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I sing.
Why do you sing?
Well, because, um, I get to experience
a lot of feelings.
It's really a lot of fun.
You get to feel all kinds of things
that you could hardly find if you went to parties all year
round and made it with everyone you ever wanted to
because you get to feel things that are in your imagination
and another end of truth.
That's why I like music because it's created from
and as it's happening creates feelings.
What could I feel if I
attended your concert tonight?
I'd like you to feel like standing up
and jump up and down in time with the music
and get sweaty and just go with the music.
Just go with it.
Like, rock and roll's very rhythmic.
That's what it's all about.
You know, it's 1,2, 3, 4.
Yeah, you thought you had
found yourself a good girl, one who would love
you and give you the world.
Then you find, hun, that you've been misused.
Look at me, honey.
I'll do what you choose.
I want you to, well, tell Mama all about it.
Yeah, tell Mama.
What do you need?
Tell your Mama, babe.
What you want?
Tell your Mama, babe.
What do you need?
What do you want?
What do you need?
What do you want?
I'll make everything all right.
I'll tell ya.
When you get lonely... and I figure everybody does, now,
because as a matter of fact, everybody does... I'll
tell you what you need, baby.
When you get those strange thoughts in your head,
you don't know where they came from,
man, you've got those strange little weirdness
that's happening to you.
You don't know what they are.
I'll tell you what you need.
You need a sweet-loving mama, baby.
Hun, a sweet-talking mama, babe, you
know, someone to listen to you, someone to want you, someone
to hold you, someone to need you, someone to use you,
someone to want you, someone that needs you, someone
to hold you.
You need a mama, mama, mama, babe, a mama, ma, ma, ma.
Yeah, mama, mama, mama, ma mama.
Tell Mama all about it.
What do you need?
What do you want?
Anything I can do, anything I can do,
I'll be your mama, babe, yeah, your mama, babe,
oh, mama, babe, oh, mama, babe, oh, mama, babe, oh, mama, babe.
I'll make everything all right.
Dear family, I managed
to pass my 27th birthday without really feeling it.
Oh, it's such a funny game.
Two years ago, I didn't even want to be it.
No, that's not true.
I've been looking around, and I've noticed something.
After you reach a certain level of talent... and quite a few
have that talent... The deciding factor
is ambition or, as I see it, how much you really need,
need to be loved and need to be proud of yourself.
And I guess that's what ambition is.
It's not all a depraved quest for position or money.
Maybe it's for love, lots of love, ha, Janice.
Port Arthur, to a lot of people,
it was a really good town to grow up in.
I never thought so.
Janice never thought so, and she couldn't
figure out how to make herself like everybody else,
thank goodness.
Our parents, I'm not exactly sure
how they actually met, but they started
dating after Mother had gone away to college and come back
and started working.
Daddy was a mechanical engineer, but he
was able to get a job because at that time,
so many people were away fighting.
So he got a job at Texaco, and he stayed
there his entire working life.
And he came home from work one day and told mother,
let's do something for posterity.
So that's Janis being born in 1943.
She joined the choir,
and they kicked her out of the choir.
She wouldn't follow directions, and they said, you're out.
Like most women, Janis
wanted to be beautiful and curvaceous and skinny
like the pictures that she saw in magazines.
And she saw herself, you know, gain weight and get chunky.
Her skin broke out, and her features
weren't that fine, beautiful, female thing that we
see pictures everywhere.
And so she had questions about her own,
you know, desirability.
She demanded to be different.
You know, our parents had given us permission to do it
and then weren't aware of what would happen if you did it.
Janis was the first one in our family to find that out,
that if you were rocking the boat, you might get noticed.
And she rocked the boat as often as she could.
She liked rocking the boat.
The world was changing,
and I think that Janis's interpretation of what being
good was included things that a lot of people in the South
weren't yet ready to include.
She said, I think immigration is the right thing to do.
Well, our hometown had an active KKK chapter.
And what happened was she was harassed
by some guys in her class.
They threw pennies at her.
They called her names, and she became a target
for the last three years of high school.
She started dressing differently, wearing loafers
without socks and tight skirts.
Her hair was becoming more, like, beatnik,
and still there was an aspect of her sexuality
and her personality that was at odds.
Where does she go?
What does she do?
She was pushing the limits, and women
weren't supposed to swear.
And women were supposed to be demure
and not know that anything existed below their waistlines.
And I met her in high school, and she wouldn't go away.
She was always calling us up, one of us or the other,
and say, what are you doing tonight'?
Where are we going?
She was a lot of trouble.
We went to Louisiana, and she would start fights which
we didn't want started because the Cajuns
were known, good fighters.
But she got a kick out of it, just playing the bad girl.
She wasn't a bad girl.
I mean, she just liked to bait the men.
You know, we would deny all knowledge of her
and barely escape with our lives.
That made her real dangerous to take to a bar.
I mean, she was amusing, so we took her to the beach with us.
She borrowed some records which were obscure.
One of them was a record by Odetta.
All of a sudden, she busted into a perfect imitation of Odetta
on the record, and everybody was just
stunned... this little, troublesome kid, you know,
could sing that well.
This particular night Janis said,
let's go see this wonderful Austin
you're always talking about.
So we pulled in at five thirty in the morning,
and you could hear music.
And it wasn't recorded music.
It was live music.
And Janis grabbed my arm, and she said,
Jack, I am going to like it here.
On accident, I discovered
I had an incredibly loud voice.
So I started singing blues because that was always
what I liked, and, you know, I got in a bluegrass band,
played hillbilly music in Austin, Texas for free beer.
I used to sing at folk clubs just for a goof.
We call ourselves the Waller Creek Boys,
and instantly Janis became one of the boys.
People just stared open mouthed, and she
was not ever accepted, really, except by the folk community.
Growing up, her peers picked on her and bullied her.
And by the time she got to Austin,
and by the time I knew her, she had already been
profoundly hurt over and over.
And so in Austin, it was the same way.
Every year, the fraternities held a contest,
and people could nominate someone to be ugliest man.
And someone nominated Janis, and all these jerks voted for her.
And it crushed her, saddest thing I ever saw.
You know, it really was.
To that point, I'd never seen Janis cry.
Janis had a very tough exterior, but it really got her.
It got her bad.
And I said, Janis, they don't mean anything to you.
They're... they're not even in your class.
It became increasingly harder to fit
into a group of angry, angry men who liked to pick on her.
Even though she ran around with a tight group of friends that
were into books and ideas, she needed
to go out to where the people were
that wrote those books, where the people were
that sung those songs.
Where does she go?
What does she do?
San Francisco.
It would have to be about '63 or something like that.
I couldn't stand Texas anymore, and I went to California
because it's a lot freer.
You can do what you want to do, and nobody bugs you.
15,000 San Franciscans protest segregation
in Birmingham, negro and white citizens
marching in unity for equality in San Francisco.
