When Janis Crashed Tina Turner’s Stage (1969) – HT

 

 

 

Janice Joplain was drunk in the audience at Madison Square Garden on Thanksgiving night 1969 when Tina Turner took the stage. Nobody invited her up. Nobody gave her permission. She walked out of the crowd, climbed onto the stage, and what happened next is one of the most extraordinary unplanned moments in rock history.

And almost nobody knows the full story. >> [clears throat] >> November 27th, 1969. Thanksgiving Day, Madison Square Garden, New York City. 20,000 people inside. The Rolling Stones were headlining. This was the 1969 American Tour. The tour that would end 6 days later at Altoont. The stones at their most magnetic and their most combustible.

Opening for the stones that night were Ike and Tina Turner. This was before anyone used the word iconic to describe Tina Turner. She was 30 years old and had built one of the most explosive live acts in American music through sheer relentless physical force. The Ike and Tina Turner review was not an opening act in any diminishing sense of those words.

 They were an experience that the audience had to survive before the headliner could begin. Janice Joplain knew this. She had told a television interviewer that year that she was a major fan of Tina Turner. She had said it with the specific reverence of one performer acknowledging that another performer operates at a level they genuinely admire.

So when Janice found out that the Stones were playing Madison Square Garden on Thanksgiving and that Tina Turner was opening, she got herself a ticket. She got herself a bottle of Southern Comfort and she went. [sighs] The Cosmic Blues band tour had ended. She was between bands. The specific unsettled energy of a performer between configurations, between identities, not quite sure yet what shape the next thing would take.

She was also by November 1969 someone whose relationship with alcohol had moved past the stage where it was a choice and into the stage where it was a condition. She drank. That was the reality that night. She had been drinking before she arrived and she continued drinking once she was inside. When I and Tina Turner took the stage, Janice was in the audience close to the front. She watched Tina perform.

And something happened to Janice Joplain that happened to people sometimes when they watched Tina Turner perform in 1969. The part of her brain that managed decisions went quiet, and the part that was purely responding to the music took over completely. Myra Freriedman was Janice’s publicist. She had become one of Janice’s closest confidants.

 She was in the audience that night, and she watched what happened from somewhere in the crowd. She described it later. She said she watched Janice moving toward the stage, not walking exactly, being pulled, the specific movement of someone who is no longer fully choosing where they are going because the music is already decided for them.

Freriedman said she felt the specific dread of a publicist watching her client do something that cannot be undone once it begins. There was nothing she could do. Janice Joplain climbed onto the stage of Madison Square Garden during Tina Turner’s set, uninvited, unannounced, visibly drunk in front of 20,000 people, and Tina Turner saw her.

This is the moment that everything in the story depends on. Tina Turner in 1969 was not a person who yielded her stage to anyone. Her stage was her domain. She had built it note by note and step by step over a decade of performances so physically demanding that most performers would not have lasted a week in her position.

 She had earned every inch of it. She was also someone who understood in the specific way that great performers understand these things that the moment in front of her was not a disaster. It was a choice. She could stop. She could signal to security. She could let the infrastructure of the venue deal with the drunk woman who had climbed onto her stage.

 Or she could do something else. She did something else. She made space on the stage for what was happening. She opened the song up and let Janice in, and the two of them sang together in front of 20,000 people at Madison Square Garden on Thanksgiving night 1969. Two women, two entirely different approaches to what a voice could do.

Tina Turner’s voice, precision and power. every note landing exactly where she intended it, the control absolute beneath the apparent wildness. Janice Joplain’s voice, no separation between the singer and the song, everything given over, nothing held back. The specific quality of a person who cannot perform without simultaneously confessing.

They were not the same. They were not trying to be the same. That was what made it work. The audience understood that they were watching something unre repeatable. 20,000 people who had come for the Rolling Stones found themselves present for something that the Rolling Stones themselves could not have produced.

two women who had each in entirely different ways refused to be what the music industry of their era wanted them to be. On the same stage, without a plan, without a rehearsal, without anything except the specific electricity of two great performers responding to each other in real time. Myra Freriedman said the dread left her and something else arrived in its place.

She said she did not have a word for it exactly. The closest she could get was witnessing. The feeling of being present for something that you understand in the moment is not ordinary. After the duet ended, Janice came off the stage. The Stones took over and played their set. 20,000 people went home to their Thanksgiving nights with something they had not expected to carry.

 Myra Freriedman wrote a biography of Janice called Buried Alive, published in 1973. It is one of the most honest accounts of Janice Joplain ever written. In the book, she described that Thanksgiving night. She described watching Janice move toward the stage. She described the dread. She described what replaced the dread when she understood what was happening and that it was going to be all right.

She wrote that the duet was something extraordinary. She did not overstate it. She just said it was extraordinary. And let that be enough because it was. John Cook was Janice’s road manager. He had been with her since 1967. He was not at Madison Square Garden that night. He heard about it the next day. He said later that when people told him what had happened, he had two simultaneous reactions.

The first was relief that it had not gone the other way because it could have gone the other way. A drunk performer climbing onto another performer’s stage at Madison Square Garden in front of 20,000 people has many possible outcomes. Most of them are not good. The second reaction was something harder to name.

He said he thought about what it meant that Janice’s instinct, even drunk, even uninvited, even in a situation she should not have been in, was to go toward the music, not away from it. Toward it, he said that was Janice. Whatever else was happening, she went toward the music.

 Two women on a stage in New York on Thanksgiving night in 1969. One of them would die 11 months later. One of them would go on for more than half a century. Tina Turner went on. She went on for decades. She became the icon the word was invented for. She sold out stadiums across the world. She outlived almost everyone from that era.

 She died in 2023 at the age of 83. She outlived Janice Joplain by 53 years. In those 53 years, she spoke rarely about the night at Madison Square Garden. When she did, she was characteristically direct. She said Janice could sing. She said she was glad she let her come up. She said she did not know what else she would have done, as if any other choice had not really been available to her, as if the music had already decided.

 There is a version of this story that focuses on the chaos of it, the drunk performer, the uninvited intrusion, the publicists dread. That version is true. Everything in it happened, but it misses the point the way a photograph of a fire misses the heat. The point is what Tina Turner did next and what it revealed about both of them.

It revealed that Tina Turner in 3 seconds could transform a potential disaster into something extraordinary. And it revealed that Janice Joplain, drunk and uninvited, could still produce something extraordinary when she got there, because the music was in her the way it is in very few people. Not as a skill she had developed, not as a technique she had learned, as something she was made of, something that walked her toward stages she had not been invited onto and opened her mouth and meant every note right up to the last note she ever sang,

which was recorded 3 days before she died in a Los Angeles studio on a song called me and Bobby McGee in one take because one take was all she ever needed when the music had already decided. Then