Alone with the Blues

Those who knew Janis Joplin only from her records can be forgiven for wondering quite what the fuss was about. It could not be communicated fully on records--the burning lava flow of energy raising audiences to their feet and into the aisles. But for those who saw her perform even once, it was not easy to forget the gyrating girl in a glowworm mini, all surging emotion boiling up through swirls of curses and Southern Comfort in a Dixie cup. Or the single vivid impression recorded in the mind's eye that, without the scalding voice and tremulous ostrich plume headdress, she was really rather small.

She was the White Queen of the Blues. When she threw back her head to sing she became a lioness. From the moment she stomped, wailed, moaned, sweated her way through Love Is Like a Ball and Chain at the Monterey pop festival in June 1967 until her death three years later from an overdose of heroin, Janis Joplin was the high priestess of rock, the only female star to become a sex symbol on the order of Mick Jagger or Jim Morrison.

"If the zany creature that the public saw, all that campy, trivial bluster, was real enough in its way, it was far from the substance of her deeper glow," writes Myra Friedman in Buried Alive (Morrow; $7.95). "The hysteria, the extravagance, and the foolish noise were a barren fuss embraced by barren hearts, and it was a lost child who would kick up such rubbish to gain entrance into rooms so empty." Written with a sympathetic intelligence, at times fiercely lyrical, Buried Alive is an honest book about Joplin the idol and Joplin the victim in the frantic, manic disarray of rock in the '60s. A meticulous researcher, Friedman has taken great pains to document the Joplin chronicle as exhaustively as one might document the biography of a statesman--with the result that the large cast of minor characters may be recognizable only to groupies. Still, this is the best book yet about rock.

Joplin was born in the small oil-refinery town of Port Arthur, Texas, where her father was an engineer for Texaco. A docile, soft-faced child, she was a voluminous reader, and her grades were excellent. No incidents of her early childhood foreshadowed fame --or a life crudely bartered away in exchange for counterfeit thrills from drugs, sex and alcohol.

/ guess I'm just like a turtle, Hiding underneath its horny shell. . .

More than anything else she wanted to be pretty. But in adolescence her complexion raged and she got fat. A lifelong obsession with personal ugli ness began. Unequal to the conventional standards of Southern femininity, Joplin decided to be its antithesis: she became one of the guys--palling around with boys who drank beer, listened to jazz, and tolerated her because she was willing to play court jester.

They call me mean, people call me evil, I've been called much worse things around, But I'm gonna take good care of Janis, yeah, honey, Ain't no one gonna dog me down.

By her senior year in high school in 1960, she was a walking cartoon. Her dress was outlandish, her behavior outrageous. Even the boys were embarrassed by her gamy language and alcoholic escapades at sleazy bars across the river in Louisiana. Classmates took to calling her "Pig."

After a halfhearted attempt at college, she drifted across the country and wound up singing in San Francisco coffeehouses. Although she had been singing in bars and college hangouts since her middle teens, music became the core of her existence after she joined a local rock group called Big Brother and the Holding Company. "I might be the first hippie pin-up girl," she wrote back home ecstatically. Enclosed was a poster of the new Janis, slimmer, draped in swinging beads and bracelets. With her 1967 performance at Monterey she gained instant fame, a contract with New York Rock Promoter Albert Grossman, and shortly after the friendship of Grossman's new publicist, Myra Friedman.

Joplin's career was not built through a publicity machine--Friedman did not even have publicity shots of her after her first triumphant New York appearance. Joplin created her own extravagant legend onstage. Unlike singers whose music swells in a slowly rising tide over 15 or 20 minutes, she opened the floodgates in her first two songs.

"Most performers give just a fraction of themselves," Actress Geraldine Page told her after a concert. "I can't remember the last time I saw one who gave everything they have."

"If I were a musician, it might be a lot harder to get all that feeling out," Joplin told an interviewer. "But I'm really fortunate because my gig is just feeling things." Insecure as she was in her talent, she liked to boast about her spontaneity.

Yet Producer John Simon remembers that Joplin worked 17 hours a day making the Cheap Thrills album.

"She was planning out every shriek and moan as she went," Simon insisted.

"We'd do a take. She'd say, 'I like that.' The next take she'd do it the same. It was all planned, like filling up the spaces in a Double-Crostic." If Simon is right, she was an actress as well as a singer.

I once had a daddy, He said he'd give me everything in sight.

So I said, honey, I want the sunshine, yeah, A n' take the stars out of the night.

Bloody Marys for breakfast, screwdrivers for lunch, more drinks in the afternoon, leave the hotel at 6, makeup at 8, interview, onstage at 10, hamburgers at a diner, second show at 1, drive home at 3, early-morning party, pass out. A rock artist lives like a modern marathon dancer. Janis craved every bit of the action: "Hey, man, what is it?

I'll try it. How do you do it? Do you suck it? No? You swallow it? I'll swallow it." But at other times: "Those kids who touch drugs are crazy when they can have a drink of Southern Comfort."

Onstage she waved her bottle, but by 1967 she had begun to experiment with heroin.

She was suffering increasingly from the familiar affliction of the suddenly famous--a mix of narcissism, self-hatred and wretched insecurity. Everywhere she went she traveled in an impenetrable cage of loneliness.

Time keeps movin' on Friends, they turn away I keep movin' on, but I never found out why I keep pushin' so hard an' babe, I keep try'n To make it right to another lonely day.

She called it the Kozmic Blues --"You have to spell it that way; it's too heavy to be taken seriously," she said. Faced with the prospect of solitary nights in motel rooms, the world's greatest female rock star turned in desperation to lovers of either sex. One lesbian affair, which went on sporadically over the last two years of her life, was with a groupie named Peggy Caserta, who describes it all with fulsome vulgarity and very little insight in Going Down With Janis (Lyle Stuart; $7.95).

Joplin's affairs were usually brief.

For several months in 1967 she lived with "Country Joe" Macdonald and was completely free of drugs. But her well-publicized romances with Joe Namath and Kris Kristofferson lasted respectively one night and a few weeks. (On hearing that Namath was at one of her concerts, she bawled out, "Joe Joe!"

from the stage--just like anyone in her groupie audience.) At her death she was "engaged" to Seth Morgan, a college student half a dozen years her junior, and a member of a socially prominent New York family. She claimed no man could ever give her the rush she felt from a wall of applause. A few weeks before her death she told Kristofferson she was working on a new tune. "I'm gonna call it," she confided, "I Just Made Love to 25,000 People But I'm Goin' Home Alone."

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