Laura joplin series#

To quote Hynde, who saw Janis perform in Richfield, Ohio, “there was just no one else like her – total rebelliousness, abandon, musical excellence and total connection with everyone in the audience. Janis Joplin circa 1962 in her hometown of Austin, Texas. “Instead of being the person who had reached the greatest visible recognition in the country, Janis got a tyre for having travelled the longest distance.” “That’s what I find most insulting,” says Laura, audibly pained 51 years later. At the reunion, Janis was symbolically gifted a tyre, to represent “that she’d come the furthest”. It was only when the president of the class said ‘What about Janis Joplin?’ that everyone stood up and applauded.”Įven then, the recognition was miserly. “However, the guy running things thought in terms of how many people had law degrees. But in my mind, and in Janis’, they should have made her attendance and her success one of the central points to celebrate – ‘Look what someone from our high school has achieved!’ There was a sense they didn’t quite know what to do about her. “Everyone else was in straight, middle-class clothing and teased hair. She accompanied Janis, six years her elder, to the reunion, and wore a dialled-back version of her sister’s fabulous freak-out garb. “It was a formal event and it was an awkward fit,” recalls her 72-year-old sister, Laura, laughing. But before that, there was the detour back to Port Arthur, the small, conservative Texan community in which, as a beatnik-channelling teen rebel, she’d never felt at home. Love, Janis is the new life of Janis Joplin we have been waiting for-a celebration of the sixties' joyous experimentation and creativity, and a loving, compassionate examination of one of that era's greatest talents.Later that summer of 1970, Joplin would begin work on her second solo album, Pearl. In them she conveys as no one else could the wild ride from awkward small-town teenager to rock-and-roll queen.

Laura joplin series#

At the heart of Love, Janis is an astonishing series of letters by Janis herself that have never been previously published. Laura Joplin shows us not only the public Janice who could drink Jim Morrison under the table and bean him with a bottle of booze when he got fresh she shows us the private Janis, struggling to perfect her art, searching for the balance between love and stardom, battling to overcome her alcohol addiction and heroin use in a world where substance abuse was nearly universal. At the height of her fame, Janis's life is a whirlwind of public adoration and hard living.

Janis truly came into her own in the fantastic, psychedelic, acid-soaked world of Haight-Asbury.

We follow Janis as she discovers her amazing talents in the Beat hangouts of Venice and North Beach-singing in coffeehouses, shooting speed to enhance her creativity, challenging the norms of straight society. Through the eyes of her family and closest friends, we see Janis as a young girl, already rebelling against injustice, racism, and hypocrisy in society.

By the time her life and artistry were cut tragically short by a heroin overdose, Joplin had become the stuff of rock-and-roll legend. Janis Joplin blazed across the sixties music scene, electrifying audiences with her staggering voice and the way she seemed to pour her very soul into her music. A revealing and intimate biography about Janis Joplin, the Queen of Classic Rock, written by her younger sister.