We used to all hang out at a bar called the Anxious Asp
on Green Street in North Beach.
We went to a party one night, and, you know,
with a little of wine and a little bit of, you know,
whatever, We kind of got to talking.
And two weeks later, she moved in with me.
Sometimes, we went down to Monterrey,
and she would sing in the hootenannies.
And she would win tickets for us to get to the main arena.
One time, we went there, and there was Bob Dylan, her idol.
And she walks up to him, and she said, oh, Bob, I just love you.
You know, I'm gonna be famous one day.
He said, yeah, we're all gonna be famous.
I'll never forget that, you know?
She definitely felt the blues.
Bessie Smith and all the blues singers,
she loved those people.
And I think she emulated them in the sense of wanting
to be like them, you know, to have the pain,
and I guess that's why she drank like she
did and took drugs because that's
all part of the whole picture.
She definitely needed people to tell her how great she was,
and she needed that stroking all the time.
I don't think she was with girls to shock people.
I think she was with girls because that's
what she felt at the moment.
And I think she was totally in a conflict
all the time with herself, constantly,
and she was unhappy.
She was quite unhappy, and I think
on the stage it made her feel that she was somebody, that she
had something to offer.
And I said, I just think this is not working for both of us.
You know, you want to go off and do things with other people,
and I'm not strong enough to handle that.
She got with this English fellow,
and they were into shooting up and stuff like that.
And that was never my style.
You know, I just never could get into that.
Janis was in North Beach, and she
developed an intense relationship
with Peter de Blanc.
Then Janis got into methadrine.
Janis told me that they were living
in that building behind Tommy's joint
and had not a stick of furniture.
And Peter was just sitting there for hours on end
throwing a Super Ball against the wall and catching it.
And she was skin and bones.
She used, overused, lost weight,
got so strung out that her group of friends held a party,
and they passed the hat to get enough money
to put her on a Greyhound bus and send her back home.
She and Peter decided that they both needed
to get their lives cleaned up and would go to their hometowns
and get their lives together, and then they'd
get together and get married.
Dear Peter, well, I'm home now.
I have your picture on the desk where I do my homework,
and everyone in the family's seen it at least three times.
Everyone agrees you're handsome.
I really love you.
In attempting to find a semblance of a pattern
in my life, I find I've gone out with great vigor every time
and gotten really fucked up.
All I did was be wild, drank constantly,
fucked people, sang.
Then San Francisco, kind of wanting to find an old
man and be happy, but I didn't.
I just found Linda and became a meth freak.
Jesus fucking Christ, I want to be happy so fucking bad.
He came home at one point and met the family
and asked our father formally for her hand in marriage.
Well, now it's Saturday,
and you're letter didn't come.
So I'm very sad and moping around the house,
and mother's worried.
Baby, what's happening?
You could really be hurting me, and, hell, I couldn't tell.
Am I still happy?
Do I still have you?
She was embarrassed that he wasn't
going to show up after she had told
her mom and dad that he was.
He was evidently living with a woman who he'd gotten pregnant.
And Janis only discovered that when she happened to call him,
and this woman answered the telephone.
Do you ever go back to Port Arthur?
I went back once.
It's a... it's a bummer, and I ain't going back again.
No, it's no good.
Chet asked me to come and see his new band,
and that's when I heard that Big Brother was auditioning women.
So I went by his house and said, you know, I'm going to go home.
I can ask about Janis if you like.
And she found out that I was there,
and we spent the whole day talking about what was
going on since she had left.
And we should go see a rock and roll band,
and there's one playing around the corner.
Didn't have anything to drink because she was sober.
And we listened to, I think, two songs, and she turned to me
and she said, that's what I want to do.
So I said, OK.
Let's go figure this out.
He said, I'm not going to go and take
it till you tell your parents.
He waited in the car while Janis went in to tell her parents.
Janis went in and said she was going to Austin for the weekend
and left and went to San Francisco.
Mother and Dad, with a great deal of
trepidation, I bring the news.
I am in San Francisco.
Now, let me explain.
Chet Helms, an old friend, now is Mr. Big in SF.
He encouraged me to come out.
Seems the whole city had gone rock and roll, and it has.
And he assured me fame and fortune, so I came.
I'm so sorry.
My love to Mike and Laura.
Love, Janis.
I would pick her up, and I'd drive her
back to where she was staying.
I mean, she was always like, I don't know whether this
is going to work out.
I probably... I should go back to Texas.
I don't know if I should do this.
She had a lot of misgivings.
She was very afraid of drugs.
She said, I don't ever want to see anybody shooting drugs.
I can't stand to see that because if I see that,
it's just going to take her out so much.
She came out to San Francisco and had
this coffeehouse career.
She almost died that time.
She lost all this weight, you know,
and she went back to Texas.
And her mother said, if you ever go back out there again,
you're going to die.
Parents encourage you to sing at all?
Oh, no, no, no, they wanted me to be a schoolteacher,
you know, like all parents.
But I started singing when I was about 17.
I listened to a lot of music first,
and one day I started singing.
And I could sing.
It was, like, it was a surprise, to say the least.
Dear Mother and Dad, Daddy brought up
the college issue, which is good because I
probably would have continued avoiding it until it went away.
I don't think I can go back now.
I don't know all the reasons, but I just feel that this
a truer feeling, true to me.
I don't feel like I'm lying now.
I have to see this through first.
If I don't, I'd always be thinking about singing,
being good and known, and feel like I cheated myself,
you know?
Weak as it is, I apologize for being so
just plain bad in the family.
I'm just sorry, love, Janis.
We're all primitive musicians.
We're self-taught.
We don't know much about music.
We're not trained in the music that we're doing.
We've all sort of come to it.
I was trained on triangle and tuba.
Tuba, you weren't house trained.
You're a great triangle player, baby.
I wasn't even house trained.
Go outside.
I used to be sort of like a blues singer.
And Jimmy Swift.
Jimmy Swift?
She used to be a baseball player,
and she always used to say, sock it to me.
Folk blues, you know, I was a folk singer,
you know, and sang blues mostly, country blues, old time blues,
slow.
Didn't you have a job soldering once?
Soldering?
No, a key punch operator.
It was a back then.
I was a waitress in a bowling alley once, too.
Playing is like the mostest fun there is.
Feeling things and really getting into it, that's fun.
At that time, there was definitely
a sense Of camaraderie.
If you knew the Grateful Dead had the house on Ashbury,
it Wouldn't be unlikely that if you were in the neighborhood
you'd just drop by and hang out with those guys
and smoke a joint or something like that.
We were all sort of riding the same wave in a sense, all part
of the same scene, and all shared, in some ways,
the same values that we were par':
of this counterculture, revolutionary music thing that
was going to change the world.
She was just funny, unassuming, sexy,
and sort of a kind of, like, almost a sort of Huck Finn
innocence to her, the absolutely child-woman
ideal of the.
