American Music Master: Janis Joplin

Janis Joplin, in her lifetime, was famous for only about four years. Though she’s still just about as famous as she was when she died, 38 years ago.

In fact, she’s so famous that I’m not going to tell you anything about her. I’m going to let the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame & Museum and Case Western Reserve University do that. Joplin is the subject of this year’s American Music Masters series presented by the two organizations from November 9 through 14.

Now in its 14th year, the series celebrates and studies a pop music pioneer each year though a week or more of lectures, films, panel discussions and performances at the Rock Hall and CWRU, culminating with a full day seminar at CWRU, followed by an all-star tribute concert.

Joplin’s original band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, still performs. The group will be playing in Europe at the time of the AMM events, but it came into town October 22 for a discussion at the Rock Hall, open to the public, followed by a performance at the Beachland Ballroom. The group has a lead singer, who, of course, is not Joplin, for obvious reasons. Singing with the group now is Clevelander Mary Bridget Davies, the actress and vocalist who played Joplin in the Cleveland stage production Love, Janis.

Davies, by all accounts is great but even if Joplin had not died, anyone who replaced her would not be Joplin. She was unique, which can be said about some other rock stars, but nowhere near all of them. And in that short timespan within which she was well known, when she came to your town to perform, it was more than a concert; it was an occasion.

“It was a really long time ago, but I remember seeing her at Public Hall,” says “Cousin” Jimmy Wilson, host of WRUW 91.1FM’s long-running folk music show Roll Away the Dew. “They did a lot of material from the Cheap Thrills album. I think she kept disappearing behind these big banks of amps, possibly to take a drink of Southern Comfort, which was her reputation.

"I was in the balcony, on the side, pretty close to the front. The sound was pretty good – even though Public Hall is pretty cavernous. It wasn’t that I went to the show because I was so totally excited by Big Brother and the Holding Company or Janis Joplin, but it was one of those shows that you felt you had to see; it was one you didn’t want to miss. And she lived up to it. The performance was pretty close to what was on Cheap Thrills. She was every bit as powerful on stage as I expected her to be. And the band came across and it worked. So I came away from it pretty pumped up about it.”

Ann Hadley Holden was a 16-year-old from Cleveland’s southeast suburbs when she and a friend went to see Joplin in Cleveland, on May 9, 1969. “It was a big deal,” she says, “because it was our first rock concert and we got to take the rapid and go downtown. It was an 8:30 concert but we got downtown at 5:30, because we were so excited to be downtown and groovin’ on the whole downtown thing. When we got there, there were lots of people scurrying around, and leaving work, but by six o’clock, the streets were empty.

“So we went to the Mayflower Coffee Shop and sat there for two hours until it was time to go to the concert. We sat in the balcony at Public Hall, on the side. It was huge and dark and everyone was smoking cigarettes or joints. We’d never smelled pot before. I think we got a contact high from being there.

“Janis was dressed in dark, wine-colored satin and kept swigging from her Southern Comfort bottle behind one of the speakers. She and the band were fabulous. We were ecstatic. I can’t remember which songs she did because I played her albums so much that now I can’t separate out what she played live. But she was full-tilt; she was everything we wanted her to be.”

Joan Hargate went to that concert, too. She was a student at the Cleveland Institute of Art. “I remember Janis was late coming on stage. And she kept ducking back to get her Southern Comfort. She was dressed in her boas and beads and bell-bottom pants that were kind of flow-y. She was feathered and jeweled and looking quite happy. There were a lot of really high people there, though I was not one of them.

“The place full, and on the floor level, a lot of people were dancing in the back. She had that great gritty, bluesy kind of voice that made you want to cry. I just love her. She was one of my favorites – and I still play her all the time. The show was absolutely as great as I expected it to be. It was just an experience.”

Dan Garfinkle, who served as WMMS 101.7FM’s promotion director from 1975 to 1981, and now lives in Pittsburgh, saw Joplin later, when she appeared at Blossom with her new band, and wasn’t quite as knocked out by her as he had hoped he would be.

“I remember the show being good, but not great,” he says. “My memory is that she sort of went through the motions. I never felt that it was as explosive or as firey a show as I expected. Though that band was not Big Brother and the Holding Company, which was a different shtick. It wasn’t a bad show, but it probably wasn’t among her top 10 performances. It could have had to do with her drinking and drug issues; when artists are going through that kind of lifestyle, some nights the shows suck.

“But, still, it was exciting to see Janis because she was certainly an icon at that time, so it was sort of an event, from that standpoint. So I viewed it being a very special night, no question about it.”

That Blossom show may or may not have been Joplin’s greatest, but at least one person who saw her there was impressed by her – an Akron teenager named Chrissie Hynde, several years before she herself would become a world-famous rock star. “The thing about Janis is that she just looked so unique, an ugly duckling dressed as a princess, fearlessly so,” Hynde is quoted saying on a Joplin website. “Seeing her live [at Blossom] was like watching a boxing match. Her performance was so in your face and electrifying that it really put you right there in the moment. There you were, living your nice little life in the suburbs and suddenly there was this train wreck, and it was Janis."

The American Music Masters events will explore all of Joplin’s career and life, through performances, film (the 2003 documentary Festival Express, about a 1970 tour Joplin did with artists including the Grateful Dead, The Band and Buddy Guy), lectures by Rock Hall and CWRU educators, and discussions with people who knew her, like her brother and sister; people who worked with her, including Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna lead guitarist Jorma Kaukonen; people who wrote songs for her, such as Jerry Ragovoy (“Piece of My Heart, “Cry, Baby”), and others.

Some of the events are free. The Sat 11/14 seminar at CWRU is $30. Tribute concert tickets are $30-$50. For information about and tickets for all but the concert, call the Rock Hall at 216-515-8426 or go to http://www.RockHall.com. For tickets to the Sat 11/14 tribute concert, visit the PlayhouseSquare box office, call 216-241-6000 or go to http://www.PlayhouseSquare.com.

David Budin is a freelance writer and a folk and rock musician who met Janis Joplin three times when he was playing in a rock band in New York in the late 1960s, and played behind her onstage, at a club called The Scene, one of those times.

He is a former editor of Northern Ohio Live and Cleveland Magazine. His folk group, Long Road, appears occasionally throughout the region and beyond.