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One
Good Man
(1969)
Honey,
I love to go to parties,
And I like to have a good time,
But if it gets too pale after a while
Honey and I start looking to find
One good man.
One good man,
Oh ain’t much, honey ain’t much,
It’s only everything...
An’ I don’t want much outa life,
I never wanted a mansion in the south.
I just-a want to find someone sincere
Who’d treat me like he talks,
One good man.
LionHeart
June 2010
Janis
Joplin
1943-1970
Janis' Website
Janis Lyn Joplin (January 19, 1943 – October 4, 1970)
was an American blues-influenced rock singer and occasional songwriter
with a distinctive voice.
Joplin released four albums as the frontwoman for several bands from
1967 to a posthumous release in 1971.
Janis was born at St. Mary's Hospital in Port Arthur, Texas.
She grew up listening to blues musicians such as Bessie Smith, Odetta,
and Big Mama Thornton and singing in the local choir.
Janis graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School in Port Arthur in
1960
and went to college at the University of Texas in Austin, though she
never completed a degree.
While at Thomas Jefferson High School, she was mostly shunned, but
found a group of boys who allowed her to tag along.
One of those boys, a football player named Grant Lyons, played her
the blues for the first time, an old Leadbelly record.
Primarily a painter, it was in high school that she first began singing
blues and folk music with friends.
Cultivating a rebellious manner that could be viewed as "liberated"
— the women's liberation movement was still in its infancy at
this time —
Janis styled herself in part after her female blues heroines, and
in part after the beat poets.
She left Texas for San Francisco in 1963, lived in North Beach and
in Haight-Ashbury.
For a while she worked occasionally as a folk singer.
Around this time her drug use began to increase,
and she acquired a reputation as a "speed freak" and occasional
heroin user.
She also used other intoxicants. She was a heavy drinker throughout
her career,
and her trademark beverage was Southern Comfort.
Like many other female singers
of the era,
Janis' feisty public image was at odds with her real personality.
The book 'Love', Janis, written by her sister,
has done much to further the reassessment of her life and work
and reveals the private Janis to have been a highly intelligent, articulate,
shy and sensitive woman who was devoted to her family.
After a return to Port Arthur to recuperate, she again moved to San
Francisco in 1966,
where her bluesy vocal style saw her join Big Brother and The Holding
Company,
a band that was gaining some renown among the nascent hippie community
in Haight-Ashbury.
The band signed a deal with independent Mainstream Records and recorded
an eponymously titled album in 1967.
However, the lack of success of their early singles led to the album
being withheld until after their subsequent success.
The band's big break came with their performance at the Monterey Pop
Festival,
which included a version of Big Mama Thornton's "Ball and Chain"
and featured a barnstorming vocal by Joplin.
(The D.A. Pennebaker documentary Monterey Pop captured Cass Elliot
in the crowd silently mouthing "Wow, that's really heavy"
during Joplin's performance.)
Their 1968 album Cheap Thrills featured more raw emotional performances
and together with the Monterey performance,
it made Joplin into one of the leading musical stars of the late Sixties.
After splitting from Big Brother, she formed a new backup group,
modelled on the classic soul revue bands, named the Kozmic Blues Band,
which backed her on I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama! (1969:
the year she played at Woodstock).
That group was indifferently received and soon broke up,
and Joplin then formed what is arguably her best backing group, The
Full Tilt Boogie Band.
The result was the posthumously released Pearl (1971).
It became the biggest selling album of her short career and featured
her biggest hit single,
the definitive cover version of Kris Kristofferson's "Me and
Bobby McGee",
as well as the wry social commentary of the a capella "Mercedes-Benz",
written by Joplin and beat poet Michael McClure.
Among
her last public appearances were two broadcasts of The Dick Cavett
Show on June 25 and August 3, 1970.
On the June 25 show she announced that she would attend her ten-year
high school reunion,
although she admitted that when in high school she had been
"laughed out of class, out of school, out of town, out of the
state".
She made it there, but it would be one of the last decisions of her
life and
it reportedly proved to be a rather unhappy experience for her, if
not devastating.
Shortly thereafter, during the Fall 1970 recording sessions for the
Pearl album
with Doors and Phil Ochs producer Paul A. Rothchild,
Janis died of an overdose ofunusually pure heroin on October 4, 1970
at the Landmark Motor Hotel in Hollywood, California, aged only 27.
The
last recordings she completed were Mercedes-Benz and a birthday greeting
for John Lennon on 1 October;
Lennon later told Dick Cavett that her taped greeting arrived at his
New York home after her death.
Janis
and Big Brother
-'Summertime'
Live at Grona Lund -1969
Stockholm, Sweden
Please visit
the
Janis Joplin Tribute
Click
Janis below-(gently-please!)
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For
listen samples and reviews, click on CD cover photo. In new
window,
click on CD photo again and scroll down.
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Big
Brother & The Holding Company (1967)
Cheap Thrills - Big Brother & The Holding Company (1968)
Live at Winterland-Big Brother & the Holding Company (1968)
I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama! - Janis Joplin ( 1969)
Pearl - Janis Joplin and Full Tilt Boogie ( 1971)
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Joplin
In Concert ( 1972)
Janis Joplin's Greatest Hits (1973)
Janis (1975 )
Anthology (1980)
Farewell Song ( 1982)
Cheaper Thrills - Janis Joplin (1984)
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Janis
( 1993)
Box of Pearls--Janis Collection
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"Janis
knew more than I did about "how it was",
but she lacked enough armor for the inevitable hassles.
She was open and spontaneous enough to get her heart trampled
with a regularity that took me thirty years to experience or understand.
On the various occasions when we were together,
she seemed to be holding in something she thought I might not want
to hear,
like older people do when they hear kids they love saying with absolute
youthful confidence,
"Oh, that'll never happen to me."
Sometimes you know you can't tell them how it is, they have to find
out for themselves.
Janis felt like an old soul, a wisecracking grandmother whom everybody
loved to visit.
When I was with her, I often felt like a part of her distant family,
a young upstart relative who was still too full of her own sophistry
to hear wisdom.
Did we compliment each other? Yes, but not often enough."
~ Grace Slick ~
Quotes
by Janis
* Audiences like their blues singers to be miserable.
* Being an intellectual creates a lot of questions and no answers.
You can fill your life up with ideas and still go home lonely.
All you really have that really matters are feelings. That's what
music is to me.
* Don't compromise yourself. You are all you've got.
* I'm one of those regular weird people.
* It's gonna be a long hard drag, but we'll make it.
* It's hard to be free but when it works, it' s worth it!
* On stage I make love to twenty five thousand people; and then I
go home alone.
* Oh lord,
won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz?
My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends.
* Tomorrow never happens. It's all the same fucking day, man.
