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Hey people. I need a hardcore Joplin fan to help out with writing a really detailed biography for our site. I've started one and it ends when Janis arrives in San Francisco with Chet. So, if you consider yourself an expert in all things Janis and would like to help out, email anna@janisjoplin.net and we'll talk.
Thanx, really tied one on last night-forgot i was even here...lol I'm gonna order one too. It's good to be back-just got my pc de-virused...my friend said he'd see me when i did it again...lol have a beautiful day folks!
Well first of all we have to take all facts chronologically, seperate fact from fiction, but keep the fiction...maybe part of it keep if only part of its true...also prove myths WRONG and TRUE! Nearly impossible, but if i had a million dollars, that's what I'd do. AND i'd take MOMS wjmee1002! Intercontinental Folks, honestly, my moms probably a fan subconsciously since shes had to hear it so much. Janis is SO fun when YOU get it and nobody else does...Sometimes looks like she LIKES the song, and why not ...SHE had me in 68 at 35! She was COOL! I know about her 30's shenanigans...I was there. Janis would be up there in age now..wonder HOW SHE'D BE??? NUFF 4 2nite-gettin BUZZ-Have fun JANIS fans!!!!!!!! LATER
PS Your AWESOME for letting folks know where to get the new cd...mine was adollar more! I know ...I should shut up now...just tryin to entertain as always...peace out
Hey Anna, I was going through your SOUNDS section and noticed that Kosmic Blues, and To Love Somebody from Woodstock have been released officially. I believe on the Essential Janis compilation. Just thought I would let ya know! :)
Below is the bio I started. It basically pulls directly from several books. I need someone to finish it in a detailed way. This spans 3 posts!!!
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Janis Lyn Joplin, born in St. Mary's Hospital on January 19, 1943, was the first child of Dorothy and Seth Joplin. She was born in Port Arthur Texas at 9:45 a.m., weighing five pounds and eight ounces. Her development was rapid, sitting up at six months and standing up at eleven. She handled a fork and spoon with agility by the time she'd reached a year and preferred milk from a cup as early as eleven months.
Idyllic, was the word that Janis used to describe her early childhood. She started reading before entering school and began to draw almost as soon as she could hold a pencil. To encourage her child, Dorothy arranged for Janis to have private art lessons. Not much attention was paid to her singing, although she was a member of the church choir and the glee club in junior high. At seven, she belonged to junior Girl Scouts called Bluebirds. The exceptional work she did at school made it possible for her to be accelerated in the third grade. Janis adjusted well throughout the early grades.
At about fourteen, Janis started to put on weight and her face began breaking out. Her acne was so bad that her mother took her to a local dermatologist which did not seem to help much. This transformation came in 1957, when she was leaving Woodrow Wilson Junior High. At her next school, Thomas Jefferson High, she tried out for the Red Huzzars, the drum and bugle corps. When Janis didn't make the team, she was devastated. In an effort to stand out, Janis began wearing shirts cut daringly above the knee or tights she would wear with a man's white shirt and a black belt. She remade herself into a beatnik girl, the only one in all Port Arthur. This behavior not only aggravated the townspeople, but also Janis's parents. "She just changed totally, overnight," claimed Dorothy. "A complete turnabout from her former self."
At TJ High, Janis was relentlessly harassed by her classmates because of her appearance, approval of integration, and the growing reputation as the school slut. Before her senior year she became friends with five boys named: Jim Langdon, Dave Moriaty, Adrian Haston, Randy Tenant, and Grant Lyons. All of them had the tendency to fight the conformity of the town. The boys were a buffer against the rest of the students. Through Grant Lyons, Janis heard some Leadbelly records. In her sophomore year, she began singing along with records. She perfected an Odetta imitation and did exactly the same with Jean Ritchie. During that time, Janis also occupied herself with painting, her studies, and spending time with her two female friends, Arlene Elster and Karleen Bennett. By Janis' senior year, the five boys and Arlene had graduated; Karleen got a boyfriend which she spent most of her time with. Janis was left alone and rumors flew of her reading pornography and sleeping with guys left and right. Students spat on her and threw pennies at her in the hallways. The verbal harassment was relentless because the guys wanted her to lose control and fight back, which Janis often did. During her last year at TJ, she stopped attending school regularly and worked as a waitress and later selling tickets at a local theater. She also sold some paintings to Pasea's coffeeshop, where Port Arthur's "beatniks" hung out.
