. A. Pennebaker's documentary Monterey Pop released by The Criterion Collection, a digital color film of two songs from the Sunday set, "Combination of the Two" and a version of Big Mama Thornton's "Ball and Chain" appear alongside each other. She is seen wearing an expensive gold tunic dress with matching pants. Colin Rose, a San Francisco clothing designer, crafted them for her.

During Joplin's "Ball and Chain" appearance, documentary filmmaker Pennebaker added two cutaway photos of Cass Elliot of the Mamas & Papas, one in the middle of the song, as her eyes, partially covered by sunglasses, are fixed on Joplin, as well as a shot during the applause as she silently mouths "Oh, wow." The individual seated next to her looks at her. Elliot and the audience are shown in sunlight, but Big Brother's performance on Sunday was broadcast in the evening. Big Brother's road manager John Byrne Cooke, who recalls that Pennebaker discreetly filmed the audience (including Elliot) during Big Brother's Saturday appearance, although he was not allowed to point a camera at the band.

Big Brother's boss Julius Karpen barred Pennebaker from filming on Saturday afternoon. As they braced for their second set that the festival promoters had planned on the spur of the moment, the band had a bitter rivalry with Karpen and overruled him. The band was impressed with Albert Grossman, the city's resident, but did not engage with him until a few months later, excluding Karpen at the time.

In the Montey Pop film that was released to theaters around the country in 1969 and shown on television in the 1970s, only "Ball and Chain" was included. Those that did not attend the Monterey Pop Festival were treated to the band's "Combination of the Two" for the first time in 2002, when The Criterion Collection released the boxed set.

The band appeared mainly in California for the remainder of 1967, even after Big Brother signed with Albert Grossman. The group opened their first East Coast tour in Philadelphia on February 16, 1968, and the following day, the company opened their first appearance at the Anderson Theater in New York City. At the Wake for Martin Luther King Jr.'s concert in New York on April 7, 1968, three days after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination and the last day of their East Coast tour, Joe Hendrix, Buddy Guy, Joni Mitchell, Richie Havens, Paul Butterfield, and Elvin Bishop performed with Jimi Hendrix, Johnny King Jr.

During a collection of tracks from their albums, Winterland '68, which was recorded at the Winterland Ballroom on April 12 and 13, 1968, features Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company at the height of their respective careers. Columbia/Sony Music Entertainment released the compact disc for the first time in 1998. Owsley Stanley recorded them at the Carousel Ballroom in 2012, one month after the Winterland show.

On July 31, 1968, Joplin made her first national television appearance when the band appeared on This Morning, an ABC daytime 90-minute variety show hosted by Dick Cavett. The videotape was erased by network employees shortly after, but the recording remains. (Joplin appeared on Cavett's prime-time program in 1969 and 1970). In the majority documentaries about Joplin, video was saved, and excerpts were included. (Back in 1968, the video of her 1968 appearance hasn't been used since then.)

"Janis Joplin and the Holding Company" was changed to "Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company" by the band's name in 1968, and widespread media coverage of Joplin sparked resentment within the band. Some of Big Brother's other members of the party believed that Joplin was on a "star tour," while others told Joplin that Big Brother was a terrible band and that she should avoid them. For the May 1968 issue of Time magazine, Joplin was "the most influential woman to emerge from the white rock movement," Richard Goldstein wrote. "She slinks like tar, scowls like war, choking the legs of a final stanza, bemoaning that the chic remains a lady not to leave," Janis Joplin wrote.

Joplin was instrumental in the planning and execution of the songs that would appear on Big Brother and the Holding Company's second album, Cheap Thrills, for her first major studio recording. Producer John Simon attempted to capture the band's enthusiasm in a live album, but repeated attempts showed that the band was not in control of mistakes. The imprecision was not helped by transferring the sessions to a recording studio. Joplin performed a take after taking of the same song, with her appearances consistently strong, and she became dissatisfied with the band's sloppiness. Elliot Mazer, who edited the songs, overdubbing certain parts, replaced Simon. Counterculture cartoonist Robert Crumb's cover design was included on the album.

