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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Some fifty hours later, Helms and Janis were in San Francisco’s North Beach. That night she played her first gig, at a folkie hangout called Coffee and Confusion that had heard any number of wispy Kingston Trio—style singers but nothing like this woman from Texas. She brought the house down, prompting the owner to violate a long-standing house policy against passing the hat. Thereafter, Janis and her autoharp played at the Coffee Gallery, at the Catalyst and the Barn in Santa Cruz, and at St. Michael’s Alley in Palo Alto. Word came back to the Ghetto: Janis had made it.
A YEAR AND A HALF LATER, in May 1965, Janis Joplin returned to Port Arthur, haggard, her weight down to 88 pounds, her arms punctured with needle tracks. In the City of Lights she had met all her inner demons, the holes in her soul she filled with all the sex and drugs her body could withstand. She spent equal time at the Amp Palace, a Grant Avenue cafe where amphetamine junkies hung out, and at the Anxious Asp, a lesbian bar. She was doing speed and heroin, bouncing from one sex partner to the next, fast revealing herself to be what her classmates at Jefferson High had accused her of being all along.
Her singing had won her notoriety, including attention from record companies. Yet her capacity to self-destruct had overwhelmed her ambitions. She injured her leg in a motor-scooter accident, got beaten up outside of the Anxious Asp following a confrontation with a few bikers. Physically and mentally she was going to pieces before her new friends’ eyes. Most of them did drugs too, but what was happening to Janis was nothing to act casual about. Together they raised money to put Janis on a bus and send her back to Port Arthur.
Her lifestyle having edged her toward death, Janis now swung to the other extreme. She resolved to become a good Port Arthur girl. She bought dresses with long sleeves to cover the needle tracks. She fixed her hair in a bun and wore makeup. She enrolled at Lamar Tech. She threw a party at her parents’ house—only this time, the party was for straight Port Arthurans, husbands and wives who did not booze it up.
Janis herself was about to become a wife. She had met a fellow in San Francisco who went by the name of John Pierre Smith, and though little was known about him, Seth Joplin consented when the young man traveled to Port Arthur to ask for Janis’ hand in marriage. Thereafter, Janis picked out her china and her wedding gown. She would become the girl in her letters to her parents, demanding nothing but what the others had, dreaming only the simple dreams of the oil town.
But Janis’ fiance never returned to Port Arthur, and with that humiliation, her newly straightened life began to tilt. She found her classes at Lamar Tech dull and unchallenging. She took several opportunities to visit her friends in Austin. On Thanksgiving weekend in 1965, Janis performed at the Half Way House Club in Beaumont. Among those who saw the young woman with the bun and the freshly pressed dress was her old beatnik friend from Jefferson High Jim Langdon. Langdon was now writing an entertainment column for the Austin American-Statesman. He was not as stunned by her new look as by her startling evolution as a singer. Both in print and in person, Langdon encouraged Janis to play wherever they would let her play.
Janis returned to Austin, now with guitar in hand, performing at Threadgill’s, the Eleventh Door on Red River, and the Methodist Student Center. Her old band mate Powell St. John sat in the audience one night and was awed. If Janis can stay straight, he thought, we’ll have another Odetta.
If she stayed straight. No one was more aware of that provision than Janis. “California is behind me,” she would say. But now she looked ahead, and the road through Texas simply went around and around. There remained few clubs in Texas, and there remained in Texas a hostility toward its freethinking sons and daughters. One by one they were leaving Texas: Steve Miller, Boz Scaggs, Mother Earth, the Sir Douglas Quintet, the Thirteenth Floor Elevators. And not just the musicians. Chet Helms was organizing musical events, Travis Rivers was opening the legendary Print Mint poster shop, and Wichita Falls native Bob Simmons was on his way to becoming one of the nation’s seminal FM disc jockeys. But not in Texas. All of them had gone to San Francisco to blossom, and others still would follow, deserting Janis.
Sometime in 1966, Travis Rivers learned that Chet Helms had been auditioning vocalists for the band Helms was managing, Big Brother and the Holding Company. More than thirty women had tried out, but none was what the band was looking for. The band members had heard about Janis’ talent, but they weren’t sure if she was righteither.
The issue didn’t come to a head until Rivers and a friend named Mark borrowed a 1953 Chevy and drove to Austin. There, Rivers learned from friends that Janis had gotten off of drugs, was attending classes at Lamar Tech, and was making straight A’s. It sounded to Rivers as if Janis had finally found happiness. “So I decided not to call her,” he says.
