Riffs and Beats finds Janis Joplin at a bar that has no closing time, a feather in her hair and the whole room already leaning in.
Riffs and Beats
Janis, the bar up here has no last call. What are you drinking, and where are we?
Janis Joplin
Something that does not need a label, honey, and we are in the part of the night that does not close. Port Arthur is a long way down. So is the Chelsea, and that room in Los Angeles I will not turn into a postcard. I came up here with my throat intact, which is the only luggage I cared about. Pull up a stool. I talk better when somebody is actually listening, not just watching the mess.
Riffs and Beats
You left Port Arthur, Texas, as fast as a voice can. What were you running toward?
Janis Joplin
Toward a room that would let me be loud without calling it ugly. Port Arthur had its own weather, and I did not fit the dress code. I sang in cafes, I hitchhiked, I found San Francisco the way you find a fever. I was not running from work. I was running toward work that looked like me. The jokes about the hometown came later, because pain likes a punchline. The leaving was serious. A girl with that much voice cannot stay where the voice is an embarrassment.
Riffs and Beats
Big Brother and the Holding Company, Piece of My Heart. When did you know the band was big enough?
Janis Joplin
When the verse stopped being mine and started being everybody’s, which is a frightening kind of big. Piece of My Heart was Erma Franklin’s song before it was ours, and I knew better than to pretend I invented the ache. What I did was drag it into a ballroom and refuse to let it stay polite. Sam Andrew’s guitar answered me like a second throat. We were messy. Messy is not the same as careless. I counted those hits. I just counted them while screaming.
Riffs and Beats
Monterey, June 1967. The film still looks like a door opening. What did that weekend change?
Janis Joplin
It changed the size of the room, not the size of the want. People who had never heard of me saw Ball and Chain and decided I was a event. Fine. I had been an event in smaller bars for years, sweating through a dress, begging a band to keep up. Monterey put a camera on it. Cameras are hungry. I gave them the truth, which was a woman singing like the song might be taken away mid-note. After that, the door did not close. I am still not sure that was only a gift.
Riffs and Beats
Cheap Thrills in 1968 put a cartoon on the cover and a live wound inside. Did the cartoon tell the truth?
Janis Joplin
R. Crumb drew us like a circus, and a circus is honest about wanting your money and your gasp. The music was not a cartoon. Summertime, the Gershwin aria, I sang it like I had grown up inside it, because in a way every singer of my sort has. Ball and Chain is the wound. The record went to the top because people recognized the feeling, not the drawing. I have no quarrel with the art. I have a quarrel with anyone who thinks the drawing was the talent.
Riffs and Beats
You left Big Brother for the Kozmic Blues Band. What were you trying to prove?
Janis Joplin
That I was a singer, not a mascot. I wanted horns, arrangements, a band that could frame a phrase instead of racing it. I Got Dem Ol’ Kozmic Blues Again Mama! in 1969 is me asking for that respect in public. Some nights the horns and I found each other. Some nights I was still the girl screaming over a group that did not know my dynamics. The trying was the point. I did not want to be forgiven for being raw. I wanted to be heard as precise.
Riffs and Beats
Pearl came out after you were gone. Me and Bobby McGee sits on it like a last letter. What should we hear in it?
Janis Joplin
Kris Kristofferson wrote it, and I sang it in 1970 like I had hitchhiked every mile myself, because I had hitchhiked enough miles to know the feeling. Hear the smile. People forget the smile. It is a road song, not a gravestone. Full Tilt Boogie, the band on Pearl, finally gave me the pocket I had been asking for. The album came out in 1971, after. Do not let the after eat the groove. Bobby McGee is me alive, thumb out, still choosing the next town.
Riffs and Beats
Mercedes Benz is barely a minute, a prayer to a car. Why does it last?
Janis Joplin
Because it is funny, and funny lasts longer than tragic if you let it. I sang it a cappella, a wish list for a car, a colour TV, a night on the town, and the joke is that the wish is so American it hurts. I recorded it almost as an afterthought and it became the thing people quote when they want me human. Good. I was human. The prayer is not to the car. It is to the right to want ordinary joy without apologizing for the volume.
Riffs and Beats
If they write one sentence about the voice, what should the sentence refuse to say?
Janis Joplin
Refuse to say I was only the wreckage. The voice was work. It was Bessie Smith and Otis and every bar I could get a Saturday in, practiced until the break in the note was a choice. Say I was a singer who wanted to be great, not a story that wanted to be sad. The sadness was real. It was not the whole set list. If you need one sentence, make it this: she sang like she meant to stay. I did. I do.
She laughs, short and bright, and the glass stays where she left it. For a moment she hums the road song, not the sad part, the part with the thumb out and the next town still a choice. The feather shifts when she turns her head. Nobody asks for an encore and she gives one anyway, four bars, then stops on purpose, which is its own kind of craft. The night does not call time. The voice, somewhere under the talk, is still working, still counting the hits, still refusing to be only the wreckage.