However, Cheap Thrills sounded as if it were concert recordings, including "Combination of the Two" and "I Want a Man to Love," only "Ball and Chain" was actually recorded in front of a paying audience; the remainder of the tracks were studio recordings. During the song "Turtle Blues," the album had a raw quality, with the sound of a drinking glass breaking and the cracked shards being swept away. With "Piece of My Heart" and "Summertime," Cheap Thrills produced two hit hits, including "Piece of My Heart" and "Summertime." The album debuted Joplin as a performer in New York's Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts on December 26, 1968. Cheap Thrills debuted on the Billboard 200 album chart eight weeks after its debut, and it was number one for eight (nonconsecutive) weeks. At release, the album was rated gold and sold over a million copies in the first month. In the fall of 1968, the album's lead single, "Piece of My Heart," debuted at number 12 on the Billboard Hot 100.

During July–August 1968, the band appeared at the Columbia Records convention in Puerto Rico and the Newport Folk Festival. Joplin revealed that she would not be leaving Big Brother after returning to San Francisco for two hometown shows at the Palace of Fine Arts Festival on August 31 and September 1. Fans thronged to a concert that Bill Graham announced as the last official concert of Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company on September 14, 1968, capped off a three-night engagement together at Fillmore West. The opening acts on this night were Chicago (then still called Chicago Transit Authority) and Santana.

Despite Graham's announcement that the Fillmore West gig was Big Brother's last concert with Joplin, the band, with Joplin still as lead vocalist—toured the United States this fall. Two October 1968 appearances at a roller rink in Alexandria, Virginia, were examined by John Segraves of the conservative Washington Evening Star, reflecting Joplin's crossover appeal, a period when the Washington metropolitan area's hard rock scene was in its infancy.

An opera buff at the time, he wrote:

Big Brother appeared at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute during the Syracuse University's Fall Homecoming on October 11, with Janis joining the Butterfield Blues Band as a opener. Joplin's last appearance with Big Brother came at a Chet Helms benefit in San Francisco on December 1, 1968, apart from two 1970 reunions.

Joplin formed the Kozmic Blues Band, a backup band for Big Brother and the Holding Company, as well as former Big Brother and the Holding Company bassist Brad Campbell. The band was influenced by 1960s Stax-Volt rhythm and blues (R&B) and soul bands, as exemplified by Otis Redding and the Bar-Kays. The Stax-Volt R&B's sound was characterized by the use of horns and had a funky, pop-oriented sound in comparison to many of the period's psychedelic/hard rock bands.

Joplin was reportedly shooting at least $200 per day (equivalent to $1300 in 2016 dollars), but attempts to keep her clean during the recording of I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama! Gabriel Mekler, the album's producer, told publicist-turned-biographer Myra Friedman after Joplin's death that she had lived in his Los Angeles home during his insistence that she was kept away from heroin and her heroin-using neighbors.

In several documentaries, Joplin's appearances with the Kozmic Blues Band in Europe were broadcast in theaters. Joplin was spotted on arrival by plane and waiting inside a bus next to the Frankfurt venue, while an American female fan of the event says that the concert was packed with people the band members could not see each other) by the time's conclusion. Joplin grew up to London for her gig at Royal Albert Hall, and Janis also included interviews with her. For broadcast on German television, the London interview was broadcast with a voiceover in the German language. John Byrne Cooke, the road manager for Joplin and the Kozmic Blues Band, wrote a book in 2014 in which she discussed her continuing use of narcotics, particularly when she was outside the United States.

On the night of July 18, 1969, Joplin and her band performed "Just a Little Bit Harder") and "To Love Somebody" on the episode of The Dick Cavett Show that was televised in the United States. "I had a rough time touring in Europe," Dick Cavett admitted, and that audiences are very upbeat and don't "get down."

