It's a sad fact of
life, but tragedy often inspires great art. There's some
mysterious intangible that comes with heartbreak,
despair, and disappointment. Janis Joplin knew
this all too while. The singer experienced more than
her share of all three emotions in her short lifetime. She left us with a collection
of music that still makes people's hearts ache. Today, we're exploring some of
the more fascinating stories that shaped the tortured
life of Janis Joplin. But before we get
started, take a second to subscribe to the Weird
History Channel and let us know what music stories you
would like to hear about next. Now, let's trade
all your tomorrows for this one yesterday. There are a few
visual accouterments that are immediately
associated with Janis, her 1964 Porsche 356 with
its custom psychedelic paint job, her oversized,
round, rose-tinted sunglasses, and of course, the
ever present bottle of Southern Comfort whiskey. She'd take a fifth of Southern
Comfort with her onstage and take slugs straight out of
the bottle in between songs, as if she was drinking
from a water bottle. In 1970, when Rolling
Stone writer David Dalton was following her around
for a cover story, he listed the following items
found in her oversized purse, an antique cigarette holder,
several motel and hotel room keys, tapes of Johnny
Cash and Otis Redding, and the requisite bottle
of Southern Comfort, which he noted was empty. She was obsessed with the drink. It relaxed her and
loosened her up when she'd dig deep
down to reach the pain and suffering of the blues. For whatever reason, the New
Orleans-based whiskey company appreciated her love
for their product and extended a gift of
thanks for her patronage and, let's be honest,
the free publicity. As the story goes, the
Southern Comfort folks sent her a full length
lynx fur coat and matching hat for her support. Of course, today, animal
activists and social justice warriors would be up in arms
over a high profile celebrity wearing fur, but this was the
late '60s, so it was cool, man. Maybe she sensed something,
but Joplin mysteriously made adjustments to her will
just two days before her death on October 4th, 1970. She mostly gave her
estate to her parents, with some additional wealth
going to each of her siblings. But what's unusual
is that she had $2,500 put aside for her friends
to throw a party in her honor. The stipulation
allowed 200 people to hold an all night
gathering at her favorite pub, "so my friends can get
blasted after I'm gone." You think Jim Morrison
allegedly wagging his little Jim in front of a
Florida audience was a nonevent that
could only happen during the conservative '60s? Think again. Janis Joplin did less and it
earned her a night in jail. As we all know by
now, Jim Morrison was arrested for allegedly
exposing himself at a March 2nd concert in Miami, Florida and
became the object of six arrest warrants, including
one for a felony charge of lewd and lascivious
behavior in public, by exposing his private parts
and simulating masturbation and oral copulation. That's all it took for the ultra
conservative people of Florida to become concerned when
Joplin came into town later that year for a gig at
the Curtis Hickson Hall. As Joplin was performing
for the rowdy Floridians, someone made the decision
to turn the house lights on to calm the rambunctious crowd. As the auditorium was
filled with lights, a few police officers
climbed onto the stage and asked Joplin to help
them quiet the crowd. She refused and instead screamed
obscenities at the cops. Eventually, the crowd
quieted enough so that the show could continue and
Joplin was allowed to finish, unlike Morrison,
who was arrested in the middle of his gig. But Joplin was later
arrested in her dressing room and spent the night in jail. The charges were
eventually dropped when a judge felt she
was simply exercising her freedom of speech. Joplin once said
of her lifestyle, "I live pretty loose,
you know, bawling with strangers and stuff." Although she was very open
about who she hooked up with, she often suffered
emotionally if she felt that one of her lovers
was letting her down. That said, Joplin ran into
musician Leonard Cohen in the Chelsea Hotel
elevator in 1968, culminating in the two
spending the night together. The affair was short
lived, however. And for Joplin, it apparently
ended in heartbreak. Cohen wrote about the encounter
in his classic song "Chelsea Hotel Number Two," but didn't
admit it was about Joplin until years after she had died. This is how Cohen
recalled the night. "My lungs gathered my courage. I said to her, are you
looking for someone? She said, yes. I'm looking for
Kris Kristofferson." The lithe, debonair
Cohen had never been mistaken for the
large, gruff Kristofferson, but he took a shot anyway. "I said, little lady, you're in
luck, I am Kris Kristofferson. She wasn't looking for me. She was looking for
Kris Kristofferson. I wasn't looking for her. I was looking for
Brigitte Bardot, but we fell into
each other's arms through some process
of elimination." It's become something of a
rock and roll cliche now, but, yes, the 27 Club is real. And sadly, Janis Joplin
is a founding member. After a doctor told the singer
she'd never reach the age of 24 if she kept on smoking,
drugging, and drinking her Southern Comfort,
Joplin was hard pressed to prove him wrong. While Joplin's primary vise
was the aforementioned Southern Comfort, she did develop
a devastating addiction to heroin in the mid-1960s. Her usage steadily worsened. And by 1969, she was allegedly
using approximately $200 worth of heroin every day. That's about 700 dollars a day,
