O Janis
She loved her family but she left them. She hated Port Arthur, but she kept coming home. What demons drove Janis Joplin to her death?
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By the time Janis graduated in 1960, she had already been in and out of psychological counseling and had brought so much turmoil into the Joplin household that Laura fled to the church, where she prayed for God to bring peace to her family. Janis’ parents, Seth and Dorothy, hardly fit the mold of strict disciplinarians, but it was obvious to them that Janis’ behavior invited scorn. She enrolled at Lamar State College of Technology in Beaumont, where most Jefferson High graduates went if they went to college at all—meaning, as Laura Joplin notes, “the gossip mongers who had talked about Janis in high school had followed her to college.” She spent most of her evenings across the state line. She stopped going to class. Not yet eighteen, Janis was already showing signs of alcoholism. She sought counseling. But at least she had music.
No one seems to be able to recall exactly when Janis discovered she could sing. They remember only that when Janis came to her friends offering proof of her talent, they listened to her voice and agreed: God, yes, she could sing. At parties she took to mimicking whatever was on the phonograph: Joan Baez, Jean Ritchie, Bessie Smith, Odetta, even Little Richard—she could do them all. As her confidence in her voice grew, her interest in painting declined. Among the Joplin biographers, the popular explanation for Janis’ giving up painting is that she met a fellow who could paint better than she could, and realizing that she could not be the very best, she put down her brush for good. That Janis did, in fact, have a competitive streak makes it hard to imagine that she would give up so readily on anything that meant so much to her. What seems more likely is that Janis recognized that singing suited her needs and temperament better. “I don’t think she had the discipline for painting anymore,” says Tary Owens. “And in singing there’s immediate acceptance, and that’s what she was after—love and acceptance.”
IN THE SUMMER OF 1962, JANIS Joplin enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin. The change would do her good, and Janis was ripe for change. She had spent the previous year in Venice, California, haunting the coffeehouses, hitching from one bar to the next, having sex with strangers. She brought back a World War II bomber jacket, which she wore inside out, along with a smug awareness of street life that gave her instant cachet with the Austin hipsters who congregated just west of campus at 2812 1⁄2 Nueces, at a building that came to be known as the Ghetto.
Built in the twenties, the Ghetto consisted of eight apartments, some fairly comfortable in size, some not much larger than a closet. The rooms rented for $35 to $65 a month, utilities included. Some of the occupants were young men who had just come out of the military on the GI Bill; others were musicians, artists, and political leftists. At times it was difficult to tell just who lived at the Ghetto, because a rotating cast of individuals tended to crash out there on the hammocks and chairs and sofas that had been dragged out into the yard to accommodate the evening festivities. There was always a party at the Ghetto, usually with musicians jamming—and usually, by 1962, featuring the powerful voice of Janis Joplin.
Though Austin as a city was light-years ahead of Port Arthur in its cultural eclecticism, the atmosphere at UT reflected the numbness of the country at large. The males wore their hair short and their clothes starched; to grow a beard was to foreclose any possibility of a job interview. The young women stuck to gray wool skirts, white bobby socks, penny loafers, white cotton blouses, and beehive hairdos. Recalls one of Janis’ friends, “You could go on campus in between classes and see just hundreds of women who were dressed exactly like that.”
The Ghetto crowd kept their own table at the Student Union’s Chuck Wagon Cafeteria. Among them, none stood out as alarmingly as Janis, who wore jeans, a dirty blue work shirt, and no bra. She Dares to be Different! declared a story about Janis in the Daily Texan (written by Pat Sharpe, now a senior editor at Texas Monthly), and indeed it was a dare that entailed certain risks. “There were only a handful of us oddballs there,” says Powell St. John, who lived at the Ghetto and who was beaten up by fraternity boys for his beatnik appearance. “You had to kind of cluster together and keep your heads down.”
