Janis Joplin vs Jim Morrison: The Real Story Behind the Most Infamous Rock Night of 1969 – HT
It was the summer of 1969 in Los Angeles and the city was burning with a particular kind of energy that only that year could produce. The Vietnam War was on every television screen. The moon landing was just weeks away and the music industry was in the middle of something that felt less like a business and more like a revolution.
Every night in the canyons above Sunset Boulevard, in the hotels along the strip, in the small clubs of West Hollywood, the architects of that revolution were gathering. They were drinking together, fighting together, falling in love together, and sometimes they were destroying each other. On one particular night that summer in a house that was full of musicians and managers and hangers on, two of the most famous performers in the world found themselves in the same room.
One of them was Janice Joplain. The other was Jim Morrison. What happened between them in the next several minutes would be told and retold for the next 50 years. And the story would change a little each time it was told, but the core of it would remain the same. It was a moment when two people who carried enormous public personas [music] who were each fighting their own private battles with fame and addiction and identity collided in a way that neither of them seemed prepared for.
And to understand what happened that night, you have to understand who they both were when they walked into that room. Janice Joplain was 26 years old. She had grown up in Port Arthur, Texas, a small refinery town on the Gulf of Mexico, where she had never really fit in. As a teenager, she had been mocked for her appearance. Called names she would carry with her for the rest of her life.
Voted in cruel jokes by her own classmates. She had escaped to San Francisco in the mid 1960s and had found for the first time a place where her voice was not a liability but a gift. She had joined a band called Big Brother and the Holding Company. And at the Montter Pop Festival in 19607, she had given a performance that had stunned the music industry.
By the summer of 19609, she was one of the most famous singers in the world. She had left Big Brother behind, formed a new band, and was working on becoming a solo artist. She was also drinking heavily. The bottle of southern comfort that she carried with her, almost everywhere, had become as much a part of her image as her feather bows and her roundted glasses, [music] people who knew her well understood that the bottle was not a prop.
It was a kind of armor. Behind the loud laughter and the wild stage presence and the open invitations to party, there was a woman who had never quite stopped being the lonely girl from Port Arthur who still wanted more than anything to be loved and accepted and who had not yet figured out how to get that need met without paying an enormous price.
Jim Morrison was 25 years old. He had grown up in a military family, the son of a Navy admiral, moving from base to base, never really putting down roots. [music] He had studied film at the University of California, Los Angeles, and had formed a band called The Doors with three other musicians he had met there.
By 1960, nine, he had become something that the music industry had never quite seen before. He was not just a singer. He was a poet, a performer, a kind of philosopher of the dark side of American life. And he had cultivated an image that was equal parts seductive and dangerous. He had also developed a serious drinking problem.
The same charisma that made him magnetic on stage made him unpredictable off it. He could be brilliant in conversation one moment and cruel the next. He could quote ancient poetry and insult a stranger in the same breath. He was, by the accounts of nearly everyone who knew him, a deeply intelligent and deeply troubled young man who was using alcohol to manage feelings that he did not know how to handle in any other way.
By the summer of 1969, the people closest to him were beginning to worry. He had been arrested in Miami for a notorious incident on stage. He was gaining weight, drinking more than ever, and showing up to recording sessions in conditions that made it nearly impossible to work. [music] He was a star who was burning brighter and faster than anyone around him could quite keep up with.
So this was the situation when on a night in the summer of 1969, Janice Joplain and Jim Morrison ended up at the same gathering in Los Angeles. [music] The exact location has been described differently in different accounts. Some say it was at a private home in the Hollywood Hills. Others say it was at the Chateau Marmmont, the famous hotel where so many of these stories played out.
What everyone agrees on is that the room was full of music industry people, producers, musicians, managers, photographers, friends of friends. The drinks were flowing. The music was playing. The kind of party that in 1969 in Los Angeles was happening every single night somewhere in the city. Paul Rothschild, who was the producer of the Doors and who knew both Morrison and Joplain well, was there.
So were several other people who would later write about what they saw. The accounts of these witnesses gathered over the years by biographers like Myra Freriedman who wrote one of the earliest and most detailed books about Janus form the basis of what we know about that night. And what we know is that at some point during the evening, Jim Morrison, who had been drinking heavily, approached Janice.