The Kozmic Blues album, which was released in September 1969, was certified gold later this year, but not in comparison to Cheap Thrills' success. The new company's reviews were mixed. However, the album's recording quality and engineering, as well as the musicianship (including three performances by former Bob Dylan/Paul Butterfield/Electric Flag guitarist Mike Bloomfield), were considered much more fruitful to her previous releases, and several music journalists felt that the band was performing in a much more effective way to promote Joplin's superb vocal talents. Joplin wanted a horn section similar to that of the Chicago Transit Authority; her voice was lively and wide enough not to be overwhelmed by the brighter horn sounds.

However, some music reviewers, including Ralph J. Gleason of the San Francisco Chronicle, were dissatisfied. The new band, according to Gleason, was a "drag" and Joplin should "scrap" her new band and "go right back to being a member of Big Brother."

Other writers, such as reporter Carl Bernstein of The Washington Post, devoted entire articles to honoring the singer's magic. "Joker has now assembled a group of first-rate musicians with whom she is completely at ease and whose voices complement the incredible variety of her voice," Bernstein said.

Columbia Records released "Kozmic Blues" as a single, which peaked at number 41 on the Billboard Hot 100, and "Raise Your Hand" as a live version was released in Germany, where it quickly became a top ten hit there. "I Want You" (Just a Little Bit Harder), "To Love Somebody," "To Love Somebody," and "Little Girl Blues" are among the dozens of hits out there. Mama has been a mama to the I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues. Soon after being announced, the Billboard 200 reached number five on the Billboard 200.

On Sunday, August 17, 1969, Joplin appeared at Woodstock beginning at about 2:00 a.m. Joplin informed her band that they would be performing at the festival as if it were just another gig. Joan Baez and Baez's pregnant mother's mother, from a nearby motel to the festival site, became trembling and tiddy on Saturday afternoon, becoming extremely upbeat and giddy. Journalists pressed Joplin as she landed and jumped off the helicopter. Peggy Caserta, her best friend and sometime lover, was all too eager to talk to them. Initially, Joplin was keen to get on the stage and perform, but was repeatedly postponed as bands were contractually bound to perform ahead of Joplin. Joplin spent some of the time with Caserta in a tent after arriving in a ten-hour queue. Scenes from the director's cut of the Woodstock film show Joplin and Jefferson Airplane singer Grace Slick sitting near amplifiers watching the band Canned Heat's appearance, which began at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, and Caserta does not appear within camera range. According to biographer Alice Echols, Joplin was "three sheets to the wind" when she finally arrived on stage at around 2:00 a.m. on Sunday. Joplin's voice became a little hoarse and wheezy during her appearance, and she was unable to dance.

However, Joplin came through and entertained the crowd regularly, asking them if they had everything they wanted and if they were staying stoned. The audience erupted for a second performance, to which Joplin replied and sang "Ball and Chain." Pete Townshend, a writer who appeared with Joplin in the morning, was amazed by her appearance tonight but she wasn't at her best, thanks mainly to the amount of booze and heroin she consumed while waiting, but she wasn't at her best, as a result of the long wait, and possibly, too late." But it was amazing that Janis was on an off-night.

For the remainder of the festival, Janis remained at Woodstock. Joplin was one of many Woodstock performers to stand in a circle behind Crosby, Stills & Nash during their appearance on Monday, the first time anyone at Woodstock had seen the group perform at 3 p.m. In 1988, David Crosby first published this data. According to Baez' memoir And a Voice to Sing (1989), later in the morning of August 18, Joplin and Joan Baez sat in Joe Cocker's van and watched Hendrix's close-of-show appearance.

Joplin appeared backstage with Grace Slick the day after Joplin's appearance, wherein Joplin seems to be jolly. She was ultimately dissatisfied with her results, but Caserta was to blame. Her singing appeared in the 1970 documentary film (by her own insistence) or Woodstock's soundtrack: Music from the Original Soundtrack and More, but Woodstock's 25th anniversary director's cut of Woodstock includes her appearance of "Work Me, Lord." On the left side of a split screen, 37 seconds of footage of Joplin and Caserta walking toward Joplin's dressing room tent, the festival's documentary film of the 1970s includes, on the right side of a split screen.

