Jim Morrison Said Janis Joplin Could NEVER Sing Quietly. She Went Silent. Then She Proved Him Wrong. – HT

 

 

 

Janis, darling, I bet you can’t sing a single note of proper blues without screaming. Jim Morrison said it with a laugh, bourbon in hand, at a private party in Los Angeles. The entire room erupted in laughter. Everyone knew Janis Joplin was the queen of the scream, not the queen of restraint. But what Janis did next left Jim Morrison in tears and revealed a secret about her mother that no one in that room had ever heard.

It was September 4th, 1970. A private gathering at a house in Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles. Approximately 50 people. Musicians, writers, the inner circle of the Los Angeles music world in the last summer of the 1960s era before everything changed. The atmosphere was loose and warm. The specific ease of people who have been making music together long enough that the evening does not require anything from them except presence.

Jim Morrison was holding court near the fireplace as he tended to do. Tall, commanding, performing even when he was not performing. The specific quality of a man who was always simultaneously inside the room and watching it. He had been talking for an hour about poetry and music and the difference between them.

The way he talked at parties, intensely, with the confidence of someone who had read more than most people in the room and knew it. Janis was across the room. She was in a good mood. Pearl was almost finished. She could feel the shape of it now. The complete shape. The way you can feel the shape of something when you were close enough to the end to see the whole of it.

She was drinking, but not too much. She was laughing. She was telling a story to someone about something that had happened in the studio the previous week. And the story was funny, and she was telling it well. And she was happy in the specific way she was happy when the work was going right. Jim had been watching her from across the room.

He had always had a specific relationship with Janis that was not quite friendship and not quite rivalry, but somewhere in the complicated territory between two people who understand each other’s size and are not entirely comfortable with it. He raised his glass toward her. She raised hers back. He said, loud enough for the room to hear, “Janis, darling, I have a question.

” She said, “Oh, God.” He said, “Can you sing anything without screaming?” The room laughed. Janis laughed. She said, “I can sing anything I want, Morrison.” He said, “Prove it.” He said, “I bet you cannot sing a single song quietly. I bet you don’t know how. I bet you have never in your life held a note below full volume.

” More laughter. The friendly laughter of a room that is watching two people do the thing they do. The specific performance of two large personalities in the same space pushing against each other with enough affection to make it look like play. Janis opened her mouth to say something sharp and funny. And then she stopped.

Something had crossed her face. Not offense, not the wounded look of someone who has been publicly embarrassed. Something quieter than that. Something that came from further back than this room and this party and Jim Morrison’s bourbon-flavored challenge. Jim saw it. The laughter faded from his face. He said, quieter, “Joplin.

” She did not answer him. She was somewhere else. She was in Port Arthur, Texas. She was 16 years old. She was sitting in the living room of the house on Lombardi Drive on a Sunday afternoon while her mother, Dorothy, listened to the radio in the kitchen. Dorothy Joplin loved music. This was not a secret. But the specific kind of music she loved, the quiet kind, the controlled kind, the kind that required a singer to hold something back rather than give everything, was not the kind of music her daughter had been drawn to.

Janis had always been loud. Even before she knew what she was doing, even before Port Arthur had reasons to use her loudness against her. She had been a person for whom the full expression of a thing was the only honest expression. Dorothy understood this. Dorothy loved this about her daughter even when the world did not.

But one Sunday afternoon, she had called Janis into the kitchen. She had been listening to a woman singing on the radio. Not blues, not rock and roll. Something older. A folk singer. A woman with a voice that was completely controlled, completely precise. Every note landing exactly where she intended it to land.

Dorothy had her eyes closed when Janis came in. She opened them. She said, “Do you hear that?” Janis said, “Yes.” Dorothy said, “That is what it sounds like when someone loves a song more than they love being heard singing it.” Janis had not known what to say. Dorothy said, “You have more voice than anyone I have ever heard.

” She paused. She said, “One day, when you have made it, will you learn to sing like that? Not for the stage, not for your audiences. Just once. Just for me. To show me that you can hold something, that you can give everything and still choose to be quiet.” Janis had looked at her mother. She had said, “Mama, I’m a blues singer.

I don’t do quiet.” Dorothy had smiled. She said, “I know. But promise me anyway.” Janis had promised. The way you promise things at 16 when you were about to become something and you do not yet know what the becoming will cost. The promise had gone to the place promises go when life arrives faster than expected.

San Francisco. Big Brother. Monterey. The tours and the albums and the years moving faster than she had known years could move. She had thought about it. She had been meaning to. She just had not yet done it. Standing in a room in Laurel Canyon in September of 1970, she understood that not yet had gone on long enough.

She looked at Jim Morrison. She said, “Give me 20 minutes.” Jim said, “What?” She said, “Give me 20 minutes. If I’m going to do this, I’m going to do it right.” The room went completely quiet. Nobody had expected her to take it seriously. Janis walked out of the main room and down the hallway toward the back of the house.