In May of 1960, Janis graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School. For the next year, she went to classes at Lamar, in Beaumont and took courses at Port Arthur College where she learned how to work office machines. Sometime during that period she went to Houston where she hung out at The Purple Onion Coffeeshop and got herself sick by drinking too much and not eating. She come home to Port Arthur and was treated at a hospital for a kidney infection. After Janis left the hospital, she saw a psychiatrist for a short period of time in Port Arthur and also, a psychologist in Beaumont. She also made new friends, including Tommy Stopher, whose paintings convinced Janis to stop her own pursuit of art. She decided her gift was short of genius and if she couldn't be the best in the world, she wouldn't do it.
In the summer of 1961, the Joplins paid Janis' way to Los Angeles. She was supposed to stay with her mother's sister, which she did for a few weeks. Janis soon got a job as a keypunch operator with the Los Angeles Telephone Company. Upon getting her first paycheck, she moved into a little apartment within commuting distance of her job. Later she moved to Venice, which was the beatnik area. When she returned from California, she blew everyone away with her new beatnik look and attitude. "I met people just like myself," she would say. In any case, she stayed in Port Arthur until the summer of 1962. By that time she started listening to Bessie Smith and that year she began singing in public. The first time was New Year's Eve at a Beaumont club, shortly after returning from Venice. The audiences reaction wasn't very enthusiastic but Janis didn't let that discourage her. She performed at the Half-Way House in Beaumont and at The Purple Onion in Houston. Also in 1962, she made her first recording, a commercial for a bank in Nacogdoches, Texas. Jim Langdon and Tary Owens set it to the music of Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land," and Jim wrote the jingle:
This bank is your bank This bank is my bank From Nacogdoches to the Gulf Coast waters. Sixty years of savings Sixty years of earnings This bank was made for you and me.
Janis returned to Lamar in the spring of 1962 and took a job as a waitress at a bowling ally in nearby Port Neches. She lost weight and started wearing makeup. Her job ended at midnight and she would usually drive back to Port Arthur and pick up Jack Smith. They'd go to the beach and split a six pack of beer. When they got tired of the beach they started going across the river to Louisiana bars. Later that year they drove to Austin and arrived at a rundown set of tenement apartment houses called The Ghetto. Janis loved the scene and decided to stay. The night after she arrived, Janis sang for the crowd, backed by Powell St. John on harmonica and Lanny Wiggins on bass. They formed a musical group, The Waller Creek Boys. The three performed at the Union Building on Sunday afternoons and at a converted gas station called Threadgill's on Wednesday nights. Janis spent most of her time in the Ghetto but she couldn't live there because at the University of Texas, freshmen and sophomores had to live on campus. She was ridiculed by the student body, just like she had been in Port Arthur. They were angered by her torn-off jeans, bare feet, long hair, and autoharp. Although she was encouraged to sing and express herself in the Ghetto, Janis remained unhappy and lonely. Sometime during the winter, a fraternity nominated her the Ugliest Man on Campus. On a Wednesday night in January of 1963, she sang one more time at Threadgill's and after midnight left with Chet Helms for San Francisco.
After fifty hours of hitchhiking, they arrived in San Francisco and went straight to North Beach. Janis sang that very night at Coffee and Confusion on Upper Grant Avenue and would later sing at The Coffee Gallery. She sang alone, using her autoharp or backed by an accompanist, who was sometimes Jorma Kaukonen, later of Jefferson Airplane. Holding a few jobs off and on, Janis was hardly working consistently and shoplifted to survive. During this period she lived with Jae Whitaker and became friends with Linda Gottfried. At the 1963 Monterey Folk Festival, Janis wasn't a featured performer but created quite a stir nevertheless. Throughout her San Francisco stay, she drank heavily and used speed. Her attitude got her banned from the Coffee Gallery and later severely beaten up by bikers.
