Joplin as Hippie-Chick Icon and Artist

In early 1971, Janis Joplin’s “Me and Bobby McGee” hit the No. 1 spot on the pop chart--the only single of hers to do so. Throughout the country, radio listeners tuned in to Joplin’s version of the song--a rendition, typically, both wistful and wild--in which Janis promised to “trade all my tomorrows” for just one moment with her lost love. But Joplin had already traded her tomorrows in the most definitive way: The previous October she had died--at age 27--of an apparently accidental heroin overdose.

In the compelling new biography “Scars of Sweet Paradise,” author Alice Echols promises to neither “pathologize nor normalize Janis.” And she doesn’t, presenting us instead with a richly detailed portrait of a woman who was simultaneously a sexual outcast and a sexual adventurer, a defiant bohemian and a needy junkie, a hippie-chick icon and a lonely isolate. Oh, yes, and a powerful artist too.

Even better, Echols resists the lure to either idealize or demonize the ‘60s counterculture that nourished Joplin. The author stares unflinchingly at the fault lines of that culture--its reckless encouragement of drug addictions, its sexism, its frequent narcissism, its capitulation to market values--without condemning the repudiation of constraints and the quest for freedom to which Joplin, and her peers, were so dedicated. “Janis refused the compromised, diminished life of her parents’ generation by taking a blowtorch to her own,” Echols writes. Joplin’s death was sad, but Echols never suggests that the ‘60s were a “mistake,” or that the artist would have been better off had her life had been smaller, safer or longer.

Joplin was born in 1943 in the barren, racially segregated town of Port Arthur, Texas, a place that “offered so little in the way of diversion that Janis’ father would take the kids on outings to the post office to look at the Most Wanted posters.” Port Arthur in the ‘50s was not a nice place for a teenage girl who, like Joplin, was neither conventionally pretty, pleasing, placid nor popular. Her nightmarish, ugly-duckling adolescence--in which she was ostracized by her peers and her mother--was something she never exactly got over, although the wounds would feed her ambition.

As a teen, Joplin revered the great blues artists: Odetta, Etta James, Bessie Smith, Leadbelly. When she burst into the national spotlight with her out-of-nowhere, out-of-sight performance at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, it was clear that she had rejected the prevailing ethos of white women in folk and rock--virtually all of whom presented themselves as traditionally sexy and fragile. Joplin was none of those things. Like male rockers, she took up space; like black blues musicians, she expressed a range of human emotions in disturbingly direct ways.

It wasn’t that Joplin was trying to be black, a la Norman Mailer in “The White Negro.” She was just being Janis: earthy, lusty, angry, heartbroken, ebullient. The result stunned both the Monterey audience and the critics (and, therefore, the record executives, who transformed Joplin into that old cliche: the overnight star). “The real turn-on was Janis’ raw, uncompromised presence,” Echols writes. “Her emotional nakedness seemed almost obscene. . . . Her inability to control her feelings, ‘to keep them down’ . . . now made her the darling of the counterculture.” Etta James called her “an angel who . . . paved a road white chicks hadn’t walked down before.” Success brought Joplin many things: money (which she loved), friends and lovers (some of whom used her), intensified alcohol and drug use (one member of Big Brother, her original band, described her as “a maniac with needles”). Most important, though, were the increased opportunities to perform live, which was Joplin’s most abiding love: “better than . . . any man,” she once said. Success also exacerbated her apparently bottomless insecurities, as “the wounded adolescent girl” collided repeatedly with “her outsized reputation as a tough-talking broad and America’s biggest hippie star.”

The best quote in this book comes not from Joplin herself, but from Jimi Hendrix. In 1967, under pressure to play “blacker” music, Hendrix shooed away his critics: “No gotta, gotta, gotta because we don’t have ta, have ta, have ta.” Other than Hendrix, there are few people who could conceivably have tossed off this lovely, insouciant, defiant line--except, perhaps, for Janis Joplin.