In addition to Woodstock, Joplin had problems at Madison Square Garden in 1969. Myra Friedman, a photographer, said she had been to a duet Joplin performed with Tina Turner during the Rolling Stones concert at the Garden on Thanksgiving Day. Joplin was "too inebriated, so stoned, that she may have been an institutionalized psychotic rent by mania," Friedman said. Several commentators suspect Joplin attempted to compel the audience to riot during another Garden concert on December 19, 19. Johnny Winter and Paul Butterfield were onstage with her for part of this performance.

Garden viewers watched and listened to "every note [she sang] with "Is she gonna make it?" Joplin told rock journalist David Dalton. "They see them in their eyes." In a chat with Dalton, she said she felt most comfortable performing in small, cheap venues in San Francisco that were traditionally associated with counterculture.

She had already appeared in the Bay Area for what turned out to be the last time at the time of her interview in June 1970. Sam Andrew, the lead guitarist who left Big Brother with Joplin in December 1968, left the Big Brother with her back-up band in late summer 1969 and returned to Big Brother. The Kozmic Blues Band broke up at the end of the year. Joplin's last performance at Madison Square Garden with Winter and Butterfield was the one with Winter and Butterfield.

Joplin began heroin and alcohol use in Brazil in February 1970. Linda Gravenites (wife of songwriter Nick Gravenites), who had designed Janis' stage costumes from 1967 to 1969, was taken on holiday there by her companion Linda Gravenites (wife of songwriter Nick Gravenites).

David (George) Niehaus, a fellow American tourist who was travelling around the world, romanced Joplin in Brazil. "David was an upper-middle-class Cincinnati kid who had studied communications at Notre Dame," a Joplin biography told her sister Laura. [And] I had joined the Peace Corps after college and spent in a small village in Turkey. ... He tried law school, but when he met Janis he was on vacation, he was not getting time off."

The press photographed Niehaus and Joplin at Rio de Janeiro's Rio Carnival. During their Brazilian holiday, Gravenites also took color pictures of the two couples. "They appear to be a carefree, smiling, healthy young couple having a fantastic time," according to Joplin biographer Ellis Amburn in Gravenites' snapshots.

During an international phone call, Rolling Stone magazine interviewed Joplin, quoting her: "I'm going into the jungle with a big bear of a beatnik named David Niehaus." I finally realized that I don't have to be on stage for twelve months a year. For the past few weeks, I've been planning to explore some other jungles." "Janis was trying to kick heroin in Brazil," Amburn wrote in 1992, and one of David's most notable things was that he wasn't addicted to drugs."

As Joplin returned to the United States, she started using opium once more. She and Niehaus's friendship came to an end when she saw her shooting drugs at her new home in Larkspur, California. Peggy Caserta, a heroin abuser, and Joplin's inability to take some time off and travel the world together made the situation even more complicated.

About this time, she formed her first band, Main Squeeze for a short time, and the Full Tilt Boogie Band was renamed. The band was made up of mainly young Canadian musicians who had played with Ronnie Hawkins and featured an organ but no horn section. Joplin played a larger part in the creation of the Full Tilt Boogie band than she had with her previous group. "It's my band," she said.

Finally it's my band!"

The renamed Full Tilt Boogie Band began a national tour in May 1970, after appearing under the name Main Squeeze at a Hell's Angels performance. Joplin's new group became extremely popular, and both her followers and critics were mostly positive.

She appeared in a reunion with Big Brother at the Fillmore West in San Francisco on April 4, 1970, just days before starting a summer tour with Full Tilt Boogie. This concert's recordings were included in an in-concert album that was released posthumously in 1972. She and Big Brother were seen together again in Winterland on April 12th, when she and Big Brother were reportedly in peak form. According to a website maintained by Big Brother guitarist Sam Andrew, she appeared with the band billed as Main Squeeze at a Hells Angels party in San Rafael, California, on May 21, 1970. "This will be the first time that Janis' old band and her new band will be together in a joint venue," Andrew's web site states.