Well, I met Janis as a romantic interest
for one of my band mates, Pigpen, Ron McKernan.
We called him the Mighty Pig.
It was an on again, off again little affair that they had.
And on the nights that Janis would come over and visit,
I got very little sleep because Janis
was not real quiet in the rack.
And so all night long, it would be, daddy, daddy,
daddy, all that kind of stuff, I mean, but endlessly.
Isn't Pigpen cute?
They make Pigpen T-shirts now with his picture
on it for fans.
I have one in red.
Those people are all friends of mine.
Aren't they amazing?
The people with stars after their names
are members of the band.
I'm in the back on the left, really an amazing picture.
They aren't dressed up.
They look that way all the time.
Now, taken in perspective, I'm not so far out at all, eh'?
There was a party.
There was a party in the city at an apartment
on California Street.
Someone opened this bottle model of this stuff.
It's called Cold Duck.
You don't sit it around much.
Sparkling wine.
Sparkling wine, and it started to go around the room,
and people were taking chugs of it.
And Janis took a big swig of it.
And someone said to Janis, oh, man, you
must really want to get high.
And she just went, like, what?
And someone said, yeah, there's, like, you know,
60, 80 hits of acid in that bottle of Cold Duck.
Anyway, she ran into the bathroom and tried to throw up.
But she got very high, anyway, and we went from this party
to the Fillmore.
And Otis Redding was I think in his second night,
and it was his second show.
They did two shows, so there weren't a lot of people there.
And I remember sitting with her.
We sat down in the middle of the floor,
and Otis Redding came out with his band.
I think when she saw him and so the way he moved and how
he interpreted a song, I really think it very much
affected her.
I mean, literally, she'd start doing this got to, go to,
go to.
She stole that.
Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin,
now, they are so subtle.
They can milk you with two notes.
They could go no farther from A to B,
and they could make you feel like they told you
the whole universe, you know?
And Otis, too.
And Otis, oh, Otis, my man, but I don't know that yet.
All I got now is strength, but maybe if I keep singing,
maybe I'll get it.
That's what I think.
Mother, haven't heard from you yet.
But I'm brimming with news, so here I am.
Last weekend, we played in the city,
and a man from Elektra, a good label, spoke to me afterwards.
Rothchild feels that popular music
can't continue getting farther and farther
out and more chaotic.
He feels there's going to be a reaction,
and old-fashioned music... Blues, shuffles, melodic stuff...
Is going to come back in.
Well, Elektra wants to form the group to be this way,
and they want me.
Wish I could ask someone for advice that knew and wasn't
biased for any reason.
Ah, dream on, Janis.
We thought maybe we could get Janis to be
more locked into the group.
I took her down the hill, down a little pathway
here through the woods, and talked
to her all about this stuff.
And a lot of what you would say the American dream
of most girls in the '50s and '60s came out at that time.
She said, you know, I've dreamed about all this stuff
all my life, being on the cover of these magazines
and having a fancy car and living in a fancy home.
And I don't know what to do.
I mean, you guys are good stuff, but, I mean-
and I said, you know, a lot of that stuff was bullshit,
and give us a chance.
Give us a month.
Bobby Shad from Mainstream Records, he offered us a deal,
and so we signed this bad record contract.
And at the same time, in doing so,
we were kind of locking in Janis and that she knew what she was
doing, that she was in some way locking
herself in with the band for at least a few years.
It was good that she stayed with us
because we let her alone.
You know, we weren't talented enough to get in her way.
You know what I mean?
We weren't strong enough.
But those guys, you know, Paul Rothchild, they
would have eaten her alive.
They would have shoved her over in the corner,
as much as you could shove Janis in the corner.
In the very beginning, she didn't
take over as, I'm the singer.
I'm the lead singer.
She really tried to integrate into the band
and be part of it.
The big turning point was Monterey Pop.
A very good friend of mine said, you've got to come
to the Monterey Pop Festival.
There's never been a Pop Festival.
You know, you're going to have a great time.
It's a weekend.
It's in Monterey, California.
Simon and Garfunkel were going to perform there.
That's all I knew about.
So I came here with my khaki pants and a tennis sweater,
and I was astonished by everything that I saw.
I got a call from Lou Adler, who was
the producer of Monterey Pop.
He was also the manager of the Mamas and the Papas.
He told me there's in the Monterey Pop Festival.
Well, Big Brother, come.
I saw the future.
He offered me a number, and I went for it.
I didn't give a damn about the money.
I knew that this was going to be a monster.
So I vividly remember sitting in the grounds
there, being surrounded by this unusual crowd,
and then they announced the group.
Three or four years ago, I ran into a chick in Texas
by the name of Janis Joplin, and I heard her sing.
And Janis and I hitchhiked to the West Coast.
A lot of things have gone down since that time,
but it gives me a great deal of pride
to present today the finished product
of three or four years of work, Big Brother
and the Holding Company.
We had been told about Monterey Pop
that it was going to be a big party,
and everybody's playing for free.
And no one's going to make any money.
And then all of a sudden there's a movie being made
by DA Pennebaker, and they're asking
everybody to sign a release just before you get on stage.
I thought everybody in this country
is dying to get out to California
to see what's going on.
And so, without even thinking, I said, sure.
Lou Adler wanted me to sign, as he had everybody sign,
the contract for the movie.
And I said, no.
And he kept on it, and I kept saying, no.
There was a whole sort of San Francisco kind of contingent
that was of the sort of philosophy
that these LA guys are not going to make
a movie out of out stuff.
We're not going to be in your movie.
We just came for the party.
There were nine big machine-gun cameras around the arena.
All nine cameras were pointed down to the ground.
Now, they're starting to come off stage.
People are starting to tell them.
This wasn't filmed.
But Janis is really pissed off.
They got to Janis, John Phillips
and Lou Adler and these people, and they said, look.
We'll put you on again.
We'll give you a second show if you'll be in the movie.
And to make a long story short, there was a lot of infighting
amongst the band and our manager.
Grossman was involved, too.
And Albert Grossman got involved.
I went to Albert, and I said, Albert,
I know what you have to do.
But you better find a way to get her
so that we can film her because she's really critical to this.
This group we'd like to bring on now
because of the great acceptance they had on Saturday afternoon.
From San Francisco, on Mainstream Records,
let's hear it for Big Brother and the Holding Company.
Cass was sitting there in one of the rows,
and I kind of had an eye on her during Janis
because they had been a little critical because they
were Los Angelenos.
And the Los Angelenos were somewhat
critical of the San Franciscans in terms of the bands.
And so I kind of wanted to watch her when Janis sang.
Sitting down by my window,
just looking out at the rain.
Something came along, honey, grabbed a hold of me,
and it felt like a ball and chain.
Well, yeah.
And I said, oh, oh, oh, well, honey, this can't be.
This can't be in vain.