Jim looked at the person beside him. The person shrugged. Sharon Robinson, a singer who had known Janis for 2 years, who was standing nearby, said quietly, “She’s not joking.” 20 minutes. The party tried to resume. Nobody was fully in it. Everyone was waiting. When Janis walked back into the room, her face was different.

Not the performing face, not the stage face. The face underneath those faces. The one that existed before Port Arthur had taught her to cover it with something larger. She walked to the center of the room. She looked at Jim. She said, “No piano. No guitar. Just me.” Jim nodded. He did not say anything. The room gathered.

 50 people in a house in Laurel Canyon standing in a rough circle holding their drinks and their cigarettes and their breath. Janis closed her eyes. She stood very still. And then she sang. Not the blues. Not Piece of My Heart. Not Ball and Chain. Not the scream, not the full volume, not the everything given simultaneously that was the signature of everything she had ever done in public.

She sang a hymn. A simple hymn that her mother had hummed in the kitchen on Sunday mornings in the house on Lombardi Drive in Port Arthur, Texas. Something old. Something that predated the roadhouses and the festivals and the stadiums. Something that came from before any of it. Her voice was completely controlled.

Every note placed exactly where she meant it to go. Every phrase shaped with the specific intention of someone who is not trying to fill a room, but to give a room exactly what it needs and no more. The restraint was the most extraordinary thing about it. Because everyone in that room knew what Janis Joplin’s voice could do at full volume.

They had heard it. They had felt it in their chests and in their throats and in the parts of themselves they did not normally bring to concerts. And now they were hearing the same instrument operating at a fraction of its capacity. And understanding for the first time that the restraint required more control than the release.

That choosing to be quiet when you could fill the world with sound was the harder thing. The much harder thing. Janis sang for 3 minutes. The room did not move. Jim Morrison stood at the edge of the circle and did not move. He had his glass in his hand and he had forgotten it was there. When she finished, the silence lasted longer than silences usually last in rooms full of musicians who understand what they have heard.

Then Jim sat down. Not dramatically. He just sat down on the nearest available surface. Which was the arm of a chair. And he looked at the floor. His shoulders were shaking. Sharon Robinson put her hand over her mouth. Someone in the back of the room said something in a voice too low for the words to carry.

 But with a quality that suggested the words were not important. And the voice itself was the point. Janis opened her eyes. She looked at Jim. He looked up at her. He said, “Where did that come from?” She said, “My mother.” She paused. She said, “She always wanted me to learn to hold something back.” She said, “It took me a long time to understand why.

” Jim was quiet. Then he said, “Does she know you can do that?” Janis looked at him for a moment. Then she said, “Not yet.” She said, “I’m going home in October when Pearl is finished. I’m going to sing it for her.” Jim Morrison nodded. The evening continued, but it was different after that. The industry talk and the egos and the performing of personalities that these gatherings usually generated had been replaced by something quieter.

People talked about their mothers. About promises made and kept and not yet kept. About the specific things parents ask for that are not about the career or the fame or the public version of the person you became. The private things. The things that exist only between two people. And that are more specific and more important than anything the world sees.

Jim Morrison pulled Janis aside at the end of the evening. He said, “I want to record something with you.” She said, “What kind of something?” He said, “Quiet.” He said, “I have a poem. You have that voice. Not the stage voice. The other one. The one you just used. I want to record it before we lose it.” Janis looked at him.

She said, “Just for us?” He said, “Just for us.” Three weeks later in a small studio in Hollywood, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison recorded a single track together. Jim read a poem. Janis sang beneath it. The same controlled quiet that she had used in Laurel Canyon. A voice that held everything and released only what was necessary.

It was never released. Jim kept a copy. Janis kept a copy. Nobody else was told about it. Jim Morrison died in Paris on July 3rd, 1971. Nine months after that evening in Laurel Canyon. Janis Joplin died on October 4th, 1970. 25 days after the party. She never went home to Port Arthur. She never sang the hymn for her mother.

She had been planning to. She had said she was going in October when Pearl was finished. Dorothy Joplin outlived her daughter by 42 years. She died in 2012 at the age of 93. She never heard the recording. Nobody told her about it. Not because it was a secret that needed to be kept. But because some things belong to the people who made them.

 And to the silence that surrounds them. The recording exists somewhere in an archive associated with Jim Morrison’s estate. It has never been released. People who have heard it say it does not sound like anything either of them ever made publicly. It sounds like two people who understood something about restraint and grief.

 And the specific weight of promises not yet kept. It sounds like a daughter who learned too late to tell her mother that holding something back can be the fullest expression of love there is. It sounds like Janis Joplin being quiet. Which was, as Jim Morrison understood on that September evening in Laurel Canyon, the most extraordinary thing she ever did.