According to Joplin's biographer Ellis Amburn, Big Brother's lead singer Nick Gravenites was the first act at the party, which attracted 2,300 people. The Hells Angels, who had known Joplin since 1966, paid her a 240 dollar fee to perform. Gravenites and Sam Andrew (who had returned to playing guitar with Big Brother) disagreed on their performance and how substance use affected it. According to Amburn, Gravenites described her singing as "stupendous." "She was notably deteriorating and she looked bloated," Amburn said twenty years ago. She was like a parody of what she looked like at her best. I put it down to her overeating, and I got a hint of anxiety over her well-being. Her singing was flawless, with no advantage at all.

Joplin began wearing multi-colored feather boas in her hair just after. (She had not worn them at the Hell's Angels party/concert in San Rafael on May 21). Joplin told people she was drug-free when she first began touring with Full Tilt Boogie, but her drinking increased.

Joplin and Full Tilt Boogie performed alongside Buddy Guy, the Band, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Ten Years Later, the Grateful Dead, John Andersen, Ian & Sylvia, from June 28 to July 4, 1970. They appeared in Toronto, Winnipeg, and Calgary. Joplin was jammed with the other performers on the train, and her appearances on this tour are considered to be one of her finest performances.

On all three nights, Joplin headlined the festival. While her band was tuning up at their last stop in Calgary, she joined Jerry Garcia on stage with him. In a case of tequila, a film film shows her and Garcia telling the audience how awesome the tour was, as well as showing her and Garcia presenting the organizers with a tequila case. She then burst into a two-hour set, beginning with "Tell Mama." During this appearance, Joplin engaged in several rumors about her love life. In one, she recalled about being in a San Francisco apartment and competing with a female neighbor in flirting with men on the street. She appeared on long versions of "Get It If You Can" and "Ball and Chain" in Calgary.

"Tell Mama" in Calgary became an MTV video in the early 1980s, and the recording of the same film clip was included on the Farewell Song (1982) album. On Joplin's In Concert (1972) album, the recording of other Festival Express performances was included. On the Festival Express DVD, a video of the performances was also included.

These entire songs from the Festival Express concerts in Toronto and Calgary can be purchased, but other songs are still in vaults and have yet to be announced.

Joplin wore a psychedelically colored, loose-fitting costume, and feathers in her hair in the "Tell Mama" video on MTV in the 1980s. In 1970, this was her traditional stage costume. Linda Gravenites (whom Joplin had praised in Vogue's profile of her in the May 1968 edition) broke ties with Joplin shortly after returning from Brazil due in large part to Joplin's continued use of heroin.

Two shows of The Dick Cavett Show were among Joplin's last public appearances. She announced on June 25, 1970, that she would attend her ten-year high school reunion. When asked if she had been popular in school, she confessed that her classmates "laughed me out of class, out of town, and out of the state" (during the year Joplin spent at the University of Texas at Austin). Gloria Swanson, a comedian on August 3, 1970, spoke about her forthcoming appearance at the Festival of Peace, which will be held at Shea Stadium in Queens, New York, three days later.

Full Tilt Boogie and Big Brother and the Holding Company appeared together in the San Diego Sports Arena on July 11, 1970, which was decades later renamed the Valley View Casino Center. According to a July 13 review of the San Diego Union's concert, Joplin performed with Full Tilt Boogie and appeared briefly without singing onstage.

A tombstone was erected in Smith's previously unmarked grave on August 7, 1970, and it was paid for by Joplin and Juanita Green, who as a child had done housework for Bessie Smith. The following day, the Associated Press published this news, and the New York Times carried it on August 9. Joplin and Green had "shared the cost of a stone for the 'Empress of the Blues,'" the newspaper front page said, but the two women never met, according to publicist/biographer Myra Friedman. Joplin had been at home in Larkspur, California, when she got a long-distance phone call with an explanation of Bessie Smith's death and how to finance a gravestone, which Joplin had often described as a musical celebrity. Joplin printed a check and sent it to the phone caller's name and address.