Na, na, na, na, na, na, na, and I
said, oh, oh, oh, well, honey, oh, this can't be
b... b... b... baby, not in vain.
I said, no, no, no, no, yeah, whoa,
and I want somebody to tell me, come on.
And tell me why, why, 0h, people tell me why love,
honey, why love is like, well, it's like a ball and a chain.
Once she caught real recognition at the Monterey Pop
Festival, I think she began to see
what the possibilities were.
And the possibilities were somewhat over the top.
Dear Mother, at last, a tranquil day and time
to write all the good news.
I'm now safely moved into my new room in our beautiful house
in the country.
Gosh, I can't seem to find anything else to talk about.
This band is my whole life now.
I really am totally committed, and I dig it.
I wanted to send you these clippings.
Since Monterey, all this has come about.
Did "Port Arthur News" have anything on these?
If so, please send.
I just may be a star someday.
You know, it's funny.
As it gets closer and more probable, being a star
is really losing its meaning.
But whatever it means, I'm ready.
Things are going so well for me personally.
I have a boyfriend.
He's head of Country Joe and the Fish, a band from Berkeley.
He' a Capricorn like me and is 25,
and so far we're getting along fine.
Everyone in the rock scene just thinks
it's the cutest thing they've ever seen,
and it is rather cute actually.
Oh, we were never in love with each other.
No, no, there was no sizzle going on.
We were good friends.
We were both control freaks, both lead singers.
There was a maternal feminine side of her
that never was allowed to grow.
She was really trying hard, you know,
and her mother was coming to town.
She wanted to cook chow mein for her mother.
She was so worried that her mother
would like her apartment.
And had just made that poster of her naked
with the necklaces.
We put them all up on the wall.
We went out to visit her the Summer of Love as a family.
My brother and I were the only teenagers who probably
went outwith their parents.
You know, we go to see Janis.
And we're walking down the streets.
She's showing us around, and I was so excited.
Then We went to the Avalon Ballroom,
and Big Brother was not on the bill that night.
But they went on and did three or four songs.
Moby Grape let them have a set because Janis's
parents were there.
When we were getting ready to leave,
I remember overhearing one of my parents tell the other one,
you know, dear, I don't think we're going
to have much influence anymore.
I think that her own telling of her story
was about the ability to make your life fit your values,
and she found that opportunity in the music
world of the 1960s.
The social acceptance that she'd always wanted was there,
and it just propelled her forward.
Come on.
Didn't I make you feel like you were the only man?
It felt so fresh and so different
for someone who'd been an outcast.
Each time I tell myself that I,
well, I think I've had enough.
But I'm gonna show you, baby, that a woman can be tough.
I want you to come on.
Come on.
Take it.
Take another little piece of my heart now, baby.
Break it.
Break another little piece of my heart, oh, yeah.
Come on.
Take another little piece of my heart now, baby.
You know you got it if it makes you feel good.
You've got another manager, Albert Grossman,
who also manages Bob Dylan.
Yeah, he's better.
Dear Mother, as of yesterday afternoon,
we're officially with Columbia.
Wow, I'm so lucky.
25, 25, 25, it's all too incredible.
I just fumbled around being a mixed-up kid
and then fell into this.
Finally, it looks like something is
gonna work for me... incredible.
February 20, 1968, Dear Mother, our record
is a success story in itself.
We got a gold album in three days,
and the most fantastic thing of all happened at the Rose Bowl.
The cops wouldn't let the kids off the grass near us.
And all of a sudden they broke, just like a wave,
and swarmed onto the field.
They were pulling on my clothes, my beads, calling,
Janis, Janis, we love you.
Come on.
Take another little piece of my heart now baby.
You know you got it, man, if it makes you feel good.
She had a sense that as long as people gave her the stage,
she would be a winner.
Let's sit down, boys.
Come on, boys.
Let's sit down.
Here we are, sitting down.
Almost everybody's sitting down.
Oh, yes.
Fantastic.
Is there a San Francisco sound?
And if so, what is it, and how did it start?
The thing that makes what they call the San Francisco music
scene, as far as I'm concerned, is, like, first of all,
the freedom to create here.
You know, for some reason, like, a lot of musicians
ended up here and ended up together
and had complete freedom to do whatever they wanted to.
And so they came up with their own kind of music.
What do you think, Sam?
Honey.
That's what we call love music, baby.
Not bad.
Well, here we are, together again at last,
by popular demand. - Honey.
How are ya?
Yeah, I don't know what it was.
We sort of hit it off right away.
Was she romantically attached to me?
I would hope so.
May I light your fire, my child?
I guess not.
Apparently not, no, well, I would
have bet against it myself.
We were good friends.
And I will level with you.
We may or may not have ended up intimate.
I just, you know, my memory is so bad.
Or so good.
We lived in the Chelsea Hotel while we
were making Cheap Thrills and while we were touring.
And we lived in Los Angeles.
About half the time, we were in Hollywood,
and half the time we were at the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan.
And it was just so much fun.
You know, we would get together and do heroin at these people's
rooms and just kind of not nod off or go to sleep or something
but just have really nice mellow conversations.
She liked New York, and it had that tombstone quality for her.
And so I was going to do a little film with her because I
really liked her a lot.
And she was recording stuff with the band,
and I would go and listen and film them.
I was interested mostly in how she understood to control
her singing because her singing had
this thing of when she'd lose it, she would shout and scream.
And sometimes that was very effective,
but the music had to have something more to it than that.
Liar, I think it's a real good-liar, liar.
Let's do Summertime.
OK, let's go.
Play the second one, when she goes, no, no, no,
don't you cry.
No, no, no, no, no, don't you cry.
At the very end of the song.
End of the song, the last chord of the song.
You're first G major arpeggio, I think, is wrong.
That's when she says, cry.
What do you want, like, six arpeggios of G minor?
Because it changes to B minor for two after that.
He's already in a major.
He's trying to get in a minor.
We can do it either way.
I mean, they're both valid approaches.
But I think if we... Like, it's 10 o'clock.
I think by 4:00 we could have Summertime.
I'd say if we don't do it by 12 o'clock or 1 o'clock,
we can spend a few hours doing something else, you know?
If you all voted to do a bunch of them tonight,
it's OK with me.
But I personally don't agree with it.
Playing it and listening to it back
ain't gonna take us a damn thing.
Man, I know exactly what that song sounds like,
and I've racked my brain to try and get ideas for it,
as I'm sure everybody else has.
D major and D minor sing don't you cry.
I don't even know what it says.
Turn that mic thing off.
OK,.
Hey, don't go away.
You look so cute when you're passed out.
You look just like a hot dog.
OK.
OK, good time.
You dug it the first time you heard it.
Yeah, I did dig it.
I did dig it the first time I heard it.
I also liked the other way.
I mean, I think maybe an adaptation or.
Yeah, right, because, like, yours had a lot of lyricism
to it, but this has nothing but-frenetic is the word.
