This week sees the release of a documentary about the tour: a film crew joined the train and shot around 60 hours of material over five days, which has now been edited and augmented with commentary from surviving band members, organisers and journalists. With the Grateful Dead, The Band, Sha-Na-Na and others, she travelled from Toronto to Calgary on a train that became known as the Festival Express. Shortly before her premature death, in the summer of 1970, Joplin performed at a series of festivals across Canada. On October 4 1970, after a hard night's drinking with her band, Joplin went back to her room at the Landmark Hotel and died of a heroin overdose. In September, Joplin and her band went into a Los Angeles studio to record a new album. But her reputation went before her: some venues refused to book her, worried about her abusive language on stage and the rowdy audiences she drew. In the spring of 1970, she formed a new band, the Full Tilt Boogie Band. She knew it was a game, a way of fitting in, but she didn't always enjoy playing the part: "Maybe my audiences can enjoy my music more if they think I'm destroying myself." Sometimes she wanted to be herself, claiming, "I'm just a 50s chick." By the time she reached Woodstock in 1969, it was clear she was struggling to hold it together she had developed a heroin habit that made her a pale imitation of her former self. ![]() "It's not easy living up to Janis Joplin, you know," she once said. She worried that journalists were more interested in her lifestyle than in her music she felt she had a role to play both off and on stage. She was beginning to show signs of paranoia. At the end of 1968, she left Big Brother to go solo. The following autumn their first album, Cheap Thrills, went straight to number 1 in the American charts, and stayed there for eight weeks.īut Joplin was restless. She joined a band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and her moment finally came in the summer of 1967, when the band performed twice at the first Monterey Festival and secured a major record deal. There, in the hippy enclave of Haight Ashbury, she hung out with the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane. Shortly after being voted the "Ugliest Man on Campus" by her fellow students, she left for San Francisco. ![]() Joplin began her career performing in clubs while she was attending the University of Texas in Austin. In 1970, shortly before she died, she put up half the money to buy a proper tombstone for Smith's grave in Philadelphia. Joplin once told Rolling Stone journalist David Dalton that she "never sang rock'n'roll, I sang blues - Bessie Smith kind of blues". Smith lived fast, drank hard and died relatively young, in a car crash in 1937, aged 43. Her role model was Bessie Smith, widely agreed to be the greatest female blues singer ever. As a teenager, she had hung out with a mostly male gang of friends, and had an embarrassing propensity for shouting out, "Well, fuck you baby!" Often, she saw no option but to behave in a male way while trying not to lose her identity as a woman she knew no other way of being accepted. The first major female solo singer to emerge after Aretha Franklin, Joplin was one of the few successful women in a very male world of dope and drink, guitars and groupies. In the mid-60s, when she found a niche for herself in the hippy counterculture of San Francisco, the Supremes were still wearing spangly gowns and smiling sweetly. She grew up in Texas in the 50s, at a time when women performers were not encouraged to write their own material, and when the pressure to look and be "feminine" was acute. Joplin, who sang with a bluesy soulfulness previously unheard of in a white woman, confounded stereotypes from the start. She also knew that, apart from the many stories about drugs, and about sex with men and women, Joplin is central to the story of women in rock without her, Love and her female contemporaries might never have felt able to express themselves so freely. Yet even she was taken aback by the wild behaviour of a singer who had made her name over two decades previously. Even then, at the start of the 90s, the Hole singer-songwriter was no stranger to controversy herself. "This Joplin book is insanely graphic, you know, all abscesses, butt-sex, heroin this, cocaine that. "I want to read out the first sentence, OK? 'I was stark naked, stoned out of my mind on heroin and the girl lying between my legs was Janis Joplin.' " She paused for breath, looking in amazement at the first page of Peggy Casserta's Going Down With Janis. "This is the sort of biography I want written about me," she said, picking it up. When I interviewed Courtney Love in Seattle in late 1992, she fixated for a moment on a copy of a Janis Joplin biography.
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