Janis
Her Life and Music
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- ¥1,000
発行者による作品情報
It’s been said Janis Joplin was second only to Bob Dylan as the ‘creator-recorder-embodiment of her generation’s mythology’. But how did a middle-class girl from Texas become a ’60s countercultural icon?
Janis’ parents doted on her and promoted her early talent for art. But the arrival of a brother shattered the bond she had with her intellectual maverick of a father, an oil engineer. And her own maverick instincts alienated her from her socially conformist mother. That break with her parents, along with the rejection of her high school peers, who disapproved of her beatnik look and racially progressive views, and wrongly assumed she was sexually promiscuous, cemented her sense of herself as an outcast. She found her tribe with a group of offbeat young men a year ahead of her, who loved her intellectual curiosity, her passion for conversation, and her adventurous search for the blues. Although she never stopped craving the approval of her parents and hometown, she left Port Arthur at seventeen determined to prove she could be loved.
She tried college twice, and dropped out both times. She ran off to California, but came back when her heavy drug use scared her into it. She almost signed up for a life as a domesticated, hang-the-curtains wife. But instead, during a second stint on the West Coast, she launched a career that would see her crowned the queen of rock and roll.
What no one besides Holly George-Warren has captured in such intimate detail is the way Janis Joplin teetered between the powerful woman you hear in her songs and the little girl who just wanted to go home and feel emotionally safe there. The pain of that dichotomy fuelled her music – and ultimately killed her.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this excellent biography, George-Warren (A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton) paints a complex portrait of singer Janis Joplin (1943 1970). Drawing on archival materials as well as interviews with Joplin's friends, family, and bandmates, George-Warren begins with Joplin's life, stretching back to her childhood in Port Arthur, Tex., where she would "publicly flaunt her individuality." She was an outsider in high school and, in 1961, moved to Austin, where she attended the University of Texas and sang black music in a segregated folk music bar. Two years later she moved to San Francisco and immersed herself into the psychedelic rock scene, where she developed an addiction to heroin on which she would overdose in 1970. George-Warren explores Joplin's evolution as a singer, including her early incorporation of Otis Redding's vocal techniques into her own performances, as well as her moments of impulsive brilliance, such as her first time singing "Bobby McGee" live in Nashville in 1969, having just learned it which she would record only a few days before her death. Indeed, as the author points out, a lonely Joplin spent the last year of her life "trying to find a way to reconcile her ambitions as a singer with her desire for some kind of loving attachment." George-Warren beautifully tells a moving story of a woman whose life and music inspired a generation.