Oh, one of these mornings, child,
you'll rise up singing, babe.
I said you're gonna go, honey, gonna spread your wings.
Honey, take, take to the sky.
Move the sky.
Until that morning, honey, no, nothing's gonna harm you, baby.
I said, honey, nothings ever gonna let you down.
Oh, it just wouldn't do it.
Hush, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby.
No, no, no, no, don't you cry.
Janis Joplin and the Holding Company, aren't they great?
Absolutely great, Janis, I just thought you were wonderful.
You know, you were written up recently in "Life Magazine,"
and I have a copy here.
And I'd like to read what you were quoted
as saying about your music.
The audience sitting down is a weird trip.
It's like separateness.
But when they're dancing, they're doing it with you,
like you said it to them.
And they've got it, and you can play freer and freer.
Would you care to elaborate on that?
It sounds different when you say it,.
It's sort of like you as a performer
will understand like an audience communicating with a performer.
Instead of one giving and one receiving,
it's, like, a reciprocal thing.
When an audience is dancing, they're communicating with you.
And you know that you're getting to them.
And they're grooving, and you're grooving.
And it's sort of like feedback.
Do you know what feedback is in amplifiers?
Yes.
When you play the note too loud, and the amplifier
will play it back.
And you play it back.
And it goes around and back, and it just makes everything
go higher and higher.
I see, well, that... That clears it up for me.
Dear family, lots of trouble in the band,
most of them revolving around the fact
that I think I'm hot shit, as I'm told
by everyone from Albert down.
And the band is sloppy.
When she came into the band, Peter
was the leader of the band, the bass player,
and James was the mythic, iconic, you know,
beautiful figure.
He represented the band.
And then here comes Janis.
And when she joined the band, she
became both of those things.
They had a very complicated reaction to her fame.
There was a cadre of hangers that
sort of insulated her from her band, from what I could see.
And it was just a matter of time until somebody
tried to polish her up and make a big star out of her.
It's crazy, now, to think back at it that we signed, you know,
a management agreement with the guy.
But I think from the very get go,
I think there was a sense that he was not a big fan of ours,
that he really was into Janis.
But we wanted to believe that he would work for the whole band.
And the guys in the band were powerless.
No one had the ability to stop that from happening.
She was a singularity, and she attracted
that kind of attention.
She cared about Big Brother's career.
She loved those guys, but there was something that she
saw that was beyond that.
And if she didn't do it, she'd never know if she could.
Dear family, so we're back in California
for two more weeks.
After that, begins my hardest task.
I told you, remember, that I was leaving Big Brother
and going to do a thing on my own.
There will be a whole lot of pressure because of the vibes
created by my leaving Big Brother,
and also just how big I am now.
Nobody ever saw her wearing those kind of clothes,
but that's the kind of clothes she
had when she came for Texas.
If someone said, well, what did you learn from Janis?
What did she teach you?
If I had to say it in a sentence,
it's emotional honesty and the price of not emotional honesty.
She started to lose that.
She started to become something that people expected of her.
She started to become a caricature
of what she was and play it for people, you know?
And I think that hurt her in some way.
Take this lonely heart from one lonely girl.
Reach in to high, babe, can't help from getting burned.
Everything she ever wrote pretty much is autobiographical.
And I thought the reaching too high, babe,
too, this is done right at the time
when she's leaving Big Brother.
She knows she's kind of going to go for some higher
level of fame and stardom and, you know,
she might fall on her face.
She knew that.
It might not work out.
She might get burned.
The fallout for James and Peter and David
was significant because Janis asked Sam to come
with her to her new band.
I loved Jan.
I loved her all the way through.
You know, the first time I ever saw her,
she just had this attitude that I liked.
It wasn't belligerent, but it was non-compromising.
She's loud.
She's one of these loud Texas women.
She's real smart and considerate most of the time.
And we both had real quick tempers.
They called me up to play with Janis,
so they sent me a ticket.
And I went to New York.
And I went there, and they opened the door.
And this girl had on a bra and some panties.
She said, hi, I'm Janis.
I said, hi, I'm in the right place.
And she started singing.
I said, damn.
Are you sure she's white?
When you quit Big Brother and the Holding Company,
why did you do that?
Well, just because it was sort of just time for us,
I think, to go on and do something else.
You know what I mean?
Like, you grow together, you know, a certain way,
and you sort of exhaust each other.
You exhaust the good that you can do for each other,
and it was just time for us to start
growing in other directions.
You know what I mean?
You know, I think you really grow as a musician.
And that's what, after all, we're supposed to be all about,
is trying to get better at what we do, you know'?
San Francisco was the first place,
the first community, Where Janis really felt at home.
When she left Big Brother, she lost it.
The pressure to succeed was huge,
and she was carrying around this weight.
You know, she didn't know how to lead a band.
That's one of the reasons it was a mistake.
She didn't know how to lead the band.
And she was in charge, so she had people putting together
that band for her, along with a lot of other strange people who
were appointed band directors.
It wasn't working.
There were changes in personnel, and none of it
solved anything.
We went to Europe only, like, two months into touring.
She's there with a new band which doesn't know what
the hell it's supposed to be.
OK, You GUYS-
You know what?
I make it a policy.
We played in Frankfurt, and Janis was freaking out.
We peeped out a curtain, and all of these dudes
were sitting there with their little haircuts,
like you put a bowl on their head and cut around the bowl.
(Is everybody read)”
But we felt like playing.
We said, hey, man, we'll play the show.
If y'all want to boogie, come on up here with us and boogie.
If there's something you need,
hun, that you've never ever had, I know you've never had it.
Oh, honey, don't you sit there crying.
Don't just sit there feeling bad, no, no, no.
You better get up.
Now, do you understand?
Raise your hand.
Hey, hey! hey.
Raise your hand.
Right here, right now.
Hey.
Whoa, oh, yeah.
I'm nobody.
I'm just a fan.
No, I'm just a fan.
I'm crazy about her.
Where from you are friend?
I can't talk.
Quit taking pictures of me.
Why not?
Because I'm not groovy.
She's groovy.
Look at her.
I guess because we're strangers in foreign lands,
the Cosmic Blues Band came together.
The Albert Hall in London was the last concert,
and Janis knew that Bob Dylan had sold out.
And she was really excited about playing the Albert Hall,
and she did sell out.
She got people dancing in the aisles at the Albert Hall,
and she was just ecstatic after.
Excited, woo, nobody ever-nobody,
anybody, ever thought it would be that good.
Nobody's ever fucking got up yet.
No one's ever got up and danced and dug it.
No one's ever done anything there, and they did it, man.
They fucking got up and grooved.
Then they listened.
God, I'm so happy, woo-hoe.
When Janis was on stage and things were going well,
all was right with the world.
But after that hour, you've got to come off stage.
She used to say that it was like making love,
being on the stage, you know, but it's an illusion.
When the show's over, the audience leaves,
and you're left with yourself.
