Althouse: "She was feeling no pain, literally. She was interacting with the audience in almost a—well, it wasn’t almost, it was, it was..."

August 12, 2015

"She was feeling no pain, literally. She was interacting with the audience in almost a—well, it wasn’t almost, it was, it was..."

"... a sexual banter back and forth. They were calling up to her, they wanted her, and she wanted them. At one point in time she says, 'Yeah, I’ll take you on. One at a time. One at a time.' That was part of who she was."

From an article about newly found photographs of Janis Joplin's last concert.

26 comments:

Larry J said...: "On stage I make love to twenty five thousand people; and then I go home alone."
- Janis Joplin; 8/12/15, 1:55 PM
Jaq said...: She seemed like such a mother hen at Woodstock, admonishing the partiers to be careful. At least that's what I remember.... from recordings.; 8/12/15, 2:19 PM
Eric the Fruit Bat said...: The pain I felt reading that crap was considerable, literally.; 8/12/15, 2:22 PM
Etienne said...: Nina Simone (the bitch) famously said "She got hooked on a feeling and played to corpses."

That was a pretty mean thing to say, this after telling the seated audience that "they weren't worthy of hearing her song she wrote about her."

Where's the tomatoes when you needed them.

Anyway, Joplin was unlistenable outside of AM radio and drug infused concerts.

Give me a German Schlager band and some bratwurst and I'd rather be happy for the day.; 8/12/15, 2:45 PM
Wilbur said...: I always preferred the original version, Bessie Smith.; 8/12/15, 2:55 PM
Robert Cook said...: I just found an audio interview with Robert Crumb, one of my artistic heroes, on YouTube, in which he talks about the 60s and San Francisco. He knew Janis Joplin before she became famous, through mutual friends in San Francisco's artistic community. I've read interviews with him where he covered this same era, and he has said--in print and on this audio recording--that Joplin was really a smart, sensitive, and damaged person, self-conscious about her looks and longing for love. He said it was fame and its attendant leeches that killed her. She put on a tough, swaggering facade, but this was not who she really was. He said the last time he saw her was several months before she died, at a party at her extravagant new house, where he could only wave at her from across the room, so enclosed was she by her fortress of ever-present hangers-on.; 8/12/15, 2:59 PM
Etienne said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 8/12/15, 3:18 PM
Ctmom4 said...: I read Buried Alive back when - she was a truly sad individual. I was a big fan, though I realize her music was not to everyone's taste.; 8/12/15, 4:10 PM
Unknown said...: Sometime in my 30s I recall talking nostalgically about the party scene 10 years ago, that being about the time I grew weary of it, and, pausing to listen to myself, I was disgusted. I had dropped all that to begin with because the callow crowd inhabiting that scene were so boring, if you were sober, that it made me realize that I was just the same and might be unchanged through years and decades apart from decline creeping decrepitude. And now, a decade on, here I was reminiscing about it. I never spoke so again. Janice at 27, where she is frozen, reminds me of several women I knew then. I know none of them now, nor more than a couple of the dozens of people I thought I was close to in my twenties. The difference between Janice's fate and many others of the women I knew is probably money enough to afford more and better drugs. I'm not nostalgic for those women and nor do I think, as sweet as she might be if she wasn't a boozy wreck, would I go back to hang with Joplin or any other icon. It's all skull and crossbones territory to me. People who reminisce about such as her seem stuck.; 8/12/15, 4:19 PM
Paul said...: Pathetic.

I have no idea why she is idolized.

If anything, she is a poster child of what drugs do.; 8/12/15, 4:35 PM
Roughcoat said...: She died 45 years ago. Almost a half-century has gone by since she passed. She was here briefly, sang a few songs, died of a drug overdose.