What happened next is something that has to be understood not as a simple story of villain and victim, but as a moment between two human beings who were both in their own ways struggling. According to the accounts that have been passed down, Morrison began making comments to Janus that were aggressive in tone. The exact words have been described differently by different witnesses, but the general substance was that Morrison was being provocative, [music] trying to get a reaction from her.
Some witnesses have suggested that he was attempting to flirt in a way that came out wrong because of how much he had been drinking. Others have suggested that he was being deliberately cruel. Perhaps because he saw in Janus someone who reflected back at him things about himself that he did not want to see. It is also possible that both of these things were true at once.
People who are very drunk often do not know themselves what they are trying to accomplish. They speak from impulses they cannot identify [music] and their words land in ways they did not intend. What we can say with reasonable confidence is that Morrison’s behavior toward Janice became physical.
He reached out and grabbed her by the hair. The room, which had been loud and full of conversation, began to quiet down. People were noticing. This was not the first time Morrison had done something inappropriate at a party. Those who knew him had seen this kind of behavior before. But it was Janice Joplain he was doing it to, and Janice Joplain was not someone who had ever been good at backing down.
It is important here to pause and consider what was happening inside both of these people. In that moment, Morrison, by all accounts, was deep into a phase of his life where he was testing every limit. [music] He was provoking audiences, provoking law enforcement, provoking the people around him.
There is a reading of his behavior that says he was in some way asking to be stopped. He was a young man who had grown up in a household where by his own description he had not received the kind of guidance and limits that children need. He had become famous very quickly and the world had given him almost no resistance.
Whatever he wanted he could have. Whatever he said people listen to and there is something in the human spirit that when it is given no boundaries begins to seek them out often in destructive ways. Morrison’s drinking, his confrontations, his stage outbursts can be read in part as a man searching for the wall that would stop him. [music] He had not yet found it.
Janice, on the other hand, was carrying a different kind of weight that night. She had spent her entire life being told that she was not good enough. She had been mocked for how she looked, mocked for how she sounded, mocked for who she was. [music] And then, almost overnight, the world had decided she was a goddess.
The same qualities that had been used to wound her in Port Arthur were now being celebrated on magazine covers. But the wound had not healed just because the world’s opinion had changed. The little girl who had been called names was still inside her. And when a man as powerful and as famous as Jim Morrison reached out and grabbed her by the hair in a room full of people, that little girl was not going to take it.
The grown woman who had taught herself to fight back was going to respond. and she was going to respond with everything she had. What Janice did next has been described in slightly different ways by different witnesses, but the core of the story is consistent. [music] There was a bottle nearby. Most accounts say it was a bottle of Southern Comfort, the brand of whiskey that Janice was famous for drinking.
She picked up the bottle and she brought it down on Jim Morrison’s head. The sound of it filled the room. Morrison reeled. Some accounts say he fell. Others say he stumbled but stayed on his feet. >> [music] >> He was bleeding. The room was now completely silent. 20 or 30 people had just watched one of the most famous men in rock music get hit over the head with a whiskey bottled by one of the most famous women in rock music.
Nobody seemed to know what to do. Janice, by the accounts of those present, did not say anything dramatic. She did not give a speech. She did not stand over him and tell him he had it coming. She simply put the bottle down, gathered her things, and walked out of the room. Her bandmates and friends followed her. Morrison was left to be tended to by the people around him.
The party in any meaningful sense was over. In the days and weeks that followed, the story began to spread through the music industry in the way that these stories do. By the time it reached the gossip columns and the music magazines, it had been reshaped into something larger than what had actually happened.
Some versions of the story made Janice into a kind of folk hero who had stood up to a male predator. Other versions made her into a wild, violent woman who had assaulted a man. Both of these readings, in their own ways, missed the [music] point. What had happened in that room was not a simple morality play.
It was a collision between two extraordinarily talented, extraordinarily damaged young people. Both of whom were drinking too much. Both of whom were carrying wounds they did not know how to heal. and both of whom had been placed by the music industry and by their own ambitions in positions where there were almost no adults around to help them.
Paul Rothschild, who is Morrison’s producer, knew him perhaps better than almost anyone, would later speak about the incident in interviews. [music] His perspective was complicated. He did not defend what Morrison had done. He acknowledged that Morrison’s behavior toward women, particularly when he had been drinking, could be deeply troubling.
