I don’t often cry at performances, particularly canned ones, but I do tear up when I watch Janis Joplin singing Little Girl Blue on the Tom Jones show in 1969. The sadness of her voice melds with the sadness of the song and of her life.
And I’m not alone. . .
Joplin’s publicist, Myra Friedman, who wrote the biography Buried Alive, told me than when Joplin first sang the song in the recording studio, Joplin herself cried as did the engineers.
I don’t particularly like to think about Joplin. I loved her singing so much in my extreme youth that I kind of feel-enough for one lifetime! Furthermore, I find her life and death painful. Her abuse of herself was also the abuse of an incredible talent that she should have protected. “Should” however is too moralistic, judgmental: Friedman’s book makes a very good case for the way that Joplin was at the mercy of an irresistible internal command.
Writing about Linda Gravenites, however, I will make myself read all the Joplin bios. I’ve read in all of them but the only one I’ve read cover-to-cover is Friedman’s.
Joplin’s hunger to sing and to be acclaimed somehow enabled her to transcend the other drives–to the extent that she did. Linda told me that Joplin told her she had given up painting because she believed she would never be a great painter.
“Janis needed to be great,” Linda said.