In the Summer of 1964 Janis made her way to New York and slid deeper into drugs and alcohol. She rarely performed and remained unemployed, supporting herself by shooting pool. After four months in New York, she headed back to San Francisco. Upon her return, Janis shared a basement apartment with Linda Gottfried on Baker Street. By the end of 1964, she was not only addicted to speed but was also dealing it. Around that time she met Sunshine who would become one of her close friends.
Sometime in May of 1965, Janis tried to get herself committed to San Francisco General Hospital. The staff turned her away, suspecting she was trying to scam off the state. That year she was visited several times by Bob Clark and talked about shooting meth. "Bob, you learn a lot from it, but you can't learn a thing from it you won't learn from time and it's not worth it because it hurts your body too much....Don't let anybody ever get near you with a needle!" That year during a meth drought, Janis started using heroin. She also made plans to marry Michael Raymond, a seductive con man. In 1965, Janis's friends were so concerned about her speed addiction that they raised enough money to buy her a bus ticket home. She didn't return to Port Arthur right away, instead she followed Michael to Seattle where he was hospitalized. After an unsuccessful attempt at breaking him out, Janis, all eighty-eight pounds of her, returned home.
Once Janis made it to back to Texas, she made an attempt at "going straight" and becoming the daughter her mother always wanted. When Michael arrived at the Joplin estate, he seemed like the perfect suitor. He even asked Seth for his daughter's hand in marriage. What he failed to mention was that he already was married and had gotten several women pregnant while he was with Janis. She was aware of these transgressions, but insisted on going forward with the wedding plans and acting like her engagement was the most wonderful and conventional event. As her mother sewed a wedding dress, Janis began seeing Bernard Giarratano, a psychiatric social worker at a family services agency funded by the United Way. She talked of wanting to be accepted and fit in but soon discussed ways of remaining true to herself without provoking negative attitudes. She never quite reached acceptance at Lamar, but in 1965 she earned Bs as she persuaded a major in sociology. Despite her best efforts to be like everyone else she didn't fit in and her relationship with Michael came to an end. This seemed to liberate her and she began to see that she didn't have to live up to her parents' expectations. By the New Year, Janis began following her heart and singing.
Janis went up to Austin in 1966 where she was planning to join a rock group called the Thirteen Floor Elevators. At about that time Travis Rivers came to town. He was sent by Chet Helms to try to lure Janis back to the Coast one more and final time. She was needed, Chet said, to forge the last dazzling link in a circle of musicians called Big Brother and the Holding Company. Travis and Janis talked about the risks of going back to San Francisco. There were the drugs and the real question if she could sing rock 'n' roll. But the prospect of becoming a schoolteacher after graduation didn't sit too well with Janis. Travis says that he took her to an Austin bar where they shared a beer and listened to a rock band. After hearing several songs, Janis slapped him across the chest and said,"That's what I wanna do." Travis drove Janis to see her parents and to discuss the situation. He waited outside and when she came out he asked, "So what did they say?" and she said, "They agreed it would be okay." In reality she didn't even talk to her parents, it was a complete surprise to them. She knew that if things didn't work out with Big Brother she had Chet's promise that he would buy her a bus ticket home. Janis left Austin on May 30 with Travis and a carload of people. They arrived in San Francisco June 4, 1966.
Wonderful, now, you can add/ modify it IF you want to in the future...THERE'S your stone base! You make me feel stupid, your so young, and seem so much more connected than I...Outstanding, and your site IS REALLY the best one . Bye all ...til next time...
anna im always logging in at work..ive got to take minute...to add to the story..its very good so far...but ive read everthing on janis there is multiable times...janis was somewhat of star in texas before she left for san fran.this ascpect of her life seems to very vague..i need to investigate some and add more info...
Honestly about the first post here, I'm convinced that we All can contribute, but in order to like go forward with your beginning you have to like all be in chat or IM togther to put it all straight. Ideas are great also, but community is where Janis lives!
Hello Anna I´m a colector of janis from sweden for many years now, i have my colection on my homepage, Check it out and se if there is any info that you can use for you bio on janis. adress :http://hem.bredband.net/tomaangh/ just click janis joplin it is in both english and swedish.
Hi, my boyfriend is having a 'dead at 27' party this weekend, and I thought I would go as Janis Joplin. Do you have any hints/tips of what to wear to pull this off effectively?