But he also spoke about the Morrison he knew when the alcohol was not in the room. The thoughtful, well, read, generous young man who had been his friend. He spoke about the tragedy of watching someone he cared about destroy himself. He did not excuse what had happened, but he asked the people listening to him to remember that the man who grabbed Janice Joplain’s hair that night was not the whole of who Jim Morrison was.
He was at that moment someone who was very sick and who was getting sicker. Myra Freriedman, who was Janice’s publicist and later her biographer, wrote about the incident with a similar complexity. She did not make Janice into a [music] hero. She acknowledged that Janice was in her own way, also struggling with addiction, also lashing out at people, also doing things that hurt those around her.
The bottle that Janice used to defend herself that night was the same bottle that was killing her slowly. The image of Janice as the woman who hit Jim Morrison over the head with a whiskey bottle has often been told as if it were a moment of triumph. But [music] Freriedman, who loved Janice and who watched her decline up close, understood that there was no triumph in it.
There were only two people who had been hurt by their lives, hurting each other in a room full of strangers. This is perhaps the most important thing to understand about that night. Both Janice Joplain and Jim Morrison would be dead within 2 years of that moment. Morrison would die in Paris in July of 1971 at the age of 27 of causes that have been disputed but that were almost certainly connected to his long pattern of alcohol abuse.
Janus would die in Los Angeles in October of 1970 also at the age of 27 of an accidental heroin overdose. The two of them along with Jimmyi Hendris who died just weeks before Janus would become known as the 27 Club. A group of musicians who had achieved enormous fame and then died at the same young age. The story of the bottle and the hair grab would be told and retold in the years after their deaths.
But it would always carry for those who looked at it carefully a particular kind of sadness. Two young people who were both drowning had clashed in a room. One of them had hit the other with a bottle and then they had both gone home and within a couple of years neither of them was alive anymore. There is a temptation when we tell these stories from the past to turn them into clean narratives.
To make Janice the woman who stood up to a violent man to make Morrison the predator who got what he deserved to frame the moment as a kind of feminist triumph or as a cautionary tale about toxic masculinity in the rock music industry. All of these readings have something true in them. The behavior that Morrison exhibited toward Janus that night was unacceptable.
The willingness of the people around them to let this kind of thing happen again and again in party after party was a failure. The way that women in the rock music industry of the late 1960s were treated both by their male colleagues and by the press was often appalling. [music] These are real things and they should not be erased from the story.
At the same time, if we want to understand what really happened that night, we have to be willing to see both of these people as people, not as symbols, not [music] as types, not as characters in a story we already know how to tell, as actual human beings with histories and wounds and reasons for the things they did, even when the things they did were wrong.
Jim Morrison did not grab Janice Joplain’s hair because he was a monster. He did it because he was a young man who had been given everything except the things he actually needed and who was using alcohol to deaden a pain he could not name. Janice Joplain did not hit Jim Morrison with a bottle because she was a hero.
She did it because she was a young woman who had spent her entire life being told that her body and her voice did not deserve and who had finally reached a point where she would not could not accept that treatment for one more second. Both of them were right and both of them were wrong in the way that human beings are usually right and wrong about the most painful moments of their lives and both of them were running out of time although neither of them knew it yet.
[music] In the years after the incident, those who had been in the room would tell the story in their own ways. Some would emphasize Morrison’s behavior. Others would emphasize Janice’s reaction. Almost all of them would describe the strange feeling in the room afterward. That sense that something had happened, which everyone present knew was important, but which no one quite knew how to name.
The party had broken up early. [music] People had gone home. By the next morning, the story was already spreading through Los Angeles, and from Los Angeles, it was beginning to spread to New York and London and everywhere else in the world where people cared about rock music. By the end of the week, almost everyone in the industry had heard some version of it.
The version that they heard was almost never the truth. [music] It was always a little louder, a little simpler, a little more dramatic than what had actually happened in that room. But that is how legends work. They simplify, they sharpen, they take the human messiness out of the moment and replace it with something easier to remember.