Early one morning, Rivers was asleep at a friend’s house in Austin when Janis showed up, fresh from a gig in Bryan. Rivers felt obliged to tell Janis about the Big Brother audition. Janis mulled it over. As she had to many of her other friends, she told Rivers that she felt stuck in Texas but fearful of San Francisco. She wanted to become famous, but she didn’t want to fall back into her drug-dependent ways. Rivers could see that the dilemma had been eating at Janis for some time.
That night Janis and Rivers went to an Austin club and watched Boz Scaggs’s former band play rock and roll. Janis imagined herself without her autoharp, without her guitar, rocking the house with a full band. Then she turned to Rivers. Her eyes were on fire. “That’s what I want to do,” she said. “Man, let’s go!”
First they drove to Port Arthur. Rivers sat in the car outside the Joplin house while Janis explained her decision to her parents. When she returned to the car, she gave Rivers the impression that her parents had given their approval—which was hardly the case. From there they drove to Beaumont, to Lamar Tech. Janis met with her counselor, who advised her that she should find some balance between her straight life and her creative life. Then she went to the Lamar Tech registrar’s office to report that she would be leaving the state and would like to retain the option to return for the fall semester.
Janis and Rivers drove back to Austin. They made a beeline to the house of Houston White, who would later found Austin’s Vulcan Gas Company nightclub. Rivers used White’s telephone to dial the number of Chet Helms, then passed the receiver to Janis. Without hesitation, she relayed her interest to Helms and also her concerns. Where would she live? How would she support herself? And what about all the drugs?
Helms loved Janis. He wasn’t going to deceive her. Sure, drugs are still around, he told her. But the scene has changed. Things are less reckless, more relaxed. Speed and heroin are out; organic drugs are in. As for money, Janis would make plenty with Big Brother and the Holding Company. But until she did, Helms would put her up himself. And if things didn’t work out, he would personally pay her way back in time for the fall semester.
Okay, said Janis. She was on her way.
Hastily she packed and contacted a few of her friends. Jim Langdon told her she was making a mistake: She should play things slowly, groom her skills in Texas for a while, establish herself as a solo artist or take up one of the many offers she had received to play for a Texas band. Powell St. John was excited for her, although, as he says today, “I was afraid it would kill her right away.” Dave Moriaty and a few other Jefferson High friends were also horrified. “The first time she came back from San Francisco, she was so near to being dead that we figured the second time was gonna take,” Moriaty says.
But everyone could see that Janis wasn’t going on a whim. “She took it real seriously,” Owens remembers. “It was a business proposition all the way.”
AND SO IN JUNE 1966 SHE AND Travis Rivers set out from Austin, driving U.S. 290 west, pushing on to El Paso and out of Texas; replacing one flat tire with another soon to be; getting stranded with another flat in Golden, New Mexico, and making love in an abandoned house and minding the town’s general store while its proprietor drove to Albuquerque to fetch a replacement tire; meeting up with a gold prospector, lingering with the Indians at a reservation south of Taos, encountering a terrain of volcanic stone and nearby a lake as clear as glass, and making love again; Rivers contending with another flat in Flagstaff, Arizona, while Janis sat on the hood of the ’53 Chevy, reading Zelda; and having $30 wired to them from someone in the Midwest, which fueled them at last to San Francisco.
And in two weeks Janis auditioned with Big Brother, learned the songs, and performed to an adoring crowd at the Avalon Ballroom. Then more of the same, only to bigger crowds and greater acclaim—astounding them at Monterey in 1967, flooring them in New York’s Anderson Theatre and Fillmore East in 1968. Big-time management, a salary of $150,000, a debut album that sold more than a million copies as fast as they could be pressed. An explosive U.S. tour, the breakup of Big Brother, Woodstock, still more fame. Faster and faster, the record revolving at speeds never imagined in Port Arthur, Janis swinging round and round, bottle of Southern Comfort in hand, tracks on her arms again, her voice now a desperate growl, the blues plain for all to hear even after all the years and all the cheers, pig, whore, you can’t go home again, you cannot stop …
And then an explosion, and utter silence, and the sky cried ashes of Janis. Perhaps not all of them fell into the sea. Perhaps some never fell and somehow caught a rogue eastern wind and floated lazily toward home, where they now hover with the dreams and the fumes, seeking satisfaction.
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