Janis Joplin
Malcolm Lubliner/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesJanis Joplin at the New Year’s Wail in Golden Gate Park on January 1, 1967 in San Francisco, California.
Born in the oil-refinery town of Port Arthur, Texas in 1943, the gutsy powerhouse known as Janis Lyn Joplin went from church choir singer to a tough-talking drinker before leaving her hometown for Los Angeles in 1961. After floundering back and forth between California and Texas for a few years, a friend recruited her to audition for his new rock band Big Brother and the Holding Company in 1966.
The band accepted Joplin without hesitation. After an acclaimed performance at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, Columbia records bought Big Brother and the Holding Company out of their fledgling contract and released the giant hit album Cheap Thrills.
The dynamic, drug-fueled Joplin soon overshadowed her bandmates. Most of the praise was showered on her raw, sexualized vocal stylings. She broke off on her own in December 1968, with her first solo album dropping in September.
But despite her success, she couldn’t keep things together long. Janis Joplin joined the 27 Club inside The Landmark Motor Hotel, a huge orange stucco building close to Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles.
When Janis didn’t show up at the studio on Sunday, Oct. 4, 1970, her producer Paul Rothchild began to worry. “She’d been late lots of times” he remembered. “It was usually that she stopped to buy a pair of pants or some chick thing like that.” He sent her road manager John Cooke to the hotel to check on her.
No answer came from a knock at the door, even though Joplin’s car was parked in the lot.
Wikimedia CommonsJanis Joplin. 1970.
The hotel manager agreed to open the room for Cooke. They found her face down between the nightstand and the bed. She had fresh needle marks on her arm. Her nose was broken, probably from the fall. She clutched in her hand four dollars and 50 cents. What or whom the money was for remains a mystery. Potent heroin was pinned as the cause of death; others in the area with the same dealer also died that week.
Whatever the cause, Janis Joplin was cremated, with a closed service at an undisclosed location for only the immediate family. Her ashes were scattered at sea.