Ta onta ienai te panta kai menein ouden.; 8/12/15, 5:33 PM
Jaq said...: Some of her songs are great, but her version of "To Love Somebody" is painful to listen to, not because she imbued it with such emotion and pathos, but because it sucked.; 8/12/15, 6:22 PM
Tank said...: Cook's comment makes sense to me. If you're a blues fan, she was a great performer, and her fans did love her. There are some very good performances on YouTube.; 8/12/15, 6:54 PM
William said...: I have "Get It While You Can" on my playlist. Her early death puts a lot of topspin on that song.; 8/12/15, 7:02 PM
glenn said...: And this just in

Janis is still dead.; 8/12/15, 7:17 PM
Etienne said...: The pictures are too soft, some out of focus. I don't think the lens was fast enough for the lighting, most zooms on 35mm were junk. He probably should have used tri-x for the higher ISO. $250 per photo seems a bit 'get it while you can'.

She was just approaching her sexual prime, packing on the pounds. I think, if she lived, she would have looked just like her idol 'Big Mama Thornton' by age 40.

Kristofferson would have left her for some skinny chick.; 8/12/15, 8:12 PM
JCC said...: "That was part of who she was."

I was just starting my working life back then, and frankly, that whole rock-and-roll, drugs-and-sex, self-indulgent, we-the-people thing was so much crap. The music sucked, people needed to bathe more often, clothing styles were as vapid as the politics, and everyone wanted to be a revolutionary (without the risk and pain). Generally, it was the a@#hole generation subset. Janis Joplin was no exception.; 8/12/15, 8:53 PM
RichardJohnson said...: Last week I was looking for material on the late folksinger John Clay. From that link, I found out that in the early '60s, John Clay had played with Janis Joplin in a band called the Waller Creek Boys. Here she was singing Woody Guthrie's "Roll on Columbia." Seems to me that by the time she had achieved a degree of commercial success in the late 1960s, her voice had begun to deteriorate- rather scratchy compared to her younger voice.; 8/12/15, 9:41 PM
Curious George said...: I had a sales guy that said he nailed her in college. I said "And you admit it?".; 8/12/15, 10:46 PM
Bumsurf said...: I went the the Hollywood Bowl in the late 60's to see Janis. I vividly remember her coming on stage and 1,000's of people, who were in reserved seats, getting up and moved as close to the stage, and Janice, as was possible. I was one of them. She was unforgettable.; 8/12/15, 10:50 PM
donald said...: She had left a trail of destruction in women that bought into her disgusting self indulgent destruction.

My deceased wife being one of them. Fuck Janis Joplin. Every time I hear that screeching fat pig I fly into a rage.; 8/13/15, 4:33 AM
Robert Cook said...: "I had a sales guy that said he nailed her in college. I said 'And you admit it?'"

As he was probably lying, he's not admitting anything.; 8/13/15, 6:42 AM
Curious George said...: "Robert Cook said...
"I had a sales guy that said he nailed her in college. I said 'And you admit it?'"

As he was probably lying, he's not admitting anything."

Wrong. If I knew he was lying the question would have been the same.; 8/13/15, 6:46 AM
Robert Cook said...: Either way, your question is insulting to her and to anyone who might partner with her, and goes straight to Janis's personal troubles. It assumes/suggests she was not and could never be sexually appealing to anyone and that anyone who had sex with her would have be to be drunk/crazy/shameless/desperate. She had been outcast growing up, was not what is considered "pretty," (the single criterion, apparently, that determines whether a woman is worth anything or not, certainly whether she is worth fucking), and had even been voted "the ugliest man on campus" by a fraternity at her college. One does not easily shed the damage done by such insults to one's sense of worth. She was, by R. Crumb's account, quite smart and very sensitive...not at all the hard ass character she acted out in public. That persona was obviously armor she donned to protect herself--fortified by drink and drugs after she got famous--even though it failed to do so.; 8/13/15, 7:04 AM
mikee said...: I can't see Hendrix in a stage scene like this one of Joplin's, yet he too died of a drug overdose. Correlation is not causation, and all that.; 8/13/15, 2:11 PM
Bill Crawford said...: Doesn't Huckabee say he knew her? Or was it another prominent Republican?; 8/14/15, 6:24 PM