Janis Joplin

Janis Joplin would have turned 70 this year, and though I missed the actual date I did finally pick up a CD of  The Essential Janis Joplin and have been listening to it. It's hard to imagine her at 70, because so much about her was temporal--a meteoric streak across the '60s, through the drugs and music, at Monterrey and Woodstock, lover of many big names in the business, and finally dead at age 27.

Joplin was born in Port Arthur, Texas, did a bit of drifting, and ended up as a singer for Big Brother and the Holding Company. Her performance at 1967's Monterrey Pop Festival, most notably a rendition of Big Mama Thornton's "Ball and Chain," made her a star. She cut a few solo albums, had a few hits, but her reliance on Southern Comfort and heroin did her in. She died only 16 days after Jimi Hendrix did, also 27.

I would agree with those who call her the greatest female rock vocalist of all time, if you consider Aretha Franklin R&B. She had the old soul of some ancient blues singer, but looked like the quintessential hippie chick. But her voice, with sounded as if it were marinated in whiskey and tobacco, was transcendent of time. Consider the way she handled the song "Move Over:" she sings the line, "You say that it's over baby, you say that it's over now," with the emphasis on the second instance of the word "say," which she exclaims with some sort of hidden power. Or, in "Ball and Chain," the way she delivers the "whoa-oh-whoa" of the refrain, as if the entire heartache of mankind were resting on her shoulders.

The two-disc set has all of the stuff you'd expect, but I didnt' really discover anything great beyond what I already knew, although it was interesting to hear her cover The Bee Gees song "To Love Somebody." Her most well-known songs are "Piece of My Heart," a classic-rock staple that never fails to please me, "Summertime," the song from Porgy and Bess that she wails with emotion beyond her years, and her only number one hit, posthumously released, "Me and My Bobbie McGee," written by Kris Kristofferson about a woman but the genders switched for Joplin, a sublime record that chills. "I'd trade all my tomorrows for one single yesterday of holding Bobbie's body next to mine." Sigh.

There's also the a capella ditty, "Mercedes Benz," a lark that she introduces as a "song of great social and political importance." "Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz, my friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends. I've worked hard all my life with no help from my friends. Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz." The song ends with her saying, "That's it!" and giggling. That giggle gets to me. What would she sound like now?