As the Associated Press announced the news of Smith's new gravestone on August 8, 1970, Joplin appeared at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, New York. It was there that she first performed "Mercedes Benz," a song she had written a short time earlier with fellow musician and friend Bob Neuwirth. Joplin appeared at two shows at the Capitol Theatre, the first of which was attended by actress Geraldine Page and her husband Rip Torn, according to Myra Friedman's account. According to Friedman, the songs were performed at a "gin mill" [Friedman's words] very close to this concert venue, Joplin and Neuwirth penned the lyrics and performed it at the second show. In 2015, Neuwirth was featured in The Wall Street Journal: "We had a few hours to kill before [acts that opened for Joplin] Seatrain and Runt stopped their sets. The four of us [Joplin, Neuwirth, Geraldine Page, Rip Torn] walked to Vahsen's Bar about three minutes away [at 30 Broad Street in Port Chester]. "Janis came up with words for the first verse in Vain's," the poet says. Using a ballpoint pen, I was in charge of writing them down on bar napkins. She was also on the second verse of a color television. I suggested words here and there, and then came up with the third verse, about asking the Lord to buy us a night on the town and another round.

On August 12, 1970, Joplin's last public appearance with the Full Tilt Boogie Band took place at the Harvard Stadium in Boston. Despite the fact that Full Tilt Boogie had used makeshift amplifiers after their normal sound equipment was stolen in Boston, the Harvard Crimson gave the result a glowing, front-page review.

On August 14, Joplin, road manager John Cooke, and sister Laura mourned, but it was apparently an uncomfortable one for her. During her reunion tour to Port Arthur, Joplin held a press conference. Joplin replied, "Only when I walked down the aisles" when asked by a reporter if she ever entertained Thomas Jefferson High School when she was a student there. Port Arthur and her classmates who had mocked her a decade earlier were sluggish. Joplin denigrated her.

Joplin and her band rehearsed and recorded a new album in Los Angeles in late August, September, 1970, best known for their long association with The Doors. Despite that Joplin died before all of the tracks were completed, there was plenty of usable information to compile an LP.

Pearl (1971), her most popular album of her career, featured Kris Kristofferson and Fred Foster's "Me and Bobby McGee" (Kristofferson was previously one of Joplin's lovers). Joplin's opening track, "Move Over," depicts the way that women are treated in relationships. "Mercedes Benz"'s social commentary was also included in a cappella style; the album's first and only take was recorded by Joplin. "Buried Alive in the Blues," Nick Gravenites' "Buried Alive in the Blues," in which Joplin had been scheduled to perform her vocals on the day she was discovered dead.

On August 24, 1970, Joplin stepped into the Landmark Motor Hotel in Hollywood, where she began rehearsing and recording her album. Joplin continued a friendship with Seth Morgan, a 21-year-old Berkeley undergraduate, cocaine dealer, and future novelist who had visited her new home in Larkspur in July and August, which was discussed during the sessions. Morgan and Morgan were due to marry in early September, but he attended Sunset Sound Recorders for just eight of Joplin's many rehearsals and interviews.

Morgan later told biographer Myra Friedman that he had felt marginalized whenever he had visited Sunset Sound Recorders as a non-musician. Rather, he stayed at Joplin's Larkspur home while she remained alone at the Landmark, although she returned to Larkspur several times to be with him and to check on the house's progress. According to biographer Ellis Amburn, the concrete foundation for which was poured the day before she died, she told her construction crew that a carport should be shaped like a flying saucer.

Peggy Caserta wrote in her book, Going Down With Janis (1973), that she and Joplin had decided against each other in April 1970 to avoid allowing each other's drug use. Caserta, a former Delta Air Lines stewardess and owner of one of the first clothing boutiques in Haight Ashbury, said in the book that by September 1970, she was smuggling cannabis throughout California and had checked into the Landmark Motor Hotel because it attracted drug users.