If there is a lesson to take from that night, it is probably not the lesson that the legend wants to teach. The legend wants to teach us that Janice Joplain was a tough woman who hit a famous man with a bottle and walked out like a queen. That is a story we like to tell. But the truer story, the harder story is that two of the most talented young people in American music had reached a point in their lives where they could not be in a room together without something terrible happening.
They were both alone, even in rooms full of people. They were both drinking themselves to death. Although neither of them would have used those words, they were both surrounded by people who loved them but did not know how to help them. And when they collided, the collision was the only language they had.
Janice hit Morrison with a bottle because she did not have any other way in that moment to tell him to stop. Morrison let her hit him because he had run out of other things to feel. They were two people in pain recognizing each other and not knowing what to do with the recognition. There is something about the way that the late 1960s consumed its own brightest figures that has never been fully reckoned with.
The list of musicians from that era who died young, who died of overdoses, who died in accidents that were not really accidents, who died of violence they had invited into their lives is a long one. Janice and Morrison are the two names that come up most often. But they are not alone. The culture of the time had built an enormous machine for producing fame, and the machine had no off switch.
Once a young person was on the conveyor belt, there were almost no mechanisms to slow them down. There were no real rehabilitation programs for stars. There were no honest conversations about mental health. There were no managers or labels who knew how to say no. [music] There were just more shows, more records, more parties, more drinks, more drugs until the body and the mind could not hold anymore.
and the young person fell off the conveyor belt and was gone. Janice and Morrison were both on that conveyor belt that night. The bottle and the hair grab were just a single moment in a much longer pattern. Neither of them knew how to step off. Neither of them was given the help they needed to step off.
And so the night ended the way it ended and within 2 years they were both dead and the bottle on Morrison’s head became a story. When we look at this story now, more than 50 years later, we can hold all of these things at once. [music] We can recognize that what Morrison did was wrong. We can recognize that Janice was right to defend herself.
We can recognize that the people around them failed both of them by not intervening earlier in either of their downward spirals. We can mourn what was lost when they died, the music they would have made, the lives they would have lived, the wisdom they might have gained if they had been allowed to grow older. We can refuse to flatten either of them into a hero or a villain.
We can hold their humanity in our hands gently and we can let the story be as complicated as it actually was. That is in the end the only honest way to tell it. Not as a triumph, not as a tragedy, as a moment between two people who were both very gifted and very wounded, who met each other for an instant in the bright loud room of 1969, and who left a mark on each other that neither of them would live long enough to fully understand.
The whiskey bottle, by the way, did not survive the night either. Someone cleaned it up after Janice left. By the next morning, the room was back to normal. The party was just another party in a long string of parties that summer. But for the people who had been in the room, the memory remained. They would carry it with them for the rest of their lives.
[music] When Morrison died in Paris 2 years later, they would think about that night. When Janice died in Los Angeles a year before him, they would think about that night. They would think about how young everyone had been, how alive everyone had seemed, how sure everyone had been that the party would go on forever.
And they would think about how quickly, how unbelievably quickly it had all come to an end. The bottle, the hair, the silence in the room afterward, the door closing as Janice walked out. All of these things would become in their memories not just an incident at a party, but a kind of warning that none of them had been able to read at the time.
A warning about what fame does to people who are not prepared for it. A warning about what addiction does to brilliance. [music] a warning about how the loudest rooms in the world are sometimes the loneliest and how the people who fill those rooms with sound are sometimes the ones who need silence the most. That is the story of the night Janice Joplain and Jim Morrison clashed in a room full of people in Los Angeles in the summer of 1969.
It is not a story with a hero. It is not a story with a villain. It is a story about two young people who were already running out of time and who used the only language they knew to speak to each other and whose language was in the end not enough to save either one of them. The legend will keep telling itself the way legends do.
The bottle will keep coming down on Morrison’s head in the retellings, [music] and Janice will keep walking out of the room like a queen. And Morrison will keep being the cautionary tale. And the simple version of the story will keep being told because the simple version is easier to remember. But the truer version, the harder version is the one worth holding on to because the truer version is the one that asks something of us.
It asks us to see both of them. It asks us to grieve for both of them. And it asks us to think about what we owe to the brilliant, broken young people we keep producing in our own time and whether we will do for them what nobody managed to do for Janice and Jim before time ran out.