4, 1970, of an accidental heroin overdose seems like a tragic inevitability, the byproduct of a life spent leaning into the boundaries of expression and art.
Janis captivatingly tells the story of her two solo albums, 1969's I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama! and 1971's posthumous Pearl, as well as the latter's chart-topping hit "Me and Bobby McGee," rendering the backdrop and behind-the-scenes genesis of these recordings with crystalline insight. Joplin left Big Brother in early 1969 to strike out on her own, and her solo career accelerated everything in her life, good and bad, toward a terminal velocity. Her knack for capturing conflicted subjects is uncanny in Janis, she digs into Joplin's layered emotions, fluid sexuality, unshakably low self-esteem, and unquenchable urge to transcend her racist, restricted Port Arthur upbringing. George-Warren's prior work includes biographies of other troubled rockers with cult followings, most recently Big Star's Alex Chilton in her book A Man Called Destruction. And her riotous anecdotes splash color on the canvas, from the time Joplin started a massive bar-brawl thanks to her sensuous dancing one night in Austin to the snapshot of her getting into a fistfight with one of her heroes, Jerry Lee Lewis. George-Warren traces this rise meticulously, citing contemporaneous interviews as well as fresh sources in order to paint Joplin's ascendance far more fully than has ever been accomplished before. But George-Warren's deep research, eye for detail, illuminating contextualization, and clarity of delivery all make for a far more rounded and convincing image of Joplin's precocity in the heady decades of post-World War II America.Īuthor Interviews New Janis Joplin Biography Reveals The Hard Work Behind The Heart From there, sex and drugs became staples of her life, a progression that often feels formulaic in accounts of Boomer coming-of-age. Beat author Jack Kerouac's On the Road floored her in 1957, and its exploration of freedom and countercultural notions set her soul ablaze. After falling under the sway of blues and rock music as a teenager, she leapt eagerly into the beatnik scene.
As a child, her tomboy brusqueness and outspoken charm complemented her complexity of mind and spirit Port Arthur was a segregated "cultural backwater," according to George-Warren, that only served to heighten Joplin's independence and curiosity. Joplin was born in 1943 in Port Arthur, Texas, where she would spend much of her brief life. It's also a claim that Holly George-Warren sets out to prove in Janis, her new biography of the iconic Texan singer who rocketed to fame after becoming the frontwoman of the San Francisco blues-rock group Big Brother and the Holding Company - only to die four years later at the age of 27, a casualty of the freewheeling '60s, the decade she came to embody. In 1969, Newsweek bestowed this honorific on Janis Joplin: "The first female superstar of rock music." Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Janis Subtitle Her Life and Music Author Holly George-Warren
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