She did not know Caserta was in Los Angeles for about two weeks of Joplin's stay at the Landmark. Caserta's appearance at the Landmark came from a heroin dealer who made deliveries there, according to Joplin. Joplin begged Caserta for heroin, but Joplin allegedly dragged her to jail by saying, "Don't worry if you can't get it, I can't get it." Myra Friedman, Joplin's publicist, was unaware that this had occurred during Joplin's lifetime. Later, when Friedman was writing Buried Alive, she discovered that the Joplin-Caserta encounter occurred one week before Jimi Hendrix's death.

Joplin became a regular customer of the same drug store that had been supplying Caserta for a few days.

Albert Grossman, Joplin's chief, and his assistant/publicist Friedman had staged an intervention with Joplin the previous winter, when Joplin was in New York. Grossman and Friedman, a New York office manager, knew Joplin was staying at a Los Angeles hotel in September 1970, but they were unaware it was a haven for drug users and dealers.

During Joplin's lifetime, Friedman and Friedman learned that Caserta, who Friedman encountered during the New York sessions for Cheap Thrills and later, used heroin. During many long-distance phone calls between Joplin and Friedman in September 1970 and October 1, Friedman never mentioned Caserta, and Friedman assumed that Caserta had been out of Joplin's life for a long time. Friedman, who had more time than Grossman to monitor the situation, never went to California. On the phone, she said Joplin sounded less distraught than she had been over the summer.

When Joplin was not at Sunset Sound Recorders, she loved to drive her Porsche over the speed limit "on the winding portion of Sunset Boulevard." "According to a remark made by her attorney Robert Gordon at the 1995 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induct ceremony, "he is the queen of her nation." Friedman wrote that Ken Pearson, the only Full Tilt Boogie member who rode as her passenger, often refused to join her, even though she died on the night she died. He was not interested in using hard drugs.

On September 26, 1970, Joplin recorded vocals for "Half Moon" and "Cry Baby." Joplin, organist Ken Pearson, and drummer Clark Pierson ended the session as a birthday gift to John Lennon. On October 9, Joplin was one of many singers to have been called by Yoko Ono with a request for a taped greeting for Lennon's 30th birthday. As part of the greeting, Joplin, Pearson, and Pierson selected the Dale Evans composition "Happy Trails." On-camera Lennon told Dick Cavett the following year that Joplin's recorded birthday wishes arrived at his house after her death.

Joplin completed her last record, "Mercedes Benz," on October 1, 1970, which was recorded in a single take. On Saturday, October 3, Joplin visited Sunset Sound Recorders to listen to Nick Gravenites' album "Buried Alive in the Blues" which the band had released earlier that day. She and Paul Rothchild promised to record the vocal on the following day.

Seth Morgan had met other women at a Marin County, California, restaurant and welcomed them to their home, inviting them to her house and using her pool table at some point on Saturday. People at Sunset Sound Recorders expressed indignation with Joplin's current state, as well as ecstatic about the session's progress.

Joplin and Ken Pearson left the studio together, and she and her Porsche whisked him away to Barney's Beanery, a West Hollywood landmark. "She drank vodka and orange juice at the bar, but only two." Friedman wrote, Bennett Glotzer, a business partner of Joplin's manager Albert Grossman, was present at Barney's Beanery right after he (Glotzer) learned of her death. Joplin evidently had a friendly chat with a young man she did not know, and she expressed admiration for her music. She led Ken Pearson and the male fan to the Landmark where she and Pearson were staying in separate rooms after midnight. According to Friedman, the fan asked Joplin questions "about her singing style," but "she mainly ignored him" so she could talk to Pearson. Joplin and Pearson expressed skepticism, perhaps in jeopardy, that the Landmark's lobbyist and other Full Tilt Boogie musicians would not be able to perform with her. Pearson was the second-to-last person to see her alive. The last clerk on the Landmark's night shift desk was the last. He had met her several times before but didn't know her.

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