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I am, admittedly, a very hard sell when it comes to Janis Joplin biographies. I adore her music and have read multiple biographies about her life, as well as her sister Laura’s intimate, heartbreaking chronicle of Janis’ world and progress from bullied adolescent to worldwide superstar, Love, Janis has been my gold standard for Janis biographies ever since I read it in my twenties. (The musical created from the book is also fabulous). Holly George-Warren’s Janis: Her Life and Music is the only biography besides Joplin’s sister’s that has risen to my personal high watermark. It’s definitive, handsome and fascinating.
George-Warren’s research is intense and impeccable. She digs into Janis’ family tree before taking us into her formative years in Port Arthur Texas, where she yearned to belong and find love and yet desired to smash the norms around her – the staid expectations of southern small-town living.
An intellectual and a daredevil, Janis stormed through life, winning early acclaim for her painting skills but refusing to shed her tomboy rebel ways. At fourteen she discovered Kerouac and became a member of the beat generation, discovering roadhouse bars filled with jukeboxes playing blues recordings. By seventeen, rumors had turned her into a That Girl, a woman with a reputation. Her parents doted on her but could not abide her rule breaking; busy with her siblings, they could only scold Janis and try to make her conform.
At eighteen, she became a songwriter, picking up the guitar and finding her own voice. By the time she hitchhiked her way across Texas to San Francisco, her destiny seemed to be etched in stone and tears. Janis and Big Brother and the Holding Co. are where they need to be in the Haight, but destiny is cruel and kind in equal doses.
The rest is, naturally, tragic history. The drug addiction (amphetamines, heroin, booze) the failed relationships (an engagement to a cheating and already-married con-man that falls apart; multiple same-sex romances), the sterling songs, many written by Joplin, who sometimes comes off as Sylvia Plath-like when vacilitating between girlish gushiness and lacerating yearning.
George-Warren expands the known record with a phalanx of fresh interviews, digging up close high school friends and bullies, old music industry associates (Albert Grossman, BBAHC’s manager and an infamously judgmental perfectionist, comes in for a bashing), lovers, and family members, who all have their say, but the central voice belongs to Janis herself, whose bald-faced neediness, sharp sarcasm, wistful dreams of stardom (Janis got along famously with Jimi Hendrix and Janis Ian, but had a terrible encounter with Jim Morrison) and push for artistic relevance all resonate with the reader.
Ultimately the reader is given the best picture yet of Janis and her world with this biography. Janis: Her Life and Music sings because like Janis herself it never, ever compromises.
Buy it at: Amazon/Apple Books/Barnes & Noble/Kobo
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Grade: A+
Book Type: Non Fiction
Sensuality: N/A
Review Date: 22/10/19
Publication Date: 10/2019
Recent Comments …
Yep
This sounds delightful! I’m grabbing it, thanks
excellent book: interesting, funny dialogs, deep understanding of each character, interesting secondary characters, and also sexy.
I don’t think anyone expects you to post UK prices – it’s just a shame that such a great sale…
I’m sorry about that. We don’t have any way to post British prices as an American based site.
I have several of her books on my TBR and after reading this am moving them up the pile.
Lisa Fernandes is a writer, reviewer and recapper who lives somewhere on the East Coast. Formerly employed by Firefox.org and Next Projection, she also currently contributes to Women Write About Comics. Read her blog at http://thatbouviergirl.blogspot.com/, follow her on Twitter at http://twitter.com/thatbouviergirl or contribute to her Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/MissyvsEvilDead or her Ko-Fi at ko-fi.com/missmelbouvier
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Sounds terrific. I am now on the waiting list at the library.
Hope you like it!
I had the great pleasure of seeing Big Brother & The Holding Company on the university “pillow concert” circuit far too long ago. (I’m even older than you, DiscoDollyDeb!!) Janis belted out Summertime, Ball & Chain and Piece of My Heart and it was absolutely brilliant and enthralling. It’s just so damned awful that she and so many others from those days burnt like a moth in a flame: Jimi Hendrix, Mama Cass, Jim Morrison and so it goes on and on.
Oh wow, how lucky are you? That’s marvelous!
Influential (for me at least) fact: Janis died on my 13th birthday (yes, I’m old), and she sorta set the standard of the magnificently-talented but privately-fragile type later personified by Whitney Houston and Amy Winehouse. I still listen to Joplin’s “Pearl” album and lament her early passing.
Oh wow, that’s interesting, DiscoDollyDeb!
Me too, re listening to her music.
My mom has photos of Janis Joplin from a concert we attended in 1969. I was a baby, but every time I hear “Down on Me” it evokes a feeling of bliss, so I assume on some cellular level I remember being there at the Hollywood Bowl. On road trips our family and then me and mine would sing “Mercedes Benz”. “Pearl” is one damn good album.
My mom just told me it was 1967! She carried me in a papoose
That’s so cool!