if you account for inflation. After her friends intervened,
she managed to quit the habit, only to relapse later. On October 4th, 1970,
she was scheduled to record vocals
for a track called "Buried Alive in the
Blues," a song that was slated to appear on her
upcoming solo album, Pearl. When she never arrived
at the recording studio, she was eventually found
deceased in her hotel room from an apparent overdose. Joplin's death at the
age of 27 made her a member of the 27 Club, a list
comprised of other artists who passed away at the same age,
including Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, who died only
16 days after Joplin, Kurt Cobain, and Amy Winehouse. As a child, Joplin was
bullied for her appearance and different behavior. And this abuse continued
all the way through college. In addition to weight and
acne problems from her youth, she struggled with self-esteem
issues for her entire life. A good, albeit upsetting,
example of this took place when she was
attending the University of Texas at Austin in 1962. During her first and
only year at U of T, Joplin was voted
ugliest man on campus by the school's fraternities,
a label that bothered her for the rest of her life. If that nomination and win
wasn't what made her drop out of college, it certainly had to
be a major contributing factor. She soon left school and her
beloved home state of Texas for San Francisco. She later said she left
Texas for San Francisco to escape the angry men
who liked to pick on her. If Joplin learned one thing from
her early years of being kicked around by men, it's that
she didn't take crap from them later on when she
found fame and confidence. A prime example of this was
when she met Jim Morrison for the first time. The meeting took place at
music producer Paul Rothchild's house, a hugely successful
music producer who was friends with Jim and Janis. Rothchild knew Joplin
had a thing for Morrison. And he thought the two of
them meeting was inevitable. So he took it upon
himself to make it happen. Rothchild told Blair
Jackson, in a BAM Magazine interview, "I thought,
here's the king and queen of rock and roll. They should be. So I got them together at
a party in Hidden Hills. They both showed up sober
and were getting along great. Jim is fascinated by
this remarkable girl. And of course, Jim was
also a fascinating guy and really good looking. Janis loved to [BLEEP]. That was her single
greatest pastime. She saw this hunk of meat
and said, 'I want that.'" The way the story goes,
Morrison and Joplin got on famously, at first. But as the night progressed,
Jim got wasted in true Morrison fashion, while Janis
took measured swigs from a bottle of
Southern Comfort, maintaining a regal air
of drunken charisma. Morrison became rude, violent,
and what Rothchild described as a cretin and a
disgusting drunk, sloppily trying to seduce Joplin. Joplin had enough of
Morrison and the party. So she decided
they should leave. As Joplin and Rothchild
made their way to her car, Morrison ran out of the house
and made one more attempt to close the deal. Morrison then reached
into Joplin's, car grabbed a chunk of
her hair and tried to pull her out, caveman style. With her hair in
Morrison's grubby fist, Janis swung a bottle
of Southern Comfort and hit him over
the head with it, shattering glass everywhere
and knocking the Lizard King out cold. Although she spent a number
of her formative years playing jangly folk
music, blues is what Joplin was most interested
in and what made her famous. "I want to be the first
black-white person," she once said. While she loved Billie
Holiday and considered the blues legend a hero,
Joplin adored Bessie Smith. She claims Smith was her biggest
influence and inspiration and that she felt such
a connection to Smith that she even believes she
might be her reincarnation. When Joplin learned that Smith's
family, in 1937, had buried her in an unmarked grave,
she became so angered, she split the cost
for a tombstone with one of Smith's employees. So on August 7th, 1970,
Bessie Smith finally got her tombstone, thanks
to Joplin and Juanita Green, who, as a child, had
done housework for Smith. The stone's epitaph now
reads, "The greatest blues singer in the world will
never stop singing." Joplin new pain,
suffering, and the feeling of being an outcast. It's no surprise that she was
sensitive to those feelings in other people as well. While Joplin wasn't
perfect, she never hurt anyone except herself
due to her substance abuse. She always stuck up for
people on the bottom of the totem pole. When Janice's 10th
grade social studies class in her racially
segregated high school discussed racial integration,
her strong support of integration provoked
a social backlash from several classmates
who swarmed around her, calling her an n-lover as
she walked to the next class. "They laughed me out of class,
out of town, out of the state," she said after
moving to California. But as insecure as she
was, as we later find out, she was able to find
strength to stick to her guns and stand up for what
she thought was just. Did social ostracization
contribute to her early death? It's impossible to know what
caused her to lose herself in the vises that contributed
to the end of her life. But if Janis Joplin's
formative years weren't filled with
so much anguish, there's a chance
she'd be alive today. So what do you think? What would've happened
if Janis had lived? How would her career
have turned out? Let us know in the
comments below. And while you're at it, check
out some of these other videos from our weird history.