She rarely was using heroin before a concert
because it wasn't the right kind of energy for onstage,
and she cared about that.
But her after-the-concert fix was a real regular thing.
We were devolving into this drug
use that was way out of hand.
I have to, you know, digress for a second say,
when Janis was in Big Brother, Peter didn't do any drugs.
You know, so out of respect to him,
we kept it toned down a lot.
So now she's in Cosmic Blues so we're doing really
a lot of drugs, you know, because Peter's not-...
Daddy isn't there anymore.
We're free, and we can do all these drugs now.
So it really got out of hand.
In Los Angeles, in particular, at the Landmark Hotel,
she called me to her room.
And she said, your services are no longer needed.
And so then we shot up some heroin, and she said,
well, aren't you going to ask me why?
I said what difference does it make?
It was just like a marriage, you know, it had run out of juice.
And a lot of our friends were dying that year.
She's lying on a motel bed, and she says,
it's not going to happen to me.
She said, my people are pioneer stock,
you know, and they came across the country.
And they came to Texas.
They're tough.
I've got those genes, and nothing's
going to happen to me.
And I said, shit, I wish you wouldn't have said that.
We had heard about Woodstock from pretty well in advance.
And we thought, oh, great.
It's the next Monterey.
It's a very warm summer day, and all this variety of choppers
are taking off and landing.
I do remember that Peggy was on the airlift zone
where we took off from.
I was always apprehensive when Peggy was around because I felt
that she would be an enabler, rather than a helper,
with the drug problem.
She called and said, you have to come.
I said, I can't, because we were hearing reports
that the turnpike was bogged down.
And people were out of gas and having babies,
and, you know, it was like locusts coming through.
And so I said the only way I'd come out
there is if I was airlifted in.
And she said, OK.
We were both around the same age in the South
with middle-class families.
But I think Janis had a harder time of coming through.
But on the other hand, you know, people tend to take because
of that she was depressed.
She wasn't.
It was all fun.
We shot heroin for fun, and it took the edge off.
We were in the midst of one of the most
social phenomenons in history.
What I understand is she got very
high shooting up in the portisan and couldn't go on.
Finally, Peggy and John Cooke had to push her onstage.
How are y'all... how... I mean, um, how are you out there?
Are you mellow?
Are you OK?
You're not, uh, are you staying stoned?
And you've got enough water, and you've got a place
to sleep and everything?
Because, you know, because we ought to all of us, you know,
I don't mean to be preachy.
But we ought to remember... and that means promoters, too...
That music's for grooving, man.
And music's not for putting yourself through bad changes.
You know, I mean, you don't have to take anybody's shit,
man, just to like music.
You know what I mean?
You don't.
So if you're getting more shit than you deserve,
you know what to do about it, man.
Work me, lord.
Please, don't you leave me.
I feel so useless down here with no one to love,
though I've looked everywhere.
And I can't find me anybody to love, to feel my care.
So work me.
Whoa, oh, use me, lord.
Did you ever have a whole night,
though, you just stand up there and feel
like you're not making it?
Well, yeah, but you kind of try and... you
have little games that you play with yourself
to turn yourself on.
You can usually get yourself going.
You never had a desire to just leave the stage and say,
I'm sorry, it isn't working tonight, folks?
It's the best thing ever happened to me.
I wouldn't leave.
Yeah, yeah, if you couldn't do it anymore,
you'd be miserable, huh?
Yeah, I hope that by that time, I'll have
something else that's groovy.
Whoa, whoa, please, oh, no, no,
no, no, no, please... Ah, oh, no, no,
no, don't you go and leave me.
Honey, when I reach you, I want to,
I said I want to hold on to you.
Well, you're never there.
It doesn't turn me off, man.
I still reach out to hold onto my man.
I said, daddy, daddy, daddy, daddy, daddy, don't you go.
No, no, no, no, honey, don't you go and leave some love.
This is the dark time in my time with Janis.
Albert and Janis reached a point where
they said, well, we're going to let the Cosmic
Blues Band dissipate.
Janis took that failure on herself.
She felt that she was failing.
And this was, as a result, by far,
their worst abuse of heroin and alcohol.
Well, this whole thing that's happened to me, you see,
this whole success thing, uh, it hasn't yet
really compromised the position that I
took a long time ago in Texas.
That was to be true to myself, to be
the person that was on the inside of me
and not play games.
And so that's What I'm trying to do mostly in the whole world,
is to not bullshit myself.
When I saw her in the hotel, all
of the uncertainties and the little girl
lost were very visible.
And she said, come on up, and we'll
order drinks from room service.
And I hadn't been there very long
when she decided to shoot up.
And I'd never seen her do that before.
And then we had some drinks.
We talked, and she did it again before I left.
When I left, I thought, I don't know if I
will want to see her again.
What do you think when you're singing?
Are you actually thinking what's going on in the song,
or can your mind be somewhere else?
I'm not really thinking much.
You just sort of try and feel.
When last I heard of you, you were in the jungles of Brazil.
I went to Rio for a carnival, and then I
decided to hitchhike around the northern part of Brazil.
As a kind of vacation?
Just like a regular old beatnik on the road.
I knew I was going to try to make it to Rio for carnivals
because I was meeting a friend of mine.
So I got to Rio a couple days early.
And I thought, God, there's Ipanema Beach,
the girl from Ipanema you know?
So I went over to Ipanema Beach and the very first person I ran
into on the beach was Janis.
So I didn't know it was Janis.
I just saw this girl with a bikini on.
She looked up.
I remember her lifting her sunglasses up and saying,
hi, you cute thing.
And I went, wow, I, a cute thing.
I had been in the jungle a long time.
When we went back to the hotel the first night,
she wasn't sleeping well.
She was rolling around.
She was unhappy.
She was having cold sweats.
And she told me that she was trying to kick the habit.
So I held her for two and a half days while she came down.
She was really a different person.
She was much more calm.
She was much more beautiful.
You know, and she wasn't used to being straight,
so she knew she was more beautiful.
And then after that, everything was clear.
She couldn't have gotten higher when we traveled around Brazil.
She was so free and so different than any other girl
I'd ever met.
I never had a woman inspire me before, so it stopped
me in my track, so to speak.
I was heading for North Africa.
And when I met her, I realized, shit, I'm not going anywhere.
When we came back to California, we more spent time
together just the two of us.
I mean, we did come to the park here,
and we did go to.
But basically, we just pretty much fun together.
We were inseparable, really, for those months.
As my relationship with Janis grew,
I realized that when she sang me all these songs,
they were always the blues.
And that's what she felt, basically, were the blues.
She could feel everybody's pain.
That's one of the reasons she did
heroin was so she didn't have to be involved
with everybody else's life.
Most people can be oblivious to what's going on around them,
but Janis couldn't.
She couldn't block it out.
But she was addicted to it, you know, and I got her to stop.
And then when I would go away, she'd get weak,
I guess is one way to say it, and start it again.
I told her I can't do that part.
I can't put up with that because it's killing you.
And it broke my heart to see.
That's really what it is.
It broke my heart more than anything.
When I said I was leaving, she said,
why don't you stay and become my manager?
And it was a tempting offer, but the heroin I couldn't even
begin to put up with.
Baby, yeah, baby, well, baby,
oh, honey, welcome back home.
I had a man.
He said, honey, honey, you know that I love you.
See, but I gotta go find myself.
You know, I gotta go and find my life.
I gotta go find myself over in Africa or over in, uh, New York
City or over in, uh, , some place
those cats are always wandering off to.
I never figured out exactly where it was.
They're always going somewhere, man.
And I said, baby, don't you realize?
You're looking for your life over there, honey.
Well, you know where your life is?
You're life's waiting like a God-damned fool
right here for you, man.
And one morning, you're gonna wake up in, uh, Casablanca,
one of those fancy places.
Honey, you're gonna be freezing to death, man.
You're gonna wake up and you'll say, good, good lord,
good, good, good lord.
I just went off and left that woman
in that great big huge double bed with that great big fur rug
on top of it and those satin sheets, man.
What am I doing in Casablanca, man?
I mean, really, man.
One of these days, that cat's going to wake
up and say that to himself.
And when he comes back home, there, just like the Capricorn
that I am, I'll be standing there waiting.
I said, baby, I knew one day, hun,
I knew, knew, knew one day.
'Cause you've finally come on home to me.
Honey, when you walk in my front door,
I'm gonna be able to tell by the look in your eyes.
I'll say, good God, that man finally done got it.
Lord, that man finally done realized.
So you can put your head on my shoulder,
baby, yeah, 'cause I know you've got some more tears to shed.
So come on.
Come on.
Come on and cry, cry, baby.
Cry, baby.
Cry.
Oh, baby, cry, baby-
Cry, baby.
Hey, I want to ask about that tune that you just sang.
It's, um, it's about men.
It's about men?
Did you ever see those mule carts'?
Yeah.
They, uh, there's a dumb mule up there,
right, and a long stick with a string and a carrot
hanging out of it.
And they hang this thing out in front of the mule's nose,
and he runs after it all day long.
And who is the man in this parable, the mule or the person
holding the carrot?
The woman is the mule, chasing something
that somebody's always teasing.
Constantly chasing a man who always eludes here.
Well, they just always hold up something more
than they're prepared to give.
We had dinner one night, and I remember suddenly saying,
not having planned to, how-— can you assure me
that you're not doing heroin?
And her answer was interesting.
It was, who would care?
It really stopped me.
Do you ever get back to Port Arthur, Texas?
No, but I'm back in August, man.
And guess what I'm doing?
I don't know, night clubbing?
I'm going to my tenth annual high school reunion.
Oh, I want to... take movies and bring them back here
and show us.
Hey, would you like to go with me?
Well, I don't have that many friends
in your high school class.
- I don't, either. - Or mine, for that matter.
I don't either. Believe me.
You don't, either?
How do you know they won't move the reunion'?
That's true.
I wasn't going to tell them.
What do you remember most about Port Arthur?
Uh, I don't really... Uh, no comment.
Because it was really only the acceptance of millions
that could make up for that way that she had grown up.
If everyone loved her, then it was OK.
But if anyone didn't, they could destroy her in a minute.
Hi, how were you different from your schoolmates
when you were in DJ?
I don't know.
Why don't you ask them?
I wonder.
I was they who made you different?
No, I was...
In other words, you were different in comparison
to them.
Why Were you?
I felt apart from them.
Did you go to football games?
I don't remember.
Uh, I don't remember.
I think not.
I didn't go to the high school prom.
Aw, you were asked, weren't you?
No, I wasn't.
They didn't think... I don't think they wanted to take me.
And I've been... I've been suffering ever since.
I remember when I was young, some doctor told my mother
that if I didn't, quote, "straighten up," quote,
I was going to end up either in jail or an insane asylum
by the time I was 21.
So when I turned 25 and my second record came out,
I think my mother sent me a congratulatory telegram
or something, you know, that I had escaped the pen.
How do you get along with your parents?
Pretty good.
They had somewhere to go.
Right, they went to a wedding.
We go along pretty good, yeah.
Did they ever seem surprised by your success?
I think, yeah, yeah.
Our parents saw it was challenging to their way
of life, to their positions in the community,
and it created difficulties between them and both of them
silently with each other, feeling that they
had somehow caused a calamity.
I didn't see her for six months.
She had promised me that she was going to quit heroin,
and she did.
And it changed her.
Dear family, things
are going so well for me.
I have a new, smaller band, and it's really going fantastic.
I met a really fine man in Rio, but I had to get back to work.
So he's off finding the rest of the world,
but he really did love me and was so good to me.
He wants to come back and marry me.
I thought I'd die without someone besides fans asking me,
but he meant it.
And who knows?
I may get tired of the music biz,
but I'm really getting it on now.
She called me up and said, I've got a great new band.
Do you want to come back on the road?
With Janis, it was magic.
She had a gift from God when she played.
There was a connection there that I don't even
know what it was between us.
Somehow, we didn't really do a lot...
We never did a lot of talking.
She was bubbly person.
She wanted everything to be so perfect for everyone,
not just her, everyone.
You say that it's over, baby.
You say that it's over, dear.
But still you hang around.
She said, man, with Full Tilt, I
can change something in the middle of a song,
and they're right there.
She was a fantastic front person.
She would say, when I do the windmill, keep her going.
Or we'd be playing a song, and she would decide she would
like to talk to the audience.
And she would bring the band down,
and then she would start talking.
I can't hear ya.
She was working the crowd.
It wasn't just that she was clean.
She had learned just about every lesson
to be learned from the really tough times of the year before.
She was more comfortable about her whole life.
Having David leave her was actually really good for her.
She spoke of him afterwards as her lost love,
and she still hoped that he would
come back after she got clean.
Hey, make up your mind, honey.
You're playing with me.
David, honey, daddy, listen.
I kicked, man, four months ago.
I'm on the road rocking with a great group, so get Janis back.
She's delightfully crazy, but I love her, man.
I've got that picture of us in Salvador,
and every time I look at it, I look
like a woman, not a pop star.
But I'm afraid it's too late.
I know how to be a pop star, but I don't know how to bake bread.
But, honey, when I look at you, this whole flood comes over me.
I love you, and I did write, mother fucker.
Don't you yell at me.
It seems to bother a lot of women's lib people
that you are kind of so up front sexually.
I haven't been attacked by anyone yet.
You know, how can they attack me?
I'm representing everything they said they want, you know?
It's sort of like you are what you settle for.
Do you know what I mean?
You are only as much as you settle for.
And, you know, if they settle for being somebody's
dishwasher, that's their own fucking problem.
If you don't settle for that, and you
keep fighting, you know, you end up anything you want to be.
I'm just doing what I want to and what feels right
and not settling for bullshit, and it works.
How can they be mad at that?
Yeah, one girl I know said, well, how come she doesn't have
any women in any of her groups?
You show me a good drummer, and I'll hire one.
You know, show me a good chick.
Besides, I don't want any chicks on the road with me.
You don't?
I've got enough competition, man.
No, I like to be around men.
God bless ya, folks.
God bless ya.
It was fun getting back together with her
on the Festival Express because we were
all stuck in a little area.
Her yes men couldn't contain her there.
They couldn't control her there because she
wanted to get out and be with her kindred spirits,
the musicians.
Are we in Calgary yet?
We're stopped.
Hey, we're in Alberta.
Alberta?
Alberta.
Alberta, don't let your hair hang down.
I've loved you ever sine the day I saw you.
He ain't much of a boxer.
I got to tell you.
Jerry didn't love Janis because she was a Sports
Illustrated swimsuit model.
He loved her for what she did.
And the sparks that she threw off,
he had a right proper appreciation for what Janis was
and what she had to offer.
From the Kentucky coal
mines to the California sun, Bobby
shared the secrets of my soul.
Her producer gave me a demo of her singing "Bobby McGee."
It was so exhilarating for me to hear her make that her song.
If you're a songwriter and somebody
does that with what you've got, it's the greatest
feeling in the world.
But I'd trade all of my tomorrows
for one single yesterday to be holding
Bobby's body next to mine.
And freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose,
nothing, that's all my Bobby left me.
I hear you're making a new record.
Yeah, and it's really going good.
I like my producer.
He's really working out very well with me.
Who's producing it?
Paul Rothchild.
You haven't worked with him before, huh?
No, no, I haven't.
The first time I talked to Janis about Paul,
she said, boy, that guy.
And I said, what?
And she started talking about him.
This is serious Janis, and I had never heard her say this kind
of stuff about anybody.
She was talking about how much she was learning from him.
The mood was very up.
I mean, as good as sessions get, everybody in love
with everybody else and working very hard, and Janis,
she was always ready to do the most.
She was a much better singer than the world, or even she,
knew.
Oh, we knew.
We knew there was something here.
And that was all, really, that whole thing was
spontaneous combustion because she had
an incredible sense of time.
You listen to that stuff, and like I tell you,
it's like you're breathing.
And the slowing down, and it's like being in heaven.
What he was asking her to do was to understand
the different voices she had at her command.
And the ramifications for this, for Janis,
were really profound because she had always said...
And she absolutely meant it... oh, man.
When I blow out my voice, I'm going to buy a bar
and retire in Marin County.
What she was learning from Paul was enabling her to see farther
into the future, and that's where
Paul was looking all along.
He said, 30 years from now, I want
you to be making your best album,
and I want you to be making it with me.
She called me on the phone and she said,
I gotta play on the phone for you
a song of Kris Kristofferson's that I've just
recorded... to hear that voice, to hear her pride,
to hear her excitement.
I didn't hear it till she was gone,
and it was very emotional for me.
Uh, I could just hear her saying,
wait till that son of a bitch hears this.
You know?
You know, everything about it was
positive for Janis, except that she
always hated the down hours.
The Janis who says, how come the guys in the band
go home with these girls and I go home alone, she was saying,
you can't imagine how hard it is to be me.
She just didn't know who to relax with.
She just didn't know, anymore.
A lot of pressure, you've got to do this, Janis.
You've got to do that.
That's what made it hard for her, I think.
She loved everybody.
That was the probably.
She was like a little girl lost, and then she would be
as strong as a mountain lion.
As far as anyone could see, she had kicked heroin.
She had replaced it with alcohol,
but it didn't look like that was going to kill her.
I think she just thought, one last little, uh, hurrah.
I can understand her wanting to.
You know, oh, no one's ever gonna know.
I'll hang in my room, do a hit, and then go to bed.
Paul Rothchild called me, and he said, Janis isn't here.
Can you see if you can find her?
And I pull out of the driveway, and I just look up there.
And I know which window is hers, and there's
a light in the window.
And when I opened the door, I had this really
simple and direct feeling.
Nobody's here.
I came around the corner and saw Janis lying by the bed.
But that feeling of nobody is here, it was right.
I was standing at the stove, boiling an egg or something.
The radio said, Janis Joplin, and I
knew before they got the last consonant in her name
out that she was dead.
And I wrote a telegram to Janis that says, um, really miss you.
Things aren't the same alone.
I could meet you in Kathmandu anytime,
but late October is the best season.
Love you, Mama, more than you know.
I just fell apart.
I just completely fell apart.
She was in touch with her own emotions
and who she was in some way that nobody else that I knew
was that in touch with.
And to be that way, to try to get that,
that's" that's the price you pay for doing
that kind of art on that level.
Dear family, I'm awfully
sorry to be such a disappointment to,
but I really do think there's an awfully good chance
I won't blow it this time.
There is really nothing more I can say right now.
Guess I'll write more when I have more news.
Until then, address all criticism to the above address.
And please believe that you can't possibly want for me
to be a winner more than I do.
Love, Janis.
Sit there.
Go on.
Go on and count your fingers.
I know what else, what else, what have you got to do?
And I know how you feel, and I know you
ain't got no reason to go on.
I know you feel that you must be through.
Go on and sit right back down.
I want you to count.
Count your fingers, my unhappy, my unlucky,
but my little, my girl blue.
I know you're unhappy.
Oh, hun, I know, babe, I know just how you feel.
I thought I might share with you
some comments made from some of the people who loved her.
Dearest family, although I never ever met Janis,
she was my best friend in this whole world.
Janis was a beautiful person because she always
put everything she had into her music.
She was and always will be the mother of the blues.
Words fail me now.
Nevertheless, I am very, very sorry.
Women were way ballsier then than they are now,
and Janis was fearless with her pain and with her truth.
And that was one of the most inspiring things for me,
watching her, going, OK.
I don't need to be anything other than who I am.
To perform that way with those lyrics and those songs,
and to feel there's no lie in it,
it is like... you might as well be slashing yourself on stage
and opening your skin.
She, like, took a flag and made a place in rock and roll
for women.
She was the first to really feel that crazy light of what
rock and roll was at the time.
I know if you knew Janis Joplin well, or if you...
She sent me a birthday tape on my birthday.
Last birthday, Yoko asked all different people
to make a tape for me.
And she was one of them, and we got it.
After she died, it arrived in the post.
And she was singing happy birthday to me in the studio.
What do you think could be done about drug overdosing,
in or out of the profession of music?
Well, I think the basic thing nobody asked
is why do people take drugs of any sort,
from alcohol to aspros to hard drugs.
I mean, is there something wrong with society that's making us
so pressurized that we cannot live in it without
guarding ourselves against it?
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