Look back at any of American music’s significant counterculture moments in the 60s, and Janis Joplin was invariably there. The singer was pivotal to Haight-Ashbury’s Summer of Love movement in San Francisco, and made her mark on the bohemian New York Chelsea Hotel scene. Joplin stole the show with a star-making breakthrough performance at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, the first rock event of its kind; she performed at Woodstock in 1969, the ultimate expression of the hippie dream.
The girl from small-town Port Arthur, Texas, who’d run off to find her beatnik tribe armed with sheer force and a lifechanging talent, found that wherever she went the world gravitated towards her. “Janis was the first woman to really become a rock star in America.” says Holly George-Warren, author of Janis: Her Life and Music , and to watch footage of her performances is to see the passionate authenticity her music was built on: intense, emotive, uninhibited, emotionally true.
“She just let it all out there,” George-Warren says. “She was not faking it. And that voice of hers was just so powerful.
It cut through everything else and hit people right in the chest.” Joplin made such an imprint in the course of just four years in the public eye that fascination with her life remains. It is now nearly 54 years since her untimely death at the age of 27, from a heroin overdose in a Los Angeles hotel room on 4 October 1970, and still the lure persists to understand Joplin, a deep, mul.