Janice Joplin
"The maiden
with raw iron soul"
The Cosmic Giggle must have been in full-tilt hysterics on January 19, 1943 when the oil refinery seaport of Port Arthur, Texas, won the heavenly crapshoot as the birthplace of rock & roll's first female superstar, Janis Joplin. In retrospect, Port Arthur's most famous daughter both defied and defined the Texas town that raised, rejected, reviled, then ultimately rejoiced in her brief, mad existence. In a way that she never would have admitted then (but might now), Port Arthur made Janis Joplin what she was -- a more tolerant, nurturing atmosphere might have diluted the fire that burned within her.
And that fire is what everyone knows about Janis Joplin: her incendiary stage performances, her masochistic tango with the bottle, her tumultuous love life, and her fatal dalliance with drugs. Janis Joplin's musical legacy is also a part of Austin's history -- how the disheveled folkie/UT student playing at west campus hootenannies and Kenneth Threadgill's bar on North Lamar took off for San Francisco with some other Texans in the Sixties and changed the history of rock & roll.
The Janis Joplin of legend set the standard for the blues mama image of white female singers. Blues mamas have to be hard-livin', hard-lovin' and, of course, hard drinking. But life in the Gulf Coast town was not exactly hard; like much of the town's population, Janis' father, Seth, worked at the Texaco refinery and the Joplins resided comfortably
On October 4, 1970, four years and four months after she bolted from Austin, Janis Joplin overdosed in her room at the Landmark Hotel in Los Angeles, having scored a particularly pure batch of heroin. Her career had been virtually meteoric, but her ascent as the first goddess of rock was doused by her sad, lonely death, which followed that of Jimi Hendrix, who'd died two weeks earlier. Jim Morrison would die within a year, and whatever glow the Sixties had was finally dimmed for good.