But provoking frat boys was not all Janis’ new gang had to fear. The repressive culture at the university had darker manifestations than tacit dress codes. There lingered an odor of McCarthyism in the early sixties, an attitude that freethinking should be not merely discouraged but treated as a serious threat. When a former high-ranking UT official retired three years ago, he left behind boxes of papers, including a list with the heading “Ghetto.” A note at the top of the list says, “The following information was extracted from the records of the Office of the Dean of Student Life.” It consists of 68 individuals, along with information such as their majors, their home addresses, and their disciplinary records at the university, and comments such as “one of the leaders of the Ghetto group,” “secretary for the local chapter of the Young Peoples Socialist League,” “believed to be using heavy drugs,” “believed to be a homosexual,” “suspected of sabotaging the air raid sirens in Austin,” “believed to be very promiscuous,” “believed to be a communist,” “has had trouble with bad checks,” “has psychiatric problems,” and “pathological liar.” Among those listed are The Gay Place author Billy Lee Brammer, cartoonist Gilbert Shelton, several current or former professors and government officials, Dave Moriaty, Tary Owens, Powell St. John, and Janis Joplin.
Recalls Travis Rivers, who attended UT before moving to San Francisco in the early sixties, “I used to say, ‘The eyes of Texas are upon you—at all times.’”
But none of the Ghetto crowd was fully aware of the surveillance activities—least of all Janis, who smoked marijuana despite a prevailing paranoia that meant, as Owens says, “You didn’t tell your best friend you smoked pot.” Janis felt utterly sure of herself. Among her crowd, which included several other women, she distinguished herself as a singer, and the locals flocked to watch her perform at Threadgill’s, a converted gas station owned by yodeler Kenneth Threadgill where rednecks, beatniks, and English professors alike gathered to hear the bands play for the wage of two bucks and all the beer they could drink. People sat on tables and window ledges to hear the Waller Creek Boys, which consisted of St. John on harmonica, Lanny Wiggins on guitar, and Janis, singing and playing the autoharp. She still mimicked Odetta, Bessie Smith, and Leadbelly, but there was nothing borrowed about her wailing soprano and her bawdy, unrestrained presence.
Janis’ reputation as a singer spread throughout Austin. Back on campus, however, her reputation remained primarily as that of a weirdo, far more so than the reputations of others who congregated at the Ghetto. “The rest of us kept a modicum of going to school or keeping a job,” says Owens. “But she was totally in that lifestyle. Janis once said to me, ‘Tary, I don’t see how you can live in both worlds. I can’t. I’ve got to be all the one way or all the other way.’”
She remained, then, the most obvious target for insults. At the close of 1962, Alpha Phi Omega sponsored its traditional Ugliest Man on Campus contest as part of a charity drive. Each fraternity paid $5 to nominate one of its own, who would then dress up in a mask and ragged attire with artificial blood and parade around in hopes that people would spend a dime to vote for him as Ugliest Man. Though no one seems to know how it began, apparently a write-in campaign developed to elect Janis Joplin as the Ugliest Man on Campus. And although she did not win, as is popularly believed (first place went to Lonnie “the Hunch” Farrell), it seems that she did receive votes. Thirty years later, a few people contend that this event was of no consequence to Janis or that she found it amusing or even that she threw her own name into the ring. (“I think that it was easily within the realm of possibility that Janis nominated herself as Ugly Man as a joke,” says Laura Joplin.) But the overwhelming consensus among those friends of Janis’ who attended UT that year is that she was humiliated by the contest. When interviewing Janis’ mother for Buried Alive, Myra Friedman was told by Dorothy Joplin that Janis wrote an “anguished” letter home, detailing the contest’s effect on her.
Less than a month after the Ugliest Man on Campus contest, Janis wrote a song and recorded it at a friend’s house. The song is called “It’s Sad to Be Alone,” and Tary Owens retains a copy of the tape, featuring Janis on autoharp, singing in baleful, desolate tones: “The dusty road calls you, Come again. / The dusty road calls you, Come again. / The dusty road calls you. You walk to the end. / It’s sad, so sad to be alone.”
A week later, Janis Joplin dropped out of school and hitchhiked to San Francisco. Her companions were her autoharp and Chet Helms, a long-haired, deeply spiritual young man who had already hitched to San Francisco the year before to escape the racism and right-wing morality he had encountered in his youth in Fort Worth and at school in Austin. To Janis, Helms seemed to be a worldly and romantic figure. To Helms, Janis was unlike any woman he’d ever met in Texas. Together they hitched to Fort Worth, where Helms’s mother, a fundamentalist Christian, took one look at Janis in her jeans and pink sunglasses and blue work shirt unbuttoned halfway down and informed her son that they could not stay the night. Helms’s brother drove them to the edge of town, past the Stockyards, and deposited them there.
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