being janis joplin

I first heard of Janis Joplin when I started college.  A girl on my hall had an acoustic guitar and a giant poster of Janis Joplin on her wall.  I didn't understand the hero worship, but I also didn't know a thing about Janis Joplin or much of anything about music.  I was still a fan of The Jets (not that I shared that fact.  I was ashamed of it in college.  Now I just admit I have questionable taste in music.  I deal.)

Over the years, I heard some of Janis Joplin's music.  I admit, I didn't get it, didn't understand the big deal.  She had an interesting voice, yes, but so do many other people.  She was well-known as an early pioneer in rock music.  Okay. Tonight I am admitting that my opinion is entirely changed.

Janis Joplin was fucking amazing.

I saw Festival Express, a kind of amazing documentary even if you don't care what was going on in rock music in 1970.  But that summer, a Canadian rock promoter got the idea of having a traveling festival.  Originally planned to go from Montreal to Toronto to Winnipeg to Calvary to Vancouver, with the bands traveling by train between sites, the tour was truncated to the middle three cities and plagued by protesters wanting "free music."  Apparently it lost a ton of money for the producers, and the hastily put-together film crew dispersed, many unpaid, without putting together a film.  The film came together between 1994 and 2003 after sitting around in garages and basements and other random, most uncontrolled storage areas, to be made into what one of the cinematographers said was a way better film than could possibly have been produced in 1970.  The advent of digital technologies allowed for adjustments that compensated for the lack of light.

But while the tour may not have been a financial success, the footage shows an amazing behind the scenes experience, of musicians just being together and making music and having an amazing time doing so.  I am not a musician.  I don't know the joy of a good jam session.  But imagine a week of them, of the inspiration of other people who love music the way you do, of playing together and mixing it up?  Even I can see that would be an unforgettable, once in a lifetime, glad-we-caught-it-on-film experience.  And the movie is funny, too.


The movie was about music, about what it is to people who perform and make it for a living.  It was about what music means to an audience, both a peaceful paying audience and a Woodstock-inspired rioting audience.

But back to the amazing Janis Joplin.

Here:



Janis Joplin threw it all out into the world when she performed.  Her talent wasn't in her voice, her songwriting, her music.  It was her, her performance, her ability to give it all, hold back nothing, throw herself wide open to the world.

Yes, that's what I got from two songs in a film not really about Janis Joplin.


Imagine living your life raw.  Open.  Uncovered, unconcealed.  Not balls to the wall because there is no fucking wall (and you don't have balls).  Imagine being able to send it all -- your pain, your rage, your loss, your love, your need and desire, your hope, your peace, your hell -- to send it all out into the world.  What would it feel like?  What would you get back?  What would life be like without the parameters we create for ourselves?

Watching Janis Joplin, I see power, I see command.  I do not see peace.  But I do see joy in the performance, in being able to perform and give away the pain.  I see the possibilities of opening up the parts we might normally seek to keep hidden.