In the summer of 1970, Janice Joplain went back to Port Arthur, Texas. She had not been back in years, not properly, not for the town itself, not for the people in it. She had driven through. She had passed through on the way to somewhere else, but going back, walking into rooms where people…
1970, Los Angeles. A recording studio near a rehabilitation center. Etta James was in the middle of a session, closed session. No visitors, no guests, just the musicians and the work. She looked over at a corner of the room. There was a woman sitting there she didn’t recognize. Big puffy coat, funny looking hat,…
September 1968. Beverly Hills, the Estes Zipper Motor Company on Wilshire Boulevard. Cheap Thrills had just gone to number one. Janis Joplin had money for the first time in her life. Real money. The kind of money where you could walk into a car dealership and buy something without checking your account first. She walked…
In the summer of 1967, Albert Grossman came to see Janis Joplin perform. He had already made Bob Dylan. He had managed Peter, Paul, and Mary. He had taken unknown folk singers and turned them into cultural institutions. He was the most powerful manager in American music and he sat in the audience at the…
Port Arthur, Texas. Population approximately 50,000. Located on the Gulf Coast near the Louisiana border. An oil town built on the Spindletop discovery, which in 1901 produced the largest oil gusher in American history. A town that smells like petroleum when the wind comes from the wrong direction. A town that knows what it is…
Janis Joplin revised her will on October 1st, 1970. The same day she recorded Mercedes Benz. The same day she tried to call Seth Morgan and he didn’t answer. The same day she drove to Sunset Sound and sang one last song into a microphone alone. She sat with her attorneys in Los Angeles and…
January 31st, 1968, San Francisco. Janis Joplin sat down and wrote a letter to her parents in Port Arthur. She wrote about a lot of things, the band, the city, the people she had met, and then she wrote this, “Thanks for the article on Aretha. She is by far and away the best thing…
August 17th, 1969. Woodstock, 2:00 in the morning, 400,000 people were waiting in a field in upstate New York. They had been there for 2 days. They had been rained on. They had slept in the mud or not slept at all. They had eaten whatever the Hog Farm could distribute and drunk from communal…
On the first weekend of October 1970, people started dying in Los Angeles. Not one person. Several in different rooms in different parts of the city. Over the same few days, all customers of the same heroin dealer. One of them was found on the floor of room 105 at the Landmark Motor Hotel with…
The white flag came out at 6:14 in the morning. One of the Americans marked the time because it seemed like the kind of thing you marked. A bed sheet actually, not a military flag. A bed sheet pulled from somewhere inside the building and tied to the barrel of a rifle